Author Archives: Mitch Berg

Only NARN Can Break A Heart

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Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

  • , Brad Carlson is in the studio today from 1-3.  He’s got a full slate of guests – check him out!
  • Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
  • I’ll be in for Brad tomorrow from 1-3 on “The Closer”!   I’ll be talking with Andrew Richter about his resignation from the Crystal Planning Commission, and of course with former Ms. Minneapolis Julie Schliesing.

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:

Join us!

Good Intentions

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Seventy years ago today, a 500-pound bomb from an American bomber that dropped its payload miles short of its intended target fell 20,000 feet, and landed squarely on top of Lieutenant General Lesley McNair.

General Lesley McNair, who died – spectacularly – 70 years ago today.

Literally. The bomb fell directly into McNair’s foxole, landing physically directly on top of the three star general. McNair was dead from being hit by 500 pounds of metal screaming earthward at 600 miles per hour, even before the bomb exploded.

But explode it did, further mangling the unlucky general’s body so badly that the only parts that were immediately recognizable were the three gold stars from his collar, found some distance away from the bomb crater that remodeled the general’s foxhole.

The graves registration detail found the parts the best they could – which is exactly as difficult a job as you might imagine for a body that had been almost literally wrapped around 400 pounds of explosives and 100 or so pounds of steel. His mortal coil thus uncoiled and then re-coiled, he was buried at the American Cemetary in Normandy – the senior American interred at this most holy of shrines to America’s sacrifice in Europe.

He was one of four American three-star generals killed in action during the war.

It wasn’t McNair’s first brush with death; he’d been wounded by German artillery in North Africa the previous year.

McNair (center) in Tunisia. The day after this photo was taken, McNair was wounded by fragments from a German artillery shell.

But neither his bad luck nor his bravery were the the most notable thing about General Lesley McNair. For while his death was one for the trivia contests, his life was of immense impact – much of it controversial to this day.

For while generals like Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall, Patton, Bradley, Clark, MacAuliffe and Gavin were household names in America, then and (mostly, and among historians) now, there were few men in history who had more to do with how America fought the war, and the lot of the American fighting man, than Lieutenant General Lesley McNair.

And most of the legacy was just as bad as McNair’s end was spectacular and bizarre.

———-

McNair was born in Verndale, Minnesota in 1883. He graduated in the top sixth of his class at West Point, and was commissioned into the Artillery in 1904. But in the tiny US Army of the early 1900s, he served in many capacities – in the Vera Cruz expedition of 1914, and the raids into Mexico to chase Pancho Villa in 1916. Then, service in World War I in France, where at age 35 he became the youngest general in the US Army while serving in the First Infantry Division.

Like most career officers, he reverted to his permanent rank of Major after the war – but resumed his slow climb through the ranks through the twenties and thirties; he became a Lieutenant Colonel in 1928, Colonel in 1935, Brigadier (one-star) General in 1937.

Then came the frantic pre-war build-up of troops; McNair got a second star in September of 1940, and a third just nine months later. He commanded the General Staff College, and was then promoted to head of Army Ground Forces. An administrative command, it meant he was in charge of organizing and training the immense army that was forming in the US for service in both Europe and the Pacific.

And as such, he had an outsized influence on the way the new Army was being built, trained, and equipped for war.

And he used that influence in a broad, sweeping way that history records had deeply mixed results.

He had three policies that were of special importance to every US soldier that fought in the ground forces in World War 2.

Cannon, Tanks And Automobiles:  McNair was an old-school artilleryman.  But he was not the usual villain in these sorts of stories – the hide-bound, tradition-addled stuffed shirt general who spent the entire war fighting the previous war.  Far from it.  .  Unlike many US generals, in the thirties and the early years of World War 2, he saw what was going on in Europe – how the Germans had revolutionized ground warfare with the Blitzkrieg, based around tightly integrated units of tanks, infantry and mobile artillery, operating in close coordination with the air force.

And he figured he’d do the Germans one better.

Troops debarking from an M3 “Lee” medium tank during the Louisiana Maneuvers – the Armored Corps’ dress rehearsal – in 1940.

Not only did he create the Armored Force as a separate branch of service – breaking the tanks away from the Infantry and Cavalry, which had “owned” them and driven their development down two separate, abortive lines of design philosophy- but created a separate branch, the “Tank Destroyer” branch, in which all the Army’s anti-tank weapons would serve, regardless of type, towed or self-propelled.

An early “Tank Destroyer” – basically a 76mm antitank gun plunked onto a halftrack.

And McNair gave both of the new branches core doctrines.  Believing that the notion of tank-on-tank duels was outmoded and wasteful, he gave to the tanks the job of  driving through a breakthrough (a hole battered in the enemy line by the artillery and infantry) to find the enemy’s vulnerable rear-areas, as the Germans had done in France – all the while avoiding enemy tanks and anti-tank weapons (as the Germans had done in France, mostly because most of France’s tanks were bottled up in Belgium in 1940).

A “towed tank destroyer” – a towed 76mm antitank cannon. Unlike Soviet and German antitank guns, US towed anti-tank guns were largely both too immobile and not powerful enough for the enemy tanks they faced.

Fighting enemy tanks would be the job of the Tank Destroyers.  These would be a combination of light, lightly-armored, fast, relatively powerfully-armed self-propelled anti-tank guns, and traditional towed anti-tank cannon, which were treated more or less the same in the branch’s tactical doctrine.

It only looks like a tank. It’s an M36 “Jackson” Tank Destroyer. Its armor was only proof against small-arms fire and shell fragments, and the turret had an open roof. But the 90mm gun could deal with any German tank on an even footing, which, by the winter of 1944, was much better than most American armored vehicles could manage. And it was fast.

The doctrine was as revolutionary as the stimulus that created it, the Blitzkrieg itself.

The doctrine also turned out to be a complete dud in wartime.  The German tanks – with a doctrine that emphasized tactical flexibility and initiative on the part of small-unit commanders – didn’t oblige the US commanders and line up to do battle with the Tank Destroyers as the Tanks slipped past to wreak their mayhem.  The towed “tank destroyers”  – antitank cannon – tended to suffer terrible casualties for limited results; they simply weren’t equipped to fight successfully under McNair’s doctrine. The mobile tank destroyers were much more effective – but again, rarely if ever managed to insinuate themselves between the tanks and the enemy.

If anything, the Armored Force suffered worse.  They fought virtually the entire war with the M-4 Sherman (which we talked about three years ago); the best tank in the Western world when it first went into action at El Alamein in 1942, by D-Day it was under-gunned, under-armored, and frighteningly vulnerable to exploding when hit.  American (and British, Canadian, Free French, Indian and Polish) tankers paid a brutal price.

Two M-4 Sherman tanks, their turrets blown clear by exploding ammunition, inspected by German SS soldiers, probably in Italy. Early versions of the Sherman were as much as 80% likely to have a catastrophic fire, often ending with a crushing explosion.  The forward hatches are open – perhaps the driver and machine gunner got out alive.

Worse – in 1943, when forward-looking officers, worried about stories about the new generations of German tanks, the Panther and Tiger, along with contemporary generations of German tank destroyers and anti-tank guns, proposed building a heavy tank, with a gun powerful enough to defeat the German tanks and armor thick enough to withstand a hit from their powerful guns, in order to do battle with the new threat, McNair stonewalled them, insisting (using “settled science”) that the Sherman was their German tanks’ equal and then some.

The gruesome death toll among Allied tankers in Normandy shook up the US Army command; General Jacob Devers, commander of the Armored Force, went over McNair’s head to General Marshall – McNair’s boss – and finally got the go-ahead to produce the M-26 Pershing, the first American tank able to go head to head with the Panther or the Tiger one-on-one with a reasonable chance of not just survival but victory.  The M-26 was the first in an evolutionary line of tanks that ended with the M-60 Patton, which still serves in Israel and many other countries around the world – but a total of maybe 50 of them actually got into combat by the end of the war in Europe.

A platoon of M26 Pershings in Germany during the war. The M26 was the first American tank capable of going into action against German Panther and Tiger tanks with a reasonable chance of not only surviving, but winning.  It had the gun from the M36 (above), and thicker armor than a German “Tiger” tank.

McNair’s untimely but spectacular demise helped pave the way for this – but for thousands of Allied tankers, it was too little, far too late

You Fight Like You Train:   While commanding Army Ground Forces, McNair was responsible for hatching the training doctrine for troops that would go overseas.  And  before their first contact with the enemy, Americans were fairly confident in the training their sons and brothers were getting.

Basic trainees at bayonet training.

But for all the puffery about American training before the first contact with the enemy – and the reconstructive history about the subject after the war – the fact is that the US Army’s training served it very badly.

US troops received a very hasty basic training program, one that focused relatively little on small-unit tactics.  The training program before D-Day was heavily focused on training troops in their specialized skills – tankers, signalmen, artillerymen, truck drivers, mechanics and so on pretty much learned how to handle tanks, do communications, shoot cannon, drive trucks and fix things and so on, without much training in how to fight should be situation call for it.

Beyond that?  The infantry training was unrealistic and not especially suited to training people for combat in World War 2.  This wasn’t fixed until after the horrendous casualties of the Normandy campaign were assessed and absorbed. And the lessons learned at ghastly cost in North Africa and Italy were very slow to migrate outside the units involved.

Worst of all?  There was very little time spent training people how to assume duties above their grade if their superior were killed or wounded.  If a company commander were incapacitated, his platoon leaders would know only what they’d observed – and it frequently wasn’t enough.  So when US units started taking casualties, frequently they’d lose their way and flounder, until later in the war when enough men had had vital combat experience.

American troops from the 106th Infantry Division, as prisoners of the Germans. On the opening day of the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944, the 106th – mostly men who’d passed basic training and no more, some of whom had never fired a real rifle before being assigned as “infantry” – got slammed by surprise.  As much as 2/3 of the division, 8-9,000 men, surrendered. It was the largest single-unit mass-surrender in US Army history.

But both of those problems paled compared to McNair’s greatest failure -  a system whose inadequacy hadn’t even begun to be tested when McNair and the bomb intersected seventy years ago today.

The Supply Chain:  McNair’s crowning logistical achievement was the “Individual Replacement System”, or IRS.  It may have caused more dead Americans than any other factor in World War 2.

America was an industrial nation.  Its frame of reference was largely through the metaphors of industry.  And in that metaphor, a combat division – whose nominal strength was about 15,000 men – was like a machine on an assembly line.  If it could be kept supplied with the things it needed; nuts, fuels, bolts, men, washers, body bags, whatever – it could be kept running 24/7.  It was an appeal to the efficiency that industry demanded.

McNair’s idea; keep the infantry divisions fighting in the front line without a break.  When things got broken in battle – men, machines, it mattered not – use the supply services to replace and repair them.

And so the US Army built an immense force to provide the logistics needed to keep the front-line divisions in action.  If a radio or a jeep or a tank or a typewriter broke, or got knocked out, by enemy action, a new one would be sent up front forthwith, supplied by the immense American industrial effort (and, usually, electricians and mechanics and repairmen at ordnance depots would repair the broken unit and return it to service as well).  If a man got killed or wounded, the IRS would send another one to replace him (and the Medical Corps would try to fix the injured one, and if that didn’t work, Graves Registration would process the remains).  That way – so the theory went – the division could fight on, without worry about its manpower or stock of equipment dwindling.

Other armies – the Brits, Canadians, even the Soviets – would pull units out of combat after casualties built up to a certain level. The units would rest, recuperate, and absorb new men. The older surivivors would teach the new men what it took to survive – or a least get a start on it – before going back into the line. The new men at least would know their unit-mates before the shooting started – which could make a difference between life and death.

The US Army, though, would keep a pool of replacement troops at special centers – “Replacement Depots” – until a unit needed new men.  Then the men were fed, in ones and twos and bits and pieces – forward to the combat units, often under cover of darkness, frequently under fire.

It was an abominable system.

The men in the line were too busy keeping themselves alive to bother teaching the newbies.  The new men learned “on the job” – and casualties were predictably horrendous; between the shortfalls in training and the abrupt introduction to battle, the average life span among a replacement infantryman could be as little as four days in a major battle - which also dissuaded veterans from extending themselves, usually, to pass on knowledge to the replacements.   The replacements that did survive would go on to repeat the pattern when new replacements arrived.  A man that survived thirty days in battle was quite likely to develop the skill that’d make him hard to kill (until they’d been in battle for 4-6 months, when either they got careless or their minds tended to give out).

And so while the American experience of the war doesn’t record it in the community memory, casualties were horrible.  Not on a scale a Soviet or Japanese soldier might recommend, as their lives were squandered hundreds and thousands in “human wave” attacks and suicide missions.  But the losses were ghastly nonetheless.  A veteran of the Fourth Infantry Division – one of the divisions that fought from Utah Beach all the way into Germany by the end of the war – noted that the Fourth was actually three divisions; “one in the line, one in the hospital, and one underground”, reflecting – accurately – that the Division of about 15,000 men suffered over 200% casualties during the war.

And for all of those faults?  When the pressure was on, even McNair’s abhorrent system failed completely.  When the German attack at the Bulge overwhelmed the American casualty-replacement system (which had, in addition to all the aforementioned faults, started shutting down the supply of replacement infantrymen to Europe to get ready to invade Japan) the Army had to press cooks, mechanics, bakers, signalmen, and thousands of air force cadets into service as infantry – with, again, horrendous casualties.

So bad was the system, and so desperate was the Army for replacement infantry, that the Army was forced to move units of African-American truck drivers into infantry roles.  The Army had shied away from putting black units into combat – although there were several (more later in the series) – much less integrating them.

But this was desperate.  Still, unlike other replacements, black troops were fed into the line in platoons of 40 men, intended to stay separate from their white comrades in the bled-white rifle companies.  But the frictional attrition of war broke that down; soon, black squads of 10 served in white platoons of 40.  Then, black men served in white squads, and eventually shared foxholes with white troops – who, by this point in the war, were happy to have someone covering them.

So in a sense, the complete breakdown of McNair’s replacement system helped usher in the integration of the Army; officers who’d seen the performance of black troops alongside white troops in Belgium and Germany in 1945 were not averse to leading mixed troops in action in Korea, five years later.

Black and white soldiers together, in Korea, 1950.

Changes:  Today, the US Army closely reflects its long-term reactions to General McNair’s legacy.  The Army’s been integrated for almost seventy years, of course – well ahead of American society as a whole.

That New Tank Smell:  And jarred by the immense casualties of the Armored Force in its explosive Sherman tanks, the Army embarked on a generations-long battle to make its tanks not only more powerful, but more survivable.  The M-26 led to three generations of development; the M-46/M-47, the M-48 and finally M-60, all solid, reliable, well-armored vehicles with at the very least competitive hitting power.   They rarely fought in combat – Vietnam was mostly an infantryman’s war – but the M-48 and M-60 series vehicles in Israeli service crushed their Soviet-built opponents in 1967 and 1973 and 1981.

And then to the revolutionary development of the M-1 Abrams, which has for over thirty years not only been able to kill every enemy tank that faced it with relative ease, but whose crewmen have, in twenty years in combat in Kuwait and Iraq, not suffered a single fatality from a through-the-armor shot by an enemy weapon.

Hi, We’re The Replacements:  And the US Army scrapped the Individual Replacement System.

During World War 2, units were created in a serial fashion; after they created the 75th Infantry Division, they created the 76th Infantry Division.  Then the 77th Infantry Division, and so on.  They were little more than numbers, without any tradition, any history to evoke any esprit de corps in the young men who’d be doing the fighting.  This was a contrast to the British and Commonwealth armies, where men joined battalions that were spawned from “Regiments” that had long, storied histories.  It was also a contrast with US Marine Corps, where each of the infantry regiments traces a history back through World War I, the Civil War, even the War of 1812, a history that’s spun into a mythology that the USMC uses to instill a sense of pride in the unit (the technical term is “esprit de corp“) that, in combat, has a role in carrying the individual soldier through the worst of times.  In combat, every little bit helps.  And so in the sixties, the US Army began association units with historical regiments, and making thost tradition a part of soldiers’ training - especially in Infantry, Armor and Artillery.

Not that being a replacement got much easier for US troops – but in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq it was never the disastrous human meatgrinder that General McNair created.

The personally disastrous intersection between man and bomb 70 years ago today did not, by itself, ring in all those changes in the way the US Army fought its wars – ithe changes happened over the course of forty years.

But the reaction to the death and wasteage that flowed from General McNair’s best efforts had effects that are still acting on the US military today.

That’s Rock And Roll

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In the whole history of pop music, the whole “hypstr chicks warbling out-of-tune protest-y songs over campfire-style guitar-strumming” is the third worst genre ever hatched (behind only “hypstr chicks warbling out-of-tune protest-y songs over plinky pianos” and, worst of all, “hypster chicks warbling out-of-tune protest-y songs over ukuleles”).  Wanna call that part of the “war on women?”  I’m OK with that.  The genre is that bad.  Someone’s gotta say it.  I’ll take the hit for the betterment of humanity.

On the other hand?  If you are a progressive, this song is the call to action you need…:

…because if you are a “progressive”, Elizabeth Warren – Cherokee chieftain that she is – is the only intellectually honest choice for President in 2016.

You don’t have to believe me. The out-of-tune chick warbling partly in-tune over the politely-strummed, co-op-approved campfire guitar has spoken.

A Watchdog That Only Barks At Mailmen

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

They completely missed the real scandal, which is President Obama’s imperial disregard for the law, but at least this is a step in the right direction. Sorry about the annoying survey pop-up, no wonder nobody reads that newspaper.

Gun-running to Mexico and refusing to enforce the borders don’t bother the editors. Closing the ocean is no problem. Targeting Americans for drone strikes is fine. But sneak a peek at a journalist’s email and they turn on you like savages.

Better late than never.

Joe Doakes

it’s hard to come up with even a short list of things that’ve disgusted me about this administration, and about this country during this administration, but on the very short list would have to be the fact that the media only act like watchdogs when the media, itself, is affected.

There needs to be in accounting for that, someday.

Trulbert!, Part II – Blink

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 – 9PM, Saturday, August 30 – Somewhere in South Minneapolis, MN
It had been a long, brutal day – exactly enough to make Paul Hendrickson wish he’d gone to his sister-in-law’s baby shower with his wife instead. Ten hours in the office chasing bugs, another day’s worth coming up tomorrow, and no end in sight.

And nobody at home; Lynn had taken the kids to visit their cousins up in Bemidji, and nobody would be home until Sunday night.

He drove up Hiawatha Avenue, past the desultory light rail and spotty car traffic, and saw a joint he’d never seen before - the “Invisible Hand” Bar and Grill, on Hiawatha somewhere in the forties.  One of the girls in QA had told him they made a great burger.

But they had me at beer, Hendrickson thought, as he tried to remember the last time he’d been in a bar without either his wife or his co-workers.  Since the Clinton years, for sure, he mused as he pulled into the parking lot.  He hesitated – I could just nuke some leftover beef stew, he thought – before turning off the car and walking into the bar.  He yawned loudly as he walked into the bar.  A whiteboard sign pointed an arrow labeled “Seat Yourself” to the left, and “TRU LBRT, The Gathering!” to the right.

“Defininitely want “Seat  Yourself“,Hendrickson thought, absent-mindedly turning to the right.

He stepped into a large back-room, about half full of people, and grabbed a seat at a table and opened a menu.

“Welcome!”, chirped Dave Os, in a different tweed jacket, wering a different bow-tie, sitting down at Hendrickson’s table.

“Um…hello?” Hendrickson replied, looking suspiciously over the top of his menu.

“So what’s your interest in liberty?” Os asked, his fingers absendmindedly running through the impeccably-tended whiskers of his beard.

“Um – I’m strongly in favor?”  Hendrickson replied looking for a waitress.

“Good!”, said Os, as Ron Pallsacher – wearing a Gadsden flag t-shirt – sat down next to him.

“So…why are you asking me?” asked Hendrickson, looking for a waitress who seemed not to be coming at all.

“Oh, you’re at the TRU LBRT gathering!”, said Pallsacher, pronouncing it “True Liberty”.

“Huh.  I guess I’m in the wrong room”.

“Or maybe the right room”, Os said.  “I mean, do you value freedom, don’t you?”

“Well, I’m married, so clearly it’s an academic question to me…”

“So you don’t value liberty?”, Pallsacher chimed in, missing the joke.

“No, no, of course I do…although I really don’t know what you’re getting at”, Hendrickson said, giving up on the waitress for the moment.

“What we’re getting at”, said Pallsacher, “is that government takes away your liberty, and we’re going out to take it back”. Os nodded.

“Ah.  I gotcha.  Well, sort of”, Hendrickson said, leaning forward in his chair, dusting off a mental drawer that hadn’t been opened in quite a few years of not reading much about politics.  “Like what liberties have we lost?”

“Oh, like the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures”, Os said, nervously twisting a lock of his beard into a little spike, then un-twisting it.

“Oh yeah – like all those no-knock SWAT team raids.  Yeah, I’ve heard about those.  Those are bad news”.

“Or taxes!”, said Pallsacher, his fists clenched in excitement as Arnie Quist, wearing fashionably unwashed raw-denim jeans and a formal seed cap, sat down next to Hendrickson.

“Well, yeah – my taxesaremighty high”, Hendrickson nodded, casting a suspicious glance at Quist. 
“Why should you have to pay any taxes at all?”, Os asked. 
“Er…to support the government?”, Hendrickson replied gingerly, provoking chuckles from Os, Pallsacher and Quist.
“Most of our problems stem from government”, Quist said, to enthusiastic nods from Os and Pallsacher. 
“You’re telling me.  I work in healthcare software.  What a freaking nightmare”, Hendrickson said, to nods from the other men. 
“It’s so far beyond healthcare.  Most of the problems in this world are caused by government.  That’s why I’m an anarcho-capitalist”, said Os. 
“Huh”, said Hendrickson, sorting out the phrase in his head.  “Capitalism without government.  So how does that work?”
“Very well!”, said Quist. 
“Where?” asked Hendrickson.
“Well, nowhere, yet”
“OK, I figured that.  But I mean, literally – how does it work?   How do you have capitalism without some sort of court system to enforce contracts?”
“Courts can be corrupted by the banksters that control goverment”, Quist chimed in, as Oz Streachan sat next to Os. 
“Right, I get that.  But how do you enforce contracts?  I mean, I’ve had to take vendors to court for non-delivery.  How do you do that without having some sort of government?”
“Everyone observes the NAP – the Non-Aggression Principle”, said Pallsacher. 
“They have no reason not to, without government distorting the free market”, added Os. 
“OK”, said Hendrickson, “I’m going to have to think about that one.  But this “non-aggression principle” brings up the other thing – like, defending the country…”, he said, stopping when all four men started laughing.  “OK, what?”
“Well”, said Quist, “wars happen because governments exist.  In a world without governments and the interests that control them, and everyone observing the Non-Aggression Principle, there’d be no need for defense, since there’d be no government to defend against”. 
“So everyone in the world will just suddenly agree to get along?”, Hendrickson asked, looking at the four men. 
“Well, it’ll take some time to win everyone over – which is what we’re working on tonight!”, said Quist. 
“So Al Quaeda will stop trying to kill us, because…”
“Because we won’t be trying to kill them”, said Streachan. 
“Gotcha.  OK – so who builds the roads?”
The four men – now joined by Frena Marquette and Bill Durburgh – erupted laughing.
“Who’ll ‘build the roads’”, Quist chuckled. 
“Yeah, never heard that one before!” guffawed Streachan. 
Hendrickson looked among his six tablemates.   “OK, so how do roads get built – say, a road between two cities across private land, without any recourse to eminent domain?”
“The private market will settle it”, Os and Durburgh responded, as Pallsacher answered “Really, there can be no more inland cities”, while Streachan and Quist chimed in “Hover cars!”, and Marquette replied “their problem, not mine”.
Hendrickson looked at them.  “Huh.  Interesting.  So the the perfect world will become perfect through the complete lack of government?”
“Yes!”, answered all six immediately.
“Interesting”, Hendrickson replied.  “Hey – I’m supposed to meet someone across town.  Nice to meet you all.  Gotta dash”. 
Os handed Hendrickson a business card reading “Dave Os – Social De-Engineer”.  “Call me if you want to get involved!”
“Will do!”, said Hendrickson.  “Nice to meet you all”, he said, side-stepping toward the door. 

– 11AM East China Time, Sunday, August 31 – Shanghai, Peoples Republic of China

Field Marshal Li Wang H’sing groaned, half in pain, half in pleasure, as the masseuse’s fingers dug into the fleshy skin of his upper back.

Li’s uniform coat – hung neatly on the door to the room, whose view overlooked Shanghai harbor from the 42nd Floor of the Peoples’ Liberation Bank headquarters building – had six stars on the epaulettes. His ID card – tucked into his wallet, in his back pants pocket, also hanging from the door – identified him as as the Commander of the People’s Liberation Bank.

And the masseuse – an 18 year old girl from Sichuan – was definitely in line for a promotion to Sergeant.

The door knocked, three times, briskly.

“Enter”, Li yelled in his dense, Shanghai accent.

Colonel Wu T’ang Klan – a trim, athletic 40-something man in a Peoples’ Liberation Army officer’s daily dress uniform with a “Cybercommando” patch on the left shoulder – entered the room. Eyeing the masseuse, he smiled – the perks of command were indeed excellent, he briefly mused, pondering his own evening’s plans after getting off duty in the Operations Center. But he shook the thought off.

“What is it, Wu?” Li groaned.

“Three things, Comrade Field Marshal. First – Commissioner Fong is going to be here at eight to discuss the matter of the natural gas exports”

Li groaned. It wasn’t the first time this issue had raised its head.

Wu continued “Your wife called. Her car is on the way”.

Li’s eyes popped open wide. “That was the second item of business? Are you mad?”

Wu continued, calmly. “The third, matter – the purchase of US Government Bonds”.

But Li was already up, rustling for his clothes. “Screw the bonds”, he muttered in his thick, Shanghai accent, nearly unintelligible to speakers of other Chinese dialects. Li usually spoke a higher dialect of Mandarin to avoid trouble…

…but not this day. He blurted it out.

And to Wu – a native of Szechuan – it sounded for all the world like “Sell the Bonds”.

“By your leave, Comrade Field Marshal”, he said, executing a crisp salute and leaving as the Field Marshal frantically got dressed.

Wu walked briskly down the hall toward the elevator, returning salutes from a group of People’s Liberation Army Commerce Guards. An elevator car was waiting, and he climbed in for his ride down to the basement Operations Center.

Wu knew Li was nobody to mess with. In a thirty year career in the Peoples’ Liberation Army, Li had been at the thick of every action. His record was well-known; a platoon leader during the building of the Hong Kong casinos; a company commander during the cracking of the encryption for the Microsoft Windows source code, he was promoted quickly to command a Battalion. Tasked with leading the merger and acquisition of a Welsh fish and chips chain, he’d led their expansion into Africa and Asia, getting him a Regiment command. And there he might have stalled – but for his near-miraculous turnaround on the response to a sell-off of an overleveraged derivate, which he turned from a defensive play to a major fiscal victory, getting him division and then Field Fiscal Army command. Then, during the bidding war to supply natural gas to Korea, he jumped over thousands of other three-star generals to become PLA Mergers and Acquisitions Director, which added three and then four stars to his shoulders. This brought him to command of the Peoples Liberation Bank three years ago – just in time to lead it to victory in the war over the deferred accrual of Singaporean derivatives, which led to the epic fiscal “Victory of the Ten Swans”, as it was called in the popular song that all the school children sang to Li’s honor. Tough, smart, politically bulletproof, Li was a good wagon for a young greyhound like Wu to be hitched to.

Then Wu laughed. Who would hitch a grayhound to a wagon?

This brought Wu to the Operations Center of the People’s Liberation Bank. He swiped his ID card, and the door slid open with a briskswish. He walked through a splendid marble anteroom, dotted with tables at which senior officers sat, talking furtively, drinking tea and scotch and discussing fiscal policy. A steward offered him a cup – an exquisite porcelain demitasse, no doubt a product of Hai’nan’s finest craftspeople – of the bank’s utterly divine strain of H’ung Lang tea. Wu took a sip, then another. Then, taking a deep breath, he left it on the table, and stepped to a door guarded by two Peoples’ Liberation Bank guards. As he returned the guards’ snappy salute, the door opened, and the serene, incense-scented quiet of the anteroom was bludgeoned with the noise of the Peoples’ Liberation Bank bond trading floor.

Wu stepped out onto the marble balcony, thirty feet above the trading floor, as the duty sergeant major bellowed “Attention”. The men on the balcony – the guards, four telephone talkers, and Lieutenant Wang Hung Long, the third-shift duty officer, snapped to attention, saluting the Colonel.

“As you were. Wang!”

“Sir!”

“Comrade Marshal Li has ordered we sell all American bonds”.

Wang grabbed a white binder from a shelf along the wall way from the floor, and flipped to the “bond sale” protocol. “Sir – I acknowledge the sale of all American government bonds!” He turned to Captain Shih Pang Fung. “Captain. Initiate a sell order on all American government bonds”.

Captain Shih turned to Wa How Chung, the grizzled old sergeant major. “Initiate a sale of all American government bonds”.

Sergeant Major Wa took a microphone, and pressed the talk key. As he started speaking, the floor fell quiet.

“Now hear this. How hear this. Initiate a complete sale of all American government bonds. I repeat; Initiate a complete sale of all American government bonds. That is all”.

The floor erupted in a cataract of noise, as lieutenant-colonels ordered the companies of their floor trading battalions into action. The company captains passed frantic orders to the sergeants, who ordered squads of private on the phones to start placing “sell” orders on American bonds. Paper carriers, their sergeants cursing at them and jogging at double time, brought more sale forms to the phone-men at the front line, who ran through the forms as fast as they could. Stretcher bearers carried the casualties off the floor, as replacements – scared and just out of business school – took their places on the phones.

Wu stood impassively, giving no sign of his anxieties as the battle drill unfolded below other than his right hand clencing and unclenching.

But finally – three hours later, Sergeant Wa Jin Kang, exhausted, shuffled through the piles of paper and stepped over exhausted comrades, carrying a Chinese flag up the steps to the balcony. He wearily stepped up the stairs, to the top, saluted Wu, and reported “Sir, we have sold the last of the bonds”.

Wu executed a snappy return salute, prompting a weary but loud cheer from the floor.

“As you were”, said Wu, wondering if anything would ever really be as it was again.

Whatcha Gonna Do When They Come For You?

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Like most people of my generation, I was brought up to respect and trust the police.

Of course, conservatism is about enduring social orders, and, when absolutely necessary and when nothing else will work, applying judicious force to protect that order against those that would harm, rob or swindle others, within the boundaries of fair, just laws on which there was broad consensus.

But conservatism is also about limited government – the proverbial good government that governs least.

And it says impossible to miss as it is troubling to notice that nearly every day seems to bring another story of grotesque police overreach; of swat teams barging into the wrong house, shooting dogs and handcuffing people and terrorizing children (or, in one recent case, burning and disfiguring them with Military grade flash bang grenades) only to find that it’s the wrong address (and then tearing the place apart to find something, anything illegal to justify the raid, and still leaving the homeowners to pay for the damages; “rogue” cops trampling all over citizens rights.

On the one hand, criticizing the police goes against conservatives’ DNA, in some ways; it is a difficult and necessary job.

On the other hand, or the past 20 years the police have been getting more and more powerful – and, with the blessing of not a few courts that seem to forgotten what the Constitution was for, made the 4th amendment almost as meaningless as the 10th.

And criticizing the heavy handedness of the police doesn’t come without blowback; you can usually count on a few responses almost immediately:

  • “You could never do the job” – other than “reading addresses correctly” and knowing the difference between a dangerous dog and family pet barking to protect his family, you’re probably right. That’s why I pay taxes for the police department. As employees. Not feudal lords and masters.
  • “Without police, society would be overrun with criminals!” – For starters, it’s a strawman; nobody’s talking about getting rid of the police. Again, I pay taxes, in part, for a police force. As employees, to keep the order – not like medieval knights to whom I, the mere citizen, must bow and scrape.
  • “What’s the matter? If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from the police. Maybe you have something to hide…” – I’m not saying that people who say this with a straight, unironic face want a dictatorial police state. I’m just saying that dictatorial police states need lots of people who think this kind of idiocy to have a chance to take root. And in a society is overrun with rules and regulations as ours is, I think it’s fairly safe to say that absolutely no one hasn’t broken some sort of law.
  • “You can’t blame the police for wanting to come home alive at the end of the shift” – Absolutely. And watching the way the police sprayed fire at innocent civilians during the manhunt for rogue cop Christopher Dornan in California two years ago, or watching police wound nine people – none of them the perpetrator – chasing a shooter around the Empire State building in New York City, you can’t blame me for wanting to do the same.

AJ Delgado, writing in National Review,
points out the danger in unthinking, knee-jerk support for the police.

He starts with the obligatory disclaimer – although that’s not enough to forestall some of the knee-jerk reactions he gets his comments section:

Let’s get the obligatory disclaimer out of the way: Yes, many police officers do heroic works and, yes, many are upstanding individuals who serve the community bravely and capably.

But respecting good police work means being willing to speak out against civil-liberties-breaking thugs who shrug their shoulders after brutalizing citizens.

Read the whole thing.

Delgado points out that, but some statistical measures, police are actually better behaved than they used to be. And in an era where everyone has a cell phone with a video camera, it’s getting harder and harder for police to misbehave.

On the other hand, now that local police forces are running around with SWAT teams decks out in better battle rattle than the local National Guard unit, the stakes are even higher than they used to be.

Read the whole thing.

Marketing

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It’s nice to feel welcome.
20140724-082838-30518143.jpg
Joe Doakes

i’m always puzzled by stores that post themselves “no firearms”. Carry permit holders are, on average, about 3% of Minnesota customers. Members of every gun-control organization combined amount to less than 1% of 1%.

How many people would you rather have stay away from your business?

Every Parent A Felon

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When I was five years old, I walked to kindergarten every day. It was three blocks each way. For that matter, so did nearly every other five-year-old who lived within three blocks of the place.

The next year? First grade? I and all my friends walked six blocks each way to school.

My parents would probably be arrested today.

That’s the subject of Ross Douthat’s latest.

And besides the usual snickering at the overweening, overprotective helicopter parent run amok, Douthat points out something much more corrosive:

Third is an erosion of community and social trust, which has made ordinary neighborliness seem somehow unnatural or archaic, and given us instead what Gracy Olmstead’s article in The American Conservative dubs the “bad Samaritan” phenomenon — the passer-by who passes the buck to law enforcement as expeditiously as possible. (Technology accentuates this problem: Why speak to a parent when you can just snap a smartphone picture for the cops?)

20 years of watching John Walsh has turned us into a nation of Dwight Schrutes.

Except when child protective services gets involved, nobody walks away laughing.

Eggs For The Omelet, As It Were

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Michelle Obama wants grocery stores to install talking grocery carts that will encourage shoppers to buy healthier food.
I predict that as soon as my medical records become part of Obama-care, the NSA will monitor the bar code scanner as I load the talking grocery cart with purchases and when it sees the package of Hostess Ding Dongs, a red light will flash and the cart will shout “HELP HELP UNWISE FOOD CHOICE IN AISLE THREE” until a Team Member arrives to take away the unhealthy item to replace it with a nice head of broccoli.
I can hardly wait.
Joe Doakes

It’ll have to do until the kids are trained to do the ratting-out more reliably.

Trulbert! Part I: State Of Affairs

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– 8AM, Wednesday, August 29, 2014 – Longfellow Neighborhood, South Minneapolis

Myron Ilktost fumbled in his pocket for his keychain.

“Don’t forget to lock the door!” bellowed a disembodied female voice from at least two rooms away inside the house.

“I’ve got it,  honey”, Ilktost replied, straining to make his thin, reedy voice heard over the dishwasher that was clanking away in the kitchen.  As he shut the door, the woman – Iris, his wife of 32 years – bellowed “because you keep forgetting!”.

“Locking it now, honey”, he replied, shutting the door and turning the key.

He kept the keychain in his hand as he walked to his car – a green, ten year old Subaru Forester with a single “Don’t Park The Bus” sticker affixed to the back bumper.

A faint whiff of blue smoke puffed from the exhaust as Ilktost backed out of his prim driveway and out onto 42nd Avenue in South Minneapolis.  The perennials he’d labored over for so long were just starting to bloom after a hard, long winter.  Ilktost drove about six blocks, to a church building – Jehovah Methodist.  He picked the keychain up from his passenger seat, and lumbered up to the side door.

Slight, about 5’8, tidy, balding, mustachioed, gray-haired and 56 years old, wearing a gray alpaca sweater and khaki pants, Ilktost unlocked the door and turned on the lights inside the building.  He walked to the church office, sat down at a sixties-institutional desk, turned on an early-2000s vintage Gateway PC, and started rummaging through a small stack of flyers, handwritten notes and – eventually – emails.

After a few minutes, he was interrupted by a knock on the door.  He looked through the window.  It was the UPS man.  He opened the door.

“Mister Liktost?” asked the deliveryman.

“That’s I-L-K-Tost”, Ilktost said, sounding mildly worried.

“Ah, OK.  My bad.  Please sign for this”.

Ilktost took the deliveryman’s clipboard.  “I have to get this sunday’s program together”, he muttered, as much for himself as the deliveryman’s benefit.

“Ah.  Well, I’ll get out of your way” said the UPS man, mission accomplished.

Ilktost locked the door and went back to work.  Programs don’t put themselves together.

– 5:20 PM, Thursday, August 29 – Downtown Minneapolis

“Programs don’t put themselves together”.

Joshua Nieman shook his head as he said it, as if Paul Hendrickson had never heard any of it before.

“Yeah, I know”, said Hendrickson, who at 45 was 20 years older than Nieman.  “I know the requirements were hosed.  We’re in catch-up mode.  Just trying to keep Tofte from crawling up both our asses”.

“Well, I’m not working this weekend”, said the younger man.  “I’ve got a Modern Warfare hackathon to do”.

“Yeah, keep your weekend.  We’re not curing cancer, here”, said Hendrickson.  “Just give me an estimate Monday morning, OK?”

Nieman grunted, and Hendrickson walked away down the aisle separating two of the forty rows of cubes at Claimtech.

It was 5:45 PM, he noticed as he checked his phone for messages.  There were several – mostly work-related.  A text message from Lynn telling him to bring cat food home.

And that’s just what I’m gonna do.

He picked up his jacket at his cube, walked out to the ramp, drove half an hour up 494, then Cedar, then Crosstown, over to 34th. Into the convenience store, back out with the cat food, then up 34th to 48th, then over a few blocks to the tidy little Cape Cod that’d been his family’s home since they bought it from Lynn’s parents ten years earlier.

Abby – ten years old – was playing with the dog in the back yard.   ”Hi, Daddy!” she said.  “I taught Buck to play dead!”.

She looks so much like my mom at that age, Hendrickson thought as the skinny, colt-legged blond girl put Buck, the family’s eight year old Springer Spaniel, through its paces.

“That’s awesome, honey!”, he said as Abby and Buck took a bow, both grinning from ear to ear.  “I”m gonna go in and see Mommy”.

“OK!”

Hendrickson walked in the back door, up the stairs into the kitchen.  Lynn – a pretty, auburn-haired 38 year old, Hendrickson’s wife of 16 years – was throwing cheese sandwiches onto the grill as a crock pot of stew simmered in the background.

Hendrickson tiptoed up the stairs and tiptoed quickly across the kitchen floor, wrapping his arms around Lynn from behind.  “Mmm – hello!”, she purred.  “That bean stew thing you have in the pot smells glorious”.

He kissed her on the neck.  “So where are Charlie and Dani?”

“Dani’s over at the Torstengardsens doing a science project with Vicky.  And Charlie’s at track practice.”

“Hmm.  So they’re pretty much occupied…?”

“I bought a bottle of wine for later…”

Hendrickson smiled.  “Nice.  Thank God it’s Friday!”

His wife purred, leaning back to kiss his cheek.  “You sure you can’t come to Carrie’s for the shower?”

“Nah.  Stupid project deadline”

“And I know how much you love baby showers”.

“Half of one and six dozen of the other.  I’d much rather be there than working on this bug-stomp this weekend”, Hendrickson purred into his wife’s ear, nibbling the ear lobe ever so slightly…

“Ew”, shouted a crackly, adolescent male voice, as Charlie Hendrickson – a gangly, red-headed teen in track shorts and a school t-shirt – stomped up the back stairs three at a time.  “Gross, you two.  Stop it.  When’s dinner?”

“Ten minutes.  Take a shower first”, Lynn patiently responded as Paul slowly let go and walked to start setting the table.

“Yep.  Thank God it’s Thursday”.

– 9:00PM, Friday, August 29, 2014 – On the “TRU LBRT NOW!” Facebook Page

A sultry breeze blew from the west, sweeping across the south end of Plymouth, MN, where Dave Os, a late-20-ish man in with a carefully-tended beard, a tweed blazer, jeans and a “Doors” T-shirt, sat at a table at an outdoor bar patio.  Idly waiting for some friends to show up, he noodled through his Facebook timeline.  An article caught his attention, about a planned light rail line that would connect the northwest suburbs of the Twin Cities with downtown.

Os shared the article to “TRU LBRT NOW”, a libertarian Facebook page of which he was a member, writing “Great.  More money suck from government”.  He clicked the “Post” button as his friends arrived.

The warm breeze swept east, crossing Saint Louis Park, where Ron Pallsacher, a mildly obese 35-year-old with an acne-pocked face and a scraggly blondish beard, sat on the balcony of his apartment, working on fixing some JQuery code for one of his clients.  He saw the “Incoming Message” popup, and saw Os’s posting.  He read it, typed “another installment payment in the progressive statist dream”, clicked “Post”, and went back to work.

The breeze rolled across Highway 100, briefly juddering a Ford Econoline van driven by Arnie Quist, a dark-haired, 30-ish man with a dense black beard,wearing a seed cap, as he drove southward carrying a load of mulch for his garden.  He read Os and Pallsacher’s posts as he drove, and – ignoring the safety rules about texting and driving – clicked his “voice to text” function on his phone: “Not just progressives.  Republicans equally worthless!”.  He clicked “Post”, just before narrowly missing a Toyota Corolla that had legally merged onto the road.

The puff of wind rolled up Lake Street in Minneapolis, ruffling the hair of Oz Streachan – a 6’6  tall 40-year-old man, with a Billy Gibbons beard, an awlward gait and a voice that sounded incongruously high and light for such a tall man, who was en route to one of the rooftop bars in Uptown for a friend’s bachelor party.  He saw the notification, read it, and typed “The only way to get good governmente is no goverment”, he typed raggedly as he stood next to the light pole, before the light turned green.

An eddy of the breeze – which was becoming less sweet and more humid as it rolled across the city – swept through an open window into the Powderhorn Park-area efficiency apartmet of Frena Marquette – 5’6, 25 years old, with purple hair and overly-thick eyeliner, wearing a “Ron Paul Express 2012″ t-shirt, busy folding her laundry.  She saw the notification on her IPad, and typed “No Gummint?  Oh, Noes!  Who’ll build the roadz?”.  Satisfied, she chuckled, and went back to folding.

The breeze – smelling less like west-suburban gardens than auto exhaust, by now – rolled across the Marshall-Lake Bridge and across the front of Izzy’s Ice Cream Parlor, where sat Bill Durburgh – in a white dress shirt, a bow tie, a helmet of “televangellist” that he’d been cultivating as an “ironic statement” for three yers, and a perfectly-trimmed beard.  He looked at his Android, saw the list of comments, and typed “This is why all voting is a waste.  The best thing we can do is throw off the chains of all government”, hitting “post” and then angrily swearing as a drip of ice cream plopped onto his screen.

The breeze – another part of it, a mile south of Durburgh – swept through the yard of Myron Ilktost.  Ilktost was busily weeding the flower bed in front of his house, swatting at mosquitos.

“Are you STILL doing that?”, bellowed the disembodied voice of his wife.

“No, Dear”, Ilktost yelled.  Not for long, he muttered under his breath.

When The ObamaCare Story Is Finally Written…

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…then:

  1. It will no doubt be written by someone from outside the American mainstream media (but that’s a no-brainer)
  2. Somebody will no doubt note and write about the deep, intense web of influence UnitedHealth group, based in Minnetonka, has spun for itself with this administration.

Naturally, it won’t happen until Obama leaves office. But I’m just saying.

Heck, it’s something to look forward to.

No Pep

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Stopped at Pep Boys on South Robert to buy epoxy for a cracked bumper. Pep Boys Bans Guns In This Store. I asked if that was a franchise decision but the counterman said no, all Pep Boys stores are corporate. So I went up the street to O’Reilly Auto Parts instead.

No, I wasn’t carrying. But if they don’t want my business on my terms, I’m happy to take it elsewhere.

Joe Doakes
Como Park

As everyone should.

I haven’t voluntarily patronized a posted business since 2003. I’ve specifically thanked businesses that took down their idiot signs.

Now is no time to let old habits die.

Death Cult

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In the lulls between Palestinian/Israeli combat, I sometimes forget how very, very depressed I get at how very ill-informed Americans are about the recent history of the Middle East.

I’ve even seen relatively intelligent acquaintances of mine claim that both sides, Palestinian and Israeli, are morally equal.  One trumpeted “both sides are run by extremists!”, by way of excusing the Palestinians.

I’m going to link to this piece by Dennis Prager – the best, simplest explanation of the last seventy years I’ve ever seen.

“The Israelis want to have a state.  The Palestinians want the Jews dead”.

There is no moral equivalence.

Revelation

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Danusha Goska – a former card-carrying leftist, with the Berkeley degree to prove it – voted GOP in 2012, after a lifetime of being a “progressive”.

Here are her top ten reasons she made the switch.  Many of them track with my own reasons, 30-odd years ago.  Many others were things I’d never have dreamed of.  They boil down to “the left is motivated by hate; the right is not”.

Read the whole thing.  It’s worth it.  .

.

Climate Of Ridicule

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 A friend of mine in the insurance industry sent me this:

The Minnesota Department of Commerce sent a Climate Risk Disclosure Questionnaire to Minnesota insurers yesterday and ended up on my desk. It is ridiculous.

Here’s some background to it.

Here’s the exact survey I received yesterday, it’s a pretty standard form used by other states.
Here’s how I really want to answer. I think this accurately captures how all insurance companies ought to answer.

Your friend,
[redacted]

I’ll include the survey (and my friend’s answers, in italics) below. 

———-

Climate Risk Disclosure Survey

Question One: Does the company have a plan to assess, reduce or mitigate its emissions in its operations or organizations?

No.

Question Two: Does the company have a climate change policy with respect to risk
management and investment management? If yes, please summarize. If no, how do you
account for climate change in your risk management?

Yes, we look for industries that will are particularly vulnerable to higher taxes and fees from proposed carbon credit trading and excessive carbon taxes. In addition we are monitoring industries that are vulnerable to higher energy prices caused by an expected government policies which will force industry away from cheaper, safer, and more efficient carbon-based energy sources.

Question Three: Describe your company’s process for identifying climate change-related risks and assessing the degree that they could affect your business, including financial implications.

Since all of the scientific models predicting climate change are completely unreliable, an actuarial assessment of climate-related risks would also be completely unreliable. Therefore no financial implications can be adequately factored in to our financial modeling.

Question Four: Summarize the current or anticipated risks that climate change poses to your company. Explain the ways that these risks could affect your business. Include identification of the geographical areas affected by these risks.

Since all of the scientific models predicting climate change are completely unreliable, an actuarial assessment of climate-related risks would also be completely unreliable. Therefore no financial implications can be adequately factored in to our financial modeling.

Question Five: Has the company considered the impact of climate change on its investment
portfolio? Has it altered its investment strategy in response to these considerations? If so,
please summarize steps you have taken.

Yes, we look for industries that will are particularly vulnerable to higher taxes and fees from proposed carbon credit trading and excessive carbon taxes. In addition we are monitoring industries that are vulnerable to higher energy prices caused by an expected government policies which will force industry away from cheaper, safer, and more efficient carbon-based energy sources.

Question Six: Summarize steps the company has taken to encourage policyholders to reduce the losses caused by climate change-influenced events.

We have not taken any.

Question Seven: Discuss steps, if any, the company has taken to engage key constituencies on the topic of climate change.

None.

Question Eight: Describe actions the company is taking to manage the risks climate change
poses to your business including, in general terms, the use of computer modeling.

We are monitoring the additional carbon-related taxes and fees being imposed by all levels of government and building these into our financial models which predict higher costs of doing business and we are planning to raise our premiums to cover these additional fees.

———-

I think that was a perfectly useful template.

Protection

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

. Connecticut mother leaves 11 year old child in car, gets arrested by police.
California mother leaves 12 year old child in car while she visits bank, gets shot by police.
Is it just me, or is “child protection” getting out of hand?
Joe Doakes
Como Park

Like all those Vietnamese villages that had to be destroyed to protect them…

I Saw NARN Drinking A PIna Colada At Trader Vic’s

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Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

  • I’ll be live at the CarCraft Summer Nationals at the Fairgrounds today!  Come on out and join us!
  • Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
  • Tomorrow, Brad Carlson is on “The Closer”!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:

Join us!

 
 
 
 
 
 

Rose Colored Glasses

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You can’t escape it on Twitter or in the Media – the DFL and its various spokespeople, and the media (pardon the redundancy) crowing about Minnesota’s job numbers.

Because raising taxes creates jobs, dammit!

Except, as Bill Glahn notes, the numbers just don’t add up.

The state and its minions have been crowing that the state gained 8.500 jobs in June, and a total of 10,700 jobs so far this year.

Doing the arithmetic, that total means Minnesota gained 8,500 jobs in June, but a mere 2,200 jobs in the five months of January through May, combined.

And it the numbers get more interestinger:

 Each month DEED also reports on the jobs created in the previous 12 months, for a rolling look at the number of jobs created for a year-long period. For the 12 months ending June 2014, DEED reports Minnesota created almost 53,800 jobs. That figure would mean that we’d created 43,100 jobs in the six month of July through December 2013, but a mere 10,700 jobs in the most recent six months. Rather than suggesting an economic boom, those numbers indicate a real weakness in our state’s economy.

Bad, politically-driven reporting from the state?  Casual illiterate reporting from the media? 

Glahn’s not done:

 But consider this anomaly:
 
Reporting
 
Jobs Gained
 
Month
Month
YTD
Last 12 Mo.
June
8,500
10,700
53,779
May
10,300
—
45,617
April
(4,200)
—
41,934
March
2,600
—
41,582
February
(100)
—
44,714
January
600
—
52,160
Total
17,700
 
 
 
Adding together the number of jobs created each month in 2014, as reported by DEED, produces a total of 17,700 jobs for the year so far. So that means that sometime during the last few months, 7,000 jobs have vanished from the official state rolls.

“Unexpectedly” vanished, of course.

Glahn predicts the state’s rosy “8,500″ number for June will be gradually revised out of existence.

To be replaced – this is my prediction – by more inflated, misleading predictions intended to lull the incurious.

And the news consumers they report to.

An Unexpected Disappointing Tragedy

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A guided missile shoots down a Malaysian jetliner carrying over 200 people including almost 2 dozen Americans, is apparently shot down over a proxy war zone.

The President observes the “tragedy” briefly, and then goes back on script to demand Republicans build more airports. 

It’s tiresome to keep repeating “if it’d been any Republican, can you imagine how different the media response would be”.  But it’s still true.

Why I’m Never Running For Office

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About ten years ago, a sitting (at the time) GOP representative and long-time friend of this blog told me “you do realize, Mitch, that between the blog and your show, you can never, ever run for political office, don’t you?”

The fact that my written body of work is, no doubt, some oppo researcher’s dream has certainly served to keep me from getting too enthusiastic about pursuing a life in politics. 

And that’s largely a good thing.

Of course, opposition research on both sides – but especially the Democrats – is dedicated to making running for office as personally gruelling as possible for anyone who’d want to try.

Which is why the leftymedia’s on-cue jumping up and down like a bunch of poo-flinging monkey’s over Sheila Kihne’s old, excellent but long-dormant blog is so unsurprising. 

Of course, since it’s a primary battle, some Republicans are pitching in to defend incumbent Jennifer Loon against Kihne’s challenge. 

I suppose that’s one good thing about the blog; it’s cut down on any temptation.

The Good Cop

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Detroit Police Chief James Craig attributes part of 37% drop in armed robbery to armed homeowners making life a little too, er, “brisk” for the city’s thugs:

Detroit has experienced 37 percent fewer robberies in 2014 than during the same period last year, 22 percent fewer break-ins of businesses and homes, and 30 percent fewer carjackings. Craig attributed the drop to better police work and criminals being reluctant to prey on citizens who may be carrying guns.

“Criminals are getting the message that good Detroiters are armed and will use that weapon,” said Craig, who has repeatedly said he believes armed citizens deter crime. “I don’t want to take away from the good work our investigators are doing, but I think part of the drop in crime, and robberies in particular, is because criminals are thinking twice that citizens could be armed.

“I can’t say what specific percentage is caused by this, but there’s no question in my mind it has had an effect,” Craig said.

Even more notably?  It’s been two months since the last major home-defense incident, the last of a flurry of such incidents in which criminals scampered away from law-abiding homeowners who engaged them.

Sometimes the criminals got hurt.  Other times, merely humiliated – sometimes on camera:

It may not be the acme of Christian charity, but watching homeowners humiliate punks at gunpoint warms my heart.

Anyway – urban police chiefs tend to be toadies, on a policy level, to the liberal Democrats who appoint them.  It’s good to see Craig breaking that particular noxious mold.

Days Of Future Pissed

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The Saint Paul City Council voted 6-0 to start studying a 200+-million-dollar streetcar line connecting some Godforsaken part of East Seventh to some misbegotten part of West Seventh, via downtown.  Councilman Bostrom abstained, noting that for the price of the line – basically a bus that runs on tracks – the city could resurface every single street in Saint Paul’s pothole-pocked grid. 

While there will be much gnashing and moaning about this line (almost none of which will become part of the official record, due to the Met Council and City of Saint Paul’s habit of only “seeking public feedback” after all decisions have been made), I figure it’s time to pass on some stories about a similar line, from a “high-density” eastern city much better-suited to such mass-transit fripperies, Toronto. 

Because streetcars aren’t much use there, either.

Social Distortion

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals don’t mind open borders because those immigrants won’t take their jobs, or their kids. And government spending doesn’t matter because government loans never have to be repaid. Half a million illegal immigrants have swarmed the border this year, all claiming to be refugees entitled to food, shelter, medical care, in-state tuition and public defenders. Oh, and interpreters, because although they don’t speak English they sure as Hell know their rights.
In completely unrelated news, .22 LR shells are still impossible to find on the shelves, as right-wing kook bitter clinging racist homophobes continue to snatch them up the instant they roll off the truck.
This cannot end well.
Joe Doakes

That which cannot be sustained, won’t be.