Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I used $20 of electricity but my bill is nearly $50 because of the taxes and extra fees, including an “affordability” charge.

If you’re trying to make my bill more affordable, shouldn’t that be subtracted instead of added?

Joe Doakes

It’s not about making your bill, or any of our bills, more affordable. It’s about transferring money to the political class, and those whose first they need.

But Joe knows that.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Last year, I was admonished to “Fight for Fifteen.” Okay, but inflation is running around 10%. Fifteen doesn’t buy what it used to. Shouldn’t we update the slogan?

“Fight for Sixteen-and-a-half” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Maybe round it up a bit, get ahead of the game in case Lesko Brandon’s anti-inflation program takes a while to kick in?

“Seventeen or Fight!”

“Aching for Eighteen!”

“Nineteen or Nothing!”

“Give me Twenty or Give me Death!”

Joe Doakes

I mean, after a year of 8% inflation, 15 is suddenly worth about 13…

Last week the International Crisis Group unveiled their op-ed entry in the “Deep Fake: This Is Not The Babylon Bee” competition. Entitled “Another deeply gendered war is being waged in Ukraine,” it is a blinkered attempt to prove that even in the raw violence of war, the Left can still count beans, at least until hungry people taking refuge in a cold basement eat them.

But the Western supporters of Ukraine, especially the US, NATO, and the European Union, who have insisted for more than two decades now that women’s security shapes their approach to dealing with war, have done little to show that gender will be their framework, or even a framework, for addressing Ukraine’s predicament.

The author, Ms. Moaveni, is based in London. She has the freedom and safety to write sentences like the following, freedom bought by other people, many of them men, who were holding weapons, not “Give Peace A Chance” signs.

What might prove most challenging for a traditional gender-sensitive approach to this war is the emerging and dominant glorification of the militarisation of an entire society.

What the author calls the “glorification of the militarisation of an entire society” might also be called a will to survive. Ukraine is being invaded by an army that puts shells through the windows of maternity hospitals and apartment buildings. If the Ukrainian people, men and women alike, want to fight back and preferably not die cold and hungry under the treads of a Russian tank, I say we should salute them, not harangue them about why their first thoughts don’t run to identity politics.

The reference to “two decades” in the first quote is not a random one. In October 2000, U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 1325. The text of it is here. The resolution called for, among other things, the increased participation of women in conflict resolution and in peacekeeping activities.

They’re Iran’s combination of the Saudi religious police, the KGB and the Green Berets.

They were behind the Marine Barracks and US Embassy bombings in Lebanon in the ’80s, which killed hundreds of Americans.

They are known to be directly responsible for killing 600 American service people in Iraq.

They’ve been directly tied to destabilizing most of the governments in the Middle East and Africa, not that many of them need a lot of help in that regard.

They brougth Lebanon and Syria to their knees.

They’ve been waging a horrific war in Yemen.

They are behind most of the attacks against Israel for the past 30 years, and are HAMAS’s main sponsor.

So of course the Brandon administration wants to destigmatize them:

According to Barak Ravid, reporting for Axios, three Israeli officials and two American sources have told him that the Biden administration is considering removing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the terror blacklist if Iran issues a public commitment to de-escalate its activities in the region.

Look at the bright side; it’ll free up CIA and FBI resources to go after the real terrorists, like the Heritage Foundation and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.

Paul Waldman, at the Washington Post…

Over the multiple days of her confirmation hearings for a seat on the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson will have to sit attentively for hours while the 22 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee speechify at her, testing both her endurance and her ability to refrain from rolling her eyes when the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) ascend the heights of inane demagoguery at her expense.

Amid all that pontification, there’s a particular phrase you should watch out for that will likely be repeated dozens of times: “judicial philosophy.” The phrase should raise red flags because it’s a signal that the person using it is about to pull a fast one, either to claim they themselves believe something they really don’t, or to pretend that an attack they’re making on Jackson is far more high-minded than it actually is. … The alternative to all this hogwash would be a little candor.

Our current vice president is a dopey gigglebox whose morning calisthenics consist of struggling to find a coherent thought. Feel the burn! She was picked solely on the basis of her skin color and gender.

Now, our current president, whose Biden Doctrine “I can’t have oatmeal before 8 am because I get gassy” will soon be of interest only to the nurses who wheel him down to the solarium, has nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, the Left’s favorite unaccountable super-legislature. What’s more, she was picked for the exact same reasons as Harris. Given that first steaming example of affirmative action, as fresh as objets d’art on a San Francisco sidewalk, and how that is working out, might Jackson be worth a few pointed questions from a co-equal branch of government before she takes her lifetime appointment, Mr. Waldman?

Click.

To: Senator Warren Limmer, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the entire Senate GOP Caucus

From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant and, hate to say it, guy who’s starting to feel like a bit of a chump

Re: Action

Senators,

Let me direct your attention back to 2002. The GOP had played safe on “shall issue” carry permit reform for years. But in 2002, just in time for those crucial midterms, the GOP doubled down.

The time was right. Every DFLer in greater Minnesota who opposed the bill in the 2002 legislature, got retired from office that fall.

OK. Back to the present. it’s 20 years later, gun rights are in the ascendant. Why are you acting like it’s 1996?

We need to talk.

I supported you. When your people called, I gave you airtime. I voted for you.

Enough of us did to keep you in the majority – last year, against incredible odds, when most of the smart money said we would be falling into the minority again.

A key part of that fairly miraculous performance was the fact that Minnesota’s hundreds of thousands of gun owners turned out for you, come hell or high water.

So here you are, now, sitting on a thin majority, heading into a midterm where all the signs show the people are chomping at the bit to get out and support red meat conservative issues.

So, Senator Limmer, why in the flaming hootie-hoo are you sandbagging us on stand your ground and constitutional carry?

Despite complete GOP control in the Minnesota Senate and years of promises to Minnesota’s law-abiding gun owners, the Senate GOP is not moving on important gun rights legislation.

Call Senator Warren Limmer, Chair of Senate Judiciary, TODAY and demand hearings on Constitutional Carry and Stand Your Ground.

Then visit our Action Center at http://gunowners.mn/action and send an email to your State Rep & Senator demanding action on this important gun rights legislation.

They’ve made campaign promises of support for these bills for years – let’s hold their feet to the fire to take action!

If I may speak frankly – and it’s my blog, so I certainly may – you have played it too safe, and squandered opportunities to move the needle, for far too long.

Please see to this ASAP.

That is all.

I personally detest inter-generational politics, and the identitymongering that lt breeds. Few things make me want to clap a couple of cinderblocks around someones head like Bugs Bunny playing the cymbals on Elmer Fudds noggin like some moronic little twerp chirping “OK, Boomer”, or “Go get your participation trophy, Millie”, for that matter.

But you know your “generation” spends too much time navel-gazing about itself when people start writing bilge like this about it.

I’m not sure that the Biden administration, like the Obama administration before it, is undertaking multigenerational effort to destroy this nations “red” heartland.

But if they were, I wonder what they would be doing differently?

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Suppose you build a better mousetrap and the world beats a path to your door. That’s a good thing, right? Creativity? Progress? Jobs?

No, it’s a public nuisance, all those people driving their cars to your store, tying up traffic, idling engines (which cause global climate change). Cars backed up in the turning lane interfere with bicycles, the ne plus ultra of moral superiority and the highest form of virtue signaling there is.

The City must shut you down, for the good of all. Heinlein was right.

Joe Doakes

See also: the Starbucks at Snelling at Marshall in St. Paul.

In part 1 and part 2, we looked at some of the stories that can be found in Roman Britain and what they had to say to us today.

Let’s begin our final visit to Roman Britain by retasking our Keyhole satellite to the north of England. This is York.

Let’s do the exercise we started with. Just by looking at the street patterns, can you see where medieval York was? Here’s a rough outline.

There’s more to it though. York was founded by the Romans in 71 AD, about 30 years after they first arrived in Britain. Some of the local tribes were becoming increasingly hostile and Rome felt it needed a military presence in the area. A legion (the Ninth Legion, the so-called Lost Legion) marched up there and built a fort, and built it like they knew how. It’s a bit harder to see, but here’s a very rough outline of where what they called Eboracum was, at the point where the two rivers come together. York’s magnificent cathedral sits within the footprint of the fort.

Big Left is slowly eating itself – a pattern all leftist institutions, from Mao’s Politburo to Pacifica News eventually recap.

Most lately: yesterday, I heard a couple of feminist congruence-checkers masquerading as NPR correspondents on the drearily, pointlessly breezy “It’s Been a Minute” fulminating about this next bit: filmmarker Jane Campion has been raked over the coals for what, to be fair, may have been a bit of sloppy rhetoric (emphasis added):

“Venus and Serena, you are such marvels. However, you do not play against the guys, like I have to,” Campion said, referring to the four male directors who were also nominated in the best director category.:

I have to imagine Campion is horrified by how her statement was received; Campion, a fairly keen observer, has to know that it’s utterly politically incorrect to say any woman can’t kick any man’s ass at any activity whatsoever. Have some faith, people.

Speaking of which:

Huh.

Kevin Williamson successfully articulated something I couldn’t quite, myself, over this past few weeks, as American “liberals” have gone from flirting with police defunders to cheerleading for no-fly zones: it’s the dawn of the neo-neocon. All of the neo, none of the (visible) con.

The war has produced a bull market in what I suppose we have to call neo-neo-conservatism, with Democrats and center-Left figures suddenly rediscovering the uses — and necessity — of American hard power. You won’t find a better example of this than Professor Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution, who in a recent conversation with Jonah Goldberg was at pains to distance himself from anything that might be called “conservative” or “Bushian,” in his words. Instead, Professor Hamid insisted, responsible liberals such as himself (1) have kept true to their principles while other elements of the Democratic coalition have descended into mad radicalism and identity politics; (2) understand that the alternative to American hegemony is Chinese hegemony or Russo-Chinese hegemony; and (3) being worldly cosmopolitans, admit that it is entirely understandable that Europeans take a different view of European refugees than they do of, say, Muslim refugees from Syria, whose culture and religion inevitably make it more difficult to assimilate them.

For those of you keeping score at home, Professor Hamid here has channeled (1) Ronald Reagan (“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party — the Democratic Party left me!”); (2) George W. Bush (an axis of what, now?); and, perhaps most surprising, (3) Pat Buchanan, once denounced as a vile racist for asking hypothetically whether Virginia would have an easier time assimilating 1 million English immigrants or 1 million Zulu immigrants.

Everything old is truly new again.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve had my complaints about Amazon; and I recognize the social and economic threat posed by a single vendor running everybody else out of business; but consider:

I’ve been reading SciFi/Fantasy books my whole life. I just ran across a recommendation for The Chronicles of Prydain, which I’d never heard of. Placed my order for the five-book boxed set ($33) and it’ll be here tomorrow. Wait, what? I stumble across some random collection of young adult books and they’ve got it sitting in the warehouse in Shakopee? How big is that place?

On Friday, I tried out my new Beofung UV-5R handheld ham radio ($25 and yes, I hold a Technician license so it’s legal for me to talk on it). The ham I was chatting with said he could hardly hear me over the background noise. Might be a bad unit, Chinese junk, it happens. I went to Amazon to order a second unit – keep the one that works, return the other. Okay, it’ll be there in five hours. Wait, what? I realize it’s the most popular ham radio in the world so of course they have it in the warehouse, but if I order in the next 20 minutes it’ll be delivered to my doorstep tonight? For free? How many delivery drivers does Amazon have?

I saved a trip to Barnes and Noble (which probably would have been wasted because their SF/F section is only five shelves out of the entire store), and saved a trip to the Ham Radio Outlet in Milwaukee (last Twin Cities store closed two years ago), paid the same prices as I’d have paid brick-and-mortar stores and got free delivery to my doorstep faster than I could have driven to the store and back.

Retail has changed over time. The pioneers bought whatever limited selection of goods was stocked in the local General Store because they had no choice. Later, they ordered from the Sears catalogue for greater selection and department stores drove the mom-and-pop stores out of business. Now Amazon’s wider selection and faster delivery has driven Sears out of business. There’s a reason Amazon is taking over the retail world. And you know what? I’m surprisingly okay with it. What I want to know is . . . what’s next?

Joe Doakes

Artisanal bartering?

In part 1 we touched on how the past can influence the present in ways that might be easy to overlook, and how the past can remind us of the importance to defend that which we hold dear.

We had looked at part of the story of Colchester in England and I had said there was something else there that could add to our discussion. It is here, just outside the southwest corner of the old Roman fort, next to the traffic circle and next to the police station.

This is likely the earliest known church in Britain. It’s hard to date with exactness, but it probably dates to the mid 4th century.

Here’s a closer look, courtesy of VisitColchester.

While Christianity had likely come to Britain some time before this church was built, the ease with which Christianity could spread and flourish throughout the Roman Empire was greatly facilitated by Constantine the Great and the Edict of Milan. In a sense though, the Good News was too late for Britain. This church was a symbol of a hopeful future, but a future that ultimately was overtaken by events.

State senator John Marty – he of the radical gun control bill that the progressive caucus his flogging in the legislature, to try and fluff up progressive morale – took a picture at the “Moms Demand Action” rally in front of the Minnesota state capital earlier this week.

Here it is:

Pretty impressive photo.

But…it sure is a nice tight angle shot, isn’t it?

There’s a reason for that. Here’s the wide shot of the same scene:

Another angle? Sure:

Since roughly the 2002 election, gun control in Minnesota has been a mile wide and an inch deep.

And, at least in Minnesota, at least this year,, where Michael Bloomberg‘s money is going to states where they’ve got a chance of cramming down a symbolic victory, and not paying to drag “community groups” out for “spontaneous”, “community” protests, it’s not even that wide.

One out of six Biden voters would have changed their votes, had they known about the Hunter Biden laptop story. That would’ve been more than enough to turn a close election into a landslide for Donald Trump.

It’s being noted that, two years later, the New York Times is finally covering the story.

But it was never “disinformation”, nosirreebob.

The idea that this is not the plan, to say nothing of “non-accidental,“ is impossible to the point of being a media unicorn descending from heaven.

We know this, because three weeks after the election, representatives from the New York Times and Washington Post news rooms (speaking in the open, on a national public radio program), declared their mission to be to go to change the walls” of the media, from “passing on the facts and telling the story“ to “denormalizing Donald Trump“.

Do people think there is no connection?

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

There is a massive effort by the Lesko Brandon administration to paint the situation in Ukraine as black-and-white, endlessly trumpeted in the mainstream media and vigorously enforced by suppressing opposing viewpoints on social media (while selectively suspending their own rules against ‘violence’ to promote ‘Kill Putin’ posts). There’s never a measured analysis, a weighing of costs versus benefits, an explanation of Why and How which rational minds could use to decide Why Not and How Not.

I reminds me of the massive effort by the Democrats to paint the Afghan retreat as black-and-white; the vaccine situation as black-and-white; the Covid virus as black-and-white; St. George of Fentanyl as black-and-white (okay, that one actually was black-and-white, but not in the way I mean). Every Democrat disaster is a morality play with Democrats as Good and everyone else as Evil and no middle ground for compromise.

But real life is rarely black-and-white. Eventually, the truth leaks out. There is significant evidence Covid was simply a bad flu made deadly not but nature, but by the political response. There is significant evidence the election was not fortified against being stolen, it was stolen and the evidence fortified against being found. There is significant evidence the vaccine is not without risk, Ukraine is not without fault, the Afghan bug-out was not without consequence. Eventually, people figure out they’ve been lied to, by politicians of course (which we expect) but also by media talking heads (which we expect on THOSE channels but not on ours) and even by our own doctors (which we did not expect at all).

So why do they do it?

Do they seriously think we’re going to believe the price of gas is due to Putin’s acts in February, when the price of gas has been going up for months?

Do they seriously think we’re going to believe more dollars chasing fewer goods hasn’t caused inflation, when we’ve been seeing grocery prices rise all year?

Do they seriously think we’re going to believe de-funding the police had nothing to do with rampaging carjackers and record-breaking shootings?

How stupid do they think we are?

Joe Doakes

As I’ve been maintaining for years: it’s not how stupid they think we are, it’s how stupid they are counting on us being.

Cities have memories, especially old cities. If you were walking down a street in a city you’ve lived in all your life, you probably wouldn’t stop to think this street has been here for as long as I remember. It was here in my parents’ time, it was here in my grandparents’ time. This street has been here for centuries, but if we went back far enough, there would be a time when the street didn’t exist. So why is it here, in this place? What influences dictated that this street follow this path?

This is Colchester, in the southeast of England. It was known to the Romans as Camulodunum. The Romans invaded England in 43 A.D. and made Britain a Roman province, and Colchester is not far from where the Romans came ashore. For a time it was the administrative capital for the Roman occupation. Initially it was fortified with walls, but the walls were taken down and Colchester became a kind of retirement community for legion soldiers.

Around 60 A.D., about the exact same time the Apostle Paul was beginning his two-year house arrest in Rome, Queen Boudicca led a large-scale rebellion against the Romans. Her forces attacked the undefended town and destroyed Colchester and its inhabitants. Some residents holed up in the temple the town was known for and held out for a couple of days until they were overwhelmed. (The temple was where the castle now sits. The castle was built over the foundations of the temple.) Boudicca and her forces went on to attack what was then London and St. Albans. It is thought that upwards of 70,000 people were killed in the rebellion.

One of the Roman legions had been campaigning all the way over in Wales. When they received word of what had happened, they hurried back and helped put down the rebellion and were rather brutal about it. Having learned their lesson, and now acutely aware of the dangers in Britain, the Romans rebuilt the walls of Colchester, and rebuilt it according to doctrine. (A doctrine recorded by Vegetius in his De re militari, the only known surviving Roman field manual.) Typically their forts were four-sided, either square or rectangular, with a central road connecting two sides, and if it were large enough, another road connecting the other two sides (via praetoria and via principalis).

Just from looking at the street patterns, can you see where the fort they built was? The city remembers. Roads needed to go around these walls, long stretches of which still exist today, and today streets still follow those paths laid down millennia ago. The High Street, or Main Street, through town still follows the old Roman artery through the fort. A rough outline of the old Roman fort is after the break.

One of my hobbies over the past fifteen years or so has been trying to get some of my favorite bloggers from the halcyon days of Minnesota blogmongery to stay, if only a little bit, in the game.

With a few – Johnny Roosh, Bogus Diane – success was fleeting. But it was great while it lasted.

With others – not gonna name names – other priorities called. [1]

With still others – Mr. D, First Ringer – well, it worked, we found a niche, and they still do some writing in this space. My deal’s always been “write whenever the spirit moves you” – and they do. And for that I’m grateful.

And one whose writing I’ve been missing for well over a decade, since he retired Peace Like a River, is Jeff Kouba, one of my favorite writers in a medium and “scene” full of great writers.

And after at least a decade of trying, we’re going to fix that. Jeff starts writing at SITD later today. As with Mr. D and Ringer, it’s all whenever he feels like writing.

And I’ll be thrilled to see him back!

Check back later this morning.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The US keeps troops in the Middle East to prop up the governments of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates so we can buy their oil at favorable prices. All the sudden, Saudi Arabia and the UAE won’t take our calls?

Might be time to think about redeploying US troops elsewhere. Those Yemeni Houthi rebels we’ve been keeping off your backs? Have fun with that.

Joe Doakes

I don’t know. I take that as more of a “this is how bad things have gotten on the foreign policy front since Joe Biden came along to save our worldwide…”

Former secretary-general of NATO Anders Rasmussen notes the grievous mistakes NATO made in the late 2000s on his watch w/r/t Putin and Russia.

When I took office in 2009, I reached out to the Russians and told them it’s one of my priorities to develop such a strategic partnership, despite the fact that one year earlier they had attacked Georgia. So we have done a lot. But maybe Putin misread our thoughts and I think [that a] lesson learned from history is that appeasement with dictators does not lead to peace, it leads to war and conflict.

I mean, when it comes to learning lessons, better late than never.

And it’d seem some traditionally neutral countries are learning from others mistakes:

NATO is prepared to welcome both Finland and Sweden. I would say an application from Finland and Sweden could be approved more or less overnight. And let me add to this: I think it would be in the self-interest of Finland and Sweden to join NATO right now. Because now they have a window of opportunity. Putin is engaged [somewhere else], so that window might soon close again.

So it’s right now that Finland and Sweden should use the opportunity to join NATO. And that would send an extremely important signal to Putin, and

And it appears that, after three decades of lukewarm pragmatism that followed four decades of treaty-mandates neutrality, public opinion in Finland is turning toward joining as well (you’re on you own for the translation).

A friend of the blog emails regarding the civil liberties situation in Canada.

Remember that?

Anyhoo:

Did people get their bank accounts unlocked?

Do they still have to get vaxxed?

guess we forgot about Canada

To wax conspiratorially for a moment? I don’t think anyone was “forgotten”.

…about this kind of thing, City of Saint Paul?

Building permits in Saint Paul are off 80% since “rent control” passed:

The rent control ordinance passed in St. Paul last November is having exactly the consequences that were predicted before it was passed. If you set a price below a market price, you increase demand relative to supply, worsening the very shortages the price control was meant to fix.

From a MinnPost piece:

With three months of data on the books since the passage of the rent control measure in November, results are rather grim for anyone hoping for new apartment buildings in St. Paul. Compared to the same period during the previous year, multifamily building permits are down over 80 percent. Meanwhile, in Minneapolis overall construction is up as the economy has rebounded.

And it’s worse than that. Landlords are jacking up rents, fast, because they know that with inflation gutting the rest of their budgets, they’re not going to get another chance.

And yet the rent control advocates – highly schooled but uneducated drones that they are – still say this is about making housing affordable.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The US keeps troops in the Middle East to prop up the governments of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates so we can buy their oil at favorable prices. All the sudden, Saudi Arabia and the UAE won’t take our calls?

Might be time to think about redeploying US troops elsewhere. Those Yemeni Houthi rebels we’ve been keeping off your backs? Have fun with that.

Joe Doakes

I’ve been obeying Berg‘s 18th law pretty religiously. I mean, it makes sense – I wrote it, right?

So when I saw this case – of a Minneapolis homeowner who shot a burglar in her backyard, several weeks ago – I went quiet on the case for a bit.

The story went a little like this: the burglar entered the woman’s backyard, couldn’t get into the house, and then broke into the garage. The homeowner went to investigate with a pistol.

So far so good. W

When the guy didn’t leave, she then fired four warning shots.

As the story goes, the man then advanced on the woman, causing her to shoot him with a rifle (whose arrival on the scene may or may not have been related to her son, who had been standing guard inside the house with a rifle, perhaps the one used in the shooting).

Clearly there is some part of the story that isn’t public knowledge, yet.

The media responded the way they frequently seem to dec cases like this – with a borderline hagiography of the deceident. Worst, the case was apparently investigated shortly after the shooting, and the Hennepin County attorneys office – one of the more anti-gun jurisdictions in Minnesota Dash declined to prosecute. At which point, “the public“ Dash read “Nekima Levy Armstrong”, according to some rumors, the de facto arbiter of all justice in Hennepin County – went to the county attorney and demanded another look.

So, possibly at second glance, the results are back:

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman says they don’t have evidence to disapprove a self-defense argument.

“While this case is tragic, there is not sufficient proof that the homeowner and/or her son are guilty of a crime,” a news release from the county attorney reads. “Based on the evidence provided to our office, it appears the woman and her son would have valid self-defense claims.”

Not sure what we don’t know about this case, but it’s got to be interesting.