When we were in college, in the late Seventies, there were some Iranian students on campus as well. They were easily identifiable — by their Trans Ams, went the joke. Oil money, y’know.

But they weren’t all spoiled rich kids. Some took the opportunity of being outside their country to protest conditions within — conditions of living under the Shah. Such protests weren’t casual. They covered their faces with masks. The SAVAK — the Shah’s secret police — might be watching.

Being young and American — and in sleepy Eugene, Oregon, no less — we didn’t understand this at first, the ostentatious precaution of it. And Eugene being a hippie mecca — Berkeley North, we joked — the masked Iranians were just one protest group among many, a sideshow, really, part of the ongoing campus circus.

That all changed our junior year — November 4, 1979, to be precise. The day the Tehran embassy was overrun.

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In the past week, covid cases in the United States reached an average 100,000 a day.

Again.

We’ve been there before: Last November, going up, and last February, coming back down. As recently as June — five weeks ago — cases were almost a tenth of what we’re seeing now.

And looking at what’s going on out there in this glorious blighted land of ours, we don’t see what’s going to stop the numbers from continuing to shoot skyward.

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We’re gonna spell out a word here, a few times actually, that is often politely acknowledged by only its first letter, although we’re not sure for whose benefit.

It’s from testimony at Tuesday’s first congressional hearing into the January 6 insurrection, given by one of the Capitol officers protecting the heart of American democracy — what passes for it, anyway — against its opponents.

“You hear that guys, this nigger voted for Joe Biden,” the officer was told.

“Put your gun down,” a colleague reported about a separate encounter, “and we’ll show you what kind of nigger you really are.”

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In the thirty years we’ve been familiar with global warming — never mind the more than sixty years since it was first brought to public attention — a common lament has been about disproportionate effects, how wealthy nations would ride it out better than poorer ones, and how the wealthiest among us would ride it out best of all.

We’re starting to wonder about that.

We’re starting to wonder whether the advocates of “mitigation” — itself a loser’s strategy — have any fucking clue what they’re up against.

We’re wondering because Oregon somehow managed to pollute the Northeast last week.

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Let’s start with some facts. The United States is again leading the world in new Covid cases. Florida alone accounts for more than one in five new infections stateside. More broadly, vaccination rates correlate with Trump voters by county, and you can guess which direction that goes.

Oh, and hospitals everywhere are reporting that the new cases they’re seeing are almost totally among the unvaccinated.

And the National Review has decided it’s all our fault.

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Mike Lee, whose name we can’t say without spitting, has a new target in his sights.

“We should be celebrating diversity in our schools,” he emailed us last week, “and to be clear, critical race theory doesn’t celebrate diversity — it weaponizes it.”

Yeah, that part’s in bold so you don’t miss it.

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On this most sacred of days on the American civic calendar, we proudly present a patriotic Canadian chewing the scenery out of the Preamble.