Remember the 1970’s?

When society got so skeeved out by domestic spying by the CIA, and abuse of the FBI, and the Church Commission reformed the way the government intelligence was supposed to act around Americans?

Either did the Obama Administration:

A report from journalists John Solomon and Sara Carter last week, based on recently declassified documents, exposed what went on. As Solomon and Carter write:

More than 5%, or one out of every 20, searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards President Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa. …

The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying that the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor,” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26.

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans. …  The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard Americans’ privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.

As former anti-terrorism prosecutor and national security expert Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review, this is a very serious abuse. And potentially a crime. If such material were leaked to the press for political advantage, that’s another crime.

If people can’t trust the institutions with which they share their power, then how is a representative republic possible?

And is that even the goal for many of those in power?

Remember when Hillary was asked if she wiped her email server and she asked “Wiped?  Like with a cloth?” 
Democrats in Congress asked:  “Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign?”
Spy?  You mean peer at them through a spyglass, like a pirate might use?  No, we’re the FBI.  We’re not pirates.  We never spy on people. We employed covert agents to infiltrate their campaign, and electronic surveillance to listen to their conversations, which we turned over to political appointees in the White House to forward to the Clinton campaign for use in formulating strategy.
That’s completely different.
Joe Doakes

A dispassionate examination will one day show Barack Obama’s administration no less corrupt than Nixon’s.

As I noted last month, I’ve spent the past year losing almost 80 pounds.

In that time, I’ve discussed the issue with a few of my friends, many of them who like many Americans could stand to lose a few pounds. More than a few of them have responded “I could never give up…” pasta or ice cream or popcorn or whatever. And I do get that. None of them were easy for me to give up – and now that I’ve lost the weight, I indulge once in a while – but when I was in the middle of things, my response was and remains “nothing tastes as good as getting healthier feels”.

But I’ve gotten a response from a few others that’s caused me to think a little higher up the sociological food chain.

My mom wasn’t a bad cook when I was a kid – but dinner time was a matter of being together, rather than about the food, per se. There wasn’t a lot on the menu that had deep cultural or social significance for us, other than maybe my grandma’s lefse.

Dinner was about eating and family. Not pseudo-mystical connection to food itself.

I’ve met people for whom things are quite the opposite; for whom “foodie-ism” is either a nerd outlet, like being a Star Wars buff, or a pseudoreligion. Our culture caters to both; from the “Food Network” to the celebrity chef culture, there are parts of our culture that totemize, even fetishize, food to one degree or another.

Or that’s my theory.

I thought about this over the weekend, when I listened to “The Delicious Dish”…

…I’m sorry, that was an SNL spoof of NPR.

No, I was listening to “Splendid Table”, a show that used to be a pretty accessible recipe show with Lynne Rosetto-Casper, but has turned almost as serious-about-itself as “On Being with Krista Tippett”.

And I was treated to this:

Lucy Long: I lived in Spain for a year. Part of what I was doing was studying the food culture, and people kept telling me that I needed to go to the north of Spain during a certain season and try their bean soups. I was told that every village had their own variety of bean and would make these into soup or stew. And people who were knowledgeable about this tradition, they could look at a bean and tell that it came from a particular village. They’d spend a day, maybe a weekend, traveling to these villages to eat these beans.
I did go to one or two restaurants in villages and try these. To me, it was just bean soup. I was eating out of curiosity. I didn’t have enough knowledge to fully appreciate the distinctions that were being made. I wasn’t going there as a pilgrim; I was going there as a tourist. I could definitely tell that some of the other eaters were there as pilgrims because they were eating very carefully, they were tasting very carefully, and they were experiencing this on a much deeper level that just eating some bean soup.

And leaving aside the pretension in which the show marinades, it struck me – could the fetishization of foodie-ism be part of our problem?

Maybe not by itself: I doubt that people trekking through Spain to catalog seasonal beans are the ones getting Type 2 Diabetes.

On the other hand, I have to think the fact that our society’s been turning food into recreation, network entertainment, a social marker can’t help, either.

What the heck – let’s make *everyone* angry.

Rep. Omar has been taking flak over a video in which she says:

Ilhan Omar isn’t just anti-Semitic – she’s anti-American.

Nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives to Islamic terrorists on 9/11, yet Omar diminishes it as: “Some people did something.”

Democrat leaders need to condemn her brazen display of disrespect.pic.twitter.com/k3meEbUOAk

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) April 9, 2019

“[the Council on American Islamic Relations] was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

Now, the local media and the Associated Press leapt into action to tell the reader that the video is edited to show the remark out of context – which is great, and would be even better if they’d be as diligent on being honest about context on both sides of the aisle. And no, they are not. Only for Democrats.

But it’s true. Here’s the part that came before:

“For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it”

The part the GOP oppo researchers clipped out basically makes the remark in the video just a little bit dishonest. Let’s be honest – Omar is not an articulate woman, and it’s easy to nitpick peoples’ statements after the fact. And for those of you who’ve never had to try to operate on a functional, much less professional, level in a language other than your native one, don’t get too cocky

And of course, the media *are* dishonest when they fail to give the same fact-checking diligence to similar smears against conservatives. They fact that they do not – nearly never – is itself proof of corrosive media bias.

But here’s the deal – Omar’s original, in-context statement is even worse than the part in the video.

Second class citizens? Please.

Name a country in the world in which Muslim immigrants have been treated *better*, and been able to more thoroughly integrate into society, than the US? Not “claiming asylum” and “getting benefits”, mind you – actually getting accepted in a society and prospering? In what country in the world, with or without a massive terrorist attack by their radical coreligionists, have they been *more* welcomed and, when they so choose, prospered and enjoyed the *real* benefits of our society *more* than in the US?

Because one can not “become” German or French or Swedish. You can immigrate. You can learn the language, send your kids to school, become a citizen, get a job maybe – but being a German or Dane or Pole or Italian is a matter of birth, language, shared history and ethnicity.

You CAN *become* American – and most Muslim immigrants to the US (Somali teething problems notwithstanding) have, and vastly more successfully than in Europe, which is why there are no “no go” Muslim neighborhoods in the US (and none can every be allowed to happen – for them or any other ethnic group).

What she *actually* said was more ungrateful, more disgusting, more un-American than what the video actually showed.

(This post is about Rep. Omar. Not Islam at large. The usual wave of taqqiyah-theory memes will be purged without comment. Don’t waste your energy. Stay on topic, or find someone else to yap at).

next time a SITD critic claims the Obama administration was extraordinarily clean, not a single conviction, remind them of this:
joe doakes

Percpetion is reality.

If Obama’s cronies in the media and Democrat party messaging (ptr) say his time in office was “scandal free” enough times, people will perceive it that way.

Put another way – if Trump worked to defame Latinos the way Obama did to defame law-abiding gun owners, the Southern Poverty Law Center would have issued a fatwa.

Forget “conspiracy theories” – the public record shows that the Nixon Administration spied on the Trump campaign…

…sorry. Obama Administration. Obama. No similarity. Perish the thought.

At this point in time, at least six different methods that the Obama administration used to spy on the Trump campaign have been made public:
1. FISA Warrant: Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was targeted with a FISA warrant by the FBI in October 2016. The warrant was subsequently renewed three times for 90-day periods. Other members of the Trump campaign might have had FISA warrants on them, as well.
2. Unmasking: Hundreds of so-called unmasking requests were made for the identities of members of the Trump campaign in intelligence reports. The House Intelligence Committee has so far identified Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice, Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, and former CIA Director John Brennan, as having filed such requests.
3. Undercover Informant: The FBI used Stefan Halper, an undercover agent, to infiltrate the Trump campaign. He contacted Trump campaign associates Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Halper has ties to the CIA, as well as MI6.
4. National Security Letters: The use of national security letters to target the Trump campaign was first revealed by officials to The New York Times in a May 16, 2018, article. National security letters allow the FBI to secretly subpoena customer records from banks, phone companies, internet service providers, and others.
5. Foreign Intelligence: British intelligence agency GCHQ provided officials within the CIA with information on the Trump campaign as early as late 2015, The Guardian reported in April 2017. Then-head of GCHQ Robert Hannigan also provided Brennan with sensitive information on the Trump campaign on a “director level” in the summer of 2016.
6. Reverse Targeting: Brennan admitted in an Aug. 17, 2018, interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that the CIA had obtained the communications of Americans associated with the Trump campaign through what appears to have been the use of reverse targeting. “We call it incidental collection in terms of CIA’s foreign intelligence collection authorities,” Brennan said.

Nixon’s use of federal law-enforcement, and less institutional private entities, to spy on his political opponents was a national scandal.

LBJ’s and Kennedy’s, and everyone who presided over J. Edgar Hoover’s reign at the FBI, less so, for some weird reason.

Ever have a friend who’s pinned their hopes on something that, to the outside observer, seemed unlikely if not impossible? A “big investment opportunity”, the “house flip that’s gonna set ’em up on easy street”, the “girl way out of his league saying yes”, the “can’t miss deal”, or any one of life’s hail mary plays?

You’re not an animal – so you may have some sympathy, or at least empathy, for them – but that’s tempered with the realization that the dumbass pinned all his hopes in life on a long shot.

I’m reminded of that watching my Democrat friends responses to the collapse of the expectations of the Mueller Report.

I saved a dozen file-gallon jerry cans of tears to water my “Hahahaha” plants this spring from the opening day alone:

I know, I know – too much Hannity. Work with me, here.

The impact on their psyches, as manifested on social media at any rate, seemed to be…

…disproportionate?

Democrats seem both angry and frightened, and their kneejerk and perhaps even somewhat panicked response right now is to try to destroy Barr.
You can feel the frisson of fear they emanate. They waited two years for the blow of the Mueller report to fall on Trump, and now other investigative blows may fall on them. The Mueller report combined with Barr’s appointment could end up being a sort of ironic boomerang (whether or not boomerangs can be ironic I leave to you to decide).
How could this have happened? they must be thinking. How could the worm have turned? But they are spinning in the usual manner, hoping that—as so often has happened in the past—their confederates in the press will work their magic to make all of it go away and boomerang back to Republicans instead.
But whatever comes of it all, if anything, Democrats cannot believe that at least right now their dreams have turned to dust and they taste, instead of the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.

I try to stay sympathetic, on one level – but on another, it’s hard to cut too much of a break for people who put that much of their emotional well-being in long shots, especially the ones that seems so transparently stretchy, over and over and over.

Democrats want to give more money to Puerto Rico to rebuild from a hurricane that occurred two years ago.  Trump says we already gave them plenty and they pissed it away(not specifically in those words, more’s the pity, but that’s the idea).
Isn’t the US constantly being criticized as an imperial power?  Shouldn’t we liberate the people on that island from our domination?  Why aren’t they as independent and self-sufficient as their neighbors on Haiti and Cuba?
Free Puerto Rico.  Fly, little bird.  Spread your wings and make your way in the world . . . on your own dime.  No backs.
Joe Doakes

“Freedom” isn’t very cost effective for professional bureaucrats.

The FBI designated 27 “active shooter” situations in 2018. 10 of them, they called “Mass Shootings”.

So keep that in mind as you look over the stats from the FBI’s annual report on active shooter situations.

“The FBI has designated 27 shootings in 2018 as active shooter incidents.”
“10 of those 27 met our definition of a mass shooting”

Now, remember – in most states that allow civilian carry of firearms, maybe 2% of the population has a permit to carry; in permitless (“Constitutional”) carry states, I’d suspect the total carrying might be higher, but I’m going to also suspect the subsets of people willing to undergo the hassle and responsibility of carrying and the subset willing to go through the hassle and red tape of getting a permit are pretty close).

That’s about one person in fifty. Maybe more in some places; I’d imagine a pretty fair share of people in rural Wyoming, Kansas or even Minnesota might have a firearm on nor near their person much of the time. Definitely less in other places – California, Illinois, or any school, federal office or posted business.

Keep that in mind with this next set of stats:

In 5/27 incidents, citizens confronted the shooter. 3 of those 5 were unarmed and were successful in ending the shooting.
In 2 of those 5, armed citizens possessing firearms permits exchanged gunfire with the shooter.
In one of those incidents, armed citizens shot and killed the shooter (oklahoma)

So 2% of the population might have a firearm – but they were able to intervene in about 6% of active shooter situations last year – successfully in both cases:

• I wrote about the Louisville KY Kroger episode in which Dominic Rozier and another man engaged a “white supremacist” at a grocery store who’d murdered two innocent people, driving off the shooter, who was apprehended later.
• I also covered the episode in Oklahoma City last year, in which a good guy with a gun cut short a killing spree.

It’s also worth noting that the other three episodes involving civilians included a wounded teacher subduing shooters. He was in an environment where 0% of the population could be legally armed. Salute.

16/27 happened in a business, 5/27 happened at schools (4 HS, 1 middle school)

It’s worth noting that nine of the episodes at businesses occurred in places where the public had access -including both episodes where armed civilians intervened. That’s 22% – not that percentages carry that much weight with numbers this small.

The other seven occurred in non-public parts of businesses; it’s not stated in the report how many were posted or otherwise no-go for law-abiding civilians

As to conclusions?

I stress – this next bit was written by the FBI. Not the Gun Owners Caucus. Emphasis added:

“As in past years, citizens were faced with split-second, life-and-death decisions. In 2018, citizens risked their lives to safely and successfully end the shootings in five of the 27 active shooter incidents. They saved many lives. Given this reality, it is vital that citizens be afforded training so they understand the risks they face and the options they have available when active shooter incidents are unfolding”

Since we’re assessing risk – all of the deadliest episodes – the Stoneman Douglas and Santa Fe NM schools and the Sutherland Springs Texas school shootings – took place in “gun free” zones where 0% of the people can lawfully be armed.

Daniel “What-i-gieg?” Buggigieg is the incumbent mayor of South Bend Indiana.  He’s also the media’s flavor the the month among the roughly 225 Democrats running for the 2020 Presidential nod. 

Why? 

Is it the intersectional lottery – he’s a gay midwestern Democrat?  Or is it his accomplishments as mayor of South Bend?

It’s the lottery:

While Chicago is notorious for its murder rate, in 2015, Buttigieg’s South Bend actually topped Chicago’s 16.4 homicides per 100,000 people with a homicide rate of 16.79 per 100,000 people. Those numbers put Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s city on the list of the top 30 murder capitals in the country for the year.

In January, three shootings in one week killed two teens and left a woman paralyzed from the waist down. In one summer week, the casualties included a 12 and a 13-year-old. Last year, a man shot 6 people when he opened fire on 50 partygoers in a house and was sentenced to 100 years in jail.

By 2017, shootings had risen 20% on Mayor Buttigieg’s watch. Rapes increased 27% and aggravated assaults rose from 183 in 2013, the year before Buttigieg took office, to a stunning 563 assaults.

It’s hard to know which are flying faster, bullets in South Bend or dollars into Buttigieg’s campaign.

But then with Democrat politicians, effectiveness isn’t the issue.

The ability to divert the low-information voter base with a raft of hopey-changey unicorn piffle is.

Why did Prohibition fail?  The Hammerheads weren’t tough enough?  They didn’t incarcerate enough people? 
No.  It failed because ordinary citizens resented being told they couldn’t engage in activities that seem normal and harmless, so they quietly rebelled in a nation-wide fit of non-compliance.
Same reason the drug war is failing, particularly the war on marijuana.  Repeal federal prohibition.  Leave it up to the states.  This bill might be a good start.
Joe Doakes

It’s true – ending the “war” would end the black market, which would give us an opportunity to deal with the chaos on the border and in our inner cities.

Of course, there are wide swathes of our government that profit from that chaos.

We’ll see.

Frothy lefty bureaucrat suspended for trying to “shame” a gun owner/activist.

If this were in a Blue state, you’d expect that to be, perhaps, the beginning of a piece of quixotic litigation by wronged conservatives.

But it’s a Red state. Justice actually happened:

The executive director of the Alaska human rights [what else? – Ed] commission has been suspended for 15 working days without pay for complaining on social media about a “Black Rifles Matter” sticker she believed to be racist on a vehicle in the commission’s Anchorage parking lot.
Commission members voted 5-2 Friday to suspend Marti Buscaglia, effective Monday.

It’s worth noting that one of the dissenters thought the punishment was too lenient.

One thing you have to get down to paragraph five to find out – Buscaglia used her departments’ Facebook page for her “shaming”.

Buscaglia, a former newspaper publisher in Alaska and Minnesota, declined comment in an email to The Associated Press.
Last month, Buscaglia saw the sticker on Linegar’s vehicle and posted a photo of it on the commission’s Facebook page asking, “In what world is this OK?”
Linegar, who has a plumbing and heating business, has said the truck was his and that his company was doing repairs at the building that day. He has said that he understood the stickers to be about gun safety and “Second Amendment awareness.”
In his statement to the AP, Linegar said Buscaglia should never have made those comments on social media. “If she wanted to simply have a conversation with me, then a note to that effect could have been left on my windshield. Instead, she saw fit to write a different type of note, put my truck on Facebook on the State page …,” he said.

Of course, this is in a hard red state.

In Connecticut, California, or some parts of Minnesota, Linegar would have a SWAT team – figurative or literal – breaking down his door, figuratively or literally.

It’s getting harder for Democrat candidates to come up with more free stuff than the next guy.  How can we bribe voters without free stuff?
Amy Klobuchar wants to give free savings accounts/pension plans, funded by employers and off-set by tax credits, handled by the Senate’s hand-picked fund managers to invest in stocks and bonds.
But she hasn’t fully considered why employees aren’t saving money.  They don’t make enough?  Everybody can always set aside a tiny fraction of their income.  The trick is finding the motivation to do it.  Churches solicit tithes with promises of salvation.  Amy wants tax credits with promises of mutual funds.  Not nearly as enticing.  I’d rather buy the extra fru-fru coffee. 
When somebody else subsidizes the consequences of your decisions to insulate you from harm, you have less incentive to make good choices.  In some circles, that’s known as moral hazard.  In Amy’s, it’s a campaign promise.
Joe Doakes

The more dependent they make society on “the authorities” for basic life decisions, the more control they have.

California isn’t on the brink of bankruptcy.

Their public unions haven’t passed Illinois and Maryland’s as models of corruption, featherbedding and incompetence.

Their education system doesn’t give New York’s a run for it’s money as a two-tiered money pit.

Their society isn’t becoming an almost third-world example of the wealth gap between Malibu and Riverside.

That’s why they’ve got time for this kind of thing – a ban on long cash-register receipts:

Modeled after a new state law requiring that plastic straws be given in restaurants only upon request, the bill would require businesses to provide electronic receipts by default unless a customer asks for a paper one.Assembly Bill 161 by Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) said his bill is an easy way to reduce paper waste in the state while addressing consumers’ frustrations with excessively long receipts. Customers have taken to social media for years to complain and poke fun at the size of their receipts, particularly at CVS drugstore, posting pictures of the coupon-packed printouts measuring taller than a refrigerator.

“If we are looking at reducing waste, probably the easiest thing we can do is get rid of the material that someone hands us that we don’t want that we hold onto until we get to the next trash can and then throw away,” said Nick Lapis of Californians Against Waste, a bill supporter.

I can think of some waste to reduce…

During the House hearings on victim disarmament measures last week, this happened.

The reason it’s impossible to have a “conversation about ‘gun violence'” is that so many of the other side are just not equipped to have it.

In the olden days, young men found a mate at school, or at work, or at social functions. But nowadays, with feminism and #metoo, it’s risky to ask.
I recently met a guy who’s 40, has his MBA, good job, clean health, clean record, but no girlfriend. He explained it this way: if I ask a girl and she says no, I’ll be alone and humiliated. If I don’t ask her, I’ll still be alone, but I won’t be humiliated. And I can’t be reported to HR.
This is why America seems broken, why average IQ is decreasing, why young people increasingly feel they have no future. They’re right, they don’t.
Joe doakes

Why, it’s almost as if progressivism set out to destroy this nation’s morale from within.

The American “Civil Liberties” Union twote:

Girls who are trans are girls. PERIOD.

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 2, 2019

Because adding “PERIOD” to the end of a factually vacuous argument makes it a strong argument. Natch.

I’m just wondering why the A”CL”U is telling people what they must think about things that are contravened by scientific fact?

Unemployment rate down? Jobless claims at a low ebb? Market high, houses on the market a short, short time?

That’s all good.

But what says “economy humming along” like this: Sears is actually opening new stores.

While I agree with Sarah Hoyt that crimes against taste shouldn’t literally be prosecuted as crimes, and here in the US there might even be a First Amendment issue (justifiably so), I’ll admit I’m not gonna rip on the Poles too hard for this.

This winter, the news media ran stories about ice dams causing damage to the roof.  How do you pronounce the word “roof?”  Why don’t all -oo- words sound alike?  Try this sentence:
While the goofy cook chewed a root and doodled in a book on the roof, a pooch looked at a boot and woofed as a kook took good food out the door.
No wonder foreigners have such a hard time with English.

True. English is tough enough to plough through, though, without that.

Tonight: The House DFL may be trying to amend their Universal Gun Registration and Red Flag Confiscation bills to the Omnibus Public Safety bill. Debate may well happen tonight. It’s entirely possible we’ll need to get a huge turnout of people down to the Capitol or the State Office building to show the Legislature what Minnesotans really think about the erosion of our civil liberties.

That’s still up in the air. What I’d suggest is that you sign up for the MN Gun Owners Caucus’s email blasts – then, you’ll be getting the latest news. Also, make sure you “like” the MNGOC’s Facebook page – that’s also being updated constantly.

And maybe I’ll see y’all at the Capitol (or somewhere in the Capitol complex) tonight!

Friday and Saturday nights: My band, “Elephant in the Room”, is playing at the Stillwater Eagles both nights from 8-midnight. We do everything from Elvis to Nirvana, from the Cars to, well, The Eagles. I mean, we gotta do Eagles at the Eagles, right?

Stop on out, have a drink, say hi!

Alan Dershowitz, in re the faculty at Harvard Law School: “Your idea of diversity is someone with different color skin, or in a skirt, who thinks exactly the same as you do”.

See also “Comedy Central“.

The Midway Walmart is a former K-Mart, with all that implies. It’s a great place to go if you want a look at customer service from the old East Germany. It’s basically a small Walmart, with fewer groceries and more inner-urban dysfunction.

And now, via Fred Melo at the PiPress:

More than a rumor, not quite a fact: Walmart has at least kicked the tires on the prospect of leaving St. Paul’s Midway and opening in the former Rice Street Sears, which has room for an ample grocery. The degree to which they’re seriously considering it? I don’t know.

— FredMelo, Reporter (@FrederickMelo) April 3, 2019

My fearless (and likely balderdash) prediction: both sites will sit, unchanged, for the next five years.

Then, Major League Soccer (or at least the Minnesota club) will fold, and all three sites will sit vacant (or blighted, in Walmart’s case) for a decade or two while various inner-city power interests argue for decades.

When you’re a Republican, especially in a bluish-purple place like Minnesota, you hope you can vote for Republicans who’ll hold the line on taxes – even to the minimal level of not proposing new ones.

Sadly, we’re disappointed – as I discussed with Liz Mair on the show over the weekend. Senator Howe is proposing a tax on electric vehicles.

Here’s the interview:

I get the logic, sort of – it’s to replace some of the gas tax revenue lost by the increasing efficiency of cars the greater number of people driving electrics, and the people dropping out of the commuting force as telecommuting picks up speed.

But a Republican should be proposing fewer, not more, taxes.

And if we could see to some of that unsustainable spending, that’d be a cherry on the sundae.

One of the reasons I’m such a yuge fan of Dennis Prager is his weekly “Happiness Hour” – in which he talks not only about the practice and moral imperative of being happy (hint:  it’s not just for you), but about the struggle to become happy.

One of his sayings, and his advice, on the subject comes close to an old Hungarian saying I’ve been fond of most of my adult life; “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”.   Prager notes that this basic philosophy applies to so very much in life – about getting in shape, about falling or staying in love with one’s partner, and of course happiness.

There’s some science to the premise as well.  There’s a reason that disciplines from music to the military drill one endlessly on things they want to impress into the human brain – because almost nobody plays a piano scale or a guitar chord or clears a rifle jam automatically or intuitively.  But if you drill on them often enough, they become what people call “second nature”, because your brain develops space – neural pathways – for them.

Happiness works a little like that.  Not entirely – being happy isn’t quite as easy as playing a first-position “F” chord – but the idea of wiring the brain to be something isn’t all that conceptually different.

I believe you can push yourself toward happiness.  There’s some science, not to mention thousands of years of human experience, to support the premise.   It’s basic cognitive psychology.

And since one can wire one’s brain to be many good things via practice – a musician, a soldier, a happy person, whatever – it stands to reason you can do the same with unhappy, useless, miserable, depressing things.

Having raised, and working with roomful of, millennials, I’ve observed that the generation seems to collect psychological and psychiatric maladies in young adulthood the same way they used to collect Pokemon cards in childhood.  “I’ve got mild self-diagosed bipolar, which beats your dysthymia and separation anxiety!”.

Modern academia and media preach some miserable stuff to the kids; a common refrain among the young ‘uns is what a miserable world the “boomers” “left” them, with the misery being expressed in terms of climate change, the changing economy and, er, Trump.

And the few times I engage on the subject I mention that I can kind of relate – when I was a kid, the worries were nuclear war and overpopulation.  Of course, there actually were nuclear weapons all about the place, including 25 miles from my hometown, and there were still famines happening.   The nukes are mostly gone, and the obesity is a bigger problem among the poor than famine for the first time in human history.

And our presidents – Nixon and Carter – actually were corrupt and incompetent (respecively).   So compared with the world I grew up in, my kids have it pretty decent.

But I digress.

I thought about the way the world – academia, entertainment, the media – seem to be wiring the younger generation to be a bunch of dysfunctional, whiny mopes when I read this sad, pathetic story about a guy of color who dumped his perfectly good white girlfriend because, well, read the story.

Or don’t.  Maybe you’ll be happier if your brain doesn’t rewire itself just a little bit wrong with that little bit of dysfunction.

Or make yourself a little happier by considering that if this is all the younger generation has to fret about, we’ve done a good job.