As the news media rumbles and rants over the rise in COVID cases, including that of Doctor Jill, it’s time to prepare for an onslaught of information that provokes fear and misunderstanding.
I have many regrets about what I did during the pandemic.
I wouldn’t come to Temple University because of fears that young people were incubators of the disease.
I didn’t visit a friend who was dying of cancer. I didn’t keep in touch with friends who died because they couldn’t get the treatment they needed.
I waited in line for the first COVID shots—not protesting the inadequate features of the drugs and the many side effects of the shots.
I didn’t try to stop the politicians from passing laws to make voting easier without showing up at a polling station. I believe these laws were responsible for Trump’s loss, one of the worst outcomes of the pandemic.
Now, I’m making a pledge to myself and others.
I will not wear a mask. Various studies have determined that masks made little difference in preventing disease, except Dr. Tony Fauci continues promoting them.
I will not get shots. When President Joe said he requested federal dollars “for funding for a new vaccine that is necessary, that works,” it gave me chills. After the pharmaceutical companies created remedies that didn’t work well, why should the taxpayers pick up the tab again?
I will not carry around a card that lists my shots.
I will not socially distance. I will boycott stores and companies that require masks and social distancing.
I will vote against anyone who closes businesses and schools. Only recently, national surveys show that math and reading skills have dropped dramatically, and school absenteeism is roughly 10 percent each school day.
I will never retire to a nursing home where thousands of my fellow seniors died during the pandemic, a disgrace that still goes unpunished.
Many of us learned a few things during the pandemic. You really can’t trust the media, and you really can’t trust politicians!
Fortunately, I live in central Pennsylvania, where many people share my sentiments. It was a relief when my wife and I moved here in March 2021 to find signs that said masks were optional.
Matthew Hennessey of The Wall Street Journal agrees with me. He wrote recently, “In hindsight, I can’t help but feel I sold my God-given freedom too cheaply. I won’t get fooled again.”
Moving to a new town, particularly after a tragedy–the death of your father–is a painful experience. Which is what high school student Magne Seier (David Stakston) and his younger brother, Laurits (Jonas Strand Gravli), confront when they move to the small Norwegian town of Edda in the Netflix series Ragnarok.
And Edda isn’t just any town. The largest employer there is Jutul Industries where their kindly but weak-willed mother, Turid (Henriette Steenstrup), finds a job. More on Jutul in a bit.
How does Magne cope? By becoming a reincarnation of the Norse god Thor. And if “jutul” sounds familiar, they are the enemies of the Norse gods.
Over the first two seasons, Magne, for the most part reluctantly, puts together a new gathering of the gods, including assisted care home resident Wotan Wagner (Bjørn Sundquist) as the new Odin, another high schooler, Iman Reza (Danu Sunth), as the new Freyja, and Harry (Benjamin Helstad), a mechanic and a boxer, as the new Týr.
While Wotan/Odin wears an eye patch–the mythological Odin was one-eyed–he doesn’t ride a an eight-legged horse. The contemporary Odin travels around Edda in a motorized scooter. But he does look into the future with rune stones. There is also a tip of the hat to the importance of dwarfs in Norse mythology. A minor character, Halvor Lange (Espen Sigurdsen), a doctor at Wotan’s nursing home, is a dwarf.
Magne of course has Thor’s hammer.
Laurits is the reincarnation of the devious trickster god, Loki, and it’s difficult to ascertain whose side he is on. As it is with his “child,” his onetime tapeworm, the Midgard Serpent, who Laurits calls “Little O.”
In the third and final season of Ragnarok, the gods expand their crew, adding Kiwi (Ruben Rosbach), as Heimdall, and Laurits’ love interest, Jens (Vebjørn Enger), as Baldr.
Ragnarök, according to the Norse mythology, is the end time of the world, when the jutul or jötunn, often sloppily translated into English–as it is for this show–as giants, battle each other. In the first season, we are introduced to the Jutul family, led by Vidar (Gísli Örn Garðarsson), his wife Ran (Gísli Örn Garðarsson) ,and their high school age children, Fjor (Herman Tømmeraas), and Saxa (Theresa Frostad Eggesbø). Vidar is the CEO of Jutul Industries, which is poisoning the fjord off of Edda, and Ran is the principal of Edda High School. All of this is quite awkward, to say the least, for Magne.
The following paragraph contains Season Two spoilers.
A battle between Magne and Vidar at the end of the first season in inconclusive, which is not that case with their second confrontation; Magne kills Vidar with and ancient axe. That is one of the few ways gods and jutuls can be slain. That leads to a power struggle between Saxa and Fjor for control of Jutul Industries. Ran withdraws into depression, and Laurits, who we learn is Vidar’s son, plays both sides of the conflict.
As Season Three begins, Turid is planning her wedding, inevitable conflict is coming, and oh yeah, final exams and graduation at Edda High School loom. As for that battle, the two sides line up, as in a western movie, or more accurately, as with the final showdown in Akiro Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.
While I enjoyed the first two seasons, I see Season Three as a big letdown. The performances are still compelling, the cinematography still great, and an enjoyable presence who was largely absent in Season Two, the radio announcer (Jeppe Beck Laursen), briefly returns. Ragnarok’s unseen announcer is reminiscent of the one in the M*A*S*H television series.
And I have to say it, the Laurits and Jens romance is very in-your-face one–as if the writers are yelling out, “Look, they’re gay! Gay! Gay! Gay!” Much more is left to our imaginations with Magne and his female love interests. The creepy romantic encounter at a party with Ran and two male students from her high school in the first season is mostly off-screen. Are the writers and directors trying to compensate for the decades of absence of gay characters in movies and in television series? Oh, one more failing: the CG to create the Midgard Serpent, is unconvincing.
As a whole, Ragnarok is still worth your time, particularly if you enjoy coming-of-age dramas and ancient mythology, but don’t expect so much in this final season.
As of this writing, it is the seventh-most popular offering on Netflix.
Ragnarok is rated TV-MA for violence, sexual situations, marijuana use, and underage drinking. It is available in Norwegian with English subtitles as well as dubbed English. Besides Norwegian, there are smatterings of Old Norse and English throughout Ragnarok.
If you want to know what’s wrong with America’s elites, read on.
The New York Times asked 17 elite writers to opine on “one piece of culture [that] captures the spirit of our country.”
The answers are startlingly cynical. Maureen Dowd thinks Americans are ‘highly susceptible.” Her suggestion for the piece of culture that captures today’s America is the 1956 motion picture, “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in which aliens take over the bodies of ordinary people to march in lockstep with the country’s leaders. I always thought the film showed how a few people could fight the majority.
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby,” Ross Douthat argues that Americans are “on the make.” I never really was a Fitzgerald fan during my college days when I majored in English literature. I was more of a John Milton man.
Farhad Manjoo writes that we are “gleefully nihilist” and cites the cartoon “South Park” as representative of today’s America. Fortunately, I’ve never watched the show.
Nicholas Kristoff complains about “the lie of individual responsibility,” where people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. As Kristoff puts it: “Why is the United States one of very few wealthy countries to lack mandatory paid family leave, universal health care, child allowances and national pre-K and child care? Why do we tolerate a failed foster care system?” Methinks Nick favors socialism!
Jamelle Bouie describes a country “living with existential fear.” He argues that “the United States is in the midst of a second Gilded Age. For millions of Americans and for many young people in particular, the 2020s have been — thus far — a time of anxiety and dread, marked by social disruption, failing institutions, and a deepening sense of urgency over the ability of humans to survive on this planet without destroying its environment.” Does he really think we are in that bad a shape? I’d put him on suicide watch if he does.
My favorite is Zeynep Tufekci, who was born in Turkey and came to this country for her education. She calls the United States “painfully exception,” meaning, in her words, exceptional in its lack of “universal health care, lots of guns, a violent drug trade, voluminous drug overdose deaths, and middle-class jobs that allow skating by, as long as people don’t get sick.” To her, “Breaking Bad” symbolizes a cultural event that captures America. I would suggest that Ms. Tufekci spend time evaluating her home country.
I have had the opportunity to visit and live in more than 70 countries worldwide, seeing the historical landmarks of the Silk Road of China to the pyramids of Egypt and from the poverty of India to the wealth of Denmark. I’ve reported on celebrations and wars in the Middle East. I’ve even lived near the place where, in 1835, French author Alexis de Tocqueville described “the exceptionalism of the United States.”
I still believe that our country is exceptional–as do many people in the countries I’ve lived in and visited. What’s most likely to change that exceptionalism is the cynicism of our elites.
For the second straight post at Da Tech Guy, I’m writing about crime in Chicago.
Outside of the Oakland Athletics, who are on pace to lose over 110 games and may be headed to Las Vegas next season, no MLB team has had a worse season than the Chicago White Sox.
Predicted to finish around the .500 mark–which is where they finished up, exactly, in 2022–the South Siders never recovered from an April 10-game losing streak.
The Sox on are pace to lose 100 game this year, which is how many they lost in 2018. That season, the White Sox unloaded several veteran players, kicking off a rebuild project with the goal of bringing the World Series championship back to the South Side for the first time since 2005. That rebuild brought the Sox to the playoffs in 2020 and 2021, but they won only two playoff games–losing five.
Another teardown occurred this July, the White Sox are in rebuild mode again.
August has been even worse for the Sox. Longtime team owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, known to be loyal to a fault with the front office staff of the White Sox and the Chicago Bulls–Reinsdorf owns that team too–uncharacteristically fired the top two men in the White Sox front office, Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams. A couple of days later, news broke that the White Sox, a charter member of the American League, might move out of its current stadium, the state-owned Guaranteed Rate Field, its home since 1991, to elsewhere in Chicago, or perhaps to the suburbs or even Nashville. The Sox have six years left on their lease at Guaranteed Rate Field.
On Friday night, in a game where the Sox were punished 12-4 against those otherwise awful Athletics, a female fan in the left field bleachers was shot in the abdomen, another woman was grazed by a bullet.
A move to the suburbs–perhaps joining the Chicago Bears in Arlington Heights–or to Tennessee, probably is more attractive now more than ever for Reinsdorf.
The woman who was shot Friday night is in fair condition, the fan who was grazed by the bullet declined medical care.
According to the quite reliable CWB Chicago, police officials are exploring the possibility that the bullet that wounded the woman may have been fired from a mile away. A gunshot detection system detected gunfire a mile southeast of Guaranteed Rate Field–in the Bronzeville neighborhood. The White Sox and the CPD, in several statements, have said that the shooting was not part of any altercation inside the ballpark.
If CWB Chicago is correct, the Sox and the city of Chicago still have a big problem. And there is an historic precedent that bodes poorly for professional baseball on Chicago’s South Side.
The rise in criminality since 2020 has been the dominant news story in Chicago, despite subtle attempts by the mainstream media to minimize it. Headlines routinely speak of people “injured” in shootings, rather than using the correct verb, which is “wounded.” The first Chicago Police Department statement on the Guaranteed Rate gunshots spoke of a “shooting incident,” rather than a “shooting.”
Another MLB “shooting incident,” actually a homicide, took place during batting practice before a July 4 doubleheader between the host New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds–in the Coogan’s Bluff area of upper Manhattan in 1950. The post World War II decline of New York was underway, although the city was years away from bottoming out. The way NYC’s fictional doppelganger, Gotham City, was portrayed in the Joker movie is a pretty accurate portrayal of what New York was destined to become.
A teenager, in a twisted way to celebrate the Fourth of July, fired a gun from the roof of an apartment building a half-mile away from the Polo Grounds. A fan sitting in the upper deck, Bernard “Barney” Doyle, was instantly killed by the stray bullet. A horrifying photograph of Doyle slumped over, dead of course, was on the front page of the New York Daily News the next day. That pic probably gave New Yorkers nightmares for years.
The Giants struggled at the gate in the 1950s. Despite winning the World Series in 1954, only 1.1 million fans crossed the Polo Grounds turnstiles that season. In their last two seasons at the Polo Grounds, only the pathetic Washington Senator’s had worse attendance. City Journal’s Clark Whelton, writing about the Doyle killing in 2018, claims the crime was “quickly forgotten.” I’m not so sure. But Whelton did add of the team’s owner, Horace Stoneham, that he was “said to have brooded for years about Doyle’s strange demise and the run-down buildings on Coogan’s Bluff.”
In 1958, the Giants and Dodgers abandoned New York for California. When they arrived, there were plenty of Giants and Dodgers fans who had moved out to the Golden State before them.
As our day jobs wind down, Mrs. Marathon Pundit and I are eyeing our exit from crime-ridden, crumbling, corrupt, and tax-greedy Illinois. Tennesse is at the top of our list for our next, and likely last, home. Both of us watched Joker for the first time this month. We compared Gotham City to today’s Chicago.
Why should we stay here?
Wouldn’t it be great if we, as Tennessee residents, were there to welcome the White Sox to Nashville?
UPDATE August 28, 2023, 7:15pm EDT:
Thank you to Dan Proft of WIND-AM Chicago. He, along with Amy Jacobson, co-host Chicago’s Morning Answer–a show I Iisten to, either over the air, or by way of the podcast, nearly every weekday–for mentioning this post on the air today. Look for Proft’s take around the 9 minute mark.
Also, here’s an update, and I have a strong feeling there will be more than one for this blog entry. Chicago’s interim police superintendant, Fred Waller, in a press conference this afternoon, discussed what his public affairs callously called a “a shooting incident” on Friday night. It was a shooting. “We’re dispelling a lot of things,” Waller said. As for where the bullets originated, he added that “coming from outside [Guaranteed Rate Field] is something we’ve almost completely dispelled.”
Still, fans who have bought tickets to a Sox game, or are considering doing so, probably have a lot on their minds now, to say the least.
UPDATE August 29, 2023 4:20pm EDT:
This story keeps getting stranger. There was online chatter that one of the women who was shot had sneaked the gun inside Guaranteed Rate Field beneath her belly rolls. I mean, what kind of people make up stuff like that?
Well, they may not have to do so.
Here’s what longtime Chicago sports reporter, Peggy Kusinski just tweeted:
“As I reported on @ESPN1000 just now… the shooting at Guaranteed Rate Field during a #WhiteSox game was indeed an accidental discharge by one of the women “grazed” by the bullet. She reportedly snuck the gun in past metal detectors hiding it in the folds of her belly fat.”
As I reported on @ESPN1000 just now… the shooting at Guaranteed Rate Field during a #WhiteSox game was indeed an accidental discharge by one of the women “grazed” by the bullet. She reportedly snuck the gun in past metal detectors hiding it in the folds of her belly fat.
ESPN 1000 AM is the White Sox flagship radio station. It’s a credible source and Kusinski is a solid journalist.
If true, this news is a black mark for the White Sox fan base. What type of person brings a handgun to a baseball game? On the other hand, after the game, in a heavily hyped promotion, Vanilla Ice was to be the headliner of a “90s Night” concert. Were the women there for the Sox-Athletics game or for the postgame show? The White Sox cancelled the gig due to what they called “technical difficulties.” They lied. Shame on the White Sox. Police officers wanted to keep stadium lights on to look for evidence.
And how does a gun detection system miss a firearm hidden in belly rolls?
And what about the Chicago Police Department? Interim superintendent Waller said in a Monday press conference, “At one point in time it was requested as a precaution” to cancel the game. But the game played on. Who made that call to continue? The White Sox? The police? Mayor Brandon Johnson? The women who were shot are said to be teachers. Johnson is a product of the Chicago Teachers Union, for whom he was a longtime organizer, and Johnson is a former CPS teacher. Johnson’s political career is a creation of the CTU.
Without a doubt, I’ll have at least one more update.
Update August 29, 2023, 9:15pm EDT:
Second City Cop is hinting about the “graze wound” woman, that the injury may have been a power burn, is a Chicago Public Schools teacher.
UPDATE: A CPS teacher had the gun?
UPDATE: A CPS teacher with a suburban home address?
John Ruberry, a lifetime Chicago White Sox fan, blogs five miles north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.
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