Joe Rogan on the events of the past week. It’s ten minutes worth listening to, if you have been following the fracas:

I don’t know if <his controversial guests> are right. I’m not a doctor. I sit down with people and talk with them…because I’m interested in talking with people with different opinions…I’m interested in finding out how people come to their opinions, and what the facts are”.

As Rogan points out around the five minute mark, his interviews are completely unplanned. Unlike taped TV appearances where the conversation is edited to a fine sheen, or live ones that are scripted, or the Teri Gross’s interviews that are simultaneously scripted and sound like they’re done off the cuff, Rogan just gets on mic and starts talking.

Which sounds like an awful lot of fun to me. One of the few bits of advice I ever got from Larry King (via a column he wrote in 1986, not in person) was “never prepare for interviews”. You always want to approach an interview with the same level of information as your audience has – which is usually virtually nothing. Ask questions. Have a conversation. Learn the subject along with your audience. It’s advice I took to heart; I never really prepare for interviews, and rely on being mentally on the ball enough to ask the right questions to make it a worthwhile interview.

I have yet to listen to my first full Rogan podcast (this kerfuffle has gotten me looking at committing 2-3 hours to listen to one of his interviews), but it’s one of the things that I think I’ll enjoy about Rogan.

So I’m not sure if this slopover from the “no-prep” style Rogan has, or if the standup comic in him is trolling his critics, but near the end of the clip above, he points out that he’s always been a Joni Mitchell fan; “Chuck E’s in Love is a great song”, he notes.

Which could be a flub, sure. Or it could refer back to a great running gag from the ’80s, where people thought the Rickie Lee Jones song was Joni Mitchell, which would be a pretty epic troll.

Either one would be pretty awesome.

… And I’m finding myself jumping to Sean Penn’s defense, against the wokeists

“I don’t think that being a brute or having insensitivity or disrespect for women is anything to do with masculinity, or ever did. But I don’t think that [in order] to be fair to women, we should become them,” the outspoken actor added.

Penn is defending the idea that the opposite of “toxic masculinity” isn’t “femininity”, but “good, well-formed masculinity”.

Which is a fight our whole culture needs to wage, and win, for its own sake.

Which is ,I guess, why Penn is being pummeled today.

Last week’s kerfuffle between Spotify (and their contract employee, Joe Rogan) and Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Barry Manilow and (reportedly) Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters, may not mark the point where the iconoclasm and “rebellion” of popular music fromthe 1950s through the 2000s finally died.

But it’s certainly a waypoint on populist conservatism’s path to being the real iconoclasts.

Kid Rock wraps himself, crudely and profanely, in the Constitution in a new song aimed at the President, “woke” culture and the cancelers.

Armond White reviews it:

The strongest lyric on Kid Rock’s new single “We the People” is 235 years old: “In order to form a more perfect union / Do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”…On the day Kid Rock released his song, rock-music veteran Neil Young publicly threatened Spotify with an ultimatum: Either remove its broadcast of the political commentator and comedian Joe Rogan, or he’d remove his music from its streaming service. It’s enough to make a true rock and roller revolt…In this sudden ideological skirmish, Kid Rock wants to reclaim populism and protest against Young’s imperious assertion of authority and limited expression.

As with most things Kid Rock has done in the past three decades (but by no means all), light leaving “safe for work” right now won’t reach us for centuries. A radio edit bleeping out the profanity would sound like Morse Code.

You’ve been warned. Here goes.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Hatred in San Jose.

Key point: guns which are registered are subject to the law. Guns which are not registered . . . nobody knows about them so those owners need not comply. And criminals already ignore the law, so it won’t affect them at all.

The whole thing is stupid. If gun violence is the problem, they should simply ban gun violence. Leave responsible gun owners alone.

Joe Doakes

It’s nothing but red…uh bean sprouts for progressives.

So the Southwest Light Rail – already estimated at an insane two billion dollars – is going to go 40% over budget, and 3-4 years late.

Cost overruns and delays have pushed the most expensive public works project in state history well above its original $2 billion budget. Last year, Met Council tapped a $200 million contingency fund from Hennepin County taxpayers, which is now mostly committed. The council has been unable to give an updated cost estimate for months.

“These changes have impacted both the time required [for Lunda McCrossan] to complete its work and the costs under the civil construction contract,” Metro Transit General Manager Wes Kooistra and project managers wrote in a memo to council members. “These changes will also delay the systems contractor, the start of revenue operations, and result in additional costs.”

Many of the changes are due to posh Kenwood NIMBYs who support light rail, but not in their backyards, forcing the line into a ruinously expensive tunnel. That tunnel – which should be called the “Met Council Provides Concierge Service To Posh Neighborhoods With DFL Clout” tunnel, although the plaques over the galleries would probably add another $50 Million – has been a known issue for long enough that it’s already been memory-holed from the Met Council narrative.

They don’t consider themselves NIMBYs, naturally:

“They called us NIMBYs, rich people who just wanted not to be bothered,” says Mary Pattock, former chair of the Cedar Isles Dean neighborhood board and longtime critic of the LRT routing. Echoing Rep. Hornstein, she says, “we told them the geology between the lakes was messy. We told them there was not room to build a tunnel safely. We told them you are going to run into problems you are not going to be able to solve. Now it’s all coming true.”

Of course, the fact that they’re building a tunnel to carry the train under the neighborhood is because of NIMBYism on the part of the whole, well-to-do, clout-enabled neighborhood.

“750 million over budget” is in today’s dollars, by the way. My fearless prediction: by the time the first train takes the first armed robber from Target Center to Eden Prairie, this train will have cost $3.2 Billion to build. I’m making a note to check on this in 2026. I’m feeling confident.

I’ll be talking with Senator Dave Osmek about this on the show tomorrow.

But just take my money anyway.

Is this video (language not remotely safe for work):

a) the most piqant parody of Gen-Z angst ever, or:

b) justification for Russia to skip invading Ukraine and just seize New York, California, Washington, Oregon and Massachusetts?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

An altimeter is an instrument which tells you high you are. Pilots rely on them to avoid obstructions on the ground, to maintain separation between aircraft at different altitudes, and to make smooth landings.

The traditional altimeter works on air pressure. Air pressure decreases the higher you go from the Earth. If you properly calibrate your pressure altimeter, it works fine. I flew with one for years.

Modern technology has moved on. The newest altimeters work on radar. They send a radar beam down from the airplane to reflect off the ground. They are much more precise because they’re measuring the actual distance, not the calculated distance (assuming the pressure calibration is correct).

More precise, that is, unless something interferes with the radar. “RaDAR” is actually an acronym for Radio Detection and Ranging. A radar wave is a radio wave operating on a certain radio frequency. A ground transmitter operating on a nearby frequency can cause interference, making the radar altimeter malfunction. On a bright, sunny day, not a huge problem. The pilot can see the ground and estimate altitude by experience. At night or in bad weather, losing your altimeter is a terrifying problem. Anything which makes a radar altimeter malfunction is a potential disaster.

Such as, for instance, 5G cell phone frequency, which is also a radio wave. 5G was planned to roll out Wednesday but has been halted because major airlines are canceling flights for fear of it.

This isn’t a new issue. We’ve known it was coming for years. Suddenly, it’s a problem? Suddenly, major airlines are complaining about how the rollout is dangerous? Why wasn’t this worked out ages ago?

Remind me, who’s in charge of transportation issues in the United States? And who’s his boss, the man where the buck stops?

Joe Doakes

The more overwhelmed with bureaucrats our government becomes, the more amateurish it gets.

I’ll meet Mayor Frey halfway.

He’s supposed to be Minneapolis’s top cheerleader. It’s part of his job to blow smoke up the world’s collective nethers about the city.

So when he went on social media after about a week of his bizarrely illogical and unscientific vaccine mandate to say everything was hunky dory:

…it wasn’t in and of itself a surprise. Cheerleading the city, and their own policies even moreso, is part of a mayor’s job description.

Of course, the stats aren’t nearly as sanguine. Minneapolis table reservation via “Open Table” are off by…

…ahem…

…two thirds:

Now, it’s entirely possible the Mayor’s phone is flooded with photos of full restaurants. The number of choices in Minneapolis has plummeted. Literally, every place in Minneapolis where I used to do social events has disappeared in the past 20 months.

Not only is it time for the US to leave the UN and cut off all our funding to it, but we need to dismantle the building and recycle the material, preferably into new guns to distribute to deserving Americans.

UN distributes cash and sob stories to “migrants” seeking asylum:

In one, the U.N. was cited as the source of cash cards used to fund lodging, food, and medicines on their journey from Mexico to the U.S. border. Those payments have recently drawn the ire of some Republicans in Congress angered over the efforts and costs…Bensman reported some families receiving $400 every 15 days to use as they wish….

In another report Monday, Bensman said U.N. groups are providing migrants with psychological help to pull stories of torture and abuse from their memories. Those stories are often needed to win temporary asylum passage into Mexico and eventually the U.S.

“At least two U.N.-funded nonprofits with operations in the southern border states of Chiapas and Tabasco pay stables of clinical psychologists to help migrants recover ‘repressed memories’ of government persecution and other hardship stories that qualify migrants for Mexican asylum and a residence card, allowing an eventual trip over the U.S. southern border,” the report said.

I’d vote for a controlled implosion. After the bureaucrats inside have relocated.

If possible.

When I interviewed Michael Yon last winter, he characterized the “migrant caravans” as.a direct assault on American sovereignty, clearly not spontaneous, clearly planned.

It sounded conspiracy-theory-y.

Not so much anymore.

Given the situation between Russia and Ukraine, could we finally stop gushing over Angela Merkel’s brilliance at realpolitik?

She’s put the majority of the largest continental economy in NATO directly into the hands of Vladimir Putin. Over half of German energy is now supplied by Russia, with the failure of Germany’s green energy initiative and the attendant dismantling of Germany’s once awesome nuclear power capability. Germany’s economy can be thrown into a cataclysmic depression with the turning of a couple of valves.

Thus, NATO’s largest continental economy and military is at Putin’s dubious mercy.

Germany has to be calculating that if it participates in harsh sanctions against Russia, it makes itself vulnerable to Russian countermeasures. Already, Russia has been squeezing Europe’s gas supplies. It’s not at all clear that Germany would give up on the pipeline even if Russian tanks roll for Kyiv.

The Germans, meanwhile, aren’t willing to make even the slightest gesture toward deterring Russia. They are blocking Estonia, a fellow NATO ally, from sending howitzers to Ukraine that originated in Germany.

Why it’s almost as if this is another thing Trump was right about.

The DFL is waking up to the fact that people don’t like crime, and they don’t see law and order as a “privilege”.

I was going to write out the last couple years of history, but the Twitter embed seems to have added that for me.

DFL policies pretty much negate the DFL’s proposals:

You can boil these “proposals” down to “trying to fix the damage they’ve wrought into a couple of categories:

Transferring more taxpayer money to the state’s political class and the non-profit/industrial complex.

“Innovation” and “Local Community Policing” grants might be well described as “greasing the right palms”.

Paying to undo the DFL’s damage

Body cameras? Training investigators?

We had investigators. They quit when the county attorneys stopped prosecuting repeat criminals.

Trying to blame Republicans

Which, as long as the DFL runs both cities, is really what it’s all about.

I shudder to imagine who’s convinced by this.

Exhibit 1: Now, the CDC is saying openlly…

…things that got people suspended from social media, and ostracized by Big Karen, six short months ago.

Science!

Whenever your Democrat friends condescendingly coo “nobody is coming for your guns”, just remember – they’re coming for your guns:

Gun owners in Minnesota had a pretty easy session last year. This year, the Dems have to try to turn out their base. Grabbing guns certainly gets the Karens and Mascists and ninnies of the left lathered up.

More this weekend.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The law of self-defense does not cover property. So what law does? If the cops won’t do anything, if the prosecutors won’t do anything, if the courts won’t do anything, then the social compact has been breached by the government, and the right to defend property reverts to the citizenry.
They shoot looters, don’t they? These people were looters. They deserve to be shot. Pour encourager Les autres.
Joe Doakes

On the one hand, test cases are for other people.

On the other hand? If the system doesn’t start delivering the justice we pay our taxes for, people start going out and getting it for themselves, without bothering with the niceties of criminal procedure.

It’s the image that keeps Minnesota DFLers, and “moderate” Republicans of the Dave Durenberger / Arne Carlson, warm on cold nights; the moment when Minnesota’s political class got the national warm fuzzy they so desperately sought and, decades later, so yearned to have reaffirmed:

Governor Wendell Anderson on the cover of Time, proclaiming that all the best things in life could be delivered by “good government” – defined as interventionist, but driven by “compromise” between a DFL that was still very much the party of Hubert Humphrey, and a GOP that was basically the DFL in better suits.

The image encapsulates an era that for decades made the likes of Doug Grow and Lori Sturdevant misty-eyed with nostalgia, with boxcars full of newsprint over the decades devoted to columns bemoaning our inability to reach the acme of their respective youths…

…even as we with eyes for history and current events noted that that gauzy, soft-focus bit of hindsight ignores how much that sort of governance depends on a shared culture of communitarian polity that emigrated from poor, rural Scandinavian towns to poor, rural Minnesota towns – not to mention that the DFL of today would expel the gun-owning, forthrightly anti-Communist Humphrey were he seeking office.

And now comes this piece, by one of the writers behind the original Time article and the original Minnesota myth, nearly five decades ago.

And he‘s revising his view – big-time:

What happened? Minnesota once enjoyed a high degree of social cohesion rooted in the traditions of previous waves of immigrants. But as the region has grown and become more diverse, the Twin Cities in particular developed most of the problems that bedevil much of the rest of urban America (crime, unemployment, drugs and so on). The reasons for this are complicated and widely debated. In any case, Minnesota now ranks among the worst states in the country when it comes to racial inequality.

In 1973, there were two strong political parties in Minnesota, both centrist and in touch with the state’s voters. A profound change occurred in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, especially among the wealthy and young. They contrived to seize political power by leveraging certain idealistic or merely sentimental impulses in the public mind. It was the prospering woke who elected the progressive Minneapolis City Council that supports defunding the police, and it was those white elites who, more than her fellow Somali-Americans, elected Ilhan Omar to the House. A mostly white “meritocracy,” caring more about, say, transgender rights than about job creation, took command in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the country. Both parties have become much more ideological, controlled by angry amateurs—the woke and the antiwoke.

Morrow, currently 80-something, somewhat myopically saves some blame for the MN GOP, as if the Republicans move to the right was in any way symmetric with the DFL’s leftward lurch, and as if moderation itself, rather than enlightened communitarian self-interest, was what brought Minnesota’s near-mythical golden age about.

But the whole thing is worth a read – because the conclusion couldn’t be more correct:

The difference between my 1973 story and the news reports of 2022 amounts to the difference, as it were, between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Tom gives you the boyish, innocent, sun-shot rendering of Hannibal, Mo., in the middle of the 19th century. Huck’s story is the version of America that includes poverty, murder, alcoholism, child abuse, race prejudice, blood feud and imbecility. Minneapolis today looks a little more like the Huckleberry Finn version, although without Huck’s humor or his rascal charm.

Some of the same DFLers who venerated the myth created by the original coverage have been venting their bottomless barrels of spite at Morrow for turning on him – he’s being compared with Sean Hannity, for Florence’s sake.

But he’s far from wrong.

…and, according to some fairly disturbing college professors, isn’t really freedom, either.

In so many areas, the Twin Cites political class loves to affect an appreciation of Scandinavian governance.

They love the interventionist social democracy, the often successful tinkering with utopian ideas (dependent, of course, on a small, wealthy society with social cohesion that doesn’t exist in American cities over 5,000), the communitarian ethos (see previous parenthetical), while ignoring the less convenient parts, the ethnic homogeneity, the history of fighting against tyrants…

…and, I suspect, this bit here:

Yep. Critical thought, on the part of the news media:

The article charges that politicians and authorities have “lied” about various aspects of the pandemic, prompting these establishments to lose the public trust, noting that the efficacy of vaccines to end the pandemic was also vastly overstated by health authorities…Ekstra Bladet’s public apology is part of a growing trend in the European media that has begun to question the narrative and the governments’ responses to it. For example, one of Germany’s top newspapers, Bild, issued an apology last August for fearmongering over COVID, specifically about claims that children were “going to murder their grandma.” 

Who knows? Maybe if they see the Danes are OK with it, the Strib – “the newspaper of the Twin Cities of, by and for Big Karen” – will find the guts to think.a little.

A group of restauranteurs and bar owners are taking the Frey regime to court over the city’s bizarre, unscientific vaxx mandate:

Plaintiffs in the complaint filed in Hennepin County Fourth Judicial Court Thursday include Bright Red Group, LLC (owners of Smack Shack), 90’s Minneapolis, LLC (The Gay 90’s), PJ. Hafiz Club Management, Inc. (Sneaky Pete’s), Urban entertainment, LLC (Wild Greg’s Saloon), Urban Forage, LLC (Urban Forage), and MikLin Enterprises, Inc. (Jimmy John’s) and I & E Inc. (Bunkers Music Bar & Grill).

According to the complaint, the emergency resolution “is calculated and purposed to attempt to prod the general public toward vaccination… Minneapolis bars and restaurants are being used as pawns to further Mayor Frey’s agenda of pushing for and convincing the public to get vaccinated. Whether the end being sought is noble, the scheme is forcing restaurants and bars to lose additional patrons and business that have already been reduced over the past two years and incur new costs and burdens to enforce the requirements.”

When I saw the original mandate, I wondered – so some 20-something 110 pound female hostess encounters someone without a vaxx card who wants to eat anyway. Then what?

Does the restaurant call the cops?

Even if there’s some response on their part, they’ll show up long after the customers have ordered, eaten and left.

What is it exactly that the Frey regime expects restaurants to do under color of his mandate?

Turns out yesterday was “Sully” Sullenberger’s 71st birthday.

I never get tired of this story:

10 year sentence – a downward departure from sentencing guidelines by nearly half – in the burning of a Minneapolis pawn shop during the George Floyd riots:

Black Lives Matter rioter Montez Terriel Lee Jr., of Rochester, New York, was sentenced Friday to 120 months in federal prison for his role in burning down a Minneapolis pawn shop during the destructive George Floyd riots in May 2020.

Lee had previously pleaded guilty in July 2021 to a single count of arson in connection with a fire that destroyed the Max It Pawn Shop on Lake St. at 2726 E. Lake St. He admitted to starting the fire on May 28, 2020, which is now considered one of many arson incidentsthat happened during the summer riots.

Oddly, the article doesn’t list which white supremacist group he was part of

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Every government regulation restricts some individual’s freedom.  It wouldn’t be a regulation if it didn’t.

A government regulation which affects similarly situated individuals must treat them similarly.  That’s what the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment is all about. 

To survive an Equal Protection challenge, the government regulation must be rationally related to a legitimate government purpose.

The U of M concedes the Covid vaccine doesn’t halt the spread of Covid but intends to impose a vaccine mandate anyway.

St. Paul and Minneapolis require vaccine or proof of negative test to enter bars and restaurants. 

All three government entities insist the regulations are based on SCIENCE.  But other government entities in the state have not enacted similar regulations.  There is no scientific reason why restaurants in St. Paul would be deadlier than Maplewood, why Manny’s Steak House would be deadlier than Lord Fletcher’s, why a student with natural immunity is deadlier than a vaccinated student. 

The regulations do not treat citizens similarly.  There is no rational basis for the difference.  The different regulations violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In the olden days, there were organizations which cared about such things, the American Civil Liberties Union, for example.  They ought to be in court every day, suing on behalf of individual rights.  They’re not.  Nobody is.

Why doesn’t anybody care about Constitutional rights more?

What happened to us?

Joe Doakes

What happaned?

Big Left took over the institutions we used to trust to play it down the middle!

Mike Murphy is running for the GOP nomination to run against Govenor Klink,

Dennis Smith is running for the nod to run for Attorney General against Keith Ellison.

And today’s music:

He drove with a .13 blood alcohol content (as of test time, hours later, indicating he had closer to a .17 at the time of the crash).

He drove 126MPH down 94, up until he went off the road.

He drove, thus hammered, carrying his service firearm (or at least a .357 magnum revolver in a holster), at a blood alcohol level 3-4 times the level at which a civilian would lose their permit.

He lied to officers about the crash; he didn’t invoke his 5th Amendment right to remain silent (which is legal, constitutionally protected, and good); he actually lied.

The story of Sheriff Hutchinson’s DUI and crash just keeps getting worse and worse:

The Governor and Lieutenant Governor asked for his resignation.

But that’ll be the end of it.

Not because the DFL is out to protect Hutchinson; the “progressives” have a hand-picked candidate even more “progressive” than Hutchinson waiting for November. The DFL will endorse her, and Hutchinson will be shunted aside like last year’s model.

But until then? If the DFL let it he known that driving drunk was a real problem, they’d endanger the prospects of one of their candidates, in a year when the DFL expects to have enough problems.

That’s how life, and politics, in a one-party autocracy works.

Is delegitimizing elections the greatest crime one can commit against the republican form of government?

Or just when some people do it?