As soon as I saw the headline “Thousands of mink culled over COVID fears rise from a mass grave in Denmark,” I thought it stands to reason 2020 would end with a Zombie Mink Apocalypse. How could this awful year get any worse? Zombie minks.
Just kidding. They aren’t really reanimated dead minks, but the reality is almost as creepy. The contractors paid to bury them were supposed to put them 6 feet under. But, evidently to profit more by cutting cost, the minks were laid in a much shallower grave and gasses rising from them pushed them up out of it. Gross me out.
I haven’t been so grossed out since middle school. My eighth grade biology teacher passed around skinned dead minks nailed to boards — and Exacto knives — and told us right out of the blue to dissect the minks. I still have nightmares. Those poor animals. First relieved of their skins, then adding insult to injury, shared among eighth graders to be butchered.
The Danish minks, as you must recall, were murdered en masse because they came down with a mutated, worse, form of COVID-19, which maybe should have got the name COVID-20. This was done instead of what is usually done with farmed minks — murdering them en masse for their skins to make fur coats — just saving some to make more minks.
Before the culling took place, rich people around the world and the furriers who cater to them cried out, pleading with authorities to skin the minks so that all their fur wouldn’t go to waste. Then bury them. Their pleas were ignored on the grounds that there was too much risk; the minks might infect workers, who’d then spread the disease beyond the farms.
If only Denmark’s supreme court were as conservative as ours, rich people might have successfully sued for relief from the draconian measures meant to protect the Danish masses from disease. In the same way, New York churches sued for relief from having to follow the same restrictions as everyone else in the interest of public health. God forbid ministers and their congregations should have to learn how to Zoom.
I know the First Amendment says no law should interfere with the free exercise of religion, but I don’t think the Founding Fathers had in mind that churches should therefore be allowed to spread disease. That’s not any sort of exercise of religion I’ve ever heard of, and I think five out of nine of our Supreme Court justices are nuts.
Speaking of my opinions, I think that when Trump accuses Twitter of “conservative discrimination,” what he is trying to say is that they are guilty of “anti-conservative discrimination.” Trump has long demonstrated that he supports conservative discrimination, like the long-practiced discrimination that made America great in his mind and the minds of his followers. I also think what he’s really complaining about is that they aren't describing his Tweets as “trending” as often as he would like.
For this, he wants to change the law so Twitter and other social media can be prosecuted, fined or even shut down if they don’t bend their content to suit politicians.
It’s a rather bad sign that he’s calling for this kind of change in the law just as he and his entire administration should be packing up to leave. Why would he want to hand over to Joe Biden a new, improved way to control social media? Unless Trump really doesn’t believe he will have to leave the White House.
He says he’ll leave if Biden wins the Electoral College vote. So how is he thinking he’s going to get to stay unless he has plans to change the expected outcome of that vote?
At this point, it’s clear that at most two states may swing to Trump after recounts: Arizona and/or Georgia. So, to get the Electoral College to vote for Trump rather than Biden would require either convincing state legislatures to meddle in their own states’ electoral process, or, what — I don’t know, bribe electors to throw their votes to him?
The Supreme Court recently said Washington state can go ahead and fine faithless electors $1,000 each. Would Trump offer $2,000? “$1,000 is for the state; you’ll have $1,000 left over for you.”
I wish this were over with.
Dr. Wes Browning is a one time math professor who has experienced homelessness several times. He supplied the art for the first cover of Real Change in November of 1994 and has been involved with the organization ever since. This is his weekly column, Adventures in Irony, a dry verbal romp of the absurd. He can be reached at drwes (at) realchangenews (dot) org
Read more in the Dec. 2-8, 2020 issue.
The Link LonkDecember 03, 2020 at 03:02AM
https://www.realchangenews.org/2020/12/02/something-rotten-state-denmark
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark... - Real Change News
https://news.google.com/search?q=rotten&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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