If you say “we don’t *dare* judge all Muslims by the activities of a few terrorists” [1], but you consider the NRA a “terrorist organization” due to the activities of “people” whose acts the NRA has done more than most to combat? I’m not going to call you irrational and illogical.
I don’t have to.
It’s a self-evident fact that doesn’t need me to state it.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Why do Liberals hate Christ?
A couple of days before Jesus was crucified, he was in the town of Bethany visiting the home of Simon the Leper. A woman dabbed expensive perfume on Him causing some of the disciples to object: “Why has it been wasted? We could have sold it to raise money for the poor.” Jesus rebuked them, saying: “Leave her alone. You’ll always have poor people, you can help them whenever you like; but I won’t always be with you.”
We’ll always have poor people? Liberals hate that idea. It’s intolerable! We must eliminate poor people. It doesn’t matter why they’re poor – the shiftless drunkard puking on his own shoes is just as deserving as his barefoot little girl in the torn dress, looking up with big brown eyes. Jesus was wrong! Jesus was a quitter! We refuse to accept His reality. God may have made the world in His image but we will remake the world in our image and there will be no income inequality, no reward for perseverance and no punishment for indolence, only perfect equality in all things.
Heinlein’s hinted at this in “Stranger in a Strange Land,” when the Man from Mars learns about religion and happily proclaims: “Thou art God. I am God. All that groks is God.” Well, Hell, if we’re all God, then we have a perfect right to alter creation, to demand perfection. Forget the Garden of Eden, we can have paradise right here on Earth. We’re entitled to it. We are God.
That’s why Liberals hate Christ. They hate having competition.
Joe Doakes
…that liberals never suffer consequences for bad actions.
As allegations of unwanted sexual advances in 1986 by Kevin Spacey against a then teenage Anthony Rapp have emerged, Netflix today has decided to pull the plug on House of Cards after the upcoming sixth season next year.
Well, sort of, anyway.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is back in the studio, making talk radio great again!
Today on the show:
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
Back in the eighties, in a conversation with a “progressive” of the time, I called “BS” on her use of the term “Holocaust” to describe…
…welfare reform.
It was a pattern thirty years ago. Today, given the newliy-broad use of the term “white supremacy”, it’s turned into utter depenDence: berg
The term was popularized by academic race theory, where it seems to have largely replaced previous terms of art like “institutional racism” or “systemic racism.” Now it is migrating out of the ivory tower and into everyday discourse, puzzling the millions of Americans who are used to an older, narrower meaning.
It’s all in the marketing:
It’s easy to see why writers and academics find the term appealing. “Institutional racism” conjures up images of beige-carpeted offices and rows of desks; “systemic racism” sounds like some sort of plumbing problem. “White supremacy,” on the other hand, packs a visceral punch that commands the reader’s attention. Because they’re describing something that needs attention, it’s useful to have a phrase that does the job.
Of course, there’s the little matter of crying wolf:
Nonetheless, using “white supremacy” this way is a mistake. It leads to confusion in the national conversation, because opposing sides are using a critical term in very different ways. It hampers our ability to discuss the phenomenon that the anti-racists actually want to discuss. And ultimately, if we continue to use it this way, it will lose the very emotional resonance that made it an appealing substitute for more clinical terms.
The whole thing is worth a read.
And some concerted pushback.
I grew up in the middle of missile country; it was about 40- or so miles from my hometown to the nearly of North Dakota’s 330 Minuteman III missile silos.
Former Minuteman III silos in eastern North Dakota. These were all dismantled (actually, imploded) in the ’90s, as part of a nuclear missile reduction program with the Russians. The ones in the northwest part of the state remain.
And in my teens and twenties, at the height of the Cold War, I was genuineliy ambivalent about having children, ever, while the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war.
And after the fall of the USSR, in the early ’90s, it seemed we were on the brink of being past all that; both the US and Russia took their bombers off the alert they’d been on for decades, and began stepping back.
Well, nothing good ever lasts; the US nuclear force is stepping up its alert level again:
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
In the US, we have flu season. On Madagascar, they have plague season. Yes, the Black Death, it’s a regular thing for them. Hundreds have died already this year.
Can’t wait for the refugees to start arriving so they can be shipped around the country to share with us, the way that other diseases formerly defeated in America, suddenly are making a comeback.
When I visited my doctor last week, the receptionist wanted to know if I’d travelled out of the country in the last 21 days, where I might have come in contact with diseased people. No, I haven’t. But I did travel to St. Cloud, Frogtown and Minneapolis, home of large concentrations of Somali refugees, who have stunning rates of measles and tuberculosis. If the concern is risk of contagion, foreign travel isn’t required.
Joe Doakes
The people who brought you the Green Line and North Minneapolis will figure it out. Honest.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is back in the studio, making talk radio great again!
Today on the show:
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
Millennials trend left on everything but guns – where they turn into Real Americans.
Polling in gun politics is notoriously murky—much lies in the crafting of the question—but demographers have consistently reported a conservative streak in millennial attitudes on guns. Respondents aged 18-29 are the least likely in the country to support a renewed ban on assault weapons, at 49 percent, a fact that has helped drive nationwide support down to a record low. Pew’s data suggest that those falling in the youngest age range have dropped the furthest in support for “gun control” since 2000 (when the alternative is presented as “gun rights”). And when the question concerns the National Rifle Association’s top legislative priority, concealed carry, millennials appear to lead the country. According to Gallup’s version of the question in 2004, the notion that concealed guns made for safer spaces polled at 25 percent; 11 years later, it registered at 55 percent nationally. The greatest support came from those ages 18-29, at 66 percent, a full 10 points greater than the next highest scoring demographic.
There’s hope.
Over the weekend, NPR came out with a “Fact Check” piece about whether Chicago is “proof” that gun laws don’t affect crime.
Is the “fact check”, well, factual?
It’s NPR and they’re talking about guns. What do you think?
NPR starts with Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ post-Vegas press conference statement:
“I think one of the things we don’t want to do is try to create laws that won’t stop these types of things from happening,” Sanders said Monday. “I think if you look to Chicago where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year they have the strictest gun laws in the country. That certainly hasn’t helped there.”
Pointing to Chicago to suggest that gun laws don’t work is not a new talking point — Trump claimed Chicago had “the toughest gun laws in the United States” in a 2016 presidential debate; his fellow Republican candidate Chris Christie likewise pointed to Chicago as a place with high crime despite tight gun laws.
Now, if you’re a Right to Keep and Bear Arms person, you know what that really means; the idea that tight regulations on law-abiding civlilians owning guns hasn’t the foggiest impact on crime, at best, and a negative impact at worst. That – crime and death, and how infringing freedom for the law-abiding doesn’t affect either – is what we’re concerned about.
And what does NPR focus on?
The Fussy Tangent: Hey, at least NPR acknowledges the real problem, sort of:
It’s also true that there were more than 4,000 shooting victims in Chicago in 2016. It’s also true that Chicago has suffered a massive amount of gun crime recently. In 2016, homicides in Chicago sharply rose, mostly as a result of gun homicides, as the University of Chicago crime lab found in a January report.
Gun homicides in the city rose by 61 percent between 2015 and 2016. That helped make the gun homicide rate…25.1 per 100,000 residents in 2016, compared to 14.7 in Philadelphia and just 2.3 in New York.
But never mind all the carnage and death. It’s Huckabee-Sanders’ assertion that’s the real issue!
But it’s not true that Chicago has the toughest gun laws in the country, as other fact checkers have also repeatedly found…”We generally think of California as having the strongest gun laws in the country,” said Hannah Shearer, a staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “The whole state’s laws are pretty strong.”
The center has given California an A rating and ranks it No. 1 in terms of the tightness of its gun laws.
Ah. So law-abiding citizens are disarmed, and criminals are deterred only by the ministrations of the Chicago Police Department – but they’re not the “toughest” laws, according to the abstract reasoning of a gun grabber group?
This is not a “fact check”. This is an ideological purity test.
It gets worse.
The Mean Streets Of Hammond: NPR next revisits the old canard; Chicago would be safe, if it weren’t for those darned Hoosiers and Badgers:
It’s important to remember here that Chicago is very close to two states that have relatively weak gun laws: Wisconsin and Indiana. So while it’s easy to pick on Chicago (or any other high-crime city) for its ugly statistics, says one expert, taking bordering states into account weakens this gun-advocacy talking point.
“It’s not a scientific study. It’s an anecdote,” said Philip Cook, a professor of public policy studies at Duke University. “They might have pointed to Washington, D.C., back in the days when D.C. banned handguns and yet had high gun-violence rates. Those bans are only at best partially effective, because the borders are permeable.”
So why aren’t Indiana, Wisconsin and Virginia stacking up bodies like cordwood? If availability of guns were the problem, then wouldn’t places like North Dakota, New Mexico and Wyoming be shooting galleries?
NPR does try to drill further into the issue:
A 2015 study of guns in Chicago, co-authored by Cook, found that more than 60 percent of new guns used in Chicago gang-related crimes and 31.6 percent used in non-gang-related crimes between 2009 and 2013 were bought in other states. Indiana was a particularly heavy supplier, providing nearly one-third of the gang guns and nearly one-fifth of the non-gang guns.
Other evidence corroborates this — a 2014 Chicago Police Department report found that Indiana accounted for 19 percent of all guns recovered by the department between 2009 and 2013.
NPR has found correlation, not a cause. Yes, there are guns from other states to fill the black market demand for firearms. Every single one of them is the result of a felony – a theft (a state felony) or a “straw purchase”, a person with a clean record buying a buy and giving/selling it to a criminal, which is a federal felony.
Is it because Indiana has “lax” gun laws?
Or is it because the US Attorney for Northern Illinois announced that his office wasn’t going to spend time prosecuting “straw buyers” anymore? Because he wanted to focus his office on politically-sexy prosecutions, and nobody ever got elected to the Senate by showing off a record of prosecuting gang-bangers’ girlfriends, junior high pals and grandmothers?
So, In Summary: The NPR “fact-check” ignored the actual point of the Trump Administration’s statement – that gun control and public safety are not in any way linked, and in some cases may be inversely correlated – to pedantically nitpick Huckabee Sanders’ conceptually accurate statement about the legalities, and issue a deflection about other states’ laws that actually reinforces the Pro-Civil Rights’ side’s point.
Facts In The Dark rules this article as part of the NPR’s effort to be part of Big Left’s Praetorian Guard.
The mayor of San Juan Puerto Rico appeared on CNN wearing a “we are dying here” T-shirt.
I am trying to remember the last time I was in an existential crisis, and still had time to go out and make a custom T-shirt.
As her reelection bid collapses, Betsy Hodges is more concerned with virtue-signaling her hatred of The Donald than fixing her own city’s issues:
She’s referring to the Democrat mayor of San Juan, PR.
Who, ironically, is also more concerned with virtue signaling than doing her job, too…
Hacks of a feather.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Six hours after the hurricane, city inspectors were handing out code violation notices.
It’s people like them what cause unrest.
Joe Doakes
Just because your house is gone doesn’t mean you won’t be extorted into supporting the graft machine.
Last week, I wrote a bunch of pieces on an editorial that appeared in the Strib the weekend before last.
The Strib complained about the growing street crime – in particular about the consequences of some local and higher court rulings that make enforcement against crimes like public intoxication and panhandling harder without specific legislative intervention. (They also proposed the same impotent diversions on gun control that every DFL metrocrat shill runs to when faced with a wave of violence).
All the problems come back to one thing – a mayor and city council that may or may not be unable to grapple with the issues, but are certainly unwilling to interrupt the consequence-free virtue-signaling – like strong-arming local businesses with minimum wage hikes and sick time benefits, and social justice warrior-mongering – that obsesses so many of them.
Betsy Hodges in “action”. Crime skyrockets – but Target “Raises its minimum wage”. Of course, technology has led to them cutting thousands of entry-level jobs, already. Just like we warned you. More to come.
And this is the city council that, in large part, the Strib has supported to a fine sheen for the past sixty years.
And the mayor they’ve supported all along as well; I take you back to October, 2013, when the Strib editorial board endorsed Hodges for mayor:
Hodges is aligned with this page on the need for improved transit, including streetcars and enhanced bus service, as a driver of economic development citywide. As mayor, she’d play a key role in deciding the future of the Southwest Corridor light-rail project.
Although the school board operates independently from City Hall, Hodges says that as mayor she would seek to build consensus around the increasingly desperate need to close the city’s achievement gap, and she puts the right emphasis on early childhood development and prenatal health programs with her proposed “Cradle-to-K” cabinet. She’s talked generally about longer school days, more flexibility for administrators in teacher labor agreements, and support for reforms proposed by Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson.
Hodges doesn’t promise lower property taxes, but her record suggests she’ll be a strong steward of city resources and taxpayer dollars.
Hodges also promises to be aggressive in using technology to enhance public safety and would seek more accountability in hiring, training and disciplining cops. In a recent meeting with the Editorial Board, she acknowledged that the police union contract makes it too difficult to fire bad cops.
Does any of this – which reflects the express wishes and position of the most influential editorial board / DFL PR firm in the state – sound like what’s actually happened since the voters gave the Strib, yet again, exactly what they wanted?
Own it, Strib. You got your wishes in the North Loop, as you have throughout the city. You did your best to break it. You fix it.
Note: it’s been a couple of crushingly busy days, and not really in a good way. This same piece went out in raw-notes form yesterday. I’m going to re-release it with, y’know, some actual writing.
In theran an editorial this past week proposing some solutions in the tony, hip North Loop last week, the Strib editorial board pondered what to do about the rising crime rates in the North Loop, whose problems are a result of policies the DFL supports. On Tuesday, we noted that the problem is falling exactly into line with urban theorist Joel Kotkin’s theories on the subject (cities are turning into donuts – holes full of the very wealthy, surrounded by a doughy ring of poverty warehoused in the neighborhoods for the convenience of the social service bureaucracy.
Today? After decades of drawing bars to the North Loops, the City Council is shocked, shocked to discover drunkenness:
Police have lost some tools in the past couple of years that in particular appear to have affected quality-of-life issues. Public drunkenness and aggressive panhandling are more than nuisances — they can be threats to safety. Police used to be able to book inebriates who drank in public. But an order issued by then-Hennepin County Chief Judge Peter Cahill in early 2016 quashed that, allowing only ticketing for public drinking.
“Now you see someone with a bottle at 4th and Hennepin and you write a ticket,” Sullivan said. “A half-hour later, they’re at 5th and Hennepin, then 6th and Hennepin. Before, we could interrupt the cycle, get them off the streets and maybe even get them some help.” Hennepin County is the only jurisdiction in the state operating under such an order. Cahill said that his standing order can be changed, but that to his knowledge no such request has been made. It should be, and city officials should make it.
Right.
But the Hodges administration is too busy virtue-signalling against Donald Trump, and the city council – the only group of people in the metro not well-placed to mock Alondra Cano – are too busy building monuiments to themselves and keeping the graft wagon greased to be bothered, apparently.
Other efforts to help those with addictions should continue, but having created a neighborhood, city officials now have an obligation to ensure that public drunkenness is dealt with effectively.
Is it sexy enough for Minneapolis’ juvenile City Council to bother with?
Panhandling is tougher to deal with, since a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2015 — Reed vs. the town of Gilbert — has been widely interpreted as a prohibition on panhandling laws thought to restrict free speech. The high court did not make a specific ruling on that issue, but the Columbia Law Review recently noted that “there is a real danger that virtually all panhandling laws will be invalidated, even though some serve to protect pedestrians and others.”
Isn’t that rich? Panhandling is better-protected than political dissent from the right in Minneapolis.
Similarly, businesses and patrons alike complain about the large number of young people at night whom some see as intimidating…bars and clubs downtown that lure the 18-and-older set with cover charges that can be cheaper than a movie ticket…Once in, they can party until 2 a.m.
Teenagers and booze mix about as well as politicians and power. One might think the bars would see a self-interest in curbing packs of drunk teen…
…but then, with a $15/hour minimum wage and mandatory sick time coming up, they have other best interests to see to.
Minneapolis isn’t serious about solving any social problem; the whole city is a vehicle for virtue-signaling.
Tomorrow: The Same Old Crap About Guns
There must have been a poll showing that voters don’t, in fact, thing of “Anti”-Fa / the “Black Bloc” as anything but a bunch of pampered snowflakes; the left is starting to distance themselves from them.
The mayor of Berkeley – which has all but packed box lunches for the Blackshirts in recent months – is suddenly talking…well, as tough as a Democrat is allowed to talk about the children of his pals:
“I think we should classify them as a gang,” said Arreguin. “They come dressed in uniforms. They have weapons, almost like a militia and I think we need to think about that in terms of our law enforcement approach.”
Arreguin said that while he does not support the far right, it was time to draw the line on the left as well, especially on the black-clad activists who showed up in force and took over both the protests and the park, and played a part in Sunday’s violent clashes.
Word has it the Blackshirts plan on “demonstrating” this Sunday at/around the State Fair. It’ll be interesting to see if the City of Saint Paul – which has, in the past, “stood down” for the children of their political superiors – will do anything.
Brendan Doherty in NRO, in an article that is on its surface about the “Libertarian (and “Occupy”) To Fascist Pipeline”, but in fact applies to an awful lot of people who take their marginalization seriously:
Cranks therefore come to accept or even embrace their own crankishness. One marginal idea leads to the next even more marginal idea. And the mainstream they rejected isn’t just wrong; its proponents become contemptible and corrupt. And contempt spreads easily: Normal people don’t care about ideas, the crank’s thinking goes, and endure the corruption around them in nearly silent docility. It’s the “normies” that kooks really can’t stand. Like religion, politics attracts kooks and grifters because it is a field where results have a mysterious and hard-to-trace relationship with the time, effort, and cash invested in them. Grifters use this to create lucrative and low-effort consulting jobs. For kooks, the comfort is more psychological. If a kook can convince himself — or better yet, others — that Freemasons, Jews, or Cultural Marxists run the whole world, he’s suddenly relieved of the burden of explaining to himself and others the shipwreck of his own talents and ambitions.
Just here out of intellectual curiosity. Any resemblance to anyone is purely coincidental.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Well I’m certainly not in favor of this proposal. Took years and cost a fortune to get my license to practice law including a background check and continuing classes every year – now they’re proposing to hand out law licenses to people who aren’t even supposed to be in the country?
What’s the point of following the law, if nobody else has to?
What’s the point?
Devaluing law, the same as Big Left has devalued labor, community, morality and individuality.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air!
Today on the show:
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I’d love to lose weight on this new breakfast diet but I can’t make the math work. 6 plus 6 plus 18? That’s a 30-hour day. Where do these people live?
Joe Doakes
And do they get paid by the hour?
CalExit petitions can start gathering signatures.
To accelerate things. They should ask the rest of the country.
Keith Ellison may be a democratic – but, at least in a classical sense, he is far, far, far from a liberal.
The fifth district congressman says twitter should block President Trump:
"The problem is he’s been doing it and he’s never had to pay a price for it,” Ellison said. “I personally think that Twitter should treat him like any other social media harasser and snatch his account.”
If saying corrosively stupid things without consequence is actionable, Keith "The Germans bombed Pearl Harbor" Ellison is facing multiple life sentences. Including this statement.
I’m not sure what I like most about the proposed plan to save KFAI Radio – the long- running ‘Publicly-Supported” Pacifica affiliate in the west bank (where, I note in full disclosure, I was a volunteer news guy 25 years ago, trying to find a way to infiltrate the MPR Borg).
Is it the idea that a plucky underdog might survive against the MPR juggernaut (MPR’s former generalissimo, Bill Kling, spent decades trying to extinguish small community stations, the better to snarf up their funding sources)?
Could be.
But I think it’s the fact that the plan involves actual radio people bringing some actual radio programming common sense to the station, which endlessly cheeses off the sort of people who’ve been killing off these sorts of “community” stations.
As good an article as I’ve seen (hard to believe it’s from the MinnPost) about the people who keep showing up to try to make the GOP work in places like Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
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