Pun Salad

Mr. Michael Ramirez with another brilliant and beautiful commentary on Our Government swooping in with life-saving pharmaceuticals:

Like all sensible seniors, Mrs. Salad and I got appointments for Covid shots at our first opportunity. The appointment-scheduling process on the web was a little Rube Goldberg-y, but I've seen worse. First shot scheduled for today, February 2.

Oh oh. Big snowstorm also scheduled for 2/2. Well, that's why I have a snowblower…

But we got an unexpected call from the state on Sunday (1/31). The state was rescheduling February 2 shot appointments for … and here I waited to be told of a date weeks or months in the future … February 1! W00t! No problem!

So Mrs. Salad and I got our first shots of the Moderna vaccine yesterday at the currently-unused C&J Bus Terminal in Dover NH. I have no major complaints. We showed up, stayed in our car, waited in line, went here, there, got poked, parked and waited for (non-existent) reactions, and left. About an hour overall.

Could it have been more efficient? Maybe.

But even though I'm grateful, and have no personal complaints, I'll point out that our state really should be doing better than it is. Becker's Hospital Review ranks states by percentage of COVID-19 vaccines administered; New Hampshire ranks a dismal 37th place with 59.1%. (Distributed doses: 217,100; Administered: 128,313). In New England, we're only beating the famously dysfunctional Rhode Island.

C'mon Governor. Get some smarter people on this.

• Bari Weiss asks us, not unreasonably, to Stand Up to the Woke Lies. Tough to excerpt, good all the way through, but …

  How much does it cost me to log on to Twitter and accuse you, right now, of an -ism? America is fast developing its own informal social credit system, as the writer Rod Dreher has noted, in which people with the wrong politics or online persona are banned from social-media sites and online financial networks.

  When everything is recorded for eternity, when making mistakes and taking risks are transformed into capital offenses, when things that were common sense until two seconds ago become unsayable, people make the understandable decision to simply shut up.

  Do not nod along when you hear the following: That Abraham Lincoln’s name on a public school or his likeness on a statue is white supremacy. (It is not; he is a hero.) That separating people into racial affinity groups is progressive. (It is a form of segregation.) That looting has no victims (untrue) and that small-business owners can cope anyway because they have insurance (nonsense). That any disparity of outcome is evidence of systemic oppression (false). That America is evil. (It is the last hope on Earth.)

  Ms Weiss suggests ten points of action, which I'll list, click over for the explanations:

  1. Remind yourself, right now, of the following truth: You are free.
  2. Be honest.
  3. Stick to your principles.
  4. Set an example for your kids and your community.
  5. If you don’t like it, leave it.
  6. Become more self-reliant.
  7. Worship God more than Yale.
  8. Make like-minded friends.
  9. Trust your own eyes and ears.
  10. Use your capital to build original, interesting and generative things right now.

  She's looking for a job.

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• Emily Benedek tells us California Is Cleansing Jews From History.

  Well, that's a signpost on the road to Hell, isn't it?

  It's the story of Elina Kaplan, who initially approved of the state's 2016 mandate to include "Ethnic Studies" in the high school curriculum. But things worked out much worse than she expected.

  But three years later, when the first draft of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) was released, Kaplan couldn’t believe what she was reading. In one sample lesson, she saw that a list of historic U.S. social movements—ones like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Criminal Justice Reform—also included the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement for Palestine (BDS), described as a “global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions.” Kaplan wondered why a foreign movement, whose target was another country, would be mischaracterized as a domestic social movement, and she was shocked that in a curriculum that would be taught to millions of students, BDS’s primary goal—the elimination of Israel—was not mentioned. Kaplan also saw that the 1948 Israel War of Independence was only referred to as the “Nakba”—“catastrophe” in Arabic—and Arabic verses included in the sample lessons were insulting and provocative to Jews.

  Kaplan, 53, a Bay Area mother of two grown children who describes herself as a lifelong Democrat, was further surprised to discover that a list of 154 influential people of color did not include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, or Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, though it included many violent revolutionaries. There was even a flattering description of Pol Pot, the communist leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who was responsible for the murder of a quarter of the Cambodian population during the 1970s.

  Kaplan began calling friends. “Have you read this?” she asked, urging them to plow through the 600-page document. The language was bewildering. “Ethnic Studies is about people whose cultures, hxrstories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving. Thus, Ethnic Studies also examines borders, borderlands, mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations. …” This was the telltale jargon of critical race theory, a radical doctrine that has swept through academic disciplines during the last few decades.

  It will be, um, interesting to see just how bad an example California can set for the rest of the country.

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• Or you can just check out what California high school students are currently getting fed, which is bad enough. Ms. Ingrid Seyer-Ochi ("a former UC Berkeley and Mills College professor, ex-Oakland Unified School District principal and current San Francisco Unified School District high school teacher.") proudly used Bernie Sanders' Inauguration costume as a Teaching Moment. Bernie's mittens: A lesson for S.F. high school students in subtle white privilege.

  Three weeks ago I processed the Capitol insurrection with my high school students. Rallying our inquiry skills, we analyzed the images of that historic day, images of white men storming through the Capitol, fearless and with no forces to stop them. “This,” I said, “is white supremacy, this is white privilege. It can be hard to pinpoint, but when we see, it, we know it.”

  Across our Zoom screen, they affirmed, with nods, thumbs-ups, and emojis of anger and frustration. Fast-forward two weeks as we analyzed images from the inauguration, asking again, “What do we see?” We saw diversity, creativity and humanity, and a nation embracing all of this and more. On the day of the inauguration, Bernie Sanders was barely on our radar. The next day, he was everywhere.

  “What do we see?” I asked again. We’ve been studying diversity and discrimination in the United States; my students were ready. What did they see? They saw a white man in a puffy jacket and huge mittens, distant not only in his social distancing, but in his demeanor and attire.

  God help California.

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• Kevin D. Williamson provides a Lizard People Update.

  One of the lunatics who was arrested for threatening to murder prominent Democrats was a Trump guy who had been an Occupy Wall Street guy, and also an “Audit the Fed!” moonbat who read dark meanings into the design of the dollar bill. “Talk about a one-eighty,” the New York Daily News said of him, but the angle describing the turn on the journey from Occupy kook to “New World Order” kook to QAnon kook who thinks there are secret mind-control microchips in COVID-19 vaccines is a lot less than 180 degrees — more like 12 degrees or 15 degrees.

  You can read about the guy here. Friends, don't be that guy.

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• And finally, from the guy who in a saner world would have been President, Mitch Daniels. What's coming, Mitch?

  Like most people, I really hate to admit defeat. Okay, some take it a little further than others, but it’s among the most common of human traits. On a matter in which I’ve invested no small amount of time and worries, I’m throwing in the towel: Regarding our national fiscal future, as the man said, you’ve got to know when to fold ’em.

  In a variety of public employments and from various posts in private life, I’ve been among those urging that we take greater care with our public finances, to ward off serious, permanent damage to the economy and, just as important, to the safety net on which so many vulnerable Americans rely.

  Until recently, I’ve held on tightly to two beliefs essential to long-term fiscal survival.

  The first, grounded in actuarial reality, was that, if we began acting now, we could keep the promises of Social Security, Medicare and the other so-called entitlement programs.

  The second, always as much a matter of faith as of proven fact, was that the American people could engage in an adult conversation about the subject and support the needed changes, before it was too late. Surely someone eventually would appeal successfully to our reason and to our concern for our children, grandchildren and the country’s future.

  Daniels points out that we've had two presidents who saw it as their job to lie about this. We've got another one now.