Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

New password standards going into effect on January 1st, no fewer than 8 characters, no more than 16, must contain numbers and special characters. Can’t be anything easy or memorable or significant to me, and can’t be written down.

In other words, my log-on password must be a complex string of gibberish that changes every month. So how am I going to remember it?

I’m guessing asdfjkl; isn’t going to cut it. How about “ihatepasswordsecurity?” Oops, forgot the 1. And the special character @.

All this to protect me from logging into my assigned computer in my own office, to access public data on a public server.

The terrorists have won.

Joe Doakes

if we could get the worlds hackers and spammers to target the terrorists, the war would be over pronto.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Discussed Mall of America protest with a co-worker. What’s the point. To raise awareness. Of what? That police are killing Black people. Why do I care? You don’t care? Not really, I’m a law-abiding White citizen so I’m in no danger; besides, how does disrupting my Christmas shopping make me care about your pet peeve? It’s not a pet peeve, it’s an important civil rights issue that every American should care about. Oh, so now it’s not raising awareness, now it’s preaching: I can’t simply be aware of your issue, you intend to force me to agree by holding my grandkids’ Christmas presents hostage. That’s not persuasion, that’s coercion, and I resent it.

Taking people like my co-worker at their word that the protesters are acting in good faith, it occurs to me the MoM protestors are using the Underpants Gnomes Theory of Effecting Social Change.

1. Enrage people who are trying to finish their Christmas shopping by protesting at the Mall
2. ?
3. Enraged Christmas Shoppers help protestors achieve the Social Change the protestors desire.

The protestors haven’t quite figured out Step 2 yet, but they’re certain Step 3 will result. So they blithely launch into Step 1 assuming it’ll all work out in the end. It won’t: enraged Christmas shoppers will actively hate the protesters and all they stand for, will call the cops to have them arrested, and will scoff at hand-wringing newspaper editorials in the Strib and when jail time is imposed, will nod and say “Damned right.”

Kind of like the Westboro Baptist Church chanting “God Hates Fags” at military funerals, to protest the legality of homosexuality in America. Step 1 has been achieved, we all know there’s a controversy. And we all know what you want as Step 3 – outlaw buggery. But you haven’t worked out the details of Step 2 so you haven’t convinced the rest of us to act in your favor. Instead, we form parties of flag-waving motorcycle riders to drown you out. And people who might otherwise have been inclined to discuss the subject reasonably, look at the motorcyclists and say “Damned right.”

Of course, if the protesters are not acting in good faith; if the protesters are professional agitators or paid union hacks or general thugs, the above analysis does not apply.

Joe Doakes

We live in a place who’s dominant political cultural values “sending messages” over “convincing people”.

I have been feeling less than completely spectacular today.

How much less? When I wrote my post explaining “I’m feeling less than completely spectacular today”, I totally flaked posting it.

Anyway – back with a vengeance tomorrow.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I stopped for lunch at the Maid-Rite in St. Cloud. The St. Cloud Times article says Michele Bachmann is preparing to oppose Hillary’s run for president. The woman behind the counter wishes Michele Bachmann would just go away. “Obama could say snow is white and Bachmann would say it’s not.” But Obama would not say that: he’d say white snow is a micro-aggression against brown and black people; therefore Minnesotans are racist. I don’t mind having someone speak up against that attitude. Joe Doakes

The left seems to have trouble with the logical initial terms of most arguments.

Katie Kieffer is the author of Let Me Be Clear.  .

Here’s how to learn more about, and donate to, the Salvation Army.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today!

Today on the show:

• Katie Kieffer, author of Let Me Be Clear, joins me to talk about her upcoming book signing, and much more.
• Julie Borgen of the Salvation Army will call in to talk about the Salvation Army’s three-for-the-price-of-one match on donations.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! 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 UStream video and chat channel.
• 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!

Join us!

Too many of them put “humanism” ahead of humanity:

LADSON, S.C. – An anti-religion group is celebrating its recent success in shutting down a elementary school fundraiser that would have food and money to a local church’s food pantry.

And by Atheists, I don’t mean the generally good people I know who, for whatever reason, are atheists. No, it’s more like Big Atheism – the ones that aren’t so much skeptical as clogged with dogmatic hatred.

Merry Christmas, hungry people. Dogma must be served.

In addition to gundecking the premiere of The Interview, my sources at the FBI tell me the North Koreans have demanded the following:

10.  Also remove “Knocked Up” from circulation.

9. Bring back Life In Rehab

8. Digitally insert Kim Jong Un into all of Rogan’s parts in Freaks and Geeks. 

7. Digitally insert Kim Jong Un at the head of the conquering Humans in Return of the King.

6. Green-light Kim Jong Un’s screenplay for “Indiana Jones and the Kimchi Hangover”.

5. A talk show on “Twin Cities News Talk”.

4. Digitally substitute Kim Jong Un for Jeff Daniels in The Big Lebowski

3. Go back and rewrite/reshoot/re-release Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.  And get them right this time.

2. More nude scenes involving Jennifer Lawrence.

1. No South Park parody of the entire hacking/cancelling The Interview fiasco.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Muslim terrorist killed in the Australian siege is being called a “lone-wolf” and not part of an organized terror group.

He’s the latest in a long line, so many that Mark Steyn suggests they form the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves.

A single incident is an incident. Two incidents is a pair, three is a few and twelve is a dozen incidents. All single incidents.

When does a string of incidents become something more, such as a trend or a movement or perhaps even enemy action: when we reach a certain number of “isolated incidents?” Or when we admit to ourselves that they’re not?

Joe Doakes

When?

When a Republican is president, of course.

Nate Silver – in a piece entitled “Is Jeb Bush Too Liberal To Win The Republican Nomination In 2016” – answered the question halfway, after providing a nifty visual of Republicans rated (according to Silver’s choice of ratings on indices: voting records, donor base and public statements on the issues.

Here’s the list:

Quibble with the methodology if you want (Mike Huckabee is not “to the right” of Rick Perry or Bobby Jindal, much less Ronald Reagan).

But it does provide an interesting jumpoff point for a conversation; is the GOP screwing up again with the “Jeb is Inevitable” meme? 

The whole point behind John McCain was his “electability”.  Ditto, to an extent, Mitt Romney – both of whom, you may recall, lost. 

As Limbaugh put it yesterday:

So we are, in a blog here at FiveThirtyEight, we’re ranking Jeb Bush against four other men who have lost or failed to succeed in getting a nomination or did get the nomination but lost the election. Now, isn’t there a lesson there? The establishment keeps telling us, “No, no, no, you Tea Party people, look at what happened to Barry Goldwater, we’ll get creamed. You people are extremist kooks! America thinks the Tea Party is a bunch of kooks, and if we have a nominee coming from you, why, we’re gonna get creamed. We’re gonna have a landslide like Goldwater.”

And, of course, the retort is, “Yeah, well, the people you are nominating, I don’t see a W next to their names at the end of the process. You guys can cite one: Barry Goldwater. We can cite every one of your nominees. They lose, every one of them.” But, nevertheless, the process continues here to rank Jeb and other Republicans on this imaginary chart of conservatism.

Upshot: the more I watch Scott Walker, the more I like him.

A colleague from long ago writes:

I just found out that the school my children attend has stopped the student council fundraising event for the Giving Tree. The event is a cookies and cocoa Christmas sale that allows the kids to have fun buying cookies for themselves and for other students, all in the spirit of the season, and all for the spirit of giving to children who may not have a very pleasant Christmas.

The reason? Wait for it…..wait for it…. It doesn’t meet Michelles limits on sugar in school foods.

So, no fundraiser for the elementary school, and pickles for the high school (why pickles, I don’t know. Why not carrots or Bok Choy?)

I’m hoping that some day parents will realize just how much we are being controlled. I remember when school was about reading, writing and arithmetic. Not any more.

Brown Rice is the new Sugar Cookie.

To: Michelle Obama, FLOTUS
From: Mitch Berg, Commoner
Re: Shelves

I – 6’5″ white guy – get asked by short people between three and five times a year to help someone get something off of the top shelf at Target, Walmart, or any other grocery store.

Heretofore, I’ve always been happy to oblige.

You’ve taken the scales for my eyes. Please give me a civil rights department contact; clearly, litigation is in order.

That is all.

If you’ve been reading this blog’s coverage of Second Amendment issues for any length of time, you’ll note that one of my most air-tight theses is that Minnesota’s gun control movement – not just its leaders, the hapless Heather Martens, the hopeless Joan Peterson and the comical Jane Kay, and its camp followers in the political class like Dakota County attorney Jim Backstrom and Chaska police chief Scott Knight, but the entire movement, from Michael Bloomberg and the Joyce Foundation all the way down – can not seem to make a single substantively true factual statement. 

And the reason for this would seem to be, as a matter of fact,  that they can’t.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A school play condemning suicide bombing was blown up by a suicide bomber because . . . it was insulting to Islamic values.

Can’t wait for them to bring more Diversity to Minnesota.

Joe Doakes

Being as passive-aggressive and provincial as Minnesotans are, I have a hunch that if there was any sectarian violence among immigrants, Minnesota would turn about as tolerant as mid-sixties Ulster.

Minneapolis School superintendant Bernardeia Johnson resigned her office yesterday. 

Johnson was also recently thrust into a dicey position by incendiary news stories and a legislative probe into a questionable $405,000 no-bid contract awarded to Community Standards Initiative (CSI), a politically connected group run by community activists Al Flowers and Clarence Hightower. For months, groups in the African-American community exerted enormous pressure on Johnson to take a side and say whether two Minneapolis DFLers — state Sens. Bobby Joe Champion and Jeff Hayden — strong-armed her into going forward with the CSI contract. Some of the pressure came in the form of a viral social media campaign using the hashtag #JimCrowJr.

An affidavit submitted to lawmakers in her name suggested she strove to protect the district from an untenable situation. A state Senate committee hearing into the matter proved to be more partisan theater than a quest for facts that might have supplied some much-needed context.

By all accounts I’ve read and heard, she was a perfectly capable school administrator. 

Of course, by all accounts, all of the superintendents have been capable administrators, as far as we know – and yet Minneapolis’ school district is a mess (outside some of the elite challenge programs), and the mess has largely resisted any number of bureaucratic initiatives to change the situation.

And Johnson had her share of those:

Perhaps the most symbolic of the problems that dogged her tenure was the teaching corps’ failure to consistently and enthusiastically dive into a program central to her vision, Focused Instruction. Johnson struggled to articulate the merits of the approach, and it’s believed that half or more of the district’s teachers simply ignored the initiative.

Focused Instruction is a form of data-driven teaching that is, on one level, something that works in some districts and, on another, is one of those buzzwords that translates into “one size fits all approach to teaching tens of thousands of individual kids”.  There’s more to it than that, of course – it’s not the dumbest teaching fad to hit the market.

But just as politics is the worst possible way to allocate resources or solve problems, it’s also the worst possible way to education individual children.  School districts are fundamentally political institutions, not educational ones.  Any solution they proffer will first and foremost be, necessarily, a political one, designed to be the most attractive common denominator for the student body as an aggregate (and their teachers, administrators, district stakeholders, etc etc etc).  Nowhere in that aggregation is the idea that kids are unique individuals who aren’t interchangeable cogs on an intellectual assembly line. 

So the next Minneapolis superintendent may be, like Bernardeia Johnson, a good person, a well-respected administrator, and a capable bureaucrat.  Or they might be a complete schnook.  And it probably won’t matter much, because in the end they’re all selling one-size-fits-all education that is designed to serve everyone, and therefore serves nobody.

I wrote this piece five years ago today.  I’m updating the dates, but leaving the rest pretty much as was.

———-

It was 110 years ago today that Simo Häyhä was born?

“Simo Whøhä?”

Have a seat.

Simo Häyhä was a pretty typical Finnish farmer – the kind of guy you can find in any small town in rural Finland or, for that matter, the Iron Range. He was born and grew up in Rautjärvi, a spot on the map off the west edge of Lake Ladoga, two miles west of the current Russo-Finnish border. Like most Finns, he did his year of military service in the mid-twenties, and went back to his real life – farming in the summer, hunting moose in the winter. He was, outwardly, a pretty unpreposessing man – he stood only 5’3, which is especially diminuitive among the statuesque Finns.

He was 34 when the Soviets invaded Finland. Häyhä was recalled to service with the Finnish 12th Division. The division held the Kollaa front, north of Lake Ladoga, and was quickly beset by four Soviet divisions and a tank brigade.

Kollaa was the Somme of the Winter War. The Soviets would charge; they’d get through the Finnish lines; the Finns would cut them off and kill them, or drive them back. And so it went, back and forth, for three whole months – virtually the entire length of the war.

And one of the reasons was Häyhä.

Simo Häyhä

Armed with a Mosin/Nagant M/28 – a World War 1-vintage Russian rifle that the Finns had reworked into a much more accurate piece (the Finns, a former Russian province, had retained their stocks of Russian-caliber, mostly Russian-surplus, weapons after independence) – and wearing homemade white camouflage, on his own cross-country skis, Häyhä stalked the forest. Unlike most of history’s snipers, he used only his rifle’s iron sights – he thought scopes forced the sniper to raise their heads too high, dangerously raising their profile. He was thorough about concealment – when he had time to prepare a position, he would compact the snow in front of him to avoid raising a small blizzard with his muzzle blast. He’d also keep snow in his mouth while stalking, to pre-cool his exhalation, avoiding the big clouds of steam that normally accompany heavy exertion in the extreme cold. 

Did we mention the extreme cold? The average temperature during the Battle of the Kollaa varied from “freaking cold” to “how the hell do humans live in this” – from -4 to -40, Fahrenheit.  In a three-month period – roughly 100 days – Häyhä had 505 confirmed kills. 542 if you count some unconfirmed ones. Some Finnish sources say it was closer to 800.

And he wasn’t just a sniper; when the situation called for the Finns to close with with the Soviets, Häyhä would ski into hand-to-hand range with the rest of the troops for the close assault; he was credited with another 200 kills at point-blank range with his Suomi Model 31 submachine gun.

The Soviets called him “The White Death”. They tried everything to get him; countersnipers (they didn’t last long), concentrated volleys of anti-tank rifle fire (gunnies will know what they are; to a non-gunny, think “really big rifle desigined to penetrate a quarter inch of armor”), and finally rolling artillery barrages.

A week before the war’s end, on March 6 1940, a lucky shot from a Soviet infantryman caught Häyhä in the jaw, wrecking it and blowing of his left cheek. His comrades dragged him to the rear, where he began several years of recuperation. He got one of the very few battlefield promotions ever issued in the Finnish army, from Corporal to Second Lieutenant, in honor of his achievements.

The Soviets suffered 8,000 dead in three months in Kollaa; Häyhä alone accounted for nearly 10% of the total (and at least one of Finland’s other great snipers,Sulo Kolkka, claimed another 400 at the Kollaa; the two men between them accounted for over 12% of the entire death toll). On the list of the world’s greatest snipers, he’s not only the top of the list by a considerable margin, but he did it all in 100 days flat.

Even John Woo or Quentin Tarantino couldn’t make him a bigger badass.

But Simo Häyhä was no movie action hero; he was a typical workadaddy hugamommy Finnish backwoodsman. He survived the war, and lived until 2002 in rural Finland, hunting moose and breeding dogs. He was bit of a national treasure in Finland.

Häyha, signing autographs not long before his death.

Asked in the nineties what made him so successful as a sniper, he responded in Finnish “Pyytlikkonyykkeyynnkyypelaapetoonen“; “Practice”. [1]

What can we take away from Häyhä’s story? That a little guy with a rifle can make a disproportionate difference. He stymied Stalin, just like a lot of American little guys with rifles (but whose preferred weapon is the ballot and the picket sign and the checkbook), outnumbered and outgunned and outspent, rhetorically stymie Nancy Pelosi and Richard Daley and the Democrats today. [2]

The damage to Häyhä’s jaw affected him the rest of his life. But he was a hero in Finland for nearly 70 years.

And so Simo Häyhä is every bit as much a hero for Real Americans for what he represents as he is for Finns for what he did.

Happy posthumous birthday, Simo Häyhä!

[1]What? You think I speak Finnish? Of course I made that up. But I bet I’m not far off.

[2] Comment-bait? Sure. It’s my blog, and I’ll provoke if I want to.

And they got not only a hero, but a Savior.

All I can say is, it’s about time.

For decades, government has tried to reduce smoking by teenagers.

The results have been positive, but painfully slow.

With the e-cigarette, the private market introduced a tool that radically slashed the number of teen smokers.

And government is not happy.

The most important thing in our society is not to do good; it is to not compete with government.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

New study: porn is a public health crisis.

No, it’s not from a right-wing fundamentalist Christian group.  It’s a couple of college professors who want the federal government to stomp out porn on-line, in hotels and in retail shops.

If their dream came true, inevitably some cop would kill a cherub for selling dirty pictures.  What would the protest symbol be?  Hoodie for Trayvon, Hands Up for Ferguson, perhaps Clutch your Crotch for Porn?

Joe Doakes

Legions of fans who grew up listening to Eminem already have the gesture in muscle memory.

It occurs to me that there is a generation of adults who grew up listening to Eminem.

The Administration’s comforting tale – that terrorism is no longer the centralized juggernaut we faced from the nineties through 2001 – might be as inaccurate as any of the Administration’s other claims:

After 32-year old Canadian Muslim Michael Zehaf-Bibeau stormed the Parliament building in Ottawa, shot a soldier on guard duty fatally in the back, made his way into the Hall of Honor, and opened fire before eventually being gunned down himself, Canadian officials said there was no evidence tying him to Islamic State.

But in late November, Canadian Justice Minister Peter MacKay told me in an interview that not only did the Canadian government believe that Zehaf-Bibeau and Martin Couture-Rouleau, a Muslim who drove over two soldiers only days earlier, were radicalized by the Islamic State, they now suspect both men may have been in direct contact with the group.

“They were influenced by ISIS there is no question,” MacKay told me at the Halifax International Security Forum.

Clearly, the Canadian Justice Minister a conspiracy theorist of some kind.

While I’ve assumed most mainstream media is filtered through a statist lens for decades, now, there was a time I assumed that news organizations – made up of reporters like the ones I used to work with and, occasionally, was – would, if they bothered to cover a story at all (because who needs coverage of the IRS scandal, or Mark Dayton’s mental state, after all?) at least endeavor to get the basic facts right. 

Not even the whole “are the facts of a highly-charged story about a contentious issue correct”, like Rolling Stone’s rapidly-unravelling UVA rape story. 

No, little things – like “does the story actually exist“?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In 2012, the heads of big Minneapolis law firms wrote a letter in the Star Tribune against The Marriage Amendment, warning they wouldn’t be able to recruit the best and brightest lawyers if it passed.

So how’s that been working out for them?  What statistics are kept on gay Minneapolis lawyers to see if they were right, or if they were lying?

Joe Doakes

People still think it was about achieving empirical results?

(SCENE:  Mitch BERG is sitting in the waiting room at the dentist’s office, waiting on a checkup. Avery LIBRELLE enters the room, holding a throbbing tooth.  BERG tries to hunch down behind his magazine – but LIBRELLE notices him).

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!  (Speaks with difficulty through pain) Thereth  an epidemic of rape on American univerthity camputheth.

BERG:  Wow.  Your mouth sounds painful. 

LIBRELLE: You’re dodthing the queththion!

BERG:  Well, no, I…OK, so how do we know about this “epidemic”?

LIBRELLE:  Becauthe American univerthitieth thay tho. 

BERG:  (Wincing in pain as LIBRELLE thpeakth) So in other words, university administrations, carrying out their own home-grown investigations, driven by a feminist lobby that actively disparages the idea of due process for those accused of rape, and with a vested interest in resolving all ambiguous cases – say, cases where everyone involved was blind drunk and there were no witnesses, or even the occasional malicious accusation – as rape, say there’s an epidemic. 

LIBRELLE: Yeth.

BERG: So you think data coming from university administrations – who act in these cases primarily as political rather than criminal-justice bodies – are the appropriate people to investigate allegations of felonious assaults which our society justifiably regards as second only to murder in moral gravity?

LIBRELLE: Of courthe.  Who elthe knowth more about thtudentth than the univerthity thythtem?

BERG:  OK.  So in the same vein – who knows more about priests than their various dioceses, arch-dioceses and the Vatican?  When priests were being accused of sexually abusing children, by your logic, the church was right to try to deal with it by itself.

LIBRELLE:  OF courthe not. 

BERG:  How so?

LIBRELLE:  Of courthe not. 

BERG: No, I mean why do you think not?

LIBRELLE:  And I anthwered you.  Of courthe not. 

BERG:  That’s no answer.

LIBRELLE:  Yeth it wath.

(ASSISTANT calls BERG’s appointment; LIBRELLE attempts to get up and leave the room ahead of BERG)

BERG:  Um, hello?

LIBRELLE:  Get an exthternal invethtigation, thucker.

(And SCENE)

If you don’t support Elizabeth Warren in 2016, the terrorists have won.

…inveighs me to pray for a safe outcome for everyone in the siege in Sydney, where latest reports say the police have stormed the Lindt cafe where Iranian cleric named, according to press accounts, Man Monis has been holding between 15-30 hostages.  According to Australian press reports, Monis is on bail after being charged with murder and sexual assault, and has spent the past several years sending hate mail to families of Australian service people killed in action – sort of a Muslim Fred Phelps.

And I do pray for exactly that.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit part of me hopes the sonofabitch got two shots in the head.

UPDATE:  Clearly the entire story is BS.

Mr. Monis, the alleged hostage-taker, was allegedly armed with a pump-action shotgun – which is, at close range, more deadly than any “assault rifle”.  Monis has been convicted of harassment, and was out on bail on murder and sexual assault charges.  In addition, Australia has strict civilian gun control.

There’s just no way a person with Monis’ record could get a gun!  That would be illegal.