What to do if you’re surrounded by a mob on the road?
Like most self-defense law, it’s a lot more complicated than you think.
While the lawyer is talking Washington State law (talk with a Minnesota defense attorney before assuming anything) they highlight the episode that happened in Minneapolis, by the Walker, a month or so ago.
Forewarned is forearmed.
…by this point that nobody who supports absurdly high minimum wages at a policy-making level can possibly actually believe that it’s about helping working people, can you?
“Experts” have gotten a bad name over the past couple years.
It’s a fun palate cleanser, once in a while, to see the real thing in action.
Ian “Gun Jesus” McCallum goes over the reports that Hamas is “manufacturing its own sniper rifles”.
The thumbnail is kind of a spoiler – but seeing how he got there is fascinating for technology geeks.
Back in high school, there were two radio stations in Jamestown. Up above White Drug was KEYJ, my station, a little 1,000 watt AM station whose boss, Bob Richardson, always made a point of hiring local kids and showing them how to do radio.
Across First Avenue, above the jewelry store, was KSJB and KSJM. KSJB was a 5,000 watt station at 600 kilocycles – which meant it covered six states and two Canadian provinces, and broadcast couintry music and lots and lots of farm market reports. It was a big station, and – at least when I was a kid – hired pretty serious air talent for the region. High school kids? Never.
KSJM, at 93.7 FM, was a little FM pop station. It was “automated”, which is the norm in radio stations today (most music radio uses computers to splice together commercials, music and “voice-tracked” dropins from “disk jockeys” who’ve never jockeyed a disk), but was not common back then, done with reel to reel tapes and carousels of cartridge machines and clunky analog computers. I rarely listened to KSJM when I was a kid – there were much better rock stations available, even in that part of North Dakota.
Also back in high school in Jamestown, everyone knew the Ebertz family. They’d gone to high school with my dad, who had in turn taught a generation of two of Ebertz kids and cousins. One of them ran a cafe that was an institution in Jamestown.
One day, sometime about my senior year of high school or freshman year of college, I heard that Pat Ebertz had finagled his way into doing some disk-jockeying on KSJM. It wasn’t much – a few hours on weekends – but it was a fun little burst of local radio. And as someone who’s done a lot of “do it yourself radio” over the years and today, the idea grabbed me.
I moved to the Twin Cities, and inadvertently slipped back into radio. And it was a few years later – probably 1991 – when I was at KDWB when the jock I was producing, “Michael Knight”, was on the phone with his old buddy, Pat Ebertz, from his old station, KNOX in Grand Forks. We talked for a bit – he’d stayed in the biz.
I was just about to leave it, actually – within a few weeks, I’d bail on KDWB, and not set foot in a radio station for another 11 years.
But Pat made the move to the Cities a few months later, latching on at KDWB, where he spent years as a producer and sidekick for Dave Ryan. Being music radio, fashions change and jobs come and go fast – but Pat had a long run at the 101.3. I heard he’d moved to Saint Cloud and was at the Top40 station there, and then recently that he’d latched on with Tom Barnard. We hadn’t talked in decades.
Someone sent me this yesterday:
My condolences to the whole Ebertz clan. From another radio do-it-yourselfer.
I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and say that either…
For his sake, I’m going to cross my fingers and hope for “b”.
Among the “setter projects” that Americans established as we (yes) conquered the North American continent, along with representative democracy, were universities.
And I’m thinking that those are among the “settler projects”…
…that actually need to be dismantled.
Or at least, it’s time for an actual honest-to-god McCarthy-style purge of Universities.
Caught in passing from Rep. Murphy:
Cute. But it’s actually up to Democrats to show that Ukrainian aid is more important to them than closing the southern border of the US.
Glad we could settle that.
Ever noticed how it’s one, and only one, side of our political debate that gets to block freeways and run riot with impunity, or functionally close to it?
My favorite example – when the gang of droogs pulled over the statue of Christopher Columbus on the Minnesota state capitol mall in 2020, no arrests were made (even though it happened with a squad of Highway Patrol were standing right there). Eventually, one “ringleader” surrendered – and was “sentenced” to…
…teach children about the evils of Christopher Columbus.
Of course, no conservative who pulled down the statue of authoritarian socialist scumbag Floyd Olson would expect not to do serious jail time – because there are two justice systems in Minnesota. One for the far left and those they favor, and one for the rest of us.
Imagine Pro-Life Action MInistries trying to block a road? There’d be water cannon and attack dogs, and the media would be busy covering the new all-womens-sports bar as they carted the injured protesters off to jail.
But the favored classes?
And sympathizers with Big Left’s favorite fascists?
Why, it’s almost like they want regular schmucks to be afraid to go about their day, or poke their heads up where radar can see them.
More later this week.
Rabbi Schmuley relates this episode in Paris.
No, of course it’s not Paris. It’s New York. (Although if that giggle trollop girl is 11 years old, I’m 18.
But this is…Christmastime in the USA today.
UPDATE: Schmuley seems to bring them out of the woodwork:
I’ve probably written this before. And that’s OK.
I make a point of being – in modern parlance – “radically joyful” during the Christmas season.
Let me explain.
As I pointed out in memorializing my mom last year, her and my father gave us what I now know to be a priceless gift; a boring, mostly drama-less childhood. Christmases were always low-key, but – crazy as this may seem – they were *happy*.
I get it – there are people with all manner of trauma in their lives. Not everyone has great associations with the season. But there’s also a cynicism to modern life; a crowd that seems to think that whizzing on the idea of a *happy Christmas* is the thing to do.
I went through a stage in my life where I was around people whose primary emotion around Christmas was stress. The names, and for that matter the stages, aren’t that important, and I’m not judging, or even discussing, the motivations – the point being, Christmases exuded stress, panic, misery and tension.
I hated it.
And I had little kids at the time. And for what it was worth, I figured I was going to try to pass on some of the joy I still held onto.
And so, on some dark, tense, difficult Christmas long ago, I resolved that I was going to be happy, whatever it took. To “crap sunshine”, as one of my more charming mentors put it.
There was some psychology to it. I’d read a biography of photographer Robert Capa, which had included an old Hungarian saying – “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”. And while I didn’t know it at the time, that’s true in a lot of things in life – “fake it til you make it” can be a very helpful principle. For everyone, in every situation? Of course not.
But it worked for me. The less counsel I took of the stress and tension, and the more I pushed “joy”, the less I needed to push, and the further into the back that stress and tension faded.
The best way to become happy is to act as if you already are.
Anyway – whatever Christmas is to you, and yours, I hope you have a happy and blessed one!
I saw Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” two years ago.
“Whaaaaat? You never saw…”
That’s what I freaking said. I somehow managed not to see the movie until Christmas-time, 2021.
I probably watched it 4-5 times that season, and a couple more last year and this.
But I wasn’t aware that there was another ending…:
Speaking of movies – it’s become clear in recent years that the only thing needed to call a film a “Chrismas Movie” is any intersection with Christmas of any kind, no matter how tangential.
So with that in mind, here is the list of the top 12 “Chrfistmas Movies”:
But whatever you think is really a Christmas movie, I wish you and yours a happy one.
I recorded an “evergreen” Christmas Weekend broadcast. Merry Christmas!
Here’s the song list:
Let’s take a look back to last May.
I started this post at the end of the session, last May, amid the DFL was doing its endzone happy dance over having gotten their way on literally everything during the session,
Here’s Rep Long – who in normal times one would be tempted to call “one of Minneapolis’s more annoying legislators”, but “progressivism” has lapped him a few times on that count:
They sure loved to prattle on about “gridlock being over”, didn’t they?
The Strib cheered on the home team! Here was a rare photo from last year of Governor Walz not eating something:
And here, one of them rejoices that the trains will run on time.
Or something like that.
This tweet caught my eye last spring – someone had a clue what was going on.
Today, of course, the “surplus” (which wasn’t) is long gone. There’s going to be a deficit in the next biennium, even if the economy hangs on.
All as predicted.
A Look Ahead To The Ghost Of DFL Excuse-Making Future
Budget deficit of $2.5 Billion Plus?
I was a punk fan from the beginning. I may have been one of two people in Jamestown to have had a copy of the Sex PIstols first album. I don’t think my parents would have approved – but that was kinda the point, wasnt it?
I’ve been a fan of Pistols lead singer John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon – the Elvis Presley of punk rock as the leader of the Sex Pistols from 1975-1978 – since I was a teenager. And I’ve gotten to be more of a fan over the past 20-odd years, as he’s shown himself to be quite a political and social free thinker, breaking from the monolithic showbiz narrative on a *lot* of issues (albeit not all, but then, he’s John Lydon).
But…
…I was today years old when I learned that Lydon was married to the same woman for 44 years, withdrawing from much of public life for the past five years to take care of her while she was suffering from of Alzheimers before dying last month.
He also raised the children of his wife’s daughter (Ariane “Ari Up” Forster, also a punk icon) – the oldest two after Forster gave up trying to raise them (they’d essentially grown up wild, almost as art projects, and as teenagers couldn’t read, write or form complete sentences) and the youngest after Up died of cancer in 2010.
Now, if I could just run down the accuracy of that persistent rumor that Joe Strummer had become a bit of a Tory before he died, that’d be a perfect Christmas present.
In the book Red Storm Rising – Tom Clancy’s second novel, released around 1985, at the height of the Cold War, and tho only Clancy novel that didn’t focus on Jack Ryan, his family and his professional and social circle – the protagonist, obscure intelligence analyst John Toland, connects the dots among several events – a Chechen terrorist attack on an oil refinery, its attendant economic turmoil – and becomes concerned about a possible Soviet invasion.
The line that connects all the dots? The Soviet government releases an updated version of the 1938 film Aleksander Nevsky, Sergei Eisenstein’s historical drama about the eponymous Nevsky, getting the quarreling Russian nobility to shelve their differences and set about repelling a Teutonic invasion in the Middle Ages.
Am I butchering the plot worse than Nevsky butchering the hapless Germans? Perhaps. Here – watch for yourself:
Finer plot points notwithstanding, the movie is intensely nationalistic – which got the film shelved, and then un-shelved after Barbarossa and the invasion of the USSR.
The point – as John Toland put it in Red Storm Rising – was that whenever the Communists wanted to whip up a nationalistic frenzy against the West, they’d trot out Nevsky. Which was, indeed, the case in the book, as the USSR let slip the dogs and tanks and artillery of war, in what became one of the better, and final, fictional novels of World War 3.
So, Hollywood is doing a fictional “civil war” movie, featuring an A-list….
…well, B+-list cast, a big-name sci-fi director, an apparently significant budget…:
…and a fairly bizarre premise: that DC, New York and the Midatlantic states, Texas and Califonria will be allied against, I suspect, a bunch of of blockheaded rednecks and roobz from Florida and most of “flyover land”.
The movie is billed as science-fiction, but the sides drawn appear to be more fiction than science;
Little has been released about the plot, although speculation is running hot:
The reasoning behind the seemingly bizarre alliance of Texas and California in the film points to the notion that the war isn’t over Democrat and Republican politics but more about Offerman’s corrupt three-term Presidency. The United States federal government has apparently disavowed its allegiance to the United States Constitution and is now held under the budding dictatorship of Offerman’s tyrannical President.
The reasoning behind the seemingly bizarre alliance of Texas and California in the film points to the notion that the war isn’t over Democrat and Republican politics but more about Offerman’s corrupt three-term Presidency.ent.
So, maybe it’s not a Blue-Vs.-Red thing, as such.
But coming in the immediate aftermath of a state supreme court ruling that has just served as a Reichstag fire for those on both sides insisting that they are fighting intractable anti-democratic forces on both sides – a decision that has raised the temperature and lowered the signal-to noise ratio and increased the likelihood of a, let’s just call it “less than reasoned” response to any election result next year, is this really the media cue we want to be sending out?
“Depends on which “we” you’re talking about, doesn’t it, Mitch?”
Why, yes – it does.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is loading some garage junk into a truck. He doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE, whjo is walking up the alley writing down the addresses of homes without handicap parking spots.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Uh…
LIBRELLE: Christian Nationalists can’t handle freedom of religion! They’re having a cow and melting down over a Satan Club at a school!
BERG: Huh.
LIBRELLE: What do you have to say about that?
BERG: Other than “Satanism is a religion in exactly the same way as “The Onion” is, only even less funny? It exists only to mock faith. Well, to mock Christianity. It’s not a worldview. It’s a running adolescent jape.
LIBRELLE: You’re gonna crrrryyyyyyyyyyyy…
BERG: So, if a school had an “Amos and Andy” club, or a “Speedy Gonzales” club, or an “Apu” Club, or a “Boring Basketball” club, do you think Blacks, Latinos, Indian-Americans or women might take umbrage?
(But LIBRELLE is already skipping, literally, down the alley.
And SCENE>
I’m a little old-fashioned in a lot of ways. I guess part of it goes along with being a conservative. And/or a Christian. And/or a decent human being.
Which is why seeing the current statistics about the beliefs of the younger Gen-Zs seem so very catastrophic to me.
Huge percentages of people from the late teens through late 20s:
It’s to them that I commend this Israeli documentary about the massacre at the Nova dance party – drawn entirely from footrage from partygoers and the terrorists themselves.
It’s all in Hebrew and Arabic – but it’s easy enough, and utterly terrifying, to figure out for yourself what’s going on anyway, as the film spirals from ecstasy-soaked rave through “Iron Domes” bursting in the distance, to swarms of goons with AKs and RPGs murdering and grenading civilians, fleeing and hiding for their lives.
And in my unguarded moments tempted to tell actual humans to force their acquaintances who believe it’s all a conspiracy to watch it. Jamming it down their throats if necessary. With a stick and a hammer, if needed.
But that’d be uncivil, wouldn’t it?
Almost as uncivil as hoping the IDF strangles the last Hamas terrorist with his own entrails.
PS: you can have my gun when you pry it from my cold head hand.
PPS: Palestinian Arabic is an extraordinarily ugly sounding language.
If you aren’t running on this…
…for the love of all that is holy, please tell me why?
To: The Minnesota Republican Party
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Stragegery
Republicans,
Wanna cause a stampede of voters outside the 494/694 loop?
Make this person – Rep. Sandy Feist – the face of the MNDFL.
Her and her pet billl (I’ve added emphasis):
The Minnesota Legislature is considering a bill that would require all public and charter schools to make menstrual products available in school bathrooms, including boys’ bathrooms.
The bill, House File 44, would make it so “A school district or charter school must provide students access to menstrual products at no charge. The products must be available in restrooms used by students in grades 4 to 12.” …
“There are a lot of schools that are moving towards gender-neutral bathrooms, and if we add ‘female,’ we might become obsolete very quickly,” Feist said.
“Second, not all students who menstruate are female,” Feist continued. “We need to make sure all students have access to these products. There are obviously less non-female menstruating students and therefore their usage will be much lower. That was actually calculated into the cost of this.”
Business output is down 9%. Investment is cratering.
And Sandra Feist’s priority is giving middle-school boys lots of materials for practical jokes.
Sincerely,
That is all.
…that the Venn diagram of people who were dumping on Lauren Boebert’s drunken (and let’s be honest, tacky and ill-advised) make-out last summer…
…and people who are excusing, celebrating and even…uh…
…celebrating a couple of Democrat aides filming gay porn in the US Senate is a circle.
I can’t help but wonder – when he said “I would never disrespect my workplace” – what does he think doing the nasty in the nation’s upper deliberative chamber is? And what would “respect” look like?
Chaser: At least one rumor says Maese-Czeropski’s, uh, film set was Amy Klobuchar’s desk.
Watch out for flying binders!
I wonder if the members of the DFL “coalition”…
…will start to put together for themselves how much of that “alliance” is built on social gaslighting and browbeating by their white, pronouned, “progressive” overseers. (and, naturally, their “leaders” bellying up to the trough for their graft paymetns)?
As predicted by yours truly about this time a year ago, the DFL squandered a $18B “surplus” [1]
The DFL is contratulating itself that it still has a surplus of a couple billion dollars – which is a little like jumping from the top of the IDS building, opening your eyes and seeing the 20th floor, and thinking “Hey, I’m at the 20th floor, I guess I’m OK”.
The DFL has spent the state into debt.
Minnesota passed a humungous budget in the last session. To make that possible, they drew from other funds well outside of general funds, such as special revenue funds and money from the federal government.
For Health and Human Services spending, for example, lawmakers loosened eligibility and working requirements for cash assistance programs. The cost of these changes — which is about $50 million — is currently being funded by federal TANF dollars until the 2027 fiscal year.
And it’s actually much worse than that:
Once the state starts paying for these with state dollars in 2028, spending will go up. And if current events are any indication, the cost of these new changes will likely have blown past $50 million by then.
Additionally, lawmakers also allocated over $2 billion in extra funding to Medicaid. Until 2027, over half of the money will come from the Health Care Access Fund (HCAF) — a special revenue fund that has historically been used for MinnesotaCare. If at any point in the future, HCAF cannot sustain this new Medicaid spending, it will have to be shifted to the general fund.
And, go figure – the economically-illiterate DFL have killed a bunch of the golden geese (aka ripe suck citizens) that usually pay for DFL gigantism:
For one, Minnesota heavily relies on income taxation. But our income tax system is highly progressive. So, the state disproportionately relies on a small portion of the state’s high-earning individuals, which is in itself a problem.
Unfortunately, this problem was made worse last session, when lawmakers passed targeted “tax cuts” that have eliminated or reduced income tax liability for select taxpayers, such as social security income recipients and low-income parents with children. This has narrowed the individual income tax base even further.
And let’s not forget that high-income earners have already been fleeing Minnesota and going to low-tax states like Florida.
The recent changes to the tax system do not just narrow the income tax base, however. According to MCFE, these targeted tax cuts and tax redesigns have substituted less volatile sources of income tax revenue — such as salaries and social security — with the most volatile sources — such as corporate income — putting the state further in a precarious position.
I”m not in on the DFL’s planning, but I suspect it involves reliance on two things:
After all, that [2] is what got them through 2022.
[1] Which was a bit of a mirage, to be honest – made up of limited-time Federal stimulus money and taxation of economic activity spurred by other government-stimulated spending.
[2] Well, and that whole Roe V.Wade thing, of course.
I was reliably informed that the DFL’s spending spree was going to “reduce poverty by 30%”, and that “Bidenomics” was a new golden age.
And yet…:
Apparently the (checks scorecard) Mainstream Media are now spreading Russian disinformation.
Wonder why Big Left’s noise machine was so quick to try to gundeck The Fall of Minneapolis?
Because they’re smart enough to see that it coud change some minds.
In this case, the minds of academic Glenn Loury and the NYTimes’s John McWhorter – both of whom formerly bought Big Left’s story on the events of May 2020.
And both of whom re-evaluated things pretty radically:
Haven’t seen it yet? Make up your own mind.
This fellow – a Doctor of Intersectional Grievance Studies – is sure nuff gonna show his neighbors what’s what:
Where to start:
Having spent at least eight years getting a PhD in Intersectional Grievance Studies, it’s understandable he’s not clear on the nuts and bolts of Christian theology – and, being an academic in a field built on fomenting social nastiness, that he’d post a sign and a Tweet so deeply steeped in toxic condescension.
It’s forgivable.
CORRECTION: I’m sorry, I read that wrong. Hef’s not a Doctor of Intersectional Grievance Studies, but rather a PhD in some variety of Theology. He also describes himself as a “Pastor”.
I’m gonna go out on a short, sturdy limb and guess that either he’s the “pastor” of a very sparsely-attended Episcopal parish, or that he’s more of a professor these days.
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