(SCENE:  A lecture room at an esteemed university.  As 30-odd students take their seats and set up their laptops, Professor Evelyn MUNCHENBERG-SCROGGINS welcomes an older man, Avram COHEYN – a frail 80-something man with thin white hair covered by a Yarmulke.  COHEYN sits on a chair next to the professor’s podium.

MUNCHENBERG-SCROGGINS:  Class?  (Din gradually subsides).  I’d like to welcome Mr. Avram Coheyn to the class.  He’s a native of Poznan – do I have that right? (COHEYN smiles and nods), and he’ll be talking with us about his experiences in the Holocaust.  I’d like  you to give him your undivided attention, and come up with some good questions for him at the end of his talk.  Mr. Coheyn? 

(Class applauds politely as COHEYN rises)

COHEYN (speaks with faint Polish-Yiddish accent):  Thank you, Professor Munchenberg-Scroggins.  And to all of you, also, my thanks.  I am Avram Coheyn.  In Sosnowiec, Poland I was born, in 1929.  And from 1941 through 1945, in a variety of concentration camps I was kept.  By the Nazis…

(Corey KRETINOWSKI, a 21-year-old political science major, leaps to his feet).

KRETINOWSKI:  Godwin’s Law!  

COHEYN: (Stops, puzzled).

KRETINOWSKI:  Godwin’s Law!  He mentioned Nazis!  (MUNCHENBERG-SCROGGINS shifts uncomfortably in her seat)

COHEYN:  Er – what is this “Godwin’s Law” of which you speak?  Of this I have not heard…

(Jane PLATT-WANCKER, a severe-looking 22 year old anthropology major, rises): “It’s a law on the internet or something.  When you mention the Nazis  you get banned”

(Ian BIMMLER, a 21 year old Victimology Studies major in a “Che” T-Shirt):  It’s the law that says when an argument goes along, there’s going to be someone who wrecks it with a Nazi reference”

KRETINOWSKI:  So, dude, your argument is shut down because you mentioned the Nazis.

COHEYN:  Er…what?

(Stacy KREEFELD, a 21 year old Womyn’s Studies major with a “Question Authority” button on her Mao cap):  I think it means that your argument is done.

KRETINOWSKI:  Whenever you mention Nazis, everyone gets to tune you out because mentioning Nazis means you don’t have an argument!

(A few students clap, while a few others look on, confused, and others stare blankly at their desktops)

(Bree EPSTEIN, a 20 year old Sociology major, speaks up):  Mr. Coheyn, I don’t mean to lecture, but perhaps you should try to tell your story without any references to Nazis.  It might make your argument better.

COHEYN:  An argument?  What is this, argument?  I’m telling my story!  When I was 13 year old, my family and I were rousted from our home in Poznan, and force-marched through the cold to the railyard, and packed onto trains by the Nazis…

(KRETINOWSKI, KREEFELD and BIMMLER simultaneously yell): Godwin’s Law!  Godwin’s Law!

COHEYN: What?

KREEFELD:  You keep mentioning Nazis!  Godwins Law says that means whatever you’re saying is invalid!

COHEYN:  What?  What is this madness?  Do you mean that saying the name of the…(catches himself)…National Socialist German Workers’ Party (a few students trade puzzled looks) means I get you crazy kids yelling “Godwin whatsis” at me?  This do I have right?

(A few students nod). 

COHEYN:  When I was 15, I escaped from a concentration camp.  A year in the woods I spent, fighting with the Partisans, fighting so that what we went through, my children and their children and my childrens children freynde would never forget – and now, to me you say I can’t say “Nazi”…

(Several students): “Godwin’s Law!”  (A few titters of juvenile mirth follow)

COHEYN: …without your verkachte yapping?  Distinguished professor Munchenberg-Scroggins, for this you have to say what?

MUNCHENBERG-SCROGGINS (Looks up from iPhone):  I can see both sides, here. 

BIMMLER (Shouts):  This is what democracy looks like!

(A few students clap and cheer). 

COHEYN:  What?  Millions died, my family along with – and because of some stupid internet rule, their names I can not mention? 

(Students fidget, looking amongst themselves)

COHEYN:  Because from what happened there are probably some things we can learn!  That there are things we, today, can learn about that ordeal, do you not see?  Huh?

(More fidgeting)

COHEYN:  With this I am finished! 

(COHEYN stomps from the room, as the shadows and sun form, completely at random, a series of shapes on the window that read “While invoking Nazis can be lazy rhetoric, lazy invocations of “Godwin’s Law” are, if anything, a bigger hurdle to effective communication, in that they give the invoker an unearned sense of intellectual accomplishment” before disappearing. )

(And SCENE)

Not sure this news would have helped my kids’ mother twenty-odd years ago – but I’d have enjoyed it.

An economist looks at the studies linking alcohol and coffee to birth problems, and finds less there than meets most OB/GYNs’ eyes:

One big worry about drinking during pregnancy is that it will result in child behavior problems later. One of the best studies of this issue was published in 2010 in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. What makes it a reliable study? The sample group was large (3,000 women), and the researchers collected information about maternal drinking during pregnancy—not afterward. The study also followed the children of these women through the age of 14 and looked at behavior problems starting at age 2.

The other thing I liked about this study was that it was run in Australia, where recommendations on drinking during pregnancy are more lax than in the U.S. Because the rules are more permissive, Australian women who drink occasionally aren’t necessarily the kind of women who go against medical advice; it’s more likely that differences in drinking levels there are just random variation. Drinkers in the study were classified in five groups: no alcohol, occasional drinking (up to one drink a week), light drinking (2-6 drinks a week) and moderate drinking (7-10 drinks a week).

The researchers compared the mothers’ drinking level at 18 weeks of pregnancy with the children’s behavior issues at age 2. They found that 11% of the children whose mothers did not drink during pregnancy had behavior problems—versus 9% of the children of light drinkers and 11% of the children of moderate drinkers. (Nearly 14% of 2-year-olds whose mothers occasionally drank had behavior problems, but the difference is small and, statistically, could have occurred by chance.) The results were very similar for older kids.

There is much, much more.  Read it, and tell a pregnant friend…

…and even if you don’t have one of those, there’s a lot in there about how to read scientific studies.

“You didn’t build that”.

President Obama said it to America’s entrepreneurs during the campaign; the not-remotely-muted message was that “private sector innovation follows public sector investment” – that without roads, there’d be no car company; without airports, there’d be no aircraft. 

On the state level, one of Governor Messinger’s budget czars made essentially the same statement at a meeting of government and business leaders in Thief River Falls last year; without government to build the infrastructure, entrepreneurship would be doomed to failure. 

On the one level, it’s wrong – unless the entrepreneurs and their employees not only weren’t paying plenty of taxes, but hadn’t already paid their taxesforall that infrastructure all of their lives, and their parents, and grandparents, back to statehood. 

But even beyond that – and I can’t believe I and many other conservative pundits didn’t note this at the time?   It’s just not true; infrastructure tends to follow innovation.

A great example – which came first, the car or the road?

Henry Ford and dozens of other auto makers put a car in almost every garage decades before the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956. The success of the car created a demand for roads. The government didn’t build highways, and then Ford decided to create the Model T. Instead, the highways came as a byproduct of the entrepreneurial genius of Ford and others.

Read a little about the history of the automobile.  When cars were expensive, handmade playthings of the wealthy, roads, were few, far between, and largely wretched outside the cities, where they existed at all.  The normal “road” in the greater US in 1900 was a cow path or a wagon trail.  Early cars were as likely to be found driving along railroad tracks as anywhere else. 

And what happened next?  A huge federal road-building initiative? 

No!  Ford mass-produced the Model T, which brought the car financially into reasonable reach for working-class Americans.  Other auto makers followed suit. 

And then the roads got built: 

Moreover, the makers of autos, tires and headlights began building roads privately long before any state or the federal government got involved. The Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway for cars, pieced together from new and existing roads in 1913, was conceived and partly built by entrepreneurs—Henry Joy of Packard Motor Car Co., Frank Seiberling of Goodyear and Carl Fisher, a maker of headlights and founder of the Indy 500.

And this was the pattern for advance after advance in industry and “infrastructure”; the canal boat led to the government canal; the burgeoning steamship industry led to everything from seaports to the taming of the Mississippi; commerce, not Algore or even the Department of Defense, built the Internet. 

And the business in Thief River Falls which Governor Messinger’s budget apparatchik owed its existence to infrastructure?   Not only had they paid their fair share for the infrastructure that exists (more than their fair share, actually, given Minnesota’s business taxes) over the past 40 years, but it was the company’s existence that gave Thief River Falls the need for significant infrastructure in the first place. 

It’s time government – especially the arrogant, preening, narcissistic variety practiced by the DFL – learn its place.

To: Representative Ryan “Beavis” Winkler”
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Your Minimum Wage Thing

Rep. Winkler,

Here’s what technology has to say about your minimum wage hike.  Read it and think. 

That is all.

PS:  No, it’s not.  I know you’re not paid to think about these things; yours is not to reason why.  But those who support you?  Maybe not in your stu-foresaken district, but in the rest of Minnesota?  There might be hope.  And so I write.

To: You know who you are
From: Mitch Berg
Re: A Peeve, A Mission

If you have ever used the word “disrespect” as a verb, we are probably enemies.

That is all.

About ten years ago, there was a  Saint Paul city council rep – it’d probably be redundant to note that he was a “progressive” – who was a died-in-the-wool public school-support machine.  Looooved those public schools.  Hated hated hated homeschools and charter schools and private schools.  Thought school choice created separate, unequal school systems.

Naturally, the councilperson’s son went to Saint Paul Academy.

“Progressives” have given any number of examples of such hypocrisy; Chelsea Clinton and the Obama kids would never be allowed in a public school, even as their parents fought against meaningful school choice for the children of the less fortunate. 

Anyway – Matt Damon, outspoken supporter of more tax funding for the schools that are supposed to be good enough for all us proles, isn’t going to risk  his own children in the public education cesspool:

 Actor Matt Damon is a strong supporter of America’s public schools. Just two years ago, the star spoke passionately about the importance of public schools at a Washington DC “Save our Schools” rally. In fact, the actor is so impressed with public school teachers that he has demanded they receive a pay raise. That passion and conviction, however, does not apply to Damon’s own children, who will not be enrolled into the Los Angeles public school system.

And the excuse is almost too stupid for “progressives” to buy.

I said “almost” (emphasis added):

In an interview with the Guardian published Saturday, Damon revealed that he had just moved to Los Angeles from New York, but that he didn’t “have a choice” when it came to putting his four daughters into private schools. The multi-millionaire did say that it was “a major moral dilemma” and then made the bizarre excuse that the public schools aren’t “progressive” enough.

That was a leap in logic not even Jason Bourne could make.

Level-setting:  Berg’s Laws are pretty much inviolable rules of human (largely political) behavior based on years of observation.  And while Berg’s Seventh Law gets most of the action these days, Berg’s Tenth is getting a workout, too.

Berg’s Tenth Law reads:

Berg’s Tenth Law of Quantum Context: When a liberal says a conservative is “lying”, the odds of the “lie” being merely an ambiguity triggering some form of cognitive dissonance increases in geometric proportion with the volume and stridency of the liberal’s declaration. Here are the references in this blog to Berg’s 10th Law.

 It’s a nice broad (but iron-clad) law.  But sometimes laws need corollaries.

Which brings us to “The Santorum Corollary” to Berg’s Tenth:

The Santorum Corollary to Berg’s Tenth Law:  If the news media reports something askance about a conservative’s behavior, a full look into the facts will almost invariably show that it was reported with key context missing. 

That’s almost invariably.  People misbehave; sometimes they’re conservatives, sometimes they’re apolitical, and sometimes they’re liberals; the media reminds us of the conservative ones, anyway (sometimes in an onanistic frenzy).

But the Santorum Corollary is nearly airtight, as in this week’s episode; the lefty “alternative” media thought they heard Rick Santorum saying something weird – or so they were told by the HuffPo, which is paid good money to do “progressives'” thinking for them:

Here’s the “story”, as reported by the HuffPo:

Speaking to anti-abortion group Students for Life after receiving an award last month, Santorum attempted to explain what he saw as an enthusiasm gap between liberal and conservative activists. During his speech, a clip of which can be seen above, via Right Wing Watch, Santorum argued that the pro-choice movement infuses passion about abortion rights into “every aspect of their life.” He said that because of this, showering at a gym had become an “uncomfortable” prospect for students.

(Switching into leftyblogger cant):  Oh, noez!   Can I haz weird? 

(Back to English):  Showering around pro-choicers is “uncomfortable?”  That sure sounds…off, doesn’t it? 

But the HuffPo said it!  And thus it must be The Revealed Truth!  Every leftyblogger took the “story” as gospel in the tittering, Junior-high cadence that is the lingua francaof the “Reality Based” alt-media community. 

But was it accurate?

Have you read the Santorum Corollary yet?    Of course not!

From the Byron York piece that the HuffPo wrenched out of context…:

“In July, members of anti-abortion group Students For Life, the group Santorum was addressing, complained that they had been bullied by pro-choice activists after using facilities at an Austin Y.”

“The group had come to the area to show support for anti-abortion legislation then being debated at the state Capitol, and had made last-minute arrangements to use showers at the gym. They did so one night, with the students entering the building in shifts wearing blue shirts, indicating support for the bill. After the first night went without incident, the Y contacted a director at Students For Life and asked them not to return.”

According to the director of the anti-abortion group, YMCA staffers stated that abortion rights activists had intimidated them into making the decision:

“Said, again, ‘You guys [the pro-life students] were respectful. We have no problems with you, in particular, however there were some people that support abortion who talked to our staff, intimidated them.’ They actually said that they felt threatened, and they asked us not to come back,” [Students for Life director Alexa] Coombs said.

So apparently its the pro-infanticide crowd that gets hinky about cognitive dissonance…

…and feels the need to sexualize their own bigotries. 

Now, who are the weird, skeevy ones?

Just so we’re clear on that.

They don’t call it “Blue” America for nothing:

In a new YouGov poll, 53 percent of Democrats say that the American dream is no longer achievable. By comparison, 55 percent of Republicans say the dream is still achievable. By the same percentage, 27 percent, Republicans think the dream is not achievable and Democrats do think it is.

But when combined in a single question about the American Dream, the poll finds that the dream is slipping away in the minds of most Americans.

Republicans have faith in the idea of America; Democrats – according to this poll, and no, I don’t know the methodology, and just like all those “Democrats are teh smrt!” polls that leftybloggers like to gurgle and coo about like toddlers that just made nice pantses, it’s nothing you necessarily want to bank your retirement on.

But it doesn’t flunk the sniff test, now, does it?

Michael Paymar is back.

His attempt to make the law-abiding gun owner pay for the Newtown Massacre squibbed in the last session; even his own party deserted his effort; even some sensible DFLers like Rep. Hilstrom threw Paymar and his metrocrat extremists under the bus.

But he and his buddies in the mainstream media are trying a different tack; around the time his bills bogged down amid party defections and an avalanche of public opposition, Paymar and the metrocrat extremists started a whispering campaign that the legislators were “intimidated” by the number of citizens who showed up at the hearings with firearms – legally, naturally (the law allows people to carry in the Capitol complex if they are legal carry permittees and they notify the head of Capitol security).

Of course, it is an objective fact that Paymar is vastly safer in a room full of carry permittees – who’ve passed background checks and completed training in the subject – than he’d be in a room full of, well, DFLers. Or any other private citizen. Because it’s an objective fact that carry permittees, nationwide and in Minnesota, are a couple of orders of magnitude less likely to commit any crime than the general public are.

But Paymar wants to continue the slander of his fellow citizen; he’s authoring a bill for the next session that’d clamp down on citizens carrying in the Capitol complex.

It’s not just a solution in search of a problem, of course; it’s a bitchy little slap at the law-abiding citizen.

I can’t wait until he’s in the minority again. 

The inevitable result of across-the-board minimum wage hikes?  Fewer minimum wage jobs.

Case in point; as minimum wages around the country rose during the 2000s, McDonalds started pre-cooking its hamburger patties, so they’d only need to be reheated in the stores.  This got rid of most of the traditional “burger-flipper” jobs, the ones that liberals sneered at but provided hundreds of thousands of opportunities for teens and others entering and re-entering the workforce to learn how to show up for work on time and do a good job at something. 

But there was always the front counter.  Right?

Maybe not; McDonalds is testing thousands of touch-screen kiosks in France:

The move is designed to boost efficiency and make ordering more convenient for customers. In an interview with the Financial Times, McDonald’s Europe President Steve Easterbrook notes that the new system will also open up a goldmine of data. McDonald’s could potentially track every Big Mac, McNugget, and large shake you order. A calorie account tally at the end of the year could be a real shocker.
The touch screens will only accept debit or credit cards, adding to the slow death knell of cash and coins. This all goes along with an overall revamp of McDonald’s restaurants worldwide aimed at projecting a modern image as opposed to the old-fashioned golden arches…

Winkler is spending his between-session time agitating for a minimum wage hike bill. 

Minnesota’s young and poor should ask him to stop doing them any more favors.

Maybe if there was a touch-screen kiosk of some kind…

The left-leaning media – meaning “most of the media” – is tittering and cavorting about the sparks that’ve been flying between New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. “GOP CIVIL WAR”, they bellow, as if it’s something new.

It’s not.

There are three different definitions of “Conservative” in American political life:

• Northeastern Conservatives: Comfortable with big government, socially moderate-to-liberal on social issues (defined broadly; it refers to education, welfare and immigration as much as abortion and gay marriage), assertive on defense, tolerant of massive intrusions in the interest of internal security. Their focus is less on shrinking government than on getting the best value for the tax dollar. Think Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Chris Christie – or for that matter Norm Coleman. Don’t think Michael Bloomberg; he’s not a conservative in any way, shape or form.
• Western Conservatives: Favor aggressively limiting government. Generally socially libertarian (at least on a policy level; they may or may not be personally conservative), frequently vague on defense, favor law and order but opposing massive law-enforcement overreach. Favors shrinking government intrusions in the economy and personal life. Think the Tea Party and the pols that are aligned with it, including Rand Paul and, largely, Rick Perry.
• Southern Conservatives: Comfortable with big government, conservative on social issues, hawkish on defense and law-and-order. There aren’t many major contenders from the Southern school in this campaign.  Huckabee’s a southern-con.  You could make a case Dubya was one, too. 

So the Christie/Paul kerfuffle isn’t just a battle between candidates; it’s a battle between fundamentally different schools of American conservatism.

And after reading both of them, it’s clear; they’re both right.

Christie Was Right – Libertarians, when it comes to national security, frequently are lost in la-la land. I’ve long since lost count of the Ron Paul supporters who sincerely believe that Iran would be a great friend of the US if we just acted nice to them (and left the Israelis to their own devices with no further ado). Not a few libertarians are just as lost in the fog as Vietnam-era anti-war liberals when it comes to one of history’s great facts; societies that practice war eat societies that would eschew it for breakfast.

Sure – the relatively peaceful, relatively liberal democracies of the West did in fact eventually defeat the warmongering totalitarian Nazis, to pick an example – but only at staggering cost and dislocation.

If you accept that war happens, and that sometimes those wars come to us against our national will, and that it’s better to win them than lose them, then some form of effort to gain intelligence about ones’ enemies’ intentions is one of those things that one trades for, among other things, casualties. And don’t kid yourself – intelligence-gathering has been an incredibly intrusive force in Americans’ lives in the pasts; FDR ordered his intelligence and counter-intelligence services to read every single piece of snail-mail, every telegraph, and eavesdrop on every single phone conversation entering and leaving the United States during WWII.

And like winning wars, staying a jump ahead of your enemies is an ugly, messy thing; it’s the sausage you really don’t want to see getting made. Like fighting crime – there’s a trade-off between liberty and effectiveness. A perfect police state might, hypothetically, be crime-free (at the cost of being, in essence, a criminal state itself); a pure libertarian state might be “Crime-free” in that, having no government, it recognizes no crime.

Say what you will about libertarian purism; if you stop short of anarchy, then defending your society from those who’d harm you is the most direct justification to have a government in the first place. It’s one of the few really good reasons to have a government; without defense (and courts to enforce contracts), really, what truly useful purpose do they serve that the private sector doesn’t do better?  If government can’t keep the people safe from foreign aggression, why have it in the first place?  Even libertarians that aren’t anarchists largely agree on this, right?

If you think you prevent airplans from crashing into skyscrapers, or underwear bombers from blowing your kids out of the sky as they come home from London, happens by just squirting good-will at the world, you are completely nuts. 

But Wait – Rand Paul Is Also Right! – But then you’re also nuts if you believe that government doesn’t take a mile for every inch you give it, or that “Defending the Nation” is a static, unchanging thing. 

All of you national-security hawks who say “The FISA Courts, into which was have no visibiliity and into which there is exceptionally limited oversight, are ample protection of due process for Americans” have apparently forgotten the IRS scandal.  Or Fast and Furious.  Or the trampling of the Fourth Amendment, or the growing militarization of the police. 

In short, law and order conservatives who are pollyannaish about government are no less addled than those who are pollyannaish about the role of unilateral good-will in keeping the world at peace. 

“We’re from the government and we’re here to help” is no less a joke coming from the NSA than it is from the Fish and Wildlife Service.   Just as liberals would suspend the Bill of Rights to cut CO2 emissions, some conservatives – especially the ones that are comfortable with “the System”, and there is nobody who can grow more comfortable with “The System” than a federal prosecutor like Christie – are perfectly fine saying “would you trade the Fourth Amendment for getting that drug dealer out of your neighborhood?”

As to defense?  The libertarians are wrong, we need a strong one.  But the definition of “a strong defense” changes, and changes radically, over time.  Is it the right time to engage the American military in an endless counterinsurgency that might be better suited to intelligence and proxies to carry out (uh oh, now the Libertarians and Liberals will get upset) when the Russians and the Chicoms are taking the world in a much more convention direction again?

The point being that re-assessing what the nation’s strategy actually is, and how the military forwards it, and what kind of military we need to do the job isn’t “anti-military”. 

Above all?  Due process needs to be more than just an inconvenient speed bump for the authorities – or what’s the point of pretending to be a “representative Republic” anyway?

I’m not a person who nurses a lot of peeves.

I’m pretty much live and let live; I have my foibles, you can have your peccadillos. 

But if there’s a trait among journalists that annoys the piddle out of me, it’s their tendency to imbue journalism with the attributes of a holy calling, and its institutions with a significance that was absurd even back when “journalism” ostensibly meant something. 

But there’s never been anything quite like this.

Ruth Marcus writes in RCP, with emphasis added:

Don Graham’s decision to sell The Washington Post was his reverse Sophie’s Choice moment.

She had to decide which cherished child to save and which to send to the gas chamber. Don and the Graham family weren’t forced to make an anguishing choice but did so anyway. They relinquished the newspaper they love in order to protect it.

If the comparison sounds hyperbolic, you don’t know the Grahams.

And Ruth Marcus is as tone-deaf as Ryan Winkler. 

If it were any other business – including yours – it’d be just the daily thrum of business happening to theWaPo. 

Do newspapers have any greater significance to society, especially the parts of society that don’t work for the newspapers?

If that was ever the case, it was long before the Big Media whored itself out to the Big Left.  To the extent that newspapers ever played a role in civil society, it was when they still saw themselves as a check and balance on government.  Rather than just conservative government. 

Good riddance.  Hope Bezos shuts it down.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emailed:

No wonder gun control advocates all sound as if they’re talking from the same playbook. They are.

Thank GOD they’re not getting their sample talking points and draft legislation from a special interest group like ALEC. Because that would be wrong.

Joe doakes

Five’ll get you ten this campaign is financed in large part by the Joyce Foundation, which, along with victim-disarmament groups like “Protect Minnesota”, funds the “objective journalists” at MinnPost.

UPDATE:  The original version of this post – complete with comical typos – shows the danger of trying to blog before one’s first cup of coffee.  In the bathroom.  On an iPhone.

On the one hand, correlation doesn’t equal causation.

So I’ll restrain my end-zone happy dance at the news that gun crime in Virginia has plummeted as gun sales boomed:

Firearms sales rose 16 percent to a record 490,119 guns purchased from licensed gun dealers in 2012, according to sales estimates obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
During the same period, major crimes committed with firearms dropped 5 percent to 4,378.
“This appears to be additional evidence that more guns don’t necessarily lead to more crime,” said Thomas R. Baker, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs who specializes in research methods and criminology theory.

See also: the rest of the freaking country.

Bit remember – correlation isn’t causation. Knowing that people who live near Mosquitos are prone to getting malaria doesn’t mean Mosquitos cause malaria. But that knowledge can help lead you to the cause. Mosquitos carry malaria.

Do more guns decrease crime? Not necessarily. But there’s enough patterns in enough places to give you an idea that there’s something to investigate that has to do with the availability of guns to the law-abiding.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails;

Minnesota court says I have no reasonable expectation of privacy in my cell phone records. Local police don’t even need a warrant supported by probable cause, they can fax over a fishing expedition request and the cell phone company rats me out. And if cops can get it, you know private investigators can get it, not to mention politically motivated bureaucrats looking for dirt on political opponents.

Why doesn’t a cell phone provider offer a Secure Option? For just $$$ per month more, all your calls will be encrypted, location and usage data will be scrubbed, there will be nothing for local law enforcement, hackers, hijackers, and even the NSA to snoop on.

Secret doesn’t have to mean illegal. Sensitive contract negotiations for the new quarterback. Corporate merger negotiations. Undercover cops. Political candidates discussing strategy with advance teams. Just plain cranky people who don’t like bureaucrats snooping on them. Sounds like a business opportunity.

Joe Doakes

 Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the left’s current ascendancy, across the US but especially in currently-single-party Minnesota, is the complete control they have of the long-range planning bodies that control the spending of so very, very much money in our society. 

And Katherine Kersten is onto the biggest and baddest such body in Minnesota, and their real aim – to take control of life as we know it in Minnesota.

The goal – from the Obama administration all the way down to the State of Minnesota – is to view metropolitan areas as “Regions”, and plan those regions so as to start funnelling people, by means subtle and brash, from the outskirts back into the cities. 

It’s called Regionalism, and it’s not merely for your and society’s own good; it intends to set things straight:

Regionalism is driven by a core ideological conviction: The cause of the poverty and social dysfunction that bedevil America’s cities is the greed and racial bigotry of suburbanites — especially those in prosperous, outer-ring suburbs, which are viewed as unjustly excluding the poor. Regionalists believe that financial aid for the inner ring won’t remedy this injustice. A profound change in governance is required.

It’s an authoritarian approach to building Utopia.  And like all such attempts throughout history, it requires a villain. 

What sort of change? The title of a book by regionalist guru David Rusk puts it bluntly: “Cities without Suburbs.” In regionalists’ view, suburbs with their own tax bases are, by definition, a menace to cities, and the distinctions between the two must be wiped out as completely as possible.

Regionalists’ strategy to effectively merge cities and suburbs turns on two ideologically freighted buzzwords: “equity” and “sustainability.” “Equity” is code for using public policy to redistribute wealth and to engineer economic equality among demographic groups.

Regionalists view metrowide “economic integration” as one of government’s primary responsibilities. Their plan to accomplish it is twofold: Disperse urban poverty throughout a metro area via low-income housing and make suburban life so inconvenient and expensive that suburbanites are pushed back into the city.

So the suburbs – and suburbanites – are the enemy, the Emanuel Goldsteins against whom the Regionalists will muster their side’s ignorant rage. 

“Sustainability” means policies that would override market forces to ensure that in the future, the great majority of new jobs, economic development and public works projects are funneled into the metro area’s urban core and inner ring — where, not coincidentally, regionalists’ own political base is concentrated. “Sustainable” policies promote high-density, Manhattan-style living, and attempt to wean us away from our cars and push us to walk, bike or use public transit to get to work.

As one critic — speculating on MSP 2040’s likely outcome — lamented: “Do we all have to live in a 1,500-square-foot condo above a coffee shop on a transit line?”

That’d be the goal. 

Of course, if you’re a conservative – at least, a libertarian-conservative – you know that allocating society’s resources via political means, especially to promote political ends, is the least-efficient way to do it.  And it’s Economics 101 to observe that “making people pay more, or less, than they naturally would for a good, or service (or, by extension, government) is the road to wrenching unintended consequences”. 

But that’s the point – making society, or at least the less-favored part of it, pay the bill for utopia:

Suburbanites will disproportionately shoulder the costs of this socially engineered transformation, paying more in taxes and getting less back in infrastructure and public services…Regionalists’ strategy for imposing their agenda hinges on giving regional bodies like the Met Council the ultimate trump: the power of the checkbook. The Obama administration’s “Sustainable Communities Initiative” (SCI) provides a model. SCI channels federal funds for land use, transportation and housing projects through regional bodies. The catch is that, to participate, municipalities must embrace redistributive “equity” goals.

Kersten doesn’t mention – because it’s outside the scope of the piece – that the “unintended consequences” of this sort of gigantistic destruction of the free market toward political goals are always, always vastly worse than planned.  Trying to force people and jobs back into cities at a time when the market is obsoleting the central core city – a concept that never actually occurred in human history outside of the 200-year window of the Industrial Revolution, a period that is drawing to a close even as we speak – is going to cause huge problems. 

Kevin Williamson may have been dead right; it may well be that the faster the Federal government goes broke, the better.  At least it’ll stymie this sort of authoritarian meddling.

Guns save the lives of real Americans.

Story first.  Then a quiz:

It was an extremely scary situation when a female bank teller and her husband were kidnapped from their home and forced to drive to the bank where the wife worked to help the thieves steal money from a safe after hours.
According to KHOU, the couple was at home, when two armed men, who knew the wife was a bank teller, forced their way in and held the couple at gunpoint.

The suspects forced the couple into their own car, made them drive to the bank, and had the wife remove money from the safe.

Afterwards, the robbers told the husband to drive away – in a completely different direction.  To the dreaded “Secondary Crime Scene”, where anyone with a brain knows your odds of survival are in the single digits. 

At some point during that drive, the husband was able to gain access to his personal firearm, which was in the vehicle. 

He opened fire on the suspects, hitting both of them. One of the suspects died of his injuries and the other is in serious condition.

The suspects are described as brothers, aged 20 and 21, who live in the community.

By the way, one of the self-defense questions I get most often is “is there a site that chronicles self-defense cases?”  Clayton Cramer retired his excellent “Armed Self-Defense” site a few years ago – but the site posting this piece, Guns Save Lives, is stepping in to fill the void. 

Now, the quiz.  It’s aimed at all you leftybloggers out there who, in the absence of any knowledge or intellectual curiosity on the subject, labeled the “stand your ground” as “Shoot First” laws. 

The gentleman in this storyshot first.

What do you think would have happend if he’d shot second?

Answers please.

…but getting passed around as much?

Apparently so, since not only – as I pointed out two weeks ago – do minorities benefit disproportionately from “stand your ground” laws, but now we find that a very solid majority supports the laws overall.

The obvious conclusion – most people are smarter than the media.

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

•  I’ll be on from 1-3PM.  I’ll be talking with MNGOP gubernatorial candidate Dave Thompson about the evolving 2014 governor’s race.  I’ll also talk with Representative Mary Franson about the status of the battle against the daycare union jamdown.
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Brad Carlson is on “The Closer” from 1-3 tomorrow. Tune on in!

(All times Central)

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

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my new UStream video and chat channel (don’t ask)
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

First things first:  congratulations to AM1280’s Dennis Miller for chasing AM1130 out of weekday evening radio.  I count that as a big win for AM1280, the little station that could.

Tomorrow on the NARN, it’s going to be a fun show. 

For starters, I’ll be talking with GOP gubernatorial candidate Senator Dave Thompson.  The race is 15 months away – even the convention is still nine months out – and the race is already heating up.  Got questions for Senator Thompson?  Call in!

Then we’ll be talking about the Daycare union jamdown with Representative Mary Franson.  This battle took a small, disappointing turn last weekend – but it’s nowhere near over yet. 

Tune in tomorrow from 1-3PM on AM1280 The Patriot – the station that isn’t moving its programs all over hell and half an acre!

The income gap has gotten worse under Obama. 

Much worse:

In his speech in Illinois last week, and at events since, Obama described income inequality in the starkest terms. “This growing inequality is morally wrong,” he said, and “undermines the very essence of America.”

To be sure, income inequality is a standard trope for liberals, who always use it to advocate more wealth redistribution.

And Obama’s latest focus neatly coincides with his plans to push for more federal spending and taxes on the “rich” in coming budget battles.

But what Obama conveniently leaves out of his sermons is that income inequality has grown faster on his watch than any time in the past two decades, at least.

Research by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez shows that since the Obama recovery started in June 2009, the average income of the top 1% grew 11.2% in real terms through 2011.

The bottom 99%, in contrast, saw their incomes shrink by 0.4%.

As a result, 121% of the gains in real income during Obama’s recovery have gone to the top 1%. By comparison, the top 1% captured 65% of income gains during the Bush expansion of 2002-07, and 45% of the gains under Clinton’s expansion in the 1990s.

 Who’da thunk it – the party whose entire compaign is aimed at gulling “the 99%” is the one that’s dedicated to screwing “the 99%”.

Couldn’t see that one coming.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A 22-year-old Black man was shot by White police officers. “Community activists” in Minneapolis point out similarities to Trayvon.

Black, White, gun. Yep, sounds the same. News reports say Minneapolis police shot him with Heckler and Koch MP5’s, full-auto 9mm submachine guns. Same thing you’d see a German cop carrying. Here’s a sample photo from another law enforcement agency:

More details here.

Police dog, submachine gun, car chase . . . yep, just exactly like Trayvon. No further analysis needed. Clear case of Black child killed by gun violence. So how do we prevent this tragedy from happening again?

Universal background checks. Mayors Against Illegal Guns were in town Wednesday to read off the names of people killed by gun violence. The sister of the school principal who died in Newtown spoke. A relative of someone who died at Accent Signage spoke. Sensible, reasonable, background checks for all firearms transfers, that’s all it would have taken to prevent every single one of those deaths.

It does strike me as odd that the Minneapolis Police Department doesn’t do background checks on its own officers every time they check a fully-automatic assault weapon out of the firearms locker to go shoot some Black children but no doubt that’s due to Bush tax cuts or the Koch Brothers war on women. We could pay for all background checks by taxing the rich. And we should. For the 22-year-old Children.

Joe Doakes

To the hard left, facts are whatever they say they are.

The London Telegraph lists the world’s most “Libertarian” countries…

…where “libertarian” is apparently defined as “in terms of drugs, gay rights, prostitution and tax policies”. 

Y’know.  The liberties that really matter.

Dear Brit media:  there is more to “liberty” than torching up and waving your private parts around. 

It reminds me of those Americans who are leaping up and down about how “libertarian” Russia is…because they’re giving Snowdon asylum.

This is an update of a piece I wrote five years ago. 

It was 30 years ago today that Big Country’s The Crossing was released.

In America, Big Country has that “one-hit wonder” patina about them, which only goes to show that when it comes to music, too many Americans are ignorant clods.

While The Crossing‘s “In A Big Country” was, indeed, their only real entry into the Top40 in America, it’d be hard to overestimate what a blast of fresh air the album was in 1983.

1983 was a great year in music; it was also the year that provided many of the decade’s musical punch lines; “Putting On The Ritz” by Taco, “Mr. Roboto” by Styx, “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats, Kajagoogoo and Culture Club and Asia and Naked Eyes and Laura Branigan and not one but two Jim Steinman bombast-fests (Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” and Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing At All”) duked it out with some of the great pop music of all time; “Little Red Corvette”, Michael Jackson’s entire Thriller album back before he turned into a walking freak show, and a long list of other classics.

Amid all the good and all the bad, there was a definite trend; it was the era of the synthesizer.  The battle between analog instruments like the guitar, bass, physical drums and mechanical and electromechanical keyboards like the piano and organ on the one hand and purely-electronic ones like the synth and the sequencer had just begun. 

(And if you’ve listened to pop radio lately, you know that the electronics won.  But we’re getting fifteen years ahead of ourselves). 

Some declared the guitar dead.  Articles in Rolling Stone said that the new wave (heh heh) of cheap electronic technology would finally euthanize the venerable analog stringed instrument.  It was the year Yamaha’s revolutionary DX7 synthesizer hit the market, bringing digital Frequency Modulation technology down to around $1,000 for the first time, making it possible for pretty much anyone (with $1,000) to create any sound they wanted, save it onto cassettes (or, for a few bucks more, floppy disks!), play it onto the first inexpensive digital sequencers and MIDI processors and “drum machines” and essentially run a “band” from ones’ keyboard. The future of music, said the wonks, was pasty-faced geeks with hundred dollar haircuts in flamboyant suits, pecking away at keyboards as masses of lobotomized droogs bobbed away in the audience.

Straight into the face of those predictions charged Big Country – a band from Dunfermline, Scotland that mixed technical “wow” with actual fun (the Scottish football-hooligan atmosphere that accompanied their shows and appearances), they blew the knobs and faders off of the synth-wankers that glorious autumn.

The band wrapped itself in “Scotland” – but ironically, none of the band’s members were native Scots.  Bassist Tony Butler and drummer Mark Brzezicki were from London, guitarist Bruce Watson was Canadian, and guitarist and singer Stuart Adamson was from Manchester (although he grew up in Dunfermline.  His impenetrable brogue was the real thing).

The “wow” came partly from technology (really cheap technology, like the MXR Pitch Transposer and the e-bow, basically a hand-held electromagnet that acts like an electronic violin bow, giving a guitar infinite sustain), great guitars (the lads favoredYamaha SG2000s and Fender Strats) clever engineering and pure guitar technique to wrench amazing impersonations from their instruments; they loosely modeled bagpipes, Irish fiddles, and all manner of supercharged traditional instruments which, combined with the Gaelic-y arrangements and playing technique, roused talk of a “Celtic revival” in that year that also brought U2, the Alarm and Simple Minds to the charts.

And of course, there was great musicianship; Butler and Brzezicki were superb session musicians before Big Country; Adamson and Watson were excellent in a more restrained, controlled way.

Adamson and Watson rarely played power chords, sticking to carefully-orchestrated one-and-two-note patterns over their carefully-built sound-setups to create a distinctive, loud, joyful noise.

Nearly every song on the album was a keeper:

1. “In a Big Country” – hardly needs explaining, right?
2. “Inwards” – like German techno, played on guitars. By humans.  Who are having fun and not praying for imminent nuclear war.
3. “Chance” – A hit single in the UK, unknown here, but a gorgeous song; spare, evocative guitars and vocal harmonies that, in Tony Butler’s career as a spectacular backup singer, are among his best. Actually one of my two favorite songs on the album.
4. “1000 Stars” – An infectiously danceable bit of Cold War paranoia.
5. “The Storm” – As Scots-Gaelic as the flat side of a claymore.
6. “Harvest Home” – An irresistably danceable song (in the “Sword Dance” vein, rather than “Dancing With The Stars”, or even “Dance Fever with Denny Terrio”), drawn from that bottomless well of Rock and Roll inspiration, the Jacobite Rebellion and the diaspora of Scots afterwards.
7. “Lost Patrol” – Never liked this one all that much; another one of those “Gaelo-Teutonic techno on guitars” things.
8. “Close Action” – My other favorite.
9. “Fields of Fire” – The other single in the US, and one of many great bagpipe impressions…
10. “Porrohman” – A fun bit of guitar-effect wizardry to try to pick apart, but it did in fact get tiresome and shrill after a while. Hey, one out of ten ain’t bad…

The album was a huge splash in 1983.

But the band never really had much impact in the US after their debut; they only charted with one more single (“Wonderland“, from the next year, one of my favorites) which peaked at #86, while Steeltown, my favorite Big Country album, barely dented the album charts in the US (it debuted at #1 in the UK).  Steeltown’s marquee single, the spectacular “Where The Rose Is Sown“, a Falklands War protest of sorts, didn’t show up at all.

I think I spent sixty hours over my “interim” period in 2004 (my college was on a 4-1-4 system – January was spent on one, all-day class for the whole month) learning how to play and imitate every single song on the album. I had the bagpipe thing figured out, anyway…

Adamson, after years of fighting alcoholism,  committed suicide in December of 2001.  The band knocked around in limbo for most of the last decade, held up with legal wrangling among the surviving members and the Adamson estate. They re-united last year, with former Alarm frontman Mike Peters singing lead, and Watson’s son Jamie sitting in on guitar.

I’m gonna down a Newcastle and break out the SG in honor of the anniversary.