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.

…liberals of the type we call “progressives” these days got very tired of me pointing out the irony that their side was the one obsessed with one level of “class warfare” or another…

…but that on many issues (guns, taxation, property rights), theirs was the patrician side of the “debate”.

It’s even more true today.

I don’t as a rule care about artists politics, anymore than I care about a politician’s taste in music.

But the flip-flop of so many “counterculture” artists to “cultural enforcer” would be jarring, to anyone who thought about it critically.

It made headlines last week: Neil Young, who’s spent the last couple weeks trying to shut down Joe Rogan, was participating in “Free Speech rallies” in 2006.

Now, you could call them anti-George W Bush rallies that had little to do with free speech; I certainly called them that at the time.

But the language Young used is interesting:

“Just getting up in front of a lot of people makes you nervous. But when you know that some of them are really going to be angry at you, and you’re in a crowd, and it’s a volatile situation, people have been drinking, whatever — you know, it makes you nervous.”

“It was just that critical time in history where things were turning. Things were changing,” he added. “Those who feel the way we do had some hope and those who don’t feel the way we do were angry that the change happened. And those people have got a voice, and they have a reason for feeling the way they do. They strongly believe in the convictions. They believe in the military.” 

“They believe that we’re doing the right thing for the world, and they have every reason to be respected for their beliefs,” he said. 

Does it look like he’s describing Rogan listeners to anyone else?

Did Neil Young become The Man? Did “Rage Against the Machine” become “Rage Enforcing The Machine?”

Maybe – but I suspect the Tea Party, and its slandering back into the shadows, from whence it emerged mean and without manners as the Trump Populist movment, had a lot to do with it. The counterculture of 50 years ago is now the dominant culture.

A friend of the blog emails:

I am in no way in favor of banning books or burning books. I am not in favor of censoring something for others. If I do not want to read something, I simply don’t. This tweet really got my thinking about fascism and the Nazis who burned books.
.

Is this person tweeting sure that it is the right wing side of the country burning Harry Potter books? Gosh, I am old enough to remember the never ending cancel culture of Liberals going after JK Rowling for questioning the transgender culture and the idea that a man can identify as a woman and be legitimately considered a woman

Harry Potter. Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry Finn. To Kill a Mockingbird. God and Man at Yale. Jordan Peterson.

Here’s the difference: On the right, the people doing the book burnings and the other authoritarian depravity‘s are almost invariably nobodies that you’ve never heard of; school boards in Tennessee, county commissions in rural Louisiana.

On the left, it’s the mainstream and leadership burning the books.

…the current President took an oath to uphold the Constitution.

On the other hands…

…his Administration seems hell-bent on destroying it.

1936: Jesse Owens, running in the Olympics, humiliates Adolf Hitler.

1948: Jackie Robinson humiliates bigots.

1980: US Hockey team humiliates the USSR.

2022: Nancy Pelosi humiliates the US and freedeom-loving people everywhere:

Nancy Pelosi urged U.S. Olympic athletes not to speak out against the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights abuses while in Beijing, saying the athletes shouldn’t risk “incurring the anger” of the “ruthless” CCP…“Make no mistake — our athletes should participate,” Pelosi said. “They’ve trained, they’re disciplined, they’ve dreamed, they’ve aspired, they’ve worked hard. But this year we must celebrate them from home as they compete in China.”

But Pelosi also indicated that she believes U.S. athletes should keep quiet in China to avoid the Chinese government’s wrath.

If we’re worried about a government’s “wrath” – particularly that of a regime that is historically among the most murderous in history, and one that is currently engaging in genocide – why are they over there, anyway?

A friend of the blog emails:

LOL. White urbanists who make up majority of attendees at MN United games upset that US Soccer chose Allianz Field for USMNT World Cup qualifier game because of the fan base whiteness.

Have any of them decided to just give their top row tickets to, say, immigrants or refugees?

I write this, not because I think my audience needs to see it, but because it illustrates something that’s right on the verge of being a Berg’s Law.

To something like wit: Democrats can tell their audience anything they want, because they know that their voting base – whether they have a Masters in Education or are non-profiteers from Linden Hills – are ignorant, devoid of facility in critical thinking, and basically intellectual herd animals.

The White House is crowing about the “economic growth” under Brandon:

You know as well as I do – it’s a dead cat bounce, up from the government-induced trough at the end of the Trump term:

If American public education taught critical thought, the Democrats would poll somewhere below the Legal Marijuana party.

When government doesn’t provide the public order that people pay their taxes and exchange a bit of their liberty for, people will seek their own public order.

This is the polite, Midwestern version of that.

It won’t stay that way forever.

Last year‘s Fourth of July picnic was cheaper than it was in 2020.

Bars and restaurants, closing in record numbers for two years, are “packed full of people“.

Crime, rising to levels we haven’t seen in a generation, is delusion from an alternate universe.

The powers that be have no idea – honest! – why it’s easier to get through the southern border then onto any ride at Disney World.

Joe Rogan and his glorified barroom bull session “spreads misinformation“, while Brian Stelter and Don Lemon are “journalism“.

Why, it’s almost as if they’ve decided their only shot at any traction this fall is nonstop gaslighting.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Is this a clever public relations ploy to divert attention from Ukraine, is it a mere prank tweaking the Left’s nose, or have Russians actually become more sensible than Democrats?

Substitute “America” for “Russia” and I could sign up today.

Joe Doakes

It’s all three.

And I suspect most conservatives already have signed up – to the private sector initiative, at least.

A friend of the blog emails:

This thread makes me extremely sad as a healthcare worker.
It is so full of people identifying themselves as fellow healthcare workers who are mocking this man for being worried about the Covid-19 vaccine affecting his heart. They claim he’ll get a new one anyway if he just gets the vaccine. He’s worried the vaccine might kill him first. I don’t know what his doctors have told him, but I think it’s a reasonable question. Have his doctors addressed his concerns? Have they mocked him like those on Twitter?
As a healthcare worker, I encounter skeptical people all the time. They don’t believe they have to follow restrictions after surgery, they don’t believe their stroke has affected their safety, they believe there’s a pill for any possible problem and don’t believe they have to do any effort for their health. It’s not my job to laugh, shrug my shoulders and walk away. I want these patients to meet their goals. I need to ask questions and listen to their concerns. I need to give them information so they can at least understand their options and risks and make informed decisions.
Our healthcare system has set up a country of opioid addicts, a country of people who have Type 2 diabetes through diet choices, a country of people with cholesterol and heart problems. All of these issues probably could be reduced through listening to people rather than just telling people what’s best for them and expecting them to follow through because “we are the experts.”
I have been on the patient end myself. Were it not for my own medical background, my experience would be much different. It shouldn’t be that way.
But, if our healthcare system is being run by some of the people in this thread, things are not going to change.

If Arhtur (not Henry) Miller were writing The Crucible in 2021-22, he’d be setting it in a public health clinic.

UPDATE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. On a day like today, I’m lucky I didn’t refer to the Minneapolis Millers.

…that the loathsome Whoopi Goldberg had said the Holocaust wasn’t about racism, I thought it was bad.

Hearing what she actually said?

‘When you talk about being a racist, you can’t call this racism,’ she said. ‘This was evil. This wasn’t based on skin. You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. You had to delve deeply and figure it out. My point is: they had to do the work.

‘When you talk about being a racist, you can’t call this racism,’ she said. ‘This was evil. This wasn’t based on skin. You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. You had to delve deeply and figure it out. My point is: they had to do the work.

“The Jews all look the same to me”.

Even worse.

It fits snugly into the left’s current notion that racism is a uniquely American phenomenon that has always driven everything about the American experiment.

Which is becoming accepted as gospel.

This is just your periodic reminder that Joe Biden blocked a black woman from the SCOTUS, and a wise Latino from the Federal bench, because they were black and Latino and not progressive.

Berg’s Eighth Law is universal and omnipresent.

Last week, Minneapolis Mayor Frey Took to social media to declare his vaccine mandate – which he implemented as the Omicron wave had already peaked in Minnesota – a raging success, with his phone clogged, clogged, he told us, with photos of people at jam-packed restaurants.

We must only conclude, then, that “Seven”, The long time downtown tent pole restaurant with the best rooftop in the history of Minneapolis hospitality, closed because of overcrowding concerns.

Or not:

Worries about crime in downtown also contributed. “I can’t get staff to be excited to work downtown, because they don’t feel sale” he said.

You may find Karen responding “but restaurants close all the time, and it’s got nothing to do with draconian, misguided, on scientific emergency orders!”

And Karen would be wrong:

Finally, Patterson said city-ordered requirements on masks-wearing and vaccinations dealt the business a final blow. “We’ve seen a big decline even in the past few weeks,” following the revival of an indoor mask order by Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. On an average Friday night, he said, Seven could generate at least $25,000 in sales; after the mask order, Friday receipts dropped to $5,000.

With absolutely Marie Antoinnette like timing, the mayor got perhaps the puffiest puff piece in the puffy history of a puffy magazine this week; This is the week that the mayor appeared in Vogue magazine, as one does:

The mayor’s first term, which culminated in a hard-won reelection in November, gave him endless reasons to pace. Beyond Frey’s brio, he is an exposed nerve. “From the global pandemic to the economic downturn, the murder of George Floyd in our city, the subsequent unrest,” Frey speaks solemnly, “it was a lot. I don’t think anybody, including the former me…fully comprehends what this has been like.” Frey gestures to photos from four years ago, when he took office as a “bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 36-year-old.” He drank Red Stripes and sampled hot sauce with the local press. Now, like presidents gone gray in the White House, “I’ve aged a decade, easily,” Frey tells me, citing crow’s-feet, stress pimples, and trauma he hopes will manifest as post-traumatic growth. “This is a time that changed me forever.”

Speaking of changing:

from Vogue: “Frey, photographed at home in a Rag & Bone sweater with his wife, attorney and advisor Sarah Clarke, in Tory Burch and Altuzarra, and their daughter, Frida. Photographed by Alec Soth, Vogue, March 2022.” Photographs in March 2022?

Glad to know the mayor and his family are doing all right. It must be a tough time for them.

…neither Spotify nor at least some current research need him around anyhow.

Penzeys spices – The “high end“ spice store thst tried to get Scott Walker recalled, and which went completely unhinged after the Trump election – held a “Republicans are Racist“ sale on MLK day.

And is shocked to notice their sales plummeted:

Well, they’ve lost 3 percent of their “Voice of Cooking” email subscribers over it. 40,000 people just up and unsubscribed, and now CEO Bill Penzey is seriously out here trying to get his loyal brainwashed fanbase to purchase discounted gift cards in order to make up for the loss.

This is one of an increasingly long list of companies that I would love to boycott, if I had ever patronized any of them in the first place…

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.