Today’s “hot gear” is, along with the Bowie knife and the K-Bar, perhaps the most legendary piece of cutlery in the business – the Khukri.

The Khukri is a strange knife, to western hands; oddly-balanced, weirdly-shaped, more of a machete than a knife.  It looks, and to western sensibilities, feels odd.

So clearly, the legend is less in the hardware than in the software.

The Khukri is the traditional blade of the “Gurkhas” – members of tribe from rural Nepal that, in 1815, not only stymied a British/Indian invasion, thus securing Nepalese independence, but so impressed the would-be conquerors that it led to an agreement to allow the Brits to recruit tribe members into the British Army.  Being selected into a Gurkha regiment is not only one of the greater honors in the tribe – it’s also the only career path that doesn’t involve farming and raising yaks.

Given a choice between living more or less the same way they did a thousand years ago, or jetting into the 21st century (or 19th, for that matter), getting into the Army is an incredibly competitive process.  And it shows; the Gurkhas have been an elite force in the British Army for the 200 years since.   Sometimes they step beyond “elite” to just plain legendary.

But here – learn some more:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The “other” dark meat?

 

Every couple decades or so, someone floats the idea as a trial balloon.

It always comes out about the same.

Sort of like professional soccer.

For hours, women had gathered in line at the farmer’s market in Cologne.  Before even daybreak, hundreds, and then thousands of German women had lined up to try and be among the first to buy badly needed supplies fresh from the nation’s farms.  The long lines, and limited food stuffs that awaited them, were nothing new.

But the prices were.  The cost of eggs, butter and fat had been raised yet again.  Indignant, the women began to argue with the market’s sellers.  The arguing quickly turned to shoving, as women pushed past farmers to grab what food they could.

Cologne’s police were quick to arrive, which only seemed to anger the women further.  “We want to eat,” the women chanted.  “Our men are fighting for the country, and we are starving!”  With the market’s supplies being overrun, the police drew their sabers and charged into the crowd.  Dozens were wounded as the women fled, trampling five of their fellow protesters to death.  For the next two days, thousands of Cologne’s women rioted in response, smashing the windows of shop keepers they accused of hiking prices, and attacking police units around the city.

In the fall of 1915, Germany and her allies might have been winning on the battlefield, but were losing the war at home.

—

A German Food Line – the initial effects of the blockade weren’t really felt until 1915 as the 1914 crops had already been harvested when the war began

While the Central Powers were experimenting with new technologies to try and win the war, unleashing poison gas and zeppelin raids, the Entente’s most powerful weapon had been among the simplest – starvation.    Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the storied history of this blog, there was a liberal blogger who fancied himself a transit advocate – indeed, was alleged to have taken money from light rail interests to attack, using his various sock-puppet blogs, not only opponents of light rail, but proponents of any competing type of transit.

Among some of his many howlers over the years, the leftyblogger claimed – repeatedly – that I was a supporter of “Personal Rail Transit”, notwithstanding the fact that I repeatedly wrote I did not.   “His” “reasoning” was apparently that Michele Bachmann once parenthetically noted some interest in PRT, and Bachmann is a conservative, and I’m a conservative, so I must also support it.  To be fair, it wasn’t the least logical the little fella ever got.

But I always opposed PRT.

Part of it is, and has always been, that I think PRT’s supporters underestimate or underreport the technical challenges of having “just in time” personal rail service on a city-wide network of tracks.   Also the costs.

Part of it is that I don’t care; I’d rather have a steering wheel in my hand.

But the biggest reason I’ve never supported PRT was that I believed that the private market will provide a way to power cars from hydrogen and guide them with software decades before the government can put tracks of any kind, ultralight and personal or heavy and East-Germanlike, from anywhere people are to anywhere they actually want to go.

And, as usual, I’m right.

Not that I’ll ever buy one.  Trusting my safety and schedule to a bunch of programmers is only marginally better than trusting them to government transit employees.

Stuart Mills makes it ooh, so close to official that he’s going for a rematch in the 8th CD.

A rematch with Mills – whose 2014 bid lost by about a point – will give the DFL a chance to exercise those keen logical and reasoning skills in their never-ending pursuit of the stupid vote:

House Majority PAC and the DCCC aired ads thrashing Mills for his personal wealth, and at the time, his long hair.

“If you take a look at the attacks that they leveled against me, the one thing they never wanted to engage in was the issues,” Mills said on Wednesday. “They wanted to talk about my hair. They wanted to talk about my family’s success and the people we employed. They did not want to talk about the issues.”

Mills cut his iconic long hair this summer after a barbecue accident.

How many ancient keg-stand photos do you think the DFL can recycle before people figure out they’ve got nothing?

Planned Parenthood supporters are trying to trend a “#ShoutYourAbortion” hashtag on all the usual annoying social media.

And if you’re a pro-lifer, this may be the best news of all:

Recent polling from Gallup revealed that 61 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in the first trimester. After that, though, “support drops off sharply, to 27%, for second-trimester abortions, and further still, to 14%, for third-trimester abortions.” Thus it is that the average voter is opposed to the overturning of Roe v. Wade – and in favor of banning abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy. Thus it is that America’s moderates believe that women should enjoy a short window during which to make a decision, and that after that point the government should step in. Thus it is that the practice carries with it a serious stigma – even in the eyes of those who believe it must remain available. Should the “shout your abortion” contingent somehow manage to persuade the country’s leading pro-choice politicians to speak about the phenomenon as if it were a mere trifle – or, perhaps, even to praise it — they would be entering new and untested ground — ground, I’d venture, on which they may begin to lose. As my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru has argued convincingly, the perceived aggressor in any culture-war dispute is likely to be the ultimate loser. Might there be a good reason that the pro-choice crowd has remained reticent?

They may be wrong, but they’re not stupid.

Well, some of them aren’t, anyway.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Illegal immigrants sneak into America to escape hard labor and scant food, while Americans diet on scant food and hit the gym to perform hard labor.

Joe Doakes

It’s occurred to a few commentators.

Bruce Springsteen turns 66 today.

Here’s a vid from 40 years ago, in case you don’t feel older enough already.

I’m sure this fellow was a real person – but there are so many things about this email to the Rochester Post – Bulletin, and Minnesota’s anti-gun social media is so packed with people who run multiple “sock puppet” identities, that it’s hard not to wonder if he isn’t a plant.

As Joe Doakes noted in the comments re yesterday’s story about retiring DFL representative Kim Norton’s plans to push more pointless, time-wasting anti-Second Amendment legislation in the next legislative session, it would be not only funny, but the perfect response, for some member of the House to rise up and propose a kill-all amendment that would repeal the requirement to register kayaks.

Who in the House could make this happen?

While campaign finance laws would no doubt forbid offering a beer to the representative that offered the amendment, I’ll certainly offer a drink to someone else in your honor.

For democracy!

To:  The Democrat Party
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Campaign 2016

All,

We’re heading toward a presidential election.

You’re facing a field with a highly-accomplished woman, two Latinos, a black man, two very accomplished surgeons, two CEOs, a couple of Horatio Alger stories, a former Solicitor-General of the United States (that means “a really, really smart lawyer”), a former federal prosecutor who beat the Mob like a bongo drum, and a couple of governors who’ve actually accomplished great things (albeit one fewer than I’d have liked, all things considered).

You’ve got a governor who enthusiastically led a failed state, a career senator who’s famous for his malaprops, a retreaded hippie who would run the economy on unicorn farts, and a “feminist icon” who is where she is precisely because she married an up-and-comer, no different than any other Mad Men-era Scarsdale housewife, and has spent the past 40-odd years enabling him no less than the most abjectly-subjugated burqua-clad Pakistani second wife.

This is the paragraph where I normally throw in the punch line.  But I really don’t need one, do I?

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

O’Sullivan’s Law states any organization that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time.  It’s tongue-in-cheek, but also true.  Case in point:

The Minnesota State Bar Association was started as a trade association to protect and enhance lawyers making a living.  Lawyers pay MSBA a fee to advertise themselves as “Certified Specialist” in certain areas of law.  The bar association collects so much from that program, people are asking why we’re sitting on a pile of money.  The technical answer is “when the present glut of Baby Boomer specialists retires, we’ll need the money to fund the program” but that cuts no mustard with the More Money For Poor People crowd, they always have their hands out.

So MSBA is spending the surplus on vouchers for classes – not all of them, only the classes some staffer decides are worthy.  The logic is: we overcharged you in the parent company, so we’re giving you a voucher to take select classes from our daughter company, not free but at a discount.  Isn’t that great?

The one idea that never occurs to anybody is “Give the money back.”  Or even “cut the fee going forward.”  No, they’re keeping the overbilling, maintaining the overpricing, and dribbling out coupons.  Typical Liberal thinking: all money belongs to us.  If any other corporation did it, the class action lawyers would be all over them.

And yet, they can’t figure out why half the lawyers in the state don’t belong to the Liberal Lawyer’s club.

Joe Doakes

If every person in Calcutta took on the job of writing Avery Librelle satires, we could still not keep up with all the material.

Minnesota’s gun-rights movement has carried out probably the best single grassroots political reformation in recent state history; over the course of 20 years, Minnesota has gone from being an anti-gun state that flirted seriously with Chicago-style gun bans in the eighties, to being a state with a decent shall-issue law and a reasonable chance of debating “Stand your Ground” and even “Constitutional Carry” in coming years, provided some elections break the right way.

More than that?  The pro-Second Amendment human rights movement in Minnesota is a bipartisan front; Republicans throughout the state have joined with DFLers through most of greater Minnesota – who’ve learned, in some cases the hard way, that most of Minnesota outside the 494-694 ring hold their Second Amendment human rights in high regard.

To the point where the DFL apparently has to keep their lobbying to Metrocrats and DFL machine-players who have nothing to lose.

Like Rochester DFL rep Kim Norton, who’s leaving the House after this next session, and wants to go out in a blaze of big-government, criminal-coddling glory, apparently.

Gun rights supporters are none too pleased with Norton’s announcement that she’ll push for stricter gun laws during her final legislative session next year…

Norton, who is not running for re-election in 2016, said she has received about 50 emails so far. The vast majority of those emails are from people who do not live in her legislative district. She said she has no intention of giving up on her plan to introduce a bill tightening gun rights. Among the ideas she plans to push is one prohibiting guns in the Capitol complex saying, “I don’t feel safe at work.”

She added, “Many of my constituents have asked for change.”

Rep. Norton; it’s entirely possible you’re not safe at work.  Same as everyone else in the Rice/University neighborhood, which has become one of Saint Paul’s sketchiest.

But it’s not because of the people who were covered by the Capitol carry restriction (carry permittees had to notify the Capitol Police if they planned to carry in the Capitol complex) – who are absolutely no danger to anyone, legislator or not.  It’s because of the same, common criminals who threaten all the rest of us, and who don’t bother getting permits or notifying Capitol police, any more here than they do in Chicago.

In other words, your proposal is as useless as any other gun control measure – and utterly pointless as well.

Speaking of which:

The good guys have responded:

The Minnesota Gun Owners Political Action Committee sent out an email urging its supporters to email the Rochester DFLer and tell her they oppose her efforts. In an interview with the Post-Bulletin earlier this month, The gun rights group’s email begins, “Just when you think anti-gun politicians in Minnesota have gotten a clue, one pops up and proposes what they call ‘common sense gun law changes.'”

In an interview, the group’s political director Rob Doar said his organization has serious concerns with the idea of establishing any sort of gun registration system…He said the idea also raises privacy rights concerns, with there being a potential for the data to be hacked. He noted that Canada decided to scrap its firearms registry because it proved to be expensive and ineffective.

Bank robber in Warren, Michigan – suburban Detroit – fought the law and pointed his gun at an innocent, law-abiding citizen.

And the citizen won – to the tune of three hits on the would-be robber, and an arrest:

“It’s not every day you see a bad guy get shot and get taken down,” said witness Gary Guyette.
The 43-year-old suspect turned his gun on the wrong customer, a 63-year-old CPL holder who was packing heat, himself.

“The 63-year-old responded in kind by defending himself,” said Mayor Jim Fouts. “It’s his Second Amendment right.”

“The one guy’s arm was full of blood,” said Guyette.

Guyette pulled up in front of the bank to see police apprehending a wounded and whimpering robber

“They cuffed him and then they surrounded him,” he said. “He was moaning and kind of screaming and paramedics pulled up and started working on him.”

FOX 2: “Is it surprising at all to hear about this?”

“To be honest with you, no,” said Stefan Bahry.

No charges are expected against the citizen.  I’m going to guess that bank’s gonna be safe for a while.

Speaking of which – I haven’t heard about a lot of street crime at Summit and East River Road lately…

Walker’s out of the race.

And I couldn’t  be more bummed.

Walker was the *only* candidate in the race that has actually walked the walk when it comes to pushing back on the public employee unions, whose pensions are going to bankrupt this nation long before any war will.

“But he built a stadium for the Bucks!”, some chant. Yeah, he’s not perfect. No candidate is.

“But he’s weak on foreign policy”. He could appoint his motorcycle Secretary of State and have a better foreign policy team than the current occupant.

“He’s a warmonger!” No, he isn’t. Appearing strong and resolute leads to peace; begging for peace brings war.

“But he’s got no charisma!”. Good God, people – voting for charisma is as likely to get you Barack Obama as it is Ronald Reagan. I’ll take an “uncharismatic” president who not only knows how to *talk* about drawing and holding lines, but *has done it, successfully, against brutal, ruthless opposition*, over some “charismatic” candidate for whom it’s all theory, however charismatically expressed.

Given a choice between Calvin Coolidge – an uncharismatic president who shrank government, getting it out of the way of epic prosperity – and a “charismatic” hamster like our current president, is it even a choice?

This is a lousy day for America.

OK, Fiorina and Rubio people. I’m listening

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Donald Trump releases his position on gun rights.

It’s not bad.

Today.

As on so many positions, it’s one of many Trump has held over the past 30 years.

And I know – I’ve said I don’t care if people change their minds, as long as they change in the right direction.

Let’s just say the artist has not closed the deal.

A regular reader of this blog (whose name does not rhyme with “Moe Jokes”) writes:

I know this has been talked about in Minneapolis for a few months, but when I read the following, I just couldn’t help but think that if you don’t rate voting as a high priority, perhaps you shouldn’t be voting.  Perhaps, if you need your landlord to hold your hand through life’s responsibilities, you aren’t yet ready to live away from your parents.

“Council Member Jacob Frey, who sponsored the measure, said he could have used the reminder about voter registration when he was younger and frequently changed apartments.

“When you’re thinking about your study group and your track team and the girlfriend and the social and what you’re going to do that weekend, and all the other trillions of stimuli that you have at a university, for instance, you don’t think to register,” Frey said.”

You ever notice how the Democrat “get out the vote” machine is focused almost to exclusion on reaching people who don’t pay much attention to government and politics?

There’s a reason for that.

Since the story of Ahmed “Alarm Clock” Mohammed broke, half of America has become demolitions experts.  Charles C. W. Cooke – one of my two favorite political writers in America today – notes that Ahmed Mohammed’s clock looks a lot more like a bomb than a chewed-up pop tart looks like a gun.  He’s half-right; the poptart wasn’t a gun; the clock looked like a prop from a community-theater production of “24”.

The other half?  They seem to think they’re clairvoyant; the loathsome Richard Dawkins, for starters.

I attended the Black Lives Matter “rally”/demonstration in Saint Paul yesterday.

Or the end of it, anyway; the protesters blocked the Green Line and all traffic on University at Lexigton starting at 9:30 AM, and I got there around 11:30 – in plenty of time for the die-in, a bunch of speeches, and all sorts of chanting.

Uni at Lexington, looking northwest to southeast through spilled coffee. Or maybe a dab of salsa. Or hash brown grease. Not sure. You can sorta make out a cop car on the left; beyond it, the Lexington Avenue Green Line station. The actual protest is out there. Honest.

The bad news?  I brought my camera; I also apperently dripped some coffee on the lens, which coagulated in place, leaving me with really bad photos:

Looking across Uni, cops on the left, protesters behind the crud.

My photos aren’t clear.  I get it.

But they were about as clear as the rationale for the protest.

The stated reason for the protest was to mess with people using the Green Line to get to the Vikings home opener.

But – and let’s leave aside for a moment that Metro Transit routed buses around the stoppage during the entire course of the protest, and had additional buses standing by to carry passengers past the protest – there’s the little matter that…

…no more than a dozen Vikings fans actually park east of Lexington and take the train to downtown Minneapolis.

Speaking of numbers, I counted the following when I was there:

• Perhaps 75 protesters, including speakers.
• Of them, 15-18 were African-American. 50-60 were white.
• There were 14 police squad cars – one state patrol, one Transit cop, the rest Saint Paul.  They blocked University and Lexington a block away on all sides of the protest.
• There were also four mounted cops and six cops on bike.

The police didn’t outnumber the protesters – but the protesters outnumbered the cops by maybe two or three to one.

So why “protest the NFL” in a place where the NFL and the Vikings will be the absolute last people to notice it?    Why didn’t they hold the protest on the Washington Avenue bridge, blocking the many, many people who take the train up from the Mall of America area from getting to the game, and actually getting the NFL’s attention?

Because – this is my theory, here – the Saint Paul wing of BLM isn’t about protesting power structures.  It’s about 2016, and trying to keep African-Americans fired up to vote in a year where the Democrat party’s entire slate is geriatric white people.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When Hillary got the 3 a.m. phone call from Benghazi, I bet she said: “Send me an email in the morning.”

 

Joe Doakes

That’d explain all the calls for “reboots on the ground”.

Here’s the “Scorecards” page for the Taxpayers League.

Here’s the website for Financial Fortitude.

Here’s David Gerson’s website.

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

Today on the show,

• We’ll interview Ted Lillie and Margaret Martin of the Taxpayers League on this years’ report card.
• We’ll be talking with David Gerson, candidate to replace Rep. John Kline in Congress in the Minnesota 2nd Congressional District.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.

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!

I’m not a Donald Trump fan.  I disliked Trump even before it was cool – going back to the ’80s, even, when I thought his “if you’re not a billionaire, you’re a loser” schtick was too stupid to take seriously.

I still do.

But today, in USA Today, we see Trump being blamed for…

…a question asked at a Trump rally?

“We got a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. We know he’s not even an American. (Trump: We need the question.) But anyway. We have training camps brewing where they want to kill us. That’s my question. When can we get rid of them?”

Trump didn’t directly address what the man said about the president — nor did he correct him — and replied:

“We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. A lot of people are saying that. A lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to be looking into that and plenty of other things.”

Let’s leave aside, for a moment, the likelihood that the “questioner” was a plant; our experience during the Tea Party, when lefty provocateurs were busted red-handed posing as Tea Partiers, bringing signs, is still fresh in my mind.  Back then, there’d be an occasional ring of fringies around the edges of the protest, who’d gravitate toward the cameras – unless the rally made a point of publicizing that its security people would be taking pictures of provocative signs to crowdsource; they tended not to show up.  Candid shots of “racist tea partiers” tended to turn out to be slumming lefties.

No, we’ll leave that aside for now.

It’s a Republican event – and no Republican, least of all Trump, is immune to what seems to the great truth of American politics and media in the 21st century

1. Nothing any Democrat says, or does, up to and including violating federal law and national security, will ever be held against them
2. Anything untoward done, said, hinted at, or speculated to have been done, said or hinted at by any Republican officeholder (no matter how obscure or inconsequential), candidate, party official, contributor, voter, supporter, rally attendee, or putative supporter, contributor or rally attendee, or anyone claiming or reputed to be or to have at any time been a Republican party member, supporter or sympathizer, will not only be treated like it’s evidence in a federal trial, but imputed to every conservative, anywhere, regardless of its context, accuracy or even truthfulness.

Oh, yeah – and the story will focus exclusively on violations of political correctness, and studiously ignore any actual issues that may have been addressed.

This behavior is so pervasive and predictable, I have canonized it as “Berg’s Seventeenth Law“.

In the orthodox rock ‘n’ roll canon spread in the late 70s and early 80s by the curia of rock critics – the likes of Dave Marsh, Griel Marcus, Robert Christgau and the rest of Rolling Stone’s round-table of critics – the nadir of popular music was the six-year stretch between Elvis departing for the army, and the Beatles landing in New York.

The reason – this according to a claque of people who build careers “criticizing” an art form that was immune to criticism – was that for those six years, control of the pop music industry reverted back to what had it had been before the rise of Sun records and “black” radio; groups of full-time, professional “song pluggers” cranking out music by the bushel basket in the Mad Men-era equivalent of Tin Pan Alley, in places like the legendary Brill Building, where is songwriters cranked out songs in bulk lots, matched them up with casting-agency generic singers, who recorded the songs with groups of anonymous studio musicians with all of the ceremony of running groceries past the scanner, applying mass production tactics not much different than Eli Whitney or Henry Ford had brought to their products.

According to this mythology, on the other hand, 1954-58, and again after 1964, music was the production of legions of plucky songwriter-performers, during Elvis’ heyday, and again from the Beatles through roughly Woodstock.

According to their orthodoxy, music in the early 70s started slipping, with the creative process falling into the hands of  “corporations ” , From which it was saved first by the punks, then by the “new wave” and then…

… well, it doesn’t matter. History has gone on. The curia has obsolesced itself; who on earth reads Rolling Stone anymore, much less remembers, much less pays attention, to Greil Marcus or Robert Christgau or Dave Marsh?

Of course, both impressions were an illusion; a few songwriters, whether working in a song mill in Manhattan or in a row house in Liverpool, have always hoarded a disproportionate share of talent and sales.  And plucky independents have always existed and upset the machine on occasion.

I list all of that background by way of saying something that would otherwise sound like the ravings of a curmudgeon; for all of the “critics” caterwauling about music before ’54, from ’54-’58, or during the early ’70s, the notion that every generation of parents has held – that all music sounds the same – has never been more true.

It’s not just a curmudgeonly illusion; it does largely sound the same, because most of what passes for popular music today is written and produced by, literally, the same five people.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My cousin from Fridley is smart: National Merit Scholar, scholarship to St. Thomas, worked for the State Department abroad, taught college in Madison, lives near Baltimore – a very smart and thoroughly educated woman.

She’s shocked and appalled at gun violence. Something Must Be Done!  But not if it would offend anyone. Can’t focus our efforts on the 13% of the population who commit 50% of the murders, that’d be racissss.  Besides, who says so, the KKK?  No, the FBI.  It’s not hate speech, it’s the truth but she no longer recognizes it because she’s embraced so many lies from The Left, the truth sounds ridiculous to her.

I wish there were a way to have a reasonable discussion but when the first words out of her mouth are “assault rifle,” I know it’s hopeless –

Joe Doakes

Converting someone from the Madison/Macalester/Berkeley version of America’s left is not much unlike deprogramming a cult member.