…her career.

Nor would I care to try.

But this Fox9 piece from last week tells the story of a Minneapolis organization – “Melanin in Motion” – which is teaching urban kids “of color” to ski and snowboard.

Now, cringey name aside, I do applaud the group’s goal; skiing and other snow sports are among Western and Northern Europe’s greatest exports.

It’s just curious how the culture cops haven’t jumped out and called this “cultural appropriation”.

Weird.

The Salt Lake Tribune calls for martial law to enforce a mask mandate:

Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.

Why is it that now, as the public health bureaucracy is finally starting to come around to what most of us have known about this pandemic for a year and a half, that Big Karen is getting crazier and crazier?

“Government is all the things we do together – stupidly and ineffectively”.

Government is ponderous and brittle. People, when acting in enlightened self-interest, usually make the right call.

My favorite example: before 9/11, the official guidance for people in skyscraper offices in case of a major emergency was to wait for official instructions. The powers that be assumed that people would be a panicky mob, there’d be stampedes in the stairwells, and more people would die from the panic than from the disaster, since humans are (to officialdom) like longhorns in a thunderstorm.

Of course, on 9/11, the normies ignored the instructions to stay in their cubes – and, more importantly, they self-organized an evacuation that got just about everyone below the points of impact out of the Twin Towers that morning. Another epic self-organization led to the more or less organic appearance of the greatest maritime evacuation since Dunkirk, as boats, official and private, carried people across the Hudson and East Rivers, without any need for official guidance.

Government learned nothing from this, of course; one of the first rule of public health crisis communications is to try to convince people of one or both of two things; “you’re going to die a horrible death if you dbn’t follow directions”,, or “your children are going to die a horrible death if you don’t follow directions”.

Doesn’t sound very confident in human intelligence, does it?

People can be breathtakingly stupid – but enlightened self-interest is a powerful force for good.

It’s by no means a rare trait.

I talked about this article in “Commentary” last weekend on the show – “Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace” by James Meigs.

It’s about the gulf between the panicky official response to the Anchorage Earthquake of 1964 – the strongest earthquake in North American history – and the calm, purposeful response of the normies, who organized themselves much more effectively than the local authorities did.

The officlals assumed that the populace would panic:

Almost as soon as the shaking stopped, city officials began worrying about how the populace would respond. With every shop window broken, would looters ransack the local merchants? Would citizens panic at the sight of the dead or wounded? Police quickly deputized a group of volunteers—some of them freshly emerged from those Fourth Avenue bars—as ad hoc officers. The men put on armbands with the word police emblazoned in lipstick—a few were even issued firearms—and off they went to protect the city from the inevitable post-disaster crime wave.

The Anchorage officials weren’t being unusually paranoid. At the time, most experts believed any major disaster would cause “a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population,” as social scientist Richard M. Titmuss had put it some years earlier. Shocked by carnage and desperate for food and shelter, people would “behave like frightened and unsatisfied children.” Only firm control by powerful authorities could keep the lid on such dangerous situations….Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies don’t just waste resources, one study notes; they also “undermine the public’s capacity for resilient behaviors.” In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors.

This led the authorities to devote far more effort to controlling crowds that tryint to rescue people trapped in buildings.

Sound familiar?

In the meantime, the normies organized themselves, and did what needed to be done:

Cars were buried in debris. One station wagon had been crushed almost flat by a concrete slab; Chance could hear a woman’s voice coming from inside. A crowd of people was trying to save her, clawing at the slab. Then a man stepped forward to organize the effort. Somehow, two tow trucks were located; they were able to split the slab partially in two. Another man climbed into the breech with a cutting torch—a cutting torch!—and carved a hole in the vehicle’s roof. The woman was pulled free, gravely injured but alive. She would survive. [Anchorage TV reporter Genie] Chance later marveled that all the people involved in the operation were mere passersby—impromptu volunteers. And yet they functioned as a team. Though she didn’t know it at the time, this dynamic was being replicated all over the city.

Officialdom was, in the meantime ,paralyzed by the collapse of its assumptions:

[Psychologist] Enrico Quarantelli, the leader of [a team of academics that flew to Anchorage to study the response], was particularly interested in Anchorage’s small Civil Defense office. It should have been in charge of search and rescue, but, Quarantelli noted, had quickly become bogged down over questions of bureaucratic protocol. Of course, Bill Davis’s amateur mountaineers had taken over that function almost immediately. Quarantelli used the term “emergent groups” to describe teams of self-organized volunteers like Davis’s searchers. He didn’t miss the irony that the agency created to protect civilians soon became an obstacle that this emergent group of rescuers had to work around. And, far from being a hindrance to trained first responders, those gangs of citizens turned out to be an indispensable resource.

It’s not a new phenomenon at all:

Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies don’t just waste resources, one study notes; they also “undermine the public’s capacity for resilient behaviors.” In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors.

I urge you to read the entire piece.

I urge you to read the whole thing – in particular, the article’s focus on the importance of getting reliable, trustworthy information to the population:

 Fear of public panic remains common today. Disaster literature bulges with examples—from Hurricane Katrina, to the 2011 Japan tsunami, to the current coronavirus pandemic—in which officials suppressed information, or passed along misinformation, out of concern over an unruly populace…One symptom of elite panic is the belief that too much information, or the wrong kind of information, will send citizens reeling. After the 2011 tsunami knocked out Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, officials gave a series of confusing briefings. To many, they seemed to be downplaying the amount of radiation released in the accident. In the end, the radiation risks turned out to be much lower than feared, resulting in no civilian deaths. But, by then, the traumatized public had lost faith in any official statements. As one team of researchers notes, any “perceived lack of information provision increases public anxiety and distrust.”

Similar example. the Bengal Famine of 1942, where British/Indian authorities clamped down on information, causing the rumor mill to take over, leading to food hoarding and bureacratic – dare we say, “elite” – panic, leading to two million starvataion deaths, in a place with plenty of food.

Think of that when you remember the Minnesota Department of Health’s refusal to divulge the mathematical model by which it predicted tens of thousands of Covid deaths by July 2020i, as a best case, because “people might reach different resujlts”.

A friend of the blog emails:

Seen on Twitter- “Some people really don’t get how much more appealing a place is when we know people like them won’t be there.”

Is this:

A- referring to Black Americans during segregation

B- referring to the unvaccinated

C- does it matter?

We might also add “D Dash Penzeys spices “call a republican a racist“ day“.

No shortage of bigotry out there.

No shortage of bigotry out there.

Declan Leary, on Muriel Bowser’s vaccine mandate in the District of Columbia – which isn’t all that different from the ones going into “effect” in Minneapolis and Saint Paul

It is all the more concerning given the precedent we risk setting if we tolerate the vaccine mandates. As a number of conservatives have warned repeatedly these last few months, even begrudging compliance with irrational diktats issued by the Covidcrats gives the ruling class valuable strategic ground. Moving forward, we can only expect our government to become less sensible and more immoderate if we refuse to push back now. As TAC’s

Helen Andrews wrote last week, “Once Americans get accustomed to scanning a QR code every time they enter a building, there is no limit to the surveillance and nudges that can be built on top of it.”

So I don’t know what to do here. I could easily comply; I have proof of the jab ready to go right on my phone. I need to show it if I want any part in so much of what makes city life good, worth living even under the rule of a Muriel Bowser and with a not insignificant risk of getting shot on a given day. (This latter point, by the way, calls into question the sincerity of the mayor’s interest in preserving the lives of citizens.) But I am far from convinced that the benefits of compliance—just like the benefits of enforcement—will really outweigh the costs.

I’m in about the same boat:  I’ve had the J&J vaccine (chosen because it was alleged to be best at preventing hospitalization, which given that I had OG Covid in the spring of 2020 was my only actual concern).   I could play the game.

But I am not going to.

Dear Saint Paul bars and restaurants,

I get it. You’re between a rock and a hard place. Many of you know how stupid the mayor’s vaccine mandate is – someone who got the Pfizer vaccine a year ago can come into your establishment, hacking their brains out and contagious as can be, while someone with natural immunity a month old is kept out. And your employees have no vaccine mandate, even though they’re the ones who will be standing around the place for hours at a time – which, the science shows, is where the real risk comes from.

And it’s not like I don’t take this pandemic seriously. I’ve got very vulnerable relatives. I’ve had Covid, donated all kinds of convalescent plasma, been vaccinated, and take all the care necessary. I’m not laughing this whole thing off.

But even the CDC and other public health authorities are starting to admit that vaccine mandates and lockdowns are completely counterproductive, that masks are about as useful at public health as aluminum foil pants, that eventually everyone is going to get Omicron, and that the right approach is likely going to be to protect the vulnerable, but go on living our lives.

Which is the exact opposite of the approach the Mayor is taking with this idiot mandate.

So I’ll tell you what.

If you agree with the mandate? Feel free to make your sentiments public. My response should be obvious by this point. You needn’t worry about making room for me.

If you want to go along with the mandate because you have to, that’s fine. I won’t be patronizing your establishment for the duration. I get the bind you’re in, but at some point people have to say enough is enough. Feel free to tell the mayor, the Chamber of Commerce, and all the other people who support this idiot policy I said so. Do you want me to help you put pressure on them? I’m there. And I hope we can get together when the crazy is over.

If you don’t want to go along with the policy, but you need to be discreet? Pass the word around – under the table, discreetly, obviously. I will do my best to be there, and bring friends. I get it, you don’t want to be made an example of like the places that stayed open last year. “Test cases are for other people”, in public health as in self-defense. I’m not going to ask you to be a hero. But pass the word; I will do my best to make it worthwhile.

Enough is enough.

To: All of you who were condemning Trump for undermining the legitimacy of our elections
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Unity!

So – we can all agree to condemn this scabrous attack on our elections, then?

That is all.

I’m just a schlub with a blog, so my predictions are worth what you’re paying for them…

…but I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that Kendall Qualls isn’t the last person who’s going to throw their hat in the ring for Govenror this cycle.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Americans are the world’s greatest innovators, right?  We come up with all the clever new ideas, then other nations copy us.

Except . . . not lately.  Remember the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973? The price of gas doubled, if you could even buy it (purchases were rationed).   American carmakers were building V-8 Impalas and Chargers when consumers wanted 4-cylinder Civics and Corollas. And nobody wanted a Nova, Pinto, or Pacer, ever.   At one point, it was cheaper to dig iron ore from Minnesota, ship it through the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, then through the Panama Canal to Japan to be made into steel which was turned into an automobile to be sent by ship back to the US and carried by rail to Minnesota for sale . . . cheaper than a car built right here in America. American car makers got hit so hard President Reagan had to impose ‘voluntary” import quotas to save the industry.  The innovation in automotive design and manufacturing came from abroad, not from at home.

I enjoy flying very small airplanes (Light Sport category, total aircraft weight under 650 lbs, smaller than a Cessna 152).  I’d love to have one but surveying the used airplane market is eye-opening, and not just in price.  The 162 Skycatcher never caught on and is all but orphaned now, they’re practically giving them away and for good reason – nobody wants one.  The real innovations in light sport aircraft are coming from Europe: Germany (Remos and Flight Design), the Czech Republic (Aerotrek, Aeroprakt, Bristell, Evektor, Czech Sport), Slovenia (Pipistril), and Italy (Tecnam).   My last airplane had an Ivo prop (go read his life story on the company website, it’s amazing).  Even South Africa (Sling) and Australia (Jabiru) are in the game.  Sure, there are American light sport airplane makers but the big names aren’t ours, the big sales aren’t ours, the innovation and enthusiasm aren’t ours.  Why not?

Some people argue it’s because the FAA regulations are stupid (they are, but that’s nothing new).  I wonder if there’s something else going on.  Why has America lost the innovation lead?  What happened to our entrepreneurs?  Was President Obama correct to say, “You didn’t build that?”  What happened to us?

Joe Doakes

Possible guesses:

• Americans are too addicted to entertainment to innvovate
• Regulations – FAA or whatever – really are stifling innovation
• Democrats have succeeded in raising a generation with no ambition whatsoever.

I’m open to othet theories.

A friend of the blog emails:

Mitch, I received this communication today as I am a Hennepin County Leader.  I wonder if some event prompted County Administrators to review the county’s motor vehicle safety policy.  Said policy is attached along with the document linked at the bottom of the paragraph (the document emphasizes what to do in an accident that occurs while driving a county vehicle).

What possible event could have happened that prompted this timely reminder to all county employees? It makes me wonder if some county employee when confronted about misuse of county vehicles or one who had a recent accident with a county vehicle might be claiming…”What, I didn’t know there was a policy against…” I thought you might find it interesting timing as I did.

You have my permission to share.

I’m sure there’s no connection…

While it’s always worth casting a cold eye on polling numbers, it’s striking how poorly the Leader of the Free World is doing these days across the board. Real Clear Politics has the numbers and they aren’t pretty:

RCP Average                            12/17 – 1/11 —           41.9               53.1               -11.2
Quinnipiac                                 1/7 – 1/10 1178 RV    35                  54                  -19
Politico/Morning Consult           1/8 – 1/9 2000 RV      44                  53                  -9
Rasmussen Reports                 1/9 – 1/11 1500 LV     40                  58                  -18
Economist/YouGov                   1/8 – 1/11 1258 RV     45                 51                   -6
IBD/TIPP                                   1/5 – 1/8 1308 A         44                 45                   -1
Reuters/Ipsos                            1/5 – 1/6 1000 A         45                 51                   -6
Economist/YouGov                    1/2 – 1/4 1201 RV      43                 51                   -8

It’s one thing if Rasmussen, a pollster generally favorable to the GOP, posts ugly numbers for Joe Biden. What’s truly eye-opening are the results from Quinnipiac, a poll historically gentle with the portsiders. If their numbers are accurate, Biden’s disapproval rating is a whopping -19, and that’s from a poll conducted after the recent Pelosi-produced passion play of 1/6.

So what are the larger implications? A few thoughts:

• If you’re Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, do you fear the political wrath of the leader of your party? Apostasy has rarely been safer.
• If you’re Xi or Putin, do you concern yourself with anything Joe Biden says? Or, for that matter, with anything he does? I doubt the citizenry of Ukraine or Taiwan is particularly sanguine at the moment.
• If you’re Mitch McConnell, do you sleep well? Never better, I would guess, and certainly better than your average Ukranian.
• If you’re Stacey Abrams, do you see any value in hanging with Grandpa Joe?

While there’s certainly entertainment value in watching Uncle Joe moving kinda slow, we’re not headed for Petticoat Junction at the moment.

When I was a kid, working at small-town radio stations in North Dakota, my favorite part of the job was working during tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings.

Which seems counterintuitive, perhaps – but there was something about the crackle and buzz of imporance, of purpose, in the air; the increasingly urgent National Weather service bulletins, the terse phone calls from the cops and sherif, that far more than overcame the whole “there’s a tornado coming!” thing.

And as a tall, gawky, greasy-haired, uncoordinated kid with little apparent athletic talent in a town that idolized the basketball team, it didn’t hurt that I knew, all over town, people were listening.

To me.

Of course, when the warning was over, I and the rest of Stutsman and Foster Counties went back to normal life. I didn’t keep telling people to stay in their basements when the front had passed and the warning was over. Because much as I enjoyed knowing that people were paying attention (and, more important, that I could deliver what they were tuning in for, with style), there were other things in life, and I didn’t need the state of crisis to keep giving me value.

A lot of people out there today can’t say that.

Covid has brought out a strain in a small, but socially prominent, group of people that find their self-worth in crying “Crisis!”.

Not just the media – it’s a given that they will make hay out of crises; pandemics and riots make them more relevant, just as tornados made Mitch Berg’s patter more important to more people than the usual diet of local sports and Rupert Holmes records that occupied most of my time on those stations.

No – it’s regular, workadaddy, hugamommy, usually but not always left-of-center types, for whom being the harbinger brings meaning to life.

And it’s to them that so much of Big Public Health’s narrative is aimed.

Great Twitter thread on the subject:

They – on social media, in the checkout line at Target, or in the comment section here – remind me. of the kids who ran to the teacher when someone stepped out of line when talking from the classroom to the water fountain. They got their sense of personal value from enforcing rules on others – whatever the rules, however niggling and petty and useless – back then, as now.

It’s the toxic corollary to “we’re all in this together”: the unstated “…and I’m not gonna let you forget about it!”.

Remember in the 1980s, when some “conservative” fundies rejoiced at the deaths of AIDS patients.

It was a pretty depraved stance. Everyone knows that.

Someone tell the fairly irredeemable LA Times drone Michael Hiltzik – who has reprised that particular bit of human depravity by declaring “Mocking some anti-vaxxers’ deaths is necessary“.

Helpfully, he adds “My exception applies to those who have actively undermined public health for the sake of an ideology and a culture war”.

I’m not going to extensively pull-quote the column – which is full of the sort of “two weeks to stop the virus” cheerleading that seems to have come from a CDC press release in April 2020, or from someone who thinks Gavin Newsom is on the right track.

That’s not especially remarkable.

Remarkable? Humanity is secondary to progs like Hiltzik:

It may be ghoulish to celebrate or exult in the deaths of vaccine opponents. And it may be proper to express sympathy and solicitude to those they leave behind.

But mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-COVID measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled…There may be no other way to make sure that the lessons of these teachable moments are heard.

Actually, there is another way: : stop politicizing public health. Stop spreading distrust of “the Trump Vaccine” during the elections, and then turn around and claim credit for it. Stop making “sowing controllable panic” the default setting for public health messaging. Stop being whores for the Democrats, if you’re the media.

Of course, this is more about them than – and their needs to find a scapegoat for their frustrations – than the unvaccinated.

But let’s not pretend this – mocking and giggling about opponents, on whatever issue, that die unfortunate deaths – is anything but the default setting for ghouls like Hiltzik. After watching people like him giggle and guffaw over the deaths of Tony Snow, Antonin Scalia and Rush Limbaugh, and hoot and holler for the death of Steve Scaliise, it’s a stretch to assume they have any other setting.

Sort of like guffawing about dead AIDS patents, only apparently acceptable.

To: Mayors Carter and Frey
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Your Hostages

Mayors,

You just announced your new and, if I may be frank, moronic Covid restrictions:

Let’s make sure we’re clear here.

I had the OG Covid, way back in 2020. Back before it got easy to catch and less virulent.

I’ve donated convalescent plasma. As much as I could, in fact.

Got vaccinated – not out of any ideological drive, but because I’ve got some exceptionally vulnerable relatives.

Pretty sure I just got over Omicron.

I’ve been contributing to herd immunity since most of you, my “Karen” neighbors, were hiding in your basement and dunking your food in rubbing alcohol before eating it. I am likely the immunologically safest person you will meet anytime soon.

And I will not be spending one dollar in Minneapolis or Saint Paul until this is over. And if I get completely out of the habit of spending in Saint Paul?

Oh, no.

Bear in mind – I’ve been trying to spend more money in harried Saint Paul establishments over the past 20 months; I’ve tried to help my neighbors out.

No more. You people voted for these hamsters. You all can go down with the ship.

Not another dime.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

One of the brilliant concepts of federalism as envisioned by the Founders, was the notion that various states could experiment with local solutions to local problems. The federal government would get involved only when necessary to mediate between the states.

People are still taking off their shoes and belts to go through the scanner at the airport. Why? Is there seriously a grave risk to air safety posed by shoe bombers and belt buckle assailants? Why not try an experiment?

Airline A will revert back to the security measures in effect in 2000. Passengers must sign a security waiver to fly, but their tickets are $10 cheaper and they bypass the security line so they can arrive at the airport 10 minutes before boarding instead of 2-3 hours early.

How many people will choose Airline A? How many air disasters will Airline A suffer? How long before Airlines B, C, D all clamor to be part of the plan?

Joe Doakes

It’s a trick question.

All questions involving the expansion of liberty wind up being trick questions, these days.

77 years ago last month, World War II went into a brief run of extra innings, as German troops launched a surprise attack, trying to drive a wedge between the US and British armies and take the port of Antwerp, robbing the Allies of their main logistics hub on the continent. We know it as the “Battle of the Bulge”.

In a strategic sense, the attack was doomed before it started. It may have cost the Germans more than it ganed them, burning through their last supplies of fuel, ammunition and fresh vehicles, to no gain that they were able to hold for more than a month.

But that was little comfort to the GIs on the ground – many new to the front in brand-new divisions, many more exhausted after six months of constant battle and resting in the “quiet sector” of the Ardennes, and the corner of Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany.

The GIs fought on – some of them famously surrounded, others who just happened to be at the wrong place at the right time, still more who rushed to the scene to hold lines in the snow that could not be passed.

They fought an enemy that was exhausted and morally shaped by five years of total war, including troops – the Waffen SS, who had made war crimes part of their “mystique” since the fall of 1939. One SS battlegroup had left a trail of war crimes, including the massacre of a group of combat engineers at Malmédy, Belgiuim, and a smaller and more obscure but perhaps even more gruesome slaughter of African-American troops at Wereth – two of a number of real shootings of American POWs, and dozens more rumored mass killings.

It’s no secret to those who read military history; at times, after hearing news about the GIs gunned down at Malmédy in particular, that GIs – cold, often cut off from higher authority, thousands of miles from home, fighting for people they largely didn’t understand, in a war none of them asked for – took rough revenge. The history of “The Good War” is not void of stories of American troops gunning down Germans, and especially Japanese, without worrying too hard about the rules of war. Americans and Brits were less likely to throw the rules of war under the treads of the passing tank than the Russians or French – all of whom took “take no prisoners” pretty literally – but war, being famously “hell”, brings the worst out of everyone at times.

Suffice to say – while the typical 18 year old American draftee was on balance, as Stephen Ambrose called him, “the. best thing that could have happened to a conquered Germany or liberated France, Luixembourg and Belgium”, some of them, sometimes, had their breaking points. It wasn’t taught in high school history class – which, when I was in school, was still being taught by some of the men who’d been there – but you don’t have to dig too far into history to find honest portrayals by GIs who, as the years rolled on, talked it out (including at least one infamous episode from Band of Brothers itself).

It’s not news, suffice to say.

If you read your history.

But this is 2022. And most Americans, including most of today’s generation of “news” reporters, never read history, or at least nothing before 1960.

“The Reveal” is an NPR ‘Investigative journalism’ program, hosted by Al Letson. This past Sunday’s episode focused on the groundbreaking investigation of a massacre of 80 German POWs in Belgium by members of the 11th Armored Division.

I listened so you don’t have to – but here it is, anyway:

So what’s. the purpose of this “investigation?”

To prove that World War II a reductionist battle between good-hearted, white-hatted GIs and cartoony black-hearted Nazis, and that some Americans did some horrible things?

Again – it’s not news.

To bring out a story that has been hidden by history?

As the story itself points out, the episode was common knowledge among people who follow the war.

That George Patton and other Army brass, at the time and during the telling of the story of the war, found it expedient to either “not publicize” or “cover up” the details of the massacre, to a people who were becoming weary of war and who were shocked by the late-campaign bloodshed? Leaving aside the whole “what the hell do they expect?” angle – who do they expect to hold accountable? 95% of the GIs are gone; all the senior officers who set the policy had passed on forty years ago.

To undercut and sandbag a key part of the American self-image? To throw crap on the notion that America has had, and acted upon, and sacrificed mightilly, for noble ideals that didn’t strictly benefit us? To liberate people we had no moral obligation to sacrifice for?

I think I’m getting warm.

A former teacher, who has drifted far to the left since I was a student, once said “the Walt Disney version of history doesn’t tell the whole story” – to which I replied “either does the Ingmar Bergman version (I suppose I could have said NIkole Hannah-Jones, as well).

Either way – when it comes to piddling on any shred of American exceptionaism, to say nothing of nobility, there is no statute of limitations.

If a Republican wins in 2024, I suspect there will be a bonfire of dox at the FBI headquarters. 

Maybe they’ll make s’mores. 

Representative Todd LIppert is leaving the House so he can tour rural Minnesota teaching rural Minnesotans about January 6:

He’ll be joining OJ, still out there looking for the real killer.

Joe Doakes from Como parks emails:Joe Doakes from Como parks emails:

Hospitals are bringing in foreigners to do the nursing work Americans won’t do.

The article implies the reason for the nursing shortage is that American nurses are tired from working so hard taking care of Covid patients. They’re quitting in exhaustion. Apparently, they will never recover, never return to work, therefore we must replace them with nurses brought in from overseas. Foreign nurses are much more durable, more resilient, I guess. They aren’t quitters. They’re willing to work.

Who believes this rot?

If we’re worried about a nurse staffing shortage, maybe we shouldn’t be firing nurses during a pandemic for violating a vaccine mandate? Particularly not over a vaccine which doesn’t prevent the spread of an illness which is basically just a bad flu. Another example of the endless lack of Second Order Thinking in the Brandon administration.

Joe Doakes

Why, yes – it does seem a little bit like the right hand doesn’t know what stories the left-hand is telling.

If we consider the notion of “sanity“ as a continuum, with “very very sane“ on one end, and “not sane at all“ on the left, it’s pretty fair that our systems Covid fear mongering has driven this particular mother (and teacher) to the “left“ end of the scale:

An arrest warrant has been issued for a Houston-area mother whose teenage son was allegedly found in the trunk of her car at a COVID-19 drive-thru testing site on Friday…According to the charging documents, Beam told Gordon that her child was in the trunk because he had previously tested positive for COVID-19 and as a result, wanted to “prevent her from getting exposed to possible COVID” while driving him to get additional testing at the stadium.

Gordon told Beam that she “would not be receiving COVID testing until the child would be removed from the trunk of the vehicle and place[d] in the back seat of the vehicle.”

On the other end of the scale? This entire Twitter thread:

Sanity is pounding at the door.

And from inside the trunk, where applicable.

Scene 1: Fall, 2020.

Us:  “Eventually, Covid is going to be endemic.  We’ll never eliminate it.  Masks are public health theater.  Shutdowns will make things worse. Vaccines are great news, but let’s be cautious about the claims.   We need to protect the vulnerable, and learn to live with it.  Eventually, between herd immunity and mutation,  this is going to be just like the flu. 

Them:  Hah!  Just like the flu, he says!  Hundreds of thousands have died!  Masks are effective! IF we could only lock down for six weeks, we’d destroy the virus, just like the Germans!  Mask up, Minnesota!

Scene 2: Today.

Them: The experts say Covid is going to be with us for good. Masks maybe useless. The economy needs to breathe! Vaccines are really more like flu shots than smallpox or polio shots. This is going to be like the flu, eventually.

Us: Ummm…

Them: Becasue shut up.

(And SCENE).

To: The World
From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re: Not the tough, decisive Patton

“Comedian” Patton Oswalt has been taking flak in recent weeks for having tweeted out a photo of him standing with Dave Chapelle – who is trayf among the Wokies.

He issued a groveling apology last week.

My hot take:

If you have ever seen Oswalt’s work, and his record outside of his “comedy”, and thought he was remotely:

a) smart enough to stay on “woke” message in the first place, and

b) solid enough in thought and integrity to stand up for “a”

…then you cared about him more than I did.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This is the first worthwhile analysis of supply chain disruptions I’ve found. It’s worthwhile because it doesn’t focus on one tree (ships in port) but on the whole forest of supply chain issues, particularly the consequences of the abrupt shift in consumption due to Covid regulations. It’s another example of Second Order thinking.

Remember last year when Cub had no toilet paper? That’s because toilet paper in the office restroom is single-ply industrial grade on a huge roll, but toilet paper at home is two-ply softer grade. Toilet paper manufacturers know the normal office-versus-at-home percentages but when everybody shifted from working at the office to working at home, manufacturers weren’t prepared to instantly shift percentages and weren’t thrilled at incurring the expense because nobody knew how long lockdowns would last so they couldn’t calculate whether the shift would be worth the cost. It took months for the industry to catch up.

Everything in the supply chain works that way, including food. The author claims that pre-pandemic, 60% of all food in the US was eaten outside the home, at school and restaurants. How much during the lockdowns? Consider the consequence of shifting tomato sauce from Costco sized cans into Cub sized jars, if you can even obtain that many Cub sized jars because they’re made in Mexico where workers are quarantined for their own government’s lockdowns and the few jars they do make are shipped on boats sitting in ports waiting to unload containers.

The people who thought they could lock down the economy without consequences are the same people who figure they can shut down electric generating plants without consequences. There will always be toilet paper on the shelves and the lights will always come on when you flip the switch, right? They never seriously ask, “What could go wrong?” because they are too busy signaling their virtue to engage in second order thinking.

Joe Doakes

In the “progressive“ world, everything but political science is, in a practical sense, hypothetical.

And then there were six, again: Kendall Qualls has jumped into the MNGOP Governors race.

And the MNDFL’s Ken Martin’s response?

So…for the 2022 Governor’s race, Ken Martin is still running against…

…Trump?

Which is interesting, because it wasn’t so long that his party’s line was completely different:

Why yes. Indeed.

I suppose it beats trying to run on the DFL’s record…