Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Three years ago, an employee who wanted to work remotely was routinely denied. All employees must come to the office. For the last two years, an employee who wanted to come to the office was routinely denied. All employees must work remotely. Today, the business magazines are full of articles on The Lessons of Covid. How can remote work increase employee satisfaction while trimming business cost? What has management learned?

Nothing. Management has decided all employees in our office are “hybrid” employees meaning we must come into the office AND we must work from home. Why? It’s the worst of both worlds. I waste expensive gas and contribute to global warming while commuting plus I maintain a home office at my expense to subsidize my employer’s operations. Why not one or the other?

Ahhhh, the true answer is revealed by the survey asking how many days per week I want to commute. The true answer is some people might be working remotely from Florida and allowing them to work remotely from out-of-state wouldn’t be fair. Oh? What about employees who live in Hudson? Prescott? Mason City? Where’s the cut-off line? There is no cut-off line. You just have to come in two days per week, which makes it uncomfortable enough to work from far away.

It’s not about productivity, morale, efficiency, or customer service. It’s about waaaaah, it’s not Fair, I don’t Get To, waaaaah! Lessons of Covid? We don’t need no stinking lessons, we’re management. We do what we want.

Joe Doakes

Some companies have painted themselves into corners; unable to find employees locally to replace people lost “the great resignation “, they recruited remotely, far and wide.

Hard to uncross that line.

This is a CD I’ve been meaning to get around to for a long time, and finally checked off that box. It features two members of Boston, Brad Delp and Barry Goudreau. It was recorded in Goudreau’s home studio and released in 2003. The cover and reverse photos were taken on the beach near Goudreau’s home.

Delp was the clear, high, strong voice of Boston, and while Goudreau (on guitar) was sometimes overshadowed by Tom Scholz, he was part of the founding of Boston and, pun intended, instrumental in the sound of the first two Boston albums that together have sold over 30 million copies.

Notes from, arguably, the worst retirement party ever.

I never watch the Oscars. Literally, not once since, maybe, college.

And I’m not about to start.

But I will say that I wanted to say this; in the entire history of standup comedy, I don’t believe anyone…

…has handled a heckler quite like that.

I wanted to.

But I won’t.

I will, however, say this: It’s entirely possible that the entire episode – the miked-jiust-well-enough audio, Smith stepping into the exact right “mark” to “throw” the “punch” so the camera angle couldn’t see the “impact”, Rock’s cool, calm, collected “response” to the “hit” – wasn’t a perfectly constructed “stage punch”, straight out of a community theater production of West Side Story.

But if it were, it wouldn’t have come across any differently.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

did everything right.

did not initiate conflict.

size disparity – reasonable fear of great bodily harm

attempted to retreat

used only the force necessary to end the attack – one shot

dug out her phone to call 911 immediately after

good girl, proud of her

Joe Doakes

[Author’s note: this completely unoriginal attempt to pick low-hanging fruit so low it would take a ladder to reach cantaloupe was arrived at independently from our host’s post… in the future we will strive to be unoriginal in original ways…]

This is Jeopardy! Our contestants today are our returning champion Warren, from Bakersfield CA. And, Ketanji Brown Jackson from Washington DC.

Here’s our host, Bert Convoy!

[Applause light on]

[Bert] Thank you! Let’s get right to it.

(later in the game)

[KBJ] I’ll take Facts of Life for $200.

[Bert] And it’s a Video Daily Double! What is this person?

[KBJ] I, I can’t… I’m not sure. I’m not a biologist.

[Warren] What is a woman?

[Bert] Correct!

(later in the game)

Exhibit 33,045

SCENE: Mitch BERG is having a glass of wine at the bar in Whole Foods in Saint Paujl, after a day of vigorous shopping. Lost in the reverie, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE has walked in.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, shhhhhuuuure enough, it’s Avery. Long time no see. What’s u..

LIBRELLE: Marsha Blackburn asked Ketanji Brown Jackson a stupid, badgering question at her confirmation hearing to be the best Supreme Court justice ever.

BERG: Best?

LIBRELLE: She is the most qualified jurist in history! The Washington Post showed it! Pictures, being science, never lie!

BERG: Well, not so much.

LIBRELLE: I never read National Review.

BERG: Clearly. So why do you think it was a “stupid, badgering question”?

LIBRELLE: It’s purely politicized, and she’ll never have to rule on that. “What’s a woman?” Mitch, please.

BERG: First: SCOTUS hearings, politicized? Bring that up when Robert Bork, Janice Rogers Brown, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are up for confirmation.

LIBRELLE: Those people were all in the past…

BERG: Exactly. As to never having to rule on that? Perhaps. But answering “what is a woman?”

LIBRELLE: It was an unfair question for which she had no time to prepare.

BERG: (looking at watch). A woman is an adult human with two “X” chromosomes. Three seconds. No prep time. And I didn’t even go to Harvard Law School.

LIBRELLE: She will never have to rule on what a woman is.

BERG: Perhaps. But she’ll be asked to rule on questions where much of the population does know what the answer is; the fact she’s willing to equivocate on something this comical, to keep the “progressive” wing of her party happy, is a very bad sign.

LIBRELLE: There are no such quesitons in the law! Its science!

BERG: When does human life being?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.

BERG: When do community standards violate free association?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not the community.

BERG: Huh. When does the right to free speech interfere with private property rights?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not a professor of rhetoric.

BERG: Huh. What does the phrase “Right of the People” mean?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not a law professor.

BERG: A SCOTUS justice will be ruling on any or all of those things, including in the next term.

LIBRELLE: I don’t care. It was still a stupid question.

BERG: Nah. It fixed the front lines in the culture war – the issue beneath all the other issues in the upcoming mid-terms. And it showed which side are the metaphorical Russians, and which are the figurative Ukrainians.

LIBRELLE: Bla bla bla. So where are the avocados?

BERG: I don’t know. I’m not a grocer.

(And SCENE)

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Giant spiders falling from the sky. My Exodus is a little rusty, which plague is this? And while we’re at it . . .

Joe Doakes

This Thursday piece in the Washington Post caught my eye for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, but it is illustrative of how when war is unleashed, the shrapnel goes in all directions.

In a Minnesota classroom, two weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, a high school teacher asked her class where they would travel if they could go anywhere in the world. Barrett Buck, 16, who was adopted from Moscow at 15 months old, began replying, “Russia, because —” A scoff cut her off before she could finish the sentence.

Buck continued, saying she’d like to experience more of the country of her birth. Then she added, “I don’t support Russia and what’s going on.”

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has complicated the lives of kids like Buck, one of tens of thousands of children adopted from Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s, and their families, as they navigate layers of feelings about their Russian identity amid the backdrop of an unprovoked war.

Mara Kamen, chair of Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoption (FRUA), a volunteer-run organization shepherding a network of about 7,000 member families who have adopted children from the former Soviet bloc, says kids and teens adopted from Russia have felt intense hurt these past few weeks.

My son and daughter are both adopted from Russia, though at different times and from different places. We made a total of four trips to Russia, two for each of them. With our son, our first day with him in the orphanage was 9/11. With our daughter, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 started the day after we got to Moscow (which, looking at the calendar, within the last week was exactly nineteen years ago.) I might share those stories at some point down the road.

Could we at least call this what it really is – bribing you, with your own money?

Hand one to Fred Melo of the Pioneer Press – he’s done the unthnkable, for a Twin Cities mainstream media figure; actually reporting on the actual state of life on the “Vomit Comet” (AKA Green Line)..

A friend of the blog emailed re this story:

I’d rather double down on reminding people why the Green Line is so awful than be snarky. But, with all the urbanists subtweeting Fred Melo’s post about smoking/drinking on light rail, them tweeting that smoking is no big deal, not a safety issue, I kind of want to ask if smokers will be welcome again at bars/restaurants again. 

It’s a mostly smokeless smoke.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Check me on this – are you seeing what I’m seeing

Joe Doakes

As much as the climate panic crowd wants desperately to believe in the dream that we can glue solar panels to the roof of our vehicle, nail a 3-inch diameter battery-operated fan on the back bumper, do away with all fossil fuels and still toodle down the road at 70 mph and heat our homes with a windmill in the back yard and notice no economic impact, the world runs on petroleum products. Without them, we’re living in the Little House on the Prairie.

With 41% of their gas imports coming from Russia, Europe knows full well how dependent they are Russia. Go figure but they like staying warm in the winter. (And yet, with eyes wide open Germany still embarked on ending their nuclear program. Pro Tip: Never let leftists run your country) They are in a bind when it comes to imposing meaningful sanctions on Russia imports, and everyone knows it.

A significant portion of that gas transits through Ukraine. Though the percentage has dropped over time, according to Statista at least a third of Russian imports comes through Ukraine.

The St. Paul school board voted to keep masks on kids.

Bear in mind, the districts “Director of public health and wellness” recommended dropping the mandate:

“Effective 12:01 a.m. on March 28, that we move forward with the following changes: Masks are not required with low- to medium-community case rates in Ramsey County,” Langworthy said while presenting a slide with numbers.

One of the boards members responded (with emphasis added):

Concerned board members argued taking action, based on numbers that would be delivered with a delay, would be too late.

“If it was from the previous week’s data, we receive it the following Thursday and then we implement masks on Monday, we’d be implementing it from previous weeks’ data though, correct?” board member Chauntyll Allen said. “So, the surge would be happening, basically. It would already be happening — we wouldn’t have masks, we would find out about it on Thursday, and we would implement masks Monday — but from Tuesday or Wednesday the week before until Thursday, students would still be walking around without masks as the surge is existing.”

Ms. Allen has done an admirable, If inadvertent, job of illustrating Kevin Williamson’s thesis that politics is the least efficient possible way of getting anything that matters done.

As far as making public health decisions there anything but reflections of the current state of political logrolling?

You know where I’m going with this, right?

The defining jape of the current economic contortions may have been a piece from last week by Teresa Ghilarducci at Bloomberg, had some “advice” for Americans making “less than $300,000 a year” and coping with inflation:

Inflation stings most if you earn less than $300K. Here’s how to deal:

➡ Take the bus

➡ Don’t buy in bulk

➡ Try lentils instead of meat

➡ Nobody said this would be fun

Ignore, for a moment, that the price of Lentils is apparently outstripping the price of meat:

…and that very few Americans live where buses are, much less get them to where they need to be, and that no s**t it’s not “fun”, seeing your retirement savings getting chewed up and spat out by the inflation that your party brought on.

This particular line needs to be held up against every Democrat, everywhere, this fall.

Most readers of this feature knew the truth in 2020 — Hunter Biden, the uber-prodigal son of the now Leader of the Free World, abandoned a laptop computer at a repair shop in Delaware. The laptop was filled to the brim with embarrassing and yes, incriminating evidence of financial malfeasance and videotaped debauchery. It was real and yes, it was spectacular. And the New York Post was on the case.

But you weren’t allowed to know any of it, and if you tried to tell anyone what you weren’t allowed to know, you were in for a banning:

Twitter went so far as to lock users out of their accounts if they shared this piece of journalism that was clearly in the public interest. It locked the Twitter accounts of the actual White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, and the New York Post itself. Here we had the spokesperson for the democratically elected president of the United States and the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in America being cast out of social media for the crime of sharing a story that was true. This was surely the most egregious, arrogant interference in democratic politics and press freedom carried out by corporate elites in recent times.

Recent times? I think the term we’re looking for here is ever. And as Brendan O’Neill discusses in the piece linked above, the implications are chilling:

This was a truly extraordinary moment in the political life of the United States of America. A free-thinking daily newspaper published a fascinating report on the emails and behaviour of the then vice-president’s son and it found itself shamed, blocked and defamed for doing so. Californian oligarchs, former members of the American deep state and virtually the entire opinion-forming set of the East Coast clubbed together to denounce the Post, ban it from Twitter, and rubbish its reporting as the handiwork of evil Ruskies. Yet some of them now admit the story was actually true, a fact that has been clear since at least December 2020, when federal authorities started investigating Hunter. What took place following the Post’s breaking of the laptop story was a terrifying assault on media freedom, the right to dissent and truth itself.

We are free, theoretically, to express our views. From the founding of the republic, we have been able to drag a soapbox to the public square and hold forth. Twitter isn’t the only public square available; in form and in fact, it’s an upholstered cesspool. But it is the realm where our betters and minders, coextensive as they are, disgorge the received wisdom of our age. And it’s where the game is played. And the game is rigged. Back to O’Neill:

But it was the elites’ brutal stomping on this story that should worry us more. It confirmed that the new woke elites will do whatever it takes to crush inconvenient facts, to bury stories and ideas and beliefs that pose a threat to their power or their interests. And it confirmed that Big Tech billionaires will happily engage in explicit political censorship to protect their allies and sponsors from scrutiny. If an established newspaper like the New York Post can be forcefully locked out of the 21st-century public square, just imagine what could be done to you or me if we ever happened upon some facts the elites would prefer to keep hidden.

There’s a chilling line in the 1939 French film La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game). The character Octave (played by Jean Renoir, the film’s director) says:

You see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.

Those who control the game and the general discourse in the country have their reasons as well. The reason is power, nothing more and nothing less. If we are to play the game, we’d better understand that.

…somebody tells you what a genius and go in miracle was, or how she was the “leader of the free world in pro for four years, just mention this.

…I’ve seen in my lifetime is this: when I was a kid, famine still stalked Africa and Asia.

And today, worldwide, obesity is a bigger problem than hunger, in the third world. This has never happened in all of human history.

And it can all end tomorrow.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I used $20 of electricity but my bill is nearly $50 because of the taxes and extra fees, including an “affordability” charge.

If you’re trying to make my bill more affordable, shouldn’t that be subtracted instead of added?

Joe Doakes

It’s not about making your bill, or any of our bills, more affordable. It’s about transferring money to the political class, and those whose first they need.

But Joe knows that.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Last year, I was admonished to “Fight for Fifteen.” Okay, but inflation is running around 10%. Fifteen doesn’t buy what it used to. Shouldn’t we update the slogan?

“Fight for Sixteen-and-a-half” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Maybe round it up a bit, get ahead of the game in case Lesko Brandon’s anti-inflation program takes a while to kick in?

“Seventeen or Fight!”

“Aching for Eighteen!”

“Nineteen or Nothing!”

“Give me Twenty or Give me Death!”

Joe Doakes

I mean, after a year of 8% inflation, 15 is suddenly worth about 13…

Last week the International Crisis Group unveiled their op-ed entry in the “Deep Fake: This Is Not The Babylon Bee” competition. Entitled “Another deeply gendered war is being waged in Ukraine,” it is a blinkered attempt to prove that even in the raw violence of war, the Left can still count beans, at least until hungry people taking refuge in a cold basement eat them.

But the Western supporters of Ukraine, especially the US, NATO, and the European Union, who have insisted for more than two decades now that women’s security shapes their approach to dealing with war, have done little to show that gender will be their framework, or even a framework, for addressing Ukraine’s predicament.

The author, Ms. Moaveni, is based in London. She has the freedom and safety to write sentences like the following, freedom bought by other people, many of them men, who were holding weapons, not “Give Peace A Chance” signs.

What might prove most challenging for a traditional gender-sensitive approach to this war is the emerging and dominant glorification of the militarisation of an entire society.

What the author calls the “glorification of the militarisation of an entire society” might also be called a will to survive. Ukraine is being invaded by an army that puts shells through the windows of maternity hospitals and apartment buildings. If the Ukrainian people, men and women alike, want to fight back and preferably not die cold and hungry under the treads of a Russian tank, I say we should salute them, not harangue them about why their first thoughts don’t run to identity politics.

The reference to “two decades” in the first quote is not a random one. In October 2000, U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 1325. The text of it is here. The resolution called for, among other things, the increased participation of women in conflict resolution and in peacekeeping activities.

They’re Iran’s combination of the Saudi religious police, the KGB and the Green Berets.

They were behind the Marine Barracks and US Embassy bombings in Lebanon in the ’80s, which killed hundreds of Americans.

They are known to be directly responsible for killing 600 American service people in Iraq.

They’ve been directly tied to destabilizing most of the governments in the Middle East and Africa, not that many of them need a lot of help in that regard.

They brougth Lebanon and Syria to their knees.

They’ve been waging a horrific war in Yemen.

They are behind most of the attacks against Israel for the past 30 years, and are HAMAS’s main sponsor.

So of course the Brandon administration wants to destigmatize them:

According to Barak Ravid, reporting for Axios, three Israeli officials and two American sources have told him that the Biden administration is considering removing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the terror blacklist if Iran issues a public commitment to de-escalate its activities in the region.

Look at the bright side; it’ll free up CIA and FBI resources to go after the real terrorists, like the Heritage Foundation and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.

Paul Waldman, at the Washington Post…

Over the multiple days of her confirmation hearings for a seat on the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson will have to sit attentively for hours while the 22 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee speechify at her, testing both her endurance and her ability to refrain from rolling her eyes when the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) ascend the heights of inane demagoguery at her expense.

Amid all that pontification, there’s a particular phrase you should watch out for that will likely be repeated dozens of times: “judicial philosophy.” The phrase should raise red flags because it’s a signal that the person using it is about to pull a fast one, either to claim they themselves believe something they really don’t, or to pretend that an attack they’re making on Jackson is far more high-minded than it actually is. … The alternative to all this hogwash would be a little candor.

Our current vice president is a dopey gigglebox whose morning calisthenics consist of struggling to find a coherent thought. Feel the burn! She was picked solely on the basis of her skin color and gender.

Now, our current president, whose Biden Doctrine “I can’t have oatmeal before 8 am because I get gassy” will soon be of interest only to the nurses who wheel him down to the solarium, has nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, the Left’s favorite unaccountable super-legislature. What’s more, she was picked for the exact same reasons as Harris. Given that first steaming example of affirmative action, as fresh as objets d’art on a San Francisco sidewalk, and how that is working out, might Jackson be worth a few pointed questions from a co-equal branch of government before she takes her lifetime appointment, Mr. Waldman?

Click.

To: Senator Warren Limmer, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the entire Senate GOP Caucus

From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant and, hate to say it, guy who’s starting to feel like a bit of a chump

Re: Action

Senators,

Let me direct your attention back to 2002. The GOP had played safe on “shall issue” carry permit reform for years. But in 2002, just in time for those crucial midterms, the GOP doubled down.

The time was right. Every DFLer in greater Minnesota who opposed the bill in the 2002 legislature, got retired from office that fall.

OK. Back to the present. it’s 20 years later, gun rights are in the ascendant. Why are you acting like it’s 1996?

We need to talk.

I supported you. When your people called, I gave you airtime. I voted for you.

Enough of us did to keep you in the majority – last year, against incredible odds, when most of the smart money said we would be falling into the minority again.

A key part of that fairly miraculous performance was the fact that Minnesota’s hundreds of thousands of gun owners turned out for you, come hell or high water.

So here you are, now, sitting on a thin majority, heading into a midterm where all the signs show the people are chomping at the bit to get out and support red meat conservative issues.

So, Senator Limmer, why in the flaming hootie-hoo are you sandbagging us on stand your ground and constitutional carry?

Despite complete GOP control in the Minnesota Senate and years of promises to Minnesota’s law-abiding gun owners, the Senate GOP is not moving on important gun rights legislation.

Call Senator Warren Limmer, Chair of Senate Judiciary, TODAY and demand hearings on Constitutional Carry and Stand Your Ground.

Then visit our Action Center at http://gunowners.mn/action and send an email to your State Rep & Senator demanding action on this important gun rights legislation.

They’ve made campaign promises of support for these bills for years – let’s hold their feet to the fire to take action!

If I may speak frankly – and it’s my blog, so I certainly may – you have played it too safe, and squandered opportunities to move the needle, for far too long.

Please see to this ASAP.

That is all.