Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Does it seem as if Americans are struggling to find jobs, but immigrants have no problem? That’s because it’s true.

Joe Doakes

“They take the jobs Americans won’t to do”, in some cases, because Americans don’t get to them first.”

No, it’s not hyperbole:

The one chart that matters more than ever,has little to nothing to do with the Fed’s monetary policy, but everything to do with the November 2016 presidential elections in which the topic of immigration, both legal and illegal, is shaping up to be the most rancorous, contentious and divisive.

The chart is the following, showing the cumulative addition of foreign-born and native-born workers added to US payrolls according to the BLS since December 2007, i.e., since the start of the recession/Second Great Depression.

Anyone wanna seize this one from The Donald?

This stuff fascinates me; tracing the derivation of the number “two” through ethnohistory, and how it traces the history of Western Civilization:

And in all of those cultures, to the left, Dva and Doi is Fünf.

A couple of elderly Holocaust survivors assaulted in a genuine hate crime in the Netherlands:

Samuel (87) and Diana (86) Blug, two elderly Holocaust survivors, fell victim to a vicious and violent anti-Semitic attack at their home in Holland a month ago.

According to a Yedioth Ahronoth report on Sunday, the couple were only able to come forward now and recount what happened to them.

The Blugs say two men, who looked to be of Moroccan descent, knocked on the door to their apartment, claiming to be the police and demanding entrance.

As soon as Samuel opened the door, the nightmare began. Two men dressed in black barged into the apartment and started severely beating the couple.

The assailants threw the couple on the floor, kicked them repeatedly and shouted: “Dirty Jews – from now on your property is ours.”

After tying up the badly injured couple, the thieves ripped Diana’s jewelry off her body. At gunpoint, they forced the couple to tell them where the rest of the valuables in the apartment were located.

Samuel was blinded in the assault and suffered a broken femur. Both he and Diana, who were living independently before the attack, are now confined to wheelchairs at a rehabilitation center in Amsterdam.

“Those bastards have destroyed our lives,” Samuel said in tears to Yedioth Ahronoth. “I have severe pain. I’m completely broken inside,” Diana added.

Emmanuel, the couple’s son, has offered a prize of ten thousand euros to anyone who can provide information that will lead to the arrest of the assailants.

He also circulated pictures of the beaten Diana and Samuel, urging “the world to see what they did to my parents.”

Americans are a nation of migrants and, in many cases, refugees.  We tend to be the most generous nation on earth.  Most of us – and I include myself – would love to be able to help the refugees.

But the stories coming from Eastern and Central Europe are in all too many cases not the stories of people coming to free lands for fresh starts.

And before anyone says it – yep.  American natives have said the same thing about pretty much every wave of immigration i American history.  And they’ve been right, to an extent; each wave of immigration changed this country.

And it’s not as if every wave of immigrants came here with clean hands and no grudges; Scots and Irish came here with bones to pick with the Brits; French and Germans came here fresh from innumerable European battlefields; Russians, Poles and Jews – the pogrom thrower and the pogrom victim – all came here, as did the Armenians and the Turks.  And somehow, after a generation or two, most of them pretty well fit in as Americans, and buried their squalid ancestral squabbles and hatreds, and got down to work.

The difference is, every previous wave of immigrants has, inside a generation of two, assimilated to American life.

But at the same time as our government has officially switched from emphasizing assimilation in favor of integration – they’re very different things – we are faced with a wave of refugees that, as their numbers crept well out of the 1-2% range in Europe, have shown no desire to assimilate, and who seek integration on their own terms, making their neighborhoods in London and Stockholm and Paris and Hamburg effectively off-limits to the rest of society.

All of them?  Certainly not.  But enough of them to where “assimilation” looks like a dim prospect, ever.

And with that in mind, I think it’d be just an outstanding idea if Minnesota’s congressional delegation slowly stepped back and thought for a moment; are they being compassionate, or giving into irrational, PC exuberance?

I’m going to imagine most of you have heard this – a bit from a Fargo radio station (that was started by a former GM of mine, by the way).

I thought it was a bit, initially – until I heard the disk jockey’s initial, befuddled reaction.  Music radio guys don’t deal with this kind of stuff often, and when they do, it’s staged as often as not.

So…yeah.

Sometimes, when I think about the people who have the same right to vote that I do, I get very depressed.

One of the primary tenets of conservatism is that we sit on the shoulders of giants, and th burden of proof for “improving” a good idea is necessarily and justifiably high.

With that in mind:  James Bond is getting a 21st-century update:

In a new book, however, James Bond will be getting a dose of modern morality, as author Anthony Horowitz reveals the tricks he used to drag the spy kicking and screaming into the era of political correctness.
Horowitz, the writer of new Bond novel Trigger Mortis, said he had worked carefully to preserve Ian Fleming’s original character and ensuring his 1950s attitudes remained in tact.
But he has introduced a cast of new characters to point out the error of his chauvinistic ways, including messages about smoking causing cancer, women who give him a run for his money, and an “outspoken” gay friend.

Joe Doakes Feom Como Park emails:

The United States has more mass shootings than any other country. Yes, and we also have more toilets and iPhones. That’s because we have 320 million residents in one country, third behind China and India. We have more shootings because we have more everything.

Our State populations are as large as these countries and our State economies are as large as these countries.

If Americans have too much compared to smaller countries, the obvious solution is to break the United States into smaller parts that would more closely equal the size of other countries. The technical term for this is “secession” which I believe was considered briefly around 1865, but came to naught. Perhaps it’s time to revisit the concept? Blue states could become socialist countries with strict gun control and red states could become free countries with lax gun control, a win-win.

Of course, that would mean Liberals would give up wielding power over the whole nation, they’d be stuck ruling smaller and smaller fiefdoms. Is the chance of equality worth the loss of dominance? 

Joe Doakes

I’ve never much cared for conspiracy theories – but the more you look into the American Lefts rhetoric, the more it makes sense that they’d want American children to be illiterate at math and history.

As far as secession girls? We’ve looked at it on this blog before, and even more before that, and I have a feeling we’re going to look at it again.

As I’ve noted for many years, I oppose the death penalty for one, and exactly one, reason: The inevitability that an innocent person or people will be executed. It’s not academic – it’s happened.

I support the death penalty for every other reason you can imagine.  And it’s irrelevant – because the inevitability of executing the innocent is more than enough to tilt the balance for me.

With that out-of-the-way? I won’t be protesting outside any South Carolina prisons if Dylann Roof gets the death penalty.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Hilary has a group of die-hard crones and Pajama Boys who support her no matter what, but there aren’t enough of them to put her over the top. She needs someone to frighten voters away from Republicans, into her camp.

Trump frightens “moderates” and Mexicans. He sucks all the media attention away from normal Republican candidates (and from Hilary’s scandals). 

Trump is Hilary’s dream opponent.  

She’s really lucky he’s running. As lucky as winning at cattle futures. As lucky as Vince Foster dropping dead to derail the Travel-gate and Whitewater investigations. As lucky as classified emails disappearing from her toilet server. As lucky as foreigners donating millions to her Foundation in exchange for later unspecified favors. It’s amazing one woman could be so lucky all the time.  

Unless it’s not luck . . . .

what?

Is he suggesting…?

No…

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is prowling the aisles at Fleet Farm in Lakeville, looking for .22 Long Rifle ammo.  

He rounds a corner, and runs into Bill GUNKEL, former Republican and now chairman of the Inver Grove Heights chapter of “Former Republicans for Ron Paul”,

GUNKEL:  Hey, Merg!

BERG:  Hey, Bill.

GUNKEL:  The RINO statist John Kline is retiring from office!

BERG:  Yeah, Representative Kline wasn’t the most conservative congressman we’ve had.

GUNKEL:  He may as well have been a Democrat!

BERG:  Enh.  And in an R+2 district…well, bygones is bygones.  The real question is who’s gonna replace him?   I’ve heard talk of State Senator Dave Thompson, Mary Pawlenty…

GUNKEL:  Why elect another RINO?

BERG:  Um, what? Dave Thompson is a RINO?

GUNKEL:  He never criticized Kline!

BERG:  Er, why would he do that?

GUNKEL:  Why not?

BERG:  Violating Reagan’s 11th commandment by attacking other conservatives, even imperfect ones?  Alienating Kline supporters in his own district, to no benefit to himself?  Spending political capital on something that gains him nothing?

GUNKEL:  Gains him nothing?  He’d get the respect of the Liberty voters!

BERG:  You mean the people who bum-rushed the 2012 State Convention to send a slate of delegates to Tampa to make a symbolic vote for Ron Paul, and then largely went home and never came to another GOP meeting?  Who pushed Kurt Bills to the nomination, then abandoned him when he actually acted like he was part of the party that endorsed him?  A group that seems more focused on bashing Republicans than winning elections?

GUNKEL:  Principle!

BERG:  Right.  OK, so Dave Thompson is insufficiently pure.  Gotcha.  So who do you support?

GUNKEL:  David Gerson.  The only candidate to support if you care about Liberty!

BERG:   Gerson says all sorts of things I support.  I’ve got no problem with him.  I’d love to have him on the show.   It’s just that last go-around, he raised less money than a typical Saint Paul Republican legislative candidate.

GUNKEL:  So?   Money isn’t everything.

BERG:  Right.  But it’s a leading indicator.  If someone can’t raise money from supporters to run a campaign, it’s a fair question to ask whether they can raise votes.

GUNKEL:  Well, it’ll be different this time!

BERG:  Well, that’d sure make the race more interesting!   I think a solid, credible challenge from the Libertarian wing of the party would be a very good thing.   But the candidate – and especially his campaign – have got to ramp up the game.

GUNKEL:  Oh, we will, by the time of the election on March 1.

BERG:  Um, what?

GUNKEL:   We’ll get the support out in droves by the time the battle for all the marbles, on March 1, happens.

BERG:  Um, March 1 is the caucuses.

GUNKEL (looking confused):  Riiiight?

BERG:  Not the general election.

GUNKEL:   (Shrugs extravagantly, indicating non-comprehension)

BERG:  March 1 is when he’ll try to knock off other GOP…Oh, never mind.

And SCENE

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

New York City cops fire 84 shots on city streets to hit a suspect once, Chief says they’ll investigate but expects it to be justified.
Man trapped in his own Minnesota apartment fires three shots to stop attacker, convicted of Reckless Discharge.  

Joe Doakes

Milwaukee County Sheriff Clark – whom I’ve praised in Thao space before, and no doubt will again – said “stop focusing on fixing the police.  Fix te ghetto”. 

I say there’s room for both. 

After a year or two ofdabbling I pretty much swore off Food Porn shows. They’re all pretty much the same, and the whole “foodie” culture has come to annoy the bejeebers out of me.

Since I stopped paying attention to the whole genre years ago, I wasn’t familiar with Food Network star Alton Brown.

Reading this profile in the NY Times, I wish I had encountered him earlier. He eschews “foodie” culture – at least partly on religious, as well as aesthetics, grounds – and is want to show businesses few “out” shooters.

It’s worth a quick read..

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Eden: God created the world and holds all power over it. Residents have the right to do anything they please except eat of the fruit of one tree.

Monarchy: God delegated His powers to the king, who has the right to do anything he pleases. Residents have no rights, only privileges specifically granted to them by the king.  

United States of America in 1776: God gave all rights and powers to The People; the government has no rights and only the powers specifically granted to it by The Constitution.

Socialism: There is no God. Government bureaucrats hold all power and can do anything they please. Residents have no rights, only privileges specifically granted to them by The Party.

The Obama Administration . . . .

I’ll  take a guess; like Socialism, only with more snide pettiness.

It was a hot, dry summer – like most summers in North Dakota, really – 39 years ago.

I was going into seventh grade in the fall.  But that was a few months away.  Like most sixth-graders in those days before video games, I spent my days biking, playing sandlot baseball and football (usually behind the Stutsman County Jail), and spending lots of time at the library – which was the only building to which I had regular free access that had air conditioning.

But boredom drew me to a lot of other things.

One of my favorite haunts was the Stutsman County Historical Society – an 1890’s vintage mansion on Third Avenue in Jamestown, built by, of all things, a North Dakota timber baron.

I kid you not.

The museum’s lovingly-preserved rooms were a time capsule of life in central North Dakota from about 1860 to probably the ’50s; rooms were dedicated to the kitchen, entertainment, children and schools, stores, doctor’s offices, the railroad…

…and, on the second floor, to Fort Seward.  An army outpost built in 1867 to protect the railroad’s construction crews, the Fort covered the crossing of the James River right around the confluence with Pipestem Creek.  It was there, where the rivers and train came together, that Jamestown formed.

The Seward room covered the city’s military history – the fort, and Jamestown’s contributions to the wars since then; the 1st North Dakota Volunteers who fought in Cuba during the Spanish American war, and Company H of the 164th Infantry, which fought in both World Wars 1 and 2 and Korea.

I knew all this.  My first “big kid” book, at age 5, was my dad’s old book of World War 2 aircraft, from when he’d been about my age.  I’d learned them all – and, as my parents walked among the people getting ready for the town’s Memorial Day parade in, probably, 1969 or so, I showed the book to one of the National Guard guys who was getting ready to march in the parade.

“Yeah”, he nodded.  “I was there”.  And he had been; into middle age now, he’d been a teenage infantryman at the end of the war.

So I took to this stuff early.  And as a 12 year old military history buff, I was able to rattle off the story behind each of the pieces of equipment in the room to the attendant – the .45-70 Trapdoor Springfields of the fort’s original infantrymen (three companies of the 20th US Infantry), the M1903 Springfields of the WW1 doughboys, the Garands that the town’s GIs carried on Guadalcanal and Bougainville and the Philippines and Korea, the various uniforms, and on and on.

The ladies who worked there were impressed enough to ask if I’d like to come in and be the “docent” for the room.  It was something to do – so I spent a few Sundays explaining, and knowing me, over-explaining the room, to passersby.

Not that it was that busy.

The “job” – I got paid in cookies and lemonade – left me lots of free time to explore.  One the things I explored was a large wooden trunk sitting below the Fort Seward room’s window.

One day, I opened it.

I found a large piece of red and white fabric, folded many times, neatly stored in the trunk.  On top of it was a small typewritten piece of paper.  It was actually a Japanese “Rising Sun” flag.

But not just any flag.  The flag that’d been given by the Japanese delegation at the surrender ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, to General Douglas MacArthur, as a traditional part of the surrender ceremony.

The piece of paper noted that the flag had been given by MacArthur to a Colonel DuPuy, a US Marine who was a native of Jamestown.  This, he took home with him, and at some point in the fifties or early sixties, gave it to the Stutsman County Historical Society.

Which put it in the trunk and forgot about it.

Until that sweltering Sunday afternoon in August of 1976, when I found it.

I told the museum ladies – the museum owned a big piece of history.

“That’s nice, Mitch”, they nodded.  There was a reason I was handing the Fort Seward room; it really wasn’t their subject.

I told my parents.  “That’s interesting, Mitch”, they said, not very interested at all.

I told other people, over the years, but nothing much came of it.  It was only me, after all.

Sometime about 20 years ago, my dad called me; some history buffs had “found” the flag.  They’d carefully unfolded it – it was huge – and gotten a picture taken; it made the front page of the Jamestown Sun, along with the story behind how it got to Jamestown.

Twenty years after I found it and tried to tell people the story, naturally.

It was good preparation for being a conservative in Saint Paul, actually.

My good friend First Ringer and I just finished writing our six-year-long series on the seventieth anniversaries of events of World War 2 yesterday.

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One of the classic rhetorical small talk questions as “when would you like to have been born?”

On the one hand, at least from where we sit now, there’s never been a better time to be alive, at least from all of the basic utilitarian perspectives that most human beings would have wished for over the last few tens of thousands of years.

But purely from the perspective of my lifetime? There are times I think I should’ve been born 100 years ago, in 1915.

Had I gotten into radio at age 15, in 1930 rather than 1978, I would’ve been getting in on the glory years of the industry. A time when instantaneous mass communication was just starting to take off;  when the rulebook hadn’t been written yet, and the whole industry, craft, and art form was still virgin soil:; when Stanley Hubbard was pioneering spot news with a Duesenberg mounting a short wave transceiver, reporting from breaking news stories around the country in real time, AND inventing broadcast entertainment as we know it today, right here in the Twin Cities, running Jack Benny and his vaudeville show live from the Orpheum in Minneapolis.

And above and beyond all that, mostly, so I could have been there for what was likely radio’s greatest moment; World War II.

The list of iconic radio moments from the war is almost too long to do justice to: Churchill and Roosevelt’s speeches; Edward R. Murrow’s “this is London” and reporting  from Buchenwald; Walter Cronkite reporting from Air Force bombers and soldiers’  foxholes; those riveting moments when NBC told the nation Pearl Harbor had been bombed, and when the BBC told the world that Hitler was dead.

I won’t delude myself by believing I would’ve done anything other than wet myself and hide under a truck after two seconds of trying to follow Andy Rooney across Omaha Beach, or sitting in the waist gun compartment of the B-17 with Charles Collongwood as the Flak and Messerschmidts erupted all around.

But after my early years in talk radio, working with the likes of Don Vogel, I could completely see myself working for this guy, on his project.

Sefton Delmer was an Australian Jew born in Berlin in 1904.  After  A bit of elementary school in Germany, and a brief period of internment as a hostile national at the beginning of World War I, he was educated in a typical British public school, and found work as a journalist.

Sefton Delmer

He was in the right place at the right time for the dawn of radio, connecting with the early BBC in the 30s.  In 1931, he was the first western journalist to interview Adolf Hitler – at the time, leader of a Nazi party that was just starting to move to electoral  prominence, on its way to the majority in two years.  During those years, he had the distinction of being suspected by both the German Abwehr and the British MI6 as being a spy, respectively, for MI6 and the Abwehr.

Then, at the beginning of World War II, using contacts in MI6, he pieced together the assignment of a lifetime; produce fake German radio programs, for distribution to the conquered  continent.

His first broadcast, GS1, took place 75 years ago this month; “GS” had no actual meaning, and was an intentional ambiguity, left for the listener to fill in what it meant (“General Stab, or “General Staff?”  Could be!).  It was an ostensibly “underground” broadcast from inside Germany, featuring an announcer and a character called Der Chef (“the Chief”), played by Peter Seckelmann, a former Berlin radio announcer and refugee, playing the role of a Nazi party insider.  Most shows involved what we’d call “opposition research” today; blasting out stories (some real, some fictional) about corrupt and depraved Nazi party officials.

The 12 minute programs were recorded on glass discs in London, and transmitted starting at 12 minutes before the top of the hour, hourly, usually for a day, sometimes (if the bit was particularly juicy or of major intelligence value) two or three days.  While the Germans jammed GS1, the show developed what MI6’s “Political Warfare Executive” determined was a large audience.

The broadcast carried on for two and a half years, until Delmer ended the show in a simulated Gestapo raid, going out in a hail of (recorded) machine gun fire not unlike the final Don Vogel broadcast, in the fall of 1943.

He went on to other “black propaganda” operations; one that appealed to consciences of German Christians, with some success.  Another, the “Atlantic Shortwave Service”, broadcast “news” to U-boat crews in the Atlantic; a typical example involved a message being sent to an actual U-boat commander whose boat was at sea, congratulating him on the birth of twins.  The commander was known not to have been home in over a year, of course.   Many of the broadcasts featured a cast of German characters, including the dusky, sultry “Vicki”, a seductive newsreader played by Agnes Bernelle, a woman who went on to a long career in the US and UK as an actress and cabaret singer.

Best of all?  The BBC crabbled about Delmer’s broadcasts.  Some of it was journalists, appalled at the hijacking of their medium to deceive.  More of it was tactical; they were worried that if Delmer’s broadcasts were broadly attributed to the BBC, then people in occupied countries might not trust the information on the Beeb.

Were Delmer’s black propaganda broadcasts successful?  There have been apocryphal stories that a U-boat commander surrendered in part because of the stories; they’re probably apocryphal for a reason.  But MI6 did in fact note that Delmer’s “news” did in fact push some cracks into the morale of German troops whose morale was subject to cracking.

Either way – that must have been some fun radio to do.

A story about guns in a Twin Cities media outlet – in this case the City Pages – that not only ignores any of Heather Martens’ blather…

… but gets virtually all of its (highly learned and accurate) content from Joe Olson?

I am saying is in all honesty and without the faintest hint of sardonicism – I never saw that coming.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My cousin constantly posts to Facebook how upset she’s become about gun violence. She insists we must Do Something by which she means Universal Background Checks. My response: moral problems do not have technological solutions.

The solution to the problem of alcoholism is not prohibition, but sobriety.

The solution to the problem of teenage pregnancy is not abortion, but abstinence.

The solution to the problem of murder is not universal background checks, but the Sixth Commandment.

Liberals are terrified of morality because it’s judgmental so they resort to ineffectual alternatives then complain when they fail. I fear I lack sympathy for intelligent people acting like idiots.   

Joe Doakes

That is the difference, of course, The difference between liberals and conservatives; conservatism offers relatively simple answers to most problems – but those simple answers require a lot of work.  Morality is easy to understand, and hard to achieve. 

Liberalism offers a byzantine array of “easy answers” – Heck, let’s just have everyone pay for everyone else’s health care!  – that really don’t work as answers. But boy, they sure seem simple upfront!

It was a little before 9am in the morning as Mamoru Shigemitsu, Japan’s foreign minister, and the rest of the Japanese delegation, boarded the massive American battleship the USS Missouri on September 2nd, 1945.

The small Japanese contingent was dwarfed by the presence of the American military, and the number of representatives from other Allied forces.  89 warships, the majority American but a handful of them British, lay at anchor in Tokyo Bay, while hundreds of American planes flew in formation overhead.  The deck of the Missouri itself was overflowing with brass and press, the occasion dripping in symbolism of the American military might than had finally brought Japan to surrender.

At 9:04am, Shigemitsu signed the Instrument of Japanese Surrender on behalf of Emperor Hirohito.  In a small form of irony, Shigemitsu had been among the few prominent figures in the government to oppose a war with the United States (Japan’s militarists never trusted him) and yet stood signing for a surrender to a war he had never wanted.  Gen. Douglas MacArthur, milking the moment, signed as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces before turning the pen over to the representatives of the other Allied nations.  By 9:23am, the signatures had been completed and the brief ceremony finished.

World War II had ended.  The challenge of the post-war world had begun.

—

The formal Japanese surrender – the actual ceremony was very brief

Defeating the Axis powers had been a monumental task, won at the cost of perhaps 50 million dead or more (some estimates range as high as 80 million).  Rebuilding those same powers would prove to be a nearly equal task.    (more…)

Someone pointed it out in the comment section; Brian Lambert interviewed Jason Lewis in the MinnPost earlier today:

MP:​ But even The Patriot [AM 1280] is now all syndication. They used to have local bloggers with shows ripping the feckless liberals and all the usual stuff. Now, it’s all mailed in.

JL:​ ​It’s the only thing they can afford. They don’t have the budget for anything else. The economics of the industry requires a massive paradigm shift. And, as I say, it’s due to mismanagement, technology and debt, the over­buying of radio stations.

Lambert exhibits the attention to detail he always showed when he was the Pioneer Press’ “broadcasting reporter”.

AM1280 was always syndicated.  The Northern Alliance started three years after the station went on the air – almost two years before AM1130 went all talk, before Jason Lewis left the Twin Cities for Charlotte much less before he came back and bumped Lambert’s show from the 1130’s lineup.

And unlike both of them, we’re still here.  Different group of us, to be sure – but we’re still alive and kicking.

And I’d love to invite Lambert on the show to prove it.  But I have no idea where to find him, or for that matter, whether he still really exists or not.

If you know where he’s at, please forward my invite.

Years ago, I was working in an “oldies” station.  Still being in the middle of a radio career, and trying to keep my options open (I’d always wanted to do news and talk, and was chafing with life as a disc jockey – but “when in Rome…”, as they say), I asked the station’s program director what it was that made a song an “oldie”.

He replied that music directors operated on two key bits of psychology:

• People are intensely emotionally attached to music that connected with them during puberty; music mixes with raging hormones to create a powerful, almost chemical bond.
• People are also mentally and emotionally attached to the music that was in their lives when they were in their late teens and early twenties – but for slightly different reasons.  It was the music that was current, and on their minds, and affecting their emotions, about the time their brains were finally, belatedly getting formed and becoming adult.

I was sitting in a Culver’s the other day.  They were playing Sirius FM’s “Original MTV Veejay” station – the station where Martha Quinn and the rest of the original MTV VJs (no, I can’t remember anyone but Martha Quinn) voicetrack the songs that were in vogue from 1981-86ish.

And for some reason, they played a 4-5 song sweep of nothing but music that was on the radio and MTV when I moved to the Twin Cities, 30 years ago next month.

And, just like my old program director said, it was incredibly evocative.  I remembered how it felt driving across the prairie for the last time as a North Dakota resident, listening to Rain on the Scarecrow.  Driving down 494 and turning onto the Southtown Strip for the first time as “Money for Nothing” played on the radio.  My first rush hour on 494 at Cedar, racing to my first job interview in the Cities to the tune of “Shout”, in WLOL.  Watching MTV after a long day of cold calling and seeing “Take On Me” for the first time.

And I started writing this post on my phone.

(Warning:  immense number of embedded videos below the jump.  You’ve been warned).

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Joe Doakes, of Como Park, emails:

Gun control proposals never die, they just rest a while. Mandatory insurance has staggered back to life. 

The notion is that guns cause injuries which require medical attention which the public must pay for; therefore, gun owners should have insurance policies to pay the cost of treating those injuries. It’s like car insurance, see?

Of course, unlike car insurance, the real hope is that such insurance would be so expensive, nobody would buy guns and if nobody has a gun, gun violence ends. 

Two things:

First, unlike driving, gun ownership is a Fundamental Right protected by the Constitution. We don’t require journalists to buy insurance in case an inaccurate, misleading article ruins someone’s life. On the contrary, under the New York Times v. Sullivan standard, the more likely the harm, the harder we make it for victims to recover. Remedies for problems caused by privileges don’t apply to problems caused by rights.

Second, I am forced to buy uninsured motorist coverage to subsidize law-breakers who drive without insurance. I am forced to buy Obama-care compliant health insurance to subsidize scoff-laws who lack health insurance. Neither of those schemes eliminated the uninsured, they simply shifted the cost to me. Similarly, forcing gun purchasers to subsidize criminals using guns to commit violence won’t eliminate gun violence. 

It’s wrong and it won’t work. So naturally, Democrats are all over it.

 

Joe Doakes

 

Voluntary gun insurance, driven by the free market, makes  sense.

Mandatory gun insirance is nothing but back door gun control.

The left must be counting on the idea that Second Amendment advocates turn over every couple of years, so all of these ideas sound new.

Two weeks ago:  A study shows that most psychology and social “science” studies are irreproducible BS.

This week:  Stanford issues a learned study about “why white people don’t acknowledge white privilege”.

Can’t argue with science that debunks “science”.

Well, more than most marketeers I’ve dealt with.

I’m on board.

Governor Dayton calls North Dakota’s “climate change” policy quote Neanderthal“.

And yet north Dakota not only has much better air quality (it’s smaller state – but all of those gas flares have an effect…) but Minnesota’s dirtier air is a result of the states boundless hunger for…

… North Dakota coal!

Just to reset the stage:  last Saturday’s “Black Lives Matter” demonstration (and its union benefactors), without bothering to get a city permit to block a street or use a city park, used a city park to organize a parade that went on to block traffic on the Midway’s busiest street for 3-4 hours, on one of Saint Paul’s highest-traffic days on one of the ten days a year when the Midway gets any outside traffic at all, escorted and guarded by an impressive array of Saint Paul Police and the rest of the city’s DFL-run bureaucracy.

And after all that?  The biggest controversy about last weekend’s “Black Live Matter” March at the Minnesota State fair, at this remove, is the chant that the crowd broken into at one point during the March; “Pigs in a blanket/fry’em like bacon”.

The St. Paul police union criticized the chant.

To which parade organizer Rashad Turn replied:

“It definitely wasn’t a threat. I don’t know if they would have received it differently if we would have said on a stick. We’re there chanting, using our voices,” Turner said.
“It definitely wasn’t a threat. I don’t know if they would have received it differently if we would have said on a stick. We’re there chanting, using our voices,” Turner said.

And I’m sure if a group of white people walked up Snelling chanting…

“Save our cities, cut our losses

 line their lawns with blazing crosses” 

…or called a blazing cross “campfire on a stick”, Rashad Turner would be calling it “just words”, too.

I’ll take bets on that.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

As a youth, I looked for Science Fiction books with Hugo Winner on the cover because that was a sign of quality science fiction writing.

For the last 30 years, Hugo winners have been more about political correctness than starships and laser beams, a future of despair, not hope.  Look, I read escapist fiction to escape political correctness and despair, I don’t want it in my Science Fiction so I quit buying SF.

Three years ago, author Larry Correia noticed the trend and in a parody of typical politically-correct appeals, claimed that boring message fiction was the leading cause of puppy-related sadness.  He said the Hugos put authors’ politics above the quality of the work, that conservatives were shunned.  He formed the Sad Puppies club and got a few conservatives nominated for the award.  The Liberal response was typical:  Sad Puppies are racist, sexist and homophobic and must be shunned.  SP did it again last year and the response got worse.  This year there were two groups: Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, who swept the nominations and then the fur really flew.

The major media reporting on the controversy started from the wrong premise: they examined genitals and scrutinized skin color to see if Sad Puppies nominees filled quotas of women and racial minority authors.  That investigation entirely misses the point: regardless of who wrote the stories, were the stories any good?

The metric used to measure the problem, IS the problem.

The 2015 Hugos were announced: no Award won several categories.  Politically correct fans would sooner give no award at all than let conservative nominees win, not even the woman, Hispanic or American Indian Sad Puppies nominees.  Politics ruled; Liberals burned down their politically correct village in order to save it.

The insanity goes beyond science fiction.

President Obama nominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court because she was a “wise Latina.” Is there something about being a woman that makes the Commerce Clause easier to understand?  Some special cultural benefit of having Spanish ancestors that gives you clearer insight into the Due Process Clause?  Liberals insist Diversity is Essential but never provide an intellectual justification for it.

We can see the results of Affirmative Action in the Hugos and in the White House.  When will we, as a society, get the message that rewarding the least qualified and punishing the most qualified on the basis of immaterial factors such as race and sex . . . is a stupid way to run a society?

Joe Doakes

I’m happy that Joe can explain  the flap about the Hugo Awards because I, myself, have never cared for sci-fi.

And when I say “sci-fi”, I mean “sci-fi fans”, of whom I have the grossly-unfair stereotype of being a roomful of people who look and act like Comic Store Guy on Simpsons…

…and who justify the stereotype, in part, by doing such a terrible job (Joe Doakes excepted) of explaining why we should care?  Reading sci-fi fans’ “explanations” of the Hugo Award flap is like reading about “Gamergate”;  clogged with subcultural jargon that, like all subcultural argot, is intended to make the subculture opaque to outsiders.

And it works!  What is a “sad puppy?”  (Joe explains it adequately, in context, which is a first).  What in the f*****g f*****g f*** is “Dragoncon?”  Who is who, and how do we know, and for the love of The Force, why does it matter?

So it’s a start.  Thanks, Joe.