I personally detest inter-generational politics, and the identitymongering that lt breeds. Few things make me want to clap a couple of cinderblocks around someones head like Bugs Bunny playing the cymbals on Elmer Fudds noggin like some moronic little twerp chirping “OK, Boomer”, or “Go get your participation trophy, Millie”, for that matter.

But you know your “generation” spends too much time navel-gazing about itself when people start writing bilge like this about it.

I’m not sure that the Biden administration, like the Obama administration before it, is undertaking multigenerational effort to destroy this nations “red” heartland.

But if they were, I wonder what they would be doing differently?

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Suppose you build a better mousetrap and the world beats a path to your door. That’s a good thing, right? Creativity? Progress? Jobs?

No, it’s a public nuisance, all those people driving their cars to your store, tying up traffic, idling engines (which cause global climate change). Cars backed up in the turning lane interfere with bicycles, the ne plus ultra of moral superiority and the highest form of virtue signaling there is.

The City must shut you down, for the good of all. Heinlein was right.

Joe Doakes

See also: the Starbucks at Snelling at Marshall in St. Paul.

In part 1 and part 2, we looked at some of the stories that can be found in Roman Britain and what they had to say to us today.

Let’s begin our final visit to Roman Britain by retasking our Keyhole satellite to the north of England. This is York.

Let’s do the exercise we started with. Just by looking at the street patterns, can you see where medieval York was? Here’s a rough outline.

There’s more to it though. York was founded by the Romans in 71 AD, about 30 years after they first arrived in Britain. Some of the local tribes were becoming increasingly hostile and Rome felt it needed a military presence in the area. A legion (the Ninth Legion, the so-called Lost Legion) marched up there and built a fort, and built it like they knew how. It’s a bit harder to see, but here’s a very rough outline of where what they called Eboracum was, at the point where the two rivers come together. York’s magnificent cathedral sits within the footprint of the fort.

Big Left is slowly eating itself – a pattern all leftist institutions, from Mao’s Politburo to Pacifica News eventually recap.

Most lately: yesterday, I heard a couple of feminist congruence-checkers masquerading as NPR correspondents on the drearily, pointlessly breezy “It’s Been a Minute” fulminating about this next bit: filmmarker Jane Campion has been raked over the coals for what, to be fair, may have been a bit of sloppy rhetoric (emphasis added):

“Venus and Serena, you are such marvels. However, you do not play against the guys, like I have to,” Campion said, referring to the four male directors who were also nominated in the best director category.:

I have to imagine Campion is horrified by how her statement was received; Campion, a fairly keen observer, has to know that it’s utterly politically incorrect to say any woman can’t kick any man’s ass at any activity whatsoever. Have some faith, people.

Speaking of which:

Huh.

Kevin Williamson successfully articulated something I couldn’t quite, myself, over this past few weeks, as American “liberals” have gone from flirting with police defunders to cheerleading for no-fly zones: it’s the dawn of the neo-neocon. All of the neo, none of the (visible) con.

The war has produced a bull market in what I suppose we have to call neo-neo-conservatism, with Democrats and center-Left figures suddenly rediscovering the uses — and necessity — of American hard power. You won’t find a better example of this than Professor Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution, who in a recent conversation with Jonah Goldberg was at pains to distance himself from anything that might be called “conservative” or “Bushian,” in his words. Instead, Professor Hamid insisted, responsible liberals such as himself (1) have kept true to their principles while other elements of the Democratic coalition have descended into mad radicalism and identity politics; (2) understand that the alternative to American hegemony is Chinese hegemony or Russo-Chinese hegemony; and (3) being worldly cosmopolitans, admit that it is entirely understandable that Europeans take a different view of European refugees than they do of, say, Muslim refugees from Syria, whose culture and religion inevitably make it more difficult to assimilate them.

For those of you keeping score at home, Professor Hamid here has channeled (1) Ronald Reagan (“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party — the Democratic Party left me!”); (2) George W. Bush (an axis of what, now?); and, perhaps most surprising, (3) Pat Buchanan, once denounced as a vile racist for asking hypothetically whether Virginia would have an easier time assimilating 1 million English immigrants or 1 million Zulu immigrants.

Everything old is truly new again.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve had my complaints about Amazon; and I recognize the social and economic threat posed by a single vendor running everybody else out of business; but consider:

I’ve been reading SciFi/Fantasy books my whole life. I just ran across a recommendation for The Chronicles of Prydain, which I’d never heard of. Placed my order for the five-book boxed set ($33) and it’ll be here tomorrow. Wait, what? I stumble across some random collection of young adult books and they’ve got it sitting in the warehouse in Shakopee? How big is that place?

On Friday, I tried out my new Beofung UV-5R handheld ham radio ($25 and yes, I hold a Technician license so it’s legal for me to talk on it). The ham I was chatting with said he could hardly hear me over the background noise. Might be a bad unit, Chinese junk, it happens. I went to Amazon to order a second unit – keep the one that works, return the other. Okay, it’ll be there in five hours. Wait, what? I realize it’s the most popular ham radio in the world so of course they have it in the warehouse, but if I order in the next 20 minutes it’ll be delivered to my doorstep tonight? For free? How many delivery drivers does Amazon have?

I saved a trip to Barnes and Noble (which probably would have been wasted because their SF/F section is only five shelves out of the entire store), and saved a trip to the Ham Radio Outlet in Milwaukee (last Twin Cities store closed two years ago), paid the same prices as I’d have paid brick-and-mortar stores and got free delivery to my doorstep faster than I could have driven to the store and back.

Retail has changed over time. The pioneers bought whatever limited selection of goods was stocked in the local General Store because they had no choice. Later, they ordered from the Sears catalogue for greater selection and department stores drove the mom-and-pop stores out of business. Now Amazon’s wider selection and faster delivery has driven Sears out of business. There’s a reason Amazon is taking over the retail world. And you know what? I’m surprisingly okay with it. What I want to know is . . . what’s next?

Joe Doakes

Artisanal bartering?

In part 1 we touched on how the past can influence the present in ways that might be easy to overlook, and how the past can remind us of the importance to defend that which we hold dear.

We had looked at part of the story of Colchester in England and I had said there was something else there that could add to our discussion. It is here, just outside the southwest corner of the old Roman fort, next to the traffic circle and next to the police station.

This is likely the earliest known church in Britain. It’s hard to date with exactness, but it probably dates to the mid 4th century.

Here’s a closer look, courtesy of VisitColchester.

While Christianity had likely come to Britain some time before this church was built, the ease with which Christianity could spread and flourish throughout the Roman Empire was greatly facilitated by Constantine the Great and the Edict of Milan. In a sense though, the Good News was too late for Britain. This church was a symbol of a hopeful future, but a future that ultimately was overtaken by events.

State senator John Marty – he of the radical gun control bill that the progressive caucus his flogging in the legislature, to try and fluff up progressive morale – took a picture at the “Moms Demand Action” rally in front of the Minnesota state capital earlier this week.

Here it is:

Pretty impressive photo.

But…it sure is a nice tight angle shot, isn’t it?

There’s a reason for that. Here’s the wide shot of the same scene:

Another angle? Sure:

Since roughly the 2002 election, gun control in Minnesota has been a mile wide and an inch deep.

And, at least in Minnesota, at least this year,, where Michael Bloomberg‘s money is going to states where they’ve got a chance of cramming down a symbolic victory, and not paying to drag “community groups” out for “spontaneous”, “community” protests, it’s not even that wide.

One out of six Biden voters would have changed their votes, had they known about the Hunter Biden laptop story. That would’ve been more than enough to turn a close election into a landslide for Donald Trump.

It’s being noted that, two years later, the New York Times is finally covering the story.

But it was never “disinformation”, nosirreebob.

The idea that this is not the plan, to say nothing of “non-accidental,“ is impossible to the point of being a media unicorn descending from heaven.

We know this, because three weeks after the election, representatives from the New York Times and Washington Post news rooms (speaking in the open, on a national public radio program), declared their mission to be to go to change the walls” of the media, from “passing on the facts and telling the story“ to “denormalizing Donald Trump“.

Do people think there is no connection?

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

There is a massive effort by the Lesko Brandon administration to paint the situation in Ukraine as black-and-white, endlessly trumpeted in the mainstream media and vigorously enforced by suppressing opposing viewpoints on social media (while selectively suspending their own rules against ‘violence’ to promote ‘Kill Putin’ posts). There’s never a measured analysis, a weighing of costs versus benefits, an explanation of Why and How which rational minds could use to decide Why Not and How Not.

I reminds me of the massive effort by the Democrats to paint the Afghan retreat as black-and-white; the vaccine situation as black-and-white; the Covid virus as black-and-white; St. George of Fentanyl as black-and-white (okay, that one actually was black-and-white, but not in the way I mean). Every Democrat disaster is a morality play with Democrats as Good and everyone else as Evil and no middle ground for compromise.

But real life is rarely black-and-white. Eventually, the truth leaks out. There is significant evidence Covid was simply a bad flu made deadly not but nature, but by the political response. There is significant evidence the election was not fortified against being stolen, it was stolen and the evidence fortified against being found. There is significant evidence the vaccine is not without risk, Ukraine is not without fault, the Afghan bug-out was not without consequence. Eventually, people figure out they’ve been lied to, by politicians of course (which we expect) but also by media talking heads (which we expect on THOSE channels but not on ours) and even by our own doctors (which we did not expect at all).

So why do they do it?

Do they seriously think we’re going to believe the price of gas is due to Putin’s acts in February, when the price of gas has been going up for months?

Do they seriously think we’re going to believe more dollars chasing fewer goods hasn’t caused inflation, when we’ve been seeing grocery prices rise all year?

Do they seriously think we’re going to believe de-funding the police had nothing to do with rampaging carjackers and record-breaking shootings?

How stupid do they think we are?

Joe Doakes

As I’ve been maintaining for years: it’s not how stupid they think we are, it’s how stupid they are counting on us being.

Cities have memories, especially old cities. If you were walking down a street in a city you’ve lived in all your life, you probably wouldn’t stop to think this street has been here for as long as I remember. It was here in my parents’ time, it was here in my grandparents’ time. This street has been here for centuries, but if we went back far enough, there would be a time when the street didn’t exist. So why is it here, in this place? What influences dictated that this street follow this path?

This is Colchester, in the southeast of England. It was known to the Romans as Camulodunum. The Romans invaded England in 43 A.D. and made Britain a Roman province, and Colchester is not far from where the Romans came ashore. For a time it was the administrative capital for the Roman occupation. Initially it was fortified with walls, but the walls were taken down and Colchester became a kind of retirement community for legion soldiers.

Around 60 A.D., about the exact same time the Apostle Paul was beginning his two-year house arrest in Rome, Queen Boudicca led a large-scale rebellion against the Romans. Her forces attacked the undefended town and destroyed Colchester and its inhabitants. Some residents holed up in the temple the town was known for and held out for a couple of days until they were overwhelmed. (The temple was where the castle now sits. The castle was built over the foundations of the temple.) Boudicca and her forces went on to attack what was then London and St. Albans. It is thought that upwards of 70,000 people were killed in the rebellion.

One of the Roman legions had been campaigning all the way over in Wales. When they received word of what had happened, they hurried back and helped put down the rebellion and were rather brutal about it. Having learned their lesson, and now acutely aware of the dangers in Britain, the Romans rebuilt the walls of Colchester, and rebuilt it according to doctrine. (A doctrine recorded by Vegetius in his De re militari, the only known surviving Roman field manual.) Typically their forts were four-sided, either square or rectangular, with a central road connecting two sides, and if it were large enough, another road connecting the other two sides (via praetoria and via principalis).

Just from looking at the street patterns, can you see where the fort they built was? The city remembers. Roads needed to go around these walls, long stretches of which still exist today, and today streets still follow those paths laid down millennia ago. The High Street, or Main Street, through town still follows the old Roman artery through the fort. A rough outline of the old Roman fort is after the break.

One of my hobbies over the past fifteen years or so has been trying to get some of my favorite bloggers from the halcyon days of Minnesota blogmongery to stay, if only a little bit, in the game.

With a few – Johnny Roosh, Bogus Diane – success was fleeting. But it was great while it lasted.

With others – not gonna name names – other priorities called. [1]

With still others – Mr. D, First Ringer – well, it worked, we found a niche, and they still do some writing in this space. My deal’s always been “write whenever the spirit moves you” – and they do. And for that I’m grateful.

And one whose writing I’ve been missing for well over a decade, since he retired Peace Like a River, is Jeff Kouba, one of my favorite writers in a medium and “scene” full of great writers.

And after at least a decade of trying, we’re going to fix that. Jeff starts writing at SITD later today. As with Mr. D and Ringer, it’s all whenever he feels like writing.

And I’ll be thrilled to see him back!

Check back later this morning.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The US keeps troops in the Middle East to prop up the governments of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates so we can buy their oil at favorable prices. All the sudden, Saudi Arabia and the UAE won’t take our calls?

Might be time to think about redeploying US troops elsewhere. Those Yemeni Houthi rebels we’ve been keeping off your backs? Have fun with that.

Joe Doakes

I don’t know. I take that as more of a “this is how bad things have gotten on the foreign policy front since Joe Biden came along to save our worldwide…”

Former secretary-general of NATO Anders Rasmussen notes the grievous mistakes NATO made in the late 2000s on his watch w/r/t Putin and Russia.

When I took office in 2009, I reached out to the Russians and told them it’s one of my priorities to develop such a strategic partnership, despite the fact that one year earlier they had attacked Georgia. So we have done a lot. But maybe Putin misread our thoughts and I think [that a] lesson learned from history is that appeasement with dictators does not lead to peace, it leads to war and conflict.

I mean, when it comes to learning lessons, better late than never.

And it’d seem some traditionally neutral countries are learning from others mistakes:

NATO is prepared to welcome both Finland and Sweden. I would say an application from Finland and Sweden could be approved more or less overnight. And let me add to this: I think it would be in the self-interest of Finland and Sweden to join NATO right now. Because now they have a window of opportunity. Putin is engaged [somewhere else], so that window might soon close again.

So it’s right now that Finland and Sweden should use the opportunity to join NATO. And that would send an extremely important signal to Putin, and

And it appears that, after three decades of lukewarm pragmatism that followed four decades of treaty-mandates neutrality, public opinion in Finland is turning toward joining as well (you’re on you own for the translation).

A friend of the blog emails regarding the civil liberties situation in Canada.

Remember that?

Anyhoo:

Did people get their bank accounts unlocked?

Do they still have to get vaxxed?

guess we forgot about Canada

To wax conspiratorially for a moment? I don’t think anyone was “forgotten”.

…about this kind of thing, City of Saint Paul?

Building permits in Saint Paul are off 80% since “rent control” passed:

The rent control ordinance passed in St. Paul last November is having exactly the consequences that were predicted before it was passed. If you set a price below a market price, you increase demand relative to supply, worsening the very shortages the price control was meant to fix.

From a MinnPost piece:

With three months of data on the books since the passage of the rent control measure in November, results are rather grim for anyone hoping for new apartment buildings in St. Paul. Compared to the same period during the previous year, multifamily building permits are down over 80 percent. Meanwhile, in Minneapolis overall construction is up as the economy has rebounded.

And it’s worse than that. Landlords are jacking up rents, fast, because they know that with inflation gutting the rest of their budgets, they’re not going to get another chance.

And yet the rent control advocates – highly schooled but uneducated drones that they are – still say this is about making housing affordable.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The US keeps troops in the Middle East to prop up the governments of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates so we can buy their oil at favorable prices. All the sudden, Saudi Arabia and the UAE won’t take our calls?

Might be time to think about redeploying US troops elsewhere. Those Yemeni Houthi rebels we’ve been keeping off your backs? Have fun with that.

Joe Doakes

I’ve been obeying Berg‘s 18th law pretty religiously. I mean, it makes sense – I wrote it, right?

So when I saw this case – of a Minneapolis homeowner who shot a burglar in her backyard, several weeks ago – I went quiet on the case for a bit.

The story went a little like this: the burglar entered the woman’s backyard, couldn’t get into the house, and then broke into the garage. The homeowner went to investigate with a pistol.

So far so good. W

When the guy didn’t leave, she then fired four warning shots.

As the story goes, the man then advanced on the woman, causing her to shoot him with a rifle (whose arrival on the scene may or may not have been related to her son, who had been standing guard inside the house with a rifle, perhaps the one used in the shooting).

Clearly there is some part of the story that isn’t public knowledge, yet.

The media responded the way they frequently seem to dec cases like this – with a borderline hagiography of the deceident. Worst, the case was apparently investigated shortly after the shooting, and the Hennepin County attorneys office – one of the more anti-gun jurisdictions in Minnesota Dash declined to prosecute. At which point, “the public“ Dash read “Nekima Levy Armstrong”, according to some rumors, the de facto arbiter of all justice in Hennepin County – went to the county attorney and demanded another look.

So, possibly at second glance, the results are back:

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman says they don’t have evidence to disapprove a self-defense argument.

“While this case is tragic, there is not sufficient proof that the homeowner and/or her son are guilty of a crime,” a news release from the county attorney reads. “Based on the evidence provided to our office, it appears the woman and her son would have valid self-defense claims.”

Not sure what we don’t know about this case, but it’s got to be interesting.

The KARE Bears are “fact checking” people over, apparently, a run on iodine pills.

No, iodine pills won’t protect you from most radiation effects in a nuclear attack

Which is true as far as it goes…

..but they’re not intended to protect you from “most radiation”.

They’re intended to protect you from one particular kind of radiation – radioactive isotopes of Iodine, which are incredibly prone to getting absorbed into the body and and infiltrating the thyroid – one of the body’s most delicate and temperamental organs – and causing thyroid cancer very quickliy.

It doesn’t, and isn’t intended to, prevent the side effects of other elements of a nuclear detonation – Cesium, Strontium 90 – but then those elements are generally responsible for much longer-term effects (strontium is liked with all kinds of bone cancers)…

…and it’s irrelevant, because the article isn’t about nuclear attacks. It’s about fears in Europe over nuclear plants in Ukraine melting down while under Russian attack.

Modern “fact checkers”; they aren’t “fake news”, per se. But they are fake journalism.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When central planners dictate what Must be sold, what May be sold, and what Must Not be sold, entire industries are forced to retool the factories and establish new supply lines to comply with the latest dictate, regardless of whether it makes economic sense. And when dictates change, chaos ensues until industry catches up. This is entirely predictable but for some reason, always entirely unforeseen.

Think about the scramble to find bottled water and toilet paper when the lock down was announced. Remember why the lock down was extended – not enough ventilators – and why Covid death numbers are ridiculously inflated – not enough test kits to identify Covid so hospitals were told to count every death from respiratory distress as Covid – and now look at stockpile of ventilators nobody needs and thestockpile of vaccine that nobody wants. The dictates forced industry to scramble and now it’s all wasted.

For everyone but a small percentage of the public, President Trump was right: Covid is just a bad flu. The existence of the virus was not a hoax; using the virus to terrorize the public was the hoax. And it distorted the economy in ways we’re still trying to understand. Not just a stolen presidential election, we knew that right away. But how many people lost jobs that still haven’t come back? How many businesses were closed and still haven’t reopened. How much was invested in developing product lines that suddenly are no longer needed?

The slogan of the day changes as people catch onto the old one, but the scam is always the same. In order to transform society from a messy, buyer beware, capitalist system into a sensible, orderly, communist system, there must be an intervening period when citizens are taught the new way of thinking so they fit into the new society. It’s like taking a puppy to the dog park or a toddler to kindergarten so they can be ‘socialized’ to learn the rules of acceptable behavior. And there must be someone to set the rules, of course, lest the new world order degenerate into chaos from an overabundance of freedom.

Except nobody in the world can ever be smart enough to understand all the factors that go into a prosperous economy nor can they understand all the implications of a dictated change to the economy. The invisible hand continues to rule as long as people can figure out a way to let it. The only solution is to kill off enough citizens that the few remaining survivors are those who enthusiastically embrace the new order. And that takes a lot of killing, as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao can attest. Lesko Brandon hasn’t started killing his own citizens directly, yet, but he’s on the same path as his intellectual guides. And that’s not a good thing.

Joe Doakes

People say Biden is nothing but a second term for Barack Obama. I disagree. Obama was a third term for Woodrow Wilson; Biden is the fourth.

Report apparently leaked last week shows – to the surprise of nobody – that the City of Minneapolis just was n ot ready for the George Floyd riots – or much of anything else:

An independent audit of Minneapolis’ handling of protests and riots following the police murder of George Floyd found city leaders and police ignored emergency plans in place, instead making decisions on the fly, according to Council Member Robin Wonsley Worlobah, who saw a draft report.

One line in the report Wonsley Worlobah pointed to reads: “We learned that MPD does not adhere to the principles of the ICS (incident command system) but rather addresses emergencies and crises with an ad hoc command structure.”

Of course, the fact that Minneapolis wasn’t ready was on display worldwide, almost two years ago – including the fact that Minneapolis’s administration had no idea how to ask a passive-aggressive governor how to get the National Guard onto the streets.

I’ll take a moment to air this tweet, by “Dr.” Katie Knuth, 2021 Minneapolis mayoral also-ran and..

…well, we’ll delve back into her resume in a moment.

The administration has “no clue about basic emergency operations”?

Now, it seems that at one point the CIty of Minneapolis had a full-time bureaucrat, a “resiliency director”, whose vague and unaccountable brief would seem to the untrained eye to cover things like “making the city resilient”.

Now, I’m just an untrained, unlettered peasant, but one might think it’d be part of a “resiliency director’s” brief to make the city…resilient?

So who was city’s first “resiliency director”, two scant years before the riots?

Oh.

…when Joe Biden was going to “restore the world’s faith in America.”

The price of oil is skyrocketing – It’s been rising since long before the war in Ukraine, although the war has certainly accelerated things (counter to Democrat propaganda):

We could fix this, by moving the permitting process along to allow more wells in the United States to start drilling.

But the environmentalist that help control the Democrat Party won’t have that; more expensive gas drives down the price of driving, and forces people into electric cars, A long-term goal of bagel left.

But you can’t build electric cars without a menu of more or less exotic metals, especially nickel. Which of the US produce is relatively little of Dash but Russia produces lots of.

The United States could start producing nickel.

But the potential nickel mines in the United States – including those in northern Minnesota Dash are being held up…

…by Democrats.

Are we starting to see the problem, here?

Problem: Oil prices spiking due to world events.

2008: Turn to domestic oil production, making parts of the US that hadn’t seen any unseemly prosperity, ever, like my native North Dakota, pretty darn well-off, bringing down fuel and natural gas prices, making the US functionally independent for energy, and spreading prosperity.

2020 Dumbass Solution: Keep US production shut down, go hat in hand to Iran and Venezuela for more oil, keeping Americans straitened and the world less stable. And blame the peasants for not being woke and upper-middle-class enough.

Problem 2: Ukraine needs more hardware.

Commonsense 2020 solution: Poland, who wants to upgrade its fleet of fighters with modern American designs, wants to give the Ukrainians their Cold War-era Mig 29s – the plane that is the backbone of the currennt Ukrainian air force. Just as they are talking about giving the Ukrainiains their old T90 and T72 tanks, since they‘re tradiing up to US-surplus M1 Abrams.

Dumbass 2022 Solution: Vacillate, and demur.

Conclusions:

1. Biden is working for our enemies
2. Some other conclusion that, honestly, I can’t think of at the moment.