Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Obamacare repeal failed so now Republicans will have to bail it out. McCain is on board. So is Lindsey Graham.
I don’t know anything about the plan and already, I hate it.
Joe Doakes
With ya there.
I just got this from a contact of mine at UC Berkeley:
My contact asked “is that all they could find – one quote from Ben Shapiro?”
Distort the economy of a sector, an industry or a city to benefit an industry, a policy or a class of people, and you’re going to cause unintended consequences – almost all of them bad, at least for someone.
Fifteen years ago, the NPR-listening, Whole Foods-Shopping, Volvo-driving set nodded and snapped their fingers to the beat of Richard Florida, who wrapped up a bunch of toxic economic interventions in a bunch of artisanal wrapping paper and slapped a name on it – appealing to the “Creative Class” – that was marketing genius, making the children of America’s upper-middle-class feel like their apps, their hedge funds and their vegan restaurants were part of something Big and Important.
Cities – or rather, city planning wonks (who love to see themselves in that Creative Class – fell all over themselves to engineer cities to draw this class, on the promise that they’d spur economic growth.
The results? Well, I predicted this – and now, Richard Florida himself is acknowledging it:
The rise of the creative class in such cities as New York, Washington, and San Francisco did produce economic growth—but mostly just for those who were already wealthy. The poor, and especially the working class poor, were right out of luck. They were priced out of the city and driven out to the suburbs, where they created the kind of urban problems known only to the cities. The modern city is the greatest economic engine the world has ever known, but these days it seems to run only for the aid of those who need its benefits least. When the rich, the young, and the bohemian revitalized Austin, Boston, and Seattle, they induced a cycle of soaring prices and class replacement. The creative class brought an income inequality that hadn’t been predicted. Florida could call them a new class all he wanted. They proved to be merely the children of the old white-collar meritocracy, grown doubly rich from the rising tide of urban renewal.
So, in The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida takes a long second look at the nation’s cities. He doesn’t admit that he had been wrong in 2002 with The Rise of the Creative Class, mostly because he doesn’t think he was wrong. The city progressed just the way he described. But what he has called the “externalities” have mounted to such an extent that they now outweigh the gains he saw 15 years ago. The creative class triumphed, and his prize cities have turned into wealth preserves—the old gated communities of the suburbs, transplanted to the urban core.
The whole thing is worth a read.
The Big Media complains that America is just too tribalistic.
And I have to ask myself – why, oh why? Why does half of America seem to hate the other half with a fury beyond Dodgers vs. Yankees?
Stephen Colbert’s contribution to civil, de-tribalized discussion in this country. Yes, he’s “Sieg-Heil”-ing Trump.
Why on earth would half of America distrust the other half?
Blackshirts of “Anti”-Fa in masks attacking unarmed Republican demonstrators.
Why would half of America think the other half is not only imposing itself on the rest of the country, but doing it on behalf of ideas that have failed miserably?
The book that asked “why don’t Red states vote for their ‘best interests'” – like the people of Baltimore, Newark, Trenton, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Stockton, Saint Louis, Camden and Minneapolis did. Notice the cover, by the way; like any good delusional, the author thinks the donkey is carrying the elephant.
Why, oh why?
…you have to remember “fraud” requires intent.
By the voter, anyway.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
When you abandon the “women and children first” policy because it’s sexist and ageist, this is what you get.
Joe Doakes
When society’s traditions collapse, who do you suppose is waiting to rush in?
This slipped past me over the summer; the Czech Republic broke with most of their bovine European neighbors and voted to recognize the human right to keep and bear arms to defend self, property and community: (Page is in Czech; most browsers have some sort of auto-translation feature these days…)
It’s 9/11 today, as most of you are aware.
If you’re younger than 34, it happened when you were still in school. And it shouldn’t blow my mind that people who were toddlers on 9/11 have graduated from high school – but it does.
Put another way – if 9/11 were December 7, we’d be in 1956; the war would have ended 12 years ago; Elvis would be at his peak, Germany and Japan would be back from the stone age and rebuilding their economies, and we’d be on the brink of the space race. Tempus fugit.
After the attacks, one of the social undercurrents – which morphed, as social currents do, into comedy that often tried too hard – was the notion that if we gave up our freedoms out of fear of terror, then “the terrorists will win”.
So today, 16 years later, government goons grope us in line at airports (but miss all the dangerous stuff anyway), and we don’t complain because, well, we gotta make our flights; the whole exercise seems designed more to train people to get in line and shut up than to find terrorists.
We fill out paperwork if our bank deposits are too big. We watch as our police departments turn into playtime special forces teams, chasing after pot dealers and trial skippers with armored cars and assault rifles. We see our Fourth Amendment gradually being reduced to toilet paper – and, in parts of the country where the people are more amenable to presenting their papers on demand, the Second as well.
And on the campuses where the generation that has the same memory of 9/11 that I have of Barry Goldwater (hint: I was a toddler) are getting “educated”, people are being badgered into line by social codes imposed by self-appointed cultural police no less zealous than the Wahhabi morality police, enforcing a social code that are no less absurd than the rules, and rulers, in Afghanistan 16 years and one day ago today – enforced (!), in some cases, by people whose only difference from ISIS’s morality police is that they haven’t cut off anyone’s head.
Yet.
I’m less and less sure this nation – or at least it’s self-appointed culturaloverlords – learned the right lessons from 9/11.
I’ve never much cared for science fiction. Not sure why – it just never took for me.
The exception was always Jerry Pournelle – pretty much the only person who ever wrote sci-fi that ever grabbed me.
That goes back almost forty years, to reading, among others, Lucifer’s Hammer – a book that probably grabbed me in the same way The Walking Dead does today.
There was more; fifteen years ago, during the heyday of the blog, Pournelle had an influential site – and he read and frequently llinked to Shot In The Dark; I’m not sure if any of you in my audience today found me through Pournelle, but I know he gave me a good boost in traffic back in the day.
Anyway – rest in peace, Jerry Pournelle.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is filling up his gas tank, focusing on the meter, as Avery LIBRELLE rides up on a Vespa.
LIBRELLE: Hey, Merg.
BERG: Er, hi, Avery. What’s up?
LIBRELLE: Trump is an idiot.
BERG: Naturally. Why this time?
LIBRELLE: He wants to deport DACA kids.
BERG: Well, no. He’s giving Congress six months to come up with a law that passes constitutional muster; DACA did not. Trump is right about this.
LIBRELLE: Nonsense. It’s not these childrens’ fault their parents came to America.
BERG: So children are not at fault for what their parents – the previous generation – did?
LIBRELLE: Absolutely not.
BERG: So White people…
LIBRELLE: …are all still at fault, precisely and exactly, for racist acts committed by white people from the 1500s to the 1960s, even if their ancestors didn’t own slaves, didn’t live in slave states and didn’t have anything to do with the slave trade.
BERG: Children of illegal immigrants…
LIBRELLE: …bear zero culpability for their parents supposed misdeeds.
BERG: White people…
LIBRELLE: …are still fully complicit in acts that happened 400 years ago.
BERG: Huh.
LIBRELLE: Say, I need to put gas in this thing. Which pump is vegan and gluten-free?
And SCENE.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which is being sued for slandering conservatives, has moved $69 million overseas.
Nice work, if you can get it.
The SPLC is the Big Left’s Goebbels.
Preya Samsundar works for Alpha News Minnesota.
The National VOAD website and the American Logistics Aid Network, as well as the Red Cross.
And of course, today’s music playlist.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is back in the studio, making talk radio great again!
Today on the show:
Too much program for two hours? In the lands of a lesser host, yes, but not me. Tune in!
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
…better than watching Real Americans of all races, faiths and ideologies cutting the crap and helping each other out in a jam?
Across the [area affected by Hurricane Harvey], Americans are coming together to help each other. Despite the racial divisions exacerbated by small numbers of fanatics on the left and right, (and amplified by the press), out in the real America white people, black people and Asians helped each other, men rescued women and children, and so on. The “Cajun Navy,” which had so distinguished itself in response to flooding in Louisiana, took its boats to Texas and started saving people.
Why, it’s watching Big Left crabbling about it:
People who spontaneously organize impressive responses might make the public feel as though government doesn’t have all the answers, and that self-reliance beats waiting for the government to solve their problems. Why, that’s troubling.
Something like this mental process must have prompted New Yorker editor David Remnick to greenlight this article, titled “Why does American need the Cajun Navy?”
I saw somebody on Facebook yesterday saying “I hate it when people in low-tax states ask the Feds for help”. To which I replied “everyone pays the same federal taxes, for the same federal “Services”, including disaster aid; if coastal states pay more per capita, it’s because incomes and cost of living are higher – and since when do you people not support progressive taxation?”
By the way – does it seem to anyone else that “low-tax, low-service” Texas’ response to Harvey, one of the great catastophes in American history, is going a lot better than high-tax, high-“service” New York, New Jersey and Connecticut’s response to the fairly mundane Sandy?
…I leave questions of eternal consequences to the Almighty. It’s his job – not that I could affect that (outside myself), even if I wanted to. Which I do not.
But I do hope there’s a smack upside this woman’s head in the afterlife.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
President Trump got skunked in the Spring continuing resolution – no money for The Wall. He was busy with the Supreme Court nominee so okay, let that one go. But in this next deal, he absolutely must get some money for The Wall or he’s never going to get it. If the Resisters beat him on his signature issue, his presidency will be lame duck all the way down.
Trump should start tweeting now, warning citizens to prepare for a shut-down if the money’s not in the resolution. The people who elected him want that, first and foremost. He’s got to deliver.
Doesn’t have to be much money. It could be a symbolic $1.00, just as long as Congress votes for it. Trump must make them cry “Uncle” because after that, we’ve established the principle and we’re only arguing over the amount.
Frankly, Democrats are not the problem. They continue to serve the interests of the dead people and illegals who elected them. But the Never-Trump RINOs have no excuse so why not go after them? Because we need them. We need every one of their votes and as tempting as it might be to name names while kicking behinds, a different tactic is warranted on this side of the aisle. On that side, we know Democrats will never break ranks so there’s no harm in savaging them.
Of course, Liberals will complain that funding The Wall is a budget-buster. We can’t afford it. There are higher priorities. Get out in front of that argument early. Start by proposing to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and shift that funding to The Wall. Trump gave up his salary this year, but he could offer to redirect his salary as President toward The Wall next year. Divert federal aid from sanctuary cities to The Wall. Revenue neutral, no additional funding required, completely affordable if we would only make national security a higher priority than frivolities.
And blame Democrats for the shutdown, starting now. Send a tweet every day. “Democrats make Grandma eat dog food; shut down!”
“Democrats end school lunch: shut down!” “Democrats squander dollars, pinch pennies: shut down!”
This is not a political problem or fiscal problem, it’s a marketing problem. Trump has to rally the troops to swing the polls so finger-licking moderates can feel the change in the wind and cast a vote to fund The Wall. There will never be a better time.
Joe Doakes
Electoral fear is both sides’ best weapon. Trump has the initiative. Will he use it?
I’m going to be doing a special Northern Alliance Radio Network this weekend.
I’ll be doing a show about “Anti”-Fa, the self-styled “anti-fascist” thugs who are, in point of fact, worse – more violent, more toxic, more corrupting at this point in American history – than the “facists” they pretend to “attack”…
Upper-middle-class pansy maces Republican in the rotunda at the Capitol last March. The offender – just pled guilty and allocuted to the fact that he intended to attack a defenseless group of people. This is “Anti”-Fa.
…when they’re not attacking their usual prey; workadaddy, hugamommy conservatives, Republicans and Trump supporters going about their peaceful business.
Remember – their line is “punch a Nazi” – but then, pretty much everyone they disagree with, including at one point yours truly, is a “Nazi”. And so, by the way, are you, if you get in their way in any way.
I’ll be talking with Preya Samsundar of Alphanews – who was attacked at an “Anti”-fa even last spring – and Jonathan Aanestad, who was among those attacked at the GOP rally last March at the Capitol.
Blackshirts patrolling the streets looking for free speech to pummel.
The goal? To completely dismiss and debunk the idea that “Anti”-Fa is any better than the Klan or the Neo-Nazis, and to take to task anyone that thinks otherwise.
Join us from 1-3PM on Saturday. Hopefully, nobody will punch you for listening, but I can make no absolute guarantees.
Liberal hamsters love to amuse themselves by saying that there’s no civilian use for guns with 30 round magazines.
Which might be true, if you could guarantee all attackers were solo and not very persistent.
But in North Houston, three attackers fired over 40 shots at a homeowner…
…who returned fire with an AR15, killing two of the dirtballs and wounding the third in what police are calling a case of self-defense:
Wounded, the three thugs exited the vehicle and continued the pitched firefight on foot. The homeowner who is an avid marksman continued returning fire hitting all three, stopping them before they could reach his property.
One of the men was immediately killed at the scene, while the others were rushed to the hospital. A second shooter was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, while the third is in critical condition battling for his life.
According to news reporters, aside from being an excellent marksman the Texas homeowner is licensed to carry a concealed weapon, and goes to the shooting range regularly and practices his skills with his AR-15, the weapon he usually has by his side when sitting on his porch late at night.
Instant gun experts babble that “assault rifles” are “designed to kill as many people as fast as possible”. It’s poppycock, of course; they’re designed to not run out of bullets before your attacker runs out of attacks.
Mission Accomplished.
Barely.
“Protect” Minnesota: “Gun violence is oUt oF cOnTrOoooOoOOOoolllLLllll!”
Reality: Crime is Minnesota is at a 50 year low.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Liberals believe the law of supply and demand is suspended during times of scarcity caused by natural disasters. Hotels charging high prices after a hurricane is shameful, harms the local economy.
Liberals believe the law of supply and demand is in full effect during times of scarcity caused by sporting events. Hotels charging high prices for the Superbowl is wonderful, helps the local economy.
Herein the problem with ascribing morality to mathematics.
What really grinds me about the hurricane article is the self-absorbed arrogance of the writer. It demonstrates the stunning disconnect between the leftist media and the real world. They have the audacity to write this article about a TV crew being gouged while sucking up scarce resources (hotel space, food, water, gasoline) so the TV crew can document the misery of the locals which the TV crew will use, not to alleviate the misery, but to increase ratings which will enable the TV station to sell more advertising at higher prices and thereby earn a larger profit. If anybody is engaging in exploitation, it’s the media.
The TV crew should be charged a 1000% markup, or more. It’s a public service to do so. A natural disaster is a limited opportunity to charge high prices to outsiders who are carpet-bagging their way into the region. It’s an opportunity to take from the vultures to support the local economy that is in turmoil. They should be happy to pay for a better Houston.
Joe Doakes
It’s all about who the heroes and villains are on any given day.
Charlie Martin echoes my real concern about Kim’s new nuke arsenal – that they’re aiming to launch and electromagnetic pulse attack on the US.
Or at least, planning on appearing to be able to. In some ways, a big-enough EMP strike might cause more damage to the US than nuking one city, especially given the likely poor accuracy of Kim’s missiles.
And it’s an imposing deterrent:
The possibilities of a NEMP attack have been talked about for a long time, as John Moore’s articles show. It’s possible that the real risk is finally becoming clear to our politicians and our legacy press. The Boston Herald recently had an extended story on the danger of a North Korean NEMP attack, and Tucker Carlson recently showed interest in the problem.
Of course, there are others who don’t think it’s much of a risk, In that Boston Herald story, they quote Joshua Pollack, the editor of the Nonproliferation Review, as saying:
[A]n EMP attack doesn’t warrant more alarm than any other type of nuclear offensive because its efficacy is still uncertain — and it would have consequences for whichever nation launched it.
“It’s just an untested approach to trying to use a weapon, and just invites retaliation without doing a lot of damage,” Pollack said. “I’m much more concerned with blasting fire and radiation. Those will kill lots of people and destroy lots of stuff, and can do it very reliably.”
The problem here is that it’s based on a false assumption: that NEMP has not been tested. It’s never been applied as a weapon, but it has certainly been tested — and I don’t think my little fiction above is a worst-case scenario. So, how much damage from an inefficient NEMP attack should we plan on absorbing?
The mainstream media were wrong during the 70s and 80s, and they’re wrong today.
U.S. Virgin Islands Gov. Kenneth Mapp signed an emergency order allowing the seizure of private guns, ammunition, explosives and property the National Guard may need to respond to Hurricane Irma.
Do You Think This Emergency Order Is Unconstitutional?
Mapp signed the order Monday in preparation for Hurricane Irma. The order allows the Adjutant General of the Virgin Islands to seize private property they believe necessary to protect the islands, subject to approval by the territory’s Justice Department.
I’m feeling pretty good about supporting the 2015 bill that bars the Minnesota state government from doing any such thing.
No, really!
And, snark aside, they have a point – it’s people from northern Europe, as well as people from cold, high-altitude places like Tibet and the Caucasus, that have any tolerance for other species’ milk; it was a trait selected for by millennia of survival in places where people couldn’t eat most of the vegetation most of the time, but animals could, turning inedible celliulose into edible fat.
But that’s about all the slack I’ll give the article, by one Andrea Freeman, a law professor; the rest of it is chock full of lines like this:
Popular racial stereotypes cast African-Americans and Latinos as fat and lazy, lacking the will power necessary to ward off obesity and other food-related illnesses.
Popular smug liberal stereotype of honkeys is that we “cast African-Americans and Latinos” as anything at all as a group.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
President Trump gave a speech in which he explained why he’s changed his mind on pulling out of Afghanistan: it would create a power vacuum and enable the Taliban to sweep in. Instead, we’re going to stay and kill terrorists until conditions on the ground allow us to leave. But we’re not going to engage in nation-building.
Great, he’s going to pivot to Afghanistan and focus like a laser on killing terrorists. Where have I heard that before?
I don’t object to killing terrorists but why aren’t we nation-building? Because nation-building was proposed as the cure for the root cause of terrorism but it turns out the root cause of terrorists is not poverty or lack of democratic institutions. Establishing a puppet regime with purple-finger elections and midnight basketball won’t stem the flow of terrorists so we’re not going to waste time and money doing it.
Fine. If that’s not the root cause, what is the root cause of Islamic terrorism?
I suspect the root cause of Islamic terrorists is radical Islam, even if everybody in Washington is terrified to say it. Why not fight them? Because there are different sects with different agendas and different funding, making them hard to find and kill, and the press would crucify you for trying.
But we know one of those sects is Wahhabism. Which is funded by Saudi Arabia. Which is run by the Royal Family of the House of Saud who the US protects from domestic unrest with US troops even as the Saudis work to get OPEC to undermine American domestic oil production.
As it sits now, our War on Terror policy is to kill the individual puppets but support the puppet masters even as they attack our economy. That’s insane.
Forget the terrorists. Let them squat in their mountains and kill each other. Close our border so terrorists can’t come here, then go after the root cause. Go after the money.
Issue drilling and pumping permits to produce oil on leased federal lands which will flood the world market with American oil and depress Saudi incomes.
Declare Saudi Arabia to be a financier of terrorism and seize all Saudi money in American banks.
Pull US troops out of Saudi Arabia to force them to spend their remaining money defending themselves from their own people. If we have any AK’s laying around that we captured in Libya, hand them out to the locals as we’re leaving Saudi Arabia. Regime change on the DIY plan.
We’ve been fighting a War on Terror since 9-11 by going after street-level terrorists. It’s not working. Try something else.
Joe Doakes
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