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

I’m off on assignment, so Brad Carlson will be filling in from 1-3PM this afternoon live at the AM1280 booth on Machinery Hill!

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is normally 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!

This just in; John Rusciano, a former contributor to SITD, has has published his first book.

“Fire Yourself” – a concise guide to getting the most your enjoyment and potential in your career – is out on Amazon  right now.

And there are going to be some book events happening;  stay up to date on Facebook.

I find myself more and more these days trying to give historical context to current events, to clarify current events for the various millennials in my life.

Here’s a big one:  while the media is turning cartwheels about the “Obama Recovery” (happening an unprecedented eight years after the crash – worse than the Great Depression), the best quarter of GDP growth in this “recovery” is lower than the worst quarter of Reagan’s recovery, from 1983 through 1987.

But never mind – the media will keep the narrative of Obama the Economic Lightworker warm and dry.

But with Hillary Clinton in the picture, there’s another wrinkle.   John Hinderaker notes at Powerline (with some emphasis added):

n 1992, Bill Clinton announced that “It’s the economy, stupid.” That was pretty much the sole theme of his campaign. He ludicrously claimed that the country was then experiencing “the worst economy since the Great Depression,” a lie that the press, to its everlasting shame, not just allowed but often endorsed. So what was the level of GDP growth that Clinton relentlessly denigrated?

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the quarterly growth numbers for 1992, in chained 2009 dollars, were 4.8%, 4.5%, 3.9% and 4.1%. That’s right–the growth that Bill Clinton derided as the “worst economy since the Great Depression” was around four times what we are now seeing under Barack Obama. And Hillary Clinton promises to continue Obama’s anti-growth policies.

I remember the recession at the tail end of the Bush 41 administration – as the economy adjusted from a Cold War economy to civilian spending – very well; it slowed down my transition from radio to IT by a few harrowing months when I was welcoming a couple of new children into the world.  But it was a short recession with a sharp recovery (“Thanks, Ronald Reagan, for that “peace dividend!”) that led to 15 mostly-prosperous years…

…whose various windfalls are long in the past.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I flinch when people urge that we condition law enforcement on “humanity” rather than “legality.”  Who decides which law is inhumane and need not be obeyed?  Taken to its logical extreme, that argument produces anarchy.  

 For example, Paul Mirengoff writing at Powerline about Trump’s immigration stance says: “First, walk away from mass deportation once and for all. Deporting 11 million people, if it could be done, would be inhumane.”

 Inhumane?  That’s a powerful condemnation, a word we’d use to describe slavery or torture.  Is it justified in this context?

A person who sneaks across the border into this country, claims asylum as a refugee but loses the case in immigration court, is ordered “removed” which is the politically-correct word for “deported.”  That’s the law.  The fact there are many such people, does not change the law.

 Is it inhumane to enforce existing law?  Why?  Because immigrants would be sent out of the land of Milk and Honey back to poverty and misery?  If that’s the case, isn’t it equally inhumane to leave people rotting in misery and poverty in their own countries because of an arbitrary border line?  Shouldn’t we share our riches with everyone?  Shouldn’t we eliminate the border on basic humanitarian grounds and let everybody in?  Are borders themselves, inhumane?

 If it’s “inhumane” to enforce the border, then we shouldn’t criticize Trump: we should criticize Congress and the President for maintaining the inhumane laws that presently exist.  We should insist Congress repeal all immigration laws, fling the borders wide open and let everybody in.  Doing any less would be “inhumane.”

 Unless . . . unless that’s not what Liberals really want.  Unless they simply want to beat on Trump and any stick will do.  If that’s the case, then arguing for open borders gives millions false hope of amnesty, a unicorn dream in this political climate.  And that would be truly inhumane.

 Joe Doakes

When they start applying this to logic and intelligence, then it’ll get serious.

After spending a few weeks going full-blown fanboy over the Pillsbury Foundation/Bloomberg Youth’s “gun buyback” last weekend, the leftymedia has its feelings hurt by the mockery the conservative alternative media (including this blog) has heaped on the “events”.

The piece, by the inevitable Corey Zurowski, is entitled “Gun fans mock Minneapolis’ buyback program over crude homemade shotgun” – after the shotgun that our Joe Doakes noted at one of the buybacks.

Oh, we mock the buybacks for a lot more reasons that that.

We mock the buybacks because they don’t affect crime. Never have, never will.

They didn’t take any guns “off the street”; virtually all the people turning in guns were middle-aged folks from the surrounding area who were trading junk guns for more in gift cards than they’d ever get from a buyer.

We mocked the bald-faced graft – the transfer of money from Pillsbury Foundation donors and Minneapolis taxpayers (via the dozen or so cops that were working the “events”) to – let’s be charitable – “artists”, as well as enterprising rummage-salers.

We mocked the media (smile, Corey Z!) for their unability or unwilingness to dig past the press releases; at both buybacks they ran out of gift cards after *maybe* 10-15 guns were turned in. If the buyback “bought” more than 30 guns, no witness can confirm it. Most of the guns were garbage that were “donated”, AKA “thrown away” at the buyback.

The shotguns *was* functional – just go google “Slamfire Shotgun”; you can do it yourself. The homemade shotgun was a prank, a joke played at the (literal) expense of the smug, sanctimonious, ELCA-haired dreamsicles running the events – but probably the LEAST mock-worthy part of the event.

Oh, and we mock Corey Zurowski as a “reporter”;  in the caption of the photo of the homemade-yet-parodic shotgun ,he sniffed “Gun fans allege this primitive weapon was turned in a Minneapolis’ buyback event. There’s just no evidence that it actually happened.”

Click to enlarge

But then, in the final paragraph of his own article, Zurowski carries a quote from the Minneapolis police’s public relations officer: “The gun in question was turned in,” says Minneapolis police spokeswoman Catherine Micheal. “Our people inspected it, found out it was operable, however crude the construction, and that’s why it was accepted.”

So yeah, we do some mocking there, too.

And it’s absolutely glorious.

The Brazilians just finished impeaching their first female leader, Dilma Rousseff, for corruption.

As Kevin Williamson points out, her corruption was pennies on the American “Progressive” dollar; the sort of creative accounting that the left (has been foisting on the American public for decades (with the connivance of way too many Republicans in DC, naturally), and why it, at this point, really matters anyway:

Corruption leads to poverty. It leads to poverty in Brazil, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Philadelphia, in Los Angeles, in Upstate New York, and in the Rio Grande Valley. Capitalism — the awesome productive capacity of free people — can bear many burdens and defray many costs, but it can be perverted and misdirected, too. From the state-run enterprises in Brazil and Venezuela to the green-energy fantasies of U.S. progressives, we see that the real threat to capitalism is not domination but seduction. Brazil seems to be hearing that gospel. We refuse to listen.

Is it because the media wouldn’t call Hillary (or any) Clinton “corrupt” if they caught her walking out of Fort Knox with a stack of gold bars in her purse?  Or because Americans favor the corruption – the looting of the public treasury – that benefits them?

We’ll see – sooner than later:

In November, the people of the United States almost certainly are going to elect Hillary Rodham Clinton their next president. Like Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, she will be the first woman to hold the office. Like Dilma Rousseff, she is an old-fashioned party-machine pol who is deeply and consistently corrupt, habitually dishonest, funny with money, and prompt to dismiss any and all efforts at holding her to some basic standard of decency and accountability as — remember the words, which could have been Rousseff’s — “a vast right-wing conspiracy.” We had to impeach the president the last time we had the poor national judgment to send a member of this hilljack crime syndicate to the White House, and Mrs. Clinton already has been acting as a one-woman crime wave when it comes to the laws that regulate how sensitive government information is handled and how official communications are archived for the purposes of accountability and oversight. Mrs. Clinton has argued that this all stems from her being too stupid to understand how to operate a mobile phone: “I used one device,” Mrs. Clinton lied. (She used many and has a talent for nesting lies within her lies.)

Americans may one day – soon – envy the corrupt, malarial hellhole that had the common sense to show at least one member of that class the door.

Finally.

KAEPERNICK (Staring out of the desert): “Chris Kluwe, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!”

My new hero; the Lyft driver who told “Feminist” tyrant (and supremely annoying “human”) Annaliese Nielsen where to stuff her virtue-signalling:

Why is it so vital to resist the Wahhabi Social Justice Warrior?

Because they kill people.

UPDATE:  Commenter Seflores notes something that I’d missed the first time about Ms. Nielsen:

Coincidence? I think not.

And of course, being a “social justice warrior” in today’s academic and media society involves little more actual thought than…

I mean, why not?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

University of Chicago just become Alt-Right U? 

According to NPR, “alts” are everywhere.  

Beware, citizen! 

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Doctors are like walleyes: everybody wants one but there aren’t enough to go around, so we must ration them.

 Walleyes are rationed by license.  Medical care traditionally has been rationed by price.  But when the government pays, there is no price, so now Britain is rationing by morality.

 It should be obvious that obese people have more medical needs than fit people, and smokers more medical needs than non-smokers.  The new rationing cannot be medically based on need; instead, it must be morally based on reward.  The unspoken rational is that fat people and smokers are lazy and  stupid so they don’t deserve medical care.

 Before you start nodding, consider that when Hillary is elected, she might change it to “Conservatives are stupid and don’t deserve medical care.”

 If we shift to a political basis for deciding who lives and who dies . . . .

 Joe Doakes

Power is always a temptation.