Paddock’s motive remains unknown. “This person may have been radicalised, unbeknownst to us, and we want to identify that source [according to Las Vegas sheriff Joe Lombardo].”
Of course, everyone on all sides is racing to show Paddock was with the “other side”; some lefty sites are “reporting” he had friends of friends with “alt-right” sympathies, while “InfoWars” is claiming he was influenced by “Anti”-Fa (although the target – a country western concert, with an audience many a “progressive” would like to see scourged from the earth (by organic, gluten-free, carbon-neutral means, not icky guns). Only ISIS seems to want to claim the guy.
But if it turns out that InfoWars is right, and that the target bepeaks the motivation?
Watch this story disappear faster than the last bag of Cheetos at a Dave Matthews concert.
I urged gun owners in CD1 to remember this photo – the photo of “gun grabber Tim”.
And this next bit should help?
Every word of it is crap, of course:
What “we’re doing” has lowered violent gun crime and gun murders 50% in the past 20 years.
The “facts” do lie, when they are nothing but correlation leading to a false claim of causation; neither mass shootings or cops being shot are in any way effected by background checks of any kind (criminals don’t take them!), and if he thinks suicide would be prevented by background checks, he’s clearly figuring cops will become clairvoyant. So facts may not lie – but Walz is.
But that’s the line; he’s going to “do everything” he can to foist a law on the people that can not affect crime, and can only serve to register the gun of the law-abiding citizen.
He is, of course, playing for the Metrocrat vote, trying to get the DFL endorsement to run for governor. He will promptly reverse course if he gets the nod (or runs for Congress again). The media will let this fall down the memory hole.
The traditional way to show respect for the national anthem is to stand, face the flag, place your hand over your heart. Doing anything else is a protest. Some players sit, some kneel, some give the Black Power salute, some link arms . . . doesn’t matter: if you’re not doing it right, you’re protesting. Television is trying to hide the protests from the viewers by skipping the anthem, cutting in late, but it’s not working. Viewers notice. Viewers get upset. Why are they upset?
There are 168 hours in a week. Your game is on for three of them. We don’t tune in to learn your opinions on social policy, we tune to watch the team play football. Don’t hijack my football game for your lecture; protest on your own time.
The AFL is gone. The UFL is gone. There’s no reason the NFL can’t go broke. All you need to do is drive away enough customers.
When I was a kid, the cosmology of the musical world was Pete Townsend, Joe Strummer, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Davies, Tom Petty (Bono and the Edge joined when I was in college)…
When I heard that he’d been found in his Malibu home unresponsive, with a cardiac arrest mere days after the end of what was reputed to be the last Heartbreakers tour, I couldn’t help but think of Charles Schultz, the “Peanuts” comic artist who passed away mere hours after the last panel of his seminal strip ran in papers around the country; their life’s artistic work over, they retired for real, for good.
I wrote about Tom Petty years ago; my abrupt conversion from doubter to fan 38 years ago next month. I was watching Saturday Night Live, looking to mock and scoff at the singer I’d heard about – for reasons I can’t begin to remember four decades later. Buck Henry introduced Petty; by the time they got three counts into “Refugee”, I had reconsidered my skepticism, and become a fan
(NBC blocked access to that original SNL video years ago; someone needs to die in a grease fire. This one is close):
. The next morning, after sunday school, I skipped church and ran to the drug store to pick up Damn the Torpedoes; me andMike Aylmer and Matt Anderson and Keri Kleingartner listened to it on a record player in one of the classrooms. And that night, I sat down with my guitar and started learning every single song, every lick Mike Campbell played; every flourish Benmonth Tench played on the organ; I didn’t so much listen to it as I absorbed it.
Because when you were a little too tall and coulda used a few pounds, and were hardly renowned, it was revelation to know that even the losers – tramps like us – could get lucky sometimes:
It was like a musical flash-bang grenade went off in my brain, blowing it open to a phalanx of new influences: the Byrds, Del Shannon, the whole canon of post-Beatles American rock and roll – it was all there.
Indeed, given that Petty, like his contemporaries Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger was such a traditionalist, it’s hard to remember sometimes what a radical departure from the 1970s’ mainstream he was. Music radio lumped him in with the New Wave (as they did with many acts and artists that didn’t fit neatly into 1970s’ radio formats, from Dire Straits to AC/DC to The Police); in a half-decade of American pop music dominated by disco, sixties-holdovers from the “singer/songwriter” genre like James Taylor and Jackson Browne, arena acts like Styx and REO Speedwagon, and top-40 machines like Fleetwood Mac, Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, the idea of a singer doing perfectly crafted homage to the Byrds, Stax/Volt (Duck Dunn sits in on bass on Damn the Torpedoes’ “You Tell Me”) and all that was great about early-sixties American rock and roll, and turning in into something vital, funny, crisp, fierce,was kind of radical.
It sure felt radical at the time.
His cardiac arrest yesterday was Petty’s worst medical problem, obviously – but it wasn’t his first medical issue, as he relates in this stunning 1985 version of “The Waiting”:
And as the years unwound, he had the same personal issues a lot of us fans had when we grew up; the girl who Petty told not to do him like that, did him like that in 1999, leading to one of his best albums (and the one from which he never played anything live), Echo, full of world-weary anthems about profound loss:
But maybe my favorite thing Petty did? He wore that Dixie chip on his shoulder with pride – and wrote one of the best songs every about that chip:
And that – the idea of putting the chip on my own shoulder out there in the form of music, the one art form I ever failed to completely fail at – led to one of my life’s great adventures, writing music and playing it for people, an adventure that’s still going on today.
If you told me to take a Tom Petty song to a desert island, it’d be…well, “Even the Losers”. But I’d sneak “Southern Accents” along under the table anyway.
Imagine if a conservative group that was as tightly connected with the leadership of the American rights as “Anti”-Fa is to Big Left were to publish something with a tone like this.
And you’d have to imagine it – because nobody this side of Alex Jones does, or would.
Why now? Martin Luther, Henry VII and John Wesley all died centuries ago. It can’t be Anglicans, Methodists or Lutherans threatening Jews. What’s changed in the last couple of years that has disrupted Danish life so much they need to put troops on the streets to maintain order?
Amazing, they have both kinds of unrest: Muslim and leftist. The incident cited was a Muslim terrorist who shot up a free speech event. Striking parallels to the Left in this country. Sounds as if Danes need to start listening to The Donald.
Build The Wall.
Joe Doakes
That should stretch the Danish military to the breaking point. Not joking.
(Danish Military trivia: the Hjemmeværnet, or “Home Guard”, which is their national militia, was established after WW2 on the basis of the wartime Resistance – and with the mission of operating independently of the King and Parliament to defend the country (or kill invaders) regardless of the any government capitulation. It was the closest I’ve seen to a “Second Amendment”-style policy in any non-Swiss European state. But in recent decades, that mission has been softening; the Hjemmeværnet has been drawn more into the government mainstream, and the notion of having to resist an invader even in contravention of a (subjugated) government has faded from living memory. I wonder if it’ll make a reappearance? Nota bene: don’t underestimate the Danes).
Berg’s 18th Law is still in effect; we don’t know what motivated the Vegas shooter.
But I take heart from this, a guy I’m proud to call a real American hero:
Mandalay Bay being a gun free zone (and at 400 yards, firing back with a handgun would have been a triumph of optimism over feasibility), the man fought back with the only weapon allowed him, his middle finger – which, were the First Amendment all one needed to protect freedom, would be a fearsome weapon, and was, as it happens the best he could do under the circumstances.
