Canoeing while drinking.  Is there any other way? 


Joe Doakes

The rationale sounds strained enough to be a Minnesota Supreme Court majroity opinion:

…Justice West concluded that yes, canoes count — and so does pretty much anything else that transports you over water. In the eyes of the law, then, being drunk while paddling an inflatable dinghy is the same thing as being drunk while driving a pickup truck. Smoking a joint and paddling a canoe is equal to smoking a joint and driving a car. All of the same penalties, including mandatory minimum sentences, apply. Yet you cannot be charged for impaired operation of a bike, because the Criminal Code says land vehicles must be motorized to count.

Of course it does.

There’s plenty of actual tragedy in the story, too, unfortunatlely.

“Anti”-fa thugs – upper-middle-class children of our idiot “elites” all, wearing masks to give them a little anonymous mob bravery – attack and injure Andy Ngo, editor of Quillette, the academic left’s current bete noir. It took place in, where else, Portland Oregon – the “Minneapolis of the West”.

The government of Portland – being largely the parents, uncles and aunts, teachers and employers of the “Anti”-fa thugs, sit on their hands at best, cheer along and order the cops to stand down at worst.

The “Elite” media? They’re even worse, gaslighting Ngo and his supporters.

Ngo was viciously assaulted on Saturday afternoon while he was covering Antifa protesters. In a video posted online, the journalist was kicked, punched, and had milkshakes thrown on him by the left-wing thugs. According to Portland Police, some of the milkshakes being tossed by Antifa reportedly contained quick-dry cement.
Soon after the attack, Dhillon informed the public that Ngo “is being admitted to the hospital overnight as a result of a brain bleed.”

Portland’s neo-socialist government, and the media (but I repeat myself) say do nothing at the very least, participate in a hate crime at worst.

I’m thinking it’s time for some litigation therapy. And it sounds like Mr. Ngo’s attorney has the right attitude:

Goodnight everyone except Antifa criminals who I plan to sue into oblivion and then sow salt into their yoga studios and avocado toast stands until nothing grows there, not even the glimmer of a violent criminal conspiracy aided by the effete impotence of a cowed city government.

— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) July 1, 2019

I’m liking the cut of her jib, as they say.

I had the rare treat of listening to the utterly ironically named “MPR News with Keri Miller” earlier this week.  And by “treat” I meant “update of the notion that Keri Miller is the one “journalist” in the Twin Cities that’d be ill-advised to tell Esme Murphy “dial back the shilling for the DFL and Big Left, you Big Left Shill, you””.  

Anyway – she had a show on Tuesday featuring a Hindi woman talking the co-option of Yoga by non-Hindi.  Not “decrying” it, per se – just urging people to be aware of, and perhaps learn something of, its Hindi roots.  

Pull quote:  the woman, Suhag Shukla, describing the various non-Hindi permutations of Yoga, including…:

SHUKLA: “…even Christian Yoga!”

MILLER: (In the background) (Disgusted, mocking snork)

Now, Ms. Shukla has a point – part of her culture has been appropriated. Like solstice trees and Chow Mein and polyrhythm and virtually everything else about every culture in the world that hasn’t been isolated from every other culture in the world, “appropriation” is a two-way street.

As someone who’s lost eighty pounds and wants to gain some flexibility and joint resiliency, I’m interested in yoga (although I haven’t done it yet). As a Christian, I have only intellectual interest in Hinduism. You wanna talk, Ms. Shukla? We’ll talk.

But since Keri Miller – and by association, the modern progressivism for which she shills – is the venue that brought me and Ms. Shukla together, let’s talk appropriation.

Big Left, like a suburban housewife going to an agnostic Hot Yoga class in a strip mall in Minnetonka, appropriates the convenient parts of the American experiment – the fun parts, like free speech and privacy. Like that housewife, or the Cafeteria Catholic, or the Allah-carte Muslim (actor, comedian, and observant but not fundie muslim Rami Yusef’s term, and I love it), they leave out the inconvenient parts – the citizen as self-sufficient atomic political unit, with the same rights, powers and responsibilities in microcosm of actual states are. The whole “government by consent of the governed” and “Free Association of Equals” bit.

If you want to practice the fun parts of the American experiment – immigrating to a country with freedom and opportunity, getting paid to be on the radio, free speech and waving signs about? Then pay some thought to the complex stuff – the tension between order and liberty, the moral right of the free market versus the stifling moral decay of socialism.

It’s a fine day for that, isn’t it?

According to the not-at-all-conservative but fairly rational Joel Kotkin, the modern left is retreating into a sort of feudalist orthodoxy:

In the past, the right, notably the segment affiliated with religious belief, was closely associated with censorship and control of thought. Today, enforced orthodoxy derives primarily from the left, emboldened by near total control of the media, university curricula and cultural products.
Remarkably [to the authors, anyway – Ed.], a recent study by the Atlantic found that “the most politically intolerant Americans” tend be white, highly educated urban progressives.
Conservatives may have once driven intolerance from the pulpit and the press, but they no longer have the ability to exercise thought control in a meaningful way.

Long ago, religious zealots embraced feudal ideals, but increasingly it’s the ultra-secular progressives who reprise the role of Medieval Inquisitors.

One of the things that originally led to “Berg’s Seventh Law” was noticing that, while John Kerry was quick to condescend to his various opponents’ lack of “Nuance” in approaching complex issues, it was in fact people on the left that exercised the most rigorously reductionistic approach to analyzing the world.

I’m happy to see I’m not alone:

Today these ideals are being undermined by a fevered rush to reject empiricism and complexity. “There’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right,” suggests the left’s super-star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez .
This emphasis on intent and “morality” reflects a more Medieval attitude than that of a reasoned politics that grows from facts and evidence.
As in the Middle Ages, the new progressives often seek to impose a secular version of the imperial theocracy. Like the Medieval Catholic Church, new school progressives often exhibit hostility to the roots of our own past, whether verities contained in Shakespeare, the writings of the founders or even the notion of disinterested jurisprudence. In the new fundamentalism, as in the old, there can be only one set of truths, while all others are viewed as evil.

Can you remember when this scene…

…actually didn’t remind you of a typical day at a modern American university?

SCENE: A meeting of the “Protect” MInnesota governing board. The Reverend Nancy Nord Bence presides over a room with half a dozen middle-aged, white men and women with ELCA hair (short, unadorned gray for the ladies; close cropped gray hair and neatly-trimmed Progressive-standard beards for the males).

NORD BENCE: OK, I call this meeting of the governing board of Protect Minnesota to order. Miss Scat, would you please give the membership report?

CAT SCAT: Unchanged from last meeting, at [NORD BENCE coughs over BIRKENSTOCK’s report] members.

NORD BENCE: OK, Mizz Stromberg, the treasurer’s report?

GRETEL STROMBERG: We got another Bloomberg check. Why bother counting?

(Applause ensues)

NORD BENCE: Order! OK. New business?

( Chauncey GUNDERSON, a 50-something man with raffish but neatly trimmed gray hair and a tightly trimmed gray beard – like every other man in the room over the age of 35 – and a representative from an ELCA church in Edina, raises his hand:)

NORD BENCE: Mr. Gunderson?

GUNDERSON: Yes, Madame Executive Director. I’m wondering – there’s this impression I’ve heard people talk about saying that Protect Minnesota is a bunch of smug, entitled, white, suburban, upper middle class people who are out of touch with the reality of this issue.

NORD BENCE: ( Looks around room at the small group of smug, entitled, white, suburban, upper middle class people ) Well, clearly it’s a scientific fact that that’s utterly absurd!

MARGE GUSTAFFSEN: But I’ve heard this, too.

NORD BENCE: While it is utterly absurd, I am willing to entertain ideas to address it.

AVERY LIBRELLE: I’ve got an idea. Let’s debunk the notion that Protect Minnesota is a bunch of smug, entitled, white, suburban, upper middle class people by holding a cocktail party at a swanky club!

NORD BENCE: I like it! Social media director BIrkenstock?

MOONBEAM BIRKENSTOCK: Already on it. I set up the event and put out the invites on Facebook!

NORD BENCE: Oooh! Let’s see!

BIRKENSTOCK: Here. Let me show you:

NORD BENCE: I like it! OK – next order of business…

And SCENE

NOTE: The scene above is probably mostly fictional. Except for the ad. And the event. And the cocktail.

Women decry absent fathers, deadbeat dads, lack of male role models in modern families. Liberals don’t acknowledge that’s the cause of crime because a woman is just as good a man at everything, right?
They forget that the massive rise in broken homes is due to no fault divorce, which feminists demanded so they could escape unfulfilling marriages. It wasn’t men using their patriarchal male-dominated muscle who pushed that through in 1975. We had Women’s Lib then. I remember when it was invented. It was women who wanted to be able to get out, no strings attached, no excuses required.  They pushed through no-fault divorce.  And it’s been a disaster, the shape of which we’re only now realizing.
In the olden days, women knew that you didn’t get things ready made, you had to work them into shape. That went from food you grew, to clothes you made, to a man you would turn into a husband. A Marriage Prospect was someone you thought you could work on to become a finished product you could live with.
But modern women expect things to come prepackaged and disposable. Women say “I married a man that I wanted to be Prince Charming but he turned out to be Prince Charming’s stable hand, so I want to dump him and try something else.”  They’re not willing to put in the effort. Maybe don’t even have the skills to put in the effort. And all of society has changed from telling them to put in the effort, to telling them to walk away.
Walking away from an unfulfilling marriage might make a woman feel better about herself, but it tells us nothing about how the kids will turn out.  Not worth the effort?  What does that say to a kid? How does it affect the kids outlook on relationships, willing to trust, commitment to long-term effort?  Read Judith Wallerstein.  She’s eye opening, sobering, depressing.
Which politician will speak Truth to Power and tell feminists “You were wrong and you made things worse.  We’re leaving what sounds good and going back to what works.”
Joe Doakes

Which politicians?

Among today’s “progressives”? Expect the “men are just sperm donors” line to just get worse until it can’t be sustained any more .

I’m picturing DFL Representative John Lesch – he of the Capone suits and the junior-high demeanor – apparently believes that “legislative privilege” immunizes one from being a ghastly little entitled jagoff.

The Minnesota Court of Appeals, to my boundless amazement, disagrees:

State Rep. John Lesch is not protected by “legislative immunity” in a defamation case brought against him by St. Paul city attorney Lyndsey Olson, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled Monday.
The decision allows Olson’s case to proceed.
Olson sued Lesch last year after he sent a letter to incoming St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter criticizing her work history and judgment, saying she has a “track record of integrity questions and management problems.”

If you’re a commoner and you make statement of fact about someone that are false, that can damage their reputation and living, and are done with malicious disregard for fact, it’s actionable.

Lesch apparnetly believes that being an elected DFLer in a one-party city confers divine right.

To be fair, there’s not much about any urban DFLers experience that would teach ’em otherwise, under normal circumstances.

So maybe, just maybe, Lesch’s arrogance and stupidity went outside the norm?

Lesch, a Democrat who represents part of St. Paul, has sought to dismiss the suit, arguing in part that he has legislative immunity. He will file a petition in the next month with the Minnesota Supreme Court, his attorney Marshall Tanick said.
“The Appellate Court construed the legislative immunity of legislators extremely narrowly, and we think that it’s more proper to take a broader view of what legislators do,” Tanick said.
He said he hopes the Supreme Court decides to take up the case to provide “clarification and guidance” on legislative immunity.

If the SCOM rules that “legislative immunity” protects any (DFL) pol’s statement, anywhere, for any reason, no matter what the context, then it is time for someone to take a can of Raid to the whole enterprise.

When was the last time there was a Republican representing MInnesota’s 5th District?

The answer – when I was a newborn.

On the one hand, Ilove it when two of the darlings of Big Left start eating each other.

As the fairly inexcusable and heinous Piers Morgan did in a sociall-media jape so colossally tone-deaf that I suspect it might have been a paid communication on Alexandria “Tide Pod Evita” Ocasio Cortez’s behalf.

Morgan, commenting about Tide Pod Evita’s previous job:

“Could be worse … Ivanka could have been a bar-tender 18 months ago [sic],” Morgan wrote on Twitter.
Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender and as a waitress at a restaurant in Union Square before she defeated Joe Crowley in the June 2018 Democratic primary race to become the youngest congresswoman in United Stateshistory.
The 29-year-old responded to Morgan’s gibe with a tweet of her own, writing: “Actually, that would make government better – not worse.
“Imagine if more people in power spent years of their lives actually working for a living,” she continued.

She’s not completely wrong – our Federal government would be a much better thing with more Mr.and Mrs. Smiths, and fewer Guys and Glans In Dark Grey Suits.

Of course, that’s predicated on the Mr. and Mrs. Smiths not being a bunch of pollyannaish neo-socialist stooges. To wit:

“We’d probably have healthcare and living wages by now.”

So maybe she’s not the “regular guy / gal” we need, here.

Important quote: “Lacking a gun permit is not an element of the crime of carrying a gun in a public place; rather, having a permit is an exception to the crime of illegally carrying a gun.”
Therefore, being seen carrying a gun in public automatically gives the police a reasonable, articulable suspicion that the carrier is engaged in criminal activity: specifically, illegally carrying a gun.
Therefore, every person carrying a gun in a public place, with or without a permit, is automatically subject to stop and investigation by any police officer.
Seems like there should be a change to the statute.

Our people will need to have a word with the legislature’s people.

I’m trying to imagine the wave of outrage that’d ensue if someone were to observe a black man mouthing off to a bunch of “white supremacists”, and getting pummeled for his troubles, and say “well, he kind of had it coming”.

Or a Jew, after getting lippy with some Nazis, “kinda brought it on himself”.

So it was interesting listening to NPR host Al Letzen – of “The Reveal”, which is one of NPR’s attempts to package African-American-sounding voices into a package palatable for the virtue-signaling “progressive” whites that are NPR’s audience. Letzen found some fame outside the NPR echo chamber a few years ago for rescuing someone who was being pummeled by some more of those virtue-signalilng progressive white guys in “Anti”-Fa.

Turns out the guy was an “out” White Supremacist. Letzen got a chance to interview him later – and his observations about how it’s naive to expect a kumbaya moment are interesting enough.

This week on the air! Host @lukeburbank and announcer @elenavox dispute the importance of their dream lives with satirist @KunkelTron, comedian @IanKarmel, radio host @Al_Letson, and singer-songwriter @lauragibsongirl.

Podcast: https://t.co/xPEk4YV59X pic.twitter.com/1I4hvkhsNu

— Live Wire Radio (@LiveWireRadio) June 28, 2019

Not nearly as interesting as his statement “brought it on himself”.

Let’s recap that; free, hateful, obnoxious speech “dservers” a group beat-down by a bunch of cowardly rich kids playing commie thug?

Ever notice how so much of the power “progressives” seek involves squashing the rights of others – especially those living in one-party “progressive” wastelands?

I’ve been noticing a log of agitation in “prog” media against state pre-emption laws – laws that prevent cities, almost invariably “progressive” cities with authoritarian one-party rule – from passing laws that are stricter than state laws on certain subjects.

And those “certain subjects” invariably involve the economic and personal freedom:

Many of these preemption bills at the state level overrule local decisions about inclusiveness, housing rules, the minimum wage, and other issues. The updated report found the most common issues subject to preemption included tax and expenditure limitations (with laws in 42 states), ride sharing regulations (41 states), minimum wage (28 states) and paid leave (23 states). There have also been preemption legislation aimed at limiting a city’s ability to enact stricter gun laws or ban plastic bags…Preemption has important ramifications for many of the new business models and technologies changing cities and real estate, including home sharing, ride hailing, and the potential introduction of municipal broadband. While statewide regulations can simplify operations, they also sacrifice local nuances and control, and in many cases, take away a localities rights to control or introduce new services. Twenty states have banned localities from creating their own broadband systems.

Pre-emption is the one reason the “citizens” (borderline subjects) of Minneapolis and Saint Paul still have the right to defend themselves.

And you can be the DFL is taking aim at that. Every single session.

I’ll admit it. I’ve never much cared for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Even when I was much younger, the idea of pledging allegiance to a government skeeved me out. Governments should get the loyalty they deserve.

Starting in my teens, when I was for any reason involved in saying the Pledge, I’d hold a clenched fist over my heart, by way of saying my allegiance had best not be betrayed – because my real allegiance is to freedom, to government of by and for a free association of equals, ruling by consent of the ruled – to the ideals, not the bureaucracy headquartered in DC with branches close to wherever you live.

But the Saint Louis Park City Council, having solved all the west-suburban town’s other problems, has voted unanimously to stop reciting the Pledge before City Council meetings.

And I’m not impressed with the rationale:

“In order to create a more welcoming environment to a diverse community, we are going to forgo saying the Pledge of Allegiance before every meeting,” said Council Member Tim Brausen. At the meeting, Brausen said members might recite it in the future if there’s an appropriate opportunity, like if Boy Scouts are there.  

Any parts of that “diverse community” that are uncomfortable with the fact that this is America should perhaps re-evaluate why they’re here. Stat.

To: Sen Klobuchar
cc: the entire Minnesota DFL party
From: Mitch Berg, obstreporous peasant
Re: Impeachment Now!

All,

What Senator Klobuchar said.

You owe it to progressivism, to the children, and to all the hopey changey to start working on impeachment now, to make it your only priority, and to spend your every waking moment between now and November 2020 working for it with your every waking breath, and some of the sleeping ones.

Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar says she would support impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump “beginning now.”
The Minnesota senator’s comment to CNN Friday followed Trump’s statement this week that he’d take information from a foreign power that offered dirt on an opponent.

Accept nothing less than impeachment!

NOW!

The Ghost of Paul Wellstone will cry if you waste any time or effort on lesser causes!

Program at the U of M helps transgender women…sound like women…:

“Every time [“Alice”, the transgender woman who is one of this story’s subjects] called [her grandmother] in high school, she would say, ‘Oh, your voice is getting deeper, you sound like you’re growing into such a nice man, you’re going to be like your dad,'” Alice said.
Those were painful words to hear [of course they were – Ed]. Alice remembers artificially raising the pitch of her voice to thwart her grandmother’s comments.
It wasn’t until years later that Alice realized she was transgender. She started to publicly transition during her senior year in college. She’s 23 now and recently graduated from a speech therapy program that helps transgender people safely adjust how they speak, so they can sound more like themselves.
“I’m at a point where for like 90 plus percent of the time, I’m happy with how I sound and how I’m perceived by other people,” Alice said. “This is something I never expected to be in a position of. And it’s really exciting.”

…but only the kind of women they approve of:

Alice did adopt some behaviors, such as using her hands differently when she spoke. But she refused to fall in line with gender norms she thought were antiquated or offensive.
“I am a feminist. I’m going to act like it. Just because this is a typical feminine behavior, if it is just a very patriarchal, like trying to silence and subdue women, I’m not going to do that,” Alice said. “It’s not worth it.”

Wait’ll the Progressive Powers that Be learn that people think they can turn their intesectional triggers on and off.

She’ll never do lunch in the Warehouse District again.

They don’t. This author is mistaken. The left doesn’t love Islam, they hate The Beav.
You remember Leave it to Beaver, a typical show showing typical American society as it was? The left hates every single thing shown in that program. They are completely dedicated to reversing it.
Instead of men married to women, gay marriage. Instead of boys taught to act like men, boys taught to be girls. Instead of moms making home, moms building careers. Christianity, Automobiles, Law & Order, hard work, Fair play, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, these are all hateful, despicable, horrible, no good, very bad ideas that the left must reverse
It is literally a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater for them, but they don’t care. Social justice is a moral imperative. Sometimes you have to destroy the village in order to save it. And they are working feverishly with gas cans and matches to do just that.
Islam is simply one more stick to beat us with.

During World War 2, the Nazis recruited soldiers from Poland, Ukraine, Arabs, Asians, Russians – people who were slated to be enslaved at best, exterminated at worst. They were mans to the Nazi end.

Same with Muslims in the US and “Progressives”.

Not all government safety regulations are an idiotic waste of time. A window washer just fell off our building.

The platform is attached by ropes to a metal contraption on the roof, but the metal contraption didn’t have enough weight so when the worker went over the edge, the contraption did too. The harness caught, swung the worker into the window, then dangled upside down until a ladder could be brought to lower her to safety. Yes, the window washer is a woman. Banged up her leg but the EMTs who took her away said she seemed okay. I guess my job doesn’t suck so badly after all.
I…Woman is damn lucky to be alive, that safety harness saved her life.
Joe doakes

Laws that directly affect public safety? Good.

Laws that direct affect who you can have haul your trash away? Not so good.

I don’t think it’s all that complicated. Which is why I”ll never be an elected official in Saint Paul.

I work in user experience – but I specialize in enterprise, engineering and IT software. Not marketing, e-commerce or “storefront” design.

Because that stuff is not only boring to work on, but I get skeeved out by some of the tactics.

And because I’m not the only one that’s onto ’em.

The only tragedy about the plane that crashed holding 200 marketing and SEO executives was that it coulda held 300.

My granddaughter is on vacation this week in Wisconsin Dells, so Grandma and I are gerbil-sitting. I remember gerbils from the olden days, they were just rats that lived in a big cage and made noise all night. Nowadays, they have a space-age plastic entertainment complex, with a menu of carefully selected natural foods and colorful blocks of wood, scientifically selected from the best species to promote rodent tooth health and avoid chemicals that may be hazardous.
That stupid rat lives better than I do, and vastly better than people in Venezuela, not to mention the free-range rats living in my attic. When did pets become bling?
I suppose I shouldn’t complain. At least she hasn’t declared it to be her emotional support animal, so I can prohibit her from bringing it in the car.
Joe Doakes

When you think about it? Gerbils have gotta be thankful for the blessings of the free market. Not only do they live better than “citizens” (subjects) in Venezuela, but in fact they’re pretty much food down there these days.

OK, so Jamestown never had a Tastee Freeze.

Even better – we had Polar King! The home of all things cool and delicious on hot, dry, windy summer days…

…provided you were willing to work for it. It was north of the college on the way to the airport – a solid mile and a half from home, up the North Hill, beyond the tracks that were pretty much the northern border of my world until I got a bike, a mile and a half away back when that seemed like a long way.

But once I got that bike? They always had a couple of cute high school girls behind the counter (this back when I was in junior high and high school, just to be abundantly clear), and air conditioning, and free water. Polar King was a 50 cent vanilla reward at the end of a long day of pedaling across the dry, windswept plains, warding off boredom and seeing the world outside the little island that Jamestown, like all small towns on the prairie, was back then.

Jamestown had it. No more.

The only thing permanent is change.

Change sucks the cool out of a beautiful day.

This American Life is a guilty…well, sometimes pleasure, sometimes intellectual hemorrhoid.  Either way, the guilt is real.  As is the pleasure, sometimes.

This piece was a pleasure in the sense that it showed the Escher drawing that is modern intersectionality, and the nightmare it leaves modern Democrats (darn), as vividly as anything I’ve heard recently.

A man attacked homeless people, telling them to get out of his city.
Naturally, I deplore violence of any sort.  But it got me to wondering – which is more likely to solve the homeless problem in his town: beating the homeless while demanding they leave, or giving them food, shelter and privileges that law-abiding citizens don’t get (see, for example, San Francisco)?
The article didn’t say whether homeless people were flocking to that city, or fleeing from it.  I wonder . . . .
Joe Doakes

It’s amazing how unaffordable housing had gotten since governments all over the country made “affordable housing” a priority.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking down Grand Avenue, looking for Grand Avenue Distillery Supplies. As he looks in the storefront, MyLyssa SILBERMAN, Reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, gets out of a cab.

SILBERMAN: Merg!

BERG: (Nonplussed) Er, hi, MyLyssa. What’s up?

SILBERMAN: I’m curious. You continuously say, on your blog and show, that the media is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the progressive movement.

BERG: I do. And it’s true.

SILBERMAN: How can you say that? We have layers and layers and..

BERG: …and layers of gatekeepers. Right. Got that. I base my assertion on, well, reading and listening to the media, and taking what they say seriously.

SILBERMAN: Meaning…?

BERG: Well, for example, listen to this bit by NPR’s “On the Media” – supposedly their media “watchdog” show – and the train of ultra-left dogmatics and magical thinking, and tell me any part of it that wouldn’t fit right in with a Wobbly pamphlet in the 1900s.

SILBERMAN: (Puts on earphones. Listens to segment. Removes headphones). I don’t hear anything.

BERG: This is my shocked face

SILBERMAN: It might be the global warming.

BERG: Might be

(And SCEN)E

The “militia” making the threats in Oregon will turn out to be a bunch of Portland activists, and resolute leftists.

It’s possible I’m wrong – it’s a big country.

But over time, one never goes broke assuming the depravity of the extreme left for political behavior you can’t explain otherwise. It’s a borderline-corollary to Berg’s Seventh Law.

Over this past weekend, I saw the movie “Rocket Man”, the Elton John biopic.

And while it was a good movie, as these things go – more below – it left me with one huge, nagging question unanswered.

To wit: what ghastly crime did Bernie Taupin see Reginald Dwight/Elton John commit, and promise to keep quiet about forever, in exchange for Elton John turning his “lyrics“ into songs?

Because it say what you will about Elton John’s music – I liked some of it – but Taupin was the one lyricist in the history of the world that can’t get away with mocking and taunting Desmond Child.

There simply has to be some ghastly conspiracy. There’s no other rational explanation.

More seriously, now – I did in fact see the movie over the weekend.

Truth be told, I was way too cool for Elton John when he was at his peak. I loved the Clash, the Ramones, Springsteen, the Iron City Houserockers, Television, Emmylou Harris, the Pretenders – all the stuff that the rest of the kids in my high school weren’t listening to. It was how a tall, geeky nerd with no athletic talent stood out from the crowd (or thought he did).

And I never had much time for pop stars disintegrating in public, as I watched Elton John (among many other celebs back then) collapse in a welter of excess, booze and cocaine. “You think you got it tough?”, I muttered, reading every week in the pages of “Rolling Stone” down at the library. It’s why I had no time for a lot of seventies pop stars; half the reason I couldn’t stand Styx as a kid was Dennis DeYoung’s constant whinging about what a meaningless illusion being a star was; “then go back to Chicago and work in a ^%$#@ meatpacking plant and make some room for someone else”, I muttered.

And he was a piano player. Nothing against keyboard people – I always wanted to be decent on keys. But they have a very different approach to music than guitar players do. Some of his stuff, like most of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, was marvelously melodic, in the kind of way that piano players can tease out of a song in a way guitar players can’t.

So Elton John was…well, not a non-entity for me as a kid. His public image was something that annoyed me; his music sometimes grabbed me (“Someone Saved My Life Tonight” was guilty pleasure), some didn’t.

Anyway.

“Rocketman” is billed as a “fantasy biopic”, which started me off thinking “what could go wrong?”.

Short answer: Nothing!

In its own way, telling the story of Elton John’s path – from neglected child to piano prodigy to sideman to “overnight star” (it actually took him eight years of gigging, song-writing and session work, given very short shrift in the movie) to one of the biggest selling singers of all time, to recovering addict and, we’re told at the end, happy, loved, well-adjusted elder, is a lot more interesting in the telling that it was in the watching 30-40 years ago. Taron Egerton plays a better Elton John than Elton John himself ever did.

One interesting bit, if you’re a serious music trivia buff; there’s a scene where John and longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin are auditioning for a manager (in a scene that could have come out of every iteration of “The Jazz Singer” or “The Star Is Born”). The manager asks John to play some of his stuff. John, at the piano, tosses out a few songs that the manager cuts off immediately…

…that are actually from the early ’80s, when John and longtime Taupin were on the outs – things like “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues” and other stuff from John’s fallow years after going through treatment. The manager only warmed up when John played “Border Song”.

It was just one of the ways in which John – one of the movie’s executive producers – seemed to be saying that his career without Bernie Taupin was never quite what it should have been. Every single non-John/Taupin song is associated with failure, with bottoming out (as when “Victim of Love”, one of John’s most vapid songs, is playing in the background during a scene when he meets the partner in his ultimately sham 1984 marriage). In some ways, Taupin is every bit as much the star of the movie as John is.

So I won’t be coy about it – it’s a lot better than I expected.