Apropos nothing all that much, but I really enjoyed this clip by Warren Zanes, the author of the definitive bio of Tom Petty.
If you’re a petty fan, you likely will as well.
If you’re a yuge fan, it might just close the deal on a copy of the biography.
Home invaders in Minneapolis beat a woman and her daughter, film the whole thing.
But remember – the real problem is mean tweets.
That’s not true.
The real problem is, when peoples taxes don’t buy law and order, they will get it for themselves. And that’s usually not done via the anarcho-capitalist fantasy of spontaneous self-organization of groups of sovereign individuals.
I’m informed by a reliable source that Shot in the Dark is blocked at United Healthgroup!
So – what do you suppose they’re afraid of?
According to Dana Milbank…
…dissenting from Big Left/Big Media/the Brandon administration is “fascism”..
Not sure if they’re trying to foment a civil war.
If they were, what would they be doing differently?
(And how is the Brandon Administration “salvaging democratic norms?” Labeling everyone that disagrees a “white supremacist?”)
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
If I can see the sign, then I will know I can ask for a menu for the blind?
If I can read the sign in English, then I can ask for a picture menu for people who cannot read English?
I expect this is corporate HR’s attempt to satisfy the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements.
It is worthy of ridicule.
Joe Doakes
Not to be a contrarian, but I suspect Joe’s first paragraph is correct.I would guess that most blind customers don’t walk in the McDonald’s on their own.
Among those that do? The sign is there to remind the staff, as well.
But yes, it is absolutely there to satisfy the ADA – and to placate regulators, and especially the people that wander from store to store looking for ADA lawsuits to file.
A friend of the blog and fellow Midway resident writes, in re last week’s piece on being shamed by the Shiny Happies for telling the truth about what’s going on in the city:
Saw your blog today. In My neighborhood, we’ve felt like we’ve had ghetto tourists since they started building the stadium. They remind me me the young suburbanites you talked about.
As far as us, we too want to stay here. It’s getting harder.
As I was walking [Redacted] home from school the other day, we were half a block from the intersection where two cars were having a shoot out. They were just a little east of the intersection, so didn’t see it, but definitely heard it.
[Redacted] , somehow, knew it was gun shots. I kept saying it was a car backfiring until all the neighbors came out to check on us. This happened at the end of my alley.
Zillow bought the house next-door to me and now is just letting it sit vacant. So far, one of their storm doors has been removed and the other is broken. I reported it as vandalism, but I anticipate much more happening to the house, which actually was one of the better kept house’s pre-Zillow.
All down University on my side of town businesses are moving, leaving vacant buildings.
I told my family that we still like it here, but my moving criteria is if several houses become long term vacant, then we’re moving.
That’s the point I keep trying to make to the Shiny Happies – it’s not like I’m stating, or overstating, the situation in the city to add drama and gravitas to my life.
I’ve invested nearly three decades in my house, my neighborhood and my city. It’s a little depressing to see it run by people who don’t value those tens of thousands of investments as much as they value their demented ideology.
Theory: As mutation-prone viruses evolve, natural selection favors strains that are more contagious, and less lethal to their hosts.
It’s basic natural selection. Dead hosts = viruses that reproduce less,.
Evidence?
While it’s early, there have so far been no confirmed deaths attributed to Omicron, according to those Anti-Vaxxer tools, the WHO and the Guardian.
Of course, we don’t get that until paragraph six – but we get it.
Fearless prediction: Omicron will be more contagious than Delta, and less lethal.
Pi, Rho and Sigma will be more contagious still – and the death rates per case will drop.
By the time we get near Psi and Omega, it’ll be nearly as contagious as the common flu, and about as deadly.
And Karen will need to find another purpose in life.
Uh, because they routinely lie to you, and we know it, but they keep on trying to deny it?
Whistle blown on Bloomington public health director, lying to school parents about the effectiveness of masks:
Emphasis added:
At an August 2 “Return to School” webinar on the district’s proposed COVID plan, Kelley urged parents to get their kids vaccinated, calling it the “cornerstone” to containing COVID. Next up in his presentation, Kelly unveiled a list of best practices for schools to follow in preventing the spread of the virus, emphasizing masks were the most important tool of all.
“They’re called best practices because this is the evidence-based data we have for driving how to protect kids in school environments based on experiences we saw in the last two school years,” Kelley said in the August meeting posted on YouTube. “Masking is at the top of that list. The ability to have source control and some aspect of protection for the wearer is a phenomenal tool to control a respiratory pathogen like COVID.”
Yet in a closed door meeting of Bloomington Public Health staff the week school began, Kelley appeared to offer a markedly different view of the usefulness of mandatory masking at schools, according to a watchdog who attended the virtual meeting.
“In terms of purely broad effectiveness, the least effective mitigation we’re implementing in this process is masking,” Kelley said in a recording provided by the watchdog. “Masking, the quality of the consistency of the fit, all those things are highly variable in a population setting.”
It’s becoming a Berg’s Law; anyone who refers to an argument as “evidence-based” should be distrusted and verified – and, almost invariably, distrusted thereafter.
Congratulations to Tony Oliva and Jim “Kitty” Kaat, who were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday:
The National Baseball Hall of Fame will induct at least six new members in 2022. Sunday evening the Hall of Fame’s Early Baseball Era Committee announced Negro League legends Bud Fowler and Buck O’Neil have been voted into Cooperstown. Also voted in were Gil Hodges, Jim Kaat, Minnie Miñoso, and Tony Oliva by the Golden Days Era Committee.
Few things are more contentious (or more pedantic) than the arguments concerning the merits of those who are on the outside of the Hall. The statistical devotees crank out the metrics in every conceivable way to argue their points, while the old timers often use the same approach to Hall worthiness as Potter Stewart used to define pornography — they can’t define it, but they know it when they see it.
Since the arguments are indeed contentious and pedantic, I’ll try to avoid them here. But I will say this: I am old enough to have seen both Oliva and Kaat play, mostly in the 1970s. Oliva was a shadow of what he once was by then, just as Willie Mays was in his final, awful season as a New York Met. Oliva’s knees were shot and he couldn’t play in the field any more, but his swing was still sweet and he would flash occasional power. I was living in Wisconsin and didn’t see the Twins much, but when they would appear on the Game of the Week you could tell Oliva was a figure meriting great respect — the Curt Gowdys and Tony Kubeks of the world described him in almost reverent tones. In some ways, Tony Oliva and Kirby Puckett had similar careers; great stars cut down by injuries. And both were lifelong Twins.
Kaat was a good, perhaps not great, pitcher for a very long time. He was a contemporary of other pitchers who had comparable careers — Don Sutton, Bert Blyleven, Tommy John, and the Perry brothers, Gaylord and Jim. Of these pitchers, Sutton and Gaylord Perry are in the Hall because they were 300-game winners, usually a surefire ticket to the Hall as long as you’re not Roger Clemens. Blyleven was next to make the Hall, primarily because the statistical devotees championed his cause. Blyleven won 287 games, John won 288, and Kaat won 283. Jim Perry trailed the rest with 215.
As it happens, Kaat, Blyleven and Jim Perry were all Twins for long stretches of their careers. All three were among the best pitchers in the American League. What separates them? I don’t know the answer. But I do know this — Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat are both worthy, whether you use metrics or the Potter Stewart test.
The Uptown McDonalds.
In the eighties and early nineties, if was a great place to go to watch dissociatives dissociating.
For most of the past 20 years? On a Saturday night, it’s the place to go if you wanted to watch college girls in cocktall dresses throwing up on the sidewalk on 30 degree nights.
Today? It’s a great place to go to feel like you’re in Beirut in the ’80s.
Rebecca Brannon – one of very few actual journalists working these days – was there around bar closing on Saturday night/Sunday morning.
This is what she recorded:
But the 20 second video doesn’t show the half of it. I talked with Brannon on the show over the weekend. What got her attention was…
…guys, including the guy with the long-ish gun (looks like a Hi-Point carbine to mme) standing around in the parking lot, openly displaying their guns.
Brannon started taping when the guy with the long-ish gun fired a shot in the air. He shot into the air again when he drove off in the stolen car.
A civil society can not sustain this sort of thing. If the authorities don’t stop it, either the economic crash that follows the collapse of order will, or the people themselves will. Hard to tell which is worse.
cc: Shiny Happies.
…the Babylon Bee has become America’s newspaper record in recent years
This was the graph The Democratic Congressional campaign committee (DC cc ( released last week, purporting to credit President Branden with a drop, of sorts, in gas prices:
These are the actual prices since the beginning of his regime.
The blue graph above covers, literally, the last little square of the second graph.
It is, I think, further evidence of my theory that the Democrats realize they don’t actually need to push actual facts, since their audience just doesn’t think that critically.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I loved the Artemis Fowl books. I just saw the trailer for the movie and I feel like crying.
Artemis is a teenaged boy, a genius and ruthless criminal mastermind, assisted by his hulking bodyguard, Butler. The scriptwriters dragged out all the tropes to make him a naive kid guided by the Wise Old Black Man to Save the Planet from Ancient Evil and Rescue his Father . . . they turned him into a Disney Princess.
Look guys, you bought the movie rights to a wildly popular series of books because you wanted a ready-made fan base. But that fan base knows the character and knows the story. They don’t want you to ‘improve’ it, they want you to put the movie in their minds up there on the screen, like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.
Yeah, yeah, Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench and awesome special effects, great stuff. But couldn’t they have done it with a new story, one that nobody knows so the fans wouldn’t mind if it was butchered?
Joe Doakes
Hey, you’re lucky they didn’t turn him into an ass-kicking girl.
The media yesterday expressed wonder that Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey had created a group of his “political critics“ serves a task force to “work“ on the cities crime problem.
A reader emails describe that group as:
…a veritable who’s who of those with their snout in the trough.
With LA carpetbagger Nekima Levy at the helm nothing but good can come from Mayor Frey’s Community Safety Workgroup
This gets, I think, to the truth that our media won’t, can’t, or aren’t supposed to talk about; this exercise is entirely a matter of greasing all the palms that need to be greased.
Joel Doakes from Como Park emails:
For months, I’ve been saying Democrats stole the election with help from the media and RINO Never-Trumpers, all banding together to rid themselves of the Bad Orange Man.
For months, it’s been obvious Biden and Harris weren’t smart enough to have engineered The Big Steal; they were merely the patsies put forward by The Real Usurper.
For months, we’ve known Joe Biden’s mental and physical health is failing too quickly for him to serve his full term of office and Kamala Harris has virtually no support among Democrat bigwigs.
For months, I’ve been asking how The Real Usurper plans to get rid of the patsies so he can take up the power of the Presidency.
For months, I’ve been suggesting Biden gets rid of Harris, who is replaced by The Real Usurper, who moves up when Biden resigns/is removed from office, but Harris’ supporters claim it’s impossible.
The fact my strategy is being openly discussed in Washington power circles means it is not impossible, it simply is not yet time to act. That time is coming – Biden’s decline will force it to happen.
The question remains: who will The Real Usurper install as his puppet, to finish his efforts to destroy America? Who is being groomed by the media for the job? Who would have an easy confirmation as Vice President?
My money is on Michelle Obama.
Joe Doakes
I should start a pool…
I live in the Midway.
When people think of the Midway, they think urban blight – and they’re not wrong. .
South of Thomas, anyway. So far.
I’ve lived here a long, long time. I’ve been on the rollercoaster – the worst of the “Murderapolis” years (where Saint Paul was also beset with violent crime as well, although as usual to nowhere near the level of Minneapolis.
I’ve got no intention of going anywhere anytime soon.
And most of us live here without much incident.
And throughout the cities, most of us do. Some places it’s harder than others; I know people in North Minneapolis who’ve learned to tune out gunfire that’s not too close, sort of like infantrymen who ignore artillery shells that are passing overhead. Other places it’s harder for reasons that go beyond ambient crime; people stuck in the “George Floyd Autonomous Zone” or whatever they call it these days, or Powderhorn Park last year, where external forces change the neighborhood, against the neighbors will or not.
But for the most part, we live here, more or less like we did five or ten or 25 years ago. Maybe a little less retain, maybe a little more careful at stoplights – but life goes on, the changes slow enough, riots notwithstanding, not to raise any particular alarms.
But things are worse than they were five years ago; the numbers don’t lie. VIolent crime has skyrocketed. In Minneapolis, they were at 82 homicides so far this year. That was the total in 2016…
…for the entire state of Minnesota.
So life goes on – but all is not well, and all is not what it was five years ago, when Minneapolis had very low crime by urban standards, and carjacking was something you read about in Chicago. .We carry on – but we’re aware that property crime is a third above the national average; violent crime, double the national rate.
IShiny Happy People: bring it up because Ive been beset by a small plague of Shiny Happy People lately. Overwhelmingly young women in their late ’20s/early ’30s, visibly and vocally members of “progressive” Christian congregations, resisdents of third tier suburbs, who declare “Don’t believe all the apocalyptic hype; I’ve been to Minneapolis (or Saint Paul), a bunch, and it’s still pretty awesome”.
The message comes with an. implied “Tut tut, all you big angry white men; if lil’. ol’ me can take in a show, I don’t know what you’re jabbering about”.
I’ll meet ’em halfway. I’ve stopped bothering responding to hysterics from Orono and Landfall and their Mad Max fantasies.
But a quick note to the Shiny Happy People, the “progressive” evangelical tourists who drive in, proclaim, and drive back home.
On any given day in Minneapolis last year:
That averages out to roughly 66 crimes per day- about 14 of them violent.
Spread that across a population of 400,000 people and your odds of being directly victimized by a crime of any kind is about 1/66 (and lower than that if you leave out the burglaries, which won’t apply to the Shiny Happy tourists).
Your odds of being involved in a violent crime on any given day in Minneapolis are about one in 2,666.
So you’re right; if you go to visit a congregation, or a restaurant or a coffee shop in the city, the odds that you’ll get back to Circle Pines unscathed are very, very high. Even in North Minneapolis, the odds favor you.
But for those of us who are here – many by choice, many not – the odds get worse every year. And the crimes that affect quality of life – the ones that make you focus on. personal security, make you leave a car length in front of you at traffic lights, make you run out to an Amazon drop location rather than get deliveries to your door, make you get your catalytic converters branded to help maybe prevent yet another petty but grossly expensive theft, or that make you wonder in the pit of the night “was that fireworks, or was that gunfire?”
Mind your tact, Shiny Happies. We don’t go home to Anoka when we’re done.
Joe Doakes from Como park emails:
I don’t watch much TV, but a Sci-Fi series was recommended. It has commercials. They’re the same every break: out of four ads there will be one for childhood covid vaccine and one for Medicine for black homosexuals with HIV. Commercial ads are annoying enough, but relentless liberalism is infuriating.
Joe Doakes
The first cold, stormy Saturday we have, I’m going to do an ethnographic study of ads on TV, not so much to prove a political point as to illustrate the sociological absurdity that there is such a thing as “structural racism“ in our society.
…that a city run by Kim Norton, which has been becoming blue-er and blue-er over time, would play passive-aggressive bureaucratic pattycake games with the citizenry…
…right?
A group of parents, with a Twin Cities law firm, are asking for records related to the district’s adoption of Critical Race Theory.
And how did that go over?
“On Nov. 12, an attorney representing the district said that it would cost ‘Equality in Education’ $901,121.15 to obtain the records and they must prepay before the district completes their request,” the report reads.
The battle lines for next November could not be clearer.
It was a generation ago – when I was in high school – that Margaret Thatcher become Prime Minister. The media and popular culture were less tribalized then than they are today – but the drumbeat from the cultural authorities was this is a very bad thing.
And it foreshadowed the great American resurgence that followed; a wave of center-right leaders followed – Kohl in Germany, Mitterand in France, Pope John Paul II in the Vatican, and of course Ronald Reagan – who altered the course of, and in many ways saved (or postponed the demise, at least) of Western Civilization.
Is Eric Zemmour cut from the same cloth?
I don’t know, and he’s only a candidate at the moment.
But if he turns into the man of the moment in France, perhaps there’s still hope for the West.
Here’s his speech announcing his candidacy. Translation here.
It’s an incredible work of political rhetoric and, if not oratory, certainly videography.
Steven Hayward:
Today Zemmour released a video declaring his candidacy for president, and I’ve heard comparisons (including from a French student in my political science class this semester) comparing it to Charles de Gaulle’s famous July 18, 1940 radio broadcast pronouncing the cause of Free France amidst the nation’s collapse before the German army.
This caught me:
We are worthy of our ancestors. We will not allow ourselves to be mastered, vassalized, conquered, colonized. We will not allow ourselves to be replaced
It’s an overtone of my wish, every Memorial Day, that we leave a society worthy of the sacrifice so many have made for this civilization.
The other overtone?
The moment isn’t a whole lot less grave.
Countdown to anguished “think” pieces on NPR starts now.
This is on the façade of the former uptown theater Dash the long beloved, offbeat art house theater that was a victim of the pandemic, and, perhaps more so, what Minneapolis has become.
“Transtifa”.
Will they be getting into a war with “Anti-“Fa? And will “Anti”-Fa Now I have to change them to “CisFa”, Or risk losing its Progressive cred?
It’s sort of reminds me of the old joke; Q: if the hair-metal bands Poison and Cinderella got into a flamethrower fight, who would win? A: The world.
As many of you noticed, the blog was offline yesterday. And it’s been running slow for a few months before they.
The two were, as it happens, unrelated; there was a move to a new server that caused a few problems, and a denial of service attack bogged the blog down yesterday.
Hopefully we’ve got them both fixed.
Thanks to the good folks at Hosting Matters, who have hosted this blog for the past 15 years, and who are still the best in the business.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club asks whether the Lesko Brandon administration is strolling into our next quagmire.
We canceled pipelines and oil leases at home, to signal our virtue on climate change. The price of gas at the pump, and natural gas for home heating, is going up. We’ve called on Saudi Arabia to pump more oil for us but we’ve also removed sanctions on Iran, which is funding Houthis in Yemen, who are attacking Saudi oilfields. The US could back the Saudis with arms sales or troops so they could keep pumping the oil we want, except Progressives insist the Saudis are repressing the Yemenis so we must not help them. Can “no blood for oil” be far behind?
We’ve caused a world-wide oil shortage and are about to stumble into another war in the Middle East with conflicting policy goals and no clear mission. But all the Left wants to talk about is Kyle.
Joe Doakes
If it weren’t for gullible, low information voters, the Democrats will be pulling somewhere below the libertarians.
…that looks at an article like this, (and, for that matter, infuriating junior-high-level behavior like this among America’s future US attorneys) cheering on the demise of regard for academia outside, well, academia, and things “More, faster, now!”.
But while it’s a fact that academia has tutyhis rned into a cesspool of leftist indoctrination, I get to this bit here (I’ve added emphasis):
Unfortunately, as we’re starting to see, there’s a bit of a pushback against that sort of thing. It’s limited, but more and more people are flocking toward non-woke entertainment. People are starting to look to the trades as an option after high school. Folks are backing laws restricting some of the leftist indoctrination on our school campuses.
Nothing wrong with looking at the trades.
But academia, worthless as it largely currently is, is of disproportionate importance in a society’s future. As Orwell said, “He who controls the future, controls the past. He who controls the present, controls the past”. Academia controls, not history, but how history is passed down to future generations; they control a disproportionate share of the cultural “present”.
And telling kids who have it in them to fight that battle, to instead go and be an apprentice electrician, is a little like Eisenhower sending the D-Day invasion ashore in New Jersey rather than Normandy. It’s a path of lesser resistance, but it doesn’t really win the war.
I suspect what society really needs is an academic equivalent to Fox News: for conservative money to go to building a classically-liberal academic system, and letting people vote with their feet.
Which is far easier said than done – but then, isn’t everything that’s worth doing?
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I’d bet a brand-new nickel the guy who drove his pickup into the
Christmas Parade was not protesting the Rittenhouse verdict by mowing
down White people. I doubt he follows civic events closely enough to
realize the parade was happening. He drove down that street running
over people like an entitled ass who isn’t required to follow any of the
rules of civilized behavior because . . . he’s not. As a Black man in
America, he’s a member of The New Nobility, a class above the law, not
subject to it.
Junior Level, of course. This particular nogoodnik isn’t a jet setter
flying to the climate change summit. He won’t be invited to any
birthday parties on Martha’s Vineyard or Hollywood awards events. But
he’s minor nobility just the same. Imagine if 200 years ago, Lord
Brooks had driven his carriage through a group of peasants dancing in
the lane, killing several of them. The commoners would have been
outraged but the Powers That Be would express their hope his horse
hadn’t chipped a hoof while trampling those filthy vermin. That’s why
certain Black men believe they can loot stores, jack cars, rob people,
drive like crazy, shoot from car windows and beat their women. It’s
learned behavior. They’ve learned it’s okay for them to do. You see it
on the highways around the Twin Cities every day.But now, suddenly, after a string of wrist-slaps for years of crimes,
Brooks is charged with five counts of intentional murder. How completely
unfair. That’s like giving a puppy a treat every time he poops on the
floor until one day he poops on the rug and you bash his head in. How
was he to know?If you’re looking for a greater social commentary in this incident,
that’s the lesson. Stop treating criminals like nobility.Joe Doakes
If you remove consequences from doing something, people will do it. Whether it’s shoplifting or having babies out of wedlock or putting money in investment bubbles.
…that the current, possibly-excessive, garment-rending over the “Omicron” variant is the sound of an awful lot of people who’ve gone through lives with little purpose or meaning, and have found a perverted version of both in bullying, shunning and scarlet-lettering people with different conclusions and means of dealing with Covid?
That depression and anxiety might be the least of society’s mental health issues when it comes to this pandemic – that the wave of cultural narcissism it’s released dwarves everything else (except, obviously, the suicide?)
I just started nioting the “Land Acknowledgment” – the laborious-yet-offhand “acknowledgment” that an event was being held on land once occupied by Natives – in the last couple of years, mostly among the sorts of Twin Cities “social justice” non-profits that exude self-righteousness like some people exude bad breath.
It’s struck me as mawkish and purposeless, the sort of consequence-free moral preening that, well, defines the modern “social justice” mob, while putting none of their own skin in the game. It is to history what the term “Latinx” is to sociology and linguistics; a way to make a complex subject palatable to socially fussy white progressive social justice lemmings.
I finally have an arsenal of responses, from this article, which has almost too many great points to try to pullquote.
I said “almost”:
It is difficult to exaggerate the superficiality of these statements. What do members of the acknowledged group hold sacred? What makes them unique and identifies them to one another? Who are they, where did they come from, and where are they going? The evasion of these fundamental questions is typical. The speaker demonstrates no knowledge of the people whose names he reads carefully off the sheet of paper. Nor does he make any but the most general connection between the event and those people, other than an ancient one, not too different from the speaker’s relationship with the local geology or flora.
Things get more substantial, but no less acerbic. I recommend it.
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