Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

One of the standard tricks lawyers use at trial is to show that a witness has lied about something, then argue “We know that she lied about X so we know she’s a liar – what else has she lied about?  Why should we believe anything she says?”

 Remember all the Liberals who promised to move to Canada, or to quit their federal jobs, or to abide by the results of the election?  Turns out they were lying about that. 

 What else have Liberals been lying about? 

 Why should I believe anything they say?

 To be fair, Liberals never promised to abide the results of the election.  They demanded that Trump do so, and when he declined they claimed that was a direct repudiation of 240 years of tradition, constituted banana republic thinking, that he was attempting to start a civil war.  But they never said that the same standard would ever apply to them.  

 Rule No. 4 of Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ says: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”  Great – but what if they don’t acknowledge any?  What if their only rule is “Heads we win, tails you lose?”

 Joe Doakes     

The libs who followed Alinsky may have been depraved, but they weren’t stupid.

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

Today on the show:

• Orwell Won.
• The campaign to turn Minneapolis  into a cold Flint.

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!

Behold the spokeswoman for Minnesota’s minority community.

Voice of Minnesota “minorities”, Heather Martens, exploiting a dead woman to no avail back in 2013.

It’s Heather Martens, longtime “executive director” and, for most of the decade, pretty much sole “member” of “Protect” Minnesota, a criminal-safety group famous for its comic ineptitude.

She left “Protect” Minnesota a while ago; word has it that MIchael Bloomberg realized that he’d be throwing even more money away if he was filtering it through her; Minnesota’s Criminal Safety movement is essentially run from New York today (the Reverend Nancy Nord Bence notwithstanding).

Given that she isn’t formally involved in the Criminal Safety movement anymore, I’m not sure why the Strib is giving her free space to recite her chanting points.

But give her space, they did, last Friday.   The op-ed was titled “Story on ‘gun rush’ by minorities lacked evidence”.   And I’ll had Martens this much; she’s an expert at “lack of evidence”; she makes Jesse Ventura look like Alan Dershowitz.

I was disappointed in the Star Tribune’s article “New fear bolsters gun rush in state” (Jan. 1), which amounted to a grossly misleading advertisement for the gun industry.

If Andrew Rothman ordered a pizza in the woods, and Heather Martens wasn’t there to hear it, would he still be “advertising for the gun industry?”

The subheading, “Worried for their safety, minorities have increased applications since Nov.,” is not supported by any information in the article. The article itself states, “There is no data on the number of Muslim-Americans buying guns, and permit application records don’t reveal demographic information beyond the age, gender and the county of the applicant.”

One suspects Heather would recoil in horror at the notion of registering Muslims for any other reason – but she wouldn’t mind making the rest of us walk around with yellow “gun” shapes sewed to our shirts.

The only evidence of a “rush” on guns by Somalis and other minorities is the word of gun lobbyist Andrew Rothman and the existence of one minority gun group.

Well, yeah – and a lot of anecdotal evidence from an awful lot of other people, minority and gay and liberal.   Perhaps Ms. Martens believes NBC and the BBC are also emissaries of the “Gun Lobby”.

There may or may not have been any such rush on guns.

Which may or may not undercut the entire stated point of this op-ed.

You’ve got to hand it to Rothman, however. He scored, with no proof, a front-page story normalizing gun carrying for a market the gun lobby has been unsuccessfully pursuing for years.

And since Ms. Martens is putatively concerned about “evidence”, we’ll await her proof that the surge, if any (heh heh), is in any way related to “gun lobby” marketing efforts, rather than minorities, gays and liberals discovering what Second Amendment supporters of all races (including Dr. Martin Luther King) have always known.

Now for the reality. Gallup’s research shows that American household gun ownership reached a near-historic low of 37 percent in 2014, compared with 57 percent in 1977. According to the General Social Survey, overall household gun ownership has dropped fairly steadily for decades (though a small number of people continue to increase their already large collections, keeping the gun industry profitable).

And, as pointed out in this space, the Gallup Poll was a fairly risible effort – a telephone poll of a “minority” in this country, before the last election, when gun owners were legitimately reticent about talking.   Thin evidence?  Perhaps – but then, given Gallup’s performance in the last presidential election, not as bad as I might have once admitted.

Speaking of thin evience, it’s the point of the article where Ms. Martens drops a series of unsupported-to-fictional statements in hopes of gulling the gullible – a practice I call “Heathering”.

There are many reasons most Americans, including minorities, aren’t behaving the way the gun lobby wants.

So while neither Martens nor (for sake of argument) Rothman “has any evidence”, Martens states this as a conclusive fact?

Huh?

First, bringing a gun into the home puts the family at greater risk of injury or death. The Annals of Internal Medicine reported in a 2014 meta-analysis that a gun in the home doubles the risk of homicide and triples the risk of suicide. Unsecured guns also pose a lethal threat to young children.

And without context, that sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it?

Of course, the study doesn’t control for who it is doing the shooting; is the gun “in the house” of a felon?  A gang member?

As usual, Martens seems to think that simple hardware corrupts people.

The push to market guns to people of color is particularly ironic in light of the gun industry’s history of championing an extreme white supremacist agenda.

As has been noted in the past, this is a complete fiction.  The National Rifle Association armed Martin Luther King’s bodyguards, and allowed them to train at their range in Virginia – one of very very few integrated facilities in the DC area in 1960.

In 1977, extremists took over the formerly moderate National Rifle Association. In the post-civil rights movement era, the NRA found it advantageous to play on white Americans’ fear of people of color, and the organization has now become a platform for racist rhetoric from white supremacists…

WHOAH!

OK!  Strap yourselves in!   She’s going for the big claim here!

Here comes the “Evidence” she was talking about!  Here’s where she’s going to deliver on her claims!

Wait for it…wait for it…

….like board member Ted Nugent.

Oh.

Ted Nugent.

An over the hill rocker and loose rhetorical cannon who’s said some deeply stupid things.

But “supremacist?”

Feel free to pony up the evidence, Heather.  You’re verging on defamation, here.

Still – her claim about Nugent – devoid of fact as it is – is about as close as she’ll get to a fact in the rest of her wrticle.

In 2003, when [shall-issue carry] was being debated here in Minnesota, proponents dismissed all predictions of political intimidation with guns. But such intimidation is now commonplace. Men (it is almost entirely men) now openly carry loaded weapons to legislative hearings about guns at the State Capitol and to other government meetings and political events.

Intimidation?  With guns?

Why, that’s illegal!

Surely there were complaints filed, police called, a paper trail created?

No.  There was not.  What happened was a group of people, following the law to the letter, did something they were legally entitled to do.  The Capitol Police say, openly, that the carriers were among the most diligently law-abiding people in the building.

There was no “intimidation”.

Ms. Martens – feeling “intimidated” by law-abiding people doing things that are perfectly legal is your prerogative.  Whining about it puts you on par with people who don’t like being in rooms with black people.

A gun-toting group took over a national wildlife refuge in Oregon, with no legal consequences.

Ms. Martens is apparently as ignorant about the Fifth Amendment as she is of the Second; there were legal consequences.  There were arrests, arraignments, a trial…

…and an acquittal.   That, Ms. Martens,  is a legal consquence.

Following a shooting last year in Minneapolis at a demonstration led by people of color, one man whom a prosecutor identified as a “white supremacist” is soon to be tried on charges of shooting and wounding peaceful demonstrators.

Well, wait, Ms. Martens – there’s going to be a trial.  At issue was whether the protesters were peaceful, or in fact a legitimate threat of death or great bodily harm, potentially leading to a self-defense claim.   Until then, the suspect is innocent until proven guilty.

Now, this blog has made great sport of pointing out, debunking, and roundly mocking Ms. Martens’ endless parade of lies – all the while scampering away from any engagement from those who know better.

And it’s all been good clean political fun, as these things go, so far.

But next, Martens slides over the edge, from being a befuddled ninny to complete moral depravity.

Gun carry laws don’t go far enough for those who want to return to the “good old days” when it was easier for white men to kill black men with impunity.

We carry guns because we want to kill black people?

Wow.  And Martens thought Rothman made a claim with no evidence.

It seems I’ve been giving Martens too much credit all these years; where I used to think she was just a gabbling ninny, it seems she’s really something much, much less innocent.

That’s why the gun lobby invented “Stand Your Ground” or “Shoot First” laws, which allow a person to shoot and kill, in public, anyone they deem threatening — and people of color are well aware who that means.

Well, no – that’s not how “stand your ground” works.

But “people of color” are aware of what the law means; they use “Stand Your Ground” in self-defense cases twice as much per capita as white shooters.

In Heather Martens’ weird little world, where black people are nothing but hapless victims, I’m sure that comes as a shock.

So let’s recap:  in a column where Heather Martens accuses Andrew Rothman of presenting no evidence to support his claim, she presents…at best no evidence to support any claim, and at worst, evidence that debunks her and, finally, marks her as a fairly toxic little person.

Dear Minnesota Minorities:  you might want to specifically terminate Ms. Martens as your official spokesperson.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Most Americans agree there should be different standards for different classes: children have fewer rights than adults; felons have fewer rights than innocent; military have fewer rights than civilian. 

 Not so with Liberals.  It’s taken for granted that Liberals have more rights than the rest of us, and the Queen Liberal, like the Boy Emperor, have ultimate rights including the right never to be doubted and certainly not prosecuted.

 I suspect the double standard of preferential treatment toward Hillary’s email problem cost her more than Democrats will admit.

 Joe Doakes

I suspect that a fair part of the left thinks of media and other lefty groupthink sort of like a court system;  once their starchamber has decided, the issue is over.

I think this past election showed that, at least for now, it’s not true.

Lori Sturdevant – like a lot of liberal scolds of a certain age – pines for the halcyon days when Minnesota Republicans and Democrats supposedly worked together “across the aisle”, arm in arm marching toward the great Progressive future.

I’m not sure how much of that fabled past was comity, and how much was Stockholm Syndrome.

Still, after nearly fifteen years of writing this blog, I’m keenly aware how hard it is to remain civil with the current entitled, Privileged, intolerant Left.

Ian Tuttle, by way of reviewing the new Milo Yiannopolis book (or rather, the left’s hysterical reaction to it), answers Sturdevant and her ilk by way of tangent:

But the intelligent, principled Right for which progressives are always waxing nostalgic (“If only today’s conservatives were like . . . ”) is considerably less likely without a Left that can recognize the difference between debate and “danger,” joking and “violence.” Having spent years decrying reasonable right-wing positions as outrageous and unconscionable, progressives are now stunned to find that a chunk of the Right is cheering on an opportunist who glories in being outrageous and unconscionable. Does any of this sound familiar?

To them?  I doubt it.

I’ll cop to it – I’m a sucker for language geekery.  I focused a lot on Linguistics in college, and still enjoy the subject, even though I don’t actually do it for  any kind of a living.

Daniel Foster in NRO reviews two new books on the subject – with some fascinating insights tucked in.

While I urge fellow language geeks to read the whole thing, I liked this bit in particular:

Bergen’s treatment of slurs is slight and tentative compared with his coverage of other subject areas, but he’s Kanye West compared with Adams. Consider that Bergen’s first chapter is titled “Holy, F*cking, Sh*t, N*gg*r” sans asterisks. It hits like a freight train, producing first an uncontrollable guffaw and then a pupil-dilating scandal. But the formulation is actually much more innocent, a shorthand for the ingenious theory that all languages are sortable into four categories according to whether their most taboo words are blasphemous, copulative, scatological, or bigoted. Spanish, for instance, is a sex language, while the French, for all their fallenness, consider sacrilegious speech most offensive. German, infamously, is a language obsessed with “scheisse.” And English, Bergen argues, is among the relatively few languages where the biggest taboos are slurs.

It’s interesting, reading “Beowulf” and seeing how very comfortable English speakers in that era were with scatological talk, but how very carefully they avoided blasphemy.  Given we’re a nation of immigrant’s, it’d seem we are little hinky about pretty much all cursing, one way or the other.

Nine guns were purchased last year for every 100 Americans:

Driven by terror threats and a potential Hillary Clinton administration, sales of guns in America soared to record levels in 2016, according to the FBI.

Just released FBI background check numbers, which roughly equate gun sales, totaled some 27,538,673, 4 million more than in 2015 and nearly double the number in President Obama‘s first year.

The numbers do not include many guns sold to or given to friends and family.

Sales hit record levels for some 19 months in a row as the number of terrorist attacks around the world and here at home increased, driving purchases by those seeking protection. The increase paralleled increases in those seeking a license to carry a concealed weapon.

The battle over gun control is a fundamentally class-based one – and the proles won.

So far.

Complacency is misplaced.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Remember in school when one kid refused to stop talking when the bell rang to start class, so nobody got recess?  Remember how much that used to annoy you?  It still annoys me.

 There were rumbles at a dozen malls across the country.  Now comes the inevitable response: nobody gets recess.  Everybody gets punished.  The local PD acknowledges the mall fights were caused by “a pretty discrete group of people . . . it tends to be teenage boys,” but the new policy extends to everybody. 

 Look at the video.  The brawlers are Black teenage males.  They’re the problem group, they’re the ones who ought to be banned and everybody knows it.  We see the news, we know about FBI crime statistics, we know who the troublemakers are.  You’ve got a problem?  Solve the problem.

 But that would be politically incorrect and therefore society can’t do what everybody knows it ought to do, and also why nobody can talk about it.  Liberals claim they’d rather let 10,000 guilty men go free rather than convict 1 innocent man, but in practice they punish 10,000 innocent girls so the 100 guilty boys doesn’t feel they’ve been disrespectfully singled out.

 Black Lives Matter blocking State Fair traffic didn’t raise awareness, it raised blood pressure.  So will this new policy.  I don’t think it will help ease racial tension.  It will drive it underground, festering, same as when the idiot in class cost you recess.

 By the way – what group in society has more disposable cash to piss away at the mall than unaccompanied teenage girls?  This policy is deadly in more ways than one.

 Joe Doakes

It’s hard to pick just one policy that’s screwed up our schools. But Zero Tolerance on on the short list.

We’ve fallen a little behind on our World War I series.  Over the next few weeks/months, we’re going to work to get caught-up to the calendar.

The men of the British 2nd Light Horse Brigade welcomed the setting sun on the night of August 3rd, 1916.  Stationed at the small Egyptian town of Romani in the Sinai, the men had been forced to contend with the unforgiving elements of the desert more than their Ottoman opponents for months.  The few wells and vast distances between towns or outposts exacerbated the effects of the 120-degree temperatures, which took their toll on the Brigade’s men and horses.  Wrapping up their daily patrol in the cool desert night was a refreshing change of pace.

The night-time patrols had been deemed necessary as the Ottoman presence near Romani, only 23 miles from the Suez Canal, had slowly increased.  But since the Ottoman raid against the Suez in January of 1915, what little fighting had occurred in the Sinai had been done as minor raiding parties by either side.  Other than the disastrous Turkish invasion of Sarikamish early in the war, the Ottoman Empire had been almost exclusively on the defensive.  The threat of a large-scale Turkish offensive seemed little more than another desert-fueled illusion.

The sounds of gunfire and artillery as the night of August 3rd became the early morning of August 4th confirmed the fears of the Brigade’s commanders.  8,000 troops – the vanguard of a mixture of 16,000 Ottomans, Germans and Austro-Hungarians threw themselves against the light horsemen.  The strength of the Central Powers in the Middle East was about to reach its zenith.

Members of a captured Turkish ambulance at Romani. The battle would be the Central Powers’ attempt to gain the upper hand in the Sinai and Egypt

For all of the strategic importance of the Suez Canal – its construction had reduced the journey between Bombay and London by nearly half, facilitating trade that rapidly grown Britain’s economy – neither Britain nor the Ottoman Empire had prioritized efforts to defend or occupy the Sinai.  Instead, the significant battles for control of the Middle East had thus far occurred in the Bosphorus and Mesopotamia.   (more…)

Gallup reports the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as politically conservative is the highest it’s been in twenty years.

Which doesn’t surprise me much; while Americans may have any number of political orientations, real life is conservative for most Americans.

But the real takeaway?  Those describing themselves as Democrats are becoming more extreme toward the left:

Most of the long-term change in Americans’ political views occurred after 2000 and can be explained by one overarching factor — an increasing likelihood of Democrats (including independents who lean Democratic) to self-identify as liberal. Democratic liberal identification has increased by about one percentage point each year, from 30% in 2001 to 44% in 2016. As a result, liberalism now ranks as the top ideological group among Democrats.

Meanwhile, there has been an eight-point decline since 2001 in the percentage of Democrats identifying as conservative and a six-point decline in the percentage of Democrats who are moderate.

My two cents?  That’s good news.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The latest Minnesota State Bar Association magazine arrived, celebrating their commitment to diversity.  You might have thought a trade association would be committed to helping its members be better at their jobs but no, they’re committed to bringing in more women, people of color and people of indeterminate gender orientation.  It’s one of their core values.

So lemme ask you this:  if the Plaintiff is represented by a White Male lawyer and the Defendant is represented by a Black Female Lesbian lawyer, who wins?

 If the answer is “The race, gender and sexual orientation of the lawyer doesn’t matter, what matters is the law and the facts,” then the MSBA’s core value is misguided.  Bringing in more people on the basis of things that don’t matter . . . doesn’t matter.  That’s an idiotic thing to make a core value.

 Unless the objective of being a lawyer is not what I thought it was?  Perhaps they were serious in Diversity Class when they explained that diversity is important so that I can accept and understand the viewpoint of the client, a person who probably is not from the same background and class as I am.  Because by understanding them and feeling their pain and being their pal, I will better relate to what they need and want.  Actually winning the case for them is not an issue; being sensitive to their demands is what matters. 

 I wonder if I get a participation trophy for that?

 Joe Doakes

Who says mental illness isn’t contagrius?

Well, the title is a little misleading.  Where I wrote “without limits”, I guess I what I meant was “no bottom to the barrel”.

Because in the arc of downfall for the City Pages, from its heady days in the eighties publishing James Lileks, and its journalistic peak in the nineties, where they ran a lot of excellent reporting, the CP just keeps falling.

And every time I think “they can’t possibly get any worse as reporters?”   They somehow pull it off.

I didn’t think they could get any worse than Dan Haugen’s factual malaprops – but sure enough, Kevin Hoffman was right there with the onanistic panty-sniffing disguised as high-school-caliber schadefreud.  From thence, we’ve had a couple years of the ongoing gift of hilarity that is Corey Zurowski’s writing, which has been its own reward.

So given that the City Pages seems to have no lower limit, I’ll refrain from saying Pete Kotz’s piece about the GOP’s pushback on cities trying to jam down $15 minimum wage laws bespeaks any descent below any journalistic or factual pale.

Because there’s always more ground below the barrel.

But oh, lord – it’s getting worse.

(more…)

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is leaving a downtown Saint Paul bar after happy hour with friends.  

As he fumbles for his keys by his car, MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, steps out of an organic tax accountant office.  Dressed in a hemp power skirt, her brunette-but-slightly-prematurely-gray hair cut into the style known as “ELCA Hair”, she wrinkles her nose on encountering BERG.

SILBERMAN:  Er, hello, Merg.

BERG:  MyLyssa.  A pleasure (He finds his car key)

SILBERMAN:  You and your show and blog are “fake news”

BERG:  Huh.  You don’t say.  Why’s that?

SILBERMAN:  You don’t have a staff of fact-checkers.

BERG:  .Like the Washington Post.

SILBERMAN:  Exactly.  The Washington Post has layers and layers of gatekeepers and factcheckers, all trained at Ivy League journalism schools to the highest standard of the journalistic craft.

BERG:  The WaPo ran a story last week about Russian hackers trying to bring down the Vermont power grid.  Until it turned out it wasn’t; just some malware on a laptop that wasn’t connected to any grid other than an AC plug.  Then they revised the story, and tried to re-focus it under the radar while going “um, nothing to see here” about their earlier claim that Russians  were trying to bring down the US power supply.

SILBERMAN:  Right.  The fact-checking worked.

BERG:  The “fact-checking” was entirely external to the Washington Post.  They were “fact-checked” by their audience and the rest of the media.  No different than my blog.

SILBERMAN:  No, Merg.  That’s false.  And I’ll tell you why.

BERG:  OK.  You do that.

SILBERMAN:  The person who pushed “publish” on the online revision?

BERG:  Yes…?

SILBERMAN:  And the person who started the printing presses?

BERG:  Right?  Yes?

SILBERMAN:  They were Washington Post employees.  Without them, the correction would have never gotten out.

BERG:  Huh .

SILBERMAN:  Also, you are a white male.  (Looks at bare wrist)  Oh, look at the time.  (Steps back into accountants office).

BERG:  (Rolls eyes, climbs into car)

And SCENE.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Ramsey County Sheriff Bostrom is retiring to move to England to study whether it would improve law enforcement if they hired persons of good character as police officers. 

The fact he’s having to go all the way to Oxford to find anybody willing to seriously consider the question shows just how far American academic and law enforcement standards have fallen.

 Meanwhile, St. Paul has decided the less people know about law enforcement practices, the better police oversight will be.  So when civil rights activists complained the Internal Affairs Review Commission was biased, the City ordered a report of interviews with 25 people conducted by the U of M Center for Restorative Justice and now the Council has decided to adopt the recommendations of the “study.”  Kick the cops off, pack it with activists, move it out of the police department, hold meetings out in the neighborhoods and give its recommendation to the Chief of Police.

 My question is: when the Commission finds that a St. Paul cop acted wrongly but the Chief of Police declines to accept that decision on the grounds the reviewers don’t know what they’re talking about, will there be more peace in the community, or less?

 Joe Doakes

Either way, the needs of both the bureaucracy and the “activist” communities – both fully-owned subsidiaries of the DFL – are served.

And that’s called a win-win!

Seven murders in Chicago in one neighborhood withihnt hours of each other on Thursday:

Seven people, including four men killed in a gang-retaliation attack at a fast-food restaurant and a pregnant woman found with a gunshot wound to the head, were gunned down Thursday in three separate incidents within blocks of each other, police said.

The latest convulsion of violence, which occurred over a 12-hour period in the city’s South Shore neighborhood, comes as Chicago tallied nearly 900 murders in the past 15 months.

They weren’t killed by cops, so the professionals at BLM don’t care.

The victims didin’t look like relatives of news anchors or NPR executives, so the media doesn’t care.

They weren’t killed by middle-aged white guys with carry permits, so the “Gun Safety” certainly won’t  spare a tear.

I’ll say it here and now:  “right wing terrorism” is a boogeyman that the left has been floating out there for decades to try to create a sense of urgency and alarm among their base.

There certainly has been some terror associated with the…well, not “the right”, per se; more like “the non-left”.  The “Klan” has nothing to do with mainstream American conservatism, much less the GOP, and never has.  Tim McVeigh was neither conservative nor Christian.  And by the time of the Murragh building bombing, even that wave of activity, whatever it was, was on the wane.

But with Donald Trump, a GOP Congress, 2/3 of America’s state legislative chambers in GOP hands, and a solid conservative Cabinet waiting to take office in less than three weeks, the left has been stepping up its efforts to create hysteria about “right wing” boogeymen under everyone’s couches – whatever the cost.

Cut to the “A and E Network’s recently-aborted documentary about The Klan.

Well, no.  Not about “the Klan”.  About a Venice, California-based documentary maker’s narrative about what “The Klan” was supposed to be like, whatever it took (emphasis added by me):

The KKK leaders who were interviewed by Variety detailed how they were wooed with promises the program would capture the truth about life in the organization; encouraged not to file taxes on cash payments for agreeing to participate in the filming; presented with pre-scripted fictional story scenarios; instructed what to say on camera; asked to misrepresent their actual identities, motivations and relationships with others, and re-enacted camera shoots repeatedly until the production team was satisfied.

The production team even paid for material and equipment to construct and burn wooden crosses and Nazi swastikas, according to multiple sources including Richard Nichols, who is one of the featured subjects of the documentary series as the Grand Dragon of a KKK cell known as the Tennessee White Knights of the Invisible Empire. He also said he was encouraged by a producer to use the epithet “nigger” in interviews.

“We were betrayed by the producers and A&E,” said Nichols. “It was all made up—pretty much everything we said and did was fake and because that is what the film people told us to do and say.”

Rest assured, it’s not just a couple of hack producers for a hack cable network.  “Journo-list 2.0”, wherever and whatever and whoever it is, and the leadership of the American left itself are layout out this narrative from the top, and pushing it through the entire media.

A week back, I linked to the fairly noxious MTV video showing a raft of millennials giving “white guys” a series of “new years resolutions”.  I’m not going to  display it again – once was plenty.

But I figure, one good turn deserves another.  I’ve got some resolutions for Social Justice Warriors to observe for the coming year.

Enough with the Whitesplaining:  Y’know who I consider the apex of credibility when it comes to running down the crimes of the Caucasoid ethnicity and the scourge of “white privilege”?    Upper-middle-class white pseudoacademics with advanced degrees and cupboards full of Whole Foods packages, that’s who!

The next such person to whitesplain (condescendingly explain the sins of “whiteness” while being, y’know, white) me is getting pantsed.

Snowflakes Who Cried Wolf:   Not everything that you disagree with is “hate”.   Not everyone that disagrees with you “hates” you.

When you call all disagreement, all difference of opinion, all dissent, all views different than yours “hatred”, you make any meaningful discussion impossible.

Speaking of which:

Silence Is Golden:   Stop jabbering about “seeking a dialogue” or “wanting a conversation” about an issue, and then aggressively blocking all attempts by people who disagree with you to actually have the disagreement.  I’m not gonna name names, but it’s  hypocrisy and cowardice, Kim Norton and Alondra Cano and “Protect” Minnesota .

Innocence Until Proven:  Believing that suspects are innocent until proven guilty by a jury of one’s peers does not make one “pro-rape”.  Say it around me and you will get your face singed so bad you won’t be able to get a tan for 20 years.

You’re welcome.

…I do support the death penalty for “Swatters” – people who sic Swat teams on innocent third parties.

Some do it to take a shot at their political or social enemies – and for them, the Eighth Amendment should be repealed. .

For others?  It’s apparently a prank:

Audio of the emergency call has been made public. A man can be heard telling authorities that he had shot his father in the head, and claimed to have taken his mother and siblings hostage.

The caller also said he had a handgun and had poured fuel over the house and wanted to set the property on fire.

Police say they surrounded the address the caller had given, and were preparing to make contact with the suspect reportedly inside when Mr Finch came to the door…

Tyler Barriss, 25, was arrested by police in Los Angeles on Friday in relation to the investigation.

Local reports say Mr Barris had previously been charged with making bomb threats to a local television station in 2015.

Note to Mr. Barris’ defense attorney;  you don’t want me on the jury.

The next time you’re getting a cavity search, watching purses get rifled through and having a wand jammed down your throat at a Vikings or Twins game, just remember; three people were apparently able to smuggle a huge banner, and rappelling gear, into the USBank Stadium, climb the rafters, and stage a demonstration yesterday.

We do the security theater precisely why, again?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals object when I say we ought to run government like a business.  Here’s an example why we should (from the public land records, nothing confidential, all public information):

 House in the 1300 block of Fremont Avenue in St. Paul sold in 2007, peak of the market just before the collapse.  First mortgage $164,000 federally insured loan; second mortgage $20,000 to Family Housing Fund; third mortgage $3000 to Minnesota Housing Finance Agency.  Fourth mortgage in 2010 for $6,000 to St. Paul HRA.

 House was foreclosed in 2016, bank bid $97,000, sold it this Fall to new buyer for $90,000 using a realtor, for which the bank paid the commissions.

 All told, the public lost about $100,000 on that single deal. 

 Yeah, but it helped out a poor person, right? She had a place to live for nearly 10 years. 

 Sort of.  She made payments on four mortgages – that’s enough to cover a ton of rent – and now she has a foreclosure on her credit report and possibly an eviction on her judgment history.  Nobody will lend her any money now, and no landlord wants to rent to her, either.  So did pouring that public money down the drain really do her any good?

 I wonder if she got a participation trophy?  Seems like the least they could do.

 Joe Doakes

When you make something “worth” other than what people would pay for it on their own, there will be unintended consequences.