Converting to conservatism started simply enough – intellectually.

Personally? It was still a tough pill to swallow, growing up in what passed for a “liberal” home in rural North Dakota in the eighties. Conservatism made sense. Conservatives, as people, made sense – to the extent that stereotypes always do. . Conservatives looked and acted – in the stereotypes that drove much of my 20-ish year old mental model – with Jerry Falwell’s seeming smug sanctimony, with Pat Buchanan’s aggressive know-it-all-ism, the cloying certainty of some of the Young Republican crowd I’d met, with all the usual stereotypes that the media culture, then as now, made the official narrative.

The stereotypes, applied to the people I knew or knew of, made sense.

Me being one of those people did not.

Not until I found P.J. O’Rourke.

Reading the essays that led to his 1987 book Republican Party Reptile, in Rolling Stone and Car and Driver and the usual dog’s breakfast of magazines that paid the freelance journalist and humorist’s bills, O’Rourke told the tale of the “pants-down conservative” – the person who played their music too loud, liked a cocktail or two, had a liberarian outlook on day to day – with a caveat:

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty the duty to take the consequences”

The list of keeper quotes itself serves as a great guide to life, politics, and political life.

O’Rourke passed away earlier this week:

I never got to meet O’Rourke in person; I was always a day late and a dollar short. David Harsanyi was luckier.

After 30 years, A Parliament of Whores remains the single best satire/fact book about American government I’m aware of. Give War a Chance, some of the finest conflict journalism ever. As Harsanyi noted, many libertarian conservatives have aspired to O’Rourke’s style (Mitch bashfully raises his hand); none have ever come close to matching it. He’s been described as an HL Mencken – but without the misanthropy or unearned arrogance.

And if Mitch Berg ever become Secretary of State, the Foggy Bottom mission statement will be rewritten as follows:

“I was having dinner…in London…when eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about “Your country’s never been invaded.” And so I said, “Let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us. WE BE BAD. We’re the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars. We’re the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap d’Antibes. And we’ve got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go. You say our country’s never been invaded? You’re right, little buddy. Because I’d like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who’d have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying ‘Cheerio.’ Hell can’t hold our sock-hops.

We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I’d rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch.”

RIP, P.J. O’Rourke.

UPDATE: Mr D. had about the same idea, at about the same time.

The Minnesota congressional and legislative redistricting maps came out yesterday.

My options were:

1. Remain in a moldy, one-party district run by authoritarian Karens who sit if office at the behest and pleasure of the public emplioyee unions, or:
2. moldy, one-party district run by authoritarian Karens who sit if office at the behest and pleasure of the public emplioyee unions.

Anyway, it turned out I got #1.

Yay me.

P. J. O’Rourke died yesterday at the age of 74. He was one of the best conservative pundits of the last 50 years and certainly the funniest. He also had a keen eye. In his 1990 classic Parliament of Whores, he provided a spot-on synopsis of the people you meet at a protest rally. Tell me if these descriptions from 30+ years ago still don’t ring true:

World Council of Churches sensible-shoe types who have self-righteousness the way some people have bad breath

Angry black poverty pests making a life and a living off the misfortunes of others

Even angrier feminists doing their best to feminize poverty before the blacks use it all up

Earnest neophyte Marxists, eyes glazed from dialectical epiphanies and hands grubby from littering the Mall with ill-Xeroxed tracts

College bohos dressed in black to show how gloomy the world is when you’re a nineteen-year-old rich kid

Young would-be hippies dressed exactly like old hippies used to dress (remarkable how behind the times the avant-garde has gotten)

And some of those old hippies themselves, faded jeans straining beneath increasing paunches, hair still tied into a ponytail in the back but gone forever from the top

His powers of observation set him apart from other writers, especially those who tried their hand at satire. He understood his targets better than the targets understood themselves.

As O’Rourke grew older, he softened the sharp edges and some of his thinking got a bit pear-shaped. He drew the ire of conservatives everywhere when he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. I was not a fan of Donald Trump either, but O’Rourke’s powers of observation betrayed him that time:

Dorothy and Toto’s house fell on Hillary. I endorse her.

Munchkins endorse her.

Donald Trump is a flying monkey.

Except what the flying monkeys have to say, “oreoreoreo,” makes more sense than Trump’s policy statements.

Not that Hillary makes much sense either.

Hillary is wrong about everything. She is to politics and statecraft what Pope Urban VIII and the Inquisition were to Galileo. She thinks the sun revolves around herself.

But Trump Earth™ is flat. We’ll sail over the edge. Here be monsters.

O’Rourke was wrong about that. Hillary is more of a monster in real life than anything O’Rourke could imagine over the edge. We’ll leave that aside. Where O’Rourke made his mark, and where his legacy will reside, is in being a proto-Mencken for our age. And let’s say it — his bon mots were pretty bon:

There are probably more fact-finding tours of Nicaragua right now than there are facts— the country has shortages of practically everything.

Or this:

The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors— psychology, sociology, women’s studies— to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you’d have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.

Or this:

Even the bad things are better than they used to be. Bad music, for instance, has gotten much briefer. Wagner’s Ring Cycle takes four days to perform while “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more than three minutes.

But above all, this:

The American political system is like a gigantic Mexican Christmas fiesta. Each political party is a huge piñata — a papier-mâché donkey, for example. The donkey is filled with full employment, low interest rates, affordable housing, comprehensive medical benefits, a balanced budget and other goodies. The American voter is blindfolded and given a stick. The voter then swings the stick wildly in every direction, trying to hit a political candidate on the head and knock some sense into the silly bastard.

We all need our sticks and few wielded a more elegant brickbat than the Irish kid from Toledo. RIP,

Y’know, if I were really feeling the snark today, the metaphor count could jump into double digits, here.

“Nice state youse got here. It’d be a shame if it…broke, for not respecting and paying us…”

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Remember this thread jack fr

Emery on February 4, 2022 at 4:07 pm said:

The previous two months was revised up by 709,000. This was a strong report — and surprising given the surge in Covid-19 cases in January.

Remember my response? I was right.

I concede that government jobs are jobs. Government employees spend paychecks to buy things, which is good for the economy in general. But creating new government jobs to pump up employment numbers is straight out of the FDR playbook. It doesn’t mean the economy is recovering. It’s a sign the economy is foundering and is only being propped up temporarily.

Can’t wait to see next month’s numbers.

Joe Doakes

And the government jobs aren’t assigned a new wealth is being created; it’s a sign that more of it is being transferred to the public sector.

Justin Trudeau has essentially seized dictatorial power in Canada to rid his capitol of unruly subjects and their :

This is the first time the Emergencies Act has been invoked since it came into force in 1988, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said yesterday it is necessary to protect critical infrastructure such as borders and airports from the blockades, and create time-limited powers that do not already exist.

The government will use the act to force towing companies to remove big rigs and other vehicles that are blocking highways and other critical infrastructure.

It will also be used establish zones where public assembly is not allowed, and require banks to suspend or freeze accounts suspected of supporting the blockades, including those belonging to companies whose trucks are part of the convoy.

That seizure of assets, by the way? No court order or due process needed.

What could go wrong?

Can you imagine what the likes of Trudeau, and the rest of western pseudointelligentsia, would have done if Trump had declared a state of emergency to shut down a legitimate, if obsstreporous, protest?

One of the main organizers behind the truckers’ protest in Ottawa, now in its third week, said members are not going anywhere, and will “hold the line” in the face of the act.

This, after weeks of the Canadian media – generally no less incurious and subservient than the US media to government – telling the world the protesters were violent (the only the actual violence was when some counterprotesters rammed a vehicle full of protesters), racist (no photos) and destriuctive (all “vandalism” was easily picked up).

Let’s make sure we’re clear on this: after a year of barbering about the (real, serious) riots on January 6, which had no chance whatsoever of affecting the Constitutional process, much less seizing any actual government power, the western Left is applauding a western “progressive” leader usurping banana-republic powers to stifle obstreporous and boisterous speech that could be dealt with by legal, due-process means, had Trudeau the will and the courage.

This is not only the work of a coward, awash in fear over his 16% approval rate.

It’s the work of a politician, at the head of a moment, that has no respect for representative democracy.

Scratch a “progressive”, and they’ll bleed “tyrant”.

I “joke” that Covid restrictions and states of emergency are on the ropes in states where Democrats are polling badly in the mid-terms.

I supposed that it’s a logical corollary that in states where Democrats don’t need to worry about mid-terrms, they don’t have to care.

Exhibit M:

Maybe it’s just to forestall refugees from Canada…

Study shows that “racial justice” protests that include “Anti”-Fa are at least 18 times more likely to end up in violence than protests where they didn’t show up.

And no, the same does not hold true for “right wing“ groups:

They continued on to question whether the right-wing groups were the real source of the violence given that Antifa tens to show up to counter their presence.

“That’s not what our research found. We sawno difference between events in which antifa was facing off with a group such as the Proud Boys or the Three Percenters and when they were protesting unopposed,” they wrote.

The use of violence as a tool of political “persuasion“ appears to be almost purely a leftist phenomenon.

Last week on social media (and, maybe, althought I can’t remember, in this space), I pointed out this excellent thread by Ezra Levant – one of the most cogent commentators on civil liberty in Canada and, in many ways, the US – for some interesting insights on the effect the Canadian trucker’s strike is having on both sides of the border.

The whole thread, like most everything Levant writes, is worth a close read:

A commentator who, to be fair, is lately doing a pretty fair Bill Gleason impression, replied to me saying “I remember when conservatives said blocking bridges was a bad thing” – as if I’m excusing something with the truckers that I condemned with BLM blocking freeways.

It was, of course, an ignorant take at best, and a dishonest one at worst (and I’m leaning toward dishonest); your protest, like any other free speech, has no right to harm others, and blocking freeways does in fact harm others.

But my criticism, then as now, was not of the legitimacy or turpitude of the protesters – there are plenty of people covering that turf – but of the local and regional governments in both cases. Local government in Minneapolis and Saint Paul enabled BLM to take over streets and freeways, passively (pointedly ignoring applicable laws) and actively (opening routes and managing not just freeway traffic, but protester traffic, in some cases pointing out foot routes onto the freeways). I pointed out, from experience, that a pro-life or 2nd Amendment group going out on the freeway would have gotten a very different official reception…

…as, indeed, have the truckers, who have turned Big Left’s methods against Big Left, and are getting Big Left’s exposed inner id out there on display:

As I write, Canadian police, many dressed in military garb and supported by armored vehicles and snipers(!), are moving in to enforce several court orders and demands of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and others that the “Freedom Convoy” of Canadian truckers stop blocking the Ambassador Bridge, the major artery between the United States and Canada, and disperse. Some of the protestors are leaving while many others are standing their ground. 

My point – which apparently still eludes the commenter noted above – is that representative democracy can not survive when there are one set of laws for the political “haves” and one for the “Have nots”. ere we

Which, when it comes to political speech in general, is exactly where we are today.

More later.

After reducing the size of the German military by 85% in the face of a resurgent Russia, decommissioning all of Germanys nuclear power plants and actively making the German economy in effect entirely dependent on Russian natural gas (as the German “green energy program” – could could have seen this coming? – ignominiously flopped), and essentially setting Germany up to be a commercial patsy of the oligarchs, could we stop referring to Angela Merkel as a political genius?

And by “we”, I mean the Western “intelligentsia” and pseudo-intelligentsia?

Am I the only one with a sneaking hunch that Putin knows he’s up against the Western B-team, and is going to operate unconcerned about any western response?

In an outspoken interview yesterday, Viktor Tatarintsev told the country’s Aftonbladet newspaper that ‘the more the West pushes Russia, the stronger the Russian response will be’. 

He claimed Russia had become more ‘self-sufficient’ amid the threat of sanctions and accused the West of not understanding his country. 

‘We are more self-sufficient and have been able to increase our exports. We have no Italian or Swiss cheeses, but we’ve learned to make just as good Russian cheeses using Italian and Swiss recipes’, he said.

This is something the smart people have been warning about for half a century; “globalization” in and of itself only when all parties involved are more or less completely “globalized”.

International sanctions can have an effect on Spain, by Spain’s choice, or on Saudi Arabia because of the markets they chose to enter.

Countries that can make themselves self-sufficient on at least the level of necessities? Like (in theory) Russia, or China?

I suspect Putin knows he’s dealing with a whole cabinet full of Neville Chamberlains (which is a bit of a gratuitous slam against Chamberlain, who at least realized he’d been had, albeit too late).

Say what you will about the practice of blocking streets – the left sowed the wind, they are reaping a whirlwind – but Big Left sure isn’t happy.

One of the great fault lines in American – really Western – politics is with the concept of “Freedom”.

The term means different things to different people.

To “the right”, broadly, it means freedom from government interference in one’s life. Coming from societies where the individual had worth only as a subject of a monarch, and whose human rights were (and, in most cases, are) still considered privileges bestowed by more or less benevolent sovereign (at best!), it’s understandable.

And as Western Civilization has gotten farther and farther from having to scrabble for the right to be secure in one’s home and to not be considered chattel for trade or barter by whatever gangster had managed to seize a sword from a watery bint, the concept of freedom has, at least among people we broadly call “the left”, rotted into the notion of “freedom from material want” and, increasingly, “freedom from social want”.

Which brings us to this op-ed in the Glob and Mail by one Gary Mason . It’s been the subject of absolutely cataclysmic, scathing mockery in the Western right for habitually garbling the meaning of “freedom” that most of us understand.

And mangle it, he does (emphasis added):

Freedom, of course, has not always been a concept usurped for selfish, malicious purposes. It’s been a rallying cry behind great triumphs such as the end of slavery and the civil rights movement. But others have believed freedom is about protecting property rights, even if that has to occur at the diminishment of democracy.

Those who are paying attention note that freedom to enjoy one’s property rights is freedom; without property rights, and the system of legal and social guarantees that make property rights possible, there is no prosperity; without prosperity, freedom is academic. Ponder great thoughts, or farm for your subsistence; pick one.

And he’s also right that it “diminishes democracy”; “Democracy” with a capital “D” is three people deciding who gets to keep the bag of cash they just found, by 2:1 margin, with the “1” out of luck.

Mason seems, beyond that, to think that to the protesters in Canada, and by extension the US, think “freedom” is a synonym for Trump.

Quite the opposite.

I’ll explain.

13 years ago, the Tea Party sprang from an earlier wave of public discontent, over the creeping nationalization of healthcare. The Tea Party minded its manners, cleaned up after itself, was friendly and utterly inclusive and had a place for everyone – whether educated, articulate and polished, or not – at the table.

And the establishment on both sides slandered it back into the shadows.

But that energy remained. And as society got more authoritarian – in Canada even moreso than in Obama’s US – it realized that the other side had made the rules; it was time to make them live by them.

Trump saw this, and capitalized on it. Pierre Poilievre, whom Big Left is currently trying to slander back into the underworld, is capitalizing on it. Ron DeSantis could easily capitalize on it.

You mock your opponents into submission? Trump did it better.

You want to block traffic? Hold our beer while we get our trucks.

The energy is there. The leaders that see it will change, but the energy never goes away.

On the one hand, official hypochondria along with privileged lawlessness is polling very badly for the DFL this fall. So the vaccine mandates (and the whole “public safety is a privilege” thing) have got to go.

On the other hand, if DFLers abandon hypochondria, the Karen vote (social, not ethnic) will rebel.

So the mayors chose the middle path: end the useless mandate, keep the useless masks.

After Vietnam, the “physically healthy but psychologically ravaged veteran became part of the American storybook.

Eventually, it turned a spotlight – or at least a flashlight – on the damage veterans of all wars had, but had never really talked about.

I bring that up to set the stage for what may become a far greater psychic plague: PCSD.

Post Covic Stress Syndrome.

Like this…er, person:

Now that “Science!” has intersected with politics – specifically, pre-mid-term polling – and “blue’ governments are dropping restrictions faster than Jacob Frey dropping fashion shoots, look for these veterans of the pestilence to feel just as traumatized and abandoned as John Rambo at the end of First Blood.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Remember my picture from two months ago, complaining the price which had been 2 for $6, had jumped to 2 for $8? It’s up again. Two for $9. But don’t worry, the Lesko Brandon Administration has assured me there is no inflation.

I know what you’re thinking, the earlier picture was from Cub and this one is from HyVee. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. Correct. Because HyVee has it, but Cub does not. Cub has been out of stock for weeks. Which is not a supply chain issue; the Lesko Brandon Administration assures me there are no ships waiting to unload in port, the supply chain problems have been solved.
There can be only one explanation: this is obvious price gouging by greedy corporations in the lucrative retail grocery industry. Senator Warren, are you listening?
Joe Doakes

Somewhere in the Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia, Gus Tostito is rolling in ill-gotten gains, lighting his cigars with $100 bills.

“Sure would be a shame if you couldn’t afford insulin for her”:

“Pass my bill, and it can all go away…”

David Strom, writing on Facebook, sums up what I’ve been wanting/trying to say for much of this past 23 months:

Follow the science is a bullshit phrase, not because science itself is bullshit, but because science at best can only provide input and data on what are not scientific questions.

Science is a branch of knowledge seeking. It is not equipped to provide answers to what are in fact judgment calls. Public policy is at its root about making judgement calls–weighing risks and rewards, costs and benefits, and of course balancing competing rights and goods.

And in fact, no actual scientist believes that the scientific method is, in and of itself, superior to the other methods of seeking knowledge: history, logic, math, philosophy, and so on . They’re all just different tools to similar ends.

Science can help us better understand risks and rewards (when done well, with good data, and the right questions), but it can’t help us weigh those and come up with a “right” answer. If you have ever had a difficult conversation with a doctor you understand this. Doctors give you information upon which you make medical decisions, but in the end they ask you what you want to do based upon your own set of values.

When somebody tells you to “follow the science” they aren’t just making claims about what the science say (and in many cases it isn’t clear), but also to accept their values about how to weigh the costs and benefits.

Consider this extreme example of how important values are in making judgements about behavior (not a public policy example):

Alex Honnold is the world’s best “free solo” climber, and is admired by millions for his skill and grace. He is also, by any measure that values survival above all else, utterly insane. This is true of extreme athletes in general.

Science can tell us nothing about whether what he is doing is admirable or is just off his rocker, but if you watch any interview of him he seems perfectly rational–he just values preservation of his own life as less important than the things he gets from performing his craft.

It’s no different for a ballet dancer or football player, who both sacrifice their body and endure horrible pain to create their art/sport. They balance the risks and rewards based upon their own judgement of what is important. And obviously the answers vary by what individuals value most.

I’m going to emphasize this next bit:

Public policy exists in that same realm, although on a different scale. And public policy in a pluralistic society means that decisions about such matters are made with an eye to balancing the judgments of millions of people and finding artful compromises that garner enough support to be maintained. It’s why we have elections.

“Follow the science” is nothing more than a bullshit way to tarnish the values of people who have different visions of the good society. Science doesn’t speak to values and morals. Ask Josef Mengele. Science is just one of several means to get knowledge. A useful way. But no scientist can use it to tell you whether Monet is a great artist or not.

And yet we have bred a generation and change that believes science…

…no, conclusions given by people in real or rhetorial lab coats = morality.

…that American ingenuity, inventiveness and just plain cantankerousness, is not dead

So – did Mayor Frey promised to push reform of “no knock raids”.

And to hear him discuss it, you’d think he’d made progress:

When you’ve got Channel 4 actually criticizing DFLers’ policies, you know…

…that there’s a crazier DFLer in the wings, who has given the Big Four TV staitons, the Strib and MPR permission to do so.

If this is a ban, I’d hate to see what a no-knock offensive looks like:

It’s amazing how that creeps up on you…

…as it were.

I’m not sure there’s scientific evidence of any of these – but if someone gave me a seven figure government grant, I’m sure I could come up with some.

School Kids “Walking Out Of Class” Is Not Spontaneous: Big Left must be trying to get people to the polls in nine months; the headlines are again full of stories of teenagers “walking out of school” to “protest” “causes”.

Amazingly, there were news cameras waiting right there as they walked out of school, carrying their professionally printed signs!

Those are some pretty motivated, well-funded, well-organized high school kids!

There are, of course, exceptions.

Mascists, Lockdown Fanboys/Fangirls Will Exhibit Deep Psychological Issues When Crisis Fades: The people hectoring you about your mask at Target are having the time of their lives right now. Feeling that they’re saving lives by badgering people about masks, virtue-signalling their vaxx status, and demanding we stay the locked-down course are living out their version of fighting an existential threat – sort of like their grandfathers landing on Utah Beach, only with DoorDash bringing them Oaxacan tacos, left “safely” on their doorsteps.

And like many of those veterans, when the crisis is over, so will end The Best Years Of Their Lives.

I”m picturing a movie in ten years about the readjustment blues and trauma that “veterans” of the pandemic will feel – sort of like Coming Home, only with DoorDash bringing Oaxacan tacos.

The backpedaling has begun. Politicians throughout the U.S. are winding it all down and hoping (against hope) that the blowback won’t be anything approaching what is happening in Ottawa.

Mind you, it’s been peaceful thus far, despite the increasingly manic sputterings of Justin Trudeau, who didn’t think much of those who would suggest a course correction:

“Individuals are trying to blockade our economy, our democracy and our fellow citizens’ daily lives, it has to stop,” Trudeau said in a speech to Canada’s parliament on Monday evening. “People of Ottawa don’t deserve to be harassed in their own neighborhoods. They don’t deserve to be confronted with the inherent violence of a swastika flying on a street corner or Confederate flag.”

Are there actually swastikas flying in the streets of Ottawa? Here’s a recent photo:

Looks like a maple leaf to me, but one never knows.

Trudeau, like many other politicians, senses a reckoning is nigh. And perhaps there will be violence. But don’t count on it coming from the maple-flavored C.W. McCalls currently deployed in the streets of Ottawa. 

It would be easy, and understandable, after watching the rampant property and violent crime, and the rioting that has mangled the quality of life and Innervated, and literally gutted, so many American cities going back to 2015, that the left has no interest in law enforcement.

The dim bulb mayor of Baltimore even described it openly, saying that government needs to give rioters “room to destroy“.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that People on the left can get very creative indeed when it comes to enforcing the laws – provided the “offenders” are on the right.

A friend of the blog sent me this bit of brow furrowing from the Canadian left, on the trucker protests, which appears to be a greater crisis than World War II – and has re-introduced the Canadian left to a fairly radical concept, noted in bold below:

Police are the only ones who can defuse the convoy protest peacefully, said Candyce Kelshall, the president of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies in Vancouver.

“Protest is legal. Breaking the law makes it illegal.

And, almost as if gift wrapped and sent to the Minneapolis police department, and the Hennepin and Ramsey county attorneys offices…:

If police look impotent, that’s the way they are perceived,” said Kelshall. “It emboldens people.”

Huh.

Why, it’s almost as if the enforcement of laws depends on the “criminals” you’re talking about.

I would bet a shiny new quarter that the mayor of Ottawa won’t be abandoning any police stations to the truckers.

A friend of the blog emails

Love this:

This is what sliding into authoritarianism looks like.

During the American revolution, it’s pretty likely a thin majority of the population thought living under the British was juuuust fine.

Nekima Levy-Armstrong, at the demonstration over the weekend outside what may have been the Minneapolis interim chief’s house:

My – she’s kind of a bully, isn’t she?

She’s well on her way to being Al Sharpton.

It was a passive-aggressive MInnesota winter day; a storm threatened to make the afternoon commute miserable, but all it was doing was making traffic between Saint Paul and Minnetonka miserable.

I was working at a little startup that, five months after 9/11, was already exhibiting the stench of death that would soon stalk the high-tech market. I was being managed by two of the stupidest people I’ve ever met in the world of business – a titanic accomplishment, in my various careers.

And I was smack dab in the middle of trying to rebuild my life. Not in the sense that a refugee from Rwanda tries to get back to subsistence – no, nothing that eternal and existential. I was just a guy who’d been divorced a little over a year, busy raising a couple of kids – 10 and 9, at the time – and trying to figure out where I fit into the world.

I didn’t have much of a social circle – for a variety of reasons, the one I had hadn’t survived my ten years of marriage. I certainly hadn’t had the time or, perhaps, the wisdom to rebuild one the conventional way.

And the pall of gathering rot about the company punctuated the sense that had crept over me; a chapter of my life had ended, and I had no idea what the new chapter was. It was more a sense than an idea – but it was real, and it wasn’t a whole lot different than the restlessness I’d been wrestling with 16 years earlier.

Lunchtime came. I pulled out a sandwich – that stench of imminent corporate collapse had turned the social, lunching-three-times-a week crowd I worked with into hermits – and started grazing about the internet.

I got to Time.com, and opened up an article about “The New Generation of Conservative Intellectuals”. That grabbed me. I hadn’t been especially active in thinking about politics, much less actual politics – but I fondly remembered my time as a political talk show host at KSTP in the late ’80s. It was a time I’d felt…

…well, not like I did that day.

I read onward. It introduced a number of writers – most notably, Andrew Sullivan, a gay British writer who was making waves with his blog, a new invention that was sweeping the internet.

I thought “Blog? Good lord, what a stupid word”.

But there was a sidebar piece on “What is a blog”. Which I read. And took notes, to take home.

And that night, after the kids were in bed and the dishes done, I went out to blogger.com, and started writing. After briefly considering calling it “Reel News” – after a “‘zine” I’d fantasized about putting out, back when ‘zines – small, do-it-yourself print magazines – were the bleeding edge of DIY media – I settled on “Shot in the Dark”. It seemed to fit; that’s what it was; that’s what most everything in my life had been. It seemed to fit.

And twenty years later, it still does.

It’s hard to count up all the things that this blog has brought to my life over the past, ahem, two decades. But I’ll try.

It brought me a social life. The “Minnesota Organization of Bloggers” hasn’t really been active in a decade – but the connections that were made haven’t gone anywhere. Some of the best friends I have, I have from doing this.

It brought me a voice. While I started this blog thinking that I might reach 5-10 people a day, I thought that’d be just fine. It was mostly about the writing. While blog traffic isn’t’ what it was 15 years ago, I still reach a lot more than 10 people a day. And even if there were still five people a day clicking into the site, it’d still be an outlet for all the things that have been let out, here, over the past 20 years.

It got me back on the air. This blog led me into contact with John HInderaker and Scott Johnson from Power Line, and Chad, Brian, Atomizer and JB from Fraters LIbertas, King Banaian from SCSU Scholars and Ed Morrissey from Captain’s Quarters, which got noticed by Hugh Hewitt, who dubbed us the Northern Alliance of Blogs, which in turn led us – after another one of those bouts of restlessness of mine – into pitching the idea of doing an all-blogger talk show to AM1280, which incredibly got green-lit by some of the least risk-averse radio management I’ve ever met. And that – for almost 18 years now – has been an unalloyed blessing in my life.

It got, and kept, me independent. Along about 2013, when Facebook promised to take away the content management headaches, and Twitter forcibly limited the length of one’s thoughts, I thought about following a lot of bloggers over to social media. I didn’t think about it long, though. Part of it was suspicion of Big Tech’s motives, even then – which were utterly justified in retrospect. This blog owes nothing to Jeff Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey. Neil Young can bitch about me until he turns blue(er) in the face. I’m here, and I’m not going away until I’m good and ready.

And perhaps most importantly, it’s given me a…what’s the right word? A rhythm.

I’m not a fundamentally orderly person. I thrive on chaos; I’m one of those fish who swims toward the turbulent water. I was increcibly bad at things like “follow-through” (outside work, anyway) and “focus”. I started my adult life in a career – radio – that is chaos incarnate, where changing jobs. yearly is (or was) the norm, and went into another career where a (largely) contractor’s life ion’t a whole lot more stable. It’s been a career that would take a chaotic and spin him into a complete basket case, as indeed I kind of was on the morning of February 5, 2002.

But for the past twenty years, sitting down five mornings a week to write something, has been the beat behind my days. Through cataracts of creativity, and bouts of writer’s block so serious I could taste it, I made it my goal to write something at 6AM, 7AM and 11AM, every weekday, with very few breaks. It might be crap, it might be perfunctory, it might be something I’m enduringly proud of, or something in the great in-between – but hitting those deadlines has lent my life a discipline and focus I didn’t have before.

I finish thoughts. I follow through on actions (more than I did, anyway). I think about “what comes next”.

Obsession? Habit? Therapy? Blessing? Zen exercise?

I can cop to any or all of them.