OK, so Jamestown never had a Tastee Freeze.

Even better – we had Polar King! The home of all things cool and delicious on hot, dry, windy summer days…

…provided you were willing to work for it. It was north of the college on the way to the airport – a solid mile and a half from home, up the North Hill, beyond the tracks that were pretty much the northern border of my world until I got a bike, a mile and a half away back when that seemed like a long way.

But once I got that bike? They always had a couple of cute high school girls behind the counter (this back when I was in junior high and high school, just to be abundantly clear), and air conditioning, and free water. Polar King was a 50 cent vanilla reward at the end of a long day of pedaling across the dry, windswept plains, warding off boredom and seeing the world outside the little island that Jamestown, like all small towns on the prairie, was back then.

Jamestown had it. No more.

The only thing permanent is change.

Change sucks the cool out of a beautiful day.

This American Life is a guilty…well, sometimes pleasure, sometimes intellectual hemorrhoid.  Either way, the guilt is real.  As is the pleasure, sometimes.

This piece was a pleasure in the sense that it showed the Escher drawing that is modern intersectionality, and the nightmare it leaves modern Democrats (darn), as vividly as anything I’ve heard recently.

A man attacked homeless people, telling them to get out of his city.
Naturally, I deplore violence of any sort.  But it got me to wondering – which is more likely to solve the homeless problem in his town: beating the homeless while demanding they leave, or giving them food, shelter and privileges that law-abiding citizens don’t get (see, for example, San Francisco)?
The article didn’t say whether homeless people were flocking to that city, or fleeing from it.  I wonder . . . .
Joe Doakes

It’s amazing how unaffordable housing had gotten since governments all over the country made “affordable housing” a priority.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking down Grand Avenue, looking for Grand Avenue Distillery Supplies. As he looks in the storefront, MyLyssa SILBERMAN, Reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, gets out of a cab.

SILBERMAN: Merg!

BERG: (Nonplussed) Er, hi, MyLyssa. What’s up?

SILBERMAN: I’m curious. You continuously say, on your blog and show, that the media is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the progressive movement.

BERG: I do. And it’s true.

SILBERMAN: How can you say that? We have layers and layers and..

BERG: …and layers of gatekeepers. Right. Got that. I base my assertion on, well, reading and listening to the media, and taking what they say seriously.

SILBERMAN: Meaning…?

BERG: Well, for example, listen to this bit by NPR’s “On the Media” – supposedly their media “watchdog” show – and the train of ultra-left dogmatics and magical thinking, and tell me any part of it that wouldn’t fit right in with a Wobbly pamphlet in the 1900s.

SILBERMAN: (Puts on earphones. Listens to segment. Removes headphones). I don’t hear anything.

BERG: This is my shocked face

SILBERMAN: It might be the global warming.

BERG: Might be

(And SCEN)E

The “militia” making the threats in Oregon will turn out to be a bunch of Portland activists, and resolute leftists.

It’s possible I’m wrong – it’s a big country.

But over time, one never goes broke assuming the depravity of the extreme left for political behavior you can’t explain otherwise. It’s a borderline-corollary to Berg’s Seventh Law.

Over this past weekend, I saw the movie “Rocket Man”, the Elton John biopic.

And while it was a good movie, as these things go – more below – it left me with one huge, nagging question unanswered.

To wit: what ghastly crime did Bernie Taupin see Reginald Dwight/Elton John commit, and promise to keep quiet about forever, in exchange for Elton John turning his “lyrics“ into songs?

Because it say what you will about Elton John’s music – I liked some of it – but Taupin was the one lyricist in the history of the world that can’t get away with mocking and taunting Desmond Child.

There simply has to be some ghastly conspiracy. There’s no other rational explanation.

More seriously, now – I did in fact see the movie over the weekend.

Truth be told, I was way too cool for Elton John when he was at his peak. I loved the Clash, the Ramones, Springsteen, the Iron City Houserockers, Television, Emmylou Harris, the Pretenders – all the stuff that the rest of the kids in my high school weren’t listening to. It was how a tall, geeky nerd with no athletic talent stood out from the crowd (or thought he did).

And I never had much time for pop stars disintegrating in public, as I watched Elton John (among many other celebs back then) collapse in a welter of excess, booze and cocaine. “You think you got it tough?”, I muttered, reading every week in the pages of “Rolling Stone” down at the library. It’s why I had no time for a lot of seventies pop stars; half the reason I couldn’t stand Styx as a kid was Dennis DeYoung’s constant whinging about what a meaningless illusion being a star was; “then go back to Chicago and work in a ^%$#@ meatpacking plant and make some room for someone else”, I muttered.

And he was a piano player. Nothing against keyboard people – I always wanted to be decent on keys. But they have a very different approach to music than guitar players do. Some of his stuff, like most of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, was marvelously melodic, in the kind of way that piano players can tease out of a song in a way guitar players can’t.

So Elton John was…well, not a non-entity for me as a kid. His public image was something that annoyed me; his music sometimes grabbed me (“Someone Saved My Life Tonight” was guilty pleasure), some didn’t.

Anyway.

“Rocketman” is billed as a “fantasy biopic”, which started me off thinking “what could go wrong?”.

Short answer: Nothing!

In its own way, telling the story of Elton John’s path – from neglected child to piano prodigy to sideman to “overnight star” (it actually took him eight years of gigging, song-writing and session work, given very short shrift in the movie) to one of the biggest selling singers of all time, to recovering addict and, we’re told at the end, happy, loved, well-adjusted elder, is a lot more interesting in the telling that it was in the watching 30-40 years ago. Taron Egerton plays a better Elton John than Elton John himself ever did.

One interesting bit, if you’re a serious music trivia buff; there’s a scene where John and longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin are auditioning for a manager (in a scene that could have come out of every iteration of “The Jazz Singer” or “The Star Is Born”). The manager asks John to play some of his stuff. John, at the piano, tosses out a few songs that the manager cuts off immediately…

…that are actually from the early ’80s, when John and longtime Taupin were on the outs – things like “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues” and other stuff from John’s fallow years after going through treatment. The manager only warmed up when John played “Border Song”.

It was just one of the ways in which John – one of the movie’s executive producers – seemed to be saying that his career without Bernie Taupin was never quite what it should have been. Every single non-John/Taupin song is associated with failure, with bottoming out (as when “Victim of Love”, one of John’s most vapid songs, is playing in the background during a scene when he meets the partner in his ultimately sham 1984 marriage). In some ways, Taupin is every bit as much the star of the movie as John is.

So I won’t be coy about it – it’s a lot better than I expected.

A refugee who wants to come to the United States can apply and wait for approval.  May take years.  Meanwhile, you sit in the refugee camp overseas.
A person who sneaks into the United States can apply for asylum.  Your approval also may take years.  But meanwhile, you’re released into the United States and given a work permit and relocation benefits. 
A person who sneaks into the United States and claims to be an unaccompanied minor seeking asylum, gets all of that plus extra cash and benefits. 
A person who sneaks into the United States and claims to be an unaccompanied minor trans-gender seeking asylum, gets all of that plus extra cash and benefits and now might receive even better preferential treatment.
No documentation is required for any of this stuff.  In fact, if you have it, it can be used against you.  So nobody has any papers when they arrive, the entire system is based on verbal claims.
Now I ax ya . . . if you wanted to get into the United States plus maximize your benefits, what story would you tell?   

The story that was given to you by those who want your vote in exchange, that’s who.

…with trying to run a society with the entitled cranks that make up so much of the modern left is that if you’re a consevative, they really, really hate you and the idea of sharing a society with you.

University of Texas “Anarchist” (really Maxarchist) group promises to “dox” students who joint the campus’s conservative organization:

“Hey #UT23! Do you wanna be famous? If you join YCT or Turning Point USA, you just might be. Your name and more could end up on an article like one of these,” the tweet said, linking to previous doxxing posts of conservative students at the school. “So be sure to make smart choices at #UTOrientation

There are times I wish I was still in school.

What’s the appropriate penalty for throwing a cigarette butt on the ground?
What if it’s a lit cigarette?
What if it’s a lit cigarette in an area prone to wildfires?
this seems light, to me.
If your car doesn’t have an ashtray, carry an empty Coke can in drink holder with a few drops of water in the bottom.  Throw your trash in the trash can, not out the window.  Act like a civilized human being, not an ignorant savage.  How hard it is?
Joe Doakes

How hard it is?

Civilization?

I’m starting to think we really can’t handle the truth on that one.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is waiting in line to get into a Saints game. As he scans the program, Avery LIBRELLE rides up on a segway.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Er…(looks around, sees no escape) hey, Avery.

LIBRELLE: White people owe black people reparations!

BERG: Huh. So you mean that people who’ve never been enslaved are owed money by people who never owed slaves.

LIBRELLE: History has meaning!

BERG: And the actions of one’s ancestors matter, right?

LIBRELLE: Absolutely!

BERG: Huh. So – being as I am descended from people that abolished slavery 700 years before the US, or Britain for that matter, am I owed a big thank you?

LIBRELLE: (stares briefly, guns the segway)

And SCENE

Proposal to outlaw jokes on campus to fight sexual harassment, if it offends the most sensitive person they can dig up. 
Wouldn’t it be easier to go back to single-sex colleges?  No different sexes, no sexual harassment. 
And if someone offends you badly enough that your honor demands satisfaction, perhaps bring back dueling?  It certainly would help resurrect the manly arts.
Joe Doakes

Single sex colleges? Good idea – until they get turned into 1,200+-gender-combination collees.

Alexandria “Tide Pod Evita” Ocasio Cortez claimed yesterday that ICE runs “concentration camps” for illegal immigrants, and that makes our treatment of illegals the equivalent of the Holocaust.

MSNBC drone Chris Hedges leapt to her defense:

If you spend a few minutes learning some actual history, you will find out that concentration camps are different from death camps and have a history that both predates and extends far past the Nazis. https://t.co/Bccy3SaXW0

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 18, 2019

And he is right on three levels.

Historically and Semantically, the term “Concentration Camp” dates to the Boer War, when the Brits, waging a scorched earth campaign against Boers in South Africa, began rounding up the families of Boer soldiers away at war against them and concentrating them in camps. They were frightfully unpleasant, and a human rights violation at a time when the concept really didn’t exist – but they were expressly intended to kill people (although many died).

Likewise, America’s internment camps were “concentration camps” in that same sense – concentrating those who it was believed needed eyes kept on them at wartime; the camps where German and other Central Power nationals, Turks and Bulgars and Austro-Hungarians, were kept during World War I, and German, Italian and Japanese nationals (and, infamously, US citizens of Japanese birth and ancestry) during World War II.

For that matter, German “concentration camps” – Konzentrazionlslager, or “KZ” camps, were a widely mixed bag, run by a variety of members of the Nazi bureaucracy for a variety of reasons. Most were labor camps, not designed specifically to kill inmates (although they did die in droves, especially at the end of the war when disease, starvation, exposure on forced marches, and last-minute massacre killed people in droves. And some “KZ”s were holding camps for people before they were sent off to the death camps.

Which were another entire wing of the Nazi bureaucracy. Run by the SS-Totenkopfverband, or “Death’s Head Department” – the SS department that ran the Final Solution – they were designed and built for the sole purpose of murdering people in industrial lots, as befitting their name, “Vernichtungslager“, or “Extermination Camp”, abbreviated “VZ”.

The vast majority of people who were sent to “Extermination camps” died. The majority who arrived at a concentration camp left alive (although huge numbers of them were sent to their deaths in VZs).

And the term lost all linguistic nuance in the west – justifiably so – when footage from camps like Buchenwald, Dauchau and Bergen-Belsen showing bodies stacked like logs and emaciated wretches covered in lice, barely recognizable as human, showed in their newsreels – unaware that the Soviets had liberated places far, far worse.

So Hayes is right.

But in modern-day terms, nobody on the southern border is being put to work for 16 hours a day with 400 calories of bread and soup; nobody is shot if they flee; nobody is driving illegal immigrants into gas chambers and choking them to death with diesel fumes.

And hinting as much proves not so much that Ocasio-Cortez and Hayes are stupid and evil, as it indicates they don’t expect their audiences to have the historical, intellectual or moral firepower to check them on such a depraved claim.

And they’re not wrong.

The unqualified David Hogg couldn’t get into a junior college in Florida on his merits, but Harvard grabbed him because he’s got the right Social Justice profile. 

Kyle Kashuv – who survived the same shooting – got into Harvard on his merits.  

Or so he thought.  

Kashuv explains in this twitter thread:

1/ THREAD: Harvard rescinded my acceptance.

Three months after being admitted to Harvard Class of 2023, Harvard has decided to rescind my admission over texts and comments made nearly two years ago, months prior to the shooting.

I have some thoughts. Here’s what happened.

— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) June 17, 2019

Because it’s not enough merely to be a victim (forget about pretty brilliant). It’s about being the right kind of victim. Otherwise, you’re expendable – and, if you’re too obstreporous, must be destroyed.

New York is ending the religious exception for vaccinations.
Do we really believe Orthodox Jews in New York are the ones bringing back once-eradicated diseases?  There’s no connection between illegal immigrants from sh**hole countries and rising cases of measles and tuberculosis?
This is the same logic as taking guns away from law-abiding citizens, or looking for your lost car keys under the street light.  It’s easier to find them.  But it doesn’t do any good.
Joe Doakes

Everything that isn’t banned is mandatory

If it could be said the MInnesota DFL party has three intellectual standardbearers – the people who define the full depth and breadth of today’s DFL’s worldview, belief structure and moral parameters – they’d be Minneapolis Congressoman Ilhan Omar, Minneapolis city councilwoman Alondra Cano, and William “Robespierre” Davis.

You might recall Mr. Davis from before the 2018 elections, when he “joked” about hauling Republicans “to the guillotines”, the sort of thing that would have gotten a Republican staffer fired and exiled, but seems to have only cemented Davis’ reputation as a (ahem) thought leader.

And you know what they say – thought leaders’ gonna lead thoughts:

“Ope, sorry about that cruise missile” https://t.co/f1TuT8jNuE

— William Davis (@WilhelmDavis) June 15, 2019

“Ope, sorry about that cruise missile” https://t.co/f1TuT8jNuE

— William Davis (@WilhelmDavis) June 15, 2019

“Murder boats”.

Got that, veterans? Forget Tim Walz’s hopey-changey; this is what the Minnesota DFL actually thinks about you.

Vote accordingly.

By the way – I think it’s fascinating how every time an elected DFLer is in a self-inflicted jam, some DFL staffer says something dissociative and inflammatory.

Kyle Smith on the Met’s new exhibit of notable musical instruments of the rock and roll era.

Read the whole thing. But I thought I’d pullquote this:

Yet the mystical power of some of these objects drowns out the racket. Here is a surviving fragment of the guitar Hendrix doused with lighter fluid and set on fire at the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, in a gesture intended to one-up Townshend’s guitar-ruination. Hendrix famously knelt in a pose of ecstatic worship behind the burning object, conjuring spirits from the vast deep. What was the meaning of that act? Hendrix was playing off the attraction of all things pagan for the hippie generation, but on a deeper level the ritual sacrifice cast rock as an art whose genuineness, hence its attractiveness, was tied up in its inability to control itself. Rock mesmerizes and destroys as fire does. To burn his own guitar showed Hendrix reveling in evanescence as not just the natural passing of youth but also a kind of death wish, an appetite for self-destruction. Like many of his peers Hendrix set fire to himself, and some part of it was performative, dutiful. Three years later he would be dead at 27.
It may be that the age of rock gods has already concluded, like the Jazz Age or the Big Band era. The youngest artists represented at the exhibit — Tom Morello, Lady Gaga, St. Vincent — seem unlikely to inspire veneration, or even much interest, circa 2049. Some alchemy of sound and performance on the one hand and societal tumult on the other made rock a leading cultural indicator, for a time. “You’ve left your fingerprints on the audience’s imagination,” Springsteen once said, “and they stick.” Rock matters, or at least mattered, and the Met’s imprimatur on the form is well justified.

That was certainly what grabbed me as an adolescent with more emotion than reason.

Still does, in some ways.

The Left is united in denouncing President Trump’s comment that he’d listen to opposition research, even if it came from overseas.
Andrew Napolitano says it’d be a felony.
Excellent.  Now do Hillary.
Joe Doakes

Rules are for peasants.

On top of the $11 million in compensatory damages a few weeks back, an Ohio court has awarded Gibon’s Bakery $22 million – the statutory maxiumum – in punitive damages over the bakery’s defamation suite:

The counts were:
Defamation – Oberlin College and Raimondo were found liable
Infliction of intentional emotional distress – Oberlin College was found liable
Intentional interference of business relationships – Raimondo was found liable
Oberlin College President Carmen Twillie Ambar in a letter to the campus community on Friday expressed dissatisfaction with the jury’s decision, and signaled the college plans to appeal its findings.
“Let me be absolutely clear: This is not the final outcome. This is, in fact, just one step along the way of what may turn out to be a lengthy and complex legal process,” Twillie Ambar said. “We are disappointed in the jury’s decisions and the fragmentary and sometimes distorted public discussion of this case. But we respect the integrity of the jury, and we value our relationship with the town and region that are our home.”

Note to Social Justice warriors – outside your bubble, your curious illogic doesn’t fly. As Paul Mirengoff notes:

As I understand it, Oberlin argued at trial that it isn’t liable because its students, not the college, were to blame for harming Gibson’s. Then, at the damages phase, Oberlin argued that the college shouldn’t be slammed with a big damages assessment because that outcome would harm its students.
I suspect the jury hated Oberlin and its students and wanted to punish both.

And it turns out that outside that bubble, real-world rules apply..

…to the chagrin and, I suspect, the deep surprise of the SJWs.

It’s a wonderful day.

“Protect” Minnesota – most likely their “executive director” and one of very few actual members, the Reverend Nancy Nord Bence – reported on what the belived to be their bete noir, a good guy with a gun, doing something allegedly stupid and horrible.

Oh, no!

On the one hand, it touches all “P”M’s hot buttons: a gun and a civilian. Sounds bad.

But on the other hand, you need to remember – the Reverend (and, really, any anti-gun leader) has never, not once, said anything about guns, gun owners, the 2nd Amendment or its history, gun laws, crime or statistics that is simultaneously substantial, original and true.

With that in mind, you need to merely cast a wider net. Was this an example of a “good guy with a gun” getting into a squabble and blazing away?

Look a little closer.

Oh.

I think we’re on the brink of a Berg’s 21st Law: “The Reverend Nancy Nord Bence’s first draft is never right, and almost always comical”.

To: White Castle
From: Mitch Berg – guy who loves White Castle, although Keto denies it to me
Re: Missed Chances

Dear White Castle,

Why did you not get to this idea first?

That is all.

Here’s Scott Johnson’s writing on Rep. Ilhan Omar.

And if you know a high school girl interested in competing in “Speaking Proudly”, here’s the website. It could be worth $1,000 – and could help save the Republic!

Today would have been Anne Frank’s 90th birthday.  

Erin Blakemore has an excellent article on how the Attic may, or may not, have been discovered by the Nazis and their collaborators.  

And I urge you to read Blakemore’s twitter thread (starting below) about the anger she feels seeing the remarks in Frank’s diary about believing in her heart in the goodness of people are so often ripped out of context today:

Today would have been Anne Frank's 90th birthday.

And as I do every year on this day, I bristle at people sharing her out-of-context quote about people being good at heart. pic.twitter.com/WWS9IYKfM3

— Erin Blakemore (@heroinebook) June 12, 2019

If you keep reading, you’ll note that Frank – who wrote that three weeks before the Attic was raided – went on to say she had a harder and harder time believing that. Justifiably so.

The Diary of Anne Frank wasn’t the first book I ever read about the Holocaust – The Black Book, Treblinka and Escape from Sobibor all came first – but it was one of many things that convinced me that the hopey-changey of the left were at best a trifle and at worst bait. It started me down the road toward being a Reagan Conservative, a 2nd Amendment activist, and someone who eschews horror movies. Who needs to watch The Walking Dead – cable TV’s excellent show about the complete collapse of civilization – when it’s all right there in history?

This hit twitter yesterday; Ilhan Omar’s spin doctor, Ben Goldfarb, caught in the emailed act of trying to fix media and pundit coverage of the perennially-scabrous Ilhan Omar:

My God. Props to @bloisolson for sharing.

From @IlhanMN’s crisis manager Ben Goldfarb:

“Does anyone in the team have a relationship with Blois? Someone should probably reach out to talk off the record and shut it down with him AS WE DO WITH THE STRIB” [emphasis added]

THREAD pic.twitter.com/cFx49KxZCm

— Nick Solheim (@NickSSolheim) June 13, 2019

“Someone should probably reach out to talk off the record and shut it down with him as we do with the Strib“.

Not that this is a mystery to anyone, but it’s still a little jarring to see it in black and white from one of the co-conspirators.

The downside, of course – if the DFL does in fact primary Omar, and manages to replace her (doubtful), they’ll only come up with someone worse.

…turns out you were just too far ahead of your time.

Collecting old Kool-Aid packets is big money:

While there’s no real quantifiable way to know just how big this particular community is, the best place to pulse-check their vitality is eBay. A quick search for “Kool-Aid packet” seemed to signal the market is alive and well, returning over 250 active listings, some of which were going for triple-digit asking prices: $400 for a still- sealed case of Pink Swimmingo, $225 for a single packet of Yabba-Dabba-Doo Berry, and $195 for a single packet of one of Kool-Aid’s most beloved flavor mascots, Purplesaurus Rex, just to name a few. A search for recently completed eBay auctions showed a display of 1960s Grape packets being sold for $250 and a single packet of Rock-A-Dile Red closing out at $125. The good stuff don’t come cheap, my friends.

There has simply got to be a way to turn this into a glorious troll of obnoxious foodies.

Back during blogging’s brief heyday, I commented that a few of the “progressive” bloggers that tried to make a sport of getting conservatives fired, doxxed and “othered” were the kinds of people who’d loved pulling the wings off of moths as children. I’ve found little to change that assessment.

It carries on to the insitutional level, according to Dennis Prager in this article about Big Left’s cavorting about the ongoing legal pummeling of Paul Manafort.

Big Left is those moth kids with law degrees.