Or most technical “standards”, really:

And don’t get me started on the Chicago Manual of Style…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minnesota election law requires party delegates at the convention to designate electors and alternates.  Minnesota Republicans failed to do that at their convention so party big-shots designated some afterwards.  Democrats correctly pointed out this duct-tape fix failed to comply with the law and asked the Supreme Court to strike Trump’s name from the ballot.

The Secretary of State objected that early voting starts in 11 days and they’ve already printed a million ballots so it would cost a fortune to change the ballots now. The Supreme Court decided the Democrats had waited too long to bring the challenge and ruled against them based on the ancient equitable doctrine of laches.

 Laches?  Laches?!? That’s Republicans’ ace in the hole?  That’s their big defense? 

 Laches is one of those kitchen-sink defenses you throw into the Answer when you’re totally desperate and have no defense on the merits of the case.  It’s for losers and scoundrels and weasels.  A major political party trying to get a Presidential candidate onto the ballot shouldn’t be relying on laches.

 They really are the Stupid Party. 

 Joe Doakes

But why did the DFL file the suit – which, but for logistics and the appeal to, ahem, laches, might have succeeded?

Michael Brodkorb, newly at MinnPost, breaks that down.   Short story short; there are people who get paid to be cynical about things like rules.

Frank Drake is running and extremely aggressive, and fairly tart, campaign against Keith Ellison in the fifth Congressional District.

Will it work? I saw the 1980 Olympic hockey team; I do believe in miracles. I’m a Republican in the inner city, so I have to.

Anyway – Drake provides a list of Keith Ellison’s “accomplishments” in office:

Top Keith Ellison accomplishments:

1) I promise to end these wars, and not start any new wars.

2) Minneapolis is now a UN sanctuary city funded by Minnesotans.

3) I can show up anywhere, and I’m the story.

4) The DNC was impartial. That’s why “Keith’s for Hillary” now.

5) Who’s this Frank Drake dude anyway?

6) Community Action of Minneapolis was a great front and money laundering operation until it was seized by the Government for fraud. Bill Davis remains a trusted advisor. President Obama will pardon him before leaving office.

7) Marijuana remains a Class 1 Narcotic, just like Heroin.

8) Keith Ellison was never involved, in any way, with the overthrow of Syria or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

9) Unemployment is low, especially in our urban centers. That 4.5% Unemployment Rate is true, despite 1/3 of all Americans not working. Over 94,000,000 Americans don’t work.

10) Our Government is in the business of War. Private prisons are a growth industry.

11) My ideas are proven in Venezuela and many controlled economies.

Keith Ellison’s ideas resonate like a frying pan dropped from a five-story building hitting the pavement.

Drake has a way with words that we could use a lot more of an inner-city Republican politics.

Two men attacked a woman in a WalMart parking lot in Shawnee, Kansas, hitting her in the head.

An unarmed man attempted to intervene.  The assailants shot him.

Another Good Samaritan – armed with a legally-owned firearm – responded, shooting and killing one of the attackers (some emphasis added by me).

Police said the second man ran off. Police originally believed they captured the second suspect using a K-9 officer, however, that person was not connected with the incident. Police are working to identify the second suspect at this time.

The good Samaritan who was shot and the woman who was injured were both initially listed in critical condition. The woman has since been released from the hospital. The good Samaritan who was injured had surgery Sunday night. He is being identified only as a 33-year-old Kansas City, Missouri resident. The second good Samaritan, a 36-year-old DeSoto, Kansas man, was interviewed by police and released.

Interviewed and released.  Written between the lines; he was carrying legally (Kansas has Constitutional Carry), and the shoot was righteous.

Prayers for the good samaritan who didn’t have the means to deter being shot.

And for the good samaritan who did.  Right though he seems to have been (and events will no doubt vindicate him completely), it’s as traumatic for a righteous shooter as anyone.

…in Minnesota’s legal system that I gave the DFL’s attempt to weasel Trump/Pence off the ballot a 50-50 chance of succeding.

Happy to be “disappointed”, this time at least.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

 

Hilary Clinton repeatedly told the FBI she couldn’t recall details of her email server, security clearance, briefing details.  Trump supporters say she’s still suffering from the concussion in 2012.  I say her inability to recall is not evidence of absent-mindedness, it’s a criminal defense necessity in a politicized law enforcement environment and she knows it, first-hand, from prior experience.

 Remember Scooter Libby, convicted because he “lied” to the FBI about who “outed” Valerie Plame to him?  Libby didn’t “out” Valerie Plame – that was Richard Armitage, which the prosecutors knew all along – but they were digging into who told who.  Libby claimed he learned it from Tim Russert, who denied saying it. 

 Even the Wall Street Journal concluded the entire case was a political witch hunt based on false evidence and a colossal waste of money.  But Libby remains a disbarred convicted felon.

Hillary is smart enough to know you NEVER say anything, NEVER remember anything, NEVER concede anything to the cops. 

Which is not the same as saying she doesn’t actually remember.

 Only that she can’t be convicted.

 Joe Doakes

Hillary “regrets” the “gross generalization” of saying:

“…you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” Clinton said. “Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.”
She added, “And unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.”
Clinton then said some of these people were “irredeemable” and “not America.”

Candidate says something stupid on the campaign trail that the media gingerly reports during the weekend news dump, and quickly walks it back Saturday? Dog bites man.

Democrat noise machine (non-profit and mainstream media divisions) leap into action to support the “gross generalization” within hours, waving polls of deeply suspicious origin about?

Dog licks dog.

Here’s the problem with the “gross generalization”; Hillary Clinton doesn’t take a dump if it’s not part of a plan.  This was no accidental “gross generalization”.

The other problem?  The things she accuses the “irredeemable deplorables” of are nice and non-specific; each deserves a section in the DFL Dictionary (more later this week.    They resemble nothing so much as Article 76 of the Soviet Constitution – which basically covered nonspecific crimes against the state that weren’t articulated anywhere else – sort of an extrajudicial wild card.

Question government “human rights” policy?  Or even debate that racism is anything but a social construct of white Americans? You’re racist!

Point out the bias built into domestic abuse law, or even question the result of modern feminism?  You’re sexist!

Stand for traditional marriage?  You’re a hatefui homophobe!

Advocate caution and protecting our economically disadvantaged with immigration policy?  You’re xenophobic and probalby Islamaphobic!

Are you in the irredeemable half of the “not voting for Hillary” public, or not?

Depends on where they need you to be.  Only they know for sure.

Hillary’s “generalization” was a slander of half the American people.

One of the great lessons in leadership?  Express caricaturish contempt for those you’d like to have follow you:

“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” Clinton said, according to CNN. “Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.”

For “the most qualified candidate in history”, she seems to have a fuzzy grasp on how you lead people.

I don’t recall Ronald Reagan referring to a quarter of the people as “irredeemable government teat-suckers”.

In perhaps the most bald-faced violation of Berg’s Seventh Law in history, the DFL – which is constantly whinging about phantom claims of “voter suppression” – is actively trying to disenfranchise half of this state’s electorate in the Presidential election.

DFL Chair Ken “Dwight Schrute” Martin is sueing to keep Donald Trump off the Minnesota ballot in November, over an absurd, abstruse technicality in election law:

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s Thursday lawsuit claims the Minnesota Republican Party failed to nominate its presidential electors, the people who cast the state’s 10 electoral college votes, in accordance with state law. Keith Downey, the chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, said last month that the party called a special meeting to approve alternative electors because it had previously neglected to do so.

One of these people is imitating Mussolini. The other was a character on a hit TV show.

The suit, which was filed directly to the Minnesota Supreme Court, adds a new level of chaos to an already strange election season. It could cause the parties to spend some of the rushed final eight weeks of the election fighting in court, distracting from other campaigning. While the suit is a technical one, if successful, it could affect the entire presidential election.

If the DFL wins – and one would think even Minnesota’s absurdly liberal Supreme Court couldn’t possibly be that obtuse – then long-time friend of this blog Dave Thul had a great idea; every conservative should vote for Jill Stein, and make the Greens a major party in Minnesota, sapping DFL votes for at least the next four years and drawing money from the DFL’s graft pool.

There’s also a part of me that hopes Martin “wins”.  This – the most baldfaced example of corruption masquerading as law I’ve seen in my lifetime – would stand a good chance of opening an epic floodgate of support for Trump, or at least against Hillary’s party.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When Jacob went missing, Democrat Governor Rudy Perpich called out the National Guard to search for him.  No other kid gets that kind of treatment – Amber alerts hadn’t even been invented.  Why that kid?

 Because Patty Wetterling was connected. And she’s stayed connected – and in the spotlight – for all these years.  Now we’re supposed to leave our porch lights on for her.

 She suffered a terrible loss, no doubt about it.  But what about all the other moms who didn’t get celebrity media treatment?  100 kids a year go missing in stranger abductions.  They don’t have foundations.  They don’t have media coverage.  They’re not connected.  Nobody remembers them.

 I’m not objecting to the compassion shown to Patty Wetterling.  I’m objecting to the lack of compassion shown to everybody else who isn’t as politically connected.  Once again, there are rules for politically connected Democrats, and different rules for the rest of us.  That’s awful.

 Joe Doakes

It wasn’t two years after Wetterling’s disappearance – and three weeks after the birth of my own daughter – that Margaret Marques disappeared.  She was kidnapped, molested and murdered by a store clerk who is, God willing, the bitch of a very lonely sadist in prison.  The Minneapolis Police did a capable job of catching the scumbag; but the eight year old daughter of immigrants passed from the news fairly quickly.

This isn’t to take anything away from the work the Wetterling foundation has done and still does, to minimize or politicize their tragic loss – Joe Soucheray is right, we do owe the Wetterlings something – or to wish anything but a very very different background had befallen Jacob and his family.

But would the family have gotten the kind of leverage they did if they were just a regular bunch of central Minnesota schlubs?

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air!

I’l be on from 1-3PM today this afternoon.  We’ll talk about:

• Jacob Wetterling
• Ken Martin’s voter suppression effort
• 9/11
• And much more…

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is  heard on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

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!

Dana Loesch once noted via subtitle that “you can’t govern a country you’ve never been to”.  I might add that it’d be hard for the mainstream media to cover a nation none of them understands – but that’s another article.

The easiest way to govern people that you never see, and don’t care to bother to understand, is to tell them what they really want and need.  And the American Left is doing that via the notion that the great mass of Americans in largely-red “flyover land” – the expanse between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre that America’s political and major media classes regard with such frigid fear – consistently “vote against their interests” by voting Republican.  The phrase “voting against their interests”, where “they” are people you don’t know, whose lives and values you don’t understand, used to remind me of a zookeeper wondering why the cats in the panther exhibit turned up their nose at Panther Chow – but that underestimates both the panthers and the zookeepers.   It’s really more like the relatoinship between plantation owners and their serfs – but not that kind of plantation owner, y’understand.  No, the kind that cares about his/her serfs, and wants to do right by them, and who is hurt when they, being unruly knaves, spurn his/her benificence.

And being good plantationers, they occasionally try to understand their subjects.

Of course, those attempts invariably fail – run aground on their patronizing, condescending, usually classist assumptions.

The NYTimes bestseller list first saw this phenomenon with the best-selling What’s the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Franks, in which the writer – a Kansan who fled the state for New York – prescribed a generation of Kansans (and by extension other flyover staters) becoming, or at least voting like, Ivy Leaguers.

I personally saw it in Gail Collins’ inadvertently comical trip to Williston, in which she looked at the roughneck oil-town environs through her Park Avenue contact lenses, and in the documentary “The Overnighters”, which pounded oil workers into sociology-class stereotypes with the energy of a Nigerian metalsmith turning an oil drum into a cook stove.

So when a Berkeley sociologist¹ Arlie Russell Hochschild goes to rural Louisiana  to chronicle the lives of Tea Partiers, you’d think you could predict the results.   The book is called Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, and it’d seem you’d be right. No, I’ve not read it, and likely won’t.  But the surprise is in the review itself, in the Washington Post, whose article on the book is titled “A Berkeley sociologist made some tea party friends — and wrote a condescending book about them“.  

I’ll invite you to read the whole thing.  But this reminded me of Gail Collins standing in the line at McDonalds in Williston:

When she lands in Louisiana, Hochschild realizes, “I was definitely not in Berkeley, California. . . . No New York Times at the newsstand, almost no organic produce in grocery stores or farmers’ markets, no foreign films in movie houses, few small cars, fewer petite sizes in clothing stores, fewer pedestrians speaking foreign languages into cell phones — indeed, fewer pedestrians. There were fewer yellow Labradors and more pit bulls and bulldogs. Forget bicycle lanes, color-coded recycling bins, or solar panels on roofs. In some cafes, virtually everything on the menu was fried.”

Dear God, no yellow Labs or solar panels? How do you live?

And I’m trying to imagine this bit here…:

Hochschild preps for her conservative immersion by reading “Atlas Shrugged,” because we know tea party types are into that. “If Ayn Rand appealed to them, I imagined, they’d probably be pretty selfish, tough, cold people, and I prepared for the worst,” this acclaimed sociologist writes. “But I was thankful to discover many warm, open people who were deeply charitable to those around them.”

…had Hochschild changed her subjects from rural whites to Urban blacks, and Ayn Rand to Malcolm X.  

She’d never do lunch in Berkeley again.

The second American Revolution will be against our fellow Americans.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Ad Hominem logical fallacy is an attack on the speaker’s credibility, rather than on the facts at hand.  A Liberal using that fallacy would say: “His opinions are wrong because of who is expressing those opinions, regardless whether he’s correct on the facts.”  

 I want to know the word for the opposite of Ad Hominem, where a Liberal would say: “His opinions are correct because of who is expressing those opinions, regardless of whether he’s right about the facts.”

 I thought of Appeal To Authority but that’s where the authority actually is an authority, for example, citing Paul Krugman as an authority on economics.  It’s still a logical fallacy because it substitutes Krugman’s opinion for proof of the facts at hand, but it’s not quite the right fallacy.

 I’m thinking of the Liberals saying Obama is Black and therefore Obama-care must be good, anybody who opposes him must be evil, based on his skin color and not on the merits of the proposal.  He’s not an actual authority on health insurance so Appeal to Authority is the wrong fallacy.

 I was reminded of it by the recent article on Thug in Pastels starring Javier Morillo, who advocates the same ideas as any Left-Wing union stooge but from the unimpeachable position of a Gay Hispanic man.  Liberals treat him as if his opinions are right because of who is expressing those opinions.  He’s untouchable, so his opinions are untouchable, whether or not they’re correct on the facts.  What’s the word for that?

 Is it the Halo Effect? 

Joe Doakes

Figuring out the logic of the left could keep an army of philosophers busy for years.

Fearless Prediction:  If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, Black Lives Matter will disappear faster than you can say “Hands Up Don’t Shoot”.

Reason for my Fearless Prediction:  Given its funders, it’s bald-facedly obvious that Black Lives Matter largely exists to inflame the black vote for an election where the Democrats will be fronted by a geriatric woman, rather than an black man.   While it’s not strictly an arm of the Democrat party, it may as well be.

Evidence:  BLM has come out against charter schools – an institution whose most passionate supporters in the Twin Cities are in fact black families.  So much so that their controversial Saint Paul organizer, Rashad Turner, is resigning from the group:

Rashad Turner, who led Black Lives Matter St Paul for nearly two years, says he is leaving his position after the national Black Lives Matter organization joined forces with the NAACP to call for a moratorium on charter schools….Turner says public schools not only have a bad record of staff assaulting black students [to say nothing of consigning them to an inferior education – Ed.], but offer less options for black families, stating, “I think that this moratorium really takes away the student voice, it takes away the parent voice, because we’re seeing families in increasing numbers want to attend charter schools.”

Mark my words.   Budget cut to zero by January.

With the tragic resolution of the Wetterling case, we’re starting to see the inevitable flurry of calls for the return of the death penalty to Minnesota; it’s the same flurry we see after every grisly, heart-wrenching crime.

I’ve said it before; I support the death penalty for every reason but one.  And it is, unfortunately, an absolutely dispositive reason.

We’ll come back to that.

Walter Hudson, in PJM, attempts to debunk the five most common conservative objections to the death penalty.  I’ll list ’em; you can read ’em yourself:

1. Government can’t be trusted
2. Death is not an adequate punishment
3. It’s cheaper to keep them alive
4. Death is not a deterrent
5. Life is precious.

And he does a good job with those five arguments.

But he – like Dennis Prager before him  – misses a sixth argument; the inevitability of executing innocent people.

The best comment I’ve seen about the new iPhone 7’s replacement of the headphone jack with a pair of tiny, non-connected Bluetooth buds:

Of course they are.  Something’s gotta keep bluetooth device manufacturers busy…

Studies are starting to show what our lying eyes have been telling us all along; force-feeding “diversity” to people makes things…less diverse than if it merely organically.

What little research we do have on diversity programs suggest that if they have any effect, it is to inflame racial tensions. As the Harvard Business Reviewreported earlier this year, “laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out. As social scientists have found, people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy. Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person.”

Similarly, major studies show that self-segregation into “ethnic enclaves” on college campuses—a practice diversity courses often encourage—increases inter-group hostility and mistrust. That’s one reason white nationalists and others on the alt-right tend to join with the campus left in supporting racial consciousness-raising.

Why is this happening?

Well, the money, sure; pimping diversity is an epic make-work program and graft opportunity for the Social Justice industry:

If colleges were interested in making their student populations more racially harmonious, according to Martin, they would cut back on heavy-handed diversity courses and pivot instead toward programming that fosters a sense of common identity and social interaction among students of different backgrounds. Sadly, the reality is that some of the diversity programs the Times describes are likely aimed more at transferring resources to powerful political constituencies than at actually promoting cross-cultural respect.

But it goes way beyond money.

Turmoil and turbulence create ideal opportunities for asserting power.   Poking at “fault lines” – and race was a fault line that was getting relatively stable until fairly recently – creates opportunities to accrete political power.

Which leads, inevitably, to more money.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

6,500 Minnesota State Fair goers answered a survey.  They demand:

 Higher gas taxes

Higher sales taxes

More gun control

More college subsidies

More sick leave

Right-to-Die

Student privacy

 They hate:

 Restrooms designated by sex

Talking on cell phones

Non-partisan elections

Legislators setting their own salaries

 There are 5 million Minnesotans who did NOT vote in this survey.  Do you think their wishes will be considered?  Or is the fix already in?

 Joe Doakes

With Minnesota bureaucrats, the fix is always in.

Danny Heinrichs’ allocution on Tuesday puts a horrific, dismal, banally evil period on the Jacob Wetterling story.

US Attorney Andy Lugar’s plea deal – Heinrich confessed to a  child porn charge in exchange for no charge for Wetternling’s murder – is both absurd and utterly understandable; better to close the case and put the monster away for 20 years than leave the Wetterlings, and much of the state, in suspended animation forever.

I’m not happy – but then it’s not about me.  And there’s always the hope that he’ll accidentally swerve into General Population and get torn into long, thin strips.

One can hope.

For The Kids – I was driving to North Dakota with my fiance and soon-to-be stepson in October of 1990.    There was a muffled “boom”, and one of the tires on my 1984 Honda Accord flew apart like a Walmart end table in a gorilla cage.  I put on my donut spare and limped to the next freeway exit – Saint Joseph.

And as the town approached the first anniversary of the kidnapping, the place seemed to be plastered with posters, looking for any information anyone could find about Wetterling.

And it occurred to me – it was a terrible time to have children in Minnesota.

The late eighties and early nineties saw a slew of horrific kidnappings in the upper midwest;  Jeana North in Fargo; another young girl murdered by a revolting fat pig at a second-hand store in Northeast Minneapolis, another girl in Inver Grove Heights killed by a mom who was in the process of losing her boyfriend, a few more here and there.  Unlike Wetterling, most of the cases were solved fairly quickly.   Most involved relatives, or people known to the family.

And if we’d have found Danny Heinrich that day, I’d have happily peeled his skin off with a buck knife while he screamed vainly for mercy that’d never come.  Because while the phrase “we lost our innocence” is one of the most hackneyed-unto-meaninglessness phrases in the language these days, it certainly applied.

Because as I embarked on raising a stepson, and sooner than later a daughter and son of my own, we all got the pleasure of trying to teach kids, right in the middle of their innocent, wonderful early years, some ineluctible tactical calculus that is hard for adults to absorb.

If a stranger asks you to come with them, don’t.  Especially if they tell you we sent them.  We’ll never do that.

If a stranger pulls a knife or a gun and tells you to get in the car?  Run.   Don’t even think; run.  They probably won’t shoot – it’ll alert people.  And even if they do?  Moving targets are much harder to hit – and your odds, even as a kid, of surviving a knife or gunshot wound are much better than of coming home from a “secondary crime scene” alive.

If you hear gunfire at school, get away; do not get cooped up in a “locked down” classroom, like a pen full of sheep waiting for the abattoir to come to them.  Get out.  Go over the teacher, go out the window, do what it takes.  A moving target is harder to hit than one on its knees begging for mercy.

Oh, yeah – make lots of noise.  Make an ungodly racket – yell “Rape” and “Kidnapping”; even the most cynical urban adults should response to that – right?  We’ll come back to that.

Having to bring that into my kids’ lives?  Here’s hoping Satan spends all eternity ass-raping Danny Heinrich.  God may forgive.  I’m not there yet.

If It Saves One Life – Minnesota in 1989 was a much more pervert-friendly place than it is today.

Three boys biking on a dead-end road after dark, far from any adults, were a tragically easy target for a motivated pervert, of course.  Everything that could go wrong for those boys, pretty much did.

But a scream reaching an adult in 1989 had an almost zero percent chance of bringing an adult who could do anything more than hope to get a license plate, and shake their fists in misplaced comic fury.

Stranger kidnappings have always been rare – and while I don’t have the stats handy, they seem like they’ve gotten rarer, if only because the media hammers on them so hard when they do happen, and I’ve seen fewer stories.  It’s not scientific…

…but in places like Saint Joseph today, one adult in twenty has the means to respond to a screaming child and an armed adult in in the middle of the act in a more-than-symbolic way.  And you have to figure at least some of the perverts know it.

Believe it or don’t – I don’t care.  Although at least one life has been saved.

I, Stick – I read Patty Wetterling’s injunction to the media and her well-wishers – go forth, hug your kids, feel joy.  It was inspiring and beautiful in its way.

But to every useful, meaningful carrot there must be a stick.   Kids who are on guard for the unthinkable, even during a time of their lives when it should be and stay unthinkable; adults who shake off the ennui of modern life and stay aware of the situation around them; the wisdom to ski the moral slalom between vigilance, judgmentalism, and concern when seeing the signs in their fellow adults that might be nothing, or might be warnings.

And we have to do all that without destroying our childrens’ childhoods – among the most important things this world offers anyone.

[Note:  I debated closing comments for this post.  I will in fact leave them open – but any comment I deem moronic and flatulently self-entitled will be either deleted without ceremony or held up for especial mockery, depending on my mood. And my mood is not good.  Be warned]

Springsteen’s autobiography is due in stores shortly.

And at least one reviewer raves.

I do love this particular pull-quote:

“One of the points I’m making in the book is that, whoever you’ve been and wherever you’ve been, it never leaves you,” he said, expanding upon this thought with the most Springsteen-esque metaphor possible: “I always picture it as a car. All your selves are in it. And a new self can get in, but the old selves can’t ever get out. The important thing is, who’s got their hands on the wheel at any given moment?”

In Born to Run, the Bruce in the driver’s seat is often the kid or the conflicted young man who cowered or sulked in the presence of his father, Doug. The Springsteen catalogue abounds with songs about difficult father-son relationships, such as the recriminatory “Adam Raised a Cain,” the rueful “My Father’s House,” and the valedictory leaving-home ballad “Independence Day” (“The darkness of this house has got the best of us”), the last of which Springsteen introduced to the Gothenburg crowd as a song about “two people that love each other but struggle to understand one another.”

Book going on sale soon ?   I’ll be there on time, and I’ll pay the cost.

For the book, I mean.

(Not a Bruce fan?  Get your own blog).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Cal State offers segregated housing for Black students.  This is a good thing, Black students demanded their own space, safe from racist attacks, racially insensitive remarks and micro-aggressions committed by faculty and students.

 Imagine if the headline said “Cal State REQUIRES segregated housing for Black students.”  The end result would be the same safe space for Black students; but would the headlines be as cheerful?  Of course not, freedom of association would be denied if Blacks were forced to segregate. 

 Imagine if White students said “Policing our speech to avoid micro-aggressions is mentally exhausting.  We want a safe space where we can freely express ourselves without offending others.  We want Whites-only housing.”  The end result would be the same campus free of micro-aggressions against Black students; but would the headlines be as cheerful?  Of course not, freedom of association would be denied if Whites were allowed to segregate.

 Why do these things always seem to be one-way streets?

 Joe Doakes

It’s only weird if your worldview is based in logic.

It’s becoming a tradition; every year, the Star Tribune editorial board theatrically laments the “death of civility” in Minnesota politics.

Or, to be accurate, the paper – like most other media outlets in the Twin Cities – laments the fact that occasionally, someone hurts a liberal’s feelings.

Last week, the paper ran an op Ed by a Susan Mallison. And, let’s be honest – the episode she relates was pretty darn uncivil:

I wore my Hillary shirt to the fair. As I stood at the Star Tribune booth at the bottom of the Grandstand ramp, suddenly a man approached me so closely that he was invading my personal space (nose to nose). He sneered at me and snarled, “Do you like my picture?” as he pulled something out of his pocket. I was very frightened by his actions, and felt, at that moment, the picture he was shoving toward my face would be of his penis.

It was a picture of Hillary wearing prison garb. I recognized the picture as the image at the Minnesota Republican Party booth that I had seen earlier. The man had mounted it on cardboard, covered it with plastic wrap and was carrying it around in his pocket. Presumably he was looking for people wearing Hillary shirts in order to threaten them.

That’s a little scary – and, let’s be honest, no different than experiences I have had from the other side.   The Strib will never, ever, ever take the faintest shard of interest in any of those, naturally.

But when Susan Mallison cries out “who killed civility”, the response is “after all, Sue, it was you”:

I intend to proudly continue to wear both my Hillary T-shirt and the button that I bought at the DFL booth at the fair. The button says, “Love Trumps Hate.”

The purple faced, outraged caricatures like those that Ms. Mallison relates to us are the comic book version of the real incivility in this state, and in our society: The lumpen, plush bottom, ELCA-coiffed, Volvo driving, Garrison Keillor upsucking, Whole Foods shopping, free range alpaca wearing plush bottomed yoohoos who pin on their DFL issued flair and carry the message that “either you are with us, with the DFL, with Herself, or you are full of hate”.

These are the people who have debased the term “hate” unto meaninglessness.

In your own way, Susan Mallison,  you are no better.

Joe Doakes emails us a link to a post by Clayton Cramer, who compares murder rates in Idaho and western Canada:

Idaho: 2.0/100,000

For the Canadian provinces:
Manitoba: 3.43
Saskatechewan: 2.13
Alberta: 2.52
Yukon: 6.88
Nunavut: 10.93

Yet all those provinces have Canada’s restrictive gun control laws.

Alhough, at least anecdotally, people in Saskatchewan and Alberta were the least obedient to Canada’s gun control laws when they were passed.

But I digress:

Idaho at that point had a shall-issue concealed weapon license law (now,  no licenses are required).  I can buy a gun without background check or waiting period, either at a licensed dealer or a gun show.  Friends own machine guns, completely legally.  Idaho is very similar demographically to Saskatechewan, Alberta, and Manitoba.  If gun availability or porous borders make , Idaho should be substantially worse than those Canadian provinces, not better.  Of course the gun control nuts don’t care about murder rates; this is really about cultural disparagement.

And cultural conquest.

It was thirty years ago today that Neerja Bhanot won India’s highest honor for bravery in peacetime, the Ashoka Chakra Award when her jetliner, Pan Am Flight 73 from Mumbai to the US, was hijacked by terrorists from Abu Nidal, who were specifically targeting Americans.

Wikipedia takes up the story:

After 17 hours, the hijackers opened fire and set off explosives. Neerja Bhanot opened one of the doors. Although she could have been the first to jump out of the aircraft and flee to safety when she opened the door, she decided not to and instead started helping the other passengers to escape. Neerja was shot while shielding three unaccompanied American children from a hail of bullets of the hijackers. Out of a total of 41 American passengers, two were killed during the hijacking. A child on board, then aged seven, is now a captain for a major airline and has stated that Neerja Bhanot has been his inspiration and he owes every day of his life to her. 

I’m including the story partly due to its historical value…

…and partly to counter the notion that the cultural left continues to push – the idea that the individual is helpless in the face of adversity, to say nothing of aggression, without “the village” – the suffocating fog of government there to protect and validate them.  This thesis is trashed on a nearly-daily basis.  Faced with imponderable evil, against the most daunting odds, ordinary people do the most extraordinary things.  To attempt to has always been considered one of the greatest virtues of mankind.

And I’m here, in part, to keep reminding you of that.

So that, more importantly, you can remind others of that.

Thug: noun. If applied to a political conservative and intensely derogatory term. For example ” the former editor of Breitbart is a thug; his ex-wife said nasty things about him in divorce filings 12 years ago.

If applied to a liberal, it is a term of endearment, with an understated implication that the writer wants to paint of the subjects toenails in some public place.

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