…what struck me the most about President Trump’s speech in Warsaw.    The fact that it was an excellent speech – presidential, inspirational – but that showed he’s got an interest in Making Western Civilization Great Again…

…or the fact that Big Left found a way to poo-poo the value of Western Civilization:

In his speech in Poland on Thursday, Donald Trump referred 10 times to “the West” and five times to “our civilization.” His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means. It’s important that other Americans do, too.

… The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white.

And here we go.

Yep. The society that first recognized the value of the individual, that figured rights were endowed to us by our creator and not government, that decided every government rules by consent of the governed, happened to be caucasoid and Christian; elements of western history and Christian faith make both amendable to those ideas.

What do critics like Peter Beinart want?  To make Western civilization more like all those non-western, non-Christian civilizations?

Have the left learned nothing?

It’s become something of a low-impact cult on the left to declare oneself “driven by science”.

This “drive” usually manifests less in the form of “being able to develop a testable, falseable hypothesis” or design a valid, controlled course of experiements than in believing Neil DeGresse Tyson is the dreamiest or posting Bill Nye memes on social media, of course.  But to each their own.

Of course, behind all the “I F****ng Love Science” reposts and the articles about those dumb flat-earthers, actual comprehension of science is often pretty weak.

Example:  watch the heads melt when you tell “science” cultists that there is no actual controlled, empirical, scientific evidence that gay people are “born that way”.

(The response is usually a political, not scientific, one; “you think they choose to be gay?  Of course not.   Point is, there are more than one possible answer – and while “Nye-ence” is perfectly fine drawing “scientific” conclusions from political data, science isn’t).

Ohio man indicted by a federal grand jury for threatening Republican congressman:

E. Stanley Hoff, 68, is accused of leaving a voice mail for the Upper Arlington Republican after the June 14 shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., and four others at a GOP congressional baseball practice. The gunman was killed by police.

The voice mail stated: “I’ve seen the prayer ya’ll were saying at the baseball diamond. … I think ya’ll better hit your knees and pray for the people that you’re screwin’ up their lives.

“We’re coming to get every goddamn one of you and your families. Maybe the next one taken down will be your daughter. Huh? Or your wife. Or even you.”

It’s retaliation for…well, something that is sure to happen.  Someday.  Honest.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Flood of immigrants into Europe again, 85,000 so far this year, mostly people looking for the gravy train.   Immigrants generally first arrive in Italy, which is supposed to be able to pass them on to other nations in the European Union (that’s the point of open borders within the EU) but after their experience over the last couple of years, some nations are reluctant to take them.  Hmmmm, imagine that.

That leaves Italy stuck with them.  I’m waiting for the Italians to start torpedoing refugee ships; quietly, at first, claiming they were “lost at sea” but eventually openly, as necessary public policy to defend the nation from invasion.

Joe Doakes

I think you’ll see “The EU” (meaning, let’s be honest, Germany) bailing out Libya first.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

 Liberals tell us that words have meaning.  We cannot say the N word because the mere act of saying it gives the word power and that power warps our thinking to make us bad people.  In fact, thinking it is probably enough.
What happens when a word loses its power?
I was running errands over the weekend and realized it was the first day of Sunday liquor so I stopped at MGM in Roseville to buy a celebratory single can of beer.  A dozen people were picketing.  “Treat Everyone Equal.”  “MGM is Racist.”  One picketer offered me a sheet of paper on my way into the store.  I declined.
Inside the store, the store manager explained they had to check someone’s bag yesterday and that person felt it was racially motivated, hence the picket today.
I was born when Eisenhower was in office.  There was actual racism in the country at that time – segregated drinking fountains, riding the back of the bus, Martin Luther King going to jail.  That America disappeared 49 years ago.  The young people holding the signs today have never lived in a racist America.
I’ve shopped at that MGM for 13 years, since moving to this neighborhood.  I can tell you for absolutely positively certain that they do not discriminate against their own customers.  The notion is idiotic.  I don’t even need to hear the details of the incident that triggered the protest.  Every time some Person Whose Life Matters stubs their toe, it’s a racist hate crime and I’m supposed to collapse in a heap sobbing at the injustice.  No more.  The word has lost its power over me.
To Liberals, the mere accusation of racism is assumed to be sufficient to make a person apologize, cower, cravenly abase oneself to seek temporary absolution.  But it’s so overwhelmingly overused that it doesn’t mean anything, it’s a synonym for “makes me unhappy.”  And honestly, I don’t give a hang about things that make other people unhappy.   I got problems of my own.
Joe Doakes

“Progressives” destroyed the term  “Fascist” at least 30 years ago.

“Racism” can not be far behind.

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

Today on the show:

• Trump’s Warsaw speech and why it matters
• Why I think the Democrats are well on their way to blowing the midterms (if the Republicans don’t blow it first
• Independence Day

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!

Heh.

Indeed.

I beg of you (where “you” = Big Left):

According to a Facebook event created by the Women’s March, the protest against the NRA will take place on Friday, July 14 and Saturday, July 15 in Fairfax, Virginia. The rally will begin on July 14 at 10:00 AM in front of the NRA headquarters in Fairfax. At noon, the 18-mile march from the NRA headquarters to the Department of Justice in DC will begin. The rally at the Department of Justice will begin at 10:00 AM on July 15.

Wear lots of pink hats, and dress as vaginas.  Please, please please please.

“Occupy Symbolic Meaningless New York Red Carpet” appears to be progressing apace.

And get all the lavish media overcoverage you can get.  I beg of you.

The ad is a “response” to an NRA ad that the proverbial “some” found provocataive:

Mallory explained to HuffPost why the NRA ad featuring [conservative pundit and NRA affiliate Dana] Loesch was particularly problematic and dangerous.

“This particular NRA ad, in our judgement, is very dangerous,” Mallory said. “It is specifically calling for members of the NRA and other gun owners to take up arms to address protesters or to push back against protesters, particularly people of color and people who support as us protesters and as black and brown people.”

Mallory is a hysterical ninny.

And the hypocrisy stews and fumes over the left’s response to the NRA like the humidity in New Orleans.  This is the left that’s been wrapping itself in “Resistance” romance – styling itself after the French, Poles, Norwegians, Danes, Yugoslavs and others who risked their and their families lives to kill Germans and collaborators, with guns, knives, bombs, garrotes.    A movement whose violent rhetoric is expressed through phrases like “Punch a Nazi” (where “Nazi” = anyone to the right of John McCain) and “Bash the Fash” and, in one episode (so far), a committed Democrat attempting mass murder on Republican congressmen.

So yeah, shrill harpies.  Hold your march.  Go big.  I beg of you.

We’ve fallen a little behind on our World War I series.  Over the next few months, we’re going to work to get caught-up to the calendar.

For months, the rumors had trickled through the Entente lines in France.  From the highest levels of government, down to the individuals soldiers in their trenches, talk had persisted that after a year of bloodshed, and the loss of over 960,000 dead, the German army might finally begin to retreat.

On March 14, 1917, the rumors appeared to become facts.  Following several weeks of localized German retreats, the British 4th Army at Sailly-Saillisel in the Somme region began to spot the early signs of a massive German withdrawal.  Cautiously, British and French units began to advance – the Germans had used similar withdrawal tactics in 1914, luring Entente soldiers into salients and then attacking at the edges of the withdrawal; a sort of Great War pincer maneuver.  Yet as the British and French occupied territory long since lost, no counter-attack occurred.  Almost 10 miles past the original front, the armies of the Entente met at Nesle, their forces so congested into the abandoned front that the resulting march halted due to the traffic jam.

For the Entente, the retreat signified Germany’s weakening position.  In reality, the Germans had retreated behind a nearly impregnable wall of concrete bunkers and interlocked defenses.  After nearly three years of war, Germany was learning from the slaughter of the trenches.  The newly built German line might have been formally called the Siegfriedstellung or Siegfried Position, but as the brainchild of the Chief of the German General Staff Paul von Hindenburg, the “Hindenburg Line” would be the lynch-pin of Germany’s solution to the conflict – an embrace of “total war.”

Hindenburg (left) and his deputy, Ludendorff. Their reputation as military geniuses extended beyond the ranks of the Central Powers

From the earliest days of the Great War, German strategy had been to force a conclusion on the Western Front.  Whether represented by offensives such as the Schlieffen Plan or Verdun, the German General Staff had operated under the assumption that France and Britain could be knocked out of the war.  Despite ample evidence that Russia was the far weaker of the major powers of the Entente, General Staff Chief Erich von Falkenhayn had persistently vetoed shifting German resources to the East.  The pure vastness of Russia – in terms of territory, manpower and apparent indifference to casualties – had historically bested other commanders.  Falkenhayn was determined not to join their company.

By the fall of 1916, such views had changed along with the General Staff’s leadership.  In a conflict that had disgraced countless generals, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff had risen by their successes on Berlin’s secondary front.  Winning battles against the Russia juggernaut with far fewer men, and despite being encumbered by the failings of their Austro-Hungarian ally, Hindenburg and Ludendorff were seen as the ideal candidates to solve the bloody dilemma of the Western Front.    Read the rest of this entry »

One of the reasons that Black Lives Matter gives to justify their tactic of blocking freeways is that the inconvenience suffered by the “white” (?) motorists shoiuld put them in mind of the inconveniences suffered by black people.

Fair enough!

The Met Council is making it incredibly difficult to be a commuter in the Twin Cities – to get from where one lives to where one works, and back.  Commuting is the norm, not the exception.  The Met Council’s mania for building trains (from where people largely aren’t, to where they largely don’t want to be) at the expense of roads has made that task even more onerous.

So let’s borrow – dare I say, “appropriate” – an idea from BLM?

Let’s gather outside the Met Council’s next meeting.

And block the hallway to the bathroom.  While waving signs telling them to imagine they were trying to get to the next exit to get to a bathroom?

Can you smell the victory?

“What about our lives? Who protects us from the people who are supposed to protect us?”

The question is from Tonya Jameson, a black kid who was held at gunpoint by an off-duty cop when he was changing a license plate on a car that he’d bought from the cop’s mother in law.

And he asks a very legitimate question:   why should we, the citizens, have to de-escalate our police?

Jameson expresses polite disagreement with the police chief, who explained to him why the officer’s actions were, inevitably, found to be perfectly lawful:

Chief Rausch said that when investigating complaints, it is essential to understand an officer’s mindset to determine the facts. A mindset is not a fact.

Here are the facts that Janish appeared to focus on – the unmarked cab, a black person, the duffel bag and the license plate.

Then here are other facts that he ignored – he knew his mother-in-law was selling the car, it was broad daylight, and I knew her first name, but not her last name. I offered to show him the keys, registration and bill of sale signed by his mother-in-law.

Those are the actual facts. Officer Janish’s mindset was the scenario he created in his head. His fears weren’t facts.

The law cuts a very wide swathe of tolerance for cops’ “mindsets”.   Technically, so does all “use of force” law.

But part of cops’ “Mindsets” these days is constant exposure to the idea that violent death awaits around every corner; that every stop could be their last; that their first, last or next contact with the public could end up like this:

Sobering – and dangerous.

If we’re to the point that we The People need to deal with cops more carefully than we do criminals, we’ve got a big problem, here.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A shopper at a Roseville liquor store was upset that store management wanted to check her large bag.  She was at the store on Sunday with about a dozen people, picketing, signs saying “MGM Racist” and “Treat Everyone Equally.”

Maryam S., the person who complained on YELP on 7-1-17, says MGM never checks anybody’s bags.  That’s how she knows she was singled out.  Scroll past a few Fake Reviews by Social Justice Warriors from places like Arlington, Virginia and Apple Valley (who obviously never shop there), you find a review from Gnos G. dated six weeks before the complaint, another Asian whose bags got searched.

Maryam says when she called the owner, she was told that searching bags is carefully limited to people whose conduct is suspicious.  The owner pointed out that historically, most shoplifting in that store has been done by Black shoppers.

In other words, you were not singled out to be searched, Maryam, because searching bags has been store policy for weeks (and that sign has been on the door for years – I know because that’s my regular liquor store).  And you were not profiled for being Asian, they check Black people’s bags, too.

Searching large bags in a store is not racism.  It’s loss prevention.  If you worked in retail instead of being an Emergency Room Doctor at St. John’s Hospital, you’d know that.  I realize it’s jarring to suddenly find yourself being treated unfairly because of what other people have done in the past.  Believe me, I know exactly how that feels.

I am constantly berated for having White Privilege.  The fact that long ago and far away some White people mistreated some Black people doesn’t mean that THIS White person has mistreated any Black people.  I never owned any slaves, no Black person living in Minnesota today toted any bales of cotton, so using the same logic as Maryam’s example, I shouldn’t have to hear another damn word about White Privilege.

What’s that you say?  Embedded in the culture?  Indirect beneficiary of other people’s crimes?  Guilt by association?  Racial stereotypes?  That door swings both ways, too.  Identity politics paints everyone with broad brushes.

It’s all fine and good to mouth Liberal platitudes about justice and equality and vestiges of institutional oppression.  But when it comes right down to the bottom line, shoplifting is a crime and loss prevention is the solution.  Leave your backpack in the car next time.

Joe Doakes

I’m verging on just about done for apologizing for my skin color.

The Mesabi News has been one of few newspapers in the state with an editorial board that bucks the DFL line.

And their editorial from last Tuesday – “” – might be exhibit A in the “Why Trump Won” museum, someday.

They’ve had enough of the Iron Range’s future being determined by Twin Cities environmentalists:

The Iron Range is done being paraded around in the three-ring circus of hearings, resolutions and comment periods, which are really nothing more than putting the everyday Iron Ranger on trial by a jury of its uniformed peers.

At 4 p.m. today at Virginia Carpenters Union Hall, the Iron Range unifies. Labor groups, businesses, politicians and unions — and supporters in the Twin Cities — are standing up and saying we’re done. They’re calling for a boycott of a Forest Service hearing on July 18 in St. Paul over a federal land withdrawal, and instead will protect the Range’s way of life — on the Iron Range — July 25 in Virginia.

The editors see how the game is being played.

These hearings, on the taxpayers’ dime, are a mockery of working government. Go to Duluth, go to St. Paul, Ely or Virginia and it’s the same group of people talking on both sides.

What more is there to hear? And what is there to learn about mining in St. Paul? The Forest Service says it seeks a wide opinion on the subject, so by that logic environmental hearings on the St. Croix Bridge or the Fargo-Moorhead Diversion project should have hearings on the Iron Range.

But it won’t happen because this is the playground for the Twin Cities, and they’ll get there “one funeral at a time,” as Becky Rom, the leader of the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters, has been quoted by The Progressive, a grassroots publication that champions progressive politics.

Remember this the next time some plushbottom fop from Kenwood or Crocus Hill calls themselves “the Resistance”.

To:  Minnesota Public Radio News
From:  Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re:  Your Teaser This Morning

Heard on MPR’s morning edition:  Cathy Wurzer blurbs to tease an upcoming story:  “Will an Embridge pipeline in Northern Minnesota become the next Standing Rock?”

Given MPR’s connections to the Twin Cities’ Big Environmentalist Left, you’ll pardon me if it sounds like:

1. Big Environmentalism and Big Protest have been planning to make this pipeline “the next Standing Rock” for some time.
2. MPR, being tied into the same Twin Cities “progressive” non-profit circles as Big Environment and Big Protest, knows this fully well.
3. Standing Rock was good business for MPR.  Their reporters had constant access to the Standing Rock site, and responded with what sounded to this listener like an awful lot of sympathetic puff-piece coverage.   MPR News and APM would no doubt love to have another story like it to fill this long slow, election-free summer.

Of course it’s going to be “like Standing Rock”.  And I’m pretty sure everyone that matters at MPR already knows it, is planning for it, and started booking hotel rooms up amid the jackpines long before Wurzer’s teaser was written.

I mean, am I wrong?

That is all.

Via social media, from my friend “Midway Murph”:

MITCH: Institutional Social Media people can’t possibly get any dumber.

INSTITUTIONAL SOCIAL MEDIA PEOPLE: Hold my beer.

I posted this link last week – Glenn Reynolds in USAToday on how David Brooks and establishment-y pundits like him led to Donald Trump.

This passage caught my attention; the Tea Party preceded  Trump by a good 6-7 years.  We were civil, orderly, and we left the world a much better place than we found it, even in little ways, as shown in this story from a San Francisco counterprotest:

In San Francisco, too, tea party protesters met pro-Obama activists and picked up their trash. “John,” author of The City Square blog wrote: “As Obama supporters moved along in the line to get into the fundraiser, they left behind an impressive amount of trash … Tea Partiers shouted ‘pick up your garbage’ and ‘this is San Francisco, what about recycling?’ There was no response. They chanted ‘Obama leaves a mess.’ Still no response. Eventually, a tea partier (wearing the black cowboy hat) crosses over and starts to pick up the trash on his own. Other tea partiers join him. Another manages to find a trash bag. Soon the trash is being collected.”

It’s true. I was there.  It was an amazing outpouring of motivation, passion, and equanimity.

But it was spontaneous and from the right, so it had to be destroyed.  And between the media and the establishment GOP, it was.

Yet the tea party movement was smeared as racist, denounced as fascist, harassed with impunity by the IRS and generally treated with contempt by the political establishment — and by pundits like Brooks, who declared “I’m not a fan of this movement.” After handing the GOP big legislative victories in 2010 and 2014, it was largely betrayed by the Republicans in Congress, who broke their promises to shrink government and block Obama’s initiatives.

So when you shut down peoples’ peaceful, reasonable assembly for redress of grievances, what do you expect is going to happen?

So now we have Trump instead, who tells people to punch counterprotesters instead of picking up their trash.

When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly. Brooks closes his Trump column with Psalm 73, but a more appropriate verse is Hosea 8:7 “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Trump’s ascendance is a symptom of a colossal failure among America’s political leaders, of which Brooks’ mean-spirited insularity is only a tiny part. God help us all.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

All those Liberals on campus protesting White Privilege, it occurs to me to ask: if you succeeded in getting rid of White people, what will you eat?

All the food on campus comes from White people.  No, seriously, how many left-handed lesbian Latinas grow lettuce or tomatoes?  How many transgendered people raise hogs?  How many Muslim refugees grow non-GMO wheat, barley or hops?  Get rid of ordinary American White people and you say goodbye to having an ice cold beer with your BLT.

Liberals are demanding a Cultural Revolution based on ideology instead of reality, just like Mao: wiping out monuments to the past, punishing people for what they think, next step is to send commisars to the farms to re-educate peasants in fly-over land.  Then starvation, which will be proof that the kulaks are counter-revolutionaries who must be slaughtered for their own good.  We’ve heard that song before and it never ends well.

Same with Mac-Groveland ELCA-haired Liberals who support Black Lives Matters’ demand that the police be defunded and disbanded.  Wait until their house is broken into, or kid is beat up or raped, or car stolen, then what?  How to restore social order after you’ve thrown it away?  Drum circles?

Future civilizations will look back and say “I don’t get it, they had everything, how could they lose it?  It’s as if they intentionally destroyed the foundations underpinning their own civilization.  Who could be that short-sighted?  No wonder they’re extinct.”

Joe Doakes

It’s a little like all the “workers movements” through the past 200 years that have been mostly college students.

Kevin Williamson:

Americans can be — and often are — everything our critics say we are: impulsive, vulgar, oafish, clumsy, greedy, vain, belligerent, sanctimonious, hypocritical. But we are something else: a catalyst.

We’ve had 241 years of hit-and-miss government, but imagine going back to 1776 with a prophecy that one day, in the not-too-distant future, the English, French, Germans, Spanish, and Italians — to say nothing of the Israelis and the Japanese and the Indians — would form a restive and sometimes turbulent but enduring alliance against tyranny and oppression, and that this alliance would be loosely and imperfectly organized around something like the ideals ratified on July 4, 1776.

We have our political, economic, and religious disagreements with our friends and allies, but everywhere in the world where people fight against tyranny, we hear an echo of 1776. Everywhere in the world where people risk everything they have to tell the king, führer, caudillo, secretary general of the central committee, dear leader, ayatollah, or president for life to kiss their asses, we see something of ourselves. When things get bad enough, we join in, and have spent untold blood and treasure in the pursuit of other people’s liberty. Why? What’s in it for us? It is in our nature. We aren’t our politics. We aren’t our government or our president or even our Constitution, which is subject to revision from time to time. We are the people who decided that rather than just change kings, we’d do away with kings altogether under the radical theological premise that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, irrespective of the king’s good opinion.

Read the whole thing when you get a moment.

Stolen from a friend who stole it from a friend.  

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

Today on the show:

• Minneapolis’ new minimum wage should solve everything.

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!

…but I figured I’d throw this out there for your reading pleasure, since it’s something that occurred to me pretty much every time I heard David Brooks on NPR over the past year.

I’m taking an exceedingly rare sick day today.

Given that there’s a Holiday weekend coming up, I may not do a lot of regular posting until Wednesday.

Enjoy the weekend!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

You figure that if you are forced to shoot somebody and you’re up-front with the cops, the prosecutor will see that you’re a Good Guy and will drop the charges, right?   You can’t imagine the prosecutor will twist your words and play dirty tricks to cheat you out of your rights, all in a blind effort to appease a mob.  That wouldn’t happen in Minnesota, right?

“In the hour-long interview with Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) investigators, Yanez repeatedly used the pronoun “it” instead of “gun” or “firearm.” Prosecutors told jurors that the language proves Yanez never saw a gun. However, prosecutors never played the video during its case, thinking it more strategic to introduce the footage last Friday during the defense’s case. It is common practice to play a defendant’s interview with investigators during the state’s case.

“The rules of evidence clearly allow for the statement’s admission into evidence during cross examination,” said a written statement issued … by the Ramsey County attorney’s office. “Strategically, we felt the statement would be best used for impeachment purposes on cross examination when the defendant took the stand in his own defense.”

But the move backfired [at trial] when Ramsey County District Judge William H. Leary III criticized the prosecution’s timing and refused to allow the video. Defense attorney Thomas Kelly objected to the prosecution’s effort, calling it an “improper impeachment” of Yanez and asserting that the state allegedly withheld the video in order to compel Yanez’s testimony.”

Twisting words.  Dirty tricks.  Mob waiting outside.

Here’s the really fascinating question: is this merely local politicians and bureacrats doing their best to achieve justice, but their best isn’t very good?   Or is this part of a concerted effort at all levels to make gun ownership not only onerous, but even dangerous, for law-abiding citizens?  Defend yourself and we’ll bury you, to make sure nobody else defends themselves.

Joe Doakes

That’s the problem; when people stop trusting the “Justice” system, every manner of conspiracy becomes perfectly plausible.

What do you get when you combine:

• The “progressive” MO of transferring taxpayer money to other progressives
• “Progressives'” hatred of wealthy people (other than “progressive” plutocrats, naturally)
• The “progressive” party line on women’s issues
• The “progressive” drive to at least appear to bring a better life you’re bigger government?

I had to check this twice – but the City Pages actually has the story:   Governments, acting on “information” from “progressive” “feminist” groups  around the country,  are pouring money into sex trafficking enforcement based on absurd predictions about the nuimber of prostitutes supposedly showing up for Super Bowls:

He didn’t have to look hard for supporters. Dallas Police Sergeant Louis Felini told The Dallas Morning News that between 50,000 and 100,000 prostitutes were expected to come into town. The call for even more outrage was sounded by a study from the Dallas Women’s Foundation, which said the throng would include 38,000 underage prostitutes…Before Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona, Cindy McCain — wife of Sen. John McCain — declared the Super Bowl “the largest human-trafficking venue on the planet.” Glendale produced a lengthy public service video broadcasting the evils of the flesh trade.

But according to police, not one person was busted for prostitution-related crimes or sex trafficking in the days leading up to the game.

The results?  Nearly no arrests.

Deterrence?  Perhaps.

“Progressive” delusions about the habits, peccadillos and appetites of the wealthy (who are, let’s be honest, the only people who can ever afford to go to the Super Bowl)?  Definitely.

Oh, yeah.  Minnesota’s doing the same.  Bigly.

I’ve been working at home for a couple years now, for two different companies.  It’s been great; the “road construction” and “first snowfall of the year” and “thunderstorms” that make Twin Cities commuting such a nightmare are pretty much non-factors for me.

Knock wood.

In the previous couple of jobs, I worked in a combination of “Open Offices” – the “airplane hangar”-style office layout so in vogue these days, which is really just a throwback to the 1940s-stylie institutional office – and, worse, the “war room” concept that’s become the fad among those subscribing to this year’s model for software development, the creaky, plodding, dinosaur called with whimisical irony “Agile”.

The only thing I miss about working in an office is…well, people,  The right people, at the right time, anyway.  And even that’s OK.  I’ve had to get a lot more diligent about organizing a social life, which is also good.

Anyway – I’m very much hoping the trend continues.  And while any trend will get to Minnesota years after the coast, there is hope.