We’re told that Twin Cities food banks are having trouble keeping up wth demand:
Just curious if any Twin CIties “Jounalists” might have asked if perhaps the half billion dollars stolen from food aid programs by DFL/DSA-linked non-profits, and spent on cars, homes and other graft goodies, often in East Africa, might have helped with the situation.
… is worth dozens of words.
In this case, the beginning of Matt Taibbi’s smack down of Amy Klobuchar and her authoritarian proposal to censor Substack and Reddit
But I will let Taibbi put it in his own words:
Remember – according to the Democrats, you and I are the ones who are killing democracy.
I’ve seen a bit of a resurcence of the traditional 20-something paranoia about “the draft” that pops up whenever the world seems turbulent.
Example:
But this post isn’t about Selective Service.
We’ll come back to that.
Minnesota’s “Peace” creep community isn’t any smarter than it’s ever been
My first response: Our GenZ “activist community” has gone from “Punch a Nazi’ to unquestioningly supporting a literal fascist government that obsesses over race and advocates and practices the annihilation of the Jews.
You’ve come a long way, Zeepers!
But let’s go back to the top of this post, with the other Zoomers fretting about the draft.
The draft – being flooded with and responsible for paying, training and managing hordes of unwilling recruits who’ll spend a year or two as mediocre to poor soldiers – is the last thing our military wants.
I’d always assumed – mostly correctly – that that was for doctrinal reasons; willing soldiers are better, more trainable, more capable soldiers.
But looking at the caliber of the demographic pool, at the top and especially in the second videos above, I can think of a other reason…
Zach Metzger is a candidate for Minneapolis CIty Council.
This was him after the riot on Sunday:
He’s running for City Council.
To my amazement, he didn’t win endorsement in the uppeer-middle-class “urban life” theme. park that is the 13th Ward…
…but five’ll get you ten that if he moves to an open seat in Marcy Holmes, Powderhorn, the West Bank or Longfellow, his political career will get rolling for real.
Someone walks up to you with a baseball bat. They say they want to kill you.
Your response is “no, I don’t want to get beaten to death with a baseball bat”.
Looks like you have a standoff. A controversy. A conundrum.
Someone else steps in and asks “How about we compromise? Will you settle for a traumatic brain injury?”
It’s the middle way, after all. The guy with the bat might even say “sure, I just wanna hit you, hard!“
You might respond “No – in fact, I don’t want anyone hurting me in any way. At all”
And the buttinski responds “Why won’t yiou compromise?”
Who’s right?
You?
The guy with the bat?
Or the person striving to find the middle ground between the two of you?
If your response is “I’m putting my foot down; nobody is hitting me with a bat for any reason at all“, and the other to ask “why do you hate the guy with the bat?“, does that change anybody’s mind?
Point being, sometimes the middle path, the compromise, is not the most moral path forward.
The latest bit of gaslighting madness from the Minnesota chapter of Big Left: “The Star/Tribune is actually conservative“:
Americans overwhelmingly consider Hamas a terrorist organization, and condemn the wanton slaughter of October 7.
But among Americans under 24 years old, the split between pro-humanity and pro-Hamas is not only depresslingly closely-fought, but the pro-terror side has a slight edge.
Putting it bluntly, a thin majority of young Americans are OK with genocide. They may couch it in intersectional twaddle, they may hedge the ugly parts.
But a generation that grew up chanting “punch a Nazi” yapping about colonialism and calling their elders “fascists” around the Thanksgiving table are now supprting an actual Fascist regime that actually is killing minorities to further a thousand year old colonial movement.
Why?
The first order of business is to heap scorn on a generation that has adopted this morally bankrupt perspective and the older adults in their lives who have so maliciously led them astray. The second task at hand is for us to understand what convinced the younger generation to sacrifice their humanity upon the altar of an intellectual fad. The answer can be found, at least in part, in one odious word that has claimed the benignity of this generation and so many before them: “framework.”
On October 13, the Atlantic published a fascinating reflection by Helen Lewis on the callous indifference her compatriots on the American left have shown toward the wanton murder of Jews for being Jews. She correctly identified the origins of this phenomenon in the intellectualization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses, which flattens the distinctions between civilian and terrorist, between West Bank and Gaza, between Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, and so on. But that flattening is the outcome. The instrument that pummels the complexities of the region into an unrecognizable paste is that detestable word, “framework.”
“Fitting Israel into the intersectional framework has always been difficult, because its Jewish citizens are both historically oppressed—the survivors of an attempt to wipe them out entirely—and currently in a dominant position over the Palestinians, as demonstrated by the Netanyahu government’s decision to restrict power and water supplies to Gaza,” Lewis wrote. Intersectionality is, indeed, the “framework” on display here. It started out as little more than a thought experiment, but it has since transmogrified into a way of life.
While our modern academic class is largely parasitical and counter-useful, they have perfected the art of self-serving logical gymnastics.
Who on earth does Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) think she is…
(Language NSFW)
…Amy Klobuchar?
SCENE: In a drab back room at MNDFL headquarters on Plato Boulevard, two DFL communications staffers, Evan BRYANT (Macalester 2021) and Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK (St. Thomas 2018) are pecking away at their iPhones, poring over their social media plan for the week.
BIRKENSTOCK: Chairman Martin says people are starting to get tired of crime?
BRYANT: Where?
BIRKENSTOCK: Oh, rednecks in Fridley and Bemidji, mostly.
BRYANT: Yuck.
BIRKENSTOCK. I know, right? But their votes still count…
BRYANT: For now
BIRKENSTOCK: LOL, right? Anyway, we need to put out something that shows the administration and the Attorney General are engaged on crime.
BRYANT: Let’s do this:
BIRKENSTOCK: Oh, that’s good.
BRYANT: But someone just left a comment.
BIRKENSTOCK: (Reading a reply on Twitter). “So how about rampant violent and property crime, and half a billion in fraud committed by DFL constituents and contributors?”
BRYANT: Hmmm – tough one.
BIRKENSTOCK: I got it. Tweet out this photo of Lt. Governor Flanagan feeding Ellison and Governor Walz corn dogs at the State Fair!
BRYANT: I’ll caption it “#OneMinnesota”.
BIRKENSTOCK: Brilliant.
BRYANT: And on message!
And SCENE
Enrollment at Twin Cities schools continues to erode:
We’ll wait for the Walz/Flanagan administration to register their theatrical shock that “free” mystery meat and unrestricted gay porn in school libraries isn’t drawing students like Dave Matthews fans to the last bag of Cheetoz.
But I have a question.
This seems like the sort of story where someone could spend some time finding out whether the parents of senior DFL leadership in the Twin Cities and the state overall – the ones who have kids, at least – send their kids to the schools their union patrons run.
How many City Councilpeople, Mayors, policy staffers, senior bureaucrats and school leadership send their children to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, or indeed any, public schools?
This is the sort of thing that would call for, I dunno, some class of self-styed monastic seekers of information, perhaps working for institutions with printing presses or transmitterds, to do some reporting .
Pretty crazy, I know. .
John Augustine is with the Legislative Evaluation Assembly.
Charles Kuchlenz is the Libertarian candidate to replace Ruth Richardson in MN HD52b.
Song list:
Henco is going to have a “contested” County Commission race, where “contested” means “a battle between bad, worse and worst” .
I think the found ‘worst”.
People inexperienced in the ways of Metro “progressives” might joke “I wonder if she’s going to put “Irritating people into behavioral change” into her campaign literature, yuk yuk”.
To those who know the breed, it’s not a joke. The suburban white upper-middle-class “progressive” seeks out different flavors of trite masochism and whiffle-ball self-abnegation – paying for bags, making “stolen land declarations”, putting up “In This House” signs – that have little financial and no moral cost, to signal dubious but convenient virtue to the less englightened.
I bet she wins.
I personally don’t care much one way or another about legalizing cannabis.
But as I’ve heard from people running ma and pa cannabis, THC and CBD product shops, the DFL’s cannabis law is full of carve-outs to big pharma, and has regulations that are pretty sure to smother most small businesses. Tales
But the DFL was buying votes, so no biggie.
All that was foretold, has come to pass:
IRRR is funded by mining industry taxes — about $25 million a year — and was created to diversify the economy by promoting economic development and job creation in 13,000 square miles of northeastern Minnesota. It provides loans and grants to a variety of public and private projects, including broadband development and manufacturing facilities.
HWY35 is led by Jack Mitchell, who is president of Besa Group and Mitchell Hospitality in Kansas City that grow, manufacture and sell cannabis in Missouri. Another principal in HWY35 is John Hyduke, the chair of a Minneapolis-based marketing company, Modern Climate. Mitchell and Hyduke are also the leaders — vice chair and chair, respectively — of a newly formed trade association called the Minnesota Marijuana Association, which has tapped former Mining Minnesota leader Frank Ongaro as its interim executive director. Other board members are with companies from Missouri, Nevada, Maryland, Colorado and Minnesota.
Portions of a shuttered plant in Grand Rapids that used to make oriented strand board would be turned into HWY35’s planned facility, according to the staff presentation to the IRRRB. In addition to the state loan, the project would be part of a tax increment financing district approved by the Grand Rapids City Council and would also be supported by private investment that would equip a growing and manufacturing facility to produce oils for edibles and other THC products.
So – the state giving money to out of state companies to do a job plenty of Minnesota companies would love a shot at?
There are questions. Layers of them, in fact:
Giving the DFL money and power is like teenagers car keys and booze.
Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:
The Minnesota Court of Appeals issued an opinion which clarifies the duty to retreat in defense-of-others cases.
Let’s imagine a situation where Lilly is the Victim lying on the ground, Trevon is the Assailant kneeling astride Lilly beating her with a baseball bat, and Tom is the Rescuer, a lawfully armed citizen who sees the situation. Tom determines that Lilly is likely to suffer great bodily harm or death if Tom does not intervene using lethal force to stop Trevon’s attack. If Tom shoots Trevon, can Tom claim he acted in self-defense? In the past, we often heard that the Rescuer steps into the Victim’s shoes. If the Victim could use self-defense, the Rescuer could, too. But there was no case which clearly said so.
We know that in defense-of-self cases (if Trevon was attacking Tom), Tom must retreat if he can do so safely, before using lethal force. That’s not the situation here.
The State was arguing that in defense-of-others cases, Tom as Rescuer must also retreat if he can do so safely, leaving Lilly, the Victim, to die. It’s more important to prevent a shooting than to save a life.
The Court of Appeals decided that was wrong. The duty to retreat is the duty of the VICTIM to retreat, not the duty of the RESCUER.
If Lilly could not safely retreat, then Tom might be justified in shooting Trevon to stop the deadly attack.
Of course, Tom is taking a risk in doing so. The other rules of self-defense still apply. Lilly may have initiated the confrontation, Trevon may be using a bat to stop Lilly from stabbing him with a knife again, Tom is still stuck in Lilly’s shoes for those elements of the defense. But at least the leave-her-to-die argument has been laid to rest.
So that’s good news.
Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park
It’s about time.
I’m informed that the National Museum of Women in the Arts has re-opened after $70,000,000 in renovations.
I think I missed the NMOWITA in my various sprints through the DC museum scene, but by all accounts it’s dedicated to art either created by, or created by intersectional classes favored by, entitled upper middle class white academic progressives…
…who are nevertheless “victims”:
“While the discourse has progressed since the museum was founded, gender and intersectional racial inequality remain pervasive in the art world,” the museum’s director, Susan Fisher Sterling, said during the preview Tuesday. According to a 2022 report, female-identifying artists made up only 11 percent of acquisitions at US museums between 2008 and 2020 (with Black female artists representing just .5 percent).
I’d like to ask Ms. Fisher Sterling to show her work – a walk through the Art Crawl and the Fringe Festival might make you think a supermajority of “artists” are women in some currenty-fashionable sense of the term.
And if the National Endowmen of the Arts is spending $70,000,000 to remodel a museum based on your “art”, you’re not oppressed.
Although…
…perhaps the critics could “oppress” you with an honest review.
It seems appropriate.
Government subsidy is the death of art.
A “high trust” society – the kind of society where you can leave your doors unlocked, or at least not keep all your property under constant surveillance at the very least – depends on trusting your neighbors, and the institutions by which we govern ourselves.
When that trust is broken, society becomes “low trust” – a society where people don’t trust their institutions, or each other, to do the right thing; reverting to the “Law of the Jungle” becomes expedient, initially – and, eventually prudent.
And when it’s the criminal justice system?
It never took a rocket scientist to believe the Chauvin trial was swayed by, not so much “public opinion” but by “potential mob rage”.
But it’s actually written down in black and white:
I’m not saying the DFL in this state is trying to create a low trust society.
I’m just at a loss for what they’d be doing different if they were.
Hamas leader puts out a dog whistle to western leftists:
It’s not even close to the dumbest strategy.
I took a little vacation.
That’s kind of a big deal. I don’t take vacations. It’s a running gag among my European co-workers that I”m the classic American. I’ve never taken a vacation of longer than five days that didn’t involve visiting family or some major household project.
So I went to Norway from October 1-13.
And it looked a little something like this.
I landed in Oslo, and meandered my way down to Drøbak, where this historic episode happened:
I took a picture with the star of that particular show:
Then it was back to Oslo, for a flight to Trondheim, where I rented a car and started driving.
Now, I said earlier that I’d never taken a vacation that didn’t involve family, and I guess I still haven’t. I drove about an hour southeast of Trondheim to the little village of Græsli. Population about fifty – and I’m related to about twenty of them.
The Ned River in Græsli. We’ll come back to this.
My third cousin – more below – took me on a little sightseeing trip, thirty or so miles east to the Swedish border:
Just across the border in Sweden. I actually crossed the border a few times – they’re not really patrolling it out here. Because, who’s going to cross?
That’s right – reindeer. And fishermen.
I met the grandchildren and great-and-great-great-grandchildren of my great-grandfather’s little brother, the only one of four siblings that stayed in Norway.
My Great-Great-Uncle Bersven, 2nd from left in the first row. I met some of the guys who are little boys – Bersven’s grandsons – in this photo..
My visit was apparently an excuse for about thirty people from all over central Norway to get together for an evening at the village community center, where everyone brought all the photos, letters and other family memorabilia they could find.
That’s my great-great-grandfather, Ole Bernson, and his wife Karin. His father, by the way, was Bernt Oleson. .
Turns out my great-grandfather’s little sister was something of a mystery;
That would have been Friday evening, October 6 – before the events in Israel, so as luck would have it the subject of the Middle East never came up, for those who are curious. . We had plenty of other stuff to talk about.
The next day, it was off to follow my fourth-cousin to her family’s place, about four hours south.
I didn’t take many pictures of this leg of the trip – because my hands pretty much needed to be pried off the steering wheel. . I’ve driven on ice – lots and lots of it – and I’ve driven in the mountains. In the summer. Twice.
I’ve never driven on twisty, turny Norwegian roads through a mountain pass after an unexpected snowstorm, though. They don’t build shoulders on roads over there – the edge of the road, in some cases, was a forty-foodt drop into a mountain lake.. So I kept my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel.
Eventually, though, we got to Røros…
That’ Røros cathedral in the background. There was a big wedding going on, and a lot of the people in this photo were on their way to or from that.
After that, I drove down to the coast at Āndalsnes, where I jumped off on two days of driving up the Atlantic Coast Highway – a trip that had me wondering “is there such a thing as too miuch beauty? Is it possible for natural beauty to bludgeon you over the head so hard you become desensitized to it?
Åndalsnes, from across the Eisfjord. If Hallmark shoots a “film” in Norway where the plucky young superwoman takes a break from her high-pressure job running an Oslo ad agency, it’s probably Āndalsnes where she finds love running a bookstore with a rugged but sensitive fisherman.
I lost count of the number and name of the fjords that prompted me to stop, snap a photo, and think “this one makes the last four or five I saw look like wet garbage”.
Depending on the map, the Allantic Ocean Highway fronts the North Sea or the Arctic Ocean – both of them synonyms for stark dangerous beauty:
I could have probably driven from Āndalsnes to Trondheim in a day, but there was just too much to see and do – so I stopped for an evening in Kristiansund…
Kristiansund – Christian’s Sound – from the, er, sund. .
…and then to Trondheim the next day.
Trondheim. This is the part everyone knows – the Nedelva (the same river we saw above up in Græsli) along Kjøpmansvei. .
Trondheim reminds me of Duluth. It’s a port city, that got its start exporting minerals, and fy da, the. hills have got to make ice storms really. miserable. . .
And then it was back to Oslo.
The Oslo waterfront, from Akershus, looking toward Aker Brygge. . .
I spent some time doing one of my favorite things in the world – wandering around a strange city with no particular aim in mind. But I did do a little sightseeing.
I went to Akershus, the ceremonial seat of roal power, and hit the Hjemfrontmuseet (“Home Front Museum”, commemorating life, resistance and yes, collaboration in Norway during the war:
“Milorg” guerillas coming literally and figuratively in from the cold at the end of the war . . .
And the Forsvaretsmuseet, the National Defense Museum…:
A part of a diorama of the Norwegian Navy in 1909. Which wasn’t, unfortunately, much different than a diorama of the Norwegian Navy in 1940. . .
Disconnecting from daily life wasn’t easy for me. I’m not sure I quite got it down. I may need more practice.
I give Pierre Poilievre – conservative candidate running against Justin “No Way He’s Castro’s Son” Trudeau” about a thousand style points for this response:
Initially I thought Poilievre was being a little brusque in dealing with a potential voter.
I was informed the person “asking” the “questions” is, however, a journalist – someone who’s supposed to explain things clearly to people, who can’t ask a clear question.
Choose wisely, Canada. It’s never too late.
Well, almost never.
“Unruly teens” in Chicago attack a Tesla during one of their periodic galavants around their “room to destroy”. Police were reportedly standing nearby.
The Tesla driver used some of that torque for self-defense:
The cops no doubt have the guy’s license plate, so there’d be no need for them to chase and arrest the guy if they do want to prosecute him. Safe to say the “kids” will suffer no consequences.
Still – flit about, find out.
…one of those people who doesn’t need food, energy, shelter, or transportation, Paul Krugman’s got great news for you:
And apparently, if you are one of those people who needs those things, you either don’t count or are a failure.
Another thing I missed when I was out of the country – the death of the only sports figure I ever actually wanted to be.
Dick Butkus, Chicago Bears legend and the man who defined the position of middle linebacker, died last week at the age of 80:
A ferocious tackler drafted out of the University of Illinois, Butkus was an imposing force as the Bears’ middle linebacker for his nine NFL seasons in the 1960s and 1970s, and made eight Pro Bowls.
Butkus thought his intensity on the field was simply how the game should be played, according to an article on the Bears’ website.
“I thought that was the way that everybody should have played, but I guess they didn’t because they were claiming that I had a special way of playing,” he said when asked about his ferocity, according to the article.
No one remembers when I became a Chicago Bears fan – it was almost certainly before I knew what football was – but as long as anyone could remember, I knew who Dick Butkus was.
And while I was always too tall, for my weight and build completely wrong for football, literally, the only athletic ambition I ever had was to be a middle linebacker like the great one himself
The Nazis weren’t especially coy about their views on Jews. Hitler telegraphed his intent in Mein Kampf. The Nuremberg Laws were a pretty solid hint.
And yet in 1944 and 1945, as the wheels came off the Third Reich, they feverishly bulldozed the camps, shipped or force-marched the surviving inmates to other camps farther from the front, and tried to erase the record – because even the Nazis knew that their “final solution” wasn’t going to go over well with the outside world ,and could see war crimes trials in their futures.
Hamas, on the other hand, in carrying out the same mission as any of Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen, with the same exact methods they used in every shtetl in Eastern Poland (shooting, raping, smashing, burning), put it out on social media, with gleeful pride, to get eaten up by the gleeful masses of droogs on the “red/green” left…
….and, for whatever reason, ultra-right.
I was halfway through my trip when the worst atrocity agains the Jews, and one of the most ocncentrated orgies of violence against civilians since Rwanda, happened.
Ben Shapiro had probably one of the best hours of broadcasting ever last Monday. The video includes a lot of uncensored blood and gore and horrific violence in process – which is the point.
Here is is on Youtube, until it no doubt gets taken down.
Here’s the audio version, for when they do.
“Let’s not be picking black hats and white hats, here – this is a complicated situation”.
No, it’s not.
“The is a complicated situation”
Historically? Sure. .
In terms of this past week? Not complicated at all.
But let’s let you show us how complicated it *really really isn’t*. Answer this question; think of someone who did you wrong; the person who transgressed you worse than anyone in the world.
Q: What would it take for *you* to shoot that person in the face as he shielded his kids? What would it take for *you* to then rape, kill and mutilate his wife, to burn his siblings houses with his siblings and families inside, to give his daughter over to your rapey friends to haul off to another country to rape and kill, to saw his son’s head off, and use the other son as a human shield when the SWAT team arrived?
Did you answer “I would never do that?”
If not, why not?
It’s not a complicated answer at all. If you answered “No, under no circumstances would I do that”, it’s because you are not evil.
Which is what we’re talking about, here. Evil. There is no other word.
Those of you who’ve been watching this blog for years may have figured it out – when I have a loooong anthology series, I’m often doing something other than writing every morning.
Two anthology series at the same time – “Soundtrack” and “Where Credit Is Due?” Unprecedented, right?
It was. I actually took an honest-to-God vacation. I spent two weeks in Norway (by the time you read this, I’ll be home again).
I spent that time visiting relatives – in this case, the grand, great-grand and great-great grandchildren of Bernt Oleson Græsli, who I talked about last week. In getting ready for the trip, I started thinking about all the things that go into a generation of people – decades, generations, even centuries of work, wins, defeats, triumphs, disasters and innumerable lessons and traits and legends passed down to those who follow.
I had a distant relative tell me I resembled my great-great-uncle (who died in 1965 at 93 years old)
My great-grandfather’s little brother (front row, 3rd from left, his five sons, and their families, seventy years ago. The farmhouse behind them was built in 1850, has been the setting for generations of family photos, and still stands today. I spent a bunch of time this past week with some of the younger kids in this photo, and their children.
I got some questions answered (how did my great-grandfather get the idea to come to America), answered some questions (nobody knew what happened to his little sisters – but I did!), and had a great time thinking about what is family, and what are the motivations and influences and good times and bad times that make people who they are.
And there’s more to come. Maybe on the blog, maybe not.
But it’s been a couple of fun weeks, both in real life and blog-time.
Of all the music I’ve talked about this past two weeks, this one may be the closest thing to an emotional time machine.
My own baggage notwithstanding, if you built a time capsule and wanted to put “The perfect 1980s song” in it, this would be a candidate; the shufflying synth drums and faux orchestra skirling about with Mike Campbell’s ultra-minimalist punctuation on guitar (which is backwards rock and roll!) – it tied the whole decade together.
And the song itself – all about getting your arms around what you’ve lost? It felt perfect then.
And a couple of decades later, it still does.
Back to more regular blog material Monday.
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