Fauci, Mengele and Plastic

Posted on December 2, 2021 by Brian Lambert

I don’t know about you, but I wake up every morning — grab a cup of coffee, walk the dog — and register amazement at just how many things I could rant about, how many things are so deeply crazy I could spend all day dabbing at the foam around the corners of my mouth and bemoaning the barely Cro-Magnon state of some of the world.

I mean, here’s a quick re-hash of the past month:

A Republican Congressman shunned by his own family for being a vile idiot posts an anime of himself stabbing a congressional colleague in the neck.

A Republican congresswoman is caught — twice — telling (and gilding) a likely entirely bogus story of her confronting a congressional colleague as “a terrorist sympathizer.”

A former “60 Minutes” correspondent, long since dismissed for fabricating a story about the Benghazi incident pops up on FoxNews — where she is currently employed — comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Joseph Mengele.

And here in Minnesota, St. Paul cops, allegedly hired to protect the public, are playing the Joe Rogan/Tucker Carlson “personal choice” card in the context of refusing to vaccinate themselves — to avoid spreading a contagious, deadly disease to that same public, i.e. the people who employ them and pay their salaries.

I mean … it just goes on and on … . Where do you start, if you choose to start at all? Sadly, like many people I talk to these days, the post-Trump moment, this interregnum we’re in, isn’t providing the necessary respite from the exhaustion of the Orange God King’s constant vulgar grifting. People want to forget about all the stupidity, racism, fraud and shame and “get back to normal.” Except that “normal”, when Christmas shopping, football and “The Bachelorette” could fully consume our attention, keeps back-drifting off toward the horizon.

Which explains why I just want to say something about … plastic.

Yesterday, there was this story in The Washington Post, reporting on a long-in-development congressional survey of plastic consumption/production.

“The United States contributes more to this deluge than any other nation, according to the analysis, generating about 287 pounds of plastics per person. Overall, the United States produced 42 million metric tons of plastic waste in 2016 — almost twice as much as China, and more than the entire European Union combined.”

TWICE AS MUCH AS … CHINA.

Since I became deeply obsessed with plastic a couple years ago, and I began regularly filling a (plastic) bag with all the plastic wrappings we accumulate every day, I haven’t stopped being amazed at the beach ball-sized glob of plastic waste the two of us here at La Casa Lambert accumulate in a given week.

And worse, I’ve become convinced that our recycling efforts are largely illusory. (“Plastics accounted for 12 percent of the 292 million tons of municipal solid waste generated in the U.S. in 2018, totaling some 35.7 million tons. However, the volume of plastic waste recycled in the U.S. that year was 3.1 million tons, giving a recycling rate of just 8.7 percent. Nov 22, 2021.”)

Probably once a week I stroll through Costco — one of the more enlightened major retailers — and stare at water, bottled in plastic, swaddled by the case in another layer of plastic and then wrapped together on shipping pallets in yet another layer of plastic.

Water.

Here’s a petition you can sign to tell Costco they can do a lot better than they’re doing in terms of wrapping everything they sell — from water to bananas to socket wrenches — in plastic. (Usually I doubt any big company will give this a second thought. But Costco has demonstrated a heightened interest in civic-minded retailing in the past.)

Among the crazy, socialist ideas for weaning ourselves off plastic — 287 pounds per American, per year! — is … buying less. How about fixing or restoring what you already have? (It’s insanity, I know.) Screw keeping up with the fashion of the minute. Use what you’ve already got. Instead of complaining about how Biden has clogged up the ports so bad you can’t get all that plastic/plastic-wrapped Chinese Christmas crap out off ships floating outside LA and Long Beach.

Anyway, before I take a deep breath and plunge back in to the flaming sewer hole of conservative America, where a conscientious scientist is compared to a Nazi mass murderer because … he wants to stop a pandemic that has already killed 750,000 Americans … I had to cough up the plastic twine ball logged in my throat.

Fear of Crime Always Sells

Posted on November 3, 2021 by Brian Lambert

[UPDATED] I take very little pleasure in correctly predicting the ignominious defeat of Minneapolis’ “police reform” amendment. A couple weeks ago, when I wrote, “Bold Prediction: Police Reform (i.e. “Question Two”) Will Lose by at Least 10%” all the signs pointed to the same conclusion. Since no one knew — really — what came next after “reforming” the cops, the only safe choice was sticking with what we’ve got.

Were I a Minneapolis resident I would have voted in favor of “Question Two”. But that decision would be based on:

1: Having had (way more than) enough of a clearly diseased cop culture. (And judging by the number of Minneapolis cops willing to slap on an ugly t-shirt and howl approval for Donald Trump, the case is closed on whether “diseased” is fair judgment.)

Trump hates us': President's Minneapolis visit gets no welcome from Minnesota Somalis | MPR News

2: A belief that the city’s generally well-educated activist community would have had impact on the creation and function of … what would come next.

And 3: I’m a white guy in the “safe” quadrant of town. Stories of car jackings and catalytic converter thefts are frequent, but I give next to no thought of getting caught in gang-banger crossfire.

I haven’t yet seen a precinct-by-precinct break down of the vote, but my guess is that Question Two’s 57%-43% thrashing was heavily influenced by northside residents saying, “Hell no.”

[UPDATE: Well, well, well. It seems the area of Minneapolis most heavily opposed to Question Two was my neighboring hood. Comfortably middle to upper class, predominantly white, liberal, safe-as-it-gets southwest Minneapolis. This opens another interesting line for ranting … but not right now.]

That said, Democrats and progressives justifiably horrified by what (again) is fair to describe as constant cop thuggery/racism/sexism/neanderthalism, are going to have to take a painful reality check before the next election.

Department of Justice opens investigation into Minneapolis Police Department | News | insightnews.com

Fear of crime — heavily and cynically hyped by conservative media and candidates — is Issue #1 for the forseeable future. And it’s the easiest sell imaginable.

The progressive version of law and order doesn’t play on a bumper sticker.

Even comfy, otherwise liberal-minded whites, people who accept that the cop culture is such an entrenched tumor, capable of aggravating (if not generating) so much fear and hysteria through “blue flu” work slowdowns and the shivving of any politician who crosses their union, are here to stay. The slightest attempt to reform or “correct” (as Delbert Grady says to Jack Torrance in “The Shining”) will set off a new, more intense round of fear-stoking by the usual suspects.

Perhaps someone can offer a scenario where the newly powered-up Mayor’s office can end an era of cop impunity (Derek Chauvin and Mohamed Noor withstanding) and restock the department with ethical, composed professionals instead of ex-telemarketers and mall cops waving their fresh-issued police revolvers in the face every black guy with a broken tail light.

But someone else is going to have spin up that scenario, because I sure as hell can’t.

How About We Start with “What in Hell was Boogie Smith?”

Posted on October 22, 2021 by Brian Lambert

Unless Winston “Boogie” Smith was the second coming of Pablo Escobar the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the U.S. Marshalls and several other offices have some serious ‘splainin’ to do. And by all indications they are yet again taking the attitude that they don’t have to explain anything to anyone, even when their latest shoot-out set off a riot that pretty well drove the last nail into the life of an entire neighborhood.

You can tell by the tone and placement of a couple recent Strib stories that the paper isn’t buying much of what the BCA, et al are trying to sell.

In her October 15 story Strib reporter Maya Rao makes the following points:

1: ” … officers at the scene were never interviewed as part of the state’s investigation.”

2: ” … officers submitted only written statements giving their accounts of the June 3 shooting.”

3: “Officers were not wearing body cameras”

4: ” … the BCA did not interview the officers.”

5: “Why was a federal task force involved in pursuing Smith on a state-level case?”

6: “Why did officers shoot at him 14 times?”

7: “Smith had only one weapons case … tied to his warrant, which originated in 2019 when a friend he was going to see tipped off police that he had a gun. Officers found no gun on him [when he was killed], but searched the car that he arrived in and found a firearm under the seat. Smith was prohibited from carrying a gun as a felon. He had an aggravated robbery conviction stemming from a dispute with his ex-girlfriend.”

8: “One of the family’s biggest questions is why officers waited to apprehend Smith.”

9: ” … officers watched while Smith and a woman had a lunch date on the rooftop of Stella’s Fish Cafe, and continued monitoring him as the pair walked across Lake Street and into an elevator to the top floor. The officers didn’t confront him until the couple were already in a car, boxing him in with their own vehicles and announcing he was under arrest.”

And then in a follow up story this past Wednesday, Rao and two other reporters added …

10: “After they had a lunch date at Stella’s Fish Cafe, [Smith and his date] returned to his vehicle in the Uptown parking ramp across the street when ‘all of a sudden like 50 police cars’ came up to them and officers ordered them to put their hands up.”

11: “There were so many officers, and helicopters whirring overheard, that Askar [the girlfriend] wondered, ‘What the hell did he do wrong’?”

12: “An unnamed Ramsey County sheriff’s deputy said in a written statement four days after the shooting that he ‘developed information’ that Smith was at Stella’s that afternoon and asked members of the fugitive task force to come to Uptown to assist him with the case. The deputy’s statement indicated that at least nine task force members confronted Smith in the parking ramp.”

That’s a quick dozen lines of questioning for whenever the BCA or whoever decides the public deserves an full explanation for what otherwise looks and sounds like yet another jacked-up cowboy operation.

You don’t have to be a highly-trained law enforcement professional to wonder what in the hell all this action was really about? A missed court appearance for one gun charge? Nine armed and ready-for-combat personnel and a chopper? Give me a break.

Unless Boogie Smith — who we can agree was probably no altar boy — is revealed to be a central cog in a violent national meth manufacturing operation, or a wanted hit man for MS-13 with a high likelihood of blowing out of town on a second’s notice, the size of the “apprehension”, the confrontation in a high-traffic shopping/dining district with no consideration whatsoever of providing the public with 21st century transparency makes no sense at all.

Post- Boogie Smith, the Uptown business district is pretty much a zombie zone. The enraged rioting that ensued his killing looks to have put a shuddering stop to any recovery from … the rioting after Minneapolis cops killed George Floyd over a fake $20 bill.

What, I ask, might have been the reaction if the cops involved in the Smith operation had body cams running — that proved Smith fired at them first — and then quickly followed up with a definitive accounting of his very serious, very threatening-to-public-safety crimes? How much of Uptown would have been wrecked again?

This is 2021, not 1985. The public has a justifiable expectation that any police encounter, especially one where cops are anticipating violence, is recorded. Any cop, cop supervisor or politician overseeing cop behavior has to be smart enough to understand public expectations, particularly in yet another killing of yet another black guy.

To date, none of that crowd seems to comprehend the era they’re living in.

Bold Prediction: Police Reform (i.e. “Question Two”) Will Lose by at Least 10%

Posted on October 19, 2021 by Brian Lambert

Despite what you read here, I am not auditioning to be some kind of trans Debbie Downer. Good things, improvements even, are happening … somewhere. But just not now in Minneapolis if we’re talking police reform.

My joyless prediction for the upcoming vote on fixing The Problem with Minneapolis Cops is that Question Two will be defeated by at least 10%, essentially a wipe out. And that folks, will be the last time for a long time that voters will be able to do anything directly about, dare I say, one of the most notorious police departments in the USA.

The reasons for this crushing defeat are painfully obvious.

A: Based on my highly unscientific anecdotal research, way too few people understand what comes next if they in some way reduce the size and authority of the cops we have. (Since I live in Edina, so I should say “they have.”) People I hear and talk to seem to agree that the average Minneapolis cop is a poorly-vetted, poorly-trained “thumper”, a national embarrassment with a hair-trigger penchant for racially-based violence. But …

B: … fear of street crime and personal assault is as high right now as I can remember it. Upscale residents of southwest Minneapolis (one of the safest neighborhoods in the country) can’t tell you how a “public safety” force would protect them from Hollywood-style gang banger shoot-outs in moving vehicles or crowded bars. And voters over on the north side don’t care if the average cop is a racist Trumper as long as they chase down the thugs turning grade school kids in to collateral damage.

Union head draws ire after calling George Floyd a criminal - New York Daily News

And C: The excruciatingly naive cry to “defund the police” is the most poisonous egg from a toxic goose any group has squeezed out since free love hippies raged about dismantling the military. Paranoid, status quo cop supporters couldn’t have invented a more potent slogan to prevent any kind of change in how Minneapolis goes about “protecting and serving.”

Making matters worse — more Downer here — is that Minneapolis is a national test case. When, not if, this “reform movement” goes down in flames, it’ll chill similar campaigns across the country.

That of course is the voter referendum variation on reform. City councils could, if they dared, initiate reforms. Somehow they could decertify police unions. It would not be easy, (what is?), but it would clear away the single most effective barrier to cop accountability.

Minneapolis police union president Lt. Bob Kroll at the union's headquarters.

Cops would howl and their fear-addled supporters would throw countless expensive law suits in the city’s face. But it has always seemed to me that selling “police accountability” and “transparency” is an easier argument than “replacing” the force with some nebulous “public safety” corps. The latter is a wishful(ly) concept which many residents think of as where sweet little Indivisible ladies and wispy-bearded grad students sit down for chai tea with the Crips and the Bloods.

One short-term upside to the crushing defeat of Question Two is that by not being in effect next November it will tamp down “crime” (which always means black street crime and never big money white collar fraud) as a Republican vote-stoker in the 2022 election cycle.

Question Two’s ignominious defeat won’t eliminate crime as the biggest issue, because “law and order!” is as evergreen a campaign rallying cry as you can get. But it would shave — says Mr. Downer — a few degrees off the fear fever, and maybe a few votes from anyone vowing more money and fewer restrictions on “our” valorous cops.

We Have Every Reason To Expect a Lot More from the NFL

Posted on October 14, 2021 by Brian Lambert

There’s at least one more level to the Jon Gruden disaster that NFL fans should consider about the league’s remarkable influence. Like many other enormous corporations the NFL, selling a slick, bristling mix of testosterone and patriotism, ducks away from anything with a whiff of political conflict.

I concede, as others who know him personally have, that I’m stunned that a guy like Gruden who has been a high-profile media/cultural presence for over 20 years, regularly giving live interviews, chewing up air time as a TV analyst and obliging all the other requests for personal contact that go with being a football celebritry … could conceal his essential meat-headedness so long and so well. I suspect he had help. His is another example of how well powerful systems, in this case, the almighty NFL, can throw a PR cocoon around people and project to the public only the parts of its culture that serve its business interests … until they don’t.

Las Vegas Raiders: Jon Gruden faked coronavirus to players, report

Two Gruden compadres, ex-Gophers star and former NFL coach Tony Dungy and his ESPN partner Mike Tirico, both black, are in a bad spot for defending Gruden about his “michellin [sic] tires” description of another black guy’s lips. That coming the day before the New York Times dropped the bomb(s) about Gruden calling the NFL commissioner a “faggot”, ripping the league’s concussion protocols, (in other words, Gruden’s pro-concussion) and trading nudie pictures of cheerleaders. All of which is, y’know, really classy stuff.

My suspicion is that while Dungy and Tirico and dozens if not hundreds of other NFL “leaders” may have been surprised by Gruden’s racist imagery, they aren’t as unfamiliar with his other boy’s club stupidity.

So that’s Gruden. A reckless high-profile meathead, now out the $60 million remaining on his contract.

But it’s the NFL itself that should be held to greater account and responsibility than it ever is. Given its footprint, we have good rights to expect a lot more from this monolith.

The Gruden e-mails were leaked from a (way too) long-running investigation of the toxic (i.e. meathead) culture inside the team formerly known as the Washington Redskins. A company where we already know from law suits the team’s executives treated its cheerleaders like Vegas escorts and, yup, traded nudie pictures of them changing outfits.

Redskins Cheerleaders In Town for Calendar Shoot • VRAC's Costa Rica Blog

The trouble is that the NFL is not coming clean on that investigation. It is making no promises that it will reveal everything it has found out about the Redskins and others who had contact with the team. (“Confidentiality”, you know.) It is in effect protecting the team’s owner, a guy regularly reviled by sportswriters, players and fans as a (very wealthy) toxic idiot.

To anyone interested in a deeper dive into NFL culture I strongly recommend, “Big Game” by New York Times Magazine writer Mark Leibovich for an inside-the-suites sense of who says what to who when it’s more or less just them — peer billionaires — talking. (To his enormous credit, Leibovich burned up all the access his name and the Times brand afforded him to tell a story the average sports writer only dares hint at.) The NFL owners club is a remarkable collection of avaricious gargoyles. One where guys like the Vikings’ Mark and Zygi Wilf and Arthur (Home Depot) Blank of the Atlanta Falcons come off as comparatively rational.

But the level where this Gruden idiocy touches the country’s perilous moment is where the NFL — arguably one of the most popular and therefore influential organizations/corporations in the country — could and should use Gruden’s buffoonish racism and sexism to make unambiguous statements to its fans, which is to say just about everyone in the country.

The NFL could and should be a leader among other giant corporations in taking stark stands against belligerent stupidity like racism (which it is sort of good at in a lipservice/signage kind of way, considering 70% of its players are black) and sexism (where it has a long ways to go, despite promoting Breast Cancer Awareness Month with pink shoes), but also right now … for … wait for it … COVID vaccinations.

The league has recently been running in-game PSAs pushing cancer and mental health awareness screenings, etc. Players and coaches appear giving quick testimonials. That’s great.

But what, I ask, would be the effect of a dozen or so top current and former stars, coaches and league executives stepping up to a camera and telling pro football’s millions (and millions) of fans to get vaccinated … for the sake of other people — like the season ticket holders sitting next to them — if not themselves? In order to put this grinding pandemic behind us once and for all?

I seriously doubt the league’s TV ratings or ad revenue would suffer an iota.

The problem for the big, powerful, macho NFL, as it is for every other giant public entity, is that racism and cancer are kind of the easy stuff. They have no serious public, political advocates. (And I’m not forgetting Colin Kaepernick’s protests against police violence, and how the league effectively blackballed him before paying him off to avoid a certain-to-be-nightmarish public trial.)

But COVID vaccination, as a consequence of being made “political” by belligerent partisans, many of whom love football more than life itself, is terrifying territory for the NFL. (Airlines resisting vaccination mandates for passengers are another prime example of failure of true “leadership”.) It’s appalling how heavily-to-tightly-managed entities, especially those controlled by a small cluster of well-heeled egos turn into shuddering eunuchs at the thought of riling just an ugly faction of its consumer base.

How best to put it? Shrinking from conflict over something as valid, real and life-protecting as a vaccine is not what I’d call, manly, brave, courageous or patriotic. It’s more like cowardly, and meatheaded.

Only Its Investors Can “Reform” Facebook

Posted on October 5, 2021 by Brian Lambert

Who doesn’t love a good coincidence? Alfred Hitchcock used to say that you’re entitled to one coincidence per movie. After that you’re just being stupid. Well, Facebook just had its coincidence and would be wise not to try selling us another.

Barely 12 hours after a whistlebower goes on “60 Minutes” to pretty much reaffirm, with internal documents, what most of us have long known, the whole friggin’ Facebook system collapses, due, Facebook tells us, to some of its own boffins in its server cave flipping the wrong switch.

Riiiiight. (For the record, I do not think that story will hold up.)

Facebook hacked cartoon, Facebook unsecured personal data, privacy breached, Cambridge Analytica, social media cartoon, editorial cartoon by John Pritchett

After The Orange God King, Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz and maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene I don’t know if any public figure has less credibility right now than Mark Zuckerberg or any other top Facebook executive. Who believes anything he says?

Most likely Zuckerberg will be “invited” to appear again before some Congressional committee and explain how his (publicly-traded) company, which he dominates like few other CEOs, continued to let his Instagram platform provoke young girls into eating disorders and suicide while having research in hand to prove it was doing exactly that.

Given the tech sophistication of some of our most powerful elected officials — I’m thinking your Chuck Grassleys, Tommy Tubervilles, Diane Feinsteins and the like — I would not expecting a robust cross examination, no matter how good their staff preparation might be. And beyond a lack of functional understanding of algorithms and confusion in the face of slick Silicon Valley-speak, there’s the fact that in a fundamentally bought-off Congress, where Senate reelection campaigns are now pushing $60-$100 million, Facebook throws too much money around for anyone, Republican or Democrat, to push too hard for any “reform” that diminishes its revenue.

Bruce Plante Cartoon: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook | Columnists | tulsaworld.com

We long ago passed the point where Facebook could make a credible argument that it isn’t a publisher, like The New York Times, The Washington Post or the East Boogertown Sentinel, and therefore can’t be sued for spreading flagrant lies. Lies, you know, like how horse dewormer is a better bet for beating a pandemic than a vaccine that’s protected over 180 million without a single death attributed to an adverse reaction.

So I don’t see Capitol Hill, where Facebook served as a willing messaging vehicle for insurrectionist rioters, doing much if anything to truly reduce the now clear and definitive harm unregulated social media is doing to a gullible, unsophisticated world.

What might move the needle a bit isn’t any outrage over a system that provokes depression and suicide in young girls, and convinces none-too-bright average Joes to get off their barstools and attack the Capitol. What might … might … matter a lot more is if Facebook’s stock takes a slide and it’s investors decide that that is a bridge too far (i.e. farther than inducing suicide in children) and sues Zuckerberg/Facebook for insidious damage to their portfolios.

The head-spinning rationale that, like gun manufacturers, Facebook can’t be sued for the damage its products do, has never made sense. The “We’re not a publisher” dodge was never credible given Facebook’s obvious reach and impact on over nearly three billion users. (The Times and Post would kill for three billion sets of eyeballs every day.)

But in this moment Republicans won’t touch Facebook because the rampant fear-mongering, hysteria and misinformation it injects into the so-called conservative base, is a toxic accelerant for fanaticism as it tries to retain minority rule in the United States. (Waaay right-wing posts have been the most-trafficked sludge on Facebook for years.) Meanwhile, Democrats, who make regular hem-of-the-garment kissing pilgrimages to Silicon Valley for campaign cash are so convinced they’re going to lose it all — again — next fall they’re not about to make more than a few tut-tutting noises, wring their hands, clutch their pearls and hope someone else quickly replaces Zuckerberg as Sinister Robo-Nerd #1.

Should Mark Zuckerberg keep control of Facebook? | Financial Times

It’s unlikely I’ll be here when the clock turns over to Jan. 1, 2200. But my bet is that the Dawn and Reign of the Social Media Algorithm that we’re living through right now will be regarded as the single most deleterious influence on this era.

Do I Think Robert Kagan is Right? The Responsible Choice is Treating Him as Though He Is.

Posted on October 1, 2021 by Brian Lambert

Every few weeks one article or piece of punditry in the avalanche of expert bloviating hits a nerve and stands out, head and shoulders above the rest. Last week it was a long column by veteran neo-con warrior Robert Kagan, (i.e. anything but a hippie Socialist), in The Washington Post, titled “Our Constitutional Crisis is Already Here.”

It’s impact was obvious by the sheer number of mentions it got and reaction it provoked — and continued to provoke for days — from talking heads at CNN, MSNBC, PBS and other credible news organizations. The fact that it garnered responses — with multiple quotes — from other political outlets confirmed that Kagan had stuck a prod pretty deep into the collective consciousness.

If you haven’t already, you owe it to yourself to set aside 20 minutes and read the whole thing. Why? Because, as the reaction to it makes clear, Kagan is talking about something both immediate — as in right now and getting worse — and very scary.

The absolute minimalist gist of it is that while most of us have tried to enjoy a post-COVID summer and return to normalcy (it hasn’t worked out well), taken the kids out to overrun national parks and are now revved up for football season, the seditious actors who enabled Donald Trump through his reign of idiocracy, fomented and then denied the insurrection of January 6, are (very) actively at work on a more comprehensive, sophisticated plan/plot for 2022 and 2024 in particular.

Much of that has been said elsewhere, but Kagan went where others have not, by saying things like:

“What makes the Trump movement historically unique is not its passions and paranoias. It is the fact that for millions of Americans, Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments. This is a stronger bond between leader and followers than anything seen before in U.S. political movements.”

And … ” … no doubt a good number of Trump supporters have grounds to complain about their lot in life. But their bond with Trump has little to do with economics or other material concerns. They believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak — ‘losers’, to use Trump’s word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony.”

And … “Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities. Their bigotry, for the most part, is typical white American bigotry, perhaps with an added measure of resentment and a less filtered mode of expression since Trump arrived on the scene. But these are normal people in the sense that they think and act as people have for centuries. They put their trust in family, tribe, religion and race. Although zealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That, too, is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as you value your own.”

And … ” … [in 2024] Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then? On its current trajectory, the 2024 Republican Party will make the 2020 Republican Party seem positively defiant.”

It’s a very dystopian view, (much like Bart Gellman’s startling pre-election 2020 scenario in The Atlantic), and vividly imagined. Kagan asks why we would assume violence would not be a logical option were the 2024 election in dozens of states challenged and locked up for months in tortured Federalist Society-style arguments?

The people I think of as sanguine conventionalists, the musty, tradition-bound crowd who prefer to believe that even today Trumpism is a passing fad and that soon enough … one of these days … when he’s gone too far … adults will step in and stop the madness, simply block out Kagan’s view rather than fully considering everything already in motion at this moment.

I shouldn’t have to go through the long list of irrational, cult-like behavior erupting across the country. But when school districts are pleading for law enforcement or the National Guard to control school board meetings where Trump-ish partisans are brawling and throwing out death threats over “liberal” vaccines and masks, how difficult is it to imagine gun play as the next level down?

Video shows parents threaten experts over TN school mask rule | Charlotte Observer

Kagan points a damning finger at the precious few Republican “adults” who have taken the occasional defiant stand against Trump, Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse in particular. Neither he notes have dared risk anything more in the face of flagrant voter suppression and all the various attempts at election chicanery moving through state legislatures. (The adults in corporate America could be rolled in with Miutt and Sasse.)

People ask if I think Kagan is on to something or merely being hyperbolic?

I say that given just what we can see there’s no good reason to disagree with Kagan’s nightmarish vision. Human nature has a deep animalistic/atavistic component, an ugly, visceral response activated by a distorted sense of community. This is the heart of the Trump cult. It’s a cult that, as Kagan says, is intensely fearful and feels deeply threatened. Like a cornered animal you might say.

So fearful and so irrational that many are already at the point where to lose everything — their lives to a disease they could easily avoid, for example — is more appealing, seems braver, more patriotic and principled than accepting the traditional standards we used to live under.

So yeah, I think he’s on to something.

And Who Will Be the Biggest Abortion Hustler of Them All?

Posted on September 9, 2021 by Brian Lambert

The Paralympics in Tokyo have just ended. But here in the States the race among the sociopathic and ethically-challenged has only just begun. The starting gun for this particular level of competition was of course fired in Texas, where gun totin’ and medieval thinkin’ pretty much comes as a right of birth.

To re-cap, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, his approval rating under water by 9% (50-49), facing a possible re-election threat from Beto O’Rourke and desperate to make Texans forget about last winter’s fatal natural gas FUBAR, signed into law the country’s most restrictive anti-abortion law … while promising to, you know, get all the rapists off the streets. (Never mind the nuance about how a rapist has to first rape someone before they can be … oh, never mind.)

Gov. Abbott signs 'heartbeat bill' into law, fight in court expected | KEYE — A Texas cross-section

In (very) short order, ex-beauty queen Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, (a.k.a. The Alabama of the Midwest) , a bona fide Sarah Palin 3.0 in the GOP’s galaxy of presidential contenders, ordered her staff to find some way to outdo Abbott and Texas and make her and her state the most restricting-est in the whole big red country. (She didn’t quite pull off Abbott’s East German Stasi shtick of turning in Uber drivers for a $10,000 bounty. But give her time.)

Cat Scratch Fever: Ted Nugent tests positive for COVID days after flight with Gov. Kristi Noem | KELOLAND.com — Noem with Ted Nugent …

With that bit of theater out of the way, all eyes have turned to Florida’s Ron DeSantis, still over-seeing the worst-ever surge of COVID deaths and still actively crushing his state’s health care system with Alex Jones-like factlessness. Clearly, if he wants a shot at the 2024 nomination, DeSantis not only has to fight off vaccine mandates, masks and basic science, but now is going to have top Abbott and Noem in abortion restriction. (Not a big concern with his geriatric base in The Villages, but tougher with any woman under 50.)

Petition · Recall and remove Florida governor Ron DeSantis. · Change.org — Master … puppet

Up home here in Minnesota we can soon expect any and all of the Republicans running to beat Gov. Tim Walz to do the triple-down on Texas and South Dakota. (Make that quintuple down if sex-trafficker-huggin’ Jennifer Carnahan makes good on her threat to get in the primary.) But who among us doubts former GOP Senate Majority Leader, Paul Gazelka, a guy I swear Margaret Atwood had to have met in person before she wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale”, isn’t right this minute conjuring up some kind of ultra-pious, quasi-religious, Torquemada-style restriction on the freedom of women in his “flock”? You know it’s coming.

Sen. Paul Gazelka on Awakening God's People in the Workplace & More | Truth and Liberty Coalition Livecast

And while we’re at it, do note that over east, in Wisconsin, (a.k.a. The Florida of the Midwest), Scott Walker’s #2, former TV anchor-turned-lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch has announced her candidacy, with early indications that she’ll be incumbent Tony Evers’ toughest competition. (Her “platform” includes this: “Vigorously enforce antitrust laws against monopolistic Big Tech,” protect free speech on campuses and in high schools, stop church closures during pandemics, ban most state gun control laws, an anti-abortion “Born-Alive Infant Protection Act” and “Appoint originalist judges in the mold of Justices Thomas and Barrett.”)

So yeah, the race to full Gilead/”The Divine Republic” is on.

The Handmaid's Tale' Turned a DC on the Verge of Shutdown into Gilead | IndieWire

This despite recent polling that shows only 13% want the kind of laws Texas has put in place, (31% of Republicans), and that two-thirds of educated workers are saying they would not live in Texas or any other state with similar laws.

The Biden Justice Department today sued Texas to stop the law Abbott signed in to law. But until it goes back to the Supreme Court and Amy Coney Barrett (or as I think of her, Aunt Lydia), the fight will just be a huge money-maker for Abbott, Noem and every other moralistic conservative poseur ambitious for a cushy Big Gummint job.

What’s left to wonder, post-Texas, really is the “dog catches car” scenario many pundits have observed. Cynics like myself have long regarded the Republican vow to over-turn Roe v. Wade as just another cheesy, transparent hustle of credulous evangelicals. It’s a “fight” Republican con men (and women) never really want to win because as long abortion abolition remains a goal — a moral goal, y’know — its a golden goose. A fat bird consistently crapping out checks from the religiously enfeebled. Deliver the overturning of Roe v. Wade and all that easy chump money dries up.

But for now through primary season next year the race for maximum abortion restriction is on. I predict one of these cheap abortion hustlers will be pitching the new and improved “trans vaginal ultra sound” before the year is out.

Let’s Hear It for a Few of the Good Guys.

Posted on August 23, 2021 by Brian Lambert

Ok, time out for some good news. While the remaining 25%, the so-called “vaccine hostile” raid veterinary supplies for the cow and horse de-wormer Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity are telling them is a good option for fighting off COVID-19, actual fully functioning adults are putting their money where their mouth is and doing something to avoid another winter of masked shut-ins.

Patagonia. The upscale outdoor clothing/equipment company took a look at a $2000/plate fund-raiser headlined by Republicans Jim “Gym” Jordan, Mark Meadows and Marjorie Taylor Greene, noticed it was hosted by a three-store outfitting chain run by Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming and essentially said, “Take a [bleeping] hike.” As it pulled the plug — i.e. cut off a revenue stream — Patagonia said it believed in, ” … our really strong commitment to using both our business and our brand to advocate for our strong priorities. When there’s a misalignment on that, then we take action.”

Patagonia's Latest Jackets Made From Recycled Fishing Nets

This is the kind of episode Patagonia could have easily ignored, and that many … many … other companies invariably prefer to let slide without comment. But Patagonia didn’t. Worth noting is that the company isn’t publicly traded, meaning its executives didn’t have to worry about angry calls from shareholders convinced “getting involved in politics” (that aren’t, you know, supportive of the status quo) is “bad for business.”

It’s much too early to discern any impact on Patagonia’s sales, but my bet is that like Nike with Colin Kaepernick, taking a public stand against sedition and unvarnished stupidity will work toward enhancing, not diminishing, its brand.

Jason Isbell. In the modern country music world, (often referred to as “radio country” to distinguish it from the likes of Hank Williams, etc., musicians who actually had soul rather than just a keen ear for product endorsements), you’re taking a big time career risk going up against anything that Trump Nation is believing at a given moment. But Isbell, a guy with a devout following, has stepped up and said he will not perform at any venue that doesn’t require either proof of vaccination or a recent negative test. And this includes Minneapolis’ own Basilica Block Party — which piggy-backed on Isbell and announced that its grounds will be off-limits to the un-vaxxed.

Jason Isbell on Trump, Modern Country and Alienating Fans - Rolling Stone

Isbell — who I still think did some of his best work with the Drive By Truckers — is a bit too brainy to be influential with the usual WeFest crowd. But among promoters, critics and your more thoughtful country fans, his is seen as a bona fide act of conscience and courage.

New York City and San Francisco. Leave it to a couple of the most notorious liberal hell holes to lead the rest of the nation in requiring … proof of vaccination … for admission to restaurants, bars, gyms and the like. I like to think they were inspired by my people, the French, who moved in this direction close to a month ago. A move there that set off an uproar from the usual dead-enders but had over 75% popular support among every other Frenchman.

It's the first day of San Francisco's vaccine mandate. But some businesses had a requirement weeks ago - CNN

With today’s full FDA approval for the Pfizer vaccine we are truly at the point of hard division, between the morally responsible 75% and the sociopathic 25% who will forever believe they have the “rights” and “freedoms” to spread deadly disease wherever they choose.

There’s no more reason to pander to them. Close the door in their faces. Thank you, Liberal Hell Holes. I hope to visit you soon.

Education Minnesota and 150 other vendors. In stark contrast to all of the above, State Fair administrators did not have the guts to do what needed to be done for The Great Minnesota Get Together. Instead of following the lead of Isbell, the Basilica Block Party, New York and San Francisco, the folks in charge of “the Fair” choked. Clearly they could not stomach the thought of refusing entrance to anti-vaxxers. (Many if not most are likely to be rural or non-metro residents.)

Said a Fair spokeswoman, “We just don’t have the capacity to enforce a mask mandate.”

Dear, allow me to mansplain this for you. You don’t have to enforce a mask mandate … if you enforce a vaccine mandate. If the anti-vaxxers are not allowed on to the fairgrounds you have 95% less problem.

Letters: After a visit to the Minnesota State Fair, we ask, which party is inciting bad behavior? – Twin Cities

But lacking courage, Fair administrators now have a Minnesota version of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally on their hands; a roiling, sweating, heavy-breathing sub-culture tolerable in the best of circumstances, but a bona fide deal breaker for 75%-ers amid a fourth wave of COVID. We won’t be making the scene.

As it bowed out, Education Minnesota said, “We decided that we could not in good conscience ask more than 150 educator-volunteers to work at the 2021 fair under the current conditions and then go back into their classrooms a few days later. The risks to educators and their students were just too high.”

And that was before we get a judicial decision on whether the anti-mask/anti-vaxxers can also tote their revolvers and rifles around the place … for their safety and peace of mind, you understand.

Dear Minnesota GOP: Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.

Posted on August 19, 2021 by Brian Lambert

Just a brief word of thanks to Minnesota’s Republican party. Amid such a torrent of bad news — a new wildfire of COVID infections thanks entirely to MAGA Nation, half the West and northern Minnesota turning to ash, religious lunatics overrunning Afghanistan and (Trumpus Americanus again) demanding to tote their firearm/penile extensions through the State Fair — our local Republicans have served up a delicious late summer sexual distraction.

Colleague/site czar Joe Loveland has had his say on the matter of GOP chairwoman Jennifer Carnahan and what has been revealed following very close pal “Tony” Lazzaro’s indictment on sex trafficking, which is a euphemism for pimping under age girls.

Since Joe posted, a new round of stories — every political reporter in town is salivating over this mess — has revealed a gay staffer’s complaint that Carnahan “outed” her when convenient to show some LGBTQ bona fides to “moderate” Republicans, (I’d like names and numbers on that crowd if you don’t mind), but then turned around and vilified her to the (presumably much larger) GOP base laser-focused on keeping America free of swishy “preversion”, to paraphrase the great Col. Bat Guano.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, four other local party muckety-mucks stepped up to describe Carnahan’s basic office theology as “morally bankrupt”, not to mention “toxic.”

A modern Republican bureaucracy dedicated to fund-raising and messaging “morally bankrupt” and “toxic?” I could not be more shocked!

Back in my newspaper days — in the rare times I was actually in the newsroom — it was amusing to listen to the guffawing and snickering among hardened reporters over the latest statement from the chairs of either party. The stuff was always so ham-fisted and hyperbolic. Every other day one or the other was “demanding” or “calling for” the other party to concede moral dereliction, humiliating defeat and accept a month in the public stocks.

Who in god’s name were they talking to? What sort of imbecile responded to that kind of spittle-flecked ranting? (Not that I’m opposed to spittle-flecked ranting, you understand.)

Remember Tony Sutton? A lot of us didn’t think the Republicans could top a guy who so grossly “mismanaged” the party’s finances he was found guilty of “circumventing” finance laws, fined $33k, forced to resign as chair and then a couple years later filed for personal bankruptcy for not having the wherewithall to cover $2.1 million in debts, despite being CEO of the Baja Fresh chain of taco joints.

Former state GOP Chair Tony Sutton files for bankruptcy | MinnPost

The guy was a hapless cartoon. Must watch TV every time he stepped up in front of a mic to rail against the ruinous depravity of free-spending liberals.

But now we have Carnahan. And Anton “Tony” Lazarro.

May be an image of 2 people and people smiling

As I follow this story, Carnahan and Lazzaro linked up several years ago — when “Tony” was in his mid-twenties and already living the high-life, a bit like Mr. Sutton. I’d like to think Carnahan was charmed by Lazzaro’s ethics and sense of civic responsibility. But you know … I’m thinking it was really all about the Benjamin’s, as the kids say. Young Mr. Lazzaro had a lot of cash and was soon writing a lot of checks — a quarter million dollars plus of them — to Carnahan’s candidates. With each check he was brought deeper into her embrace … figuratively speaking, of course.

This was the same young man living downtown at the Hotel Ivy, (a quite posh residence), driving a Ferrari and pictured sitting atop a private jet on his Facebook page.

Some of us, perhaps you and me, would observe that spectacle and ask something like, ‘Where is that little douchebag getting that kind of cash?”

But apparently where her new BFF “Tony” was getting Saudi sheik-style dough never crossed Ms. Carnahan’s mind. (Quite Trump-like, Carnahan is now playing the “I don’t really know him that well” game.) All that mattered waas that he had it and she was tapping him.

So I guess I’m really not that shocked that “toxic” and “morally bankrupt” are words in current fashion to describe Ms. Carnahan’s office environment.

While we await some morally righteous, hyperbolic condemnation from the likes of the GOP’s Senate Majority Leader, Paul Gazelka — Minnesota’s Cotton Mather — or Congress critters Tom Emmer, Pete Stauber or Michelle Fishbach or … well any Republican whose name regularly makes the news, we can at least express a little appreciation.

This farce is a lot more entertaining than watching a bunch of morally righteous, routinely hyperbolic, fundamentally transactional zealots rampage across some hell hole on the other side of the planet.

Afghanistan’s Collapse Was Inevitable

Posted on August 16, 2021 by Brian Lambert

Everything about the situation in Afghanistan is bad, and the way these things work, “ownership” lands in the lap of whoever sits in the Oval Office at the time. So the collapse there will be in Joe Biden’s obituary.

But watching news reports the last few days I kept remembering first-person descriptions of the country and it’s people — especially its men — in New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins book, “The Forever War”. Assigned to the country shortly after the US’s post-9/11 invasion, Filkins was merciless in his assessment that the deeply conservative rural population being “recruited” to hunt down Al Qaeda was so impoverished, so illiterate and so feudal in their attachment to their local war lords that they were functionally useless. They had no loyalty whatsoever to far away Kabul, and given a couple hundred dollars they’d switch sides in a heartbeat and go off hunting men they had served with the day before.

The chances that that particular crowd — the essential core of the Taliban — would ever submit to America’s idea of “nation building” by, you know, embracing US-style democracy, by getting a dozen years of classroom education, by marrying a nice girl with a career of her own, by buying a big truck and by starting a family in the suburbs was significantly less than zero.

And that was before Filkins got to the gobsmacking corruption of the educated classes running the so-called government.

Put simply, civilizing Afghanistan, bringing it into the 21st century, was always mission impossible.

The stain on Biden right now is the abandonment of the thousands of Afghanis who served US interests over the past 20 years. That’s inexcusable.

But the the original idea of turning one of — if not the most backward and least educated countries in the world — into a version of Oman or some other “moderate” muslim theocracy was misguided from the get-go. And again, because in actual fact Afghanistan is more a name on a map than an actual, unified country.

Joe Biden will have ‘splainin’ to do when he makes his speech to the country sometime this week. But from what I’ve read, he accepted the CIA version of Afghanistan’s reality — profound ignorance, tribal loyalties, medieval religious zealotry — and not the military’s, who told everyone from George W* to Barack Obama to The Orange God King, (whose eye-roller of a “deal” with the Taliban last year set this collapse in motion), to Biden that progress was being made. That Afghani soldiers could be trained to fight off the Taliban, and protect their daughters, wives and mothers from the Taliban’s, um, “toxic masculinity.”

And maybe they would have if corruption wasn’t so bad they were rarely paid, fed adequately or the Taliban hadn’t offered them a better deal … which the CIA said was always a likely scenario.

The argument that the 3000 US troops left in Afghanistan as of this spring was so modest we should have just accepted leaving them there … forever … like we do in Korea and Germany, overlooks the fundamental fact that Afghanistan is barely even a country, and more a collection of mini-empires riddled with religious-inspired ignorance and overall, wildly more corrupt than First World colossi like Korea and Germany.

The scenes coming over the next weeks and months, particularly the degradation of Afghan women back into 13th century subjugation, will be very hard to digest. But if you’re inclined to believe societies get the leadership they deserve, it’s hard to argue that the Afghanis aren’t getting exactly what was always inevitable.

Really? The State Fair As Usual, Amid A Fools’ Surge of the Pandemic. Really?

Posted on August 7, 2021 by Brian Lambert

The red flag of extreme peril is out for the Minnesota State Fair. As all the COVID numbers once again head off in the wrong direction thanks to this latest surge — The Fools’ Surge / The Pandemic of the Unvaccinated — both The Lovely Mrs and Bouncing Baby Boy #1 have declared they will not be rubbing sweaty jowls with the masses at this year’s Great Minnesota Get Together.

Might as well board up The Food Building and The Beer Gardens.

Little by little businesses are coming around to the only effective conclusion. Namely, that they’re open only for clients and staff intelligent and morally responsible enough to have gotten themselves vaccinated. The rest — those clinging to their “personal beliefs” — can stay home, or like CNN, be fired.

Given the month it takes to acquire full efficacy from the three vaccines, we’ve already blown by the window for the Fair and the 1.3 million or whatever who show up to sweat and breathe all over each other. Fair authorities say they are “keeping all options on the table”. But as of this moment they are only seriously considering mandating masks for indoor exhibits and venues … which is ludicrous on the face of it.

Is some hapless employee really going to stand in front of O’Gara’s, The Food Building, the Grandstand or (my personal favorite) the Northern Tool shed and deny entrance to the “mask hesitant”? Give me a break. Mask mandates are unenforceable. Far better just to deny entrance to the grounds to anyone who can’t prove they’ve been vaccinated.

Our Great Cholesterol Get Together is hardly National Priority #1. IMHO getting schools back to normal operation gets top billing. But government leaders — the people we elect to make sometimes (very) unpopular decisions — are reluctant to take a walk out on the legal/political plank and make vaccines mandatory for every school with a link to public funding.

You don’t have to watch a couple hours of Christopher Hitchens/Sam Harris YouTube debates like I did the other night to get into a steaming seethe over all the unintended consequences of America’s anachronistic enshrinement of “religious and personal beliefs”.

With a vast majority of states genuflecting at the notion that what someone prefers to believe is every bit as valid and real as … well, reality … we find ourselves in a moment like this. Locked up and incapable (i.e. unwilling) to say, “No. Sorry. I’m happy for whatever you want to believe. But this disease is not a Sunday school fantasy. It is real. And deadly. And spread by people like you. Meanwhile, the vaccines are safe, widely available, free and effective. If you want to go on believing that the Great Bearded White Man in the Sky and/or His Son, the Beardless White Guy Who Looks Like the Drummer for Foghat, will protect you no matter what. You go right ahead. But until you get with the reality of science you’re not allowed in, and your kids can stay home another year.”

I don’t if anyone famous ever actually said, “Sometimes you’ve just got to take the heat.” But the line has been running through my head as I listen to people from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to U of M officials to White House spokesfolks to State Fair authorities wring their hands over vaccine mandates.

Frey was recently quoted saying he’d prefer not ordering another mask mandate given the impact that kind of thing has on restaurants and small businesses just now getting back on their feet after the first three surges of COVID. That said, he still didn’t want to demand public employees get vaccinated or stay away from work.

Public officials at nearly every level are conceding to this Fools’ Surge rather than biting the bullet and doing the only thing that will truly, once and for all stop the disease and the dying, which is to issue vaccine mandates.

No doubt all of them assume that given the country’s Federalist Society-polluted judiciary, any mandate will be hit with an injunction by some Trumpist-Libertarian judge within seconds of it being issued. Many on the basis of a violation of the basic Constitutional right to “religious or personal beliefs.” It goes without saying that at this point, with 640,000 already dead and more dying not to mention the recovery in danger of relapsing, I personally could not care less about some nitwit’s “religious beliefs.”

Generally speaking, public officials are of course required to care more about Constitutional nuances than me. But again, consider the context. We’re not talking about school prayer, or Critical Race Theory or some storefront preacher’s tax-exempt status. We’re talk the stark reality — reality, not fantasies — of serious illness and death wholly because of the ignorance, obstinancy and selfishness of a minority of the population.

Issue the vaccine mandates. Let it go to the courts. Play hardball with Trumpist judges. Slow walk the legal fight — a la Trump — for the two, three, four months it’d take to force the fools to get the vaccine. Achieve herd immunity. (Before the 30% idiot petri dish stirs up another variant that blows past the vaccines). And apologize for reckless, unconstitutional behavior later.

The Big Upside? The Lamberts afoot at the Fair, streams of grease and beer rolling off their chins.

We’ve Reached That Point. Give the Fools the Culture War They Always Want.

Posted on August 2, 2021 by Brian Lambert

(Trigger warning for more delicate readers. The following screed may include occasional outbursts of profanity.)

I wish I did, but I don’t own any Berkshire Hathaway stock. And while I tend to take the nostrums and bromides of billionaires with a 50 lb. block of salt, I find I pay more attention when Warren Buffett is quoted. Like recently, when he said, ” … there will be another pandemic. We know that there is a nuclear, chemical, biological and now cyber threat. Each of them has dire possibilities…It doesn’t seem like it’s something that society is fully prepared to deal with”.

His concerns didn’t stop at insufficient financial or technological wherewithall. That exists. What doesn’t exist in sufficient quantity is the matter of getting conservative public officials, “thought leaders” and the general public to take such things as seriously as, well, football play-offs, beach raves and motorcycle rallies.

Buffett, who credits his success as an investor to thousands of hours of reading of a wide spectrum of information, has every reason to be pessimistic about the U.S. and the world coping with a truly ravenous pandemic — a medieval-style disease with faster and more lethal rates of transmission than COVID-19. No one who has done any reading (or something other than Facebook posts) can look at this latest fourth surge of COVID-19 and fail to accept that this all but entirely due to an epidemic of stupidity … in one of the most technologically advanced societies on the planet.

I’m sure Buffett would agree that this literally death-dealing imbecility, doesn’t stop with COVID. The same bone-numbing ignorance applies to two other existential thrwats, namely, climate change and authoritarian violence against democracy.

Here in Minnesota we’re well into our second month of yellow, LA-in-the-Seventies-style, crud-filled skies, with daily records being set for the worst air quality … ever. You’d be just as healthy sucking down a pack of Camel straights as spending a day breathing in the air from wildfires. Fires stemming from drought that is a direct consequence of human-caused climate change. A crisis thoroughly researched and scientifically validated but yet still one that essentially the same 25-40% of Americans prefer to see as “liberal fear-mongering”, if not a plot by Silicon Valley elites and radical socialists to somehow deprive them of their freedoms.

That same percentage — and I’m confident a Venn diagram of the COVID “hesitant”, climate deniers and Trump worshippers would have near perfect overlap — sees no reason to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot, convinced by the echoes of their cult that it was something other than what everyone saw and was recorded for eternity.

So if you’re keeping score at home, that’s (1.) A pandemic that has already killed 640,000 and is revving back up again to re-cripple the economy, (2.) Climate change that is now routinely turning summers into bone-dry, smoky, crop-killing hellscapes, like something out of “Blade Runner: 2049” and (3.) A complete indifference to violent insurrection inspired by failed government leaders.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the connective tissue to all this is reckless, wretched stupidity, inspired and validated by a startling minority of players for their self-interest, be that commercial, ego or both.

COVID is resurging, spawned by the Trump base and the chronically alienated. Climate mayhem will only get worse, thanks to the ignorance and indifference of conservative leaders. (Do NOT read “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells if you want to believe otherwise. Stick with whatever Laura Ingraham is selling this week.) And then there’s violent insurrection, (which would aggravate both of those two). Violence egged on by elected Republican officials will happen again and likely repeat itself in worse ways in the absence of investigation and public punishment.

There isn’t just one grand solution to the “unpreparedness”. But permit me to suggest that we’ve reached a tipping point where coddling, and “reaching out” to those who don’t/won’t understand and pretending that global pandemics, global climate disaster and violent (not to mention racist) attempts to overthrow the American government are no more serious threats to our existence than quarrels over tax policy and school prayer.

What’s to be done? In the COVID context: Mandates. French style.

No vaccine? No walking into a bar. No getting on public transportation. No returning to work. Your kids stay home from school. Let the deniers rage. Let Ron DeSantis and Josh Hawley fund-raise off their voters’ dumb-as-a-stump petulance. Protestors in France made headlines, but 76% of the population agreed with the government’s vaccine mandate. Only fools want to prolong this idiocy.

Obviously the Biden administration would benefit from some back-up from private industry, which it is getting in a halting way. But we’d be snuffing out this fourth wave a lot faster if mega-coporations like Delta Airlines for example, denied service to the unvaccinated. (Might cut down on some of their “disruptive customers” problems, too.) Likewise, the Minnesota State Fair. No vaccination? No entrance.

Fair-minded Christian coddling of the stupid, the perpetually reckless (i.e. sociopathic) and the “historically suspicious” has become lethal enabling. So … remove their choice to be stupid and selfish. Give them the goddam culture war they always seem to want.

If that’s the same as saying, “Fuck them and the fucking horses of galloping stupidity they rode in on,” well, there you have it. Nothing else is working.

Wanted: Conservative Intellectuals With Even a Half-Ounce of Conscience

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Brian Lambert

With a fourth COVID surge well under way, with Ozark/red state hospitals filling to the rafters with the denying and the dying, I recalled a sad little scene from up in Duluth last week.

Within the modern, reality-averse conservative bubble, there’s a long-standing, self-proclaimed “think tank” called The Center of the American Experiment”. Former Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten is a prominent member of this cadre of, um, deep thinking patriots. Very much like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s cynical and hapless “America First” tour, the Center was having a hard time finding any venue in Duluth that would host their “Raise Our Standards” carnival. That being a kind of faux intellectual barnstorming exercise designed to alert low information parents to the dangers of … wait for it … “wokeness” and Critical Race Theory.

Four Duluth businesses denied The Center’s request to rent space, before they settled on a tiny community center out on Park Point. Naturally, instead of acknowledging that the businesses had as much interest in associating with them as they would a band of travelling Holocaust deniers, The Center touted itself as the victim … “victim, I say!” … of freedom and liberty-hating left-wingers.

Eventually the group, led by attorney John Hinderaker, best known for his role in the conservative “Powerline” blog, made it’s case in front of barely 30 people, several of whom it turned out were Duluth area lefties curious to see what a quack show looks like up close.

I’ve followed The Center from a distance for years, once wrote a profile of Ms. Kersten and attended a luncheon they put on way … way … back to refute liberal, Chicken Little concerns about climate change. At every step along the way my perspective on The Center is as a crew of oddly embittered, borderline sociopathic contrarians. A clutch of people intelligent enough to form paragraphs, disciplined enough to check their punctuation, but so intellectually dishonest they refuse to concede that their whole game is simply the business of being against whatever peer-reviewed intelligentsia and liberals are for.

The aforementioned climate change bash was naked in its reaction to Al Gore … Al friggin’ Gore! … telling us carbon dioxide was bad for our health. What an alarmist! What a woke nanny stater!

Since then and up to now, The Center and Powerline have kept up a contrarian, reactionary drum beat against … well, let’s see … electric cars, COVID lockdowns, tax advantages for wind and solar power, police reform, anything Joe Biden says, equitable taxation of large businesses and especially “wokeness”, seemingly the greatest liberal sin of all.

In the grand scheme of things The Center of the American Experiment barely registers on the Richter scale of conservative cynicism. I bring it up only to offer an example of the kind of people who come to mind anytime someone asks, “Do these people actually believe this stuff, or is it all just another grift?”

With COVID surging among the unvaccinated, largely due to the self-interested cynicism of similar conservative “intellectuals” — people like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, a handful of bow-tied opinion writers, several hundred talk radio hosts, YouTubers and podcasters — their influence is proving fatal, again. This is not to forget Republican presidential “contenders” like Florida’s Ron DeSantis — lately hawking anti-Fauci t-shirts, as his state leads the fourth wave — and South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, the beauty queen-turned-politician most responsible for, at a time last fall, one of COVID’s worst death-rates-per-capita … in the world.

Whether it be DeSantis, FoxNews hosts, Facebook influencers or the poor little Center of the American Experiment, it is impossible to watch this crowd of allegedly educated adults shovel out misinformation to the chronically aggrieved and not see the ratings, revenue, underwriting and political viability motivating them. Put most simply, it’s all about them getting theirs.

Trump Swears He Didn't Ask to Be on Mount Rushmore by Asking to Be on Mount Rushmore | Vanity Fair

You hear people say all the time that what this country needs are two — not just one — reality-embracing, fact-based political parties. And this is true. But watching the explosive sewer-flow of cynicism coming from modern conservatism’s so-called best and brightest I’d add that we also need two — not just one — ideological hierarchy that respects ethics, science and logic.

Should We Just Let the COVID-Deniers Perish?

Posted on June 25, 2021 by Brian Lambert

My wife, aka the Lovely Mrs, does not like it when I respond, “Thin the herd,” to news of the latest completely avoidable misery some idiot has inflicted on him/herself. It’s “unkind”. “We should be better than that.”

As always, she is right of course. We should all have fathomless compassion and empathy for our fellow humans. I think the nuns used to say that. But really, what are we supposed to say, much less do, when you read stories titled, “99% Of People Killed By Covid Last Month Were Unvaccinated, Analysis Finds.”

After the criminal incompetence the Trump administration, which has to be praying there’s never a 9/11-style commission to analyze how it is The United friggin’ States suffered the most deaths of any “sh*thole country” in the world, we’ve enjoyed a stunning turn around. Free … free … vaccines are available to everyone in thousands of locations nationwide. Plus, they’re demonstrating startling effectiveness against the original virus and every variant that has come along since. It’s as close to total protection as science may have ever gotten.

So what we’re now left with are … wait for it … (very) low information, mostly Red State, mostly political partisans who believe only what right wing media carnival barkers tell them. Once again, and I ask you if you’ve heard this before, the rest of us are handicapped in a return to “normalcy” (what that is exactly is a whole other topic) by, excuse me dear, utter fools. By people endangering themselves and continuing to overburden hospital staffs with a disease they could have avoided with a painless … free … shot at their local WalMart.

I have to credit the “Thin the herd” line to Jesse Ventura. Told the story of yet another drunken idiot who drowned trying to skip his snowmobile over open water, the Guv remarked, “Well, that’s nature’s way of thinning the herd.” In more Darwinian terms, idiots being idiots, they needlessly engage in life-threatening activities more often than their intelligent brethren. Consequently they die out faster, ending their opportunities to pass on their judgment-challenged DNA to a new generation of drunken snowmobile open-water skippers … or COVID deniers.

I believe the great, monolithic American insurance industry could do something about this. The cost of the average COVID hospitalization is somewhere in the range of $34,000 to $46,000. At this point in the pandemic, after an aggressive and effective government program to distribute … free … vaccine to every nook, cranny and West Virginny holler of the country, insurance companies should announce that, like suicide, they’re not going to pay death benefits … or hospitalization costs. There’s simply no excuse for anyone anywhere to continue to expose themselves to COVID. Those who do … well, they’re on their own. Might be time to pawn the rifles and pickup, kids.

Is this unkind? Well, I suppose it is. But some people engage irrational, foolish, life-threatening activities all the time, and I’m not talking about free-soloing El Capitan. There are the idiot-macho bikers, who weave in between cars on a freeway without a helmet. Or book a weekend at a “Redneck Rave” and end up getting impaled not far from the big mud-bathin’ hole. Or roar out to negligibly-vaccinated, far western Colorado for the big “Country Jam”, to get it on with 50,000 or so of their “it’s no worse than flu” compadres. Or hell, start planning for their return to Sturgis … if they’re finally off their ventilators.

These people are a lost cause. They’ve made All American free choice decisions to endanger themselves and others and lay off the cost of saving their low-information lives on professionals who need a year off, not another six months of 24-7 work saving fools from their own stupidity.

So, talking Darwin again here, I ask you, should these COVID-deniers perish as a consequence of their own Constitutionally-protected decisions, is the human gene pool better or worse off?

Talk amongst yourselves.

The Age of Barstool Republicans

Posted on June 22, 2021 by Brian Lambert

There’s a trending piece on Politico titled, “How Republicans Became the ‘Barstool’ Party”. In part a profile of podcaster Dave Portnoy and his “Barstool Sports” empire-ette, the author, Derek Robertson, writes, ” … the Barstool Republican now largely defines the Republican coalition because of his willingness to dispense with his party’s conventional policy wisdom on anything — the social safety net, drug laws, abortion access — as long as it means one thing: he doesn’t have to vote for some snooty Democrat, and, by proxy, the caste of lousy deans that props up the left’s politically-correct cultural regime.”

I think of myself as a connoisseur of barstool conversations. It’s an acquired taste to be sure. But from the Florida Keys to Forks, Washington and various rural outposts in between there’s something to be gleaned from what (mostly) men and women talk about over cheap beer in familiar hang-outs.

As presently populated, the Republican party is, as we all know, chockful of serious crazy. From sanctimonious evangelicals who have no problem cheering on a flagrantly unethical, thrice-married, porn-star-banging philanderer, to shameless racists and anti-Semites toting rifles and torches through American streets in the name of protecting northern European purity … as God intended it.

But, IMHO, the conceit of “Barstool Republican” injects something just as if not more useful than mere delusional religiosity and racism into attempts at understanding conservative politics, circa 2021.

On this side of the yawning chasm the realization settled in quite some time ago that the average Trumper doesn’t give two Lite damns about tax policy, or NATO or whether their obese, Depends-wearing, spray-tanned leader is really just a middle-man money launderer for Russian gangsters as long as he helps them “own the libs.”

The phenotype, “Barstool Republican” builds a handy definitional corral around pretty much every imaginable conservative sub-group. (The term “phenotype” refers to the observable physical properties of an organism; these include the organism’s appearance, development, and behavior.)

Portnoy’s appeal is a natural, direct line outgrowth of morning drive radio, as heard in virtually every large city in the USA. Think Tom Barnard here in the Twin Cities, or Howard Stern nationally. The ingredients of the appeal — to 18-54 year-old blue collar males primarily — are porn-y vulgarity, regular assertions of hard-won street wisdom and persistent criticism and attacks on the “over-protected”, which as practiced in morning drive usually means racial minorities and women too uptight to shake their booty for a cold beer.

I’m sorry I don’t have any numbers, but this is a crowd I see a lot of “out there” in Sarah Palin’s “Real America”, and one I dare anyone to tell me is smaller than mega-church zealots.

These folks, nursing their $3 tap brew at Middlegate Station in central Nevada or the No Name Pub on Big Pine Key, claim to “hate all politicians”, never suggest any interest in religion, share endless stories of the “assholes and idiots” who commanded them if they were in the military and belly ache constantly about the boss they have today … if they’re currently employed. Then you get to the wildly suspect information they trade about liberal “giveaways”, regulations and “la la land bullshit” about cleaning up the planet.

But as bad as all that is, nothing gets them singing the same chorus as when talk turns to “limp dick” liberals, their “bitch/bull dyke” women, and all the “asinine” rules “those morons” are trying to “shove down our throats.” Much as they hate politics, anyone who takes a slap at that crowd gets their vote … if they’re not busy hunting on election day.

There’s a reason “nihilism” is routinely bandied about when this type of value-free Republican is mentioned. But the thing is they do have values, just not much in the way of standing up for basic rights for … well, you know, the whole liberal litany of the oppressed. And that’s because they see themselves as the oppressed. Primarily by anyone in authority over them.

They are the hard-working/hard-playing straight guys who just want to be left alone to make whatever jokes they want about women, gays, Jews, blacks, Mexicans, Asians and whoever else is getting “special treatment” and who make them feel uncomfortable any time they’re around.

As I say, my suspicion is that Barstool Republicans, whether knocking them back in Oklahoma or out the 494 Strip, represent a far larger bloc of reliable Republican voter than the classic science-and-fact averse evangelical, the focus of so much liberal angst.

They are a crowd some Democrat somewhere, somehow, has to pull over to the light.

Unfortunately, lacking any pastor-like figures other than crude, in-it-for-the-money shock jocks, the Barstool kids might be even less reachable than the moony-eyed parishioners staring up from the pews at your local Abundant Life Dollars-for-Jesus palace.

UFOs are Finally Having Their Moment, and That’s Interesting

Posted on June 7, 2021 by Brian Lambert

A New York Times preview of the much-noted Pentagon report on UFOs suggests pretty much what I expected. The military, which has been tracking strange objects in the sky for nearly 70 years will officially say they have no evidence anything about these incidents is the result of space aliens space. But … and this is significant … America’s military, for which we spent $714 billion in 2020, will also say they have no idea what — or who — has been regularly invading American airspace, over water, land and heavily populated areas for going on a century … at least.

I certainly have no explanation for the most confounding UFO incidents. (My old pal, Marty Keller, a long-time UFO-ologist is finishing a book based on his years studying the phenomenon. I’ll hype it when it is published.) But I find the conversation about UFOs and life beyond this planet pretty damn interesting. As speculative dialogue goes, theories about whether, how and why intelligent life from deep space may have visited Earth is a lot … a lot … more interesting and intellectually satisfying than arguing against the average Trumper idiocy of Jewish space lasers igniting forest fires or Italy rigging satellites to switch votes and steal the election from a corrupt reality TV character with incontinence issues.

The legendary sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, who I had the pleasure to interview once, said many memorable things about existence in this universe.

Asked about the likelihood we are alone in 14 billion years of evolution, Clarke said, “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

He also said, in the context of trying to “explain” Stanley Kubrick and his movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

That said, here are some random thoughts I return to any time the conversation of life beyond Earth comes up.

1: I have a hard time believing in the little green or grey men theory. Or more specifically, the idea that biological entities would cross the vast distances of space. In humans’ perpetual and long-term quest for “immortality”, there are — right now today — serious, if nascent, attempts to transfer/upload human intelligence into some form of “indestructible” artificial intelligence, generally described as “computer-based.” Credible scientists believe a semblance of such “singularity” will be achieved within the next generation. Whether that transfer is still “human” can be argued. But the emergence of an AI “life-form” capable of analyzing data and making self-sustaining decisions strikes me as all but certain by the end of the century.

Point being, a truly advanced civilization, possibly millions of years further along the evolutionary scale than we are, would achieve any exploratory goal it wanted across space by dispersing highly-miniaturized, if not invisible (to the human eye), undetectable AI sensors. Large, clumsy, radar-detectable metallic saucers piloted by weird humanoids — who occasionally crash and die — seems absurd, given just the technologies within our grasp.

2: So if they are visitors from advanced civilizations, why are UFOs detectable? The answer here could be, “Because they want us to see them.” Someone recently made the analogy of a drone flying over a pack of monkeys to describe a super-race’s concern about humans noticing their presence. This fits with the thinking that to a species a couple hundred years further along than us, much less millions of years, we are nothing more than a biological curiosity, a primitive first step in becoming something serious in an inter-planetary context. (Insert another Trump rally reference here.) They allow us to detect them simply to gauge our developing response to them.

3: Continuing with the monkeys-excited-by-drone analogy, I’ve long thought an advanced space-faring civilization would have about as much trouble controlling our minds, and our response to their presence, as we have hypnotizing chickens. Think of it as a Jedi mind-trick. “Nothing to see here silly, ill-formed bi-peds. Resume your business.”

My favorite large-scale example of this was the reaction to the famous 1997 Phoenix lights incident, in which thousands of people witnessed extremely strange aerial phenomenon directly over the city … of four million people. The uproar was so great that then Gov. Fife Symington held a news conference to debunk everything, to the point of dressing up one of his aides as an alien … just for the laughs, you understand. Never mind no one up on the official dais had any explanation for the object(s) seen passing/hovering with impunity over a large American city. I mean, WTF, what are we paying you guys for?

It’s worth noting that Symington, who resigned from office later that year after being indicted on bank fraud and extortion, later conceded the incident was likely extra-terrestial.

4: I’m open to believing — or enjoying the conversation — that rather than making the long, long, speed-of-light leap across space, or zipping through a worm hole, or molting over via a connection with a “multi-verse”, intelligent alien species have been here on Earth for a very, very long time. The “Goldilocks” positioning of Earth from its star may have narrowed this planet as a prime target for interstellar explorers millions/billions of years ago and they “seeded” it with AI sensors/life-forms to track our progress (or lack thereof).

This idea is the basis of Arthur Clarke’s novel, “The Sentinel”, from which “2001” evolved. And again, you can entertain the idea that such a civilization would have no problem — none — disguising its presence from our pitiful technologies. I can’t recall the title, but there was a cheesy sci-fi film years ago that had aliens hiding in plain sight, as essentially, nanobots no larger than grains of sand, but with all the presumed powers of an advanced race.

So no, I have no idea what is on those Navy radars, or what went on over Phoenix, but it is significant that the Pentagon is now saying it doesn’t know either.

(BTW: The photo for this blog was taken in Roswell, New Mexico. And if you’re reading this on Facebook, my profile picture — with the little man on my shoulder — was shot on the plains outside Corona, NM, where the 1947 UFO “crash” supposedly took place.)

Big(ger) Pay-Outs to Police Victims is the Only Viable Reform

Posted on May 26, 2021 by Brian Lambert

I am of course shocked that Congress blew the deadline to produce a Police Reform bill by the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. And despite brave words about “making progress” I suspect whatever is finally produced will fall well short of the basic changes needed to control routine abuses of police authority.

That said, Ben Crump, the attorney representing Floyd’s family and a half dozen other victims of panicked/racist cops, is clear-eyed about the best and most immediate solution. Says Crump, “My goal is to make it financially unsustainable for them to keep killing Black people, unjustifiably, as we continue to fight for these policy reforms to prevent the next George Floyd.”

If the $47 million that Minneapolis alone has paid out to victims of its thin blue line of protectors and servers isn’t enough to force the city and police administration to put a shock collar around the neck of its worst-trained and regularly violent employees, nothing Congress comes up with will have any great impact.

The great Randy Newman once sang, “It’s Money That Matters” and this being the USA, he was spot on. The twist within that idea of course is connecting these enormous ever-larger pay-outs to the bottom line of residents far more terrified of ransacked auto parts stores than black folks being murdered — in front of children — over a $20 bill.

Back to legislation: the fixes that would do the most to put the spook in your average gun-waving, f-bomb dropping former telemarketer/security guard-turned-cop remain boldly obvious.

1: End qualified immunity. Republicans and a few nervous Democrats are leery of this because they imagine a ceaseless tidal wave of law-suits against individal cops for anything a citizen doesn’t like about an interaction with police. Moreover, the fear of getting sued personally would put a serious chill on cop recruitment. (There are only so many well-heeled former telemarketers and mall cops pining for the ego boost from being handed a badge and a gun.) But this is another example of cops having little to fear if they actually obey both the law … and the spirit of the law. Namely, turn on the body cam, keep your cool and treat whoever you’re dealing with basic respect, regardless if they’re a nice suburban lady in her pajamas or a big, scary black guy who maybe might have passed a fake $20. Camera on? Case dismissed. No body cam footage? Waving a loaded gun and cursing in someone’s face? You’re on your own, dude.

2: Pre-textual traffic stops. Frankly, I’d think even cops would be happy red-lining this widely-accepted policy, which as practiced around the country is a tortured abuse of the Supreme Court’s Whren v United States decision from 1996. As it is commonly perverted, “broken tail lights”, and the most minor of traffic violations (failure to signal, two miles over the speed limit) are sufficient basis for a cop to ignore any semblance of probable cause, hit the lights and get down to what they’re really up to, namely “stopping and frisking” for something that looks good on the squad room wall and gins up some easy revenue for their municipality. Deep red states have made thousands of such stops under the guise of “interdicting smugglers” from “drug states”. (I.e. more liberal places that conservative politicians want to show they won’t tolerate.) These stops — flagrantly bogus to any reasonable adult — mean a couple thousand dollars worth of court costs for someone caught with CBD oil or a couple gummies in their medicine bag. It’s one thing if the stopped and frisked are white folks. But as we’ve seen over and over … and over and over again … a whole different animal when the gung-ho cop gets in the grill of anyone whose grandparents didn’t come from northern Europe. Crude, over-aggressive police work mixed with naked pretense for the stop itself not only seriously undermines the credibility of police authority but has a habit of going very bad way, way too often.

But all this is pretty well lost in the usual partisan gamesmanship. No Republican is going to make a big show of supporting anything that might be construed as getting “soft on crime” (i.e. crimes committed on streets by black folks). Hell, unless I missed it, there wasn’t a Republican face to be seen up on the stage for Minnesota’s kick-off to these days of remembrance for George Floyd.

Maybe it’ll take another $40-$50 million out of Republican cities’ insurance funds to get their attention.

But I doubt even that’ll be enough.

Moments in the Life of a Census Enumerator

Posted on April 28, 2021 by Brian Lambert

My shoulder is a little out of joint for patting myself on the back so much. Thanks to yours truly (and a couple others) Minnesota counted up 89 more people in last year’s census than New York, which means we can keep all eight of our hard-working congress people, including even Tom Emmer, Jim Hagedorn, Pete Stauber and Michelle Fishbach, for whatever it is they actually do.

As enumeraor DACV 908*** (redacted for security), I spent a couple months late last summer knocking on doors and wandering long, maze-like hallways in sprawling apartment complexes trying to get people to either cooperate in either a basic function of democracy or … submit to yet another Big Brother socialist scheme to deprive us of our freedoms, depending on whether or not they listen to Laura Ingraham.

Truth be told, I signed up for the job because I thought it’d be interesting. You know, face to face with “real America”, albeit during a pandemic. There’d have to be some stories in that. Plus, it paid well enough to incentivize me to break away from my usual 3 p.m. happy hours.

A few quick incidents.

***

Tucked away in otherwise middle-class Hopkins, not far off Excelsior Boulevard, is a pretty down-on-its-heels neighborhood little more than three blocks long. The door and steps of one of my assigned houses was already littered with a half dozen Notice of Visit (NOV) slips left by previous enumerators. After ringing and banging, I left another and walked back out to the driveway to check on the next address … simultaneous with a beaten up SUV pulled up in front of the garage.

It was a hot day and after a 30 second stand off — the car idling, the driver obscured by heavily tinted windows and me broiling in the heat waiting for someone to step out — I took another step over and made a “roll it down” motion with my finger. Pause. Then the window began to drop.

And as it does out pours a cloud of dense cannabis smoke that would put Cheech and Chong to shame. What little I inhaled was probably three times stronger than anything I smoked in college. As the cloud wafted away I asked the driver, a mid-thirty-ish black guy, “You live here?”

“No.”

“Ok, do you know who does?”

“No.”

Right. But I’m thinking. You got nothing. But you just pulled into this driveway in frontr of this garage door because … why, exactly?

“How about the people next door?” (It was a duplex.)

“No.” And with that he buzzed up the window, backed up and drove away.

***

Another weed moment was in one of the huge apartment complexes I mentioned. A labyrinth of dimly-lit hallways, infused and cross-infused with every kind of ethnic cooking you can imagine. (IMHO Indian smells best.)

As I walk a hallway as long as one of those Vegas hotels, I hear two male voices shouting and yelping. A fight?

“Dude! Hit it, dude!” “No! No! Back out! Back out!” “Shoot it! Shoot it!” “Aw! You fucked it, man! You had it and you fucked it!”

Not a fight, but two young guys playing video games … and, as luck would have it, in the next apartment on my list.

Knock. Knock.

“Dude, someone at the door! Someone knockin’.”

A longer than expected wait, before the door cracks open just wide enough for a skinny teenage face — and another cloud of reefer — to squeeze through.

“Yo.”

“Hey, how you doing? I’m with the census. You live here?”

An expression like this might be a trick question, and a glance over his shoulder back into the room.

“No.”

“Is the person who lives here here now.”

Another furtive look over his shoulder.

“No. Bro’s sleepin’.”

The guy who “had it” but “fucked it” a second ago is now asleep? Whatever.

“Ok,” I say, as I write out an NOV with numbers to call in the info, “give this to him when he wakes up,”

“Cool.” And the door bangs shut.

***

Another complex. Another hallway. Another knock on another door.

A smiling, 60-ish black gal answers. “Why hello, darlin’. Can I help you.”

“Yes, you can thank you, mam. I’m with the census and … .”

“OH! I been meaning to fill that out. But I work nights. Why don’t you come in a minute and we’ll get this done, what do you say?”

I say, “Ok,” as I walk into a spotless, tidy living room … dominated by an enormous 85″ TV suspended off the wall by the window and angled down to a dining room table where the lady has her controllers. Her some-kind-of-dragons-and sorcerors game is on pause.

“Have a seat there on the couch,” she says. And I make myself comfortable in front of a coffee table where a Bible, with a red ribbon place holder, is open to passage that I should have remembered, but as a practicing heathen, I didn’t, other than to notice that she has a plaque over on her kitchen wall referring to the same scripture. (“John” something or other.)

The basic census interview takes maybe 10 minutes, tops. Less if it’s just one person. But as I begin, she hits the controller and resumes her game. She answers the questions half distracted by combat with the fire-breathing reptile. The dragon has a deep, weird snarl. But she’s on its tail, showing no fear as the she goes deeper into its lair.

“Ok, mam. That’s all I need. Thank you so much. We appreciate your cooperation.”

“No problem at all, darlin’. You need anything more I guess you know where I live. Be good now. God bless.”

***

My list wasn’t all minorities. And the two worst were white folks in my own beloved Edina.

In a swank condo complex a millenial woman in corporate power suit attire stands in the hallway berating me — as I’m trying to interview an 80 year-old lady with poor hearing — for having “no permission or authority to be on this property” and accusing me of “lying” when I say I just followed another resident in, who held the door for me.

She goes on so long and so loud I finally have to drop the cool, turn to her and say, “Lady, what is your problem exactly? I’m with the census. See the badge? The census. I’m not exactly Ted Bundy here.”

***

In the same vein was an upscale rambler, also in Edina. The clues, walking up, were the open garage door, with a seven or eight year-old Mercedes covered in dust. A dozen or more newspapers still in their plastic wrappers were strewn all over the walk and up a short wheelchair ramp.

The 70-something white male who answers the door is shirtless and wearing cargo shorts. He’s unkempt and his eyes have an unhealthy, milky glaze to them.

“You’re with the what?”

“The census. Just a few questions. It’ll take maybe 10 minutes.”

“Questions? Like what?”

“Well, like for starters, can I get your name?”

“My name?” he says, indignation rising. “Why would I tell you that? What is this? You’re going to get off my property, right now.”

Census training says to leave and mark folks like that down as uncooperative … or worse.

But this guy isn’t letting up, even as I walk to the next house, where a neighbor is out in his drivedway oiling his bicycle. From now 100 feet away the old guy is still bellowing.

“It’s getting to be like Nazi Germany! Like hell I’m telling you anything! You come back here again and I’m calling the cops!”

The neighbor oiling the bike takes this in and turns to me with a look that says, “Welcome to my life.”

Two Statues for George Floyd Square

Posted on April 21, 2021 by Brian Lambert

I am not a sculptor, nor do I play one on YouTube. But I have a recommendation for a statue — actually two of them — at George Floyd Square.

Along with all the imagery and signage about George himself, what that corner needs are statues of Darnella Frazier holding up her cellphone and the little girl next to her in her “Love” t-shirt. Why them? Because those two images encapsulate for me the brute motivation for the murder and how we evolve out of this violent, racist “enforcement” syndrome.

Let me explain: Reasonable minds may disagree, but the turning point of the incident, the precise, in-the-moment influence that turned just another episode of over-aggressive policing into murder was the crowd admonishing and taunting Chauvin to stop what he was doing. As Frazier’s video shows, his response was to, in effect, double down the pressure on a dying man.

Regarded as an alpha male by his rookie cohorts and by himself, (I’m guessing), Chauvin’s reaction in that moment was raw king (or at least prince) of the jungle. “I am The Man here.” “I am in charge.” “I do as I please.” “No one challenges my supremacy.” And so, rather than lift off Floyd’s neck as the crowd was pleading, he sustained force for long minutes … after Floyd was already dead.

“Anyone else want a piece of this?”

Throughout his trial, Chauvin’s defense attempted to create a picture of a tense, threatening situation — for Chauvin. It was yet another run at the classic, invariable and inevitable defense for every violent/freaked-out cop. “He/she feared for his life.”

Except that there there was no physically intimidating, much less threatening mob. There was Darnella and the little girl standing there in her “Love” t-shirt. Those two — and an older guy cussing him out — were what Chauvin the alpha dog was afraid of? No jury in the world, (with the exception maybe of some in Alabama or South Dakota), was going to believe that, and Chauvin’s didn’t.

The little girl in the “Love” shirt then represents unthreatening, life-affirming innocence affronted by the spectacle of hypocrisy — an authorized authority figure abusing his authority — committing a public murder. (When Judge Cahill assess the “aggravating circumstances” in Chauvin’s guilt, the fact that he — a cop, slowly, methodically and remorselessly murdered a man in plain view of children, should qualify Chauvin for another five to ten years.)

But superseding all other influences in Chauvin’s conviction is young Darnella’s camera.

You and I both know the situation this morning would be a lot different if Chauvin’s slow-mo murder hadn’t been recorded from start to finish. A statue of Darnella then represents the first and most powerful solution to reflexive cop racism and violence. Namely, an alert citizen with a camera and a potential audience of millions.

Not being particularly optimistic about political solutions to cop criminality, I expect little to nothing of significance from the usual clash of metropolitan liberals and their terrified, conservative, race-baiting rural colleagues.

But the public at large can’t help but have taken away from the conviction of an otherwise ordinary brute cop the searing power of video. The number of cameras (including cop body cams) recording the Floyd encounter was startling. And that level of “coverage” as they say in Hollywood is only going to increase as millions more citizen on-lookers hit “record” whenever they see cops (six of them in this case, in rabid response to that possibly counterfeit $20) go all pack-wolves on anyone, particularly another Black person.

It’s as though sinister, all-present, all-seeing Big Brother has molted into a sea of shocked and horrified teenagers and grade schoolers, all equipped with the ability to provide damning testimony against The Man.

If cities aren’t chastened by the $47 million Minneapolis has paid out in the Mohammed Noor and Derek Chauvin crimes, cops themselves have to be chilled by the sight of the brass and suits above them reacting to indefensible video evidence and cutting loose one of their own a veteran alpha. How they behave off public streets, or on lonesome stretches of road, is another matter. But even the average, fresh out of cop school rookie has to be smart enough to understand that each new Floyd v. Three Cars and Six Cops incident on a city thoroughfare is going to draw video coverage like the last quarter of the Super Bowl.

So yeah, two statues. Darnella and her camera: Alert citizen witnesses and their power of “testimony”. Alongside pint-sized “Love”: emblematic of the sick myth of mortal fear (of citizens!) among armed authority, plus a reminder of the scarring effect of police thuggery on innocents.

I’ll throw in $100 to Kickstart whatever real sculptor wants to take a run at that.

Wry Wing Politics

Politics on wry.

Author Archives: Brian Lambert

Fauci, Mengele and Plastic

Fear of Crime Always Sells

How About We Start with “What in Hell was Boogie Smith?”

Bold Prediction: Police Reform (i.e. “Question Two”) Will Lose by at Least 10%

We Have Every Reason To Expect a Lot More from the NFL

Only Its Investors Can “Reform” Facebook

Do I Think Robert Kagan is Right? The Responsible Choice is Treating Him as Though He Is.

And Who Will Be the Biggest Abortion Hustler of Them All?

Let’s Hear It for a Few of the Good Guys.

Dear Minnesota GOP: Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.

Afghanistan’s Collapse Was Inevitable

Really? The State Fair As Usual, Amid A Fools’ Surge of the Pandemic. Really?

We’ve Reached That Point. Give the Fools the Culture War They Always Want.

Wanted: Conservative Intellectuals With Even a Half-Ounce of Conscience

Should We Just Let the COVID-Deniers Perish?

The Age of Barstool Republicans

UFOs are Finally Having Their Moment, and That’s Interesting

Big(ger) Pay-Outs to Police Victims is the Only Viable Reform

Moments in the Life of a Census Enumerator

Two Statues for George Floyd Square

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