For the second straight year, Big Media, serving as the exposed id of Big Karen, has predicted the Sturgis motorcycle rally was going to be a “super spreader”.

And as the event – and the attendant Covid surveillance – unrolled, I started getting the impression that most of the “news” coverage had been written in advance, with blanks let open to fill in the numbers that, one suspects, were expected to be in the thousands, at the very least.

So when the first take on numbers came out – in the low 100s, across 700,000 attendees – my first response was “that’s probably lower than the infection rate of 700,000 people in the general population”.

I was right:

Before its Aug. 6 opening, the Washington Post ominously warned: “Sturgis Motorcycle Rally revs up, drawing thousands and heightening delta super spreader fears”; CBS blared:“Sturgis motorcycle rally sparks fears of super spreader event.”

But like last August, the derisive press thankfully didn’t get their wish. Two weeks after the gathering with more than a half-million attendees concluded, fewer than 200 cases have been attributed to the event.

The Associated Press still breathlessly reported Sunday that “nearly 4,000 people have been newly diagnosed with COVID-19 in the state,” but later noted that “a South Dakota Department of Health spokesman declined to link the Sturgis rally to the rising virus surge, noting only 39 COVID-19 cases directly attributed to the rally.”

That such a small number of statewide cases came from Sturgis is a miracle and should have been the headline.

On Monday, the Los Angeles Times, whose writers likely could not find South Dakota on a map, claimed “scores of coronavirus cases recorded.” Scores? How many, and compared to what?

So, as always, what does that mean, per capita?

If numbers still matter to agenda seekers, the entire U.S. averaged 276 new COVID cases per 100,000 people over 10 days ending last week, while the Mount Rushmore State averaged only 156.

In the meantime, Florida’s vaccination rates for the elderly are far better than California and New York, and the fatality rate among a very dense, rather old population, is well down in the middle of the pack.

The Democrats and media (ptr) are going to have to count on their voters legendary lack of facility at critical thought.

And the slant in Covid coverage from the MSM is a sign that Big Left is genuinely worried about DeSantis, Noem and the movements they represent.

Andy Richter is, by a very liberal definition, a “Hollywood star“, having gotten his start as Conan O’Briens, for lack of a better term, “comic“ foil, I shouldn’t be too uncharitable; comedy is hard, and O’Brien proves it.

But time flies, and Richter has a kid who’s going off to college.

Well, trying to:

In the very, very long Twitter thread that followed, Richter evidenced no sense of connecting his plight with the eviction moratorium that has been strangling the rental industry for the past year and a half.

It’s a pretty domestic (if needlessly snide) representation of Big Populist Left’s entire approach to, well, pretty much everything:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

So the US got tossed out of Afghanistan, so what? How does our retreat-in-disgrace affect the rest of the world?

Maybe not so good. If the US isn’t willing or able to exercise competent military actions, the nations which have been relying on us for defense, begin to look vulnerable. They might need to arm themselves to defend themselves, or risk be conquered by rivals.

Domino theory is back and I’m wondering how many weapons and how much ammunition will be required to survive the fall of the final domino.

Joe Doakes

Japan has got to be seriously rethinking its post World War II agreements on military posture.

President Trump used to say that, with him as president, we would win so much, we would eventually get tired of it.

I don’t know about that.

But after eight months of this administration, I am sure as hell tired of losing.

One of my favorite rhetorical easy hits – one I use a lot, but then it’s apposite so very very often – is “I don’t believe so and so intended to (implement some current fiasco that so and so is involved with) – but if he did intended it, what would he have done differently?”

It’s snarky, but it’s appropriate so very often.

Especially this past couple of weeks.

I’m an armchair…well, not “general”. I’m an armchair corporal. But in reading a metric poo-ton of military history, a few things seem fairly elementary:

1. Abandoning Bagram – a highly defensible base with multiple runways and enough residual capacity to support tens of thousands of troops, to say nothing of housing thousands of refugees – in preference to running a combat evacuation out of a single runway on the edge of a hostile city? It’s a little like Churchill evacuating the Royal Navy before the Army at Dunkirk. Stupid.
2. Purging generals and admirals (starting under Obama) that were focused on fighting, and promoting the ones who were onboard with Big Left’s social agenda? Stupid.
3. Making the withdrawal contingent on zero conditions to be obeyed by the enemy? Stupid.
4. Taking a pass on maybe defusing the whole thing long enough to make the evacuation at least nominally orderly, to say nothing of less of a humiliation?

Wait – what?

OK, I’ll say it – if Joe Biden and/or “his” administration were trying to humiliate the United State, isolate us from our allies, make us look completely impotent and untrustworthy, what would he be doing different?

Too conspiracy-minded? Just an accident, fomented by a senile man?

had an interesting, and ultimately intensely sobering about Afghanistan with Michael Yon on Satursay. It’s the first half of this hour.

It’s his theory that it’s actual, deliberate sabotage from within the Administration.

And if you ask yourself “Even in a Democrat administration “led” by a senescent fool and a cackling lawyer-turned-petty-authoritarian, who would be this stupid, accidentally?”, and come up with no good answers, it’s worth a thought.

So it turns out that “implied bias“ testing is based on some fairly dubious psychology, and “implicit bias training” actually makes things worse.

Never saw that coming.

To: Hollywood
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant and Lapsed Movie-Goer
Re: Planning

Dear Moguls,

Get an option in on this story. Stat.

And don’t put some moron who cut his/her teeth writing comic book movies on the job of writing the screenplay; the story calls for someone of David Mamet’s stature and talent. Nothing less.

Don’t f*** this one up.

(NARRATOR: “Hollywood will f*** this one up”)

UPDATE: And in case anyone tries to morph some credit over to the civilian and/or military chains of command?

“This Herculean effort couldn’t have been done without the unofficial heroes inside the airfield who defied their orders to not help beyond the airport perimeter by wading into sewage canals and pulling in these targeted people who were flashing pineapples on their phones,” Mann said.

Which brings up a troubling question: if one must defy orders to do the right thing, what does that do for unit cohesion and morale? The authority of the chain of command?

Hidden in this one bit of scarce good new is a lot of really awful stuff for the future of this nation’s institutions.

Joe Doakea from Como Park emails

It’s entertaining to make fun of people running around promoting wide-eyed, far-right, moon-bat crazy, pants-on-head conspiracy theories. Like, for instance, Trump didn’t lose the election, the election was stolen from him. Biden and Harris were never the popular choice, they’re merely placeholders until the Real Usurper pulling the strings behind the scenes can be installed as President-For-Life. Okay, it’s completely nuts and nobody believes it, but just for kicks . . .

Biden is senile and Harris is hated. Kill Harris in a false flag operation blamed on Conservatives, bum-rush Congress into appointing the Real Usurper as Veep, then use the 25th Amendment to remove Biden. Could work. So who’s the Real Usurper?

Here’s an article reviewing the 50 most popular Democrats in America. Those are the talent pool to replace Biden.

Some of them are dead. Carter, Clinton and Gore are too old. Pelosi, Warren, Bloomberg are theoretically possible but carry a lot of baggage.

Tulsi is cute but I doubt she has the influence to pull it off.

Bernie is wildly popular with the Democrat base. They’d do anything for him. He’s a real possibility.

Obama. He couldn’t be ELECTED to a third term, but he could be appointed Vice President and then move up. With the new election laws being rammed through Congress, he wouldn’t have to worry about winning another election as long as he lives. Question is – does he still have enough influence with the Democrat party and the Deep State bureaucrats to pull it off? And does he hate America enough to fundamentally transform it from a republic to a dictatorship, with himself at the helm?

Might make a good novel but it’s all a wild fantasy, right? Nobody would ever believe it, right?

Joe Doakes

Got a high school girl from grad 9-12 who wants to try their hand at public speaking, Speaking Proudly is coming up. Go here for info.

Over the past few days, there’s been an undercurrent on social media of people saying the implosion of Afghanistan, culminating [1] in yesterday’s suicide-bomb attack killing (so far) 10 Marines and close to 100 people all told was “the angriest/saddest they’ve felt since 9/11”.

For me? In some ways, it’s worse.

9/11 wasn’t a “surprise”, per se – if you’d been paying attention through the ’90s, with the USS Cole, the Khobar Towers and the first WTC Bombing, it was a natural progression. But it was enemies doing what enemies do. We were attacked – like Pearl Harbor, like the Norks crossing the 38th Parallel, it was people who hated us, doing what people who hate us say they’re going to do.

This past two weeks? That same motivation was – let’s not delve into conspiracy-land here – colossal incompetence on every level of our own government, humiliating this country. It’s basketball team doesn’t just shoot a three-pointer into their own basket, but every member of the team slamming a dunk into their own bucket, as the coach says “yep, that’s the plan – score 100 points for the other guys; then we’ll have ’em where we want ’em”, and the other team does casual free-throws when there isn’t one of our guys hanging from the rim.

They say “never chalk up to malice what can be better explained by stupidity”. But if the Biden Administration had planned from the very beginning to humiliate this nation, what would they have done differently? Make Robin DiAngelo the chair of the Joint Chiefs, and put Steven Colbert in charge of Special Operations Command?

Seeing our nation blind-sided twenty years ago was bad enough.

Seeing our nation humiliate itself? Over and over?

This is a new one for me.

This is not the nation I wanted to leave for my kids, my grandkids.

And as far as I can help it, I won’t.

[1] And when I say “culminating”, I mean “so far”. This seems to be a barrel with no bottom.

It was my 15th birthday. We were having dinner at my grandma’s house.

That was our family tradition – Grandma Bea lived four blocks away, so we spent a lot of time there. I knew it was a blessing at the time, and that’s only grown moreso over time.

I actually remember two presents: the Avalon Hill game “Gettysburg”, which was actually three games in one (introductory, intermediate and incredibly mind-warpingly complex – and you can probably guess the one I went straight to) from my parents…

…and, from my little sister, this album:

…which fairly scandalized Dad, gave Mom a chuckle, and drew a “kids these days” roll of the eyes from my Grandma.

Hard to beliieve Who’s Next turns fifty today.

Of course, I played that album nearly white over the next few years. In its day, it was the perfect album for channeling adolescent angst into a fury of…well, activity, anyway. Rolling Stone, in one of its periodic “Best Albums” lists that came out in the magazines tween years, referred to it as “a mature. punk’s War and Peace“, which is the sort of wannabe-Hemingway dross that passed for rock critiicism then as now…

…but it wasn’t wrong.

More than a few of my high school classmates remember me as “the kid who was always dropping Pete Townsend references” – sometimes literally (I could slip a lyric into nearly any situation) or physically (when I played in garage bands, I scissor kicked and duck-walked and windmilled away, and in one gig, when I cut my thumb on an exposed thread on a toggle switch on my guitar, just like Pete, it was the most joyous injury of my life.

I mean, has there ever been a more perfect explosion of adolescent energy?

And yes, of course they were caricaturing themselves – but then, what explosion of adolescent energy, angst and unfocused emotion isn’t, really?

Townsend has spent going on six decades exploring the world of the angry, angsty adolescent – he may be the world’s oldest t twenty-year-old art student, even today; even as The Who turned into a disappointment (after the death of Keith Moon) and then a nostalgia act after John Entwistle’s passing, he kept mining that same vein – often brilliantly. But I can’t say The Who grew with me.

But then there are days that there is no substitute for putting on Who’s Next and smiling at the sky.

…to never ascribe to malice what can just as easily be chalked up to stupidity.

I try to live by that advice.

But with God as my witness, sometimes it’s so, so very very hard:

U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that’s prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials… the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials.

“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

If they had a plan do make not only the wrong choice at every single turn of this debacle, but surgically home in on the worst possible choices in every possible circumstance, what would our Houseplant in Chief be doing different?

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Man drops dead half an hour after receiving the ‘vaccine.’ Doctors are puzzled, no idea what killed him. Couldn’t have been the ‘vaccine’ because as everyone knows, the ‘vaccine’ is safe.

This is what causes ‘vaccine hesitancy.’ Obviously, the vaccine killed him. We know there are adverse reactions, side effects, there’s tons of reports from around the world. Say so. Just say, “It looks like one of the rare adverse reactions, one in a million, simply bad luck; but we won’t know for sure until the autopsy.” Doctors pretending it’s all a great mystery when it’s obviously not, casts doubt on their veracity if not their acumen.

It’s like police officers saying, “Yes, the bearded Arabic man was screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ when he attacked the Jews with his machete, but the bearded man did not have an ISIS membership card in his wallet so it can’t be a case of Islamic terrorism. His motivation may never be known.” Nonsense, we all know what happened.

Pretending not to know what happened makes the authorities look incompetent.

Lying about what happened makes them look evil.

I was hesitant about taking a vaccine being recommended by incompetent people. I’m definitely not taking a vaccine being pushed by evil people.

Joe Doakes

When it comes to messaging the general population, about Covid or vaccines, both administrations have done a visible job messaging the public

“The authorities“ have done literally nothing right, that’s far.

To: These cretins
From: Mitch Berg, obstreperous peasant
Re: Withholding treatment

If you’re one of those “medical professionals” who believes one can make a medically-ethical case for withholding treatment to the unvaccinated, then where do you stop?

Smokers? I mean, the warnings have been out there for decades.

The obese? It’s not like they don’t know.

Addicts of all kinds?

Diabetics who haven’t been enthusiastic enough in their regimen?

Motorcycle riders? I mean, they don’t call a two-wheel endorsement a “donor card” for nothing.

Trump voters? After all, they are responsible for all the world’s ills, in some of your worldviews.

Or maybe Republicans in general?

Pick a line, and tell us why?

Bonus question: as government takes over more and more of healthcare, even if society doesn’t go single-payer, can you see where this particular set of “medical” judgments turning into policy could turn into a very bad thing?

Just curious.

That is all.

John Thompson sprang to prominence threatening to burn down Hugo, MN.

He was elected to the Minnesota House with an overwhelming margin of victory.

He was pulled over a month or so back with no license plate and an invalid Minnesota license, but a valid Wisconsin one – he denounced the officer as “Racist” – apparently leading to a trail of investigation pointing to possible fraud and a background of other unsavoriness.

He followed up the episode with a dreadful non-apology apology…

…followed by a few perfunctory demands from the DFL that he resign – which have been followed up with all the alacrity of a Joe Biden foreign policy

And yet he just becomes more prominent:

My theory: Thompson will just become more and more prominent. His early issues, spun into meaninglessness with the active connivance of a metro media machine that serves mostly as a DFL public relations apparatus, will get romanticized – or at least bowdlerized – into more an “origin story” than a record.

By 2025, he will have Ryan Winkler’s job.

By 2030, Ken Martin’s.

John Thompson is the MNDFL’s leading public intellectual.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails

We are admonished to wear masks because we must follow the SCIENCE. But is there scientific evidence masks work to control viruses like Covid? A statistician reviewed the studies to find out.

Author’s conclusion: “In sum, of the 14 RCTs (Randomized Control Trials) that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless—whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone—or actually counterproductive.”

If there’s no solid scientific evidence that wearing masks works, then there must be some other reason for demanding it. What is that reason?

Joe Doakes

Judging by the California Democrats at this fundraiser (which was dredging up money for, among many others, Angie Craig), that privilege is…:

…having a visible face.

These are the hamsters demanding mask mandates.

I’ll believe in the efficacy of masks when the people demanding I “believe” in masks act like they believe in masks.

… Jimmy Carter is hitting his knees and thanking God that, while he is still alive, there is going to be a debacle and hostage crisis worse than Iran.

Charlie Watts, one of the most estimable drummers and reluctant superstars in rock and roll history, dead at age 80:

A jazz aficionado at heart, Watts helped them become, with The Beatles, one of the bands who took rock ‘n’ roll to the masses in the 60s with classics like (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Get Off My Cloud and Sympathy for the Devil.

Other tributes came from The Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock, who said he “kept the beat to the soundtrack of our lives”, while Nile Rodgers wrote: “Thanks for all the great music.”

To me, Watts was always the prototype for the likes of Max Weinberg – the guy who keeps the insanity of a kinetic stage show firmly anchored.  Even during my years of ambivalence about the Stones (I was a Who and Kinks guy), Watts mastery of his craft stood out.  

Several crafts, really:

Jagger and Richards could only envy his indifference to stardom and relative contentment in his private life, when he was as happy tending to the horses on his estate in rural Devon, England, as he ever was on stage at a sold-out stadium.

Watts did on occasion have an impact beyond drumming. He worked with Jagger on the ever more spectacular stage designs for the group’s tours. He also provided illustrations for the back cover of the acclaimed 1967 album “Between the Buttons” and inadvertently gave the record its title. When he asked Stones manager Andrew Oldham what the album would be called, Oldham responded “Between the buttons,” meaning undecided. Watts thought that “Between the Buttons” was the actual name and included it in his artwork.

To the world, he was a rock star. But Watts often said that the actual experience was draining and unpleasant, and even frightening. “Girls chasing you down the street, screaming…horrible!… I hated it,” he told The Guardian newspaper in an interview. In another interview, he described the drumming life as a “cross between being an athlete and a total nervous wreck.”

And it occurs to me that as that entire generation of rock stars – McCartney, Starr, Jagger, Richard, Ian Hunter, Ron Wood, and on and on – slide into their eighties, the carnage is going to get pretty intense, one of these days.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails m:

Government shooting dogs to prevent people traveling to rescue them, which might spread Covid.

Government shooting citizens to prevent protests against lock-downs, which do nothing to prevent the spread of Covid.

In a country where ordinary citizens are not allowed to own guns so they have no effective means to resist.

The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It’s not about defending yourself from criminals. It’s about resisting tyranny.

The Taliban knows that, which is why they’re systematically disarming citizens.

The Australians, the Taliban and the Garden Administration – all on the same page.

Joe Doakes

Even some liberals are figuring that out.

Not “progressives”, of course. But some liberals.

I’ve been a big fan of XKCD, the blazingly smart and cunningly simple web-comic, for a long, long time.

10 years? 15? Hard to say.

Which isn’t to say I agree with everything.

Like this bit here:

The word “Tantamount” is three syllables that serve as a front for enough horrible logic to fill all of Weimar Germany to a depth of eight feet. Because only in the world of cartoony quips is waving a flag, or even parroting Nazi (or Communist, for that matter) rhetoric “incitement” per the SCOTUS.

As longtime friend of this blog Sean Sorrentino put it:

Advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protections if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless actionand(2) is likely to incite or produce such action.

“Hey, we should round up all the Jews and put them in concentration camps.”

Not Incitement.

“There’s a Jew, grab him!”

Incitement.

Distasteful? Sure.

Deserving of censure? Absolutely.

Almost always, in our society, the hallmark of people who’ll never have the power to do much of anything, much less the sweeping assaults they’re talking of? Doy.

And of course, the whole “Punch a Nazi” and “Bash the Fash” conceits, combined with definition of “Naziism” and “Fascism” broad enough to cover, say, every single Republican, are the sort of mass dehumanization that leads us directly to…

…to what?

I don’t want to keep seeing the same hands, here.

… when the Harris/Biden administration was going to restore our stature in the world.

A friend of the blog emails:

The NY Times has an article saying that Arizona’s monsoon season this year is anything but normal. Local Arizona news is reporting that climate change is bringing more extreme weather.
Surely, St Paul’s Chief Resiliency Officer has some advice for us as Arizona citizens are facing deadly flash floods and we are experiencing horrible a horrible drought. He must have some tips for us to protect ourselves, our Earth, our resources….

Nope. It’s just laughs, fun and games because the floods are tearing down the wall.

It would be easy to look at this and think that the post of “Chief Resiliency Officer“ was just a joke.

That would be a mistake.

The “resilience“ this officer is there to uphold and protect is the resiliency of the transfer of taxpayer money do you the political class.

Once you understand that, his job – and especially that of Kate Knuth – make all kinds of sense.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

A friend explains how The Big Steal will work.

Joe Biden is senile, the election was stolen and everybody knows it, whether or not they admit it. Kamela Harris is incompetent and hated more than Hillary. Neither of those buffoons is the real Usurper whom The Big Steal was intended to install in office. The Usurper is secretly running things now but can’t officially take office until the placeholders are gone. How do they do it?

Harris is already dead but they’re hiding the body waiting for Afghanistan to blow over. The Usurper is waiting in the wings to be confirmed as Vice President. As soon as he is, Biden will be removed as senile. The Usurper moves into the Oval Office, some other patsy takes the Veep job, Congress goes back to debating how many helicopter loads of money to dump into the economy to maintain the illusion of economic success, and the new administration goes to war on the American way of life.

Who is it?

Joe Doakes

It’s not the craziest thing I’ve heard this week.

That would be “Joe Biden is doing a great job”.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is sitting on his bike, waiting at a stoplight on northbound Hamline at County Road B. As he’s fishing his water bottle out of its holder, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE, riding an absurdly complex-looking recumbent bike, riding up from behind.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Aaaaah, sssshhhhhhure is a nice morning…

LIBRELLE: We need to deny healthcare to those who don’t get vaccines, so that the care goes to the more deserving.

BERG: You support single-payer healthcare, right?

LIBRELLE: Yes. It’s the only moral choice.

BERG: Huh. So – were you one of those those guy…er, gal…er, people who say “healthcare is a right”?

LIBRELLE: Absolutely! It is a human right, same as voting and housing and food!

BERG: Uh…OK. So – healthcare is a right – but rights can’t be legitimately taken away for anything but criminal behavior, and then only via some sort of due process. So – maintaining agency over one’s own body is criminal behavior?

LIBRELLE: Yes!

BERG: A future, hypothetical, ultra-pro-life administration will be glad to hear that.

LIBRELLE: Yeah…hey….

BERG: And since you called single-payer a moral choice – what’s moral about removing a person’s ability to say “Hey, I made a mistake, Vitamin D alone isn’t enough to counter my obesity and diabetes, where can I get some help, here?”

LIBRELLE: It’s too late! Hahahahahahahaha! Stupid Trumpkins!

BERG: Speaking of that – the two single biggest groups of voluntarily-unvaccinated are…

LIBRELLE: Stupid Trumpies and ultra-stupid Trumpies!

BERG: Well, no. People under thirty, and black males from 20-40. Young people because the messaging is so schizophrenic, and black males because the messaging is schjizophrenic and because of the medical industry’s history of using blacks as human test animals.

LIBRELLE: Oh, we’ve got people whose job that is.

(Light turns green. LIBRELLE abruptly accelerates away)

BERG: Of course you do.

And SCENE