Friday, December 10, 2021

Just call her Jadis?

 President Biden's spokeswoman, Jennifer Psaki, is stating that--as about a foot of snow is falling in my part of Minnesota--that parents are "grateful" for the opportunity to eat outside to "stop the spread of COVID."  Apparently lost on Ms. Psaki is the fact that children by and large do not contract or spread COVID to any great extent, and such the major effect on children exposed to this "wisdom" of public health officials is, well, exposure, to include "frostbite" when cities like Edina (a Minneapolis suburb) do this practice.  Yes, imagine your kids outside with hat & gloves, trying to eat their PBJ without completely ruining their gloves and coats.

I guess her proper name is "Jadis", and I remember reading about her in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.  Maybe she'll come up to Edina and offer the kids some Turkish Delight?

I am not quite sure whether that's better or worse than my other thoughts about her work, which is that it resembles little so much as this.  I've become used to Presidential spokesmen lying to us, but Jadis is, well, something special in this regard.



Thursday, December 02, 2021

Now the supply chain crisis is real

When it was just that Wal-Mart and Target couldn't get "junk" toys for Christmas, I wasn't too worried.  I didn't care that much, either, when fast fashion shops were having trouble getting pre-ripped jeggings in for teenagers to use for risking frostbite in the Minnesota winters.  Who knows?  It might have gotten people to learn to enjoy decent toys like those I grew up with, and perhaps there's even a tiny chance that young people would learn that the "fashionable" damage to jeans that construction workers and such show off is done "on the job", not "at the factory", and that pants without extra holes are generally warmer and more comfortable than those with those extra holes.  On a real stretch, we might wonder whether people might remember how workers at Bangladeshi factories were given a sandblaster, but no eye and lung protection--yes, resulting in fatalities.

So in certain ways, I've viewed the supply chain crisis as something of a good thing....well, until very recently, when the local liquor store didn't have any of this year's Beaujolais Nouveau.  OK, so NOW the supply chain crisis is for real!

Seriously, we might remember that historically, trade is supposed to be for the things that are difficult to make at home, and I would hope that we would remember after this debacle that maybe, just maybe, long supply chains for necessary products are a bad idea when we can avoid them.