Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Black people make up 13.5% of the US population but only 10% of vaccinated people.

Executive Orders closing entertainment venues and employment opportunities to the unvaccinated, will have a disparate impact on Blacks.

Disparate Impact discrimination is a hateful and invidious form of racism.

The Usurper in the White House is a hateful racist. We must remove him from office at once, so Kamala can be elevated to cure the building of the taint of racial discrimination.

Republicans should introduce Articles of Impeachment based disparate impact racial discrimination. No, of course they won’t pass. But it’ll be fun hearing the explanation why the Hater in Chief should remain in office instead of allowing the First Black Woman President to heal the nation.

Joe Doakes

I suspect the next step would be a state of emergency…

Back around the fall of 2020, in respect to the mewling avalanche of navel gazing in the media and among parts of my social circle about how 2020 was “the worst year ever”, I made two observations.

1. Tell that to anyone alive in 1942, or 1916 (or the 1918 Influenza), 1861, or any of the various Bubonic Plagues. Those that didn’t hit you with a brick would laugh a bitter, condescending laugh.
2. Worst ever? It wasn’t even the worst in my lifetime, from my perspective.

This last observation was a little controversial in some parts of my social circle – but among years in my life, 2020 might have cracked the bottom five, maybe. Just off the top of my head: 2008 was horrible, 2003 was a grueling slog of unemployment, 2000 involved all the fun and frolic of a divorce and 1988 was a hideous morass of depression.

So – 2020 was #5 on the *hit parade. At worst.

I posted that list on another, lesser social media platform than this blog. And it drew…

…well, some agreement, and a particularly harsh reaction from some parts of my social circle.

I’m not going to say 2020 was fun – it was terrible, and for reasons that went beyond Covid. And 2021, so far, is worse; more people in my life, speaking for myself, have died of Covid this year than last year. Again, neither year comes close to topping any of the years I listed above.

It’s heartening to see others making the observation:

No one can or should emerge from that world-historical shock without a heightened sense of life’s transience. It is the lockdown, the pause in “busy-ness”, that has been infused with more meaning than it can hold. What started as twee high jinks about banana bread became a sour reappraisal of modernity by its principal winners: the educated, the urban, the mobile. 

It is mortifyingly non-U, in fact, to say that I enter the post-lockdown world with no new angle on life. But there it is. I am going to go out as much as I did before, thanks. I am going to travel as much as the friction of new rules allows. If some urbanites crave an Arcadian life, I encourage them to find it in the obvious places instead of bending cities to their tastes. To the extent that I have changed at all, it is in the direction of more speed and zest: passing some of my forties in an Asian megacity is a goal now, as it never was before.

No doubt, my failure to have a Damascene lockdown reveals an impoverished imagination. But then which side is more bovinely stuck in its ways here? What stands out about the great odysseys of the soul I keep reading is their familiarity. Metropolitans have always been prone to credulous nature-worship. Families have always been prone to urban flight. Mid-life ennui has always been dressed up as some fault with the outside world. What is new is the respectability that such attitudes have acquired over the past year and a half. In other words, the lockdown hasn’t changed these people any more than it changed me. It just dignified existing impulses.

Read the whole thing.

But I think there was one other factor at work.

More tomorrow.

If you’re voting in California today? Your mission is clear.

Gavin Newsom is everything that’s wrong with modern progressivism (although far from alone at that). He’ part of an “elite” that has destroyed one of history’s great success stories, one of America’s onetime great accomplishments.

Larry Elder may not have all the answers, and given that even if he manages to swim upstream past the Democrat fraud machine he’ll still be facing a California State Assembly on his own.

Is there a better guy for the job than Elder? Some certainly wish it so:

As Donald Rumsfeld said, “You don’t go to war with the army you want. You go with the army you have”. The California GOP may be rebounding, but at the state level they’ve got nothing. Nationally? This next three years is going to be interesting in all the wrong ways, party-wise.

A wish and $3 will get you a cup of Starbucks. $5.50 in California.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Article on vaccine hesitancy uses risk graph that shows what they want it to show to support their argument, not what it ought to show for me to make up my own mind. Odds of dying fully vaccinated are 1 in 137,000. Yeah, versus the odds of dying from what? Car accident? Hot air balloon crash? Carnival knife thrower? Who cares? In an article about vaccine hesitancy, the correct comparison is odds of dying while fully vaccinated versus odds of dying while not vaccinated. If you’re trying to convince me to get vaccinated, then show me the vast improvement in the odds resulting from the vaccine. Instead, the next graph shows just the opposite. Odds of NOT dying from Covid are the same as the ordinary flu, except for the elderly infirm.

I lack the math skills to convert the second chart into the first chart but I’m guessing that in a nation of 350 million people with only 650,000 deaths (and those are deaths counted using the phony numbers), my odds of dying from Covid while not vaccinated are only 1 in 538. Given most of the deaths are elderly infirm, my odds are actually better, maybe 1 in 1,000 about the same as drowning or a motorcycle accident, risks that I consider slight enough to ignore. And since I work mostly from home and rarely travel, my odds of meeting an Covid-infected person to catch the bug and die from it are even lower, just as my odds of dying from snake bite are much lower than the national average, which is lower than the global average.

I hate articles that use misleading graphs like that. They actually heighten my vaccine hesitancy.

Joe Doakes

My favorite example from the last week; the star Tribune breathlessly pointing out that 69 people had gotten infected with Covid at the Minnesota State fair.

Which turns out to be an infection rate per million roughly 1/4 that of the general population.

Minneapolis.

It has an educational achievement gap at the very bottom of the national pile.

It’s on track to have its worst year for violent crime in a generation.

The gap between haves and have nots is daunting; crossing 394 between Kenwood and the North Side, or driving up Washington from the posh North Loop to Near North, is a little like crossing the Berlin Wall in 1974.

The public class is governing like Lewis Carrol’s Mad Queen is teaching a sophomore-level poli sci “laboratory” experiment – focused on bikeability and ramming trains down horse-and-carriage sized streets and telling the subjects public safety is a “privilege”.

Its downtown is decimated by Covid, its formerly stellar entertainment districts cowed by Covid and jittery from spasms of hooliganism and violence.

It’s ruling class can’t be bothered with any of that, other than chanting it’s all Trump’s fault.

But what can they do?

Virtue-signal about policies that went out of favor sixty years ago:

…where “do something” is the homeowners equivalent of putting a bumpersticker on their car.

For decades some Minnesotans added language to their property deeds barring future sales to people of color.

Two new initiatives hope to raise awareness of these racially restrictive covenants and their impact, get them removed and also raise money to increase Black homeownership in the city. And it starts one lawn sign at a time.

It’s true – these were parts of covenents in deeds, and some deeds may still have some of that language tucked away…

…over seventy years after they became illegal and unenforceable, in 1948.

The article points out, correctly, that at one point those covenants did at one point affect where populations were able and allowed to settle.

And it’s intellectually honest to note that demography takes forever to change organically – Saint Louis Park or Highland Park haven’t been semi-formal “Jewish Ghettoes” since well before World War II, and yet both still retain elements of that history.

It’s also intellectually honest to note that the demography that was forced by the covenants has been reinforced for decades, now, not by property covenants, but by the two-tiered public school system with the lower tier reserved for poor kids; by a social welfare state that uses the inner city as a warehouse for the poor; by welfare policies that have encouraged the breakdown of all families, but with the black family leading the fall.

“It starts……”

And, let’s be honest, stops, unless those wealthy progs want to change the system they own.

Or give their property away.

Otherwise, it’s just another, bigger, more expensive bumper sticker.

The “attack” on Jussie Smollett was a reflection of everything wrong about Trump’s Amerikkka, until it almost inevitably turned out to be a hoax. Then it disappeared.

The attack on Larry Elder by a “woman” (we weren’t given any actual pronouns to use, so I’m not positive about that) in a gorilla mask – a bit of Jim Crow-era racism dating back to the systematic dehumanization of black people in the 1920s through 1960s – is…

…well, if you’re a Democrat leader, nothing at all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

“Nominal” is Latin for “in name only.” William S. Lind, author of books on 4th Generation Warfare, knows a thing or two about armies. He says the Afghan Army was a ‘nominal’ army – an army in name, only. In reality, it was a bunch of guys who needed a job but didn’t much care about fighting and dying for their country. The Afghan Army collapsed overnight because it never really existed outside the minds of bureaucrats who believed in it. An army that won’t fight isn’t a military force, it’s a social work project.

That brings us to the United States military with its woke generals and high-heel wearing cadets and purging the ranks for fear of white supremacists. If the US military isn’t a fighting force, what is it? It’s a stepping stone. For young people, it’s free college. For lower ranks, it’s a place to belong until you retire. But for top ranks – admirals and generals – it’s the finishing school for a job in the military-industrial complex, all those Beltway Bandits living off the Pentagon. Manufacturers of military equipment need customers. If insurgents don’t have military grade weapons, national governments won’t buy more. Their eternal quandary is: How do we get military grade weapons into the hands of terrorists so that national governments will buy more of our product, without getting caught selling to proscribed people?

The top brass of the US military ordered the bug-out from Afghanistan leaving behind billions (with a b) billions of dollars worth of military grade weapons and equipment knowing it would fall into the hands of the Taliban and from there would find its way to insurgent groups worldwide, causing national governments everywhere to need more and better military grade weapons and hardware. Our top brass are well on the way to becoming Salesmen of the Year.

Joe Doakes

There will be so much for a new conservative administration to fix…

… if we ever get one.

Kim Crockett’s piece on HR4 – which would instutionalize the stealing of elections. Also – sign up for the “Organizing Citizens” event here.

Today’s music list:

…20 years ago, right after 9/11, when some on the left said the overreaction to the terror attacks 20 years ago tomorrow would actually give the terrorists the win they wanted?

I can’t have been the only one thinking Joe Biden’s speech yesterday must have made Mohammed Atta smile in whatever part of the Great Beyond he’s in now.

The nuts and bolts of the speech, to the extent there were any? The “president” wants to use OSHA to enforce a vaccine mandate on companies with more than 100 employees – as if forcing a medication on employees (and the forced sharing of medical records, and the inevitable shielding of employers from liability when those records are inevitably. misused) is the same as safety shields in ripsaws. We’ll await future presidents using the same precedent to force inoculations against smoking, obesity, and, eventually and inevitably, barring some outbreak of sanity, ideas.

Also – not a single mention of natural immuinity. 50 mllion Americans are known to have been infected and recovered (myself included); that natural immunity is at least as effective as any pharmaceutical – but is being pointedly ignored.

It’s hard to honestly say what was the most concerning part of our “chief of state’s” speech yesterday. I’m not the only one to whom it sounded like a desperate muddle of authoritarian knee-jerks.

His little shot at the governors who are pushing back at his misbegotten authority – how he’s going to use the power of the Federal Government and the Presidency to show them who’s boss?

It sounds like he wants to crush the idea and practice of federalism; like separation of powers is the problem.

Much of it was peoples reactions to the “President”. For example, this weasel:

People on the left have a frightening propensity to see government as a “Parent”, rather than the custodian elected by the “Free Association of Equals” in the Declaration of Independence.

Of course, if you can’t get timeless wisdom from Joy Reid and Steve Schmidt of “The Lincoln Project”, where can you get it?

The scapegoating of the unvaccinated – who, notwithstanding the left’s propaganda machcine, are largely the young, the poor, and Black males from 20-40 years old – was perhaps the most chilling thing about the, er, “speech”.

Thing is, a real leader – I’m looking at you, Ron DeSantis – could get a lot of mileage out of something that’s been pushed to the sidelines throughout this pandemic – the truth. John Hayward has a draft of a part of the speech that could have been:

20 years after 9/11, we have government by decree, an out of control bureaucracy that governs more or less as it wishes unless and until someone musters the numbers or. money to try to clip it, a plutocrat sector that buys its own boutique version of freedom, and a population that’s being conditioned to accept a dystopian shredding of freedom as “the new normal”.

…who looked at this Austin Bay tweet on Instapundit and thought he was sneaking in a bit about Minnesota GOP politics…

The pandemic and civil unrest has led, as we’ve noted in this space, to a massive realignment of attitudes about firearms, with Democrats, women and minorities the fastest-growing members of a fast-growing lifestyle.

And now – school choice?

Granted, the “choice” is for more mask mandates.

But any port in a storm.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The United States still faces a shortage of affordable ammunition. The Garden Administration is going to make it worse.

Ammunition made in Russia is imported into the US and sold under brands like Tula, Wolf, Bear and others. It’s generally made from cheaper components (steel case, bi-metal jacket, low-grade-primer) so ammo snobs like me won’t buy it. But cheaper components means cheaper prices, even after shipping it half-way around the world. Today on Ammoseek, 9mm 115 grain by Tula is $0.33 per round while Winchester White Box is $0.40 (limited quantities). Unless you’re shooting a lot of rounds, that probably won’t make a difference in your pocketbook.

But remember our discussion about Second Order Effects? Take away the cheapest ammo and what do low-budget shooters do: quit shooting altogether or buy more expansive ammo? And if they buy more expensive ammo, that depletes the available inventory of more expensive ammo which . . . pushes up the price to make it even more expensive.

When ammunition becomes a luxury good, only rich people and government can afford it. Disarming the masses on the cheap – welcome to The New United States, where Constitutional rights are a historical anachronism that you can’t afford to exercise.

Joe Doakes

It is implementing, in effect, Moynahan’s famous, and most stupid, policy suggestion; the thousand percent tax on ammunition.

Berg’s Eighth Law of DIversity states “”American progressivism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder.

There’s a reason it’s called Berg’s Law, and not Berg’s suggestion.

I don’t know if Larry Elder is going to win next week’s recall election against Gavin Newsom.

But Big Left certainly seems to think he’s got enough of a shot to pull out the big, stupid, racist guns…

…and the small, stupid, racist guns.

(No literal guns, yet – but let’s say a prayer for Elder anyway).

If you’re thinking referring to a black man as a “white supremacist” cheapens the term – well, Big Left is devaluing the term itself; since it seems Latinos in California, who’ve been the buttresses of the Democrat majority in the state for the past couple decades, are very underwhelmed with Newsom.

It’s going to be an insane five days. And not in a good way.

Remember when liberals said there was no such thing as death panels, had never been such a thing as death panels, and could never ever ever be such a thing as death panels?

Either do they.

I haven’t written here recently (sorry, Mitch!), mostly because I did a fair amount of traveling in August. I attended my high school reunion in the wilds of Wisconsin, then a week later headed east to a family wedding in the Hocking Hills region of Ohio (highly recommended, by the way).

In the course of my travels, I spent time in six different states — Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Given that the howling over the dread Delta Variant has been in full effect for much of the summer, I was particularly interested in what I would see in my travels. Were people paying attention to the renewed demands for masking and social distancing? Were the entreaties of the Powers That Be having any effect?

Not a chance.

My high school reunion had over 100 attendees, a good result for a class with 144 surviving members. Classmates returned to my Wisconsin home town from California, Washington state, Colorado, Maryland, and New York, among other places. One classmate arrived masked, but took his mask off about 15 minutes into the festivities. The venue was a local brewery with a beer hall and the entire event was indoors. My masked classmate was the only person I saw wearing a mask all weekend, outside of some of the staff at the hotel. Social distancing? Not much of that, either — as you would expect at a high school reunion, it was hugs galore.

The following week was the family wedding; we took a convoluted path so we could pick up our college-age daughter, who attends school in Missouri. We stopped in Waterloo, Iowa, for lunch — not a mask in sight. We got gas in Hannibal, Missouri — no masks at all. Our overnight hotel was in downstate Illinois — again, no masks or social distancing in sight, and a full buffet breakfast available. We stopped for lunch in Indiana — again, no masks anywhere. We gassed up again on the Indiana/Ohio border, in a town that looked like nothing had changed since 1978. No masks. We reached our destination — no masks at the hotel. We had an out-of-town guest reception — saw every face in the place.

The wedding the following day was wonderful — joyous, raucous, with an open bar and food trucks from Columbus for the meal. There were probably 250 people in attendance; not a soul was wearing a mask. It was an outdoor event, but if social distancing was a factor, no one seemed to realize it. Nothing changed on the return trip. No mask? No problem!

Over this past weekend, we attended the Great Minnesota Grease Together. Everyone had to mask up on the shuttle buses, but once we were at the fair, mask wearing was about 1%, even in the queues for a Sweet Martha bucket before leaving the fairgrounds.

We are reminded daily the Delta Variant is still in full swing, an implacable foe, with future variants lined up like planes in a holding pattern at O’Hare; Mu is coming next, and all the other letters of the Greek alphabet are getting ready to ravage the countryside, so many that we’re likely to run out of letters eventually. Presumably another naming convention waits in the wings — perhaps future variants can be named after Kentucky Derby winners (the “Seattle Slew Variant” perhaps), assuming we can independently verify that neither the horses nor their jockeys ever used Ivermectin. As anyone with a television or a smart phone knows, the hectoring and self-congratulatory moral tutelage continue unabated, all of it fact-checked, verified, or otherwise given the J.D. Power award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.

But you know what? Even after a summer of harangues and a phalanx of Tik-Tok Cassandras, people are doing as they please, at least here in flyover land. 

Yes, yes, everything I’m presenting here is anecdotal, but current behaviors are easy to observe and if a skeptic made a similar sojourn, the skeptic would see the same things. There will remain a cohort of those who follow every word and every directive from Drs. Fauci, Osterholm and their colleagues. Most readers of this feature likely see social media posts featuring our bien pensant  betters dutifully wearing their masks and keeping a yardstick or two between them as they struggle to take a selfie. And that’s fine — let your freak flags fly!

In the end, though, it’s highly likely the Safety Dance is over, unless our betters are willing to force compliance. What’s been happening in Australia has given me pause, but mandates and lockdowns will be difficult to enforce. And our betters know it.

Sure is a good thing the State Fair banned the law abiding citizen from carrying on the Fairgrounds.

Otherwise, who knows what kind of mischief all those law-abiding citizens will get into.

Rep. Matt Gaetz exonerated of allegations of sex trafficking.

He was the victim of an extortion attempt:

Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz has been exonerated after 62-year-old Stephen Alford was recently indicted by the Department of Justice for extortion.

“Stephen M. Alford did knowingly and willfully devise, and intent to devise, a scheme to defraud and for obtaining money and property by means of material false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises, and for the promise of executing such scheme, did cause, and attempt to cause, a wire communication to be transmitted in interstate commerce,” the indictment states.

So, all you Democrats in the comment section (you know who you are) who were measuring the drapes in a Supermax cell for Gaetz? Anything to say?

By the way – Rep. Gaetz’s father, Don…

…was a student of my father’s, back in Rugby, ND, back when I was a toddler.

I’m not gonna claim it gives me absolute moral authority or anything.

Remember – if you don’t live in Minneapolis, Jacob Frey and Keith Ellison don’t believe you are entitled to an opinion about the future of policing in Minneapolis.

But on other issues…

I guess it’s just the right people from out of town that are entitled to an opinion.

The DFL: Enforcing a rigid cast system since 1948.

I caught this the other day.

So let me get this straight: a virus transmitted almost exclusively by being expectorated into the air by infected people coughing, is spread less by people who aren’t coughing as much?

What manner of sorcery is this?

Yet again, science seems to be bearing out my knee-jerk assumptions, by the way.

Professor “joins the lowercase ‘movement'” (sic) to reject the “symbols of hierarcy”.

Let’s forget for a moment that she’s keeping the “Doctor” in front of her name – as noxious a symbol of hierarchy as there is.

But let’s dig a little further.

Writing in pure lower case is the sort of stylistic affectation afforded almost exclusively to “artists”, from the wonderful e.e.cummings to a raft of “quirky” and almost invariably tiresome cartoonists, “writers” and other “artists” – almost all of whom get whatever legitimacy they claim from being part of the academy or some genus of counterculture or another…

…all of which is another term for class privilege.

Wonder if I can find a “lowercase movement” meeting somewhere?

Also – it’d be interesting to run a poll of indigenous Americans to see if professors affecting lower case helps them, and how much…

Black unemployment, after hitting historic lows under “the most racist president ever”, is bouncing back up under Corn Pop’s pal:

Of course, the last jobs report produced about 1/3 the jobs expected. l

But at least things are going swimmingly along the Mexico border and in Afghanistan…

This blog has accepted as a truism that a functioning representative democracy needs institutions that The People can trust – law enforcement, the judiciary, and the news media – to keep all the other institutions accountable, and thus allowing the democracy to survive.

So in a sense the fact that National Public Radio is beginning to drop the pretense of “objectivity” might almost be seen as good news:

According to the new guidelines:

NPR editorial staff may express support for democratic, civic values that are core to NPR’s work, such as, but not limited to: the freedom and dignity of human beings, the rights of a free and independent press, the right to thrive in society without facing discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, disability, or religion.

NPR’s public editor, Kelly McBride, explains that the guidelines allow journalists to participate in such causes as Black Lives Matter demonstrations or Pride parades, though they have to discuss specifics with their supervisors.

But not – one recalls when listening to Lulu Garcia Navarro plunking generous helpings of her point of view into her “Journalism” – the audience.

The late Nick Coleman used to accuse my fellow Northern Alliance bloggers and I of trying to “burn down the public schools“ for suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the teachers union and the administrative/industrial complex weren’t necessarily working in kids best interests.

It’s taken 15 years – but it sounds like all the smart parents agree:

Enrollment in public schools nationwide declined by 3 percent last year. But it was the numbers for kindergarten enrollment that should chill the blood of teachers’ unions and school district officials. Kindergarten enrollment tanked by 13 percent last year, and it’s only expected to get worse this year.

One school district in Brooklyn, New York, has seen its rosters fall from 345 students in 2018–19 to a projected 225 this September, with kindergarten enrollment collapsing from 76 to 37. Because school funding is pegged to enrollment, that school stands to lose a sizable chunk of its funding — funds to pay teachers and other support staff.

And yes, it’s not the pandemic itself that’s causing the collapse in enrollment. It’s the policies put in place to assuage the desires of teachers.

My theory: progressives, when they get in the power, always, always, always overreach. Sometimes it even hurts them:

All of which would be another reason to view 2020–21 to be the apex of teachers union power, to be followed by inexorable descent. They got their work-at-home carveouts, their school closures, their preferred party running the federal government, their vaccine fast-tracking, their fingerprints all over the “science,” and their hundreds of billions in federal largesse. And as a result of all that influence, they created a product that’s literally repellant to millions of parents, even at the cost of free. Their ranks will almost certainly thin.

If I had known what I was doing, I would’ve spent a lot more time and effort trying to put together some sort of “homeschool pod“ when my kids were that age – sharing the effort with some of the other parents who had gotten disgusted, even back then, with the system.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

San Francisco will pay you not to shoot people. Baltimore considering it.

It sounds like the old joke about getting paid not to raise hogs, but apparently it’s real.

The government just gave fully-automatic machine guns to the Taliban. They’re paying criminals not to shoot each other. I’d like a full-auto machine gun and I won’t shoot anybody with it, pinkie-swear.

How do I get in on this action?

Joe Doakes

I’m just wondering how I would put in for back pay.

A friend of the blog emails:

This has to be the most depressing, let them eat cake piece on the “success of the soccer stadium” that I have ever read.
“There’s been some smaller businesses moving into the stadium area to serve soccer fans, but much more work is needed to boost the area.”

Excuse me? To serve the soccer fans? What about those of us who live here. This was a community long before the stadium and the light rail came along to break it up.
Nothing is going to be built there for a long time. But, hey, as long as the city keeps dealing out the money, McGuire doesn’t have to really do anything.

The fabled “memory hole“ is full of narratives that don’t match those of Big Left, locally and nationally.