I’ve been hearing the plaintive stories of Americans, many of them seniors, stranded in Puerto Vallarta by the Cartels’ tantrum over their jefe being put down.  

I’ve got a simple solution.  

They should form groups, organized online, to follow the sicarios around and blow whistles at them.  

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

A friend who owns a contracting business writes:

***

I’ve driven past a certain St. Paul grade school a few times this week, on the way to a job site. Each time, I see adults standing on the sidewalk wearing yellow vests, no kids around, apparently watching for ICE.

Just what the hell do they think they’re doing?   First off there is zero, absolutely zero, credible evidence that immigration efforts are directed at snatching kids from schools.  There is no interest in the government to waste time on that.  None.  So do these jackasses still think that’s what they’re protecting?  Or do they stand there because school administrators, janitors, indoctrinators (there are no teachers), and other adults are invaders?

And what is their plan?   Let’s assume they think they’re standing guard against ICE showing up to snatch up invaders of any type.  What do these jerks think they will do about it?  Do they intend to alert the invaders and assist them to flee to avoid arrest?  Are they intending to aid and abet known criminals?  Are they intending to engage in knowing obstruction of federal immigration enforcement?

I suspect the answer is yes to each of those and in each case it’s a crime.

They’ve been prosecuting people for silently praying outside baby murder factories for years now.  Isn’t it time to start prosecuting people who are intentionally obstructing federal law enforcement?  

***

He has a point. 

Joe Doakes

 

One the one hand, he’s got a point. ‘

On the other?  

It’s Minnesota.  Any county attorney that participated in the prosecution would find themselves doing document review for public works before the ink was dry on their motion. 

We’re all (*) familiar with the basic “logical fallacies” – flaws in reasoning that weaken or invalidate arguments. Things like the “ad hominen” (attacking the person rather than their argument), “appeal to authority” (comparing credentials rather than arguing the facts), “tu quoque” (comparing an argument with previous argument) and so on. 

I’m here to submit a few new ones. 

“Ad Foxinem” – claiming that someone’s argument is invalid because they supposedly “watch Fox News”. (And yes, the same applies to MSNow. Or would, if anyone watched it. That was an “Appeal to Ridicule” for those paying attention). 

“The Epstein Fallacy” – claiming that someone’s argument on an unrelated matter is false because the Epstein Files haven’t been released. 

“Argumentum ad Terminus” – believing that ending an argument by saying or typeing “Period” or “Full stop” makes an argument, whatever its merits, absolutely solid. 

“Faux Possibilitus – starting a claim with “What if I told you that…” does not make the claim true”. 

The Shifted Burden Fallacy: Ending a claim – solid or absurd – with “prove me wrong”. 

And “Argumentum ad LOL” – Ending your response to an argument with “LOL” is absolutely factually dispositive”. This is closely relate to the “Argumentum tu Emoji” – attacking an argument with an emoticon (for instance, the passive-aggressive “Laugh” emoji). 

Also – “Ad Omniciens” – responding to an argument with “Not EVERYONE believes that” (or its sibling, “Many people believe…”, also known as “the NPR Assertion”). 

“Argumentum pro Tantrum” – regardless of the merits of the argument, if you don’t acquiesce without question, I will unfriend you and never talk with you again. 

Discusss.

(*) I’m feeling optimistic, so sue me.

And poof, just like that, people who always venerated “due process” and chanted “NO KINGS” on demand…

…had always opposed due process and believed themselves kings. 

It’s not news – liquor licensing has always been a political meat tenderizer, used to beat businesses into whatever the powers that be want the business to comply with, frequently things most of us agree with (like punishing flagrant serving of minors or lots of unchecked brawling.   

But to “punish” businesses for patronizing a class of people who are doing something completely legal?

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Recently watched the Amazon Prime movie “Heads of State” starring Idris Elba as Prime Minister of the UK and John Cena as President of the United States.  They join forces to defeat the bad guys who want the US out of the NATO alliance.  

One of the bad guys gives a moving speech explaining the plan and the most amusing thing happened:  I found myself cheering for the bad guys. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Pretty good movie but a massive propaganda failure. 

Joe Doakes

Every time I’m tempted to re-up Prime, I hear something like this.

This is what’s been bothering me.  

We’re heading toward an election that might be the MNGOP’s best chance to move the needle in executive offices in a very long time.  The DFL’s fraud problem should by all rights give the GOP a shot at governor, if the GOP can pick a solid candidate (and the straw polls so far say we just might).  

And on the surface Richard Carlbom, the new chair of the DFL, doens’t appear to be the glib money master that his predecessor, Ken Martin, was.  (And don’t you dare let anyone say he looks like a young Herman Göring).

Here’s the problem.  Remember 2012?  

The Voter ID Amendment – which is an 80/20 issue nationwide, and even wins a majority of Democrats in public opinion polls- should have been an easy winner.  

But Carlbom engineering a campaign that emotionally logrolled ignorant, emotion driven Minnesotans into tying voting “yes” on same sex marriage to voting “no” on voter ID.  

And the morons did it.  

And he’s doing it again, with the ICE thing.   

Joe Doakes, ere of Como Park, emails:

Amazon just implemented two factor authentication. I hate it.

I get a daily email of free Kindle book listings which I receive on my phone

I sign into my Amazon account on my phone so I can download the free Kindle book

Amazon places a telephone call to my phone to recite the six digit authentication code. It is spoken so I cannot cut and paste

I flip from the phone app to the sign in page and enter the code they just told me over the telephone

And it’s an invalid code

Go all the way back to the beginning to start over

Even if it worked, all that would prove is that the person who’s trying to log into my account has my phone. Doesn’t mean it’s actually me. 

 I wish there was an opt out

Joe Doakes

 

It’s cut down my Amazon orders from mimimal to almost nil.  

Most of Secretary of State Simon’s, and his defenders’, responses to questions about election irregularities come off as some variant of:’

• Because I said so
• It’s the law, no take-backsies
• Don’t make me turn this car around.

I’m not convinced. 

Either is Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park:s

For those who don’t think it could happen

Am I the only one who thinks thar either:

1. All the posturing about ICE is to deflect attention from the fraud, or
2. if the focus turns to the fraud, all those protesters will switch from casing ICE agents to hassling auditors and FBI agents?

Remember when militant militias who rejected government authority were the bad guys?

The left, either.  

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Sydney Sweeney (the Good Jeans ad model) is in trouble for climbing the hillside to hang her new line of fashion bras on the Hollywood sign. She didn’t get permission from the owners. Here’s the final photo:

You’re telling me this millionaire hot chick spent hours climbing all over the sign to personally hang bras?  I wouldn’t have believed it.  I would have bet real money that her publicity company hired people to do it, that hers is merely the name on the label, that she had no idea what permits are needed.  

Here’s the video.  I would have lost that bet.  Awesome prank.  Good for her.

I certainly hope the DA doesn’t prosecute poor Sydney.  She could wind up a convicted felon and get stuck serving as President of the United States.  Wouldn’t wish that on anybody.

Joe Doakes

 

Christy was, btw, a really good movie.   

Look, it’s not possible for me to respect Tim Walz any less than I did in 2022 – when he’d abandoned his National Guard unit, and then spent eighteen months as a pocket Mussolini to deal with a three month crisis, completely trashing the notion of “science” – much less today. 

But somehow he’s still trying.   

The quote speaks for itself:

I don’t have any words to describe my revulsion.

Fortunately, someone does:

How long til Walz or one of his toadies calls the Holocaust Museum “Nazis?”

I got into a debate over the Good and Pretti shootings.   

I’m posting this here mostly to have my summation available when I need it.  

Modern political social media demands binaries, black hats and white hats, no ambiguity. Which is a problem, given that sSeveral things can be, and in this case certainly are, true at the same time. 

In no particular order:

1. Civil liberties are for everyone, especially people we disagree with. 

2. It’d be obtuse not to admit that Big Left is a profoundly illiberal force that, true to Alinsky, seeks to force its enemies to live by the rules it only invokes for it’s own gain. As it does with all liberal institutions, Big Left seeks to kill and skin the institutions and wear them like a meat suit. If and when they get the power they want, they *will*, not might, render those liberties pointless. We know that because that’s exactly what they’ve done every place they’ve gotten power. 

3. Federal law enforcement is very militarized, just as we warned during the Obama administration. 

4. So are Big Left’s shock troops. Militarized, well funded, and not bound by any niceties of social behavior. This past year, ICE has been shot at, and rammed over 100 times, including at least twice here in the Twin Cities. I can’t say I’d want to face that wearing a Men’s Wearhouse suit; I’d choose the battle rattle too. 

5. We can NOT trust our sources of information. Depending on who you believe, Renee Good was either a stay at home mom who’d just dropped her kid off at school and was on her way to deliver cookies and butterflies to homeless amputees, or someone with a long criminal jacket, including domestic abuse charges, who ditched her husband and grabbed the kid to come to Minneapolis to live out her fantasy of being Robyn Hood. Evidence seems to be pointing more toward “B”, but I’ll admit I have some bias. Nevertheless, the media and Big Left’s noise machine is going all in on “A”. 

6. Depending on who you believe, she was either murdered in cold blood by an untrained, inexperienced goon hired straight out of a strip club in Pensacola who was given a gun and a quota, OR a veteran of two decades in the military and law enforcement and a spotless record and ample, painful experience with how little these entitled white progressive f*cks care about hurting people. 

This next one is a little abstruse:

7. In 1933, when German President Von Walz…er, Von Hindenburg declared emergency power, and using the provisions in the Weimar constitution installed the “Hitler Cabinet”, among the biggest supporters in the Reichstag were…the Communists. They figured that the upcoming struggle between the Communists and the “horseshoe right” of the day would make the center untenable, and they would benefit. They were right about the first part, but grossly miscalculated the last bit. Point being, Big Left benefits, or thinks they benefit, from destabilizing society, including the erosion of the rule of law and “order” in the broad sense of the term. That’s why they’re reacting with so much well-financed, organic-as-an-iPhone extremism. They figure, like Ernst Thälmann, that people fleeing the center will come to them. SInce they’re NOT faced with a party that’s going to shove them into camps if they lose, what’s to stop them? Small-“l” liberal democracy requires commitment from *all* parties. There is no such commitment from BIg Left, and we know this because what they’ve done, again, every time they have taken power, anywhere. 

8. My old criminal defense attorney used to get pissed at people invoking “due process”. Paraphrasing him, he said “due process isn’t a magical guarantee of justice, or even fairness; it just means the system follows the law as it’s written down”. And the due process of law on many immigration issues *does not provide* for jury trials; I’m no expert on immigration law, but IIRC many visa violations – which were the largest source of illegal immigration until the Biden regime – require an administrative hearing, which is by law is about as probative as a hearing about your parking ticket. Don’t like that? I may agree with you – but that *is* the “due process”. 

9. A whole lot of people who were experts on the War Powers Act a week ago are suddenly experts on Use of Force and Self-defense law. And most of them, on both sides, are substituting feeling for fact on this issue; IF “due process” is followed, the officer will claim he had a reasonable fear of immediate death or great bodily harm; the lawyers will argue and a jury will likely decide. And that jury will be in a Federal court – not because Trump’s got the fix in, but because *that is due process*, according to Neagle Vs. US; federal officers doing federal things are federal jurisdiction. The disinformation has already started on that one. 

10. Let’s not underestimate how this is being harnessed to deflect from Minnesota’s only growing industry, nonprofit fraud. 

One of the reasons, probably the main one, that I left the Libertarian party and never joined the Ron Paul mob was this: without order, prosperity is impossible; without prosperity, liberty is academic; without liberty, order is onerous. American small-“l” liberal pluralism is a lot more fragile than it looks. 

Is the fed’s enforcement of immigration law heavy-handed? Probably. Is the amount of disorder and contempt for the rule of law left by the previous administration, not to mention that is the stock in trade of the opposition, a daunting challenge? Absolutely.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Dumb thing for him to say. 

He’s making the same mistake that every juror makes in a gun case.  He’s looking at the situation from every angle, having all the time in the world to analyze frame by frame and second by second.

But that’s not the law. The question is did the officer have a reasonable belief that his life was in danger at the time he pulled the trigger?

That means the only angle that matters is the angle the officer was able to see. What’s happening from the back or the side or above is not relevant.

If the shooter couldn’t see the gray coat agent take the gun from the victim’s back, then as far as the shooter knew he was still facing an armed assailant who voluntarily thrust himself into the fray to attack the officers.

How did he know the assailant was armed? Because one of his team members shouted “gun.”  Is he justified in relying on that team members warning? Absolutely. Did he see the victim pointing at him holding something in his hand? Yes, but it turned out to be a phone not a gun.  Doesn’t matter. Under the totality of the circumstances, the shooting was justified. 

 I understand the lawyer/lobbyist wants to protect Second Amendment rights, but this is a terrible case to do that. And now he just handed the rabble a huge propaganda victory.  Mistake.  

Joe Doakes

 

It’s going to be a terrible case on which to be that juror, too – if it goes to trial. 

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

President Trump is working on acquiring Greenland. He announced the framework for a deal.  Some people can’t figure out why he wants it.  They look at the standard map and say “We don’t need Greenland to defend ourselves from a mass attack by Russian tanks, we have NATO troops in Germany.  Why Greenland?”

Not everybody does original thinking, I get that, but it can’t be too hard to reason out from basic principles.

The first duty of the American government is to defend the territory of United States.  Defending the territory of other nation-states comes second. 

A Russian tank attack through the Fulda Gap does not threaten the territory of the United States.  US troops in NATO countries are there to deter Russia from attacking Europe, not from attacking the US.  

Preventing an attack on Europe is lower priority than preventing an attack on the US.

Stationing US defense forces in locations to protect the US is more important than stationing defense forces in locations to protect Europe. 

The art of war has changed since World War II.  The standard map is deceiving, the polar map is revealing.  Modern war can take the polar route to strike us.  Greenland is a better location for US defense forces than Germany. 

We don’t need Europe.  We need Greenland.  

We should pull out of NATO and redeploy our defense forces to put America First. 

How hard is that to understand?

Joe Doakes

 

Now that Europe has more people and GDP than the US, it makes sense.  

their militaries are abiut 1/6 the size they were during the. Cold War, which does not.  

Conventional wisdom and a lot of history say that the party that doesn’t control the White House always get a boost during the mid-terms.  

More conventional wisdom says that if the Democrats just avoid the mistakes of 2024 and dial back the crazy, they’ll do much better electorally.  

But what if the Democrats can’t dial back the crazy?  Or more to the point, what if something came along to make it impossible for them to tamp the crazy down?

Like, say, ICE dismantling a “sanctuary city” with enough brazen force to compel the left to go full Portland, 24/7?

Is the ICE surge the ultimate psyop?

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

The immigration protests are supposedly in furtherance of an objective, not just random violence. What’s the desired result? Google AI says:

***

ICE protesters want to end or drastically reform Immigration and Customs Enforcement, calling for an “Abolish ICE” movement due to concerns about inhumane treatment, family separations, excessive force, lack of training, and the agency’s perceived overreach, with demands including ending detention centers, protecting immigrant communities, and greater accountability for agents, sometimes pushing for redirection of funds to social services instead. 

***

Sounds like Defund the Police.  They also wanted kinder, gentler, more sensitive law enforcement and thought the way to get it was to replace police officers with social workers.  That was First Order Thinking. But remember how Defund the Police turned out? The consequences were not as hoped.  The very communities of color they intended to protect got worse as perpetrators realized lawlessness and violence were now tolerable. 

Considering the consequences before taking action is Second Order Thinking and it didn’t happen then. It’s not happening now.  Protesters and their Democrat enablers should consider the end result they desire, not just the intermediate step, lest they unleash on their communities the same lawlessness and violence which resulted from the Defund the Police movement.

Unless, of course, that IS the objective. 

Joe Doakes

 

It’s the objective. 

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Rioters broke into an FBI vehicle and stole an assault rifle bag, the kind used to transport an M-16 fully-automatic military-grade assault rifle.  Assuming it’s not just an empty bag, the streets of Minneapolis just got a lot less safe. These are the people Democrats are encouraging and supporting.

Joe Doakes

 

I’m waiting to hear how Big Minnesota Left tries to spin this as protected speech. 

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails

The polar map of the world shows why Greenland is of strategic importance to defend the United States from Russia, about on a par with Alaska.

Pull the military out of Europe and put them in Greenland.  Not tanks amd troops but bombers and missiles. Radar. Submarines. Long range drones controlled from AWACs airplanes. Snowmobile mounted lasers. Whatever.

Germany can have the tanks, the tanks weren’t defending us anyway.  Europe is on its own. America First. 

This is genius. I wonder who thought of it.  No better still,  I wonder who sold the idea to Trump? 

 

Makes sense. 

Might also be cool – as it were – if we can sell Hollywood on Greenland being the latest “in” thing, like the Pacific Diet.  

Not out of any strategic imperative. Just because I want to see most of Hollywood stuck out on a glacier, like those “influencers” from the “Fyre Festival”.  

Part of being a conservative – and a participant in Western civilization, for that matter – is treating people as individuals rather than collectives.  It’s one of the things that makes Judeo-Christian society objectively better than the alternatives.  

But sometimes groups are gonna group. 

Rep. Walter Hudson describes his observations after three years of reaching out to Somali leadership:

He stresses he’s largely referring to the community’s leadership, and with good reason; there are good Americans, and good Republicans, among Minnesota Somallis – because people, as individuals, have the free will to exercise their freedom of conscience.  

But Rep. Hudson is right in saying that the community needs a lot more of them, and they need to actually move the needle within that community – especially since it appears the grifting dollars might start drying up soon, if the DFL doesn’t manage to gaslight its way out of this round of scandals.  

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

The Lieutenant Governor is wearing Somali headgear to show solidarity with the immigrant community being picked on by racist fraud investigators.

 Look at the expression on the Somali woman’s face. Contempt.

 

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