Category: Deep Thoughts
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Changing Times
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Where did Americans get the assumption that if I work in the same office with other people, they’re automatically bosom buddies entitled to know everything about my life, and entitled to regale me with humorous anecdotes about every detail of their lives? If I wanted to know about your…
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Watch This
You’d do well to read this entire article by Kevin Williamson – about the real source of human achievement. Hint: its not politics, or politicians: Politics thrives on convincing us that things are worse than they are, telling us that we must live in fear of violence and misery if we do not elevate the…
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Rights
I’m not going to talk politics, here. I’m going to talk morality and ethics. First: as a general rule, it’s considered immoral to make someone accountable and responsible for something, but to withhold the rights needed to carry that responsibility out. It’d be wrong to say “raise this kid!” without giving someone the rights to,…
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Our Fetishistic Elites
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Liberals say Second Amendment advocates are compensating for small genitals [and let’s not forget the more recent, almost-as-dumb “ammosexual” – Ed.]; they call members of the Taxed Enough Already Party by the name for a deviant homosexual sex act; and now gasp that the intramural insult “cuckservative” refers to…
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A Modest Question 3: More Of The Shifting Dream
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: The reason for exploring all this American Dream stuff is the poor performance of Black students on achievement tests. Are the tests measuring the right things? The modern White American Dream seems to be clean, indoor, meaningful work that pays well enough for an apartment with high-speed WiFi and…
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A Modest Question 2: The Ever-Shifting Dream
Joe Doakes emails: “The American Dream” has changed several times. Used to be, laborers living in filthy tenements in New York or Chicago dreamed of traveling West where they could bust the sod, build a home, and make a new life for their families. Used to be, GI’s in foxholes dreamed of finding a nice…
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A Pet Peeve
I was listening to a segment on MPR with Tom Weber, interviewing Bryan Strawser of the MN Gun Owners Political Action Committee about President Obama’s big gun speech. But one of the callers reminded me of a pet peeve that’s developed over the years of listening to gun control activists. It was a woman from…
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That Splashing Sound You Hear When Fonzie Lands
Signs your counterculture niche has either jumped the shark, or run out of things to be irate about.
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Snappy Answers To Stupid Questions
Question (via the NYTimes): Are humans necessary? Answer: Yes. But the NYTimes is not.
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A Parable
(SCENE: A small aircraft is flying over the prairie. Inside the plane are: Carpal POX: a golf pro from Wayzata, and Vice Chair for Ideological Purity at the Minnesota 5th CD Libertarian Party Viktor VON-SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE: a professional fraternity organizer, and Vice Chair for Education at the 5th CD Libertarian Party Stephanie Marie ANNAN: Community Organizer…
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Footloose
The most famous (or is it infamous?) punter in modern history tries to pin the Minnesota Vikings against their end zone. Well, in his defense, he no longer has a job to be so focused on. Chris Kluwe may possess a number of less-than-desirable qualities, but the former punter’s media savvy remains arguably his strongest…
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To Those Who Say “You Can’t Legislate Morality”…
…and keeping in mind that I’m speaking in general, not necessarily about the “gay marriage” thing (and further keeping in mind that I barely believe in straight marriage as it’s currently done, much less the gay variety), let’s try a little thought experiment. The next time someone offends you, carry out an honor killing (whatever your ethnic…
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Requiem For A Dog
The real celebrity passing here in the Twin Cities over the weekend was “Jasper”, long-time star of James Lileks’ Bleat blog and namesake of “Jasperwood”. And recipient of probably the most beautiful elegy ever written for a dog. I’m going to hug Clu when I get home tonight. UPDATE: Fixed the link. The perils of blogging…
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Bad Lieutenant
As Yvonne Prettner Solon bids farewell to the office of Lieutenant Governor, should Minnesota do so as well? When it comes to political shockwaves, the announcement that Lt. Gov. Yvonne Prettner Solon would not seek a second-term as Mark Dayton’s running-mate barely constitutes a ripple in the political waters. And why not? Over the past four…
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Deleted Extras
Minnesota’s Film & Television Board faces a legislative re-write. Like Hollywood, Minnesota’s relationship with the entertainment industry has seen a tumultuous career trajectory. From being the ingenue of Midwestern locations in the 1990s, resulting in a bevy of films such as Fargo, Grumpy Old Men, The Mighty Ducks, to a discarded destination left in favor…
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This Hard Land
Note to all you folks thinking of moving to North Dakota to start cashing in on the oil boom: North Dakota is cold. There aren’t a lot of trees. And outside of the eight or nine significant-sized cities (Fargo, Grand Forks, Jamestown, Devil’s Lake, Bismark/Mandan, Minot, Williston, Dickinson, and maybe Valley City), there just aren’t a…
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Memorial Day
On Veterans Day, you thank the servicemen you can. On Memorial Day, you remember the ones you can’t. Today I’ll be doing what I do most Memorial Days – stopping by the memorial to the USS Swordfish, which I wrote about a few years ago – on my way about all the rest of the things the…
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It Needs Occasional Reiteration
This was forwarded to me in an email chain the other day – one of those “please forward to your friends” kinds of things. Now, I never, ever forward email. I probably don’t even forward email that I should, sometimes. But this, I figured, was worth forwarding to a lot more people than I could…
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I’ll Take A Moment…
…to send my best wishes and prayers to my friend and former NARN colleague Michael Brodkorb and his family. Michael was critically injured in an accident last night. And whatever your political point of view, I’d urge you to do the same. Not much information is available. UPDATE: A demented ghoul tried to comment that…
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Alas, Babylon
I thought about writing a long, acerbic piece about Roe V. Wade, the SCOTUS decision handed down forty years ago today. About how the decision – which sniffed imaginary emanations of penumbras from between the lines of the Constitution – was an incredibly badly-written decision. About how it was a deeply wrong-headed over-run of the Tenth…
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Bruce Springsteen Is America’s Greatest Conservative Songwriter, Part V: The Cross Of My Calling
Rock and roll has always been, ostensibly, about upsetting the existing order. In the beginning, its very existence upended what passed for “order” in popular culture, at least to the extent of helping create a “youth culture” – something that’d never existed before, and really started in America. As culture and the genre evolved through…
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The Baby Bust
P.J. O’Rourke – the greatest writer of my generation, even though he’s a generation older than me – writes on the dolorous effect of the Baby Boomers on not just American society, but the idea of America. O’Rourke laments the death of far-sweeping goals – going to the moon, building the biggest dam or the…
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Fifty Shades of Biden
Joe Biden isn’t known for subtext – just text. While the national media has treated Biden as something between a 21st Century Spiro Agnew and that crazy uncle who overstays his welcome during the holidays, Republicans have (dare I say?) celebrated Joe’s Bidenisms as occasional forays into the truth. If Barack Obama represents the modern Democratic…