He’ll probably have an easier race in reliably read SD 35, in the far north suburbs of the Twin Cities, THAN he did winning the famously fickle MOB race.. He’ll definitely have an easier time representing that district than he did the MOB.
Good luck, Andy. Have your people call my people..
A man motivated, I’m sure we will be assured, in no way, no how by Muslim extremism, has left US Marines dead in… wait for it… Wait for it
… in a gun free zone.
Not that it matters, of course, because as we found in the Fort Hood massacre, even major post, much less recruiting stations, are gun free anyway.
The shelters were scattered across the cool New Mexican desert, one in each direction, 5 miles away from the target – a simple wooden 100-foot tower, looking much like an oil derrick. Yet for most of the observers, the VIP shelter 20 miles away seemed the safer bet.
The mood was tense. The gathered collection of scientists and soldiers tried breaking the tension with betting pools on the power of the explosion they were about to witness. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the program, was on the low end of most of the predictions – only 30 tons of explosive power. More confident scientists guessed the explosion would be 1,400 or 3,000 tons. One pessimist wagered zero.
At 5:29am on the morning of July 16th, 1945, the “Gadget”, as it had come to be known, was triggered. The surrounding mountains were said to have been lit up as though it was the middle of the day. The shockwave could be felt 100 miles away. A mushroom cloud 7.5 miles high was all that was left at the center of the detonation. The explosion had the effect of 200 kilotons or 20,000 tons of TNT.
Operation Trinity – the testing of the first atomic bomb – had been a success.
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The Los Alamos headquarters for the Manhattan Project. An inauspicious backdrop to the most destructive weapon in human history
The path to Trinity had been an arduous one. Six years, 130,000 workers, $2 billion worth of expenses (the equivalent of over $25 billion today), espionage and dissent all hallmarked the journey to the design, development and eventual use of the atom bomb. It was a journey started in August of 1939 with nothing more than a letter. (more…)
So let me understand: it’s noble to kill babies but wicked to sell their corpses? Nope, still not getting it.
Better still: infanticide enthusiasts labor under the delusion that “it’s not human until it’s born”; the infantile rationalization that a “fetus” delivered two weeks early at 38 weeks is human, while another one that’s gestated for 38 weeks that hasn’t yet been delivered isn’t human at all.
But apparently the spare parts they strip out of the ripped-apart corpses are human enough to use on other humans.
So, logically, the pre-natal child isn’t human, but their parts are?
SCENE: Mitch BERG is mowing his lawn. Avery LIBRELLE, fresh from a trip on the Green Line ,ambles up the sidewalk.
LIBRELLE: Hey, Merg! Societies that impose punitive taxes on cars, like Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, all have higher qualities of life than the US does!
BERG: OK. So?
LIBRELLE: So we could do with fewer cars!
BERG: Correlation does not equal causation.
LIBRELLE: What are you talking about?
BERG: All three of those countries have higher suicide rates than the United States. Clearly high taxes and lack of cars make people want to kill themselves.
…that if we voted Republican in 2014, greedy bloodthirsty soulless profiteers would enrich themselves and their organizations by selling children’s body parts.
And they were…
…well, no. There’s nothing ironically funny, here. Planned Parenthood is, in fact, harvesting body parts from pre-natal children killed in late-term abortions, and selling them for, er, non-profit:
This is a bombshell – but I’m under no illusions that Big Left, and their minions in Big Media, will allow this story to get to a wider audience (and when they do, they’ll blame Republicans, somehow).
Planned Parenthood responds:
Planned Parenthood, which in addition to abortions provides healthcare and information regarding birth control and other reproductive issues, explained in its statement, “Patients sometimes want to donate tissue to scientific research that can help lead to medical breakthroughs, such as treatments and cures for serious diseases.
“At several of our health centers, we help patients who want to donate tissue for scientific research, and we do this just like every other high-quality health care provider does — with full, appropriate consent from patients and under the highest ethical and legal standards.
“There is no financial benefit for tissue donation for either the patient or for Planned Parenthood.”
Let’s forget for a moment that we’re talking about “tissue” from pre-natal children aborted at around 24 weeks’ gestation – inside the envelope where 25% of children, if delivered alive, can survive and live normal lives.
If there’s “no financial benefit”, then why aren’t the “tissues” donated? What’s with the price list that Doctor Spumoni rattles off?
We’re supposed to think that Planned Parenthood’s activities, and “after-market parts” service, is intended to save lives.
We can do that; we can also acknowledge that some of the Nazi’s medical “research” at concentration and extermination camps was intended to save lives, too.
Of course, if you are a functioning human being, you can not “forget for a moment that we’re talking about tissue from pre-natal children aborted at 24 weeks”.
In the 1970s – during Leonid Brezhnev’s kinder, gentler version of the Soviet Union – the gulags of the Lenin and Stalin regimes were largely replaced by “psychiatric hospitals”.
Since disssent from government was considered a mental illness in the Soviet Union, naturally, dissidents needed “treatment”.
Author Dinesh D’Souza – one of the Obama administration’s most prolific and articulate dissidents – got caught up a few years ago in one of the web of speech rationing laws. These laws – commonly referred to as “campaign-finance laws” – are intended to, and eventually will, make all political speech and activity, including (I predict) this blog, potentially prosecutable.
Judges and bureaucrats referring to speech as “illegal” is nothing new; it’s the battle freedom will always have to fight.
But using the psychiatric profession to beat down dissent? It’s baaaack; D’Souza’s judge has ordered him, for a third time, to seek psychiatric treatment:
D’Souza’s defense counsel Benjamin Brafman provided evidence to the court that the psychiatrist D’Souza was ordered to see found no indication of depression or reason for medication. In addition, the psychologist D’Souza subsequently consulted provided a written statement concluding there was no need to continue the consultation, because D’Souza was psychologically normal and well adjusted.
But Judge Berman, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, disagreed, effectively overruling the judgment of the two licensed psychological counselors the U.S. probation department had approved as part of D’Souza’s criminal sentence.
“I only insisted on psychological counseling as part of Mr. D’Souza’s sentence because I wanted to be helpful,” the judge explained. “I am requiring Mr. D’Souza to see a new psychological counselor and to continue the weekly psychological consultation not as part of his punishment or to be retributive.
Point of basic logic to Judge Berman: if you’re “requiring” the treatment, you’re not doing it to be helpful.
Man visits flea market, sees Confederate materials for sale, calls 911. He was shaking and almost vomiting, he was so upset because an ancestor suffered under a foreign government.
Give him a ticket. Misuse of police emergency resources is a serious matter.
And give his house back to the tribe it was stolen from.
Joe Doakes
Of course, if you live in a place like the Twin Cities, you realize there’d be room for a similar piece for adults in places where Jon Stewart is considered news and where chanting “settled science!” is considered an argument-ender.
I’m going to take quick shot at it, off the top of my head: if you’re an adult in a “progressive” city…:
You’ve never had to learn to confront dissent as anything other than either a mortal threat to your worldview, or a joke to be scuttled away from, using ad homina if necessary.
You’ve never had to learn to debate at a level beyond strawmen, red herrings, and chuckling “facts have a liberal bias” as if the saying were handed down by the ancients, rather than by a mediocre comic who made a living satirizing conservatives.
After 12 years of indoctrination in the public schools, and often as not 4-8 years at an institution where dissent is treated as a pathology, you are utterly secure in your faith that your club is the sole source of truth.
In September of 1914, at the very outset of the Great War, a dreadful rumor arose. It was said that at the Battle of the Marne, east of Paris, soldiers on the front line had been discovered standing at their posts in all the dutiful military postures – but not alive. “Every normal attitude of life was imitated by these dead men,” according to the patriotic serial The Times History of the War, published in 1916. “The illusion was so complete that often the living would speak to the dead before they realized the true state of affairs.”
It was blamed on asphyxia, the result of such powerful new high-explosive shells fired at massive intervals – 432,000 shells had been fired in 5 days at the Marne. That such an outlandish story could gain credence was not surprising: notwithstanding the massive cannon fire of previous ages, and even automatic weaponry unveiled in the American Civil War, nothing like this thunderous new artillery firepower had been seen before. The rumor emanating from the Marne reflected the instinctive dread aroused by such monstrous innovation.
Only the “frozen” men at the Marne were not actually dead. Rather, what the survivors of the first days of the Great War were experiencing and witnessing was an issue that would dominate every major army for the next four years – shell shock.
—
Duck & Cover – the scale of warfare experienced by the men in the trenches was unlike anything any army had encountered before. No army was prepared for how a largely conscripted, civilian-based military would react
“Shell shock,” the term that would come to define the phenomenon, first appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet in February 1915, only six months after the commencement of the war. In a landmark article, Capt. Charles Myers of the Royal Army Medical Corps noted “the remarkably close similarity” of symptoms in soldiers who had been exposed to exploding shells. The first cases Myers described exhibited a range of perceptual abnormalities, such as loss of or impaired hearing, sight and sensation, along with other common physical symptoms, such as tremor, loss of balance, headache and fatigue. (more…)
For the love of all that is holy, people – stop saying “on accident”.
It is “by accident”.
“On accident” makes, grammatically and etymologically, no sense.
Anyone who says “on accident” in my presence again will be maced. And not a jury in the world will convict me – provided the jury is all literate people.
I’ve departed from my traditional neutrality in presidential endorsement battles -certainly battles that take place over a year before the convention – and have been supporting Walker for quite some time. There are other good options in the race; I like Bobby Jindal a lot, John Kasich would be an excellent choice (who’ll never happen), and for that matter Jeb Bush, for all his faults, would be a vastly better President than any Democrat option (and more acceptable to a conservative; let’s remember that he governed generally well to the right of his brother). And I’ve got nothing against Marco Rubio or Rand Paul – other than both of them being first-term Senators. Either would be better Presidents than our current former one-term Senator – but why settle?
I’ve seen some criticism of Walker as being not conservative enough in some areas. I’ve notice that some of them are areas where conservatives criticized Ronald Reagan, too. t
Walker’s not perfect – no candidate is, and the ones that try to portray themselves as ideologically perfect (I’m looking at you, Ron Paul) are generally at the head of ideological personality cults (I’m looking at you, Ron Paul fans).
Some say Walker hasn’t had the best month, and that he’ll need to win Iowa outright to have a shot at the nomination.
And never have I been so tempted to go hang out in Iowa for a while…
To a big chunk of the left – and not a few on the far libertarian fringe – America is the worst thing ever.
I don’t bother prodding “progressives” too hard on the subject – why bother?
But with Wahhabi Libertarians, I’ve had a bit of sport asking “OK – if someone gave you an airplane ticket and told you to go somewhere with greater regard for personal liberty and freedom, all and all, where would you go?”
When I get an answer – and it’s a minority that actually tries – it’s usually someplace that’s made a big splash legalizing marijuana or raw milk or hemp jeans, or some other such vital freedom. Almost inevitably, a quick examination shows the place they want to move crushes free speech, has a confiscatory tax structure, bans civilian gun ownership, has indulgent police powers, or some such. The exception – the current Libertarian parlor subject, “Liberland“, a small “libertarian state” on the Danube between the Czech Republic and Croatia – would seem to be on the brink of being repoed by the Croatians. And a liberty that can’t be defended is only a liberty until someone bigger and nastier takes it away (which is among the subjects of a certain book released last month and currently priced to move)
Anyway – the US takes its shots from the left, the right, and the none-of-the-above. Including yours truly, at times.
For nearly a year, the Eastern Front had been something of a murderous pendulum. The armies of the Central Powers and Russia had traded monstrous blows, racking up casualty figures in the hundreds of thousands battle after battle. And despite the Front’s lack of the same sort of trench warfare that would define the Great War in the West, the battle-lines rarely shifted…and when they did, they often quickly shifted back.
The other constant was Russian blood. Whether in victory (such as in the Carpathians) or in defeat (the Masurian Lakes), Russian soldiers died in biblical proportions. At least 2 million rifles short, starving for food and being fed anti-Tsarist/anti-war Bolshevik propaganda, Russian troops were deserting in greater and greater numbers. As a Russian Army report in the summer of 1915 suggested, “super-human efforts were [being] required to keep the men in the trenches.”
The Central Powers’ offensive that began on July 13th, 1915 held goals far more modest than being the decisive blow against the Russian Army. Too many other battle plans had rested on such a notion in the previous 11 months and come up wanting. The hope had been mostly to press on the gains made by driving the Russians out of Austrian Galicia that spring. Instead, the Russian Army collapsed.
Tsarist Russia had been on the breaking point – she now appeared to be broken.
—
German troops enter Warsaw. It would not be the last major city in the Russian Empire to fall
By any metric, Russia was not prepared for a prolonged, industrialized war. (more…)
…. that if we voted GOP, workers would get gouged and see their take-home pay drop while there plutocratic overlords enrich themselves with the fruits of their labor.
What President Obama and his “advisors” seem to have forgotten is that Iranians are not like other people living in the Middle East such as the Palestinians or the Libyans. They’re not a motley bunch of towel-headed A-rabs waving AK’s in the air.
They’re Persians. They are the physical and intellectual descendants of the people who ruled the known Earth for centuries, under names like Darius, Xerxes and Alexander the Great. They are the religious descendants of the Umayyad Caliphate that conquered Europe as far North as Tours, nearly to Paris.
Giving them nuclear capability is not a mistake. It’s a blunder.
Joe Doakesd now mu
One of the reasons that other Arab countries – Syria, Egypt, Iraq and the like – have been such relative military pushovers against the likes of Israel and, in the case of Iraq, the US, is that none of them have a tradition of being anything but beaten senseless at war. The Egyptians and Syrians are 1-4 since World War II (their only wins coming as they sided with the US against Hussein in 1991); the Iraqis were a Tampa Bay-like 0-7, and seem to be headed for 0-8.
The Iranians – and to a lesser extent, the Jordanians (who are 2-1-2 since 1948 notching a win against Syria and another against Iraq, and a loss and two draws against Israel; they were beaten, but alone among Israel’s Arab foes never humiliated) have no such history. In addition to their storied history of dominance through history, Iran (fighting via proxies) fought Iraq to a draw in the Iran-Iraq war, and, fighting through proxies, have essentially conquered Yemen, Lebanon, Libya, and are in a good position to be the dominant power in Syria and Iraq today.
If a deacon were to announce a rally entitled “God Hates Fags” to begin on the church lawn and stroll the sidewalks to City Hall, but the local NAMBLA chapter obtained a court order restraining her from holding the rally or from making future comments unflattering to gays on the grounds that the Bible is hate speech, which side would the present Supreme Court favor: freedom of speech and religion? Or gay rights?
Are you sure about that?
Illinois Nazis marching through Jewish neighborhoods was protected in 1977 and cross-burning was protected in 1992. But back in those ignorant, bigoted times, homosexuality was still a mental illness and gay sex was a criminal act. Today . . . ?
Joe Doakes
The definitions of criminality and insanity are both tools of the state.
With the announcement that Senator Branden Petersen is not going to seek re-election in SD35, a crowd of Republicans is jumping in line to run for the seat:
Those possible candidates include Republican party activists Andy Aplikowski and Don Huizenga, state Rep. Abigail Whelan and former state Rep. Kathy Tinglestad.
SD35 is a pretty reliably GOP district; pretty much any Republican up there can count on a three-digit margin of victory. It’s sort of the anti-Saint Paul.
While I very rarely endorse anyone for office, I’ll note that Representative Whelan seems to be leaning against – which is, I think, a great plan (another term or two of incumbency can’t be a bad thing).
And I’m going to have to do my bit to put the kibosh on former Rep. Tinglestad; she was one of the “Override Six” who famously gut-shot Governor Pawlenty’s veto of a DFL spending orgy in 2008, joining with Ron “I’m Gonna Blow Your Head Off” Erhardt and making herself a darling of the DFLMedia. I haven’t forgotten, and neither should SD35.
Andy Aplikowski would certainly be a great choice for the office.
