The bad news: As I observed with Ann Bauer while filling in for Brad Carlson last week, lockdowns are killing kids – especially kids who are, like so many these days, predisposed to mental illness:

Millions of American kids are struggling, and their chances for long-term improved mental health is predicated on the notion that we will now prioritize their emotional well-being, which our society has tragically shown it has no intention of doing.

Our hope for raising an emotionally healthy and mentally stable generation is dissipating with every day kids are kept locked in their bedrooms and out of schools. Skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety are in no small part due to the fact that children feel neglected and forgotten, and they are not wrong to feel that way.

Our society has abandoned them and treated them as disposable. The damage caused by this abandonment is incalculable, and compounding every day we allow inertia, irrationality and the craven priorities of teachers unions to rule our decision-making.

The good news?

What, are you new around here? This is progressivism at work, operating through its wholly owned subsidiaries “Big Education” and “Big Karen”. Short of turning our culture around, there is none.

I recently suggested a new on-going feature, walking back the lies.  I have another item for the column.

The Best and Brightest people who sneered at Conservatives as ignorant, hateful racists for suggesting the debunked idea that a lab in Wuhan was the source of the virus and the Chinese were covering it up – are walking back the lie.  It seems  the virus may indeed have originated in Wuhan and the Chinese may indeed have covered it up. 

No apology of course.  No admission that Conservatives were right all along.  We don’t insist on that, don’t expect it, and would be astonished if it were forthcoming.

But somebody should remember and therefore the purpose of this ongoing feature.  We were right.  And they knew it. 

Joe Doakes

Series? Not a bad idea at all.

It’s verging on a Berg’s Law of “Fact-Checking” – something to the effect of “to the ‘fact-check’ caste, truth is directly correlated to “did a progressive say it”.

Thinking.

Policy is downstream of politics.

Politics is downstream from culture.

Culture is shaped, to a disturbing extent, by people who want to try to influence it.

And it’s been a cultural cliché for generation that television in its many forms has an overwhelming influence on society.

And as someone who spent way more time in Ramsey County family court, and dealing with culture’s assumptions about fathers and children, the subject of how media treats fatherhood has been of far more than casual interest to me for a long time.

I’ve observed since the early days of this blog that much of modern culture’s perception of fathers seems to be derived from Fred Flintstone (if you’re lucky – the cartoon rendering of Jackie Gleason was much preferable to the neutered George Jetson, albeit similar in every other way).

The good news – sociological reasarch [1] shows I’m right.

The bad news – Flintstone is a throwback to the “good old days”. Modern media, more and more, is treating fathers like incompetent, mock-worthy, if in the end lovable buffoons:

…we studied how often sitcom dads were shown together with their kids within these scenes in three key parenting interactions: giving advice, setting rules or positively or negatively reinforcing their kids’ behavior. We wanted to see whether the interaction made the father look “humorously foolish” – showing poor judgment, being incompetent or acting childishly.

Interestingly, fathers were shown in fewer parenting situations in more recent sitcoms. And when fathers were parenting, it was depicted as humorously foolish in just over 50% of the relevant scenes in the 2000s and 2010s, compared with 18% in the 1980s and 31% in the 1990s sitcoms.

At least within scenes featuring disparagement humor, sitcom audiences, more often than not, are still being encouraged to laugh at dads’ parenting missteps and mistakes.

Thing is, as more children are raised in single-parent housholds (a majority, in many communities), and given that the vast majority of those households are female-led, popular entertainment is going to have a disproportional role in shaping how children feel about what fathers are supposed to be.

I don’t watch a lot of current network TV, so it’s fairly academic to me at the moment.

But I’ve also noticed, again for over the past twenty-plus years, that the way fathers are portrayed in commercial is equally condescending [2] – but that there’s a pattern to this.

Remember – nothing in major media advertising, least of all on network or cable TV, is accidental. Every ad, down to the lowliest 10-second sweeper spot, is focus-grouped to a fine sheen before it goes near a broadcaster. The subtext of every ad is as carefully tuned as the messages themselves.

And I’ve noticed [3] that there’s a pattern:

• Spots aimed at products most commonly aimed at guys (the social group, as opposed to “men”, the sex), products like beer and athletic gear, tools, blue-collar workers’ tools, vehicles bought for work (as opposed to lifestyle accessories), tend to portray women (if at all) as improbably attractive, but not as the focus of the spot/s.
• Products aimed at women (by inference, women who lead or co-lead households, especially with children) are the ones that tend to show husbands as bumbling, dubiously competent, and very frequently not in their wives leagues, if you catch my drift.

Remembering that nothing in big-dollar advertising is accidental, what other conclusion is there than “Evidence tells advertisers that men see their women as ideal and attractive [which is sort of an evolutionary tautology], and women who spend money want to think that men – in general, and maybe their own – are hapless buffoons who’d be lying in their parents basements in a puddle of their own waste without them.”

Not sure that’s a great message for the young women or the young men of tomorrow.

[1] And yes, I now – sociology, like all soft sciences, is not a science. Soft science produces soft data, at best. And soft data is good enough for the point I’m making.

[2] Although somewhat less so if the fathers in the ads are black or Latino. And it seems that the fathers in mixed-race couples, who seem to make up a disproportionate number of couples in TV advertising these days, get portrayed pretty neutrally-to-favorably, although both of those observation are just that – impressions from a guy who doesn’t watch a whole lot of TV. Now, that would be an interesting study. And one ad that stuck out at me – the morning-TV spot for Hi-Vee supermarkets featuring the 1983 song “Our House” – indicates, albeit with a sample size of one, that even being a stay-at-home caretaker while the improbably gorgeous mom runs off to her office job doesn’t protect dad from that same level of condescension.

[3] Yep, anecdotally, not a controlled experiment bla bla bla.

It’s gotten to the point where hearing about any emotionally charged claim of abuse gets me thinking “deep breath, wait – the odds it’ll be a hoax are just about even, if not better”.

I mean, there’s a reason it’s not called “Berg’s 20th Suggestion“.

Keep it in mind, and you’re disappointed…well, pretty rarely, to be honest.

(Not gonna pullquote it – the whole thing is worth a read).

As the bad night that was the 2018 Mid-terms ground along, I pointed out something I believe to be a truism: that “progressive” overreach might be its own best limiting mechanism.

The downside (well, not the downside – one of many, indeed) is that we’re going to have to hope that’s the case, or that the opposition gets its act together, or some combination of the two. Because absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Big Left is seeking both:

People need limits in their lives. Anyone who has ever seen a spoiled child knows that these children are deeply unhappy, miserably vicious, and extreme in their rages and demands. Now imagine taking that child and subjecting it to a lifetime of having its every want, need, or desire granted. You will quickly see that you’ve created a dangerous monster. Go through any list of worst rulers (this one for example), and you’ll see how damaging it is when people’s desires are always unopposed.

That’s where leftists are right now. In 2020, thanks to the Wuhan virus and BLM, they manipulated themselves into complete power and, having gained that power, they have lost their grip on sanity. Unless reality intervenes in a way leftists must address, nothing will stop their mad dash into a lunatic world, one in which “science means whatever I say it means,” the economy is no longer constrained by inexorable rules of supply and demand, race becomes the only metric by which to judge people (and whites and Jews are inherently evil), borders serve no purpose, etc.

Nations do not fare well when madmen are at the helm. And as a reminder, while Trump may have had an eccentric personal style, everything he did was within the rule of law, and the mainstream of American, Western, and human history. It was those who opposed him who had abandoned norms. Like the narcissist, who says that anyone who opposes his abuse is at fault for the resulting fights, the left used its media control to announce that anyone who challenged its anti-science, racist, anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian dictates was evil.

The whole thing is worth a read.

A federal judge has ruled that a law requiring a citizen to produce identification upon a police officer’s demand is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.
https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/191700.P.pdf

We have that law in Minnesota. This case is not from our district so it’s not controlling.  But it’s certainly interesting. 

Joe Doakes

Someone file a test case, already.

Every spousal abuser in history: “Yeah, sure, I hit you. But you provoked me – again. So you’re at least partly to blame. Maybe mostly. I mean, actions have consequences, baby…”

Big Left’s latest line – through one of its local mouthpieces, former Reprentative and Lt. Gov. Candidate and Urban Progressive Privilege poster child, Erin Maye Quade:

This statement ticks off nearly half of the traits one associates with someone with a serious personality disorder.

And before anyone stars a’yappin’ – I’m not saying Ms. Maye Quade suffers from any psychological illness.

Merely the movement she’s part of.

[1] Not to mention a culture of abuse, and a serious collective group personality disorder.

I really can’t boycott “Hollywood”. because given the fact that Tinseltown can’t seem to get its heart into doing much of anything but comic book movies, and I just can not bring myself to go to a comic book movie, I mean, why bother?

So I’ve never seen any of Disney’s various Star Wars spinoff productions. The last, “first” three chapters of the Star Wars saga soured me on the whole franchise to the point where I just don’t care much. I’m told The Mandalorian is worth watching – but I honestly wouldn’t know.

So when I heard Gina Carano had been jettisoned from Mandalorian, after talk of her getting her own spinoff series was making the rounds, it took me a moment to dig and find out why it mattered.

It’s alleged by some media that she was tubed for being just a little too irascibly un-woke:

Carano was the subject of much criticism recently when, in a now-deleted Instagram post, she compared being a modern-day Republican to being Jewish during the Holocaust. The hashtag #FireGinaCarano has trended on social media in recent months after other incendiary comments by the television and film star.

And what were those “incendiary comments?” Especially as to “comparing” modern GOPers to German Jews in the ’30s?

Details are very, very thin. But I’ll defer to that not-remotely right-wing outlet, Variety, for the closest we have to core facts:

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children,” Carano wrote Instagram. “Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.” The post originated on a different Instagram account.

In other words, totalitarians turn societies against themselves?

If the Woke Mob things that’s politically incorrect, we’re gonna have a real difference of opinion in our society sooner than later.

In another post, Carano shared a photo of a person wearing multiple cloth masks with the caption, “Meanwhile in California…

If riffing on California is politically incorrect, I don’t wanna be PC.

Lowering the voting age has long been a Democrat dream.  Phyllis Khan promoted it in 1989, saying: “If we trust them to drive at 16, why don’t we trust them to vote?”  The notion is back again, this time in Congress. 

On the one hand, the notion that people aren’t mature enough to vote until 18, drink alcohol or buy certain tools until 21, or take responsibility for their own health care until 25, is a recent conceit unknown in the prior five millennia.

On the other hand, teenagers are less prone to nuanced thinking, more prone to letting their emotions over-ride their logic, which makes for good cannon fodder both for demanding social change and to send against actual cannons.

I’d be tempted to agree with lowering the age of majority if we were consistent about it.  At 16, you are an adult: you can drink, smoke, make babies, marry, divorce, be drafted, get a tattoo or sex change operation, sign a contract, take out student loans, file for bankruptcy, and vote. 

Yes, it will hasten the fall of society, as starry-eyed children vote for manipulative politicians selling promises of utopia but delivering indentured servitude.  But that’s coming anyway, so we might as well get on with it.  And there should be some entertaining moments along the way, watching idealists become disillusioned and forced to admit we conservatives were right all along.   That’ll be satisfying.

Joe Doakes

I’m not quite to the point where I can see it being that satisfying.

But I can see the path to that feeling.

Remember last spring and early summer? When New York’s catastrophic mismanagement of the Covid pandemic led to a national scandal that humiliated Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill “Squiggy” DiBlasio?

Of course not. The media tamped it down. With a contentious election already underway, Big Media and Big Left didn’t want any splatter getting on the Democrat nominee, whoever that was going to be.

But it was horrible; both New Yorks, state and city, had death rates that still dwarf the rest of the country. Over 10% of all nursing home residents died in a matter of mere weeks. The city was a charnel house. One nursing home left a few dozen bodies in a n un-refrigerated U-Haul, and hospitals were, as related by an endless stream of morose NPR stories, overwhelmed (even as a Navy hospital ship rode, almost empty, at anchor in the harbor, lest President Trump garner any credit whatsoever).

Big Left rallied around the inept Cuomo, spending nine months treating him as a saint walking among us, as an epidemiological Omar Bradley smiting the viral foe from the field, plumping up the sales for Cuomo’s absurd public health “how to” book, putting him up for an Emmy Award for his televised appearances.

Until the inauguration.

Now that Democrat are in charge, Cuomo’s stock has fallen faster than GameStop.

Seems weird?

Not at all. Cuomo is not popular on the hard left that is currently in vogue in DC. He’s too centrist. The progressive wing of the party hates him – and Mayor Squiggy has aspirations in Albany and (absurd as it seems) DC.

Two theories, not mutually exclusive:

All The Facts That Fit The Narrative: It’s verging on being a Berg’s Law – modern media “fact checking” is largely a matter of making sure Democrats get all the credit for the true stuff. Cuomo was a hero – until Big Left wanted him out of the way.

Which is not in any way discontiguous with the other theory:

Try To Find A Pickaxe In Albany. I Dare You: I think it’s a purge on the left. The “progressive” wing, which controls everything in DC (including, let’s be honest, the “Moderate” Biden – wants their slightly-too-moderate bete noir out of the way. While Cuomo’s presidential odds were likely slim and none, he certainly has a powerful bully pulpit within the party.

Well – had one.

This past week, in my observation, has been almost perfectly stage-managed – with the news of the whistleblower coming out while the Governor was in an audience with Biden.

Why? I addition to being a “moderate” (yep, you read that right – Cuomo is like Phyllis Kahn) wart on the Democrat party’s butt that can be excised, making room for more acceptable “Progressives” for the nation’s third-or-fourth-most powerful, but certainly most prestigious, governorship, it also allows Democrats to claim the “credit” for getting “justice” for all the seniors that died…

…even though conservatives owned the story from the beginning.

Like Stalin ordering Trotsky’s murder, this purge – with able assistance from the media that is giving itself leg and lip cramps kissing Biden’s ass – serves all sorts of purposes for Big Left.

Badda bing.

Owners of the iconic “Town Talk Diner” at Lake and MInnehaha in Minneapolis – which was turned into the “Town Talk Pile of Rubble” during the Floyd Riots – are sueing the City of Minneapolis for failing to protect…

…well, much of anyone or anything – notwithstanding it being one of the city’s only unambiguously legitimate jobs.

I’m not gonna do a pullquote – just read it.

And list for me in the comments:

1. How the city will respond
2. Why a “progressive” appointee will throw the case out. .

I was tempted to say “wrong answers only”, like all the kids are doing on social media these days.

But I figure even the right answers will test credulity these days.

Go to it.

My first thought in reading this story, I kid you not, is that I’m a little amazed a city government or law enforcement establishment actually did anything about an offense like this:

After a hearing last Friday and conversations with the city attorney, the employment of part-time Library Specialist Cameron Dequintez Williams was terminated on Wednesday.

He was charged with burning books from the library written by conservative authors.

Library officials said, “The city of Chattanooga Human Resources Department completed its investigation of an allegation that books were removed from the Chattanooga Public Library’s Main Branch on Dec.https://w.chattanoogan.com/photo.aspx?a=8&t=11, 2020. 

“The investigation determined that part-time Library Specialist Cameron Williams violated city and Library policies by improperly removing items from the Library’s collections.”

As one wag remarked:

Now, it remains to be seen if the real reason was that the library board wants to do all of that themselves.

Bonus observation: Am I the only one thinking Lt. Governor Flanagan feels pretty good, having not only gotten away with having ideological mercenaries do her cultural cleansing for her, but having them in effect rewarded for their efforts?

I see a posh consulting job for Flanagan, if she ever leaves office.

I feel so stupid.  I completely fell for the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory that the election was stolen.  But as this article makes clear, the election actually was SAVED. 

All those unsubstantiated Republican claims that an informal alliance of left-wing activists and business titans got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding; fended off voter-suppression lawsuits; recruited armies of poll workers; successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line; helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks; and after Election Day, monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not challenge the result including pressuring state legislators to certify dubious election results – they’re all true.  They did all those things and more.  But that’s a Good Thing.  Because they saved the election from Trump winning.

I wish I’d understood this last Fall.  I wasted so much time fretting over laws of statistics and suitcases of ballot and cardboarded-over windows but none of it mattered.  Things went exactly as planned. 

So I’m embarrassed at my credulity but one good thing came of it – I won’t have stand in line to cast my vote ever again, not when the big-shots have decided what the outcome should be and taken steps to ensure it.  So that’s nice.

Joe Doakes

Last week on his podcast, Ben Shapiro noted something I’d picked up when late, long-banned, forever-exiled commenter Dog Gone was trying to act as this blog’s “fact checker” – the difference between “true” and “false” usually boils down to whether a conservative or a progressive said it, regardless of the veracity of the fact itself.

Ryan Winkler takes a strong moral stand:

About time Ryan Winkler took a strong, courageous stand against corporate prisons…

…of which there are zero in Minnesota.

Remember when I said DFLers can count on the fact that DFL voters are overwhelmingly badly-informed and lousy at critical thought?

Any questions?

.

I’ll just commend to you this thread by John Hayward – perhaps the thing most worth reading on the misbegotten morass that is Twitter in a long, long time – without further comment:

Other than urging you to drill in and read the whole thing.

….that Ron DeSantis is high up on my short list of candidates for 2024.

I am saying that if he keeps up with his competent, fact-driven crisis management combined with his Trump-like ability to cut through the narrative BS while maintaining an air of measured acerbity…

…he could get there pretty quick.

Joe Biden made gun control an important part of his campaign platform.

He noted there are 40,000 gun deaths per year.  To stop them, he will ban, regulate, confiscate and tax certain rifles, high capacity magazines and build-your-own kits; prohibit inheritance and private sales; stop minors from hunting with guns by imprisoning any parent who gives the minor access to a firearm; prevent teachers from defending their students; and let the trial lawyers off the leash to sue the American gun industry into oblivion to give the competitive edge to our foreign rivals. 

All good stuff, but will it work?  Of those 40,000 deaths, 30,000 are suicides committed by people who passed the background check, endured the waiting period, and fired a single round.  None of Joe’s proposals will affect them. 

Oh sure, he blandly proposes to improve access to mental health services, but the lack of detail and funding reveals the enormity of the problem.  Most of those suicides are old white men who have lost everything and have nothing left to live for – you think they’re going to spill their guts to a mental health counsellor, hand over their gun and have a group hug? Ridiculous.

And his proposal does nothing to take guns away from the people who commit most of the gun violence in major cities.  Instead, he’ll connect them with economic and social programs that may deter violence.  Is it me or did Midnight Basketball just make a come-back? 

Honestly, I’m surprised the Biden Administration is wasting time with impeachment.  They should be pushing their gun control agenda as hard and fast as they can.  They need to get the guns out of the hands of all those new gun buyers, so when they defund the police, the people will be entirely at the government’s mercy.  Well, them and the criminals on the street.  

Joe Doakes

I endorse Joe’s position entirely.

Democrats – get on your phones to A-Klo and the Butcher of Vandalia and get them to pressure President Harris to get on it, already.

I tried to warn everyone.

During the presidential campaign, every time candidate Biden went on one of his roughly 200000,000,000,000 television ads saying “… I have a plan…“, I warned you.

“Ask for specifics“. What is the plan. Tell us.

I mean, neither I nor any of you could ask the campaign directly, of course. That fact got me thinking – wouldn’t it be cool, and salutary to democracy, if we had an institution with printing presses and transmitters and – work with me, here – perhaps rooms full of people who consider themselves a nearly monastic class of information gatherers, processors and disseminators, who take it not merely as their job but their calling to ask questions of those who would aspire to power, to hold them accountable, who might have asked those questions in our stead?

To paraphrase John Lennon, you might say that I am a dreamer.

And when it comes to schools – they of the infamous “plan“ to re-open them all within 100 days of coming in the office?

The “plan“ is apparently to put the goal posts on a C117 Globemaster and fly them to Diego Garcia.

I grew up in grew up in a family of Democrats – Dad was a teacher, Mom had a little hippie inclination – and it’s probably not a huge shock that’s how I started out as well. At North Dakota Boys State, I wrote a party platform that would have made Paul Wellstone blanche in horror – not because I was an especially well-read or committed econommic “progressive”, but becasue that was the water in which I figuratively swam as a teenager.

In college, my major advisor, Dr. Blake, convinced me that it just wasn’t true – that I was in fact a conservative. And he was right. I voted for Reagan in my first presidential election, and never really went back.

About ten years later, disgusted with the 1994 Crime Bill, I left and went to the Libertarians (just in time to miss a great redemptive moment in GOP history – but I had two babies at home at the time, so I wasn’t actually doing that much political thinking, to be honest.

Four years later, I went back, figuring the problems in the GOP were best fixed on the inside. It’s still an ongoing battle – maybe never moreso.

One thing I didn’t do? Spend years making theatrical amends to Republicans for having been a Demorat; trashing my former Republican friends to my (temporary) Libertarian pals; hovering over Libertarians’ sayings to find things to pounce on to show my GOP friends I was a true believer.

I’ve encountered a lot of that lately – various people I know who’ve left one party or another, and felt the need to not just express their new beliefs (yay, more power to you!) but expound on how blinkered, deluded, malformed and stupid the people in their old party are, and how very decisively they’ve left them behind.

One longtime real-life as well as social media friend felt the need to issue a heartfelt – “theatric” might be a better term – public apology to all his new (Democrat in this case) friends for ever having been a Republican sympathizer.

But that was just the most extreme example.

The only comparison I have is with a jilted spouse whose ex ran off with the cabana boy or secretary, and spends years sputtering first with rage, then the sort of passive-aggressive sniping that becomes a lifestyle (and a tiresome one) if you let it.

And it’s a pretty ecumenical phenomenon. I’ve seen it with ex-Republicans in the Libertarian party, Republican Trump supporters AND Never-Trumpers, ex-Trump supporters of any and no affiliation – and I’m sure it happens with ex-Democrats too.

I mean – your political beliefs changed. If your politics are so closely tied to your personality and the fabric of your life that you have to spend that kind of time and energy attacking not only your old beliefs, but the people who still hold them?

It creeps me out. Seriously.

Have you heard about the election controversy?  Votes cast by ineligible persons?  Outdated voter registration lists allowing fraudulent votes to be cast?  Warnings before the election of “widespread violation of the laws and procedures of the pre-voting process.”  Election officials saying, “There is no evidence” to brush aside allegations of misconduct?  Democrats in Congress threatening to punish those who question the election results?

No, not Trump.  Myanmar (formerly Burma) where military officers have seized control, declared a one-year state of emergency, plan to hold fresh elections under supervision, and pledge to turn over control to the winner.

Apparently, their senior military leadership believes supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some fraudulent electoral ceremony.   When they see the electoral process so blatantly corrupted that it robs the people of their right to self-determination, the military takes their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution seriously enough to intervene and force a do-over to vindicate the people’s Constitutional right.

What a bunch of haters. 

Joe Doakes

Burma/Myanmar is a decades-long expose not only of the failures of socialism, but of the western Left’s myopia about the people they’s supposed to consider heroes.

He had a lengthy series of convictions, many of them disqualifying him from holding, much less owning or buying firearms.

He was in violation of an order for protection – itself a crime.

He had a history of same:

Gregory Ulrich was already subject to every restriction, sanction and consequence a “Red Flag” law can provide, and then some.

And still he shot up the Allina Clinic in Buffalo yesterday – a “gun free zone”, by the way – killing one and injuring several. He was prohibited from having, buying or owning guns by state and federal law, he was subject to at least one restraining order, and he built bombs – itself a very, very serious federal felony.

In short – when people say “we already have laws in place that do literally everything a “Red Flag” law is supposed to do”. Gregory Ulrich was a case in point.

Which didn’t stop Metro Minnesota’s political class from plying their dismal trade – exploiting crises:

And we, the good guys, implored our political class “learn the facts before you start jabbering about policy”. What good did it do us?

The Carver County sheriff pointed out in various news conferences yesterday that a “Red Flag” law would have been about as useful as a “Miss Minnesota” tiara on tow truck driver. Which ensures that Carver County’s sheriff won’t be getting any more live feed time.

“Green” industries – like the jobs “building solar panels” that the current administration is telling newly-unemployed pipeline workers to try to get – are fleeing Germany for…

…well, you can probably figure it out:

The number of jobs in the German renewables sector (production and installation) has fallen from about 300,000 in 2011 to around 150,000 in 2018, the German Trade Union Association (DGB) found in an analysis of employment in the energy transition.

The drop in employment is mostly due to the collapse of Germany’s solar power industry over the past decade, as many companies were forced out of business thanks to cheaper competitors from China scooping up most of the market. The number of jobs in solar PV panel production and installation fell from a record 133,000 in 2011 to under 28,000 seven years later.

Industries build around commoditizing technology – like solar panels – are inevitably going to be drawn to the cheap labor.

To be fair, Democrat policy is to skip the “cheap labor” phase of the continuum of misery, and drag most Americans straight to perpetual underemployment.

I confess, I am often tempted by those click-bait ads.  This site advertises the 10 Greatest Sports Cheaters.The authors act as if it’s a big deal, as if the cheaters were some kind of villains and the people who called out the cheaters were some kind of heroes.

Who cares?  You lost.  Whether you lost fair and square or the other guy cheated to rob you of victory, what difference does it make?  Move on.  Try harder next time.

Besides, you have no proof, and even if you did, we don’t want to hear about it. Questioning the result only undermines public confidence in the sport.  In fact, your continued harping about it is so tiresome, we’re shutting down your social media account and if you don’t zip it, we’ll get you fired from your job.

Nobody likes a sore loser.  That’s not who we are. 

Joe Doakes

To suggest otherwise is seditious. Maybe even Treason.

Against sports, natch.

Where have you gone, our #UmbrellaMan?

The Star/Trib turns its lonely eyes to you:

In a city ravaged by leftist violence several times in the past year, we’re going to focus, hard, on finding the dozen doughy ex-Libertarians, sitting in their parents basements, who identify as Trumpo-Anarchists.

In related news, Germany, expressing alarm over a 1939 attack on a border radio station, is concerned about potential Polish aggression.

This site is an endless – so far – catalog of people, frequently but far from always in academia – catalog of “cancelees”.

And reading the blurbs is a little like reading log entries from a ship that is slowly sinking, but the captain just doesn’t know it yet.