Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Transcript of remarks:
“May I have your attention please?  Thank you.  Welcome to your first day at Harvard Law School.  As you may know, this year’s class is Special: there are no White students, no Asian students, certainly no Hispanics, only Black students, to make up for centuries of racist oppression.  Congratulations on being selected for our first Reparations Endeavor.  I see a hand up, yes, do you have a question?

No, there are no courses on your course schedule. The courses here are geared for brilliant and hard-working people, which, judging from your grades and test scores, includes few of you.  If you were to take our courses and be graded honestly, you’d all fail miserably and be kicked out.  That would generate terrible publicity for the school which would defeat the purpose of having you in the first place; therefore, you will attend no courses while at this school.  Instead, courses have been replaced with attendance-optional discussion sessions geared to your level of ability, in which students will discuss their feelings about law, oppression, discrimination and, of course, slavery, plus everyone will be awarded internships with major civil rights organizations like BLM and Antifa to gain hands-on experience bringing about social change through direct action.  Yes, over there, another question?

Not to worry, everyone will be getting straight A’s.  Class rank?  We have a new system for class rank.  Each of you is A Class of Your Own.  Everyone will graduate First in Class, be selected Valedictorian and have an opportunity to give a speech (on Zoom, because Covid) to your friends and relatives.  Yes, you on the right? 

Well, no, I don’t suppose you will learn much law here. But that’s not really a change, is it?  I mean, you’ve been Affirmative Action recipients all your lives. Special breaks in high school, special admission to college, special grading there . . . you’ll notice none of you took the GRE to test your knowledge in your major area of study, some of you took the LSAT which is a general knowledge bullshit exam, but most of you were given a test waiver on account of your race.  Subject matter expertise has never been expected of you; why start now?  In the red shirt, yes, your question?
No, no! Perish the thought.  Your Harvard Law Degree won’t be worthless: it’s worth half a million dollars each, to the school. Plus you will receive a handsome diploma, suitable for framing, at no additional cost.  Speak up, please, young lady, your question? 
How will you get a job if you don’t know anything?  Oh, don’t worry about that.  Big law firms will be falling all over themselves to hire a Black Woman like you.  They desperately need to fill quotas for their HR departments.  Moving on, yes, you there?

Well, now, I don’t know that I’d put it that way.  Calling yourself a ‘token’ is so harsh. And besides, better to be a ‘token’ in a major firm than not working in a major firm at all, right?  I mean, it’s no secret you’re an Affirmative Action graduate, they knew that the moment they laid eyes on you. In fact in your case, Duante, is it?  They knew it when they received your resume, which is why your resume rose to the top of the pile ahead of better qualified students named Chad or Tiffany, Yang or Levi.  

I see so many hands, I think it’s time to end this introductory session so I can hand you off to your personal Diversity and Inclusion Deans, one for each student.  They’ll help you feel good about yourselves and your role here in this historic class.  Welcome to Harvard and remember: you are Special!”

Joe Doakes

Today’s satire is tomorrow’s journalism.

And to the inevitable chirping “That’s racist” from the usual pack of pseudonymous progressive trolls: what do you call simultaneously piddling on academic merit and making race – absent all over context – a primary social determiner?

If it were in regard to sending people to prison rather than the finishing school for America’s “elite”, it’d be pretty unconscionable, wouldn’t it?

I got my start in radio.

My first full-time job paid $700 a month – after inflation today, probably more like $1,400. Which would translate to $8 an hour in 2021 dollars, except that in small-market radio back then, “full time” meant 48 hours a week. You had to pick up a weekend shift – meaning that in today’s dollars, I was making $6.75 an hour, for running the music playlist, reporting a bit of news, doing some baseball play-by-play, and being on the air from 8-noon and 3-6PM weekdays, plus the eight hour weekend shift.

I did it because, at the time, that’s how one got into the business. Before one could apply for the job making $20K (in 1985 dollars), which could lead you to the job in Minneapolis making $30-35, which could lead you to Chicago and $50-60 – maybe even that major-market morning guy or program director job that would get you into six figures.

Most of us, myself included, never got that far, of course. Oh, I made it to the big markets – in my case, KSTP in the ’80s, where I think my best year was $12K (1987 dollars) plus a whooooole lot of freelance voice work and news reporting. It actually went downhill from there; when I left radio in ’93, I’d been making $7 an hour and 20-25 hours a week at WDGY, as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity gutted the market for 20-something guys doing afternoon talk shows.

I moved on to other dreams.

One of which has never been to be the Political Class’s middle and senior management.

Which is the dream for an awful lot of people who go into political staff work.

Starting with a four-year degree in Political Science, they move on to internships, and then to entry-level staff jobs – with legislators, congresspeople, executive branch departments – that, like a lot of entry level white collar jobs with immense supplies of applicants and few positions (even in government), which (even in government) limits the wages.

Oh, yeah – these “kids” who are plugging away for peanuts are all betting on the long term – a senior staffer, a civil service management gig with the six figure salary and the government pension, a consultant job making the serious money, or like AOC an elected office with the boundless wealth that brings (for Democrats) – the big payoff for those who have the talent, the marketing acumen and the persistence to get there.

But even given all that? There’s no field so with so much upside that someone can’t wrench some victimology out of it:

They “help pass trillion dollar legislation” in the same way an Amazon delivery driver is “part of the world’s largest corporation”.

But just you watch – this sort of “story” doesn’t appear in a vaccuum. There’ll be a push to address the standard of living, “diversitiy” and pay of political staffers. None of it paid for by the senior staffers the “victims” want to one day become.

While Germany was hitting the Western Allies with hundreds of thousands of men and millions of rounds of artillery, their Austro-Hungarian ally was launching a far less impactful volley of words in the heart of their own nation.  Austrian Foreign Minister Count Ottokar von Czernin had arrived at the Vienna City Council on April 2nd, 1918 to attempt to give an inspirational speech and rally the falling support of the Habsburg’s polyglot empire.  

Czernin’s stemwinder specifically attacked France’s new Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, as the major obstacle to peace with the Allies.  Clemenceau had certainly drawn a hardline in the wake of the mutinies of 1917, stating that France’s policy would be “la guerre jusqu’au bout” (war until the end), echoing Britain’s David Lloyd George commitment to nothing less than total victory.  But Czernin’s attack wasn’t merely personal but also proclaimed that Clemenceau’s boasts didn’t reflect the true will of France because the prior administration had reached out to the Dual Monarchy in an attempt to sue for peace the year before.

An outraged Clemenceau quickly revealed the truth – it had been Austria-Hungary which had attempted to make a separate peace in early 1917.  And the proof came in the form of letters and communications from none other than the newly crowned Emperor himself, Charles I.

Charles I – for his attempt to end the war, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004 and known to the Catholic Church as Blessed Karl of Austria

Karl Franz Joseph Ludwig Hubert Georg Otto Maria had never intended to become the Emperor of the Dual Monarchy.  At his birth, he was the great-nephew of Karl Joseph and quite a distance removed from any realistic considerations towards obtaining the crown.  Karl studied science at a public school and then politics and law during his service in the army, becoming more of an educational dilettante than a man dedicated to any particular field.  HIs years of work had won him few accolades but neither had he acquired any detractors.  In some ways, Karl was a model member of the royal family – dutiful, friendly, family-oriented and deeply religious. Read the rest of this entry »

Winston Smith, the man killed last week in Uptown, was apparently already “at war” with the police:

Smith’s violent resistance to arrest may have been motivated by his belief that he was engaged in a “war” on cops.

For years leading up to his death, Smith made statements across social media platforms vowing to shoot police officers if he were ever to be apprehended, encouraging his followers to bring guns and bombs to protests and outlining tactics he believed would be most effective to kill members of law enforcement. He also frequently suggested that he was meeting with like-minded people and taking tangible steps towards these aims.

“Get ready for war,” Smith told his followers via Instagram in mid-April.

“Motherfuckers are finna move on these ‘ops,” he continued, using a slang term that means people would attack police.

“All the shooters, suit up,” he ordered. “Lace your boots up, it’s war fucking time. Bring your gun to the protest, bring them fucking bombs and rocket launchers and all that shit.”

Even some of the local media – in this case, ,reliably left-of-center Fox9 – are taking their break from the Twin Cities media’s usual “write a hagiography first, ask questions later” procedure and noting that there just might be an elephant in this particular room.

UPDATE: It’s unclear from media or law enforcement reports whether Smith was involved in January 6, the only example of violence in American history.

A decision Friday undercut the legal basis of California’s “assault weapon” ban:

California’s 32-year-old ban on a certain class of semi-automatic rifles colloquially known as “assault weapons” was declared unconstitutional yesterday in the case of Miller v. Bonta. At the same time, the Biden administration wants to impose similar restrictions federally.

The decision does not instantly nullify the enforcement of the law. “Because this case involves serious questions going to the merits, a temporary stay is in the public interest,” concludes the decision, which was penned by U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez for the Southern District of California. The injunction that would force California to stop enforcing its ban is therefore “stayed for 30 days during which time the Attorney General may appeal and seek a stay from the Court of Appeals.”

The state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, has already announced his intention to appeal—and the 9th Circuit, which will consider that appeal, is not reliably supportive of the Second Amendment. But Benitez’s reasoning remains for other jurists to draw on in other cases, especially if Biden continues his interest in banning certain kinds of rifles.

The 9th Circuit will overturn the decision. Which will likely go to the SCOTUS.

At which point the New York Rifle and Pistol case will have ended in a preceded applying strict scrutiny to state gun laws.

Gun rights are a marathon, not a sprint.

If only ever conservative cause could learn the lessons the 2nd Amendment movement teaches.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Richard Fernandez asks the right question.  Nobody in the Garden Administration seems to be listening. The Vegetable can’t figure out what flavor pudding to have today and The Hoe, well, she’s a ho and that’s about it.  Maybe the problem is the people running things behind the scenes are just plain evil so it isn’t that they aren’t listening, it’s that they don’t care.

Joe Doakes

Don’t care?

Or “it serves their interests?”

Katie Kieffer is found at KatieKieffer.com.

And here’s today’s set list.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking, sans ceremonial mask, into the Target on University Avenue, trying to calculate the number of people without masks in mandate-free, Karen-rich Saint Paul. Focused on numbers, he doesn’t notice as Avery LIBRELLE, wearing three masks, walks around the corner.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, ssssshhhhhhhhut the front door, how ya been, Avery?

LIBRELLE: Nobody is coming for your guns.

BERG: Democrats nationwide, including in Minnesota, are trying to.

LIBRELLE: Are they at your door taking your guns right this minute?

BERG: Er, no

LIBRELLE: So they’re not coming for your guns.

BERG: So if they’re not coming for my guns in five minutes, but not literally carting off my gun safe right at this moment…

LIBRELLE: Then you’ve got nothing to complain about.

BERG: Huh.

LIBRELLE: But the whole “Second Amendment” thing is just a conspiracy to sell more guns and ammo. It’s to profit from fear.

BERG: Huh. So the firearms and ammo industries staged “gun control” panic to improve their market.

LIBRELLE: Exactly!

BERG: So if that were the case, wouldn’t the firearms and ammunition industries have made sure they were ready to supply the immense demand?

(But LIBRELLE has already wandered off to badger someone who’s not wearing a mask.

An Italian “artist“ just sold an invisible statue – and not for invisible money, either:

an artist has sold an invisible statue for 15,000 euros. His name is Salvatore Garau and he has managed to auction his “work” for an amount that many consider crazy. However, he defends his creation tooth and nail.

The artist explained that “the success of the auction confirms an irrefutable fact: the void is nothing more than a space full of energy, even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle that nothing has a weight. It therefore has an energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is to say, into us

My mission is clear. I need to create a better space full of energy.

The world of art demands it.

Do you remember Kate Knuth? When we last heard from her, she was cashing checks as a resilience officer for the city of Minneapolis. It didn’t end well:

Knuth, an environmental educator and former DFL legislator, spent her first months in the job interviewing people and conducting a survey, but had not delivered any finished work product before she resigned.

So what happened? Tell me if you can figure out what happened:

Mychal Vlatkovich, a spokesman for Mayor Jacob Frey, said they’ve begun looking for a replacement and hope to hire someone by the end of March who will focus on the mayor’s goals. He said the mayor’s office did not ask Knuth to step down, but declined to answer whether she was allowed to continue in the position and referred further questions to Knuth and former City Coordinator Spencer Cronk, who is now the city manager of Austin, Texas.

Go ask the guy who moved to Texas. We aren’t sayin’ nothin’.

As you might imagine, this unceremonious departure didn’t sit well with Knuth, who has been rent-seeking for the better part of her career. And unsurprisingly, after her tussle with the tousled mayor, she’s looking for revenge:

Frey’s contentious relationship with the city’s elected representatives, among other issues, got Knuth thinking in January about running for mayor. “Especially in the last year, especially in the last six weeks, there has been an absence” on the part of Frey, she said. “I also haven’t seen as strong of an interest in the basic running of the city that I would like to see from my mayor.”

In theory, revenge is a better motive for running than monomaniacal incoherence, which is what usually delivers the goods around City Hall. But is Knuth coherent? Let’s check out her Jack Handey imitation:

“The thing that I bring is this really strong commitment to moving through the work of structural transformative change, particularly when it comes to public safety, particularly when it comes to climate change,” she said. “Pairing that with [my] experience in, and just liking working within, big public institutions and working with them and through them to make sure they’re serving what we deserve as a city is potentially really powerful and I think something people in this city would really value.”

Dude. But there’s more. Oh my yes, there’s more:

Climate change intersects with progressive economic policies for Knuth. “I think one of the best resilience strategies we could accomplish is if every family had $500 in the bank,” she said. “Whether it’s a car breaking down or the power going out and losing some food, they’re better able to handle that. Does that sound like a climate policy? No, but if climate change increases risks in the most vulnerable [communities] now or even more vulnerable [communities in the future], decreasing vulnerability overall is super important in terms of dealing with climate change.”

That’s just super.

Will Knuth have a chance? Given the puzzle palace structure of elections in Minneapolis, it’s entirely possible. Frey has been weighed and found wanting, but the current competition has Mos Eisley Cantina written all over it, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Coming on like a amalgam of Marianne Williamson and Rachel Carson may just work. 

I’ve never much liked the entire “Seventies Midwestern Arena Rock” genre. 

But among the bands in that genre, it’s Styx that’s always gone beneath and below the rest, the one whose impression to me swerves from apathy into active dislike.  

It’s not that they couldn’t play.   They certainly had live game. 

But unlike REO Speedwagon, or Head East or Trooper or April Wine (I know, they’re Canadian, but they fit the genre) or Michael Stanley Band or any of the others that were more or less like them, Styx’s Dennis DeYoung spent most of the late seventies and eighties whining about how awful being a pop star was, how degrading the machinery of the stardom industry was, and what mindless sheeple the fans were. 

To which I eventually responded “OK – then go to work in a meat processing plant and quit your whining”.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

This is the Sinead O’Connor I suspect most of us remember:

This is the response I suspect most of us, even us Protestant goyim that found, nevertheless, much that was admirable about JPII, would have loved to have made:

Thirty years and change along, and it turns out it wasn’t (just) rabid anti-Catholicism. Turns out she really, really, really loathed being a pop star, and she also had some serious mother issues:

In the book, she details how her mother physically abused her throughout her childhood. “I won the prize in kindergarten for being able to curl up into the smallest ball, but my teacher never knew why I could do it so well,” she writes…O’Connor was 18 when her mother died, and on that day, she took down the one photograph on her mom’s bedroom wall: the image of the pope. O’Connor carefully saved the photo, waiting for the right moment to destroy it.

“Child abuse is an identity crisis and fame is an identity crisis, so I went straight from one identity crisis into another,” she said. And when she tried to call attention to child abuse through her fame, she was vilified. “People would say that she’s fragile,” Geldof said. “No, no, no. Many people would have collapsed under the weight of being Sinead O’Connor, had it not been Sinead.”

Of course, being an “artist” (I put the term in scare quotes not because O’Connor isn’t one – she was an exceptional singer – but because the term has been stretched far beyond meaning these days) means being able to pass the abuse on without ever having to adopt any sort of adult coping skills, which is one of the reasons people go into being one in the first place.

The piece is an interesting read, although kind of depressing by the time you get to the end and really digest it.

Oh, yeah – I said I’d come back to Styx and Dennis DeYoung. I have a habit of saying “we’ll come back to that”, and I don’t, always. I should go back through a few years of this blog’s history and finish some of those threads.

Anyway. DeYoung.

Uh…

Actually, for all the whining about the pop star life he had (and still has), and how vocally I dislike most everything he has ever written, in or out of Styx, DeYoung would seem have avoided the most cliched pitfalls of stardom; he’s abstemious and rigorously healthy, as devoutly Catholic as O’Connor is, well, not, and he’s been married to the same woman for 50 years; he used to take his family on the road to avoid, y’know, all the problems that families get when Dad is on the road all the time. And as whiny as most of his music was, in interviews he’s always been one of the funniest, most genial, and seemingly audibly well-adjusted, grateful people in the music business.

That might be worth an article all by itself.

“George Floyd Square“ in south Minneapolis is being cleared.

By…

…well, somebody:

But it’s been kind of interesting; reporters on channel 11 and channel 9 are both saying that, while city workers are doing the work, the city is not involved.

According to CBSN Minnesota, city workers began clearing concrete barriers from the area in the early hours of Thursday morning. Local network KSTP reported that angry community members have started arriving at the scene.

Bill Keller’s on-the-scene reporting at Channel Nine led with “this is a community project” – as if a “community group” (Agape, which to be fair is a well-established group in Minneapolis) could get a bunch of public works employees (who report to the. Mayor) out on the street at 4AM, to clear the most incendiary political hotspot in the city, if not the US, without the Mayor’s say-so.

Why, it’s almost as if the city of Minneapolis realizes leaving part of the city blocked off is not politically tenable, but the “progressive” wing of the DFL that runs the city doesn’t want an even more “progressive“ wing to use this against them next year.

(Because that is the option in Minneapolis; if you think Jacob Frey and Lisa Bender are bad, he’s not going to get replaced bye a Republican; he is going to be replaced by someone who makes Ray Dehn seem like Hubert Humphrey).

UPDATE: Oh, yeah – no cops, no how:

Not everybody’s buying it:

I’ll meet the city’s PR campaign half-way – I believe the MPD is being kept far from the scene.

Ready, yes.

Nearby in plain sight? No way.

A friend of the blog emails re “PETA”:

If it weren’t for stupid stunts like this, I’s almost forget they exist.

The inevitable counter effort to re-rename it “Spam Lake“ would be epic.

The twitter thread behind this bit of video of a – shall we say – “impaired” man clobbering a rather diminuitive female cop in San Francisco…:

…have focused on the, er, less-than-decisive responses by the locals that came to her assistance.

The guys who wouldn’t put down their coffee before trying to disentangle the high guy.

The fellow who bapped away at him with the decisive authority of a Care Bear.

All the half-hearted tugging.

My angle?

In this day and age, and in that place, the part that amazes me is someone came to help the cop.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Writer Peter Grant passes along a fascinating premise for a novel. The only problem is it’s so outrageous that it would be instantly dismissed as a tin-foil hat conspiracy and therefore is too implausible even for fiction.

Except . . . remember the Somali day care scam? And the mailbox registrations in the Phyllis Kahn race? And every business rents their mailing lists nowadays, right?

Could you craft a political action thriller in which nefarious schemers use fake voters to elect a fake President to take over the country? You could be the next Robert Ludlum.

Joe Doakes

Remember: with progressives, yesterdays joke (or fictional plot) is today’s proposal and tomorrow’s law.

When last we met Rashad Turner, he was the firebrand leader of the Saint Paul chapter of BLM.

What a difference a couple years can make:

It would seem Turner started having misgivings about BLM for some of the same reasons I did – the organization joined with the Teachers union to piddle on the charter schools that are the lifeboats for so many kids, disproportionally minority, in the city.

He’s appearing at an event tomorrow evening at Willy McCoy’s in, I believe, Champlin, along with Kendall Qualls, the former CD3 candidate who’s been running “TakeChargeMN” – the group that produced Turner’s video, and which is aiming to evangelize the black community on the things that used to make it strong; family, faith, and an actual education.

I’m looking forward to it.

…I would not dream of responding to a tweet like this…:

…with something snarky like “So the good news is, I’d avoid a carnal quagmire with the Bride of Chucky. The bad news is I’d lose enough advertising space on that forehead for one of those yuuuuuge LED billboards.”

Fortunately, I am too much of a gentleman for that sort of thing.

Glad was settled that.

Have we reached a tipping point in the culture war as re guns?

It’s not a new point – if you’ve listened to my show, you’ve heard the story.

But this past year, 40% of gun sales were to people outside the “white male who’s already got a bunch of guns” stereotype:

Not only were people who already had guns buying more, but people who had never owned one were buying them too. New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners. And the data, which has not been previously released, showed that new owners were less likely than usual to be male and white. Half were women, a fifth were Black and a fifth were Hispanic.

In all, the data found that 39 percent of American households own guns. That is up from 32 percent in 2016, according to the General Social Survey, a public opinion poll conducted by a research center at the University of Chicago. Researchers said it was too early to tell whether the uptick represents a reversal from the past 20 years, in which ownership was basically flat.

Further evidence (along with the fact that younger Americans overwhelmingly support the right to keep and bear arms) of this thesis.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/an-arms-race-in-america-gun-buying-spiked-during-the-pandemic-its-still-up/ar-AAKvZfB?fbclid=IwAR3XpPNFnN3AzvSBuOo0Lg1yYnPyr606bKqagbSsPdSkYuIWo5cFxPEFA90

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Congress was aware in 1963 that foreign powers had the long-term goal of destroying America.  HA!  They haven’t gotten Number 35, yet.  

Joe Doakes

I might argue with Joe on that point. They’re off to a great start.

Despite the potential dangers of touring a front-line trench, Winston Churchill had more reasons to be grateful for his early-morning assignment.  Gallipoli had tarnished his once promising political career, forcing the one-time First Lord of the Admiralty and key war-time cabinet member to a parliamentary backbencher with little voice in the conduct of the war.  Churchill had decided instead to join the Army, being given the command of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front.  The unit saw little action, doing nothing for Churchill’s standing.

Only the fall of Prime Minister H.H. Asquith’s government gave Churchill a second chance.  David Lloyd George invited Churchill back into the good graces of the war council, even giving Churchill the Ministry of Munitions – the same role that George had rode to fame, rescuing his own once morbid political career.  As the Minister of Munitions, Churchill was touring near the meeting point of the British and French line; a position that had been in flux as the French dealt with mutiny and the British struggled to assume responsibility for more sectors of the Western Front.  British units were at half their paper strength in this area and morale had been badly shaken by the course of the war on other battlefields.  In the dark of the morning of March 21st, 1918, Churchill described what he heard:

“And then, exactly as a pianist runs his hands across the keyboard from treble to bass, there rose in less than one minute the most tremendous cannonade I shall ever hear…the enormous explosions of the shells upon our trenches seemed almost to touch each other, with hardly an interval in space or time…The weight and intensity of the bombardment surpassed anything which anyone had ever known before.”

3.5 million German shells rained down over the next five hours.  The opening phase of the Kaiserschlacht (Kaiser’s Battle) had begun.  It would be the first of four separate offensives that would usher in the end of the Great War, and provide previews of the future horrors of the next world war.

German soldiers await their advance from their trench – despite the significant ground gained by the Germans in their Spring Offensive, they also suffered tremendous casualties 

While the planning of Germany’s spring offensive had been haphazard and far from discrete (the British had known a major attack would be launched against them weeks in advance), the initial strike was nearly strategically and tactically brilliant in it’s execution. Read the rest of this entry »

…to remember when there was no how, no way, the Coronavirus was a Chinese biowarfare experiment, and it was racist to suggest as much.

I guess they’re right – elections have consequences.

UPDATE: Remember – it was only pro-Trump fake news propaganda outlets.

Politicized “Science” in Public Health is to “Science” as Scientology is to “Science”. .

Case in point: Vaping was a godsend for millions of smokers who wanted to quit smoking tobacco, but couldn’t.

Big Left, riding a wave of prohibitionism driven by (pick one) (or two, or all of them, I don’t know, it may be entirely appropriate):

• Self-righteous dudgeon, or
• A pathological hatred of people enjoying themselves, or
• The aesthetics of putting something in one’s mouth for fun, or
• A need to control everyone’s behavior

…drove a wave of rules and statutes that treated vape like cigarettes.

And the “unintended” consequences?

Well, what do you think?

When San Francisco voters overwhelmingly approved a 2018 ballot measure banning the sale of flavored tobacco products — including menthol cigarettes and flavored vape liquids — public health advocates celebrated. After all, tobacco use poses a significant threat to public health and health equity, and flavors are particularly attractive to youth.

But according to a new study from the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH), that law may have had the opposite effect. Analyses found that, after the ban’s implementation, high school students’ odds of smoking conventional cigarettes doubled in San Francisco’s school district relative to trends in districts without the ban, even when adjusting for individual demographics and other tobacco policies.

The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics on May 24, is believed to be the first to assess how complete flavor bans affect youth smoking habits.

“These findings suggest a need for caution,” said Abigail Friedman, the study’s author and an assistant professor of health policy at YSPH. “While neither smoking cigarettes nor vaping nicotine are safe per se, the bulk of current evidence indicates substantially greater harms from smoking, which is responsible for nearly one in five adult deaths annually. Even if it is well-intentioned, a law that increases youth smoking could pose a threat to public health.”

In other words: to “safeguard” people from addiction to a chemical that’s about as dangerous as caffeine, they drove people from a delivery system with minimal, largely edge-case dangers, to one that literally involves drawing concentrated air pollution into the lungs.

It’s almost too obvious to be a Berg’s Law: when you mix science and politics, you don’t get scientific politics; you get politicized science.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Does obtaining a Master’s Degree in Teaching make you a better teacher, or does it make you a better credentialed public employee union member now entitled to change salary lanes?  Is a $2,500 tax credit good public policy? 

Joe Doakes

Rhetorical question, right?

The image I’ve posted is an American cemetery in France, near Verdun. These graves are for soldiers killed in World War I. There are nearly 15,000 graves at the site. Over 53,000 Americans died in combat in World War I and 116,000 Americans in total died as a result of the war. My grandfather fought in World War I and was able to survive the carnage and come home. He was one of the lucky ones. And because he was lucky, so am I.

My grandfather died in 1959, before I was born. I never did get a chance to know him, or to thank him for his service. He did get 40 more years, time enough to marry and raise a family that included my father. I don’t doubt that each of these crosses represents a man who would have loved to have 40 more years to live, to do the things my grandfather was able to do.

We remember those who gave their all on this day precisely because of the enormity of the sacrifice they made. Every one of these crosses represents a human life that was cut short, a dream unrealized. We owe these individuals our gratitude in ways that we cannot adequately express.

We didn’t have access to a lot of contemporary popular music in the home I grew up in . It’s not that my parents discouraged it, but they discouraged it; I’m pretty sure my Mom wanted me to be a classical musician.

That started to change, a bit, in sixth or seventh grade. I got a cast-off sixties-vintage Emerson transistor AM radio, and turned into WDAY in Fargo and, eventually, KFYR in Bismarck. Through junior high, I taught myself guitar by learning to play by ear along with the “Torrid Twenty” on Tuesday nights. If you tell me the top couple hundred songs from about 1977 to about 1980, I pretty much know them all. Try me.

But I was a reader. So I took a little time off from reading history at the high school library (which I went to when I couldn’t get away to go to the city library), and read whatever I could find.

There wasn’t much.

I remember one book from the early seventies – I couldn’t begin to remember the name of the author or the book but it was some pop critic and cultural academic who bemoaned the vapid excesses of glam rock – he didn’t much care for Elton John, as I recall…

…and in the last chapter, made his case for the future of popular music.

And that future was…

Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield.

Truth be told, I got put off the song so hard by that particular book, I have somehow managed to go, lo, these past four or so decades without hearing it so much as once.

But it popped up on Youtube last weekend. And curiosity overcame me.

On the one hand, now I can see where “punk” came from.

On the other hand, that’s (checks video)…

…twenty five freaking minutes I won’t be getting back.