Ten years ago on this blog, we were talking about the trend in advertising since probably the mid-nineties; if you look at an ad featuring a family, the man is probably depicted as a bumbling doughy cretin married to an improbably gorgeous woman who is (along with the kids, apparently including any boys that haven’t gotten married and had kids yet) inevitably smarter and more capable than him.

And now, the people who study and talk about these things are…well, studying and talking about it.  At least in the UK:

What is more concerning is advertisers’ and programme makers’ depiction of men as stupid, subservient slaves to career-juggling supermums – a trend that runs from the buffoonery of Daddy Pig to an endless tidal wave of cretinous TV ad dads.

The Mintel research confirmed that 20 per cent of men think we are portrayed as incompetent about the house in ads, and small wonder. In ad land – unlike the real world where men dominate computing and engineering – bumbling blokes can’t even get a broadband connection and struggle with basic domestic appliances, while smarter women roll their eyes, then save the day.

Overall, this means that, increasingly, men in adverts are prized for their looks, but ridiculed for their brains – which is precisely where women were in the 1950s and ’60s.

Here’s the scary part – and the part that I’ve never seen anyone write about;  advertising doesn’t happen by accident.  Even in the Mad Men era, advertising was the product of rigorous audience research; it’s vastly moreso today.

The “Dumb Husband” stereotype reigns supreme in ads for products where women might be reasonably assumed to be the primary consumers.   Look at ads aimed at men; for the most part, women may well be eye candy, but the ad passes on little or no subtext about the womens’ intelligence.     And yet ads aimed at women are highly likely to portray men as idiots.

Given that ads – much less trends in advertising – don’t happen by accident, this suggests that these ads are dominant because that’s what women think about their men.  

And yet society wonders why young men are choosing video games over dating.

The city is looking for feedback (or, possibly, “looking for feedback”) in re a new police chief.   Here’s where to give that feedback, if you live in the city.

Outgoing chief Tim Smith seemed to regard the law-abiding gun owner as a bigger nuisance than criminals – notwithstanding that the law-abiding gun owner has a crime rate of roughly zero in this state.

It’d be nice to get a pro-shooter chief – but given that the city is generally run by and for the Volvo-driving, Macalester-attending, Whole-Foods-shopping set, I’d be happy to get a chief who was knowledgeably neutral.

So if you live in St. Paul, by all means provide your feedback, for whatever good it’ll do.

A couple of wannabe thugs apparently tried to turn a craigslist transaction into a heist in Shakopee yesterday.

And while the article doesn’t say so explicitly, reading between the lines, it would appear the Fugs picked the wrong guy:

Police radio reports indicated that the apparent victim of the attempted robbery had a handgun and fired at the would-be robber. Shakopee police and other law officers were looking for a silver-gray Chevrolet Venture van with at least two people inside, with at least one armed with a revolver.

Radio reports indicated that the robber ran from the scene toward the White Castle restaurant near Walmart and then got into a vehicle, which reportedly got on Highway 169. The State Patrol was looking for the vehicle.

The apparent victim was waiting near the Walmart garden center entrance for police. He apparently was not injured.

Police were planning to look at store video.

The article doesn’t say so explicitly – but waiting for the cops at the store after an incident is the behavior you’d expect from someone who took carry permit training.

Kim Norton and Heather Martens, obviously, would have preferred that the victim submit meekly, and maybe die.

UPDATE:  The Strib is being veeeeeeery slow to release the facts of this case, including who shot first and who shot who.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

What politician will tackle this persistent patriarchal problem, deal with the disparate impact, equalize the inequity and smash the Glass Coffin?

 

Joe Doakes

I’m sure Hillary will look into it if elected…

…oh, I slay me.

SCENE:  The Saint Paul City Council chambers.  Present are:

• Mayor Chris COLEMAN
• Ward 1 councilor Bernadette SANDERS
• Ward 2 councilor Benny TOMUSOLLINI
• Ward 3 councilor Francine BURNS
• Ward 4 councilor Evita P. EVITA
• Ward 5 councilor Hugh GOCHAVEZ
• Ward 6 councilor L. A. PDOG
• Ward 7 councilor Katherine ANTSY

COLEMAN gavels the meeting to order.

COLEMAN:  May the meeting come to order.

BURNS: (loudly clears her throat)

COLEMAN:  Sorry.  May the meeting please come to order, by your indulgent leave?

Read the rest of this entry »

The debate in the House of Commons had raged for several weeks.  The failures of the coalition government of Prime Minister H.H. Asquith – Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, the failure of the British offensives of the fall of 1915, and a shortage of munitions in the spring of the same year – had been thrown at the PM’s feet.  The conservatives in Asquith’s coalition had begun calling for his head, as men he had dismissed from the War Cabinet, like Churchill and Lord Kitchener, attempted to speak directly to the public about what they deemed the PM’s lapses in judgement.

The measure before the House of Commons had been intended to blunt such criticisms.  It was a measure Asquith had fought against, both publicly and privately within the War Cabinet.  Asquith had tried for months to stall such a vote, commissioning studies in the vain hope of proving it unnecessary.  Instead, Asquith’s commissions had proven the opposite.  Placed between his principles and his ability to prosecute the war, Asquith chose the war.

The vote wasn’t even close.  By a margin of 383 to 36, the Military Service Act of 1916 passed on January 27th.  The proud tradition of the small, professional British Army had vanished.  Britain had joined the rest of Europe in embracing conscription.

—

The Promise of a “New Army.”  Millions of Britons flocked to the call in 1914 and 1915

Since the Battle of the Marne in the fall of 1914, most British authorities – both civilian and military – had understood that the British system of volunteerism had reached its logical limitations in a modern war.  The only question was the best way forward.    Read the rest of this entry »

…that this was already thirty years ago:

I remember I had been working at KSTP for about a month; I’d finagled my way into a couple extra hours a day working in the control room during a couple of syndicated talk shows before the Vogel show.  I was on the board during the “Michael Jackson” show – the talk host, not the singer or the beer expert – when network news alarms started going off in the studio, and ABC Radio’s anchor broke in to announce the explosion.

And over the next minute or two, everyone in the building piled into the control room, and I – the lowliest person in the building – had to tell everyone to shut up and get out so I could concentrate on all hell breaking loose.  And, since the board operator is the bottom line in the control room, everyone – the general manager, the news director, everyone – promptly did.

I spent a chunk of the rest of the day trying to track down an astronaut to comment on the air with Don Vogel – and i found one (a guy from my hometown, an old student of my dad’s who eventually did one or two Shuttle missions).

And it was one of those days I figured that broadcast news was what I really liked doing.

Without all the national tragedies, of course.

I think we carried Reagan’s speech live.

Thirty years? Yow.

Bernie Sanders is proud to call himself a socialist.  He’s happy to continue the ideological legacy of Mussolini, Peron and Hugo Chavez.

I know I’m not the only one who sees the photos of his campaign rallies, and imagines them debouching out onto the street to look for pockets to pick and (fill in the unfavored minority) to beat up.

And yet, I can’t help watch this spot and think “hell yeah!”

It takes my (far and away) favorite Simon and Garfunkel song, and wraps it around a whole lot of stirring images, and says absolutely nothing, and says it with glorious style.

Of course, it’s dishonest.  Bernie Sanders loves “America”, provided it acts like Sweden (or like Sweden did, until recently).  But it’s not Swedes he’s trying to convince to vote for him.

But who cares, really?    I want fill up a bathtub with this ad, and soak in it for hours.  The imagery, the videography, the intersection of picture and sound – all of them are absolutely glorious.

Glorious pictures and sound have a long history, of course. We’ve seen that before; all the way back to Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), the signature movie by Leni Riefenstahl, the greatest female filmmaker of all time (that’s gotta sit just wonderfully with the Feminists) – a film (as opposed to a TV spot) that punches a lot of the same buttons.

And no, I’m not comparing Sanders to Hitler, at least as far as the whole “genocidal madman” thing goes.

But there’s little content.

There’s very little substance.

But oh, lord, the imagery and sound and cinematography.  Is it any wonder that a nation of low-information voters turned out in droves back then, just as Sanders hopes they will now?

It’s one of Minnesota liberals’ standard conceits; that Minnesota is just plain more civilized than rough ‘n tumble southern zip codes like Texas.

But if you look at the numbers, Andrew Rothman at GOCRA reminds us, you can find some interesting surprises.

For example:  If you divide Minnesota’s population of 5,457,173 by its total number of carry permits – 210.647, you get a figure of 3.86%.

If you do the same thing with Texas’ population and carry permits, you get 3.38%.

How about in convenient graphic form?

In other words, while liberals want to have you believe the sky will fall if Minnesota becomes as “gun crazy” as Minnesota liberals’ stereotype of Texas, we are already carrying more than Texans are.

By the way – that 3.86 becomes closer to 5% if you count only adults.

And yet we have one of the lowest murder rates in the country, down around western European levels.

Surely there must be some mistake.

Gun toting white Christianist terrorists armed with carry permits and a perfectly legal semiautomatic handgun and lots of hatred shoot a gay man seven times outside a gay bar in Lubbock Texas.

Clearly, that wave of white Christianist terror that Barack Obama, Janet Napolitano and wave after wave of earnest lefties have been warning us about is upon us.

Well, no.

They were Muslims.

And the attack happened in Sydney, Australia – where, President Obama assures us, hate crime can’t turn into a handgun homicide because law-abiding people can’t get those kinds of guns.

One thing’s for sure; when Mark Dayton says “if you don’t like immigrants, leave the state”, there are people out there who are ready to put some teeth into the demand!

1985:  “IBM is going to dominate the entire world!”.   1995:  IBM is fading fast.

1995:  “Microsoft is going to own the entire world!”  2005:  Microsoft has settled into a niche.

2005:  “WalMart is going to destroy small business!”.  2016:  WalMart seems to be hitting limits.

As little as the left seems to trust the market, it seems to be keeping “monopolies” pretty well under control.

Who could have foreseen it?

(Answer:  every single free market conservative).

If nothing else, Europe’s Jews have learned that when your ship strikes an iceberg, you don’t wait for a future round of lifeboats:

The European Jewish Congress has publicized a shocking poll: “A third of the European Jews think of emigrating”. That is 700,000 people.

“The Jews of Europe are at a crossroads”, tells me Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress based in Brussels. “If the authorities continue to add only defensive measures, building taller walls and thicker doors, then the Jews will not want to live this imprisoned life and will leave Europe in large numbers”.

Before the attack in Copenhagen, a year ago, there were 23 children in the Jewish kindergarten in Malmö [Sweden]: today there are only 5 left. The armed guards in front of the school triggered panic and parents prefer to enroll their children in public school. It is the end of Jewish identity. Some people whispered that the synagogue of the city will soon be turned into a museum. From 2010 to today, the synagogue lost a third of the faithful. The rabbi, Shneur Kesselman, is constantly attacked in the streets: almost 200 episodes of anti-Semitism in ten years.

Wonder where this round of refugees is going to settle?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Al Sharpton is upset the Oscars didn’t recognize a Black actor.  It makes the awards “fraudulent.”

For crying out loud, how dense are they?  There’s an award for every category down to Junior Lunch Caterer’s Assistant, why not add one more?

And let’s be blatant and clear about it – this is not an award for excellence, those awards went to Best Actors.  This is an award to shut up critics.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this year, the ‘Token Award for Black Actor’ goes to . . . .”

Joe Doakes

It’s all about “sending messages”. `

The new video from the Center of the American Experiment:

And here’s today’s ♫ music playlist.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on live from 1-3PM today!

Today on the show,

• John Hinderaker from the Center of the American Experiment.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson has “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!

Told that the State Capitol Police wanted to hold “active shooter” training for the legislature and its staff, Rep. Kim Norton decided to introduce a bill repealing last year’s law allowing law-abiding carry permittees to have their legally-carried firearms in the Capitol complex.

And the logic was…

…entertaining:

If law-abiding citizens can’t bring guns to the capitol, criminals won’t shoot anyone.

Just like nobody sells crack, drives over the speed limit or after too much to drink, or robs liquor stores any more; because they are laws against each.

Norton is wrong, by the way; at least 18 states allow law-abiding citizens to carry their legal firearms in the state Capitols in one way or another.

That’s the reason so many Real Americans have such a hard time taking gun-grabbers seriously; they’re not serious.

This is about right.

And about how I feel as a North Dakotan in the Twin Cities.

…are doing our long-running history of events of World War I that you might not be aware of in written form…

…mostly because we didn’t think of this first:

Joe Doakes from Como Park continues:

The most famous American Black Man’s Dream was, of course, brilliantly articulated by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said:

“I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.  It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.  I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’. . . I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Look at the headlines:  can any Black civil rights “leader” honestly claim to share Dr. King’s dream?  Does any politician?  Hollywood?  The Media?  Or isn’t it more likely “Black Lives Matter” would find his dream to be patronizing, judge his goals too modest?  Wouldn’t Al Sharpton still insist on a Token Black in the Academy Awards?  Wouldn’t Democrat staffers lump Dr. King with Dr. Carson as Oreos, Uncle Toms, House Negros, wanting to act White?

Modern White Americans proved they have embraced Dr. King’s dream by electing a Black man President not just once, but twice.  But what dream do modern Black Americans embrace?

Joe Doakes

Historically speaking, it’s kind of an anomaly…

Rep. Kim Norton is going to come for your guns this session.

It may not work, but it’s the next measure in what Big Left hopes to make into a steady drumbeat that eventually wears the great, underinformed middle down on the issue.

But the facts are out there.

Location, Location, Location:   If you live in Minnesota, you know that North Minneapolis is the state’s little Oakland.  While Minnesota as a whole has a murder rate of 1.6 per 100,000 people, the North Side’s violent crime (about 30 murders last year, in a population of under 40,000 people) teases out to a murder rate of 75/100,000 – higher than Venezela, double that of Columbia.

Of course, Minneapolis (and Hennepin County in general) has among the lowest legal firearms ownership rates in the state:

So if the left’s conceit  – less guns (in the hands of the law-abiding) equals less crime – would seem to predict a nice, low crime rate in Minneapolis.

But the MinnPost ran a piece earlier this week – and for starters, it confirmed what everyone already knew; the North Side is a shooting gallery, at least judging by the MPD’s “Shot Spotter” system.

Here’s a “heat map” of the city:

There’s a faint dribble of shooting in the “Phillips” neighborhood (between Franklin and Lake, east of 35W and west of Hiawatha), and some in the central core of the south side between 35W and probably Chicago (and just so we’re accurate, here, the shot-spotter microphones are only installed in high-crime areas; we don’t see shots fired in Linden Hills or along Minnehaha Creek because there are no microphones in Linden Hills or along Minnehaha Creek.  But there are no microphones there because, objectively, there really isn’t a big “gun violence” problem there.  Or Nordeast.  Or by Nokomis. Or even on Lake Street east of Hiawatha or much west of Nicollet.

More telling?  Shooting has been trending down on the south side for the past six years:

Even the NYTimes knows that North Minneapolis is a free-fire zone:

But as Willesha Moorehead, who came here from Chicago a dozen years ago, can attest, struggle is baked into its streets.

Seven of her friends or members of her family, including the father of her first child, have died from gun violence in North Minneapolis. She has struggled to get work, in part because she could not find child care for her two daughters, she said. And for the past three years she has bounced between the homes of friends and family because she could not find affordable housing.

The problem, the NYTimes seems to imply, is that not enough money gets spent on the North Side:

Public transportation is poor, residents say, and though local officials are planning to spend more than $1 billion on a light-rail line, North Minneapolis residents have been critical because it will run through downtown and the suburbs but skirt their community.

So clearly, the answer is to crack down on guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens in Northeast and Saint Paul and Anoka and Thief River Falls.

That should solve it.

The real problem?  The government has been using the North Side as a warehouse for the poor for a couple of generations now.  The city has been fine with that – they’re a nice pool of captive DFL voters – but now, the social consequences of keeping a bull pen full of dependents is catching up with the city.

Again.

…that, in fact, it did:  a Feminist “Onion”.

Yes, as a matter of fact, they do.

One of the gun grabbers’ chanting points of late is “Obama hasn’t confiscated a single gun”.  Perhaps, but states like New York, Connecticut and California are.  And Obama needn’t send a single SWAT team out on a single “search and confiscate” mission to “win” his real goal; start changing the culture back to the intolerance of guns we had forty years ago, to set the stage for making the Second Amendment irrelevant.

The good guys can not give ground ever.  Not on anything.  We are dealing with people who are fundamentally dishonest.  We need to treat them as such.

My stomach still hurts from laughing.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The reason for exploring all this American Dream stuff is the poor performance of Black students on achievement tests.  Are the tests measuring the right things?

The modern White American Dream seems to be clean, indoor, meaningful work that pays well enough for an apartment with high-speed WiFi and a Light Rail Pass, such as sitting in a cubicle at a non-profit, saving the whales.  For that, students need basic arithmetic, reading, writing and not much more, certainly not college level expertise.  Any American who shares that dream – Asian, Hispanic, Black, Native American, Muslim, Jewish, or refugee – needs the same skills.  Any high school should be capable of teaching what they need to know and our traditional achievement math and reading tests should be capable of measuring it.

What about people who don’t share that Dream, who reject it?  Those people don’t do well in those White Dream schools because the skills being taught aren’t relevant to their futures.  Those students become a stereotype (which doesn’t fit every rebel but fits enough to have a grain of truth or the stereotype wouldn’t be useful) of Black Male Troublemakers, disrupting the school, fighting with others, preventing everyone else from learning.

So what is those rebels’ dream?  What skills would they prefer to learn, to succeed at their Dream?

If the Young Black Man Dream was as silly as the hateful racists claim – free sex, free stuff, free time – then the required skills would not be the same level of math and reading skills required for the White American Dream. Instead, young Black men would need verbal skills to convince fat White chicks to bed them and to hand over their welfare checks.  They would need to speak English poorly enough to get along with their peers but well enough to convince probation officers that they were doing nothing wrong when the police arrested them.  They would need pattern recognition skills to decipher gang colors and tattoos to avoid trouble.  They would need enough arithmetic to make change from selling drugs and buying bullets.  Yes, I’m intentionally being absurd to illustrate the point:  all students want to learn things they think will be helpful in their future lives as they imagine them.  The question is: how do Black male students imagine their future lives?

So back to education: if you are a young Black man and the school isn’t teaching skills relevant to your Dream – whatever Dream that is – then naturally you’re be bored stiff in class after about 8^th grade.  You’ve learned all the useful knowledge the school has to offer – the rest isn’t relevant to your Dream.  Bored, restless, disciplined, disrespectful, fighting . . . and doing poorly on tests: do we have a discipline problem, or a Dream problem?

Should we accommodate the Dream?  Or try to change it?

Joe Doakes

It’s way past time to change the terms by which we define “the dream”.

Anyone with a living soul was nauseated by the display in Cologne on New Years Eve, where thousands of men of “North African” descent roamed the street in gangs, sexually assaulting women and impeding the police’s attempts to respond.

Here in the US – where this sort of thing is thankfully very rare – the responses depended on the responder’s politics.

People on the left strenuously denied there was a problem, or blamed it on fraternities affiliated with the NRA.

People on the right bought another box of ammo.

Either would be more productive, I suspect, than this group of…er, males in the Netherlands:

The sign says “If you’re not wearing pants, you make less of a mess when they attack you”. No, that’s not true. It says “Don’t make women dress chaste / keep your hands to yourself”. That’ll show ’em.

I’m sure the women of Cologne are thankful for the “solidarity”.

A more productive statement?  Germans are doing their best to arm themselves, as best they can given Germany’s patriarchal gun laws.

And where real people try to arm themselves, you can count on the media to get the Victorian vapours.

The caption says “The Weapons industry profits from the Refugee crisis”. Naturally. Blame Big Gun.

Or in this case, I suppose, the Hohenzollern vapours.

Which group do you suppose will actually benefit the women of Germany – the shooters or the Dutch guys in dresses?