One of the Minnesota left’s favorite conceits is that Minnesota is just plain better than The South.  Their favorite imprecation against some conservative budget-cut or program-trimming plan is that conservatives would “turn Minnesota into a cold (fill in a southern state)”.

Perhaps Minnesota’s African-American community would wish that were the case; household income for black people in Minnesota plunged 14% in the past year, dropping black Minnesotans’ incomes below those in Mississippi (I’ve added all emphasis):

From 2013 to 2014, the median income for black households in the state fell 14 percent. In constant dollars, that was a decline from about $31,500 to $27,000 — or $4,500 in a single year.

Meanwhile, the statewide poverty rate for black residents rose from 33 percent to 38 percent, compared to a stable overall state poverty rate of 11 percent.

The median black household in Minnesota is now worse off than its counterpart in Mississippi. Among the 50 states, along with Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., Minnesota ranked 45th in median black household income. Mississippi ranked 44th.

Income and poverty for other racial groups in Minnesota — whites, Hispanics and Asians — remained stable. Only blacks saw a worsening of income and poverty.

“It’s alarming,” said Steven Belton, interim president and CEO of the Minneapolis Urban League. “It’s a deepening of the income disparity, not only across the state but across the nation. When you pair that with the continuing disparities we have in education, health and wealth, it’s disturbing.

“The alleged rising tide has not lifted all boats.”

Of course, the Urban League is a DFL front; of course they’re going to take a whack at classic bit of conservative rhetoric.

But the truth is this; the vast majority of Minnesota’s Afro-Americans vote DFL, and live in DFL-dominated cities.   I don’t have the figures handy, but I don’t think it’s controversial to say that they are disproportionally not heavily represented in the parts of Minnesota’s economy that are prospering – health insurance, medical devices and financial services, all heavily subsidized by the Obama Administration.

They tend to live – again, no stats immediately at hand, but by all means, try to prove me wrong – on the economy that the rest of Minnesota lives on; the one that, for all of the DFL’s boasting and bragging, just isn’t doing all that well.

It’s officially too stupid to live.

Texas (!) school district arrests kid for building a clock that they call a “hoax bomb”, even though he never, ever called it that.  Indeed, other than the idiots at his school district and the Irvine TX police department, nobody ever did:

Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday.

Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case.

So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.

In the meantime, Ahmed’s been suspended, his father is upset and the Council on American-Islamic Relations is once again eyeing claims of Islamophobia in Irving.

And you know what?  CAIR is right, and I hope the Mohammeds sue that idiot district back to the Stone Age.

I do, in fact, have some experience with brain-dead school administrators making things up from whole cloth – and my hatred for them burns like a million suns.

Mr. Mohammed:  if you need airtime to raise money to sue your scumbag district, let me know. I’m happy to help.

Popehat has a much better piece on the subject.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Mel Brooks poked fun at racists in Blazing Saddles with the line:  “We’ll take the Blacks and the Asians . . . but we don’t want the Irish!” Well, maybe not the Asians, either.

Joe Doakes

Affirmative action penalizes Asians in higher education.

And yet, outside Vietnamese and Koreans, most of them vote Democrat.

Eventually, America’s ethnic minorities will figure it out.  Hopefully while there’s still time to fix things.

Don’t forget to check out the Patriot’s Debate Viewing Party, at the Mermaid in Moundsview.

Brad Carlson and I will be hosting the local event, and Hugh Hewitt will, of course, be hosting on CNN.

Hope you can stop by!

The American political class spends a lot of time imitating the British – or trying to – on things like national health care, traffic roundabouts, soccer, gun control…some of them even wish for a parliament.

But here’s hoping they can find the minimal guts to support something anyone smarter than Minnesota’s state government – meaning most everyone – knows is a huge, harmless improvement over the organic original, the e-cigarette?

The [Public Health England] report, which was overseen by Peter Hajek, a professor of clinical psychology at the Wolfson Institute for Preventive Medicine, and Ann McNeill, a professor of psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience at King’s College London, is very clear on the relative hazards of smoking and vaping:

While vaping may not be 100% safe, most of the chemicals causing smoking-related disease are absent and the chemicals which are present pose limited danger. It has been previously estimated that EC [electronic cigarettes] are around 95% safer than smoking. This appears to remain a reasonable estimate.

The evidence concerning e-cigarettes’ effectiveness in helping smokers quit is more limited but promising:

Recent studies support the Cochrane Review findings that EC can help people to quit smoking and reduce their cigarette consumption. There is also evidence that EC can encourage quitting or cigarette consumption reduction even among those not intending to quit or rejecting other support. It is not known whether current EC products are more or less effective than licensed stop-smoking medications, but they are much more popular, thereby providing an opportunity to expand the number of smokers stopping successfully.

It would seem to be a no-brainer; given a choice between losing the tar, the carbon monoxide, the second-hand smoke and the rest of smoking’s putative irritations, or keeping them but badgering them, go with A).

But “no brainer” is too complicated for Minnesota’s political class.

It’s a rookie flub.

But you’re no rookie.

You’re gonna wind up spending a lot of that Super-PAC money digging out of this one.

I’ve been a presbyterian  my entire adult life. This has been for a number of very good reasons; I have been blessed to know a number of fantastic ministers – and the Presbyterian liturgy is notable in putting far putting less temporal BS between man and God than most other denominations.

(Your mileage may vary, of course, and everyone can believe what they want; these are mine, and while I can perhaps believe other, no one has come close to convincing me in close to 40 years).

But the nations largest Presbyterian denomination – the Presbyterian Church in the USA (PCUSA) is collapsing before our very eyes; it is on track to complete disappear before 2040.

Not Presbyterianism, mind you – just the PC USA.

Why?

“Ministers” like this – for lack of a better term – godforsaken hamster, for starters.

New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone is proposing to investigate…

… Fantasy football.

No more worries about terrorists, economic stagnation, the impending bond bubble, the entitlement a balloon or a nuclear Iran.

It’s almost enough to make me want to take up the pastime.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

American spies gave atomic secrets to the Soviets after WW II because was unfair that America had a monopoly on powerful weapons.  They wanted to make America more equal with the rest of the world.

President Obama has taken the next steps, standing by while North Korea builds nuclear devices and intercontinental missiles and hiring Iran to inspect their own nuclear weapons facilities.  He’s opened the borders to millions of new immigrants.  He’s transformed the government into a political weapon and nationalized the auto industry, health insurance and student loans.  We’re becoming like the rest of the world, but is that good?

Makes me wonder – what country is President Obama’s model?  What nation does he consider ideal?  He’s busy transforming America, but what’s he trying to transform it into?

I could get on board if he’s trying to change America into Switzerland.  Not so much, if the model is Zimbabwe.

Joe Doakes

Every day, in every way, it seems he’s aiming for somewhere between “Kenya” and “Uganda”.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is sitting on his porch, working on his next book project.  

Avery LIBRELLE walks through the gate from his back yard and toward the sidewalk.

BERG:  Um, hello, Avery?  Hanging out in my back yard, were we?

LIBRELLE:  Oh, I was sorting your trash.

BERG:  Looking for recyclables?

LIBRELLE:  No.  Evidence of thoughtcrime.

BERG:  Huh. I burn all of that.

LIBRELLE:  Hah!  There’s some evidence of thoughtcrime!

BERG:  Of course.

LIBRELLE:  Hey – speaking of thoughtcrime – Ben Carson is a hypocrite.  He speaks out against welfare – but he and his mother used it!

BERG:  Yeah, I just saw the photomeme your side has been passing around:

LIBRELLE:  Yeah!  Hypocrite!  His entire success was rooted in the welfare system!  Hypocrite!

BERG:  Well, if his entire success was rooted in the system, then every child growing up on welfare would be a doctor or a lawyer, wouldn’t they?

LIBRELLE:  He’s still a hypocrite!

BERG:  OK, let’s just for get for a moment that the whole “argument” is a logical fallacy…

LIBRELLE:  That’s a stereotype!  Trigger warning!  Trigger warning!

BERG:  No, fallacy.  It’s a Tu Quoque Ad Hominem – saying that because someone has ever said, or done, or believed something that’s at odds with their argument, their argument is invalid.  It’s like saying because someone was once in the Klan, they could never speak out against the Klan.

LIBRELLE:  But he’s not a former Klan member!  His mom was on welfare!  He grew up in the system!  It made him what he is today!

BERG:  So you’re claiming credit for Ben Carson’s success on behalf of the welfare system?  Fair enough.  Will you claim “credit” for all the people of all races who’ve become multi-generational dependents of the system?

LIBRELLE:  There is no such thing!  The science is settled!

BERG:  Of course it is.  Look – what you are saying is this; if someone’s ancestors went on welfare, to which they are entitled – because welfare is, for better or worse, an entitlement in this country – and that person not only uses the system exactly the way it was intended to be used, but goes on to succeed far above and beyond any rational expectations, that person isn’t allowed to point out what an exception to the rule he is, and how the welfare system as it is today *harms* the upward mobility that he experienced?

In other words, if you’re born into the system, don’t care speak out against the system, because the system owns you and everything you are, think and believe, forever?

Doesn’t that pretty much prove Carson correct?  That you, the system’s supporter, are using it as a form of intellectual indentured servitude?

LIBRELLE:  Steven Colbert!  John Oliver!  Rachel Maddow!  Neil DeGrasse Tyson!

BERG:  Of course.

(And SCENE)

Minnesota’s gun grabbing DFL legislators have been beaten senseless, session after session after session, for well over a decade and a half now.Apparently they don’t get the hint.  From MNGOPAC:

Norton is still working on crafting the bill but said her legislation will focus on making it easier to keep track of gun ownership. She noted that if she sells her kayak to someone, she has to register who she gave it to and questions why the same laws don’t always apply in the case of firearms.”

Dear Representative Norton: you’re retiring from office after the session. It’s probably a good thing.

It’ll be interesting to know how the person the DFL endorses to try and hold your seat stands on this.

Scott Walker gets serious about domestic policy as Hurricane Donald enters its eighth week, launching a salvo at the public employee unions:

At a town hall meeting in Las Vegas, Walker will propose eliminating unions for employees of the federal government, making all workplaces right-to-work unless individual states vote otherwise, scrapping the federal agency that oversees unfair labor practices and making it more difficult for unions to organize.

Many of Walker’s proposals are focused on unions for workers at all levels of government, while others would also affect private-sector unions. Labor law experts said such an effort, if successful, would substantially reduce the power of organized labor in America.

Mr. Dilettante on why it’s important:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Kim Davis, the Apostolic Christian who was elected County Clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples after the Supreme Court decision in June, citing her First Amendment right to a workplace accommodation based on a sincerely held religious belief.  It’s the same argument made by Muslim check-out clerks working for Target who refuse to scan SPAM because it contains pork.

A local judge ordered Ms. Davis to issue licenses for gay marriage and sent her to jail for contempt but a federal judge released her after five days.  A Deputy Clerk in the office is issuing marriage licenses to gays while Ms. Davis is out of the office but the drive-by and social media storm is relentless and seems to boil down to:

The Apostolic Christian religion does not prohibit gay marriage in the way that, say, the Roman Catholic Church does; therefore, Ms. Davis does not have a sincerely held religious belief and is not entitled to a workplace accommodation.

The Apostolic Christian religion does prohibit gay marriage, which is a hateful and bigoted theology; therefore, Ms. Davis should receive no accommodation for her sincerely held – but politically incorrect – religious belief.

The Apostolic Christian religion prohibits gay marriage but permits divorce meaning the religion doesn’t believe in the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and thus cannot prohibit homosexual marriage in the way that, say, the Anglican Church did from 1534 until 2003; therefore, it’s an illogical religion so its adherents are not entitled to a workplace accommodation.

Even though the Apostolic Christian religion permits heterosexual divorce while prohibiting homosexual marriage and Ms. Davis sincerely believes in her religion, she is a sinner and sinners are not entitled to Constitutional rights.

American government officials should not be allowed to hold Christian religious beliefs and thus won’t need workplace accommodations, a logical expansion of the Act of Settlement of 1701 that prohibited British Catholics from holding any position of trust.

Ms. Davis is from The South but is neither Liberal nor photogenic; therefore, she has no Constitutional rights at all.

I remain unpersuaded.

Joe Doakes

The US Government will eventually establish a state religion, by defining all the things that people of faith can’t do.

By the beginning of September in 1915, Europe had been at war for over a year – a year of bloodshed and loss for the Entente.

The Western Powers of the Entente were locked in the static horror of the trenches.  The Russians were slowly losing their eastern European empire, en route to losing 2 million men in 1915 alone.  And the British were desperately throwing themselves against the Dardanelles while already contemplating a humiliating retreat.  Yet despite their victories, the Central Powers seemed no closer to ending the war than the Entente.  For both sides, their visions of victory – yet alone their rationales for fighting – were sinking into a murky morass of blood and mud.

But in the small village of Zimmerwald, Switzerland, a vision for the end of the war was beginning to form – a vision of revolution.

—

The Revolutionary in Obscurity – Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov in Switzerland in 1914

From September 5th to 8th, 1915 in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, the Great War was reduced to a war of words.  The combatants were not heads of state, military leaders, or even prominent civic leaders.  Rather, the attendees were there precisely because they lacked any real role among the warring governments.     Read the rest of this entry »

Pacifica Radio – the nation’s “oldest leftwing radio network” – has entered a death spiral:

Founded in 1946 by conscientious objectors from the second world war, the network was an influential outlet for Beat poets, Bob Dylan and Vietnam war protesters but has in recent times suffered from dwindling ratings, in-fighting and financial hemorrhage.

The network’s biggest star – Amy Goodman, host of the independently produced Democracy Now! – is also its biggest creditor. She is owed an estimated $2.1m in unpaid broadcast fees.

Observers trace the travails to 2001 when a group of rebellious listeners and broadcasters took control and instituted an elaborate governance structure of multiple boards, sub-committees and painstaking elections.

The result, according to Matthew Lasar, author of the 2005 book Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War, was continuous feuding between rival factions. In a Nation article earlier this year, he compared the network to the “late Ottoman Empire of public broadcasting” and urged progressive outsiders to step in and save it before it was too late.

Of course, it’s not just Pacifica; all of the institutional broadcasting industry as we’ve known it since the 1930’s is undergoing a radical realignment in how it does business.  The broadcast industry one step behind newspapers; its audience gutted by the internet’s explosion of free material and advertisters’ splitting their money in many different directions (what’s left of it, anyway, in the Obama economy), even the better commercial broadcast operations are having to become very lean, and very creative when it comes to sales.

And Pacifica?  Not only is it entirely dependent on handouts from non-profits and governments, but it is “creative” in all the wrong ways:

Ian Masters and Sonali Kolhatkar, hosts of the Los Angeles-based KPFK, said its parent network Pacifica Radio, the country’s oldest public radio network, was putting pressure on staff to reduce their hours and pay, leave or work for free, alienating listeners and approaching a point of no return.

“This is the end. They’re running out of road,” Masters told the Guardian. He accused managers and board members of promoting conspiracy theories – including those related to the “truth” about 9/11 and claims about cancer and HIV. “They’ve run this place into the ground.”

Today it’s Pacifica.

Of course, it’s been happening in commercial radio for a long time; commercial radio stations have been slashing costs for a solid decade now (most music radio is “voice-tracked”; the “disc jockey” actually bangs out all the spoken elements for a show in one sitting, and the computers that run the shows slip the spoken bits in to the right spots, usually), finding creative ways to make money (or not so creative ways; 40% of the revenue at many talk stations comes from weekend infomercials) or avoid it (the NARN was a decade ahead of the trend of people doing talk radio as a hobby, barring the occasional talent fee).

So how long can public radio – especially Minnesota Public Radio, with its union-level pay scales and lavish facilities and gargantuan, padded staffs – survive?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals never admit to being Liberal, they always claim to be Moderates who represent the mainstream of American political thought, not like those extremist right-wing Republicans.

Try this experiment: ask them to name prominent far-left politicians, the people on the radical fringe.

President Obama and Hilary Clinton, are they far-left?  No, they’re Moderates.

Elizabeth Warren, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, are they radical leftists?  No, they’re Moderates, too.

Look, if everybody is to the Right of you and nobody is to the Left of you, then by definition you are not the Moderate Middle; you ARE the Lunatic Fringe.  Welcome to the asylum.

Joe Doakes

From Moorhead, Detroit Lakes is “Eastern Minnesota”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In a comment to an earlier thread, Emery wrote:
“The free movement of capital.
The free movement of goods and services.
The free movement of ideas and media.
The free movement of people.
The protection of private property.
I’m not a starry-eyed idealist, but I like to think that there is a liberal ideal that we should keep our eyes on, not necessarily as a realistic objective for today, but as a goal to strive for.”
My response is that all that free movement stuff sounds great in theory but I’m wondering about it in practice.  I just poured myself a cup of coffee and dumped in a packet of sugar.  I haven’t stirred it, yet.  The sugar is  concentrated in a heap of sweetness on the bottom of the cup.  That’s America.  The coffee in the rest of the cup is bitter.  That’s the rest of the world.  If I stir the cup, the sweetness will be distributed everywhere, but that also means it will be diluted everywhere.  No one place will be super-sweet, all will be equally semi-sweet.
Wouldn’t free movement of people and money lead to the same result? If you took all the money in America and distributed it to people across the rest of the globe, they would be enriched but we would be impoverished.  If we fling open the borders to let everybody from everywhere in the world come here, will they add to the sweetness of America by bringing prosperity and stability or subtract from it by welfare and crime?
I can see why people in the bitter lands would want their lives to become sweeter.  I can’t see why people in the super-sweet lands would want their lives to become more bitter.  As I cannot be guaranteed the glorious result would obtain, a conservative would eschew the experiment.
Joe Doakes

Perverse incentives?  I get it.

Perverse wishes?  Not so much.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The American Revolutionaries wore brown clothes and hid behind trees and rocks to shoot at British soldiers wearing red jackets marching in straight lines.  This was a violation of the “rules of war” of that time period. The familiar Geneva Convention “rules of war” were crafted after World War I to protect draftees compelled to fight for nation-states. Modern military theorists talk of 4th Generation Warfare in which large formations of men and machines are useless against small, agile teams of mobile warriors, like trying to kill a swarm of mosquitoes with a sledge hammer.
Iraq War I, with Stormin’ Norman’s giant lines of tanks encircling armies in Kuwait, was 3rd Generation Warfare, as was much of Iraq War II.  Some parts of America’s military have been learning to fight 4th Generation Warfare, notably the SEALs who fought in Afghanistan.  But they’re still America’s warriors, they serve the nation of the United States.
But what is the United States?  A geographical location?  A shared belief?  A place where groups struggle against each other: rich against poor, Black against White?  Barack Obama seems intent on transforming the United States into something different from what it was then Bush The Elder was President.  What if President Obama is ahead of his time?  What if nation-states are obsolete?  What if the United States is obsolete?  Nations arose out of tribes, what comes after nations?  Maybe by transforming the United States into a collection of factions contesting against each other, he’s moving us toward 4th Generation Society.
Question is:  would that be a good thing?
Joe Doakes

Good for whom?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Hilary was appointed Secretary of State by President Obama.

She immediately set up a private email account and used it for official government business.

Hilary’s non-secure email account was maintained by Platte River Networks, a mom-and-pop operation in Denver, not by the government.

We don’t know why she chose them out of everybody in the world.

Some of the email on her account contained Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information.

TS/SCI is maintained on secure government computers that are not physically capable of connecting to non-secure computers.

The only way TS/SCI information could have gotten into Hilary’s non-secure email system is if someone inside who had TS/SCI clearance accessed the TS/SCI information on the government’s secure computer, downloaded it to a disk and walked the disk over to a non-secure computer to send it to Hilary’s non-secure email account.

We don’t know who did that for her or how often or who authorized it.

The people at Platte River didn’t have TS/SCI clearance to handle those emails.

Platte River had back-up servers, we think, but nobody knows for sure where they are or what’s on them or who has access to them.

When asked to produce the emails, Platte River downloaded them from their non-secure server to a jump drive and gave the jump drive to Hilary’s lawyer, David Kendell, who may have had TS/SCI clearance years ago but may not now.

When the FBI received the actual non-secure server, it had been wiped, leaving Kendell’s jump drive the only copy, we think.

We don’t know if David Kendell copied the emails from the jump drive to a non-secure law firm computer.

David Kendell’s law firm gave printed copies of some of the TS/SCI emails to the Justice Department, the relevant ones.

We don’t know who reviewed all the emails to determine the relevant ones, or what that person’s security clearance is.

We don’t know who printed those copies or what that person’s security clearance is.

We don’t know if the law firm made photocopies of the printed copies it delivered to the Justice Department or what the copy girl’s clearance is.

State Department officials have refused to testify as to the “chain of custody” of Hilary’s emails or list everyone who had access to them.

She’s going to get away with it.

Joe Doakes

Nobody every went broke underestimating the extent Washington will roll over for the Clinton clan.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Two teachers at Washington State University will lower grades for students who say “illegal alien” or “male” or “female” or if they fail to “defer” to non-white students.  Tuition and fees range from $15,000 (in-state) to $25,000 (out-state).

You get what you pay for?

Joe Doakes

Well, the taxpayers sure don’t.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Stillwater turned down a gun range – it would have taken up too much of the land set aside for an office park – but Oakdale approved one, soon to the largest in the state.

Hopeful signs in a time of increasingly shrill demands for gun control.

joe doakes

The demands are indeed getting shrill – which is much better than 25 years ago, when they were confident and self-assured.

They’re shrill because they’re losing.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Mark Dayton criticized Black Lives Matter protestors chanting at the State Fair about killing cops.

BLM’s response: it’s disrespectful to criticize Black people for chanting about killing cops.

Way to go, Governor.  Didn’t think you had it in you.

Joe Doakes

The stopped clock is right twice a day.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Stole this from Brad Torgersen’s Facebook page (he’s a SF writer, one of the people who ran Sad Puppies).

 

It’s probably only funny to those of us old enough to remember, but I found it hilarious . . . .

 

Joe Doakes

I wonder if my kids would even remember what a floppy drive is?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In a comment to “A Bad Idea Whose Time Will Never Come,” Troy linked to a State of Minnesota website about job safety.  Their goal is to reduce the number of worker’s comp accidents from 4.3 down to 2.5.

 

Does that mean state government WANTS 2.5 employees injured or killed on the job?  Of course not.  Every injury or death is a tragedy to the people involved.  But in a large and diverse workforce engaged in hazardous duties, some injuries and deaths are inevitable and unavoidable.  The state isn’t attempting to eliminate all injuries and deaths, they’ve set a realistic and obtainable goal to work toward.  2.5 isn’t the optimum level, but it’s an acceptable level.  Having decided that, they can adopt practices to reach that goal.

Gun Control advocates often justify their demands saying “if it saves even one life” but zero deaths is just as much an unrealistic and unobtainable goal as zero worker’s comp injuries.  There are 320,000,000 people in the United States, 2,500,000 of whom die every year.  Every injury or death involving a firearm is a tragedy to the people involved.  But society must set a realistic and obtainable goal to work toward.

How many people should die each year in firearms related incidents – suicide, death by cop, gang warfare, mass shootings?  What’s the “acceptable level?”  Until we decide that, we can’t adopt practices to reach the goal.

Joe Doakes

For purposes of setting actual, workable policy?  Joe is right.

For purposes of shoving chanting points at the ignorant?  Realism is irrelevant.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Just read your post on the Rising Sun flag.  Outstanding.

 Now that you a First Ringer have got that war cleared up, here’s a start on the next project . . . .

(hat tip: Powerline)

Joe Doakes

Something along those lines will no doubt be part of the “Cold War:  Fact and Myth” series that is brewing…

…conveniently, mostly after we, God willing, finish the “World War I” series.