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, I’ll be talking about the community meeting I went to in Highland last Thursday.   Also the debates, the Presidential race, and Minneapolis’ idiotic move to ban plastic bags.

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:

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Join us!

The Star Tribune observed the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima by playing a little morbid”what if” with a Hiroshima bomb in downtown Minneapolis:

The above map shows a range of effects that would result from the blast if a “Little Boy”-type bomb were dropped on the Star Tribune newsroom in downtown Minneapolis.

For starters, the DFL will have to hire a new PR firm.

(Ba-dum-bump)

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is at National Night Out, in Saint Paul, this past Tuesday.   While walking through the crowd at one of the neighborhood block parties, he notices Avery LIBRELLE, wandering from person to person,  accosting them.  BERG listens in. 

LIBRELLE ( reading off a sheet of paper, to a woman pushing a stroller):  Hey, maam!  Do you know what percentage of gun deaths in Minnesota are suicides?

WOMAN PUSHING STROLLER:  Er…(looks uncomfortable – then looks at her phone).  Oops, sorry – I think I have a call…(holds phone to ear) Yes?  Hi!  Oh, really…(makes international “sorry, I’m on the phone” signal to LIBRELLE as she quickly pushes stroller away).

(Undeterred, LIBRELLE walks to another bystander – an African-American man holding a beer and talking with his neighbors)

LIBRELLE:  Heh.  Hey!  (Man turns to LIBRELLE, looking mildly annoyed.  LIBRELLE reads off sheet of paper)  Do you believe that anyone buying a gun should first have to pass a background check to show they are not prohibited by law from owning a gun?

MAN:  Every time I’ve ever bought a gun, I had to take a background check.  It’s the criminals who don’t take the background checks, mis…er…si…er… (MAN stops talking)

LIBRELLE (reading off sheet)  I”m sorry you disagree with three-quarters of gun owners.  Have a good night”.  (LIBRELLE abruptly walks away – then notices BERG).  

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!  I’m out changing hearts and minds about guns!

BERG:  Er, yeah.  Do tell.

LIBRELLE:  I’m reading from the “conversation starters” Heather Martens and “Protect Minnesota” sent to start conversations with the public on National Night Out.

BERG:  And how’s that going?

LIBRELLE:  About as well as my conversations with my family about Obamacare at our Festivus celebrations a couple of years ago.

BERG:  Naturally.

And SCENE.  

Last night, the Saint Paul Police Department (SPPD) and the local neighborhood association put on a community forum at Saint Thomas University, to answer questions about the shooting that happened last Friday, as well as crime in general in the neighborhood.

I attended, fully expecting to be marooned deep in Subaru-driving, free-range-alpaca-wearing, trigger-warning-observing country.  And I largely was – but there were a few friends there as well.

Just the Facts:  the major subject of the meeting, of course, was the two incidents that happened last weekend.

The first was the shooting at Summit and Mississippi River Boulevard (the facts of which as discussed by the police didn’t differ much from the account presented in this space);  Laurentai Broadbent and his accomplices had apparently stolen a car (in which two handguns had been stored by their owner), carried out a couple of robberies, and were test-firing the guns on the bluffs above the Mississippi below the monument at East River Road and Summit when they saw the couple, figured them as “targets of opportunity”, and tried to rob them.

(more…)

…about Donald Trump, but have been too browbeaten by the Barnum-ian noise machine to have wanted to ask.

And when Jeb’s right, Jeb’s right.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When you see the headline “First Female Football Coach,” does it make you cringe?  Probably some Affirmative Action hire to please Social Justice Warriors, making the NFL more inclusive and welcoming?  A ploy, like hiring Denny “The Knee” Green to be a Black coach – he’s Black all right, but not much of a coach?

Normally, I’d agree.  But this particular woman doesn’t sound like it.

• College rugby.
• 14 seasons Women’s Football Alliance (full-contact, tackling football, not flag or lingerie).
• Running Back for Texas Revolution Men’s Indoor Football team (3 carries, -1 yards rushing).
• Two Gold Medals for Team USA in International Women’s Football.
• Master’s in Sport Psychology and PhD in Psychology.

If she only had the academic degrees, or only had flag football experience, I’d suspect this was a publicity stunt to get the team some good PR.

But she’s actually played the game and taken hits.  She might know what she’s talking about.  And if she can teach inside linebackers to play a better game, well, that’s what coaching is all about. And who knows, maybe she’ll bring back some decorum. “When you get into the end zone, act like you’ve been there before” could apply to linebackers . . . not every tackle requires a victory dance.  Huddle up, get your head back in the game.

I might become a Cardinals fan after all.

Joe Doakes

She may have rushed for more yardage than all current Vikings running backs whose last names aren’t Swedish.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was eager to go home.

For three months, the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries draftsman had resided in the port city of Hiroshima, doing his job designing Japanese oil tankers.  His job had become increasingly difficult as supplies for ship building became fewer and fewer.  American submarines,  warships and planes were sinking the tankers faster than Yamaguchi and his co-workers could design and build them.  The work had forced Yamaguchi to be away from his family and he was thankful for the opportunity to see them again when he arrived at the Hiroshima train station on August 6th, 1945.

His joy turned to frustration – he had forgotten his hanko, or hand-stamp that allowed him to travel.  Rushing to his office, Yamaguchi noticed the American bomber in the sky above.  The bomber, any American bomber, was an unusual site over Hiroshima as the city had been spared the sort of conventional air campaign that had devastated the rest of the country.  The bomb dropped its cargo – one bomb in a parachute.

Above Yamaguchi, a great flash brightened the August morning sky, blinding him and knocking him to the ground.  Within that flash, 80,000 Japanese were instantly killed.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi – and the world – had witnessed the horrible birth of the atomic age.

—

Tokyo firebombed – the Allied conventional campaign could cause as much damage as the atom bombs did

With the narrative of how the first atomic bomb came to be dropped on Hiroshima, the inevitable question and debate rides alongside of it – should it have been?    (more…)

To: John Choi, Ramco Attorney
From:  Mitch Berg, uppity peasant
Re: Wrist Slaps

Mr. Choi,

This week, you charged the three accomplices of Laurentai Broadbent – the Saint Paul teen and apparent gang wannabe – with aggravated robbery, vehicle theft, and discharge of a firearm.

The law allows you to charge accomplices in a crime that leads to a death – even of one of the criminals – with murder.

So why not murder, or manslaughter?

Gang activity in Saint Paul is booming – or at least that’s how it appears on the street.  So why not deter all those young wannabees from committing crimes against, y’know, actual citizens?

It almost looks like you don’t want to deter them all that bad.

Please think about it.  Then think about it harder.

That is all.

From the news about the shooting last week, in which a citizen with a carry permit shot Laurentai Broadbent, age 16, as he tried to rob him:

A memorial service was held for Broadbent at Memorial Park on Aug. 2, during which a white Mercedes crashed into a water fountain and the monuments. Shots were also fired.

No word on whether any Confederate flags were involved.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Dayton said:  “I am conscious of the diversity factor. I am also conscious of the fact that when Justice Wright departs there will be only one woman.”

 

I notice that Hudson is Black and all three are female.  No doubt all three are good Liberal Democrats, too.  For Governor Dayton, plainly, choosing a Supreme Court justice is all about their wisdom, maturity, experience and vision, about the content of their character rather than the color of their skin or their sex.  So we’ll get another marginally qualified Affirmative Action justice to legislate from the bench.

 

A local lawyer I know, a 50-year-old White male, has applied six times to be a District Court judge but can’t even get an interview, all the appointments go to women and minorities (and a few highly-connected, politically powerful DFLers).

 

And yet, this lawyer also is convinced DFL policies are the best thing for America because we need to combat centuries of racism and sexism by giving a leg up to women and persons of color.

 

He doesn’t see the disconnect between the politics he supports and the results he decries, can’t reconcile that Affirmative Action is the exact opposite of Equal Opportunity, can’t accept that when DFL policies prevail, not only will smart White people like him be passed over for barely qualified minorities, his own kids will be passed over, too.  He’s so used to parroting the Liberal Narrative that he can’t engage in logical analysis when it comes to the official doctrine, he believes the consequences are what the liberal elitists tell him they are, not what the actual facts demonstrate.  And he says I’m an extremist for point it out!

Genocide is when one race kills another.  Is there a word for one race committing suicide?

 

Joe Doakes

Autogenocide?

To:  Parents of teenagers
From:  Mitch Berg, veteran
Re:  Crazy kids.

All,

In the wake of last weeks’ shooting of a Saint Paul-area teenager by a carry permittee, we heard the usual response from the kid’s parents; “he was a good kid”, “he’d have never hurt anyone”, and “if he’d known someone had a gun, he’d have dropped his”.

Look – teenagers are difficult.  I had two – and my kids’ teenage years damn near killed me.  And you can be Parent of the Year and still have kids go off the path on you, just like kids raised in crack dens with no parents can go to Harvard and become doctors.  Most of us are somewhere in between; imperfect people doing an imperfect job of raising imperfect people.

Now, the kid killed in mid-robbery last week was allegedly linked to gang activity – but let’s leave all of that out for the moment.  Let’s address the mom’s statement, “He’d have dropped the gun if he’d have known someone else had one”.

Forget the obvious question – what, as long as he’s dealing with defenseless people, he’ll wave a gun around?

What would you think if someone said “If I knew I was going to cause an accident, I wouldn’t have driven drunk.”   How about “If I’d have known I was going to catch AIDS, I’d have worn a condom,” or “if I’d have known I was going to break three vertebrae and end up in traction for six weeks I’d have never jumped off the cliff?”   Or “If I’d known that was a cop, I wouldn’t have asked him to bid on those Malaysian girls I had in the van”.

Not much, right?  Because actions have consequences, and some of them are unintended.

Pointing a gun is one of them.    It is, in and of itself, a lethal threat.

Here’s the deal; A gun – or any weapon that a jury would look at and go “yep, that looks like an immediate threat to my life” – can kill a person in less time than you’ve spent reading this paragraph.

When a person is faced with what they reasonably believe to be an immediate lethal threat (and isn’t a willing participant, and makes a reasonable effort to retreat), the law says they can use lethal force in self-defense.  The law doesn’t require the person to be a clairvoyant mind-reader; they they don’t have to try to divine whether your son really means it, or whether the gun is loaded, or whether he’s really a nice kid who’ll deflate in the face of a threat.  The time to make that clear came before he drew the gun, or, God willing, after.

For the love of God, tell your idiot teenagers that waving weapons in peoples’ faces is, in fact, justification for shooting back.  Cops will do it.  200,000 Minnesota carry permittee can do it.   I did.

If they absorb that, if nothing else, maybe we can avoid more of these episodes.

(Side question:  I’m gonna guess he knew better not to point a gun at a big, nasty gang-banger – right?)

That is all.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is watching fireworks from a bluff over the Mississippi River.  Avery LIBRELLE, carrying an overstuffed bag of bug spray, sun parasols and other outdoor gear, lurches up behind him.  

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!  We need to control guns in our society!  The New York Times says so!

BERG:  Right. we talked about that the other day.  Why do you think that?  In your own words, please.

LIBRELLE:   Because we don’t want every fat, overweight, bald, red-faced, out-of-shape racist sexist anti-government Christian Tenther  Extremist in the square states having guns!

BERG:  Huh.  What was that demographic again?

LIBRELLE:  Fat, overweight, bald, red-faced, out-of-shape racist sexist anti-government Christian Tenther  Extremists!  The ones who are likely to become terrorists!

BERG:  Huh.  Speaking of which – the cops are scrutinizing radical mosques to find links to terror…

LIBRELLE:  Stop!

BERG:  …what?

LIBRELLE:  Profiling is wrong!

(And SCENE)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In the olden days, waitresses got less than minimum and earned the rest in tips.  It created a moral obligation to tip: if you can’t afford the tip, you can’t afford the meal, you owe her a tip as part of her wages.

Now that waitresses make $9.00 hourly, they don’t need to rely on tips to supplement wages.  They can quit trying so hard and I don’t need to feel guilty about not tipping, right?

Joe Doakes

Oh, why not?  Every other consequence of political manipulation of wages is unintended; why should quality of service be any different?

There was an episode last Friday on Mississippi River Parkway.  Four youths – in masks, one of them waving a gun – jumped a couple of people out for a walk along the river.

One of the citizens – a carry permit holder, and by all visible signs a good guy with a gun – returned fire, mortally wounding one of the attackers.   Then, according to the story, he did exactly what permit holders are told to do if they, heaven forbid, have to defend themselves; called the cops when he determined he and his companion were safe; then, he administered first aid until the cops arrived.

We don’t, of course, know all the details; if it turns out the shooting was so justified that the Ramco Attorney never tries to bring charges, it’s entirely likely we really won’t.   As of today, the police haven’t referred the shooter to the Ramco Attorney, which is a good sign.

But the interesitng part is the coverage the two local dailies gave it.

In the Pioneer Press?  Pretty much just the facts.

In the Strib – whose coverage of the last notable self-defense shooting, behind a Cub on East Lake in Minneapolis in 2010, was maudlin and disgraceful – there was a brief nod toward social-justice-warriorism in the early edition, focusing on the deceased robber’s mother’s reaction, as if some editor was hoping to latch onto another Trayvon Martin publicity bonanza.  However, by the beginning of this week the narrative had settled down to a sober look at teen gangs in Saint Paul – which may be one of the more unreported issues in the city.

The takeaway?  Some shooters are doing the end-zone happy dance.  I’m not; a family lost a son.  A self-defense shooting is the second worst possible outcome.

But never forget that the worst possible outcome is the intended victim dying.  The intended victim is alive today.  And the only useful outcome from this would be for every criminal – whether a wannabee gang thug or a creep looking for some unearned cash – to realize that there are 199,999 more of us as of last Thursday who can do exactly the same thing.

And especially for every kid playing at being a gangster, waving a gun around to intimidate people, to know that this state is crawling with people with the motivation and the ability to end them.  Cold.

And the odds are getting worse every day.  Criminals are mostly rarely bright people – but they have the same sense of self-preservation the rest of us do.

Let’s hope the message gets out.

One of the most engrossing bits of reading about this time 35 years ago was the speculative fictional history, The Third World War:  August, 1985 by General Sir John Hackett.

Hackett – a British Army hero from World War II who’d gone on to command all Brit forces in Europe in the seventies – wrote an engrossing story about a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, which followed on a growing series of wars around the world, in the Middle East and east Asia.  The book took the form of a series of third-party-omniscient diary entries, not much unlike my own book, Trulbert.  A series of flashpoints led to the Soviet forces which – most kids today couldn’t tell you – were stationed all over East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union to launch a full assault into Western Europe, the Baltic and Scandinavia.  It ended with nuclear strikes on Manchester and Minsk, which led in turn to a coup in Moscow, ending the war in a tense stalemate.

It was intended as a cautionary tale – about the potential results of Carter-era western weakness and fecklessness, and the potential value of the investments that “hawks” in the West (including, to his credit, Carter, who had hardened up after realizing kittens and unicorns weren’t working with either the Iranians or Soviets) were asking to make in their national defense budgets.

I re-read the book a few years ago.  It’s obviously dated  – the USSR is long gone, and nobody under age 40 can tell you what the Warsaw Pact was anymore.  But it’s still a fascinating bit of history, much the same as The Great Pacific War by Hector Bywater (a book featuring Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Phillippines and Singapore, and resolved with massive American industrial, naval and air power – written in 1925).

At any rate – today, August 4, was the date of the fictional assault across the Inter-German Border, thirty years ago.

If you’ve read this blog, you know that I believe – correctly, along with most historians worthy of the term – that it was Ronald Reagan’s hard line that brought down the USSR and ended not only the threat of such an invasion, but potentially much worse).

What’s worse? A “warmonger” who scares all opponents into avoiding war, or a “peacemaker” who gets walked over with deadly force? Fortunately, the world will never need to know. Well, we didn’t until 2009…

At any rate –  I  think it’s high time we built a serious Cold War memorial.  Perhaps we need to buy an old B-52 from the “boneyard”, and install it on the Capitol Mall in Saint Paul.  Ideally, we could surround it with a model of a torn-down “Berlin” wall, and include a plaque with the names of the 6-7 million Minnesotans who weren’t killed in the Cold War.

For the naysayers?  We could include a plaque showing the economic analysis that indicates Reagan’s deficit spending on defense more than paid for itself during the ’90s, when America cashed in its “peace dividend”, putting all that military production to work building consumer goodies.  That smart phone you’re holding?  It navigates because of technology that was designed to ensure aircraft and submarines knew where they were; the internet itself started as Cold-War effort to harden the information infrastructure against a catastrophic attack.  The benefits go on and on.

Anyway, it’s time to cut the crap.  The time is right.  The price is right (old B-52s stored at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tuscon are going for about a buck a pop, you haul.   I bet we can find some people to donate time and effort to haul it and build a pedestal for it.

What say?  Isn’t it time for a memorial to the war that freed more people than all other American wars put together, and did it without a shot being (directly) fired?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Am I the only one who read that story and thought “That’s a nice looking boat – I wonder what happened to it?”

Joe Doakes

I’m more than a little tempted to rent a boat trailer and head down to Florida.  Or Texas.  Or San Diego…

This morning, I beat up the Strib’s editorial board for babbling platitudes about gun control that I’m pretty sure none of them really understands.

But there are times that sit back and thank all that is holy that the “brain trust” behind the editorial coverage at Minnesota’s pre-eminent media outlet is merely dotty, smug, and genially ignorant.

As opposed to the toxic, malevolent, dangerous ignorance of the New York Times.   

Last week, columnist Timothy Egan wrote “Guns and the Two Americas“.

Now, I don’t know much about Timothy Egan; I’ve never written about him.  But he appears to be equal parts Dwight Schrute, rote stenographer and closet authoritarian.

Bears, Beets, Battlestar Galactica:  While Egan appears to be the kind of New Yorker that’d soil himself if he walked into the pistol range at Gander Mountain, he is, nonethless, an expert on tactics:

Just after the tragedy in a Louisiana theater a week ago — a shooting by a hate-filled man who was able to legally obtain a gun despite a history of mental illness — Rick Perry called gun-free zones a bad idea.

In his view, echoing that of the fanatics who own the Republican Party by intimidation, everyone should be armed, everywhere. [Aaaaand  there’s the inevitable strawman – Ed.] Once a shooting starts, the bad guy with the gun will be killed by the good guy with the gun, somehow able to get a draw on the shooter in a darkened theater, or behind a pew in church.

This scenario almost never happens. The logic is nonsense, the odds of a perfectly timed counter-killer getting the drop on the evil killer unlikely. And even when such a situation does happen, as in the Tucson shooting of 2011, the armed citizen who jumps into the melee can pose a mortal threat to others. In Tucson, an innocent person came within seconds of getting shot by an armed bystander who wasn’t sure whom to shoot.

There’s nothing “unlikely” about it; readers of this blog can quote the debunkment chapter and verse; even the Feds note that mass shootings where someone – with our without a badge – intervenes with a gun, the death toll is around 2; without intervention, into two digits.  Jabbering about “timing” is ignorant nit-picking by someone who’d seem to have watched too many ninja movies.

And the episode in Tucson in 2011, where a citizen responded to Jared Laughner’s shooting spree that killed six and wounded Representative Gabby Giffords, ready to return fire?  Egan uses as evidence against shooters an example of a shooter who, under pressure that would make Timothy Egan soil himself with fright, did the exact right thing, checking fire at a time when all too many police would have blazed away?

All The News That’s Given To Me And Stamped “Fit To Print”:   Egan is as ignorant and unquestioning about sociology as he is about tactics:

Nationwide, if you want to lessen your chances of getting shot, stay out of the South. The South is the most violent region in the United States, and also the place with the highest rate of gun ownership. More guns, easily obtained by the mentally ill, religious fanatics and anti-government extremists, mean more gun deaths.

But how do you feel about profiling, Timothy Egan?

Leave aside the patriarchal New Yorker references to phantom religious fanatics and militiamen; it’s entirely possible one of them actually will blow a fuse, someday.

Anything can happen.

Egan’s right, to an extent; the South is violent.  Indeed, as readers of this blog know better than anyone who gets their news from the NYTimes, the rural deep south is, per capita, the most violent place in the US.    And it was the same 100 years ago, when it voted solidy Democrat.  And it was 200 years ago, before the Civil War.  And it was 250 years ago, before most rural southerners had guns.

Because the violence in the rural South is not about hardware; it was an offshoot of Scots-Irish culture, which is and has always been more violent than the national average; southern Scots-Irish were dueling for keeps long after the rest of the country took their feuds to court; honor killings aren’t unknown.  And the violence in the South has exactly the same relationship to guns as does the violence in Chicago and Detroit or rural Afghanistan for that matter; the people were violent long before guns and, if you shut down every gun store in Dixie, it wouldn’t change.

Egan is also no better at picking his sources than the dumbest Minnesota liberal blogger:

Better to go to a city or state with gun restrictions, at least if you’re playing the odds. Most of the states with tighter gun laws have fewer gun deaths.

In which he uncritically points to a “study” in the Atlantic that was BS for all the same reasons Eric Ostermeier’s work at the U of M was wrong.

But Timothy Egan is ignorant.  So what?

One People, One Nation, One Times:  Because the Times has given a big megaphone to a guy who believes that the answer to “gun violence” is a smothering police state:

You want protection in a country that allows a deranged man to get an assault weapon to hunt down innocent people in a public space? Go to the airport — that bubble of gun-free security. Or go to a major-league baseball game, or a stadium in the National Football League.

Our big league venues may be engaging only in security theater, as critics assert, but their owners don’t think so. They now mandate metal detectors to snag weapons, and most of them even ban off-duty cops from bringing guns to the games.

“Gun Free” zones are dangerous not because they only affect the law-abiding, but because…

Most gun-free zones, like the theater in Lafayette, La., are not gun-free at all. They have no metal detectors or screening — that would cost too much, the theater owners claim. Gun-free is a suggestion, and therefore a misnomer. Eventually, the more prosperous theaters in better communities will pay for metal detectors, further setting apart the two Americas in our age of mass shootings.

…they’re not intrusive enough?

In other words, the answer is “smothering, patriarchal government surveillance?”   Allowing the state to poke and prod and scan us all will keep us safe?

Not just the state, but its private agents – like our own Mall of America?

The Mall of America — more than 500 stores in four miles of retail space, drawing 40 million annual visitors to a climate-controlled part of Minnesota — is trying to be a gun-free zone. “Guns are banned on these premises” is the mall’s official policy…The mall has a security force of more than a hundred people. Yeah — I hear the joke about the feckless mall cops. But the Mall of America trusts them more than well-armed shoppers to protect people, as they should.

No mass shootings have happened at the MOA.  God willing, they never will.   But hey, the signs at the doors must be working!

Of course, Crosswinds Mall in suburban Omaha had signs, and mall cops, when a nutcase killed seven back in 2009.

So, for that matter, did the Clackamas Mall in Portland Oregon, on December 11, 2012 – three days before the Newtown massacre.  When a man with hundreds of rounds of ammunition came into the mall, opened fire and killed two…

…and looked down the barrel of Nick Meli’s Glock.   Meli – like dozens of other armed citizens too mundane for Egan to note – did what Egan believes impossible, or superhuman (unless you have a mall cop badge); he pointed his gun at the killer.  Who, like most spree killers when faced with armed resistance, deflated; he turned, walked into The Gap, and shot himself.

Will the Mall of America’s signs (which are legally not binding, although it’ll take an expensive test case to prove it) and cops and dogs do a better job of protecting the customers?  Well, here’s hoping.

So Timothy Egan’s message is clear; the police state will set you free.  Well, not “Free” in the “life liberty happiness” sense of the term, but free from being killed off by deranged madmen.

Right?

Well, wrong.

Very, wrong.

So wrong, light leaving right won’t reach us until we’re long dead.

Having been one level of activist on the Second Amendment or another for thirty years now, and having seen how far the issue has moved since the mid-eighties – when the Second Amendment seems to be on the ropes – it’s almost tempting to fall into a bit of complacent triumphalism.  This past twenty years has been one of the most impressive grass roots political campaigns in American history.  It’s also given us the class war that the left has always been predicting – in inverted form; the gun grabbers are overwhelmingly drawn from society’s lotus-eating NPR-listening Subaru-driving patricians; the bulk of the Human Rights camp is mainstreet, blue-collar and middle-class Real America.

But the temptation can’t be indulged too long; the bad guys are still out there, and they still have the media for their mouthpiece.   There were two notable calls for more gun control in the big media last week, ranging from the historically ignorant to the hysterically demented.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

New York bar charges women 77 cents on the dollar because . . . pay equity?  Great deal . . . for ugly women.   Pretty girls never pay for drinks.  And most of the wait staff is women, who work for tips, which are based on total tab, which is now 23% smaller.  So women get paid less to protest women getting paid less?  Genius.

Joe Doakes

So will the female servers be giving part of that to the ugly male bartenders, who don’t make nearly as much as they do?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Starving workers demand living wage, but only from national chain restaurants and only in the New York City limits.

 

That’s okay, I already bag my own groceries and pump my own gas.  I’m ready for the fast-food touch-screen order menu.  I can enter “No. 5 Extra Value Meal, Small Coffee, 2 Splenda, 2 Cream, To Go” as well as that minimum wage worker can, so go ahead and lay her off.

 

Joe Doakes

And it’ll be boom-time for UX designers in the kiosk business.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Because putting homosexual men in positions of authority over young boys worked out so well for the Catholic Church.

 

Joe Doakes

That’s not going to be a problem until it’s a problem.

And then it’ll be the institution’s fault.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama [last weekend]  made a personal plea for gay rights during his visit to Kenya, warning that “bad things happen” when countries discriminate against certain groups of people.

 

But Obama’s call for universal gay rights was quickly dismissed by Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, who described the issue as something “our culture, our society does not accept.” “For Kenyans today, the issue of gay rights is really a non-issue. We want to focus on other areas that are day-to-day living for our people,” he said.

 

America’s current obsession with fashionable sexual deviancies such as gay marriage and gender reassignment are signs of a decadent culture not long to survive.  Kenyans can’t afford to subsidize idlers and hangers-on, they need to work for a living.  When Americans run out of Other People’s Money to subsidize favored victims, our massive debts will be defaulted and the world economy will collapse again.  At that point, those Americans who survive will be too busy trying to find food and shelter to worry about trigger warnings and micro-aggressions.

 

Enjoy it while it lasts, fellas.

 

Joe Doakes

Prosperity is a two-edged sword; it makes it possible to solve intractable problems – disease, Naziism – while simultaneously giving us the leisure to develop new intractable problems.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Story makes the point the woman in the car who survived because she was wearing her seatbelt (politically correct), whereas the motorcycle riders who died were not wearing helmets (politically incorrect).

 

Completely missed the point that she had a stop sign, stopped for it, then pulled out in front of the motorcycle.  She caused the accident.  She killed those men, not their helmets or lack thereof.

 

Joe Doakes

Narratives gotta get narrated, dammit.

More about Madison Rising.

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,

• We’ll interview Richard Mgrdechian, manager the band “Madison Rising”, about the musical counterculture.
• We’ll be bidding adieu to producer DJ Maegan Fatale as she begins the next phase of her life, whatever it is

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!