Bits And Pieces

*A ferret in Florida has tested positive for the coronavirus. Does this mean it has to be quarantined? Will all native ferrets now be subject to social distancing requirements and mask mandates? Will they have to be vaccinated and carry vaccine passports? On the other hand, will ferrets streaming across our southern border be bused to their preferred locations around the country with no questions asked and no testing required?

*Sam’s Club is planning to provide $10,000 sponsorships to college athletes named Sam. Is this not exclusionary and marginalizing? Surely this will make all the rest of us, those not named “Sam,” feel unwelcome and unsafe! Or, if we all claim to identify as “Sam,” will the company provide us all with $10,000 sponsorships? That seems only fair. #Equity.

*”Fuck Joe Biden” chants are all the rage across the fruited plain. The chants apparently started at a few college football venues, and have now spread to stadiums and arenas around the country. The chant has even been heard on the streets of New York city! Not exactly “I like Ike,” but Biden is so out of it he probably isn’t aware of what’s going on. His hearing isn’t the best, either, so even if he were to ask his aides what the crowds were saying, they could easily get away with telling him: “Um, er, they’re saying how lucky they are to have you as president, sir. And how plucky you are, sir.”

*The Democrats $3.5 trillion infrastructure/reconciliation bill is 2,456 pages long. The Constitution of the United States graced four pages of parchment. The reconciliation bill consists of over a million words, the Declaration of Independence 1,320. Less than one-fourth of the spending the passage of this bill would authorize would be on infrastructure. Most of it would be on ensuring Democrats never lose another election. It punishes and divides, whereas the Declaration and Constitution birthed a great nation.

*The Scientific American recently printed an article by five “academics” who claim that the use of “JEDI” as an acronym for “Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” should be avoided because the fictional Star Wars’ characters comprise an “exclusionary cult.” Moreover, they say that they are “prone to (white) saviorism” and employ “toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution,” including the use of “phallic” lightsabers. First off, the Jedi aren’t real. What’s more, they are peace-keeping guardians from the Galactic republic. But the Foolish Five who concocted the article appearing in the Scientific American are put off by the fact that the Jedi are a quasi-religious order of “intergalactic police-monks” based on—gasp—merit. I wish the “academics” were from a galaxy far, far away.

 

*A teacher at Marysville Middle School has been ordered to remove the Thin Blue Line flag sticker from her laptop that honors her brother, a former policeman who also was a school resource officer during a deadly high school shooting in the city, Jason Rantz of KTTH-AM recently reported. The teacher also displayed the flag on her room’s blackboard, with photos of her brother surrounding it. She was ordered to remove that flag, too. The school has no problem with displays promoting LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter messaging, however.

 

*Andreas Malm, a Swedish professor of ecology at Lund University, recently utilized his appearance on a New Yorker podcast with David Remnick to advocate “sabotage” to achieve the goals of climate activists. Malm exclaimed that if people “were to attack the construction equipment” and “blow up the pipeline before it is completed,” he would be “all in favor of that.” He added, “I don’t see how that property damage could be considered morally illegitimate.” Right. How could anyone consider one person’s decision to blow up vast and expensive infrastructure that exists for the public good a bad thing?