I used to drive to work, half-an-hour each way. I listened to Sirius XM in the car. They sent me a renewal reminder: $160 for another year.
I called and told them to let it lapse. I work at home, I don’t listen to the car radio. Oh, but they can offer me a promotional rate. And expand my package to let me listen on-line. And . . .
No. If you hadn’t tried to gouge me, maybe I’d have let it renew. But teaser rates and short-term promotions won’t lure me back; they only serve to prove you could have offered me a better deal earlier, but chose not to.
I suspect there will be a raft of business failures in the next year or two, prompted by similar experiences.
Joe Doakes
I’ve got my own beeves with Sirius’ way of doing business. A company whose technology is that expensive and whose service is nonetheless that expendable needs to be a lot smarter than Sirius is.
Not far from my grandparents are the markers of the graves of the 5 Coppage children who died in a fire ordered by a rival gang member of their older brother in 1994.
The deaths were horrible. Few in the community were left untouched by the 1994 tragedy. The cops, as they always do with brutal crimes involving children, took it personally and declared war on the gang, building a federal drug case that led to the convictions of about 22 gang members in 1998. (full article)
This happened at about the apex of of the “Murderapolis” years, and I think it’s fair to say it marked a tipping point in law enforcement in Minnesota. People demanded that government do its one unambiguously legitimate job – preserve order, the job that makes living in close conjunction with other people, and the commerce, society and community that result, possible.
What followed was a period of relative (!) order and tranquility – or so it seems in retrospect. Minnesota became, up until this past spring, the safest state in the union that had a major metropolitan area; the Twin Cities, especially Saint Paul, were for all their faults quite a safe metro area.
The stats are up this year – but perceptions about crime aren’t about stats, especially when “rational critical thought” is near the bottom of the priority list.
But eventually, people will demand order. They’ll either get it from government, or they’ll get it themselves (that’s the romantic notion a lot of people have – and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was occasionally one of them) or they’ll get it from whatever “strongman”, be it a street gang or a mob racket or a “vigilante militia” that offers enough of it in exchange for what they take to make it worth it, or worth it enough.
…although crowdsourcing showed quite the opposite – Dolloff appeared to have left-of-center sympathies. More on that will come out in the near future, I suspect (although you won’t get any of it in the mainstream media). Unconfirmed reports after a bit of social-media sleuthing indicate…:
Which, if proven by a county prosecutor (assuming Denver’s left-leaning administration allows a serious prosecution), could all be used as evidence that Dolloff was a “willing participant”.
Whatever Dolloff’s sympathies, Big Left was certainly clear on its feelings about the death of :
I/m farirly convinced – amost to the point of making up a new Berg’s Law – that the Democrat messaging strategy is as follows:
Assume that Democrat voters (as opposed to participants in their political class) are low-information voters who don’t really think all that critically
Message accordingly.
Exhibit NZA-212949993-6:
Can we at least recognize that “Court Packing” at all levels of the judiciary has been the Republican playbook for decades? Asking for Merrick Garland.
Well, no – doing the job one is elected to do, after winning the election, while not fundamentally changing the institution, is not “packing the court”.
But Democrats – up to and including Biden and Harris at the debats – seem to be counting on Democrat voters not knowing this.
HowPoll tests got a bad name – deservedly so – during the Jim Crow era. And it’s kind of a shame, because more and more, I think some sort of test indicating at least a minimal knowledge of the parts of our government, to say nothing of knowing what they do and why they check and balance each other, would be a very good thing.
“…when women have a conversation, they’re communicating on five levels. They follow the conversation that they’re actually having, the conversation that is specifically being avoided, the tone being applied to the overt conversation, the buried conversation that is being covered only in subtext, and finally the other person’s body language.”
― Jim Butcher, Cold Days
Chris Wallace asked President Trump: “You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out Antifa and other left-wing extremist groups, but are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups, and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities, as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland?”
“Sure, I’m willing to do that,” Trump replied. But then the debate degenerated into quibbling. It had to, because of all the levels of conversation. Here’s Trump’s answer explained more fully:
Level One – the conversation we’re having: Yes, I condemn violence.
Level Two – the conversation we’re avoiding: Biden’s side is actually committing the violence, not mine.
Level Three – the tone: I’ll be honest and fair, telling both sides to stand down, including my own.
Level Four – the subtext: I will maintain public order so your children will be safe.
Level Five – body language: You can tell I’m sincere because I look confident.
And one more level – the headline he must avoid – “Trump Concedes Supporters are Violent Racists.”
How I long for the days when the issue was a simple “Resolved” and my team was assigned either Pro or Con.
Joe Doakes
To be fair, the Democrats aren’t communicating to people who perceive particularly well on one level, much less five.
When Conservatives warned the trans-gender fashion craze would result in Boys using the Girls locker room, Liberals assured us that was tin-foil hat crazy talk, would never happen, we only said it because we were such hateful bigots.
New case: N.H. v. Anoka-Hennepin School District No. 11, No. A19-1944 (Minn. App. 9/28/20). A Boy who remains anatomically a Boy, but who identifies as Girl, must be allowed to use the Girls locker room. Preventing him from doing so is discrimination.
The words “Hell” and “Handbasket” keep coming to mind.
Joe Doakes
There’s an old saying, attributed to Gandhi, about swimming against the current: “First they ignore you. Then they mock you. Then they attack you. Then you win”.
If he were alive, conservative, and dealing with the modern left today, it might read more like “First they pretend you don’t exist. Then they say you’re paranoid. Then they take power. Then you go underground or go to jail”.
It was six months since a surprise attack had gutted the US Pacific Fleet. And as the US scrambled to bring its industrial might to bear, Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto began the next move – a bid to invade and seize Midway Island, a key stopping point in prewar air travel, slated to be turned into a vital forward base.
But as the Japanese fleet bore down on Midway, the Americans pelted them with paper masks, saving the day.
Remember during the impeachment fiasco, when a few Democrats who weren’t smoking pot outside school during civics class remembered the order of succession? And realized Mike Pence, not Hillary Clinton, would be taking over?
The fear they felt?
You could see why last night. Mike Pence mopped the floor with Harris.
How bad?
Bad enough that “feminist” pols had to revert to calls for victorian deference, that’s how bad:
What women are feeling right now: Do not lecture. Do not condescend. And do not underestimate us.
Mike Pence showed that talk radio background of his. He controlled the tempo, seized the initiative, and led Harris into more traps than the Road Runner vs. Wile E Coyote.
He got her to contradict herself on tax increases.
He made her deflect to “diversity” when the question of packing the court came up.
He got her to sweep her record as a prosecutor under a rug of bluster.
He reduced her to a smirking, hectoring blob.
How bad was it? Even NPR had to step in to do Harris’s deflecting for her:
Vice President Pence decried "rioting and looting" that followed the police killing of George Floyd.
The overwhelming majority of demonstrations associated with Black Lives Matter and racial justice have been peaceful. https://t.co/gtvlc2nSPJ
One pundit called the Veep debate “the first debate of the 2024 campaign cycle”. Judging by tonight, Harris isn’t going to do any better this time around than in 2020.
…to punch up. To treat people with respect. To treat people the way I’d like to be treated. To always take the high road.
But Maureen Dowd?
When Trump walked through the doors, Walter Reed had a stellar reputation. As he walks out 72 hours later, its reputation is in tatters. There's nothing Trump can't ruin.
“Anti”-Fa, we’re told, is not a real group, but rather an ideology.
So, for that matter, was Al Quaeda.
An the comparison holds up all the way down to the root level:
There are different types of bloc organization styles. The building block of antifa is what’s called an affinity group, people you live and work with and trust and know in real life. All the planning is done within that closed bloc, and they don’t let everyone know [what they’re going to do]. I didn’t know that they were going to burn the Portland Police Association when I joined. What they did was put a call out that said, “Anyone show up in black that night at this place, and you can join the action.”
That’s called a semi-open bloc. The planning is done within the closed group, but anyone who’s dressed in black can come join the action. If you know what you’re looking for, you can spot affinity groups that are working together. One thing they’ll do sometimes is have written agreements with other protest organizations that aren’t in black bloc. I know of one from Berkeley that illustrates this: “We agree that to not take pictures of anyone in antifa.” It will say that literally in writing, so everyone’s working together. It’s like a combined arms type thing, almost like the military. They work together and are mutually reinforcing.
…that there might be some portion of society too inherently based in innate logic and divorces from social subjectivity to get sucked into the madness…
Let’s say you had again for a candy bar. Maybe even a whole bunch of them – like, you wanted to distribute candy bars.
A “Mars“ bar, perhaps, or maybe a pack of M&Ms? Which are, as it happens, a product of the Mars company?Where would you go? Especially if you are a diligent quarantiner, and can’t leave the house?
“Maybe“, do you think, “I can go to the Capt Mars Candy Company website“.
Certainly, you might think, that would be a place you could go to find out more about candy bars.You might think that.
Forget, for a moment, the fact that not only has President Trump denounced ‘white supremacist” groups frequently and unequivocally, but he’s done it roughly 100% more than Joe Biden has denounced “Anti”-Fa.
What if the ‘group’ that the press is mau-mauing on command…
But there’s a small problem with this narrative about the Proud Boys besides the fact that Trump didn’t even know who they were and has no connection with them.
First, Proud Boys have brawled with Antifa because they regard anarcho-Communism as a danger to Western society. They’re not the ones rioting in the streets attacking the police and other people, that’s BLM/Antifa who have been the leftists’ shock troops to push radical reform. The only group that seems to be connected to a political party and political agenda is BLM/Antifa. The Biden campaign specifically endorsed the BLM during their convention and has yet to denounce BLM/Antifa violence by name. Joe Biden even denied the existence of Antifa, completely ignoring their involvement in hundreds of BLM connected riots in the last few months.
Second, there’s another problem with the accusation. Proud Boys have members of all races and have black, Hispanic and Asian leaders. They may be many things but white supremacists they aren’t, they’re multi-racial.
They didn’t like Joe Biden calling them white supremacists and following that came out in Salt Lake City, Utah to publicly say they were not in any way white supremacists.
I can’t speak for the “Proud Boys” – of whom I’ve heard very little, notwithstanding the fact that I’m, well, not tuned out of that scene.
But I do recall the local media and DFL (ptr) riffing on the “Boogaloo Boys” during the “Anti”-fa tantrum last May, as if they were a “white supremacist” group…
…when, in fact, they tend to be radical libertarians. And the closest person I’ve ever know to a Boog was in an interracial marriage.
#shrug.
If you get it from the media or Democrats, it’s probably wrong, likely intentionally so.
Employees at Spyhouse Coffee – which is sort of like Dunn Brothers, although tonier, more expensive and generally less tasty – want to unionize.
If for no other reason that this response, I may just give them another try:
I’ve always wanted one of these unions, trying to organize a low margin service business like coffee shops or bars, to test the “Labor Theory of Value” by grabbing a group of baristas, huddling them up in a vacant lot, and seeing if a coffee shop spontaneously erupts around them.
This comes up every couple of years. It usually founders when people remember how ghastly young people are – why “we” have raised age limits for drinking, buying tobacco and renting cars.
But determining the future of a democracy most of them don’t understand and many have been indoctrinated to hate?
Hi, I’m from the CDC and I’m here to ask you to take a free Covid test. If we detect Covid antibodies, you will be forced to skip the next two weeks of work, banned from restaurants and stores, your kids’ school be closed, and everyone you know will be under the same quarantine. Would you like to take the test?
No, get the hell away from me.
It’s because I identify as Black, isn’t it? Hater.
Joe Doakes
Why, it’s almost as if those expeditions were testing for social compliance more than Covid.
The flotsam and jetsam of the left’s social media legion of the invincibly depraved has legs so tingly this morning at the news the POTUS and FLOTUS have Covid, they had to drag themselves hand over hand to the kitchen to make their avocado toast.
Of course, they were in Duluth before the news broke, so the Twin Cities media has jumped into high gear to investigate, not ballot harvesting (oh, good heavens, no) but just how close Minnesota’s GOP congresspeople and candidates actually were to the President.
Strib columnist Jennifer Brooks:
Should we boil Duluth? I think we might need to boil Duluth.
If the FCOTUS recover without complications – fingers crossed, prayers being prayed – I’m almost tempted to send all these “journalists” sympathy cards.
The longer this goes on, the less I think there’s any point in trying to preserve a union, barring some unforeseeable commitment to radical federalism.
