Unless they want to.

U.S. Virgin Islands Gov. Kenneth Mapp signed an emergency order allowing the seizure of private guns, ammunition, explosives and property the National Guard may need to respond to Hurricane Irma.
Do You Think This Emergency Order Is Unconstitutional?
Mapp signed the order Monday in preparation for Hurricane Irma. The order allows the Adjutant General of the Virgin Islands to seize private property they believe necessary to protect the islands, subject to approval by the territory’s Justice Department.

I’m feeling pretty good about supporting the 2015 bill that bars the Minnesota state government from doing any such thing.

No, really!

And, snark aside, they have a point – it’s people from northern Europe, as well as people from cold, high-altitude places like Tibet and the Caucasus, that have any tolerance for other species’ milk; it was a trait selected for by millennia of survival in places where people couldn’t eat most of the vegetation most of the time, but animals could, turning inedible celliulose into edible fat.

But that’s about all the slack I’ll give the article, by one Andrea Freeman, a law professor; the rest of it is chock full of lines like this:

Popular racial stereotypes cast African-Americans and Latinos as fat and lazy, lacking the will power necessary to ward off obesity and other food-related illnesses.

Popular smug liberal stereotype of honkeys is that we “cast African-Americans and Latinos” as anything at all as a group.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Trump gave a speech in which he explained why he’s changed his mind on pulling out of Afghanistan: it would create a power vacuum and enable the Taliban to sweep in.  Instead, we’re going to stay and kill terrorists until conditions on the ground allow us to leave.  But we’re not going to engage in nation-building.

Great, he’s going to pivot to Afghanistan and focus like a laser on killing terrorists.  Where have I heard that before?

I don’t object to killing terrorists but why aren’t we nation-building?  Because nation-building was proposed as the cure for the root cause of terrorism but it turns out the root cause of terrorists is not poverty or lack of democratic institutions.  Establishing a puppet regime with purple-finger elections and midnight basketball won’t stem the flow of terrorists so we’re not going to waste time and money doing it.

Fine.  If that’s not the root cause, what is the root cause of Islamic terrorism?

I suspect the root cause of Islamic terrorists is radical Islam, even if everybody in Washington is terrified to say it.  Why not fight them?  Because there are different sects with different agendas and different funding, making them hard to find and kill, and the press would crucify you for trying.

But we know one of those sects is Wahhabism.  Which is funded by Saudi Arabia.  Which is run by the Royal Family of the House of Saud who the US protects from domestic unrest with US troops even as the Saudis work to get OPEC to undermine American domestic oil production.

As it sits now, our War on Terror policy is to kill the individual puppets but support the puppet masters even as they attack our economy.  That’s insane.

Forget the terrorists.  Let them squat in their mountains and kill each other.  Close our border so terrorists can’t come here, then go after the root cause.  Go after the money.

Issue drilling and pumping permits to produce oil on leased federal lands which will flood the world market with American oil and depress Saudi incomes.

Declare Saudi Arabia to be a financier of terrorism and seize all Saudi money in American banks.

Pull US troops out of Saudi Arabia to force them to spend their remaining money defending themselves from their own people. If we have any AK’s laying around that we captured in Libya, hand them out to the locals as we’re leaving Saudi Arabia.  Regime change on the DIY plan.

We’ve been fighting a War on Terror since 9-11 by going after street-level terrorists.  It’s not working.  Try something else.

Joe Doakes

Rolling Stone, reeling from a decade of decay of the print publication biz and its own growing irrelevance, is on the market; Jann Wenner is looking for a buyer.

The NYTimes notes (emphasis added by me):

But the headwinds buffeting the publishing industry, and some costly strategic missteps, have steadily taken a financial toll on Rolling Stone, and a botched story three years ago about an unproven gang rape at the University of Virginia badly bruised the magazine’s journalistic reputation.

“Botched”.

“Unproven”.

The actual word is “false”.

There are indeed Two Americas, as John Edwards used to say.

There’s the America where reguliar schnooks get crucified in court for “crimes” that exist only as federal regulations…

…and there are people who are  immune to the law.

It seems Obama ordered Comey to sandbag the “investigation” into the email server:

In his April 10 comments, Obama made the obvious explicit: He did not want the certain Democratic nominee, the candidate he was backing to succeed him, to be indicted. Conveniently, his remarks (inevitably echoed by Comey) did not mention that an intent to endanger national security was not an element of the criminal offenses Clinton was suspected of committing – in classic Obama fashion, he was urging her innocence of a strawman crime while dodging any discussion of the crimes she had actually committed. As we also now know – but as Obama knew at the time – the president himself had communicated with Clinton over her non-secure, private communications system, using an alias. The Obama administration refused to disclose these several e-mail exchanges because they undoubtedly involve classified conversations between the president and his secretary of state. It would not have been possible to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for mishandling classified information without its being clear that President Obama had engaged in the same conduct. The administration was never, ever going to allow that to happen.

We fought a revolution over less.  Not less than one fixed conviction – but less than “two parallel systems of justice”.

State GOP deputy chair David Pascoe reported from the Fair last week:

Don’t you dare say Minnesota “prorgressives” are getting deranged.

To:  Salt Lake City PD
From:  Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re:  Officer Himmler

Dear SLCPD,

If this piece of walking garbage with a badge…:

…is still working for the SLCPD, you are flirting with forfeiting any legitimacy as a “law enforcement” organization.

And don’t respond with “do you think you could do his job?”   I, the law-abiding citizen, hire him to do a job, and part of the job is not violating the civil rights of my fellow citizens!

This is not a feudal kingdom, and police aren’t knights to whom citizens must bow and scrape like peasants.  Some cops seem to have a hard time with that.   It’s gotta stop.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If the dams break, if Houston is washed away, if the earth is scraped clean . . . what a wonderful opportunity for urban planners to rebuild ‘the right way.’

 

Tear up all freeways and residential streets.  Replace them with bike trails and light rail.  Mail and deliveries to be made by electric drone.

 

Ban fossil fuel vehicles.  Permit electric trucks in alleys to restock stores but nowhere else.

 

Ban single-family houses, strip malls, chain bookstores and big-box retailers.

 

Build apartments with a pocket park every six blocks for picnics.  Require space for a coffee shop, nail salon, cell phone store and sub shop in every development.

 

Chase away all industry.  Dig up all underground tanks from former gas stations.  Rename public places in Esperanto to avoid cultural insensitivity.

 

This is an exciting opportunity.  The city council should adopt the new plan fast, before any scruffy citizens can show up at the meetings to complain.

Wanna bet Betsy Hodges wishes we got hurricanes?

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air live from the Minnesota State Fair!

Today’s  show isn’t just big.  It’s not just huge.  It’s bigly yuge!

Today on the show:

• Emily Annexstad, Princess Kay of the Milky Way for 2017
• Harry Niska, Candidate for Attorney General
• Jonathan Honerbrink, candidate for Minneapolis Park Board

Too much program for two hours?  In the lands of a lesser host, yes, but not me.  Tune in, or join us at our studio at the Fair, on Machinery Hill (Underwood just south of Murphy, two blocks south of Hoyt).

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

It comes in all shapes and sizes.

For most of the past eight seven years since Republicans expunged Democrat control of the WIsconsin state house, the DFL’s favorite line was “lookit how much better MInnesota is doing!”

But I haven’t heard that line in a while.  Most likely, either have you.

Wonder why?

One guess:

After seven years of conservative governance, Wisconsin is growing.  After seven years divided between completely DFL control and the intransigence of a DFL governor vetoing al legislation that doesn’t grow the Big State and with half the state’s economy hobbled by DFL-run metro governments, Minnesota’s economy is contracting.

And that’s why the chanting points have changed…

…just mention this article, or paste the link in the comments if you can.

And then if you’re a member of any of these unions…:

• AFSCME Council 5
• AFSCME Council 65
• Duluth FirePAC
• Education MN
• IBEW Local 292
• IBEW State Council Local 49
• Operating Engineers
• MAPE Minnesota
• AFL-CIO Minnesota
• International Association of Fire Fighters Local 21
• Minnesota Nurses Association
• Minnesota State Building & Construction Trade
• Minnesota State Council of Unite Here Unions
• SEIU Mn State Council Pol Fund
• Sheet Metal Workers PAC #10
• State Council of Machinists
• Teamsters
• UAW MN State CAP Council

…why not ask your leadership why they support her?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Engineering school is not exempt from Social Justice Warriors.

Purdue is shifting from teaching engineers how to build a bridge, to teaching them how to feel about bridges.

I’m sure that will be enormously helpful when the next I-35 disaster occurs.

Joe Doakes

My new theory – and it’s so new, I haven’t even thought it out:  Trump’s presidency is entirely designed to squeeze all of Big Left’s lunacy out into public view, so the public will be so disgusted, the left will be shamed out of power forever.

But a guy can dream.

The big screen has been consumed with comic book series and remakes of older movies – somtimes (Batman, Spiderman) movies that aren’t even all that terribly old.

And now – the small screen?

Roseanne, Will and Grace and Curb Your Enthusiasm are coming back.

Wheeeeee.

Never really cared for any of ’em.  I mean, sure, Curb was funny, but in the same way the UK version of The Office was funny; the long slow buildup of hatred for Larry David was hilarious, but wore thin, fast…

No word on  Firefly or Freaks and Geeks. Both of which I finally binge-watched in the past eighteen months or so, and can finally see what all the fuss was about.  Although one minor beef with Freaks and Geeks, which was set in more or less my senior year of high school, making it all the more cringe-worthy; while the final episode was at least in concept believable (I’m tiptoeing around spoiling things, here), did Judd Apatow really thing the Grateful Dead were relevant to high school seniors in 1980?

There must have been a poll showing that voters don’t, in fact, thing of “Anti”-Fa / the “Black Bloc” as anything but a bunch of pampered snowflakes; the left is starting to distance themselves from them.

The mayor of Berkeley – which has all but packed box lunches for the Blackshirts in recent months – is suddenly talking…well, as tough as a Democrat is allowed to talk about the children of his pals:

“I think we should classify them as a gang,” said Arreguin. “They come dressed in uniforms. They have weapons, almost like a militia and I think we need to think about that in terms of our law enforcement approach.”

Arreguin said that while he does not support the far right, it was time to draw the line on the left as well, especially on the black-clad activists who showed up in force and took over both the protests and the park, and played a part in Sunday’s violent clashes.

Word has it the Blackshirts plan on “demonstrating” this Sunday at/around the State Fair.  It’ll be interesting to see if the City of Saint Paul – which has, in the past, “stood down” for the children of their political superiors – will do anything.

Brendan Doherty in NRO, in an article that is on its surface about the “Libertarian (and “Occupy”) To Fascist Pipeline”, but in fact applies to an awful lot of people who take their marginalization seriously:

Cranks therefore come to accept or even embrace their own crankishness. One marginal idea leads to the next even more marginal idea. And the mainstream they rejected isn’t just wrong; its proponents become contemptible and corrupt. And contempt spreads easily: Normal people don’t care about ideas, the crank’s thinking goes, and endure the corruption around them in nearly silent docility. It’s the “normies” that kooks really can’t stand. Like religion, politics attracts kooks and grifters because it is a field where results have a mysterious and hard-to-trace relationship with the time, effort, and cash invested in them. Grifters use this to create lucrative and low-effort consulting jobs. For kooks, the comfort is more psychological. If a kook can convince himself — or better yet, others — that Freemasons, Jews, or Cultural Marxists run the whole world, he’s suddenly relieved of the burden of explaining to himself and others the shipwreck of his own talents and ambitions.

Just here out of intellectual curiosity. Any resemblance to anyone is purely coincidental.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The next step in the culture war:  fire employees for their political views.

I’m all for it.  Start by repealing tenure, fire all the pointy-headed leftists in academia, save millions of young minds from their poison.

Next, career bureaucrats in the IRS and State Department who claim they’re “The Resistance” – out you go, to make room for true patriots.

Yes, this is a wonderful advance in employment law.  Glad the Liberals adopted it, makes cleaning house much easier.

Joe Doakes

Given the concern some “progs” are showing, suddenly, for federalism and limiting government power, you never know.  Anything’s possible.

A guy named Richard Lindsay, a professed Christian writing on “Patheos” – a “progressive” Christian megablog – “renounces” his right to keep and bear arms:

I hereby renounce my right to bear arms.I will not keep guns in my house, in my car, or on my person. I will not rely on guns for self-protection. I do not believe owning a gun is a fundamental human right like freedom of speech or freedom of religion. I do not believe owning a gun is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy. I am capable of functioning in society without resorting to the threat or use of lethal force.

Isn’t that special?

Sorry, Rich.  Your rights are endowed to you by your creator.  You can choose not to exercise them.  You can even choose not to value them, or fight to allow government to illegitimately strip them away from us if you’d like.

But you can’t “renounce” your actual human rights any more than you can renounce the species you were born as.  You can tell everyone you want that you’re a dog; you can even lobby to have the law classify you, and all humans, as dogs if you’d like.  It doesn’t make you a dog.

You’re a human.  With a miserably subservient view of human rights.

I’m a Christian too – rather militantly so, actually – and there are few things in this world that nauseate me more than “Christian” gun control activists.

Even Orwell couldn’t keep up with this vision of today’s American left.

Too many good quotes to even pick one.  Just read it.

…no, shocked, I tell you, to get this news.

Big Media is papering over Marxist thugs; what’s a little acting like ISIS among pals?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Well I’m certainly not in favor of this proposal.  Took years and cost a fortune to get my license to practice law including a background check and continuing classes every year – now they’re proposing to hand out law licenses to people who aren’t even supposed to be in the country?

 

What’s the point of following the law, if nobody else has to?

What’s the point?

Devaluing law, the same as Big Left has devalued labor, community, morality and individuality.

I’m just saying that in the future, if some future wannabe despot wants to take over this country, suspend the Constitution and crush our freedoms without firing a shot (up front, anyway), he’ll need a society full of people who “think” like the Strib editorial board to have a chance of succeeding.  r

They want the President to stop having rallies like last week’s event in Phoenix – for everyone’s best interest:

These campaign-style rallies serve little practical purpose with the next presidential election not until 2020. Instead, they unnecessarily stoke anger and division at a volatile time, with the rally locations attracting the violence-prone on all sides of the political spectrum.

Well, no.  For the past year and a half, they have drawn unstable, violence-prone, Urban-Progressive-Privilege-sotted “Anti”-Fa blackshirts.  Lately, to be sure, they’ve drawn people on the other side who’ve come to aggressively defend themselves.  What, you expect people to stand still while they’re being gassed and clubbed for exercising their rights?

Clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters have already left one woman dead. It is only by the grace of God that more people didn’t die in Charlottesville. Or that violence didn’t spiral out of control during another gathering last Saturday in Boston.

Excluse my middle English, but bullshit.  All the violence in Boston was on the left.   Thousands of drooling scumbags descended on an expressly peaceful event that specifically excluded and condemed “white supremacists”.  Boston was a monument to the spoiled entitlement of Big Left and its idiot children – which is why it’s disappeared from the media.

It’s just common sense to let these tensions settle down and, until then, not offer up another obvious gathering point for extremists itching for action. President Trump should have recognized this before Tuesday’s rally, but making his way through the large, tense and often heavily armed crowd in Phoenix should have really driven that point home. Thankfully, there were no serious injuries Tuesday, but the event clearly strained local law enforcement’s capacity.

Look at the bright side; being a Red area, at least the cops in Phoenix showed up.

My suspicion; Big Media is decreasingly able to cover up the depravity of its nephews and nieces in the extreme left.

In the past couple weeks, we discussed the shooting at the Verizon store in Inver Grove Heights, where a good guy with a gun took a scumbag off the streets (for a couple years, anyway.

We’ve talked in this blog a zillion times about the four criteria one needs to satisfy to use lethal force in self-defense.  This may be the best definition of “reasonable, immediate fear of death or great bodily harm” I’ve seen:

The moment of truth inside the store for the employee, according to charges against Mays, came when the “defendant pointed a gun at [the victim’s] head and told [the clerk], ‘Make it easy on me.’ ”

With the gun still trained on his head and believing he was about to be shot, the clerk “pulled his gun from his waistband and fired what he believed to be three shots.” Mays was hit twice by gunfire and survived.

No doubt to continue the process of turning his life around that he was on and that we’d most assuredly have been hearing about had he died.

The shots sent the accomplice fleeing in a minivan, which was recovered Monday by police in St. Paul and will be searched for evidence later this week.

Police Lt. Joshua Otis said authorities are not disclosing the identity of the clerk for his safety because the other suspect remains a fugitive.

Anyway – salute, Mr. Anonymous Good Guy With A Gun!

…when a phalanx of liberal bobbleheads chanted “If you don’t denounce Nazis, that must mean you support them?” [1]

OK, “progs”.  Your turn.  Sound off like you got a pair.

Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Air Force is running out of fighter pilots.

The Air Force believes that the primary cause of this exodus is the recent hiring boom by the airline industry which offers experienced military pilots lucrative civilian jobs.  Pilots cite too many Micky Mouse requirements, not enough flying.

I say this is the result of the Colgan fiasco nearly 10 years ago.  It’s the inevitable consequence of a bureaucratic butt-covering reaction by the NTSB and FAA which rippled through the industry and now into the military.

Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed short of the runway while on approach for landing at Buffalo, New York in a wintry mix of snow and fog.  The pilots knew they had ice on the wings (which reduces lift,especially at low speeds such as when landing).  The airplane systems worked correctly to warn the pilot but the pilot over-rode the warnings.  50 people died in the crash.

In response, the FAA raised the minimum experience requirement for airline pilots to 1500 hours. The pilot shortage would have manifested itself sooner but the mandatory retirement age was raised from 65 to 70, which kicked the can down the road but did nothing to solve the cause of the shortage: expense.  When I took flying lessons years ago, it cost about $150 per hour to fly with an instructor in a little airplane like a Cessna.  Flying multi-engine and jet airplanes cost much more.  1500 hours at even a modest $200 per hour is $300,000 which nobody can afford.

Nobody but military pilots.  They don’t pay to fly, they get paid to fly.  As Baby Boomer pilots retire, airlines are scrambling to find qualified pilots and the biggest source is military.  In effect, the military is subsidizing the airlines’ pilot training program.

If the Air Force solves its retention problem, look for airlines to begin hiring foreign pilots in droves, stealing from their airlines and their militaries.

Joe Doakes

As long as they increase the seat size, I don’t care if they hire Chinese Navy pilots.