Day at the Fair / Why We Fight

Well, I got my own taste of left-wing thuggery yesterday at the Minnesota State_Fair.

As I've recently jumped on the Rudy_Guiliani campaign, I spent most of yesterday at the Fair with my Rudy_t-shirt on, meeting and greeting, working the MN Republican booth and even dropping by the MN Democratic-Farmer_Labor party booth for a friendly chat.

Now, interacting with most of the Fairgoers has been and still is a blast for me. I thoroughly enjoy chatting with people from all walks of life, including even some of the Democrats.


But I had to deal with a young male hipster yesterday who first accosted our balloon guy and then lurched to bear-hug me when I tried to intervene.


It did freak me out a bit, and it really brought home all the brutish behavior I'd been hearing about coming from the Left, like:

"Laborers for Kerry" Hoffa-thugs assaulting some College_Republicans at the Fair in 2004. . .

and Democratic operatives slashing_the_tires of Republican get-out-the-vote vans that year in Wisconsin.

Which brings me back to why I'm in this fight (and why I swung to the right 3 years ago). It wasn't so much the "attractiveness" of the Right or anger at my moderate friends in the MN_Independence_Party. It was the freakish behavior of this modern-day version of the Democratic Party of my youth- the moral(/literal/historical/scientific) relativism, the moral equivalence (e.g. between the Janjaweed militia and their Black African female victims in Sudan), the boorish behavior, and the batshit moonbattery.

No matter how outnumbered we are, no matter how many elections we lose, we cannot afford to give in to these people. Surrender is not an option. Being "intimidated" or otherwise "burned-out" is no excuse for inaction. We must press on.

the downside of biofuels . . .

It all started with a post by Jeff_Goldstein at protein_wisdom., and today I've been printing out a lot of related articles (and killing trees) on the subject of how bio-fuels are bad for the environment, so I figured I might as well post some of the links:
(UK)Telegraph:_Orang-utans_home_destroyed_for_bio-diesel

oilcrash.com:_THE_DIRTY_TRUTH_ABOUT_BIOFUELS

Christian_Science_Monitor:_Faced_with_soaring_oil_prices,_Indonesia_turns_to_biodiesel

(UK)Timesonline:_The_fututre's_black_for_orangutans

(Irish)Independent:_Green_fuel_drives_out_orangutans

NewScientist:_Forests_paying_the_price_for_biofuels

And of course lefties like Indybay and CommonDreams.org claim that it's all the right-wing capitalists fault:

They’re coming to me because I’m their environmentalist friend and they all
want to know one thing: how they can make a buck off the surge in interest in
combating global warming.

In a way, that’s a sign that the environmental movement has finally arrived.
After decades of struggling to convince the titans of finance that protecting
the planet and making money weren’t mutually exclusive, the tycoons are now
coming to us.

But many of these capitalist converts need watching. While Wall Street’s
eco-splurge has generated a flood of financing for legitimately clean ventures
like wind and solar power, it’s also spawned extremely dangerous projects that
are painted green by their unscrupulous backers, but that at their core are as
black as, well, coal.

Saturday night Taiwanese death metal concert in St. Paul

Went to see the death-metal band Chthonic at the Station_4 bar and club in St. Paul Saturday night. The opening acts were kinda lame (and over-the-top), but Chthonic really rocked. The lead singer had a fabulous screechy voice (backed by vocals from the female bassist) and they even employed an erhu, sometimes called a "Chinese violin."

I'm glad I stuck around, because I was beginning to feel like I was in some version of "This is Spinal Tap."

Gopher Cleaners up in flames (w/ fuzzy cell phone pics)

As if I didn't get enough smoke in my window when the 35W bridge collapsed,

Gopher_Cleaners&Launderers has gone up in flames.

Fraud is OK, as long as your critics are "smug"

"Analysis" from Newsweek on the Scott_Thomas_Beauchamp controversy:

But neither is The Weekly Standard clean in this fight. In the blog by Michael Goldfarb that first raises
doubts about Beauchamp, there is a partisan smugness, a gotcha undertone. A
later column by Standard Editor William Kristol, the neocon stalwart, is laced
with ideological nastiness. Instead of restricting the argument to standards of
good journalism, they effectively accuse TNR editors of running a smear campaign
against troops in Iraq. "I think this story fits really well into their
narrative and the left's narrative of the soldier as both victim and perpetrator
of the war," Goldfarb told me in a phone interview from his home in Boston.
Kristol summed it up this way: "The left is now turning against the troops they
claim still to support."
[. . . . . . .]
The author has contributed freelance pieces
to The New Republic in the past.

(new photo)Still recovering from Tibet/China protest in Chicago

Damn, protesting is hard work- walking through downtown Chicago with a heavy "Boycott Beijing Olympics" banner and yelling out the various slogans: "Stop the killing in Tibet!", "Shame, shame, China, shame!"
Even just standing in front of the Chinese_Consulate and holding up the Tibetan_National_Flag got exhausting, and I just had to sit out the rest of it.
And "sleeping" on the charter bus to and fro didn't help either.

The local Chicago Public Radio had a guy with a microphone walking through the crowd, but I haven't seen a link to a podcast/interview yet. Here's their short blurb of the day's event.
We Minnesotans were organized by the Regional_Tibetan_Youth_Congress_of_Minnesota and joined by groups like the Tibetan_Alliance_of_Chicago.

Also, this is the protest at the Metrodome in Minneapolis I sat out because the day was too soon after the 35W bridge collapse (via Slate).

A few of my digital photos will be posted just as soon as I become acquainted with the new-fangled technology of the Digital Camera(!).
08/12/2007 Update: photo posted!

Newsweek article on global warming "denial"

This_month's_Newsweek slams global warming "denial/doubt". I blogged about this some ten months ago, citing an article in Canada's National_Post published in April of last year as one reason why I currently doubt the human/anthropogenic component to global warming.

A few books on the subject I'm planning on reading are:
Unstoppable_Global_Warming, and The_Politically_Incorrect_Guide_to_Global_Warming_and_Environmentalism.

Dodged a bullet today (35W Bridge collapse) Updated

Dozens of emergency vehicles (about 40% pulling rescue boats) are still rushing past my apartment in Minneapolis to the scene of the Highway 35W Bridge collapse- about 50 cars on the bridge at the time of the collapse around 6:05pm Central Time- 3 confirmed dead as of this writing.

Am now watching continuing coverage on the local ABC affiliate, KSTP_Channel_5.

For further coverage, I've been reading both the AOL_NEWS site and Powerline.

The collapse is literally two and a half blocks from my apartment and I could smell the smoke from it until just recently.

I've either crossed once or was planning to cross the bridge myself, and I really dodged a bullet today. . . Christ, this sucks. . .

11:20pm Update: at least 6 confirmed dead and climbing. . .
Captains_Quarters has more excellent coverage, and the local Twin Cities American_Red_Cross has launched their efforts.