…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

A friend of the blog emals:

I

I’m at the Vikings game tonight.

Almost no one wearing a mask.

Lots of Hennepin county law enforcement on hand.

I have to suspect the deputies are just as sick of Karen as everyone else is.

…what we in the Twin Cities have known for a while: that if you want something resembling detached reporting (there is no such thing as “objective” reporting) of Democrats, you need to go to the UK.

For the past several years, the only place in the mainstream, non-conservative media (with all due shouts out to Powerline, David Steinberg and Alphanews) has been the Daily Mail, and occasionally the Guardian. Literally no Twin Cities media outlet will report on Omar, barring being occasionally shamed into doing the bare minimum; the Mail is all the coverage there is.

An

The world appears to have woken up to an important truth this week: which is that Joe Biden is a truly terrible president. It is a shame that it took America gifting Afghanistan back to the Taliban for so many people to realise this.

To be charitable, there were perhaps two reasons why this had not become more obvious before. The first is that Joe Biden is not Donald Trump and for a lot of the planet that seems to be recommendation enough to occupy the Oval Office. A break from the Trump show appealed to an awful lot of people.

But the second reason why too few realised what the world was going to get from a Biden presidency is that the US media simply didn’t ask the questions it needed to ask. Before the election a near entirety of the American media gave up covering it and simply campaigned for the Democrat nominee.

d on the national level? Same:

Democracy needs institutions – like the media – to survive.

Which means, at present, that we’re screwed blue.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I ran across a colorful graph but I’m having trouble understanding it, as I’m not a World Class Expert In Everything like some of our commenters, but merely an old country lawyer trying to make sense of it all.

This graph seems to tell me that Americans in general have a 1 in 10 chance of testing positive for Covid but only 1 in 600 chance of dying from it. And, of course, the risk of dying is skewed heavily toward the frail elderly, so my odds are even better – let’s say 1 in 1,000. That’s nowhere near the top of the list.

Why do I need the vaccine?

Why does the government need to FORCE me to take the vaccine?

Joe Doakes

Do you have questions, and the only answers seems to be “shut off or get cut up“

I went to the GOP headquarters last night, with a small group of activists and with what seemed for a while to be an even bigger group of media

And there, we waited for the puffs of smoke for the chimney (that none of us could find):

Gradually, some of the members of the executive committee started showing up:

And then, things settled into negotiation. Which was when I left. It was hot out there.

And, apparently, it got a little hot in there, too:

Carnahan started the evening demanding ten months of severance – likely over $100K, which is probably triple what the MNGOP has in the bank at the moment.

After a 2-3 hours of hammer and tongs, it came down to a 7-7 vote for a $38,000 severance deal. Aaaand, under the rules, Carnahan got to break the tie. Which she did. Basically skipping out with the MNGOP’s bank account.

Not, naturally, without leaving the DFL and media (ptr) a natural punch line:

I mean, on the one hand, it’s so obvious, even Jennifer Brooks got it.

And it’s not wrong.

Anyway – between the upcoming audit, the election for party chair in the next 45 days, the gut-shot this likely provides the Hagedorn race in CD1 (presuming his health permits a re-election bid), and Carnahan’s stated intent to run for that congressional seat (which has to be described as “dead on conception”, at this remove), not to mention the inevitable drama of the Lazzaro trial (or, more likely I suspect, guilty plea and showing where the financial bodies are buried, likely followed by the inevitable and justifiable clawback lawsuits on behalf of the victims, which will lead back to the party’s currently nonexistant coffers), the drama’s not over.

To say nothing of the that will attend the next year in MNGOP internal politics. Of the 14 non-Carnahan members of the Executive Committee, seven voted against the severance:

The rest of ’em need to have a short, sharp conversation with their voters. Hopefully leading to some down time, in many cases (although I can be convinced).

It’s not the end of the drama. It’s not even, as Churchill said, the beginning of the end. It’s onlyh yet another end of another frustrating beginning for the MNGOP.

…will need to talk with our patent and trademark attorneys.

But all in all, I think we can reach a satisfactory agreement in our mutual interest.

…the Biden Administration starts chattering about gun control, just mentioned this:

Without going into specifics about weapons, that’s enough to put a new firearm in the hand of every member of every NATO military, with quite a few left over.

As far as the human cost, especially to those afghans who helped us (and his records are no doubt being circulated by the Taliban as we speak)?

That’s just too depressing to engage with at the moment.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails,

Today’s headline: Biden demands all nursing home staff get vaccinated or lose federal funding.

Tomorrow’s headline: Nursing homes overwhelmed, closing, staff quit.

The day-after-tomorrow’s heading: It’s Trump’s fault.

Joe Doakes

Good thing it’s not a bet. There would have been no action.

During her first campaign for #MNGOP state chair, I supported Jennifer Carnahan. It wasn’t a slam-dunk – Keith Downey was very capable. I thought she told a good story, and had a good plan.

The vote made sense at the time.

But a lot has changed during Carnahan’s administration.

I left activism in 2018 – but heard the stories about the goings on at the GOP HQ. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt – and politics tends to draw big egos and hair-trigger tempers (much like radio) – so like a lot of grassroots voters, I paid them little mind.

But the tsunami of stories this past two weeks hasn’t left a lot of room for rational doubt. It’s time for Carnahan to go.

It’s not even really about the allegations about Tony Lazzaro, awful as they are. I think it’s entirely plausible Carnahan didn’t know that her close friend, guest at her small wedding, and primary campaign donor was involved in the activities for which he now faces Federal criminal charges; it’s not like sex traffickers advertise it in polite company.

I said plausible. But while rumors abound that Lazzaro’s side hustle was an open secret in inner party circles about (including from Andy Aplikowski’s letter this morning), let’s just leave that, noxious as it is, to the FBI and the DOJ.

The allegations against Carnahan and her staff, though? It’s impossible to read the credible, against-interest allegations of sexual harassment on the parts of various staffers and not get outraged at the “bro” culture that seems to have erupted in *our* party’s HQ.

As a conservative, a Republican and a father and grandfather of young women, I see these stories (none of them *completely* news to me, even outside the party) and wonder, not just why any woman would *work* there, but why they’d vote for the GOP?

Are they merely allegations, not court verdicts? Sure.

So what about when the “allegation” go to court? With discovery, testimony under oath? Imagine the anger every parent will feel at a party that’d foster that kind of depravity, when allegation turns to judgment? When that revulsion goes to vote?

Do you, loyal GOPer, feel lucky?

As to the allegations about Carnahan’s HR style, and her staff’s dubious HR practices, and the allegations four former Executive Directors made? Those just bounced the rubble.

It’s time for Carnahan to go.

And maybe others are reaching that conclusion:

And if Carnahan doesn’t? The Executive Committee must relieve her of her duties.

And if for whatever reason they don’t? The State Central needs to do it. Not just because the alternative is electoral disaster – although it is. No – because either way it’s the right thing to do.

It should go without saying – the GOP needs an independent investigation of the HR and financial allegations, including the out of control spending and tens of thousands in hush money purportedly paid to departing staffers.

Minnesota Republicans – the heart and brains of this state – may nor may not “deserve better”, but we had best demand better.

I’ve been frank about my long-term ambivalence (at best) about Donald Trump.

In fact, if the universe were a purely binary construct, I could say with a straight face that the only think I like less than Trump…

…is “#NeverTrump”, the reaction to Trump among Republicans that became ever-more knee-jerk over time, to the point of having “Republicans” endorsing Biden over Trump last year.

One of the worst – and by “worst”, I mean “Most Perennially Dim” – offenders is Tom Nichols.

And on a weekend where the Administration lived down to something far below our worst expectations, Tom Nichols exceeded even them:

Naturally, there are Democrats who, given their dubious critical-thinking skills, accept this notion – that Kristi Noem abrogated her foreign policy and national defense duties attendant to being governor of South Dakota, and being seen in public on a day when the person Tom Nichols endorsed was not.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Here’s New York’s vaccine passport plan. Governor Walz is a New York wanna-be; his will follow shortly, no doubt.

Normally, I’d say “Who cares? I don’t go to any of those places,” except for the fact Hy Vee has in-store dining and I will need groceries. Delivery? Oh no, you can bet every delivery service will refuse to serve customers who lack a vaccine passport. They’re private businesses, they can do whatever they want.

Dang it, I should have listened to the preppers.

Joe Doakes

The divide between sane America and crazy America is getting bigger and bigger.

The opening chapter of Paul Johnson’s Modern Times: A History of the World from the 20’s to the ’80s, relates the reporting, academic as well as journalistic, of the discovery of the theory of relativity – and the intellectual shockwave it sent through the intelligentsia and technocracy of the day.

Which was dwarfed, over time, by the side-effects of what it helped introduce – relativism, a version of the universe very much at odds with the Western Judeochristian notions of truth, creating an intellectual climate where materialistic philosophies like Progressivism, Marxism, Socialism and all manners of intellectual and (eventually) political totalitarianism throve.

Modern Times goes on to relate the history of that struggle – both World Wars, the (first) apex of Marxism, the West’s (first) attempt at suicide in the ’60s and ’70s, and ends (in its first edition) right around the elections of Reagan and Thatcher – both hopeful developments (that led, in the second, early ’90s edition, to a little burst of unaccustomed triumphalism from the normally utterly sober Johnson, relating the collapse of Communism.

Reading this piece in Federalist, it appears relativism won the rematch – at least, in regards to how the latest generation views “reality”:

Reading this piece in Federalist, it appears relativism won the rematch – at least, in regards to how the latest generation views “reality”…

“In 1998,” Derek Thompson wrote, “The Wall Street Journal and NBC News asked several hundred young Americans to name their most important values. Work ethic led the way—naturally. After that, large majorities picked patriotism, religion, and having childre“Twenty-one years later,” Thompson continued, “the same pollsters asked the same questions of today’s 18-to-38-year-olds—members of the Millennial and Z generations. The results, published last week in The Wall Street Journal, showed a major value shift among young adults. Today’s respondents were 10 percentage points less likely to value having children and 20 points less likely to highly prize patriotism or religion.”

The good news: there’s a vacuum out there. Nature – and the human mind and soul – abhor vacuums.

The bad news: the “other side”, being intellectual empty carbs, are much better at filling vacuums quickly than the hard-to-digest protein of the cultural right.

I suggest reading the whole thing.