“Occupiers” at UCLA stymied – by someone with bananas:

The next time America’s spoiled, boundlessly entitled white progressives decide to run riot, I’m going to rent a small plane and drop bananas, peanuts and Chick Fil-A on the crowd.

That should send them running back to on-campus housing.

Bazinga. Order.

You can thank me later, Mayor Mom-Pants and Governor Klink.

Hello. This is Avery Librelle.

Conservatives are seizing and pouncing on this story:

Some of you retrograde wingnuts have claimed that this vindicates Republican Christofascist Scott Jensen’s claims during the 2022 gubernatorial compaign.

Let me be perfectly clear: If there isn’t a litter pan, meaning a literal pan full of litter – physicallyl in a classroom, that means every jot and tittle of the story is completely false.

I repeat: completely false.

Now I’m off to confiscate parodies of “In This House” lawn signs.

In Gaia’s name,
Avery

They can’t overturn Roe again, but the Democrats don’t think their audience knows any better:

I’m surprised the trooper wasn’t wearing a Darth Vader helmet.

Then, there’s the vital issue of…

…uh…

…text equity. Here’s Senator Warren, who is no-how, no way a race fraud, nosirreebob:

Y’see, iPhones display messages from other iPhones in blue, but non-Apple message systems come across as green.

This is real Pettus Bridge stuff.

The Babylon Bee remains America’s most legitimate source of news and analysis [1]:

So, you give billions in cash and even more in moral legitimacy to a regime thats sworn its intent to commit genocide, that murders its own people, and that has for two generations run espionage, terror and covert military actions throughout the Middle East and Europe, and they turn around and do exactly what they’ve always said they were going to do?

Put another way: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? If you live in the Middle East (Arab, Jewish or other), or Ukraine and Eastern Europe, no. Biden (and Obama “before” [2] him) unleashed the hell you are currently living in.

This is, by the way, the first direct, non-proxy attack on Israel from Iran:

Iran launched 185 drones, 110 surface-to-surface missiles, and 36 cruise missiles, with most coming from Iran and a small portion being launched from Iraq and Yemen, the New York Times reported. IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said that, by about 3:00 a.m. local time, a small number of missiles had hit Israeli territory, causing minor damage to a military base in the country’s south.

Neville Chamberlain and Jimmy Carter’s legacies must both be profoundly thankful for Joe Biden.

[1] Along with the NARN, naturally.

[2] Cut the crap. He’s the real President today.

According to this “independent” anti-gun sock puppet account, teachers are paragons of virtue who must be trusted even more than parents, including on childrens’ pre-adolescent decisions to neuter themselves – with the the odd exception…:

…unless they choose to avail themselves of the means, or live in a state that allows them to choose to avail themselves of the means, to defend their charges from violent attack at school, in which case are presumed to be (if you’ll pardon the expression) loose cannon until proven otherwise?

I swear, sometimes it’s exhausting trying to follow the left’s logic.

“Jacobin” is an overtly socialist media site – moreso than NPR’s “On The Media”, even.

And just as the Democrat Socialists of America have been creeping into dominance in blue-city Democrat politics, their sphere of influence appears to be swelling as the media’s fortunes wane and “Journalists” leftist ideological motivation waxes.

And here they say, to paraphrase what the kids say these days, “the not quiet-at-all part out even louder:

Not sure it has a chance of happening in the wild – but if there’s anything that’ll make normies hate the media even more than we already do, “making it an organ of the state it’s supposed to check and balance” would certainly do it.

In the modern world, and to the two generations raised in it, feelings are paramount. Your feelings are reality.

Unless they, er, intersect with more important, vogue-y feelings:

Then, those feelings are supposed to be suppressed; “shut up or get cut up”, as Elvis Costello put it.

The “American Political Science Association” has released the quadrennial cesspool that is their rankings of American presidents.

You may have already figured out it’d be a leftist screed. You’d have figured largely right.

From top to bottom, with my comments interspersed:

1 Lincoln – Couldln’t see that one coming…
2 FD Roosevelt – Are you kidding? He prolonged the depression, and gave Eastern Europe to his buddy, Stalin? And he’s ahead of…
3 Washington – the guy who could have been king, and chose representative democracy?
4 T Roosevelt – Naturally – a greater triumph of image over Iprogressive) accomlishment than even Wilson. Real shocker there.
5 Jefferson
6 Truman – The victory of Democrat narrative over substance – one of many.
7 Obama – The person who did more to exacerbate America’s decline than any President of my lifetime? Of course they put him in the top ten.
8 Eisenhower
9 LB Johnson – The man who went long on Vietnam, laying the cultural groundwork for the modern “Progressive” movement? The man whose “Great Society” destroyed the black Middle Class?
10 Kennedy – The victory of romantic narrative over hard fact.
11 Madison – That he’s this far down the list shows us the APSA doesn’t really care much for federalism.
12 Clinton – Actual intellectual honesty would call for making Newt Gingrich – who was actually responsible for most of Clinton’s success – at least a co-president for purposes of this exercise.
13 J Adams
14 Biden – Biden. A potato. Ahead of Reagan, Adams, Coolidge, and over a dozen merely mediocre presidents?
15 Wilson – Without him, there’d have been no rise of Naziism. No explosion in central power. No federalization of Jijm Crow, and quite likely an acceleration of desegregation. And they put him ahead of…
16 Reagan – …the man who did more than any to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union – which was the only reason Clinton was able to reign in such prosperity.
17 Grant – 17? Perhaps this pack of historians at least figured that Grant had among the toughest jobs a President has had, and generally did well?
18 Monroe
19 GHW Bush
20 JQ Adams
21 Jackson
22 Carter – About 20 places too high. A poor president, and a few Habitat houses notwithstanding, a fairly loathsome ex-president (speechwriter for Yassir Arafat, supporter of Hamas, and a disaster in foreign policy).
23 Taft
24 McKinley
25 Polk
26 Cleveland
27 Ford
28 Van Buren
29 Hayes
30 Garfield
31 Harrison
32 GW Bush
33 Arthur
34 Coolidge – Absolutely criminal. Coolidge was in the top five, in policy terms. More later.
35 Nixon
36 Hoover
37 Tyler
38 Taylor
39 Fillmore
40 Harding
41 Harrison
42 Pierce
43 Johnson
44 Buchanan
45 Trump – Let this be your warning – no matter what your policy accomplishments, mind those tweets!

The real best and worst lists – coming tomorrow.

Minnesota, 2024: The DFL says 46 days of early voting and “no excuses needed” mail in voting doesn’t make voting (for the DFL) easy enough; demands more:

Given that young adults are least likely to own a car, and many 18- and 19-year-olds do not even have a driver’s license, it can be very difficult for them to reach early voting and Election Day voting sites,” Pursell said as she explained the parameters of the legislation, which is being backed by Secretary of State Steve Simon.

The House Elections Committee voted to place the bill on the general register on a party-line voice vote. The bill has no companion in the Senate. No Republicans in the hearing expressed support for the bill, which one member said amounts to a fiscally irresponsible “unfunded mandate” for counties.

Minnesota, 2030: The Minnesota DFL, claiming early voting and polls that come to you if you’re a prog kid at Gustavus is still not easy enough, proposes to simply enter votes for all newborns for the rest of their lives, on birth (or when they would have been born, if the mother “reproductive freedomed” the baby).

As noted below, the legislative session starts today.

And the DFL is swinging for the proverbial fences:

In case you can’t read below the fold:

The effective date of August 2023 would criminalize any gun owner in Minnesota who complied with the new Universal Background Check law, which also went into effect on that date.

If the DFL jams it down – and remember, this bill died in committee once already, but it’s a whole new session – that won’t be the end of it:

It should go without saying – but if you’re not at least getting and acting on the MN Gun Owners Caucus’s email blasts, to say nothing of contributing and volunteering, consider this an invitation.

Listen to this clip of a speech from Ilhan Omar.

No, seriously.

But when you read the translation of this speech, in your mind, translate it into German, or at least repeat the words in iyour mind, or out loud, in a German accent.

Tell the truth – doesn’t it sound like a clip from Trumph of the Will?

No, not the bit about representing Somalis in America; in politics, you dance with the ones that brung you.

And no, I don’t care that she’s talking Somali. She’s talking to a Somali audience. Latino Republicans talk Spanish at rallies. Back when there were German and Norwegian speaking towns, politicians spoke those languages. I don’t care.

No, it’s just that you can all but hear he say “Blut und Boden” if you listen just right.

“Heeeeeey, you conservatives are pouncing!”

Conservatives…like the Somali deputy foreign minister?

We are pouncing.

God knows the Strib won’t.

There’s a conceit among the lace-underwear crowd that war is the same as it was in the MIddle Ages in Europe – “armies” squaring off in a field for some perfunctory jousting and stabbing leading to the exchange of land or a change in royal wedding plans. The modern equivalent would be a sort of legal negotiation punctuated with cruise missiles and video of screaming children.

“Proportionality”, it’s called; hitting back as you were hit, but no harder.

Among those calling for “proportionality” in the Gaza War [1], the eternally useless Fareed Zakaria:

Let’s look at “proportionality”

Had the US and Western Allies observed Zakaria’s Marquis of Queensberry notion of war [2], World War 2 would have looked a little different.

The US, UK and the Netherlands would have had to stop after sinking the Japanese fleet, and liberating the Philippines, Singapore, the East Indies, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Air strikes would have been limited to single engine aircraft, and the US would have been limited to six aircraft carriers. Once the Philippines were returned, that’s it.

Germany? Once France, the Low Countries, Denmark and Norway were liberated, we’d have had to stop at the Rhine River. The Soviets, likewise [3], would have been obliged to stop at the Oder River, the frontier between pre-war Germany and Poland. Hitler would have been left to figure out how to try again.

In other words, we – like Israel – would still be at war, 3/4 of a century later.

It is a national disgrace that Zakaria has a TV show.

[1] That is to say, a proportional response from Israel. Not from Hamas or Hez’b Allah.

[2] on the part of westerners, not those who want us dead or subjugated

[3] Although people like our modern Left always give Stalin a pass on the rules.

“Experts” have gotten a bad name over the past couple years.

It’s a fun palate cleanser, once in a while, to see the real thing in action.

Ian “Gun Jesus” McCallum goes over the reports that Hamas is “manufacturing its own sniper rifles”.

The thumbnail is kind of a spoiler – but seeing how he got there is fascinating for technology geeks.

Ever noticed how it’s one, and only one, side of our political debate that gets to block freeways and run riot with impunity, or functionally close to it?

My favorite example – when the gang of droogs pulled over the statue of Christopher Columbus on the Minnesota state capitol mall in 2020, no arrests were made (even though it happened with a squad of Highway Patrol were standing right there). Eventually, one “ringleader” surrendered – and was “sentenced” to…

…teach children about the evils of Christopher Columbus.

Of course, no conservative who pulled down the statue of authoritarian socialist scumbag Floyd Olson would expect not to do serious jail time – because there are two justice systems in Minnesota. One for the far left and those they favor, and one for the rest of us.

Imagine Pro-Life Action MInistries trying to block a road? There’d be water cannon and attack dogs, and the media would be busy covering the new all-womens-sports bar as they carted the injured protesters off to jail.

But the favored classes?

And sympathizers with Big Left’s favorite fascists?

Why, it’s almost like they want regular schmucks to be afraid to go about their day, or poke their heads up where radar can see them.

More later this week.

I was a punk fan from the beginning. I may have been one of two people in Jamestown to have had a copy of the Sex PIstols first album. I don’t think my parents would have approved – but that was kinda the point, wasnt it?

I’ve been a fan of Pistols lead singer John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon – the Elvis Presley of punk rock as the leader of the Sex Pistols from 1975-1978 – since I was a teenager. And I’ve gotten to be more of a fan over the past 20-odd years, as he’s shown himself to be quite a political and social free thinker, breaking from the monolithic showbiz narrative on a *lot* of issues (albeit not all, but then, he’s John Lydon).

But…

…I was today years old when I learned that Lydon was married to the same woman for 44 years, withdrawing from much of public life for the past five years to take care of her while she was suffering from of Alzheimers before dying last month.

He also raised the children of his wife’s daughter (Ariane “Ari Up” Forster, also a punk icon) – the oldest two after Forster gave up trying to raise them (they’d essentially grown up wild, almost as art projects, and as teenagers couldn’t read, write or form complete sentences) and the youngest after Up died of cancer in 2010.

Now, if I could just run down the accuracy of that persistent rumor that Joe Strummer had become a bit of a Tory before he died, that’d be a perfect Christmas present.

In the book Red Storm Rising – Tom Clancy’s second novel, released around 1985, at the height of the Cold War, and tho only Clancy novel that didn’t focus on Jack Ryan, his family and his professional and social circle – the protagonist, obscure intelligence analyst John Toland, connects the dots among several events – a Chechen terrorist attack on an oil refinery, its attendant economic turmoil – and becomes concerned about a possible Soviet invasion.

The line that connects all the dots? The Soviet government releases an updated version of the 1938 film Aleksander Nevsky, Sergei Eisenstein’s historical drama about the eponymous Nevsky, getting the quarreling Russian nobility to shelve their differences and set about repelling a Teutonic invasion in the Middle Ages.

Am I butchering the plot worse than Nevsky butchering the hapless Germans? Perhaps. Here – watch for yourself:

Finer plot points notwithstanding, the movie is intensely nationalistic – which got the film shelved, and then un-shelved after Barbarossa and the invasion of the USSR.

The point – as John Toland put it in Red Storm Rising – was that whenever the Communists wanted to whip up a nationalistic frenzy against the West, they’d trot out Nevsky. Which was, indeed, the case in the book, as the USSR let slip the dogs and tanks and artillery of war, in what became one of the better, and final, fictional novels of World War 3.

So, Hollywood is doing a fictional “civil war” movie, featuring an A-list….

…well, B+-list cast, a big-name sci-fi director, an apparently significant budget…:

…and a fairly bizarre premise: that DC, New York and the Midatlantic states, Texas and Califonria will be allied against, I suspect, a bunch of of blockheaded rednecks and roobz from Florida and most of “flyover land”.

The movie is billed as science-fiction, but the sides drawn appear to be more fiction than science;

Little has been released about the plot, although speculation is running hot:

 The reasoning behind the seemingly bizarre alliance of Texas and California in the film points to the notion that the war isn’t over Democrat and Republican politics but more about Offerman’s corrupt three-term Presidency. The United States federal government has apparently disavowed its allegiance to the United States Constitution and is now held under the budding dictatorship of Offerman’s tyrannical President.

 The reasoning behind the seemingly bizarre alliance of Texas and California in the film points to the notion that the war isn’t over Democrat and Republican politics but more about Offerman’s corrupt three-term Presidency.ent.

So, maybe it’s not a Blue-Vs.-Red thing, as such.

But coming in the immediate aftermath of a state supreme court ruling that has just served as a Reichstag fire for those on both sides insisting that they are fighting intractable anti-democratic forces on both sides – a decision that has raised the temperature and lowered the signal-to noise ratio and increased the likelihood of a, let’s just call it “less than reasoned” response to any election result next year, is this really the media cue we want to be sending out?

“Depends on which “we” you’re talking about, doesn’t it, Mitch?”

Why, yes – it does.

“Go to NPR for hard-hitting journalism”, they said.

So I did [1].

And this is the hard hitting bit of reporting I got back

[1] OK, so I didn’t. A friend of the blog sent this to me. Call it “theater of the mind”.

Back in the ’80s, the Twin Cities were plagued by a mass of Peace Creeps; a group of dolorous, white, upper-middle-class progressives who believed that if the US just disarmed, the Soviets – who, being the intellectual children of Stalin and the parents of Putin, would naturally join hands with the theretofore war-mongering West and march into a peaceful future, in spite of the West’s base intentions. Groups like the Anti-War Committee and Women Against Military Madness spent the eighties getting slavering, adoring media coverage; it was a warmup for the sort of intellectual tongue bath today’s media gives the likes of Greta Thunberg, Ilhan Omar or Hamas.

Of course, the groups were moral narcissists to think that Soviet or Red Chinese leadership were “just like us”; that people who routinely murdered or exiled or stuffed opponents into “psychiatric clinics” were anything like Western democracies (before Obama, anyway).

I used to wonder how long people like them would last in the systems they were holding up as their moral ideal?

There was no wondering, of course. This is how it turns out:

“The Pen is Mightier than the Sword” could only be written by someone who never had to bet their life on it.

Find out more her about the American Veterans Memorial Park, hopefully in Cannon Falls.

… 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.

Growing up working in radio, I learned an interesting bit of applied psychology from my various program directors: people tend to become emotionally attached to music they hear from puberty until their brain stops growing, around age 25.

It’s not so much that music attaches itself to important events in your life, as the music and the events happen at a time when your brain is filling in a lot of important space with events that matter to you – and, given its evocative intensity, the music that’s going on at the time.

If I ever got to be a phenomenally wealthy mad scientist, ,one of my experiments would be to pay a family to raise their children around nothing but some absurd, archaic genre of music – say, John Philip Sousa marches – through their twenties, and measure to see how many events, first dances and first crushes and first kisses, they associated with marching music.

Anyway, about this time in 1985, my brain was getting stuffed with the consequences of my following up on my drunken promise to move to the Twin Cities that I’d made about a week earlier at a college homecoming dance. And for the next two weeks as I tried to fill in the many blanks of my half-baked “plan”, my still-growing brain drank in the music that was going on around me, on the radio, on my boom box, and (when I got to the Cities) on MTV, which I finally got to watch.

And to this day, I hear one of those songs, it brings it all back. I hear one of the songs burned into my cortext from that era on an overhead or the radio or at a bar, and I still smell the must of autumn building, of the harvest coming in as I worked my roofing and siding job, the feel of the wind as I drove my barely-roadworthy car to MInneapolis, the “exhilaration” of my first rush hour on my way to an interview.

The smell of fear, the feel of the tingle of hope, and the shiver of taking a huge leap.

I’ve had a theory that the period from 1977 to about 1986 was one of the best periods of all time for popular music.

It might be because it was a fact. Or it might be because it’s associated with that most searingly immediate period in life, adolescence through leaping out into the world.

Why choose?

At the risk of indulging in nostalgia, I’m going to indulge in some of the rewards of nostalgia.

Representative Kelly Moller, partaking in what’s become a pattern among DFLers, wrote this about the DFL’s apprroach to “Public Safety”:

Let’s translate this to English.

“We made losing one’s transfer paperwork an imprisonable crime, and made it legal for stalkers in areas with DFL-friendly cops or prosecutors to SWAT their victims with impunity, while doing nothing about the fact that people who commit armed robbery with illegal “assault weapons” are getting probation. In short, we signaled our “progressive” virtue. Nothing more”.

Translating DFL to human. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.

Mark Moyar reviews the new memoir by former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust.

Faust was an unabashed radical during her time running the university – a once-great institution that recently graduated David Hogg.

And her memoir highlights a tendency that I’ve identified in a depressing pluraity of “progressives”, including a dismal mass of American ones; an understanding of “freedom” that is utterly perverse (I’ve added emphasis):

Faust doesn’t delve into the how, but she does address the why in her third objection. When she was 15 years old, she recounts, her outlook on American anti-communism changed during a trip to Eastern Europe. The police-state tactics of the communist regimes, she acknowledges, seemed to violate their professions of freedom. Nevertheless, “I began to understand that when East German communists used — as they often did — ‘freedom,’ they meant something quite different from what I had come to understand. ‘Freedom’ in my mind had meant exclusively ‘freedom from’: freedom from censorship, from restrictions of movement, from governmental dictates or oppression. It was a revelation for me to hear East Germans speaking of a ‘freedom to’: freedom to be educated, to get health care, to work.”

The success of communists in providing universal health care and eliminating unemployment was so persuasive, Faust recounts, that she decided American anti-communism to be unjustified and immoral. Hence, the war to stop communism in Vietnam was “cruel and illegitimate.”

It’s not a revelation that Communists saw “freedom” in the same way a herd of anthropomorphic livestock might.

And, sad to say, it’s no longer a revelation that one of academia’s most prestigious executives might, anymore, either.

A friend of the blog emails:

I’m old enough to remember when they wanted to ban smoking basically everywhere.

So why should pot be any different?

Nothing about the states legalization of pot was thought through, beyond “getting GenZ votes, and shutting down the legal weed parties“.

The city of Champlin is mulling over seceding from Hennepin County, and joining Anoka County:

And they’re not wrong:

“When you look at the big picture, it feels like we’re just an ATM,” said Mayor Ryan Sabas about the Hennepin County Government. “But they are not making deposits here back to the city of Champlin.”

One-third of resident’s tax bill is sent to the Hennepin County government, according to the mayor.

And they are not wrong:

One example the mayor provided is that currently there are no transportation dollars being spent on projects in the community over the next four years.

“Our efforts with Hennepin County over the years to have them assist infrastructure, road projects or any requests with the county, really goes unheard,” said Mayor Sabas.

I expect a pretty robust response from the DFL. Presumably, including building a barbed wire fence around Hennepin County, with mines and guard dogs to keep people from leaving people.