When making your weekend plans – tomorrow the NARN will be broadcasting live from Bill’s Gun Shop and Range, for the Shooter Show. 

And remember – ahem:

You Get To Test-Fire Your Choice Of Firearms, For Free!

(You buy the ammo…)

The show starts today, and runs through Sunday – but I hope you’ll join me for the broadcast, and a ton of shooting, tomorrow from 1-3PM!

(I’ll be adjourning to “the Lodge”, next door, for a drink or two after the show.  Hope you can join me there!)

(NOTE:  I first ran this piece almost a year ago – April 17 2013 – fully intending to follow through and write this series.  And then…I didn’t.  But now I am.  So I’m going to re-run the piece from waaaay back when, and try to do a new piece roughly every Friday).

As I noted when I started this series a week or so ago, part of the reason I didn’t care much for most of the music of the seventies was because, in my drive to be just plain different than everyone around me, I figured if I was in for a dime, I’d best be in for a buck; go all-in with the punks and whatever else was cooler-than-thou.

When I was a kid in the seventies, I was too tall, coulda used a few pounds; the athletic gene skipped a generation (or at least the “willing to put up with coaches” gene did).  I wasn’t popular, I wasn’t especially smart, I wasn’t “in” with any crowd.  I had greasy hair and terminal social awkwardness.

But I did read Rolling Stone.  I knew what the cool kids were listening to in New York and LA and Chicago, and I sought it out; the Clash, the Sex Pistols and Generation X, to be sure, but all sorts of other stuff that was “alternative” in its day; Tom Petty, Dire Straits, Bruce Springsteen, the Police, all of them were off the beaten pop path at that point.  That they all became the top forty within half a decade is one of the glorious things about early-eighties music.

And I buried my teenage identity in pretty much anything that the kids in North Dakota weren’t listening to.  The guys?  They dug Bad Company, Shooter, Trooper, Rush, Ted Nugent, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kiss and the like; the girls were into Dan Fogelberg, Styx and the Bay City Rollers and God only knows what else. The music geeks thought Chicago and Alan Parsons and Emerson, Lake and Palmer were just dreamy.

So I was pretty insufferable.

But it needs to be added that it was, in many ways, a terrible, terrible decade for pop culture.

Maybe it reflected a hangover from the turmoil of the sixties.  Maybe it was a measure of a society floating aimlessly and beginning to decay after a couple of decades of purpose and dynamic growth.  Maybe it was just all those baby boomers.

But like polyester clothes, The Brady Bunch and the Chevette, much of the music of the 1970s was a reminder that times were really not good.

(more…)

The bill that the Metrocrats chose to call the “Safe and Supportive Minnesota Schools Act” passed the Senate. 

Let’s look at what’s in a name.  Because the name “Safe and Supportive Minnesota Schools Act” is intensely misleading – almost to a geometric fault.

There are so many names for this bill that are more appropriate:

The Redundant Feel-Good Act:  Every school district already has a bullying policy.  It’s the law. 

The PC Payoff Act:  This bill – probably soon to be a law – is a chit being paid back to the DFL’s supporters by the party currently in power, creating not only a protected class of students, but a super-di-duper protected class. 

The Full Employment For Bureaucrats Act:  This bill – which creates a huge unfunded mandate on top of all the others foisted on our school systems, to the point where many districts are nothing but mandate delivery systems with occasional spurts of “education” – will create a whole new class of administrators.  And they’ll belong to unions, who donate their dues money to the DFL. 

The Full Employment For Trial Lawyers Act:  The bill makes the entire process of dealing with “bullying” even more legalistic than it already is.  Legalistic means “designed to be controlled, and especially litigated (at an exquisitely expensive hourly rate) by lawyers”. 

The Type-Cast Your Child For Life Act:  Everything related to everything that can be defined as “bullying”, no matter how torturously, will become part of a child’s permanent academic record.  Which will affect childrens’ future chances at higher education, jobs, the military, jobs requiring security clearances and the like, long after the child has grown out of whatever phase they were in when they were bullies (and that’s assume they were rightly and justly accused of “bullying”, since the bill is also…)

“Stasi Had The Right Idea!” Act:   Anonymous informants?  Giving those who accuse others of bullying complete immunity from consequences if it turns out that the accusations were fabricated? 

The “Further Proof That North Dakotans Are Smarter Than Minnesotans” Act:  Other states – including our grown-up neighbor, my home state of North Dakota – address bullying by addressing bullying, passing laws that address actual behavior rather than creating the infrastructure for a network of secret denunciations and…

The Ideology Police Act:  …making all beliefs that don’t toe the PC line, especially personal religious beliefs, however manifested or stated, a form of behavior that needs to be watched and suppressed, overtly or subtly, “for the good of the children”.       

The “Let’s Have More Bullying, Not Less!” Act:  Bullying tends to go up, rather than down, in places with bullying bills.   

The Metrocrat Power Grab Of 2014 Act:  The bill – which does nothing to address bullying of children that isn’t already covered by existing policies – does coalesce more power to indoctrinate, to punish dissent from the state-sanctioned social views, and to extort more from the taxpayer in the bargain.  And it does it during the last session during which the DFL is guaranteed absolute power.                 

Could someone in the legislature please see to this?

New scientific poll proves that conservatives are better readers than liberals – and this translates into higher general intelligence.

This is, of course, as I’ve always suspected; liberals are big on talking about how intelligent they are, what conservatives usually stick to demonstrating it in their jobs, families, and daily lives.

For all of their babbling about snake-handling and “Faux” News and Christine O’Donnell and the like, any actual conservative dealing with liberals on a daily basis knew this to be a fact, in the pit of their gut. 

But that was anecdotal.  This?  This is settled science.

(more…)

Only 40% of Minnesotans think Al Franken is good enough or smart enough, according to this poll.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A buddy notes the insidious lure of Somebody Else’s Money:

 The old Federal rule was that you can’t get food stamps unless you qualify under income guidelines. OR if you get at least $1.00 of heat share relief. So of course the various state programs freely handed out the $1.00 because they could leverage that dollar into 50 times as much in food stamps for their citizens.

 Congress, in an effort to curtail the cheating, raised the cut-off to require $20.00 in heat share assistance, thereby avoiding the token assistance cheating. Well, except that the states now simply raised the payment to $20.00. The heat share comes out of federal funding also, and in another article the funding was described as block share grants that typically have left-over funding at the end anyway. So there is no incentive not to hand out more of one welfare to qualify for more of another welfare.

 Right back to the typical hamster wheel. The voters would never vote to raise their own taxes to build a street car, or refrigerate an outdoor ice rink, or put art on $50,000 drinking fountains for the bums. We only go along with it because it’s paid for with magic federal money that doesn’t come from OUR taxes. So if we now need to kick in a small portion of the total wasted cost in order to get someone else to pay for the rest, we’ll gladly do it.

 This is akin to what is taught at the college level, of course. For one easy example: Housing on campus routinely costs double or triple what housing on the local economy will cost. (And of course either costs more than housing at the parental home but that comparison would ignore the value of NOT living at home while in school–the value of actually being part of the school environment.) Although it costs double or triple to live on campus, the financial aid office is geared to get you more in loans and grants to subsidize (short term) that inflated cost. Of course the same is true for any other cost on campus. Books that are used one day but cost $200/e. Lab fees for history class, things like that. Since it all gets hidden into the grants and loans the kid is taught that it isn’t worth discussion or worry. Just run up the tab and go with the flow.

 Joe Doakes

If you haven’t read “The End Is Near (And It’s Going To Be Awesome)” by Kevin Williamson, you need to.

Charles Koch, one of the “Koch Brothers”, the left’s current boogeymen du jour and donor of a tiny fraction of the money bequeathed to progressivism by much more “generous” liberal plutocrats, writing in the WSJ, with occasional emphasis added:

Unfortunately, the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government. That’s why, if we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles. I have been doing so for more than 50 years, primarily through educational efforts. It was only in the past decade that I realized the need to also engage in the political process.

A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value. In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens.

That last emphasized sentence is going to be the subject of a couple of blog posts very soon here. 

The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism.

The whole thing is worth a read.

The Kochs are fundamentally libertarian-conservatives; they have some stances that vex some paleos. 

Asking “progressives” to explain exactly what’s wrong with the Koch Brothers – especially in light of the fact that there are dozens of plutocrats that give much more money to the left – is akin to watching Daffy Duck sputter; lots of flying saliva, not much fact, logic or reason. 

So why do they do it?

Berg’s Seventh Law explains it all.

While we wait for further news on Katie Kieffer’s first book – of which more to come soon – I’m happy to notice that XKCD is publishing a book this fall.

Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions will be published September 2nd by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Starting today you can pre-order it from your favorite bookseller (Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Indie Bound).  There are also foreign editions, including a UK and Commonwealth edition and a German edition

Sounds like my next couple of airplane trips are covered!

Don’t forget – the “Shooter Show” is happening all weekend at Bill’s Gun Shop and Range in Robbinsdale.   I’ll be be broadcasting live from the range (or, ideally, the other side of a soundproof wall from the range) on Saturday from 1-3. 

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Here’s the deal:  there’ll be 50-odd manufacturers there.  You can try out any of the guns on display – just buy the ammo. 

And I’m fixing to adjourn to a neighborhood watering hole after the show.  Call it a NARN “Shoot and a Shot” party. 

Hope to see you there!

(SCENE:  Mitch BERG is walking his dog down Grand Avenue in Saint Paul.   He’s walking past an organic car repair shop when Avery LIBRELLE walks out, almost bumping into BERG).

LIBRELLE:  Merg!  Hah! I woke up this morning thinking “Merg must be feeling sad today! Obamacare is a huge success!”

BERG:  Well, it’s not really…

LIBRELLE:  Which bums you out more, Merg – that more people weren’t insured, or that less weren’t?

BERG:  Well, I’m just trying to figure out what all the happiness is about.

LIBRELLE:   Seven million subscribers!

BERG:  Let’s assume the Administration is giving real numbers.  That’s seven milion people who’ve signed up.  Not seven million paid, issued policies.  But if you put it up against the five million people wholosttheir coverage over the past year, that means we’re up a net two million – assuming they all actually pay their premiums, which all of them will not.

LIBRELLE:  You’re just jealous that no Republican healthcare plan gets people lining up for it!

BERG:  Wait – you say that’s a good thing!

LIBRELLE:  When people line up to buy something, that means it’s popular.    Like an iPhone!

BERG:  If that analogy held up – if Obamacare is extremely popular – then they’d have been waiting in line last October, when the plans first hit the market.  This is like people waiting in line to buy iPhone 3s before they go out of production.

LIBRELLE:  That’s stupid!  Nobody would do that!

BERG:  Unless it was your only shot at getting a phone, and you were going to wind up without a phone if you waited another day.  The “lines” had less in common with these…:

HyPsTrZ at the sacrament of unveiling.

…and much more in common with these…:

Waiting for bread in Moscow, 1980s

…or these:

Minnesota clinic, 2018. Just kidding – it’s a DMV line.

People trying to get something before an onerous deadline makes it impossible.

LIBRELLE:  Wow.  You’re a real debbie downer.

BERG:  As always, I’m a realist.  The Administration is trying to put lipstick on a dead pig in time to save the Democrats in time for the mid-terms.

LIBRELLE:  Hey – you used the word Democrat!  You hate women and their children!

(And SCENE)

Winston Churchill once said “I’d rather be right than consistent”.  I’ve always agreed with this; I don’t personally care if I – or someone else – changes their mind on an issue, as long as the mind gets changed in the right direction. 

Turns out Governor Messinger Mark Dayton knows that quote too.

Of course, as MPR’s Tom Scheck notes, if you simultaneously take every position on an issue – say, medical marijuana – you can be right no matter what. 

Right?

Here’s a sampling of what he’s said since January.

Sponsor

• “I told law enforcement groups when I ran for office four years ago that I would not support medical marijuana over their strident opposition, and they are still stridently opposed.” — TPT Almanac, Jan. 31

• “I’m told by law enforcement that you can buy marijuana in any city in Minnesota. We have the distribution system already set up. It’s extra legal. It’s basically not a crime, excuse me a very minor crime, for people who possess an amount for personal use.” — conference call with reporters, March 13.

• “The real goal is to help as many of these kids as possible. The experiment is part of the framework of it but our real goal is to help people and to relieve suffering and pain.” — news conference, March 21.

• “Absent the interests of the authors in accepting something that can be supported more broadly, I don’t think there’s anywhere to go this session.” — MPR News interview, March 25.

• “I’ve said all I’m going to say about medical marijuana. You had statements. You asked questions. I’ll give you another statement. I’m just not going to discuss it further.” — news conference, March 28.

And as Scheck notes, it’s far from the first time Dayton has tired to play all sides of a fractious issue; Taxes, Zygi WIlf’s real-estate improvement handout…the list goes on. 

My thesis – Dayton is going to bounce around like a blind overcaffeinated ferret in a daycare playroom on any issue where Alita Messinger and Carrie Lucking haven’t affirmatively told him what to think.

I mean, seriously.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Must be getting closer to an election, or something. Being pelted with emails from Senator Franken telling me how busy he has been. Yeah? Doing what, senator?

Fourth Annual Minnesota Hot Dish Cookoff. I won’t even comment on a silly PR stunt.

Banning Stalking Apps. Al’s concerned that smart phone apps track your location and that info can be shared with God knows who. He wants Congress to ban those apps. Honestly, Al, I’m a lot less concerned about Google tracking my movements than I am about NSA tracking me, reading my texts, listening to my conversations, and sharing that info with God knows who. Focus on your government oversight duties, please.

Still fighting the Comcast-Time Warner deal because it might result in consumers having fewer choices, higher prices and lousy service. Sorry, Al, you’ve been pre-empted by the City Council, who granted Comcast a monopoly franchise for all of St. Paul so consumers already have no choice, high prices and lousy service. Your services are not required.

Ensuring No Minnesota Child Is Denied School Lunch Because They Can’t Afford It. I’m sorry, did something change in the 40 years since I was a kid? Because we had free lunch for poor families back in my day. Seriously, Al, if you and your DFL buddies have been waging a war on poverty for two generations and still can’t get a handle on something as simple as school lunch, I have grave doubt about the usefulness of the entire program. Again, not seeing an Article I problem here. Not seeing where the Founding Fathers gave the enumerated power to Congress to oversee middle school Char-Burger On Bun With Lukewarm Milk.

Frankly, Senator Franken, it looks as if you’re keeping yourself artificially busy with make-work to avoid doing any real work. What with the Fast and Furious, IRS, NSA and Benghazi scandals, don’t you guys in Congress have enough legitimate work to do? Or are you avoiding that work because you’re terrified of what might happen to the DFL if you actually did your jobs?

Joe Doakes

I think “terror” fits the bill, yes.

Remember the bloodbath that Minnesota was in 1973 and before? 

I remember the episode in November of 1971, in rural Hitterdahl, Minnesota, about 20 miles west of Detroit Lakes.  Oscar Gundersson, a plumber and handyman, was playing bridge with his wife Trina and their farmer neighbors, Rolf and Edna Berndsen.  Oscar though Edna had cheated on a hand.  Being a second-generation Norwegian-American, he skipped straight past accusation, anger and argument, and pulled a pistol from his overalls, shooting the woman.  Then, anxious to kill all witnesses, he shot Rolf and, finally, his wife, before jumping in his car and driving toward the Canadian border in a killing spree that left six additional dead and ended with Gundersson living in Indonesia, scoffing at the law.

Or the sad episode of Ruth Slorbie, who was shopping with her husband, Olaf, at the downtown Minneapolis Daytons in October 1970.  Weary of waiting in lines, she pulled a revolver from her purse and, according to a Minneapolis Star article, calmly executed six people who got in her way, calmly “changing clips” as she wandered from department to department, her husband indolently shuffling behind her holding bags of purchased merchandise, until the police responded. 

Er…wait.  None of those happened.

Before 1974, Minnesota did not require the law-abiding citizen to have a permit of any type to carry a firearm, concealed or otherwise. 

You may recall – Minnesota was a pretty low-crime state, back then.    Of course, being a Democrat-dominated state, when the winds of Political Correctness bade the left to restrict guns back in the seventies, at the Second Amendment’s legal and social nadir, Minnesota followed suit – for no real empirical reason, of course.  Which is, of course, a common thread among most gun-control legislation, and all such rules that affect only the law-abiding; none are ever supported by evidence.

Minnesota became a “may issue” state in 1974 – carry permits were issued entirely on the whim of local police chiefs, meaning that the law-abiding citizen’s Second Amendment rights were subjected entirely to the whim of their local police chief.  Police chiefs in Greater Minnesota issued permits pretty liberally; in the Metro, it was entirely based on political connections; law-abiding citizens were routinely turned down, while pals of cops and local pols could get permits even with lengthy criminal records.  The chief of Bloomington’s police department famously said that nobody in Bloomington really needed a permit, but made sure his wife – alone among the city’s women – was issued one. 

MInnesota rolled part-way back, ten years ago, with the passage of our “shall-issue” law; there are currently nearly 160,000 permits active in Minnesota, nearly double the number estimated in 2003. 

But what if we rolled the laws back even further?  To 1973? 

Last week Senator Branden Peterson and Representative Steve Drazkowski introduced a bill that would do just that; institute “constitutional carry” in Minnesota.  A law-abiding citizen would require no state permit to exercise their constitutional right to carry a firearm in a safe, responsible manner.  It’d give us the same law as Vermont, Arizona, Alaska and Wyoming. 

It’s an utterly symbolic proposal at this point, of course; the bill was introduced after the committee deadline, and even if it hadn’t been, it would have had no chance of passage with a DFL-controlled legislature and governor.  At a time when Michael Bloomberg is buying astro-turf groups to push genuine, bad restrictions in a legislature currently controlled by the DFL, it’d be misplaced to spend a whole lot of energy on it.

Yet. 

But kudos to Senator Peterson and Representative Drazkowski for firing a shot, as it were, across the DFL’s bow.  Here’s to more in a friendlier future. 

According to Senator Dan Hall, the DFL is about to propose a bill that would allow notary publics to perform civil weddings.

what this actually means is that the DFL campaign for “marriage equality” has been about making all forms of marriage worthless – a civil institution with all the more gravity involved in renewing your license tabs.

I know conservatives say there’s a case to be made for pushing back on this – and I think the “cheapen the institution of the family” lobby is going a bridge too far, even in Minnesota.

But even now with this proposal, I think the next step for supporters of the traditional family is obvious.

It’s time for people of faith to start pushing, hard, the idea of the “covenant marriage” – a marriage, even if only initiated between people of faith and ignoring the whole civil process, that holds the ideal and idea of marriage to a higher standard than the civil variety.

One of the problems with the debate about marriage in this past couple of decades has been that it’s been a little like debating which variety of 1972 Chevy Vega was worse. Marriage in general has been cheapened in the past 40 to 50 years – no fault divorce played its role, as did the changing secular notion of “family”.  The civic idea of “family” has changed in our society, perhaps (in its current form) fatally. The state to which marriage was actually observed in our society has slipped to a point where it’s hardly a defensible institution, its present form.

Along with the drive on the part of many conservatives and people are faced to privatize marriage comes the imperative to make the religious institution of marriage demonstrably better thing that the civil, profane alternative.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If you want to have a city full of blue collar workers earning a decent union wage, you need one of two things: industry, or government.

Since the 1980’s, Saint Paul has lost the Ford plant, West Publishing, Schmidt Brewery, Hamm’s Brewery, Whirlpool and 3M, good solid companies with well-paid union workers, every one. They should have been the DFL’s solidest supporters and the City should have fought to keep them.

But it seems we’re opting for less industry and more government instead. Downtown is full of government offices in former retail space. Good for the occupancy rate but government workers evacuate downtown at 4:30 so nobody shops downtown any more. Town Square died and now we’ve lost Macy’s. Moving the ball park to the riverfront might bring in the tailgate crowd and high-speed rail from Chicago will bring in the welfare crowd but neither they nor hipsters in converted Lowertown warehouse lofts promise to rejuvenate the city’s core.

Saint Paul is becoming more like Detroit every day.

Joe Doakes

Actually, downtown Detroit seens to on the mend; companies are moving to downtown Detroit, drawn by tax incentives and inexpensive office space.  Some companies are offering massive subsidies to workers who buy condos downtown (up to $20,000 toward down payment, or equivalent rental assistance).  People actually live and work in downtown Detroit, and do things there at night.  And I haven’t checked the stats, but I wouldn’t doubt that the crime stats in downtown Detroit (but not outside downtown) are competitive with downtown Minneapolis.

Which is not to say that Minneapolis or Saint Paul are quite in Detroit’s league – they’re not.  Minneapolis is merely headed the wrong way.  And Saint Paul is moving more toward the “Flint” territory.