The latest bit of gaslighting madness from the Minnesota chapter of Big Left: “The Star/Tribune is actually conservative“:

My statement on why I’m not seeking the Star Tribune Editorial Board’s endorsement.

If you want to learn more about my candidacy, I encourage you to check out the non partisan voter guides I’ve participated in (including the Star Tribune’s) or check out my website below. pic.twitter.com/YptrYCFN7x

— Elliott Payne (@ElliottForWard1) October 23, 2023

Americans overwhelmingly consider Hamas a terrorist organization, and condemn the wanton slaughter of October 7.

But among Americans under 24 years old, the split between pro-humanity and pro-Hamas is not only depresslingly closely-fought, but the pro-terror side has a slight edge.

Putting it bluntly, a thin majority of young Americans are OK with genocide. They may couch it in intersectional twaddle, they may hedge the ugly parts.

But a generation that grew up chanting “punch a Nazi” yapping about colonialism and calling their elders “fascists” around the Thanksgiving table are now supprting an actual Fascist regime that actually is killing minorities to further a thousand year old colonial movement.

Why?

It’s the professors:

The first order of business is to heap scorn on a generation that has adopted this morally bankrupt perspective and the older adults in their lives who have so maliciously led them astray. The second task at hand is for us to understand what convinced the younger generation to sacrifice their humanity upon the altar of an intellectual fad. The answer can be found, at least in part, in one odious word that has claimed the benignity of this generation and so many before them: “framework.”

On October 13, the Atlantic published a fascinating reflection by Helen Lewis on the callous indifference her compatriots on the American left have shown toward the wanton murder of Jews for being Jews. She correctly identified the origins of this phenomenon in the intellectualization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses, which flattens the distinctions between civilian and terrorist, between West Bank and Gaza, between Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, and so on. But that flattening is the outcome. The instrument that pummels the complexities of the region into an unrecognizable paste is that detestable word, “framework.”

“Fitting Israel into the intersectional framework has always been difficult, because its Jewish citizens are both historically oppressed—the survivors of an attempt to wipe them out entirely—and currently in a dominant position over the Palestinians, as demonstrated by the Netanyahu government’s decision to restrict power and water supplies to Gaza,” Lewis wrote. Intersectionality is, indeed, the “framework” on display here. It started out as little more than a thought experiment, but it has since transmogrified into a way of life.

While our modern academic class is largely parasitical and counter-useful, they have perfected the art of self-serving logical gymnastics.

Who on earth does Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) think she is…

(Language NSFW)

Leaked audio obtained by @CurrentRevolt shows Democrat Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee berating a staffer: "F**king idiots serve no goddamn purpose … Nobody gives a shit about what you're doing and you ain't doing shit!"

(WARNING: Explicit language) pic.twitter.com/Lzl4AmKhkS

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 21, 2023

…Amy Klobuchar?

SCENE: In a drab back room at MNDFL headquarters on Plato Boulevard, two DFL communications staffers, Evan BRYANT (Macalester 2021) and Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK (St. Thomas 2018) are pecking away at their iPhones, poring over their social media plan for the week.

BIRKENSTOCK: Chairman Martin says people are starting to get tired of crime?

BRYANT: Where?

BIRKENSTOCK: Oh, rednecks in Fridley and Bemidji, mostly.

BRYANT: Yuck.

BIRKENSTOCK. I know, right? But their votes still count…

BRYANT: For now

BIRKENSTOCK: LOL, right? Anyway, we need to put out something that shows the administration and the Attorney General are engaged on crime.

BRYANT: Let’s do this:

When landlords try to charge illegal fees, I will stop them.

When they try to evict tenants who don't pay those illegal fees, I will stop them.

When people break the law and make it harder for Minnesotans to afford their lives, I will stop them.https://t.co/6TYJHXHwLm

— Attorney General Keith Ellison (@AGEllison) October 19, 2023

BIRKENSTOCK: Oh, that’s good.

BRYANT: But someone just left a comment.

BIRKENSTOCK: (Reading a reply on Twitter). “So how about rampant violent and property crime, and half a billion in fraud committed by DFL constituents and contributors?”

BRYANT: Hmmm – tough one.

BIRKENSTOCK: I got it. Tweet out this photo of Lt. Governor Flanagan feeding Ellison and Governor Walz corn dogs at the State Fair!

BRYANT: I’ll caption it “#OneMinnesota”.

BIRKENSTOCK: Brilliant.

BRYANT: And on message!

And SCENE

Enrollment at Twin Cities schools continues to erode:

The number of students in the Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts continues to decline. https://t.co/CqSPmvS8wV

— The Minnesota Star Tribune (@StarTribune) October 20, 2023

We’ll wait for the Walz/Flanagan administration to register their theatrical shock that “free” mystery meat and unrestricted gay porn in school libraries isn’t drawing students like Dave Matthews fans to the last bag of Cheetoz.

But I have a question.

This seems like the sort of story where someone could spend some time finding out whether the parents of senior DFL leadership in the Twin Cities and the state overall – the ones who have kids, at least – send their kids to the schools their union patrons run.

How many City Councilpeople, Mayors, policy staffers, senior bureaucrats and school leadership send their children to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, or indeed any, public schools?

This is the sort of thing that would call for, I dunno, some class of self-styed monastic seekers of information, perhaps working for institutions with printing presses or transmitterds, to do some reporting .

Pretty crazy, I know. .

John Augustine is with the Legislative Evaluation Assembly.

Charles Kuchlenz is the Libertarian candidate to replace Ruth Richardson in MN HD52b.

Song list:

Henco is going to have a “contested” County Commission race, where “contested” means “a battle between bad, worse and worst” .

I think the found ‘worst”.

https://twitter.com/AlphaNewsMN/status/1714696874920173640

People inexperienced in the ways of Metro “progressives” might joke “I wonder if she’s going to put “Irritating people into behavioral change” into her campaign literature, yuk yuk”.

To those who know the breed, it’s not a joke. The suburban white upper-middle-class “progressive” seeks out different flavors of trite masochism and whiffle-ball self-abnegation – paying for bags, making “stolen land declarations”, putting up “In This House” signs – that have little financial and no moral cost, to signal dubious but convenient virtue to the less englightened.

I bet she wins.

I personally don’t care much one way or another about legalizing cannabis.

But as I’ve heard from people running ma and pa cannabis, THC and CBD product shops, the DFL’s cannabis law is full of carve-outs to big pharma, and has regulations that are pretty sure to smother most small businesses. Tales

But the DFL was buying votes, so no biggie.

All that was foretold, has come to pass:

IRRR is funded by mining industry taxes — about $25 million a year — and was created to diversify the economy by promoting economic development and job creation in 13,000 square miles of northeastern Minnesota. It provides loans and grants to a variety of public and private projects, including broadband development and manufacturing facilities. 

HWY35 is led by Jack Mitchell, who is president of Besa Group and Mitchell Hospitality in Kansas City that grow, manufacture and sell cannabis in Missouri. Another principal in HWY35 is John Hyduke, the chair of a Minneapolis-based marketing company, Modern Climate. Mitchell and Hyduke are also the leaders — vice chair and chair, respectively — of a newly formed trade association called the Minnesota Marijuana Association, which has tapped former Mining Minnesota leader Frank Ongaro as its interim executive director. Other board members are with companies from Missouri, Nevada, Maryland, Colorado and Minnesota. 

Portions of a shuttered plant in Grand Rapids that used to make oriented strand board would be turned into HWY35’s planned facility, according to the staff presentation to the IRRRB. In addition to the state loan, the project would be part of a tax increment financing district approved by the Grand Rapids City Council and would also be supported by private investment that would equip a growing and manufacturing facility to produce oils for edibles and other THC products.

So – the state giving money to out of state companies to do a job plenty of Minnesota companies would love a shot at?

There are questions. Layers of them, in fact:

Once again Tim Walz vows to get to the bottom of how things work in the Tim Walz administration. https://t.co/JE9Wg5knLP

— Jeff Kolb (@jpkolb) October 18, 2023

Giving the DFL money and power is like teenagers car keys and booze.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

The Minnesota Court of Appeals issued an opinion which clarifies the duty to retreat in defense-of-others cases.

Let’s imagine a situation where Lilly is the Victim lying on the ground, Trevon is the Assailant kneeling astride Lilly beating her with a baseball bat, and Tom is the Rescuer, a lawfully armed citizen who sees the situation.  Tom determines that Lilly is likely to suffer great bodily harm or death if Tom does not intervene using lethal force to stop Trevon’s attack.  If Tom shoots Trevon, can Tom claim he acted in self-defense?  In the past, we often heard that the Rescuer steps into the Victim’s shoes.  If the Victim could use self-defense, the Rescuer could, too.  But there was no case which clearly said so.

We know that in defense-of-self cases (if Trevon was attacking Tom), Tom must retreat if he can do so safely, before using lethal force.  That’s not the situation here.

The State was arguing that in defense-of-others cases, Tom as Rescuer must also retreat if he can do so safely, leaving Lilly, the Victim, to die.  It’s more important to prevent a shooting than to save a life.

The Court of Appeals decided that was wrong.  The duty to retreat is the duty of the VICTIM to retreat, not the duty of the RESCUER.

If Lilly could not safely retreat, then Tom might be justified in shooting Trevon to stop the deadly attack.

Of course, Tom is taking a risk in doing so.  The other rules of self-defense still apply.  Lilly may have initiated the confrontation, Trevon may be using a bat to stop Lilly from stabbing him with a knife again, Tom is still stuck in Lilly’s shoes for those elements of the defense.  But at least the leave-her-to-die argument has been laid to rest.

So that’s good news.

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

It’s about time.

I’m informed that the National Museum of Women in the Arts has re-opened after $70,000,000 in renovations.

I think I missed the NMOWITA in my various sprints through the DC museum scene, but by all accounts it’s dedicated to art either created by, or created by intersectional classes favored by, entitled upper middle class white academic progressives…

…who are nevertheless “victims”:

“While the discourse has progressed since the museum was founded, gender and intersectional racial inequality remain pervasive in the art world,” the museum’s director, Susan Fisher Sterling, said during the preview Tuesday. According to a 2022 report, female-identifying artists made up only 11 percent of acquisitions at US museums between 2008 and 2020 (with Black female artists representing just .5 percent).

I’d like to ask Ms. Fisher Sterling to show her work – a walk through the Art Crawl and the Fringe Festival might make you think a supermajority of “artists” are women in some currenty-fashionable sense of the term.

And if the National Endowmen of the Arts is spending $70,000,000 to remodel a museum based on your “art”, you’re not oppressed.

Although…

…perhaps the critics could “oppress” you with an honest review.

It seems appropriate.

Government subsidy is the death of art.

A “high trust” society – the kind of society where you can leave your doors unlocked, or at least not keep all your property under constant surveillance at the very least – depends on trusting your neighbors, and the institutions by which we govern ourselves.

When that trust is broken, society becomes “low trust” – a society where people don’t trust their institutions, or each other, to do the right thing; reverting to the “Law of the Jungle” becomes expedient, initially – and, eventually prudent.

And when it’s the criminal justice system?

It never took a rocket scientist to believe the Chauvin trial was swayed by, not so much “public opinion” but by “potential mob rage”.

But it’s actually written down in black and white:

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1714729290636415389

I’m not saying the DFL in this state is trying to create a low trust society.

I’m just at a loss for what they’d be doing different if they were.

Hamas leader puts out a dog whistle to western leftists:

Hamas leader of Gaza: "I want to take this opportunity to remember the racist murder of George Floyd … The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by [Israel] against the Palestinians."

Hamas, BLM, DSA, decolonization—same bloodlust.https://t.co/cQUWUxPsdp

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 18, 2023

It’s not even close to the dumbest strategy.

I took a little vacation.

That’s kind of a big deal. I don’t take vacations. It’s a running gag among my European co-workers that I”m the classic American. I’ve never taken a vacation of longer than five days that didn’t involve visiting family or some major household project.

So I went to Norway from October 1-13.

And it looked a little something like this.

I landed in Oslo, and meandered my way down to Drøbak, where this historic episode happened:

I took a picture with the star of that particular show:

Then it was back to Oslo, for a flight to Trondheim, where I rented a car and started driving.

Now, I said earlier that I’d never taken a vacation that didn’t involve family, and I guess I still haven’t. I drove about an hour southeast of Trondheim to the little village of Græsli. Population about fifty – and I’m related to about twenty of them.

The Ned River in Græsli. We’ll come back to this.

My third cousin – more below – took me on a little sightseeing trip, thirty or so miles east to the Swedish border:

Just across the border in Sweden. I actually crossed the border a few times – they’re not really patrolling it out here. Because, who’s going to cross?

That’s right – reindeer. And fishermen.

I met the grandchildren and great-and-great-great-grandchildren of my great-grandfather’s little brother, the only one of four siblings that stayed in Norway.

My Great-Great-Uncle Bersven, 2nd from left in the first row. I met some of the guys who are little boys – Bersven’s grandsons – in this photo..

My visit was apparently an excuse for about thirty people from all over central Norway to get together for an evening at the village community center, where everyone brought all the photos, letters and other family memorabilia they could find.

That’s my great-great-grandfather, Ole Bernson, and his wife Karin. His father, by the way, was Bernt Oleson. .

Turns out my great-grandfather’s little sister was something of a mystery;

That would have been Friday evening, October 6 – before the events in Israel, so as luck would have it the subject of the Middle East never came up, for those who are curious. . We had plenty of other stuff to talk about.

The next day, it was off to follow my fourth-cousin to her family’s place, about four hours south.

I didn’t take many pictures of this leg of the trip – because my hands pretty much needed to be pried off the steering wheel. . I’ve driven on ice – lots and lots of it – and I’ve driven in the mountains. In the summer. Twice.

I’ve never driven on twisty, turny Norwegian roads through a mountain pass after an unexpected snowstorm, though. They don’t build shoulders on roads over there – the edge of the road, in some cases, was a forty-foodt drop into a mountain lake.. So I kept my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel.

Eventually, though, we got to Røros…

That’ Røros cathedral in the background. There was a big wedding going on, and a lot of the people in this photo were on their way to or from that.

After that, I drove down to the coast at Āndalsnes, where I jumped off on two days of driving up the Atlantic Coast Highway – a trip that had me wondering “is there such a thing as too miuch beauty? Is it possible for natural beauty to bludgeon you over the head so hard you become desensitized to it?

Åndalsnes, from across the Eisfjord. If Hallmark shoots a “film” in Norway where the plucky young superwoman takes a break from her high-pressure job running an Oslo ad agency, it’s probably Āndalsnes where she finds love running a bookstore with a rugged but sensitive fisherman.

I lost count of the number and name of the fjords that prompted me to stop, snap a photo, and think “this one makes the last four or five I saw look like wet garbage”.

Depending on the map, the Allantic Ocean Highway fronts the North Sea or the Arctic Ocean – both of them synonyms for stark dangerous beauty:

I could have probably driven from Āndalsnes to Trondheim in a day, but there was just too much to see and do – so I stopped for an evening in Kristiansund…

Kristiansund – Christian’s Sound – from the, er, sund. .

…and then to Trondheim the next day.

Trondheim. This is the part everyone knows – the Nedelva (the same river we saw above up in Græsli) along Kjøpmansvei. .

Trondheim reminds me of Duluth. It’s a port city, that got its start exporting minerals, and fy da, the. hills have got to make ice storms really. miserable. . .

And then it was back to Oslo.

The Oslo waterfront, from Akershus, looking toward Aker Brygge. . .

I spent some time doing one of my favorite things in the world – wandering around a strange city with no particular aim in mind. But I did do a little sightseeing.

I went to Akershus, the ceremonial seat of roal power, and hit the Hjemfrontmuseet (“Home Front Museum”, commemorating life, resistance and yes, collaboration in Norway during the war:

“Milorg” guerillas coming literally and figuratively in from the cold at the end of the war . . .

And the Forsvaretsmuseet, the National Defense Museum…:

A part of a diorama of the Norwegian Navy in 1909. Which wasn’t, unfortunately, much different than a diorama of the Norwegian Navy in 1940. . .

Disconnecting from daily life wasn’t easy for me. I’m not sure I quite got it down. I may need more practice.

I give Pierre Poilievre – conservative candidate running against Justin “No Way He’s Castro’s Son” Trudeau” about a thousand style points for this response:

This is how you dismantle Hatecraft.😙🤌

Leftists can't handle when people punch back. They are accustomed to riding on blind moralizing superiority. All you have to do is pin them down on their own words and they completely collapse. Arrested development pic.twitter.com/ipwjTs5mMd

— Theo Jordan (@Theo_TJ_Jordan) October 17, 2023

Initially I thought Poilievre was being a little brusque in dealing with a potential voter.

I was informed the person “asking” the “questions” is, however, a journalist – someone who’s supposed to explain things clearly to people, who can’t ask a clear question.

Choose wisely, Canada. It’s never too late.

Well, almost never.

“Unruly teens” in Chicago attack a Tesla during one of their periodic galavants around their “room to destroy”. Police were reportedly standing nearby.

The Tesla driver used some of that torque for self-defense:

https://twitter.com/krassenstein/status/1714084039282262106

The cops no doubt have the guy’s license plate, so there’d be no need for them to chase and arrest the guy if they do want to prosecute him. Safe to say the “kids” will suffer no consequences.

Still – flit about, find out.

…one of those people who doesn’t need food, energy, shelter, or transportation, Paul Krugman’s got great news for you:

The war on inflation is over. We won, at very little cost pic.twitter.com/opumf3nEvL

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 12, 2023

And apparently, if you are one of those people who needs those things, you either don’t count or are a failure.

Another thing I missed when I was out of the country – the death of the only sports figure I ever actually wanted to be.

Dick Butkus, Chicago Bears legend and the man who defined the position of middle linebacker, died last week at the age of 80:

A ferocious tackler drafted out of the University of Illinois, Butkus was an imposing force as the Bears’ middle linebacker for his nine NFL seasons in the 1960s and 1970s, and made eight Pro Bowls.

Butkus thought his intensity on the field was simply how the game should be played, according to an article on the Bears’ website.

“I thought that was the way that everybody should have played, but I guess they didn’t because they were claiming that I had a special way of playing,” he said when asked about his ferocity, according to the article.

No one remembers when I became a Chicago Bears fan – it was almost certainly before I knew what football was – but as long as anyone could remember, I knew who Dick Butkus was.

And while I was always too tall, for my weight and build completely wrong for football, literally, the only athletic ambition I ever had was to be a middle linebacker like the great one himself

The Nazis weren’t especially coy about their views on Jews. Hitler telegraphed his intent in Mein Kampf. The Nuremberg Laws were a pretty solid hint.

And yet in 1944 and 1945, as the wheels came off the Third Reich, they feverishly bulldozed the camps, shipped or force-marched the surviving inmates to other camps farther from the front, and tried to erase the record – because even the Nazis knew that their “final solution” wasn’t going to go over well with the outside world ,and could see war crimes trials in their futures.

Hamas, on the other hand, in carrying out the same mission as any of Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen, with the same exact methods they used in every shtetl in Eastern Poland (shooting, raping, smashing, burning), put it out on social media, with gleeful pride, to get eaten up by the gleeful masses of droogs on the “red/green” left…

….and, for whatever reason, ultra-right.

---

I was halfway through my trip when the worst atrocity agains the Jews, and one of the most ocncentrated orgies of violence against civilians since Rwanda, happened.

Ben Shapiro had probably one of the best hours of broadcasting ever last Monday. The video includes a lot of uncensored blood and gore and horrific violence in process – which is the point.

Here is is on Youtube, until it no doubt gets taken down.

Here’s the audio version, for when they do.

“Let’s not be picking black hats and white hats, here – this is a complicated situation”.

No, it’s not.

“The is a complicated situation”

Historically? Sure. .

In terms of this past week? Not complicated at all.

But let’s let you show us how complicated it *really really isn’t*. Answer this question; think of someone who did you wrong; the person who transgressed you worse than anyone in the world.

Q: What would it take for *you* to shoot that person in the face as he shielded his kids? What would it take for *you* to then rape, kill and mutilate his wife, to burn his siblings houses with his siblings and families inside, to give his daughter over to your rapey friends to haul off to another country to rape and kill, to saw his son’s head off, and use the other son as a human shield when the SWAT team arrived?

Did you answer “I would never do that?”

If not, why not?

It’s not a complicated answer at all. If you answered “No, under no circumstances would I do that”, it’s because you are not evil.

Which is what we’re talking about, here. Evil. There is no other word.

Those of you who’ve been watching this blog for years may have figured it out – when I have a loooong anthology series, I’m often doing something other than writing every morning.

Two anthology series at the same time – “Soundtrack” and “Where Credit Is Due?” Unprecedented, right?

It was. I actually took an honest-to-God vacation. I spent two weeks in Norway (by the time you read this, I’ll be home again).

I spent that time visiting relatives – in this case, the grand, great-grand and great-great grandchildren of Bernt Oleson Græsli, who I talked about last week. In getting ready for the trip, I started thinking about all the things that go into a generation of people – decades, generations, even centuries of work, wins, defeats, triumphs, disasters and innumerable lessons and traits and legends passed down to those who follow.

I had a distant relative tell me I resembled my great-great-uncle (who died in 1965 at 93 years old)

My great-grandfather’s little brother (front row, 3rd from left, his five sons, and their families, seventy years ago. The farmhouse behind them was built in 1850, has been the setting for generations of family photos, and still stands today. I spent a bunch of time this past week with some of the younger kids in this photo, and their children.

I got some questions answered (how did my great-grandfather get the idea to come to America), answered some questions (nobody knew what happened to his little sisters – but I did!), and had a great time thinking about what is family, and what are the motivations and influences and good times and bad times that make people who they are.

And there’s more to come. Maybe on the blog, maybe not.

But it’s been a couple of fun weeks, both in real life and blog-time.

Of all the music I’ve talked about this past two weeks, this one may be the closest thing to an emotional time machine.

My own baggage notwithstanding, if you built a time capsule and wanted to put “The perfect 1980s song” in it, this would be a candidate; the shufflying synth drums and faux orchestra skirling about with Mike Campbell’s ultra-minimalist punctuation on guitar (which is backwards rock and roll!) – it tied the whole decade together.

And the song itself – all about getting your arms around what you’ve lost? It felt perfect then.

And a couple of decades later, it still does.

Back to more regular blog material Monday.

The Twin Cities remembers Don Vogel as one of the most instinctively funny people ever to appear on the radio. “The Round Mound of Sound”, the blind guy who was going to drive you home.

I remember a lot of different Dons.

He was a guy who’d been blind since infancy, and who lived with it as gracefully and powerfully as anyone you’ve ever seen.

Notwithstanding that, he was a frighteningly vindictive man who never forgot a slight or a miscue. Once you were out with Don, you were out. The man had no loyalty or sentiment.

And if dark were energy, his dark side could have powered half the state. A morbidly obese epicurean with blood chemistry could qualify for Superfund cleanup funding, he always said his goal was to die by fifty. And he made it with weeks to spare, of metastatic bladder cancer.

He was the guy who gave me my big break out of college, not once but twice; once when he hired me to be his screener, and once when he went way out on a limb with management to get me on the air.

He was the guy at the enter of one of the most formative experiences of my life – my first job after college, where I got to do juvenile comedy all week and argue politics with strangers all weekend – perhaps the most perfect time of my life in many ways.

And he taught me a few lessons that have formed my approach to my entire life: always think three questions ahead; always be ready for the guest to not show and the phone lines to break down; never lose control of the conversation; there are four kinds of callers – great ones, average ones, crazy ones and boring ones; stick with the first three kinds.

They sound like radio lessons, but they work for life in general, if you think about it.

My first couple of weeks in the Twin Cities, I spent a lot of time in the car.

And Twin Cities radio stations spent a lot of time playing this song.

I’m not sure if it ever went to #1, but in a month of memorable music, it was perhaps the most chant-along-worthy thing on the radio…

…which led us to hours of racing around freeways or sitting in traffic, rocking back and forth and singing “Shout…Shout…””, and waiting impatiently for the reward of the fat, glorious guitar solo at the end.

I still feel like I”m in traffic, and don’t mind that much, when I hear this one. .

“Mitch, you’re not a Democrat. And I can prove it”.

Dr. Blake looked across his desk at me. I was afraid he might be right.

---

Jim Blake was the son of a New York cop, and still had the Queens accent to show for it. I didn’t know much more about his background, other than he had gotten a Masters at Rutgers and his PhD at Marquette – a school he’d chosen because he wanted to be in a city with an NBA team.

I didn’t know the whole story:

Born in Brooklyn, NY on April 26, 1947 he was the son of the late James and Louise Blake. By all accounts he was a very shy, sweet little boy who seemed beyond his years and would at times be sad and “ morbid” as his grandmother put it. At the age of three, he was presented with a baby sister, Pamela Louise. At the age of six, his beloved mother passed away with cancer. He was unfortunatelyl eft in the hands of a very uncaring parent and thus began a very rough and tumble childhood.

When he was eleven, a stepmother and a stepsister joined the household. He spent the next several years protecting his sisters and endured continued physical and emotional abuse. He spent many nights in the car outside of a bar watching his sisters until the bars closed and his “parents” returned. His sister still remembers the pain of watching her brother being abused even during times of illness and always having to “man” up.

But fatherhood and academia were where Dr. Blake found a footing in life.

Although Jim was the first in his family to attend college, and was successful wherever he went in one way or another, his family loved him for other reasons. He broke the cycle of abuse he experiences. He was a loyal husband and friend. A wildly amusing and unique father. Bedtime for his son was having a father that became a robot and would obey his commands by pushing”buttons.” His daughters were not read bed time stories but would be visited by a “creature from the cellar.” There were eight at one time; each with a different voice and personality. One was Sidney a particularly obnoxious, bratty character which gave him full rein to be just that. Some of the characters wore a wig or an old suit picked up at a second hand store.

He taught in Memphis before getting a job running the small, ailing English department at the small, ailing college where my mother worked, giving me the 80% tuition break that got me into college.

He arrived to find the English Department with only two majors and this at a liberal arts college. One year after arriving, he was made department chair and at the end of the first year there were more than 50 students enrolled as English Majors.

I didn’t know I was going to be one of them until the end of my Freshman year – because, after taking my first class with Dr. Blake, I found I had a facility, and before long a fascination, for analyzing narratives and finding the point behind the story. By the end of my freshman year I’d changed my major to English. I’ve never regretted it.

Along with analysis and ferocious logic, Dr. Blake had two traits that would make him a pariah in education today.

First – he was utterly up-front about the prospects for English majors after graduation. He never promised that we would find a “job in our field”; indeed, he was drearily realistic about the jobs that were “in the field” for English majors (who didn’t want to be high school teachers) back then; years of graduate school leading to years on the tenure treadmill (the situation was bad then, and worse today), years of work in literary or refernce editing (working for $15K in 1985 dollars a year in New York or Los Angeles), or the endless grind of trying to actuallyl be a published author that earned a living. Instead, he emphasized the strengths the degree did give us; thinking outside the box, digging for the narrative needle in haystack, and turning it into a living, The degree didn’t teach us the “how”, but it taught us how to find the “why”. Without Dr. Blake, I’m not sure I’d have had the mental agility to blunder into the career I’m in, one which didn’t exist when I was in college.

Also – he was a conservative. He referred to himself as a “Monarchist”. And while he didn’t push anyone, he represented for the value of the traditions that made Western Civilization the hotbed of intellectual liberalism and economic humanity that it is.

I’d been getting little precursor echoes of my worldview changing for years; my anger at Jjmmy Carter’s “Malaise” speech, watching the crackdown on Solidarity, talking with boys my age from Polish and Vietnamese refugee families…

…but it was Dr. Blake who helped me tie it all together. I doubt I’d have pulled the lever for Reagan in 1984 without Dr. Blake.

Dr. Blake took a job as a dean in Marshalltown, Iowa the year after I graduated, and in 1992 moved to take a job at a school in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Marriage and kids and divorce led me out of contact with him until 2016, when I started looking him up and found his obituary from the year before.

I’ve never regretted procrastinating more.

Given that justices Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett were appointed and confirmed via the same process that has covered for over 200 years…

Republicans stole two Supreme Court seats and appointed justices who flat out ignore precedent to do the bidding of Big Oil, Wall Street… really any right-wing, dark-money group with deep pockets.

We need to #ExpandTheCourt. https://t.co/dvPFdJ2fRr

— Tina Smith (@SenTinaSmith) October 3, 2023

… can someone tell me how our “junior senator” trying to popularize this kind of garbage isn’t a bigger threat to our system of government, the January 6 ever was

Throughout this series, I’ve focused on memories triggered by music that is cemented into my brain as sublime.

But it wasn’t all good.

There was plenty of music that ranged from awkward to awful. And the more I write about it, the more of it comes back to me..

This was the second or third song I ever saw on MTV:

I gave ’em extra points for sneaking Christian imagery onto MTV (at a time when it wasn’t quite as uncommon as today) – and removed a few for it being…it.

But I never could find a reason to give this then-MTV staple any points at all…

…and am somewhat distressed to say I hear the one on the radio waaaaay more than I should.

It wasn’t all bad, per se. Some of it was just background music. This one was on the charts around this time in 1985:

Have you ever wondered what it looked like to watch two music legends deflate before your eyes, early October of 1985 brought that as well;

Of course, all of the above build up – or, rather, sink down – to the level of this song, which was peaking on the charts around this time…

…and remains , by acclamation, the worst song in pop music history.

Not all nostaliga as good.

I’ll get back on track tomorrow.