ScaifeNet because we can't let Soros have all the fun...

This has to be the most depressing aspect of the news of the Thwarted Canadian Bombing Attempt (WSJ-sub req): People who know the three men who were arrested say Messrs. Ahmed and Sher are educated professionals, a profile common to many radical members of groups like al Qaeda in Western countries, says Martin Rudner, a professor emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa, who specializes in Chadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03781053410876242483noreply@blogger.com

The following conversation is a “fake but accurate” synthesis of several conversations, emails and twitter threads. Names were changed to protect the gullible. DFLer: Target is radically anti-gay and anti-immigrant! ME: Er, how do you figure?  Target has been the most pro-gay corporation in town!  They even sponsor the “pride” parade. DFLer: Because they gave money to a radical [...]

Charles Krauthammer explains it better than I did:

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.Yepper. Read the whole thing.

The “MN Future” PAC has entered the gubernatorial ad fray: MDE’s Luke Hellier takes apart Dayton’s response to the ad. It’s…interesting.

Rubin Rosario, columnist for the Pioneer Press, had an article on page 1A yesterday regarding Muslims at the State Fair who will be informing the attendees that Islam is a religion of peace.  Mr. Rosario accepts all their premises unquestioningly, and heaps scorn all who might not agree.

The day his article appeared happened to be the 15th day of Ramadan.  To that point during the holy holiday the following can be noted:

Terrorism in the name of Islam:  94 attacks, 396 dead.

Terrorism in the name of all other religions:  0 attacks, 0 dead.

Muslims indeed should be talking about how Islam is a religion of peace.  But they, and Mr. Rosario, are trying to convince the wrong people.

Another edition of Beer of the Week brought to you by the colorful folks at Glen Lake Wine & Spirits who can help you choose the right drink to seamlessly transition the seasons of life. Is it really fall already? The back to school sales started on July 5th and classrooms open soon. The Minnesota State Fair--another annual harbinger of autumn--kicked off yesterday. And last week, the appearanceChadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03781053410876242483noreply@blogger.com

I overslept this morning, not feeling at all like writing anything… …to find not one but two pieces by First Ringer up on the site! So I was able to relax, eat my customary morning oatmeal, and noodle something out for noon before getting on my bike and heading in to the office… …um, in about ten minutes.

Grounding the “Hindenburg”. Contrary to public opinion, the advice of financial advisers doesn’t hinge on voodoo, tea leafs, chicken bones, or ritual sacrifices.  It runs on omens. The “Hindenburg Omen”, a technical analysis formula developed in 1990s, with roots from the 1970s, has appeared repeatedly in the news this August.  As the name implies, the omen supposedly fortells [...]

Alaska’s cold war heads to a boiling finish. The 2.4 miles that separate the island of Big Diomede and Little Diomede use to be among the most tension-filled in not only Alaska but the world. With Big Diomede part of Russian territory and Little Diomede part of the United States, the small space between Bering [...]

For the first time this summer, I actually had a decent dinner while attending the madness that is Rochester's "Thursdays on First." A taco salad from "Salad Bros."...

Ed "I'm going to torch this [bleep]ing place" Schultz of MSNBC and Milton "if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire" Waddams of Office SpaceSisyphushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06212947050651046226noreply@blogger.com

In Monday's WSJ, Aneel Karani made The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility: Executives are hired to maximize profits; that is their responsibility to their company's shareholders. Even if executives wanted to forgo some profit to benefit society, they could expect to lose their jobs if they tried--and be replaced by managers who would restore profit as the top priority. The movement for Chadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03781053410876242483noreply@blogger.com

Mark Dayton demanded that the GOP’s “Trackers” wear some sort of attire to distinguish themselves from all the other people gathered around him. It’s part of his two-week old whinge against the recent college grads with flipcams who’ve been recording the things he says on the campaign trail to be checked against things he says elsewhere, [...]

I think it was Mark Twain that said “a lie can make it around the world while the truth is waiting in line at Caribou”. That’s the little swatch of human behavior that the Dayton campaign, and especially its’ money-laundering smear shop, “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, seem to be hoping dominates the upcoming election. Because to [...]

Apparently, it was a hell of a concert:

After Eric Clapton's set was finished, over a ear-deafening applause, Clapton introduced "the best guitar players in the entire world." One by one, Buddy Guy, Stevie, Robert Cray, and Jimmie Vaughan all strolled on stage with their Fender Stratocasters for an encore jam to Robert Johnson's "Sweet Home Chicago", a fitting tune as all of the musicians were home-ridden to "Windy City". After 20 minutes, they finished off the tune, the lights went up, and the musicians strolled off stage. Stevie was last off stage, as he gave a wink before he disappeared backstage.My sister was there that night, 20 years ago, at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin. The Stevie mentioned here was Stevie Ray Vaughan, of course, the brilliant guitarist who had faced and conquered his demons and was playing the best music of his life. Unfortunately, he didn't know that this concert would be his last.

Tour manager Skip Rickert had reserved helicopters from Omni Flights to circumvent congested highway traffic. The helicopters chosen were Bell 260B Jet Rangers, which were enough for five people to be seated, including the pilot. Seats were reserved on the third Bell 260B Jet Ranger for Stevie, Jimmie and his wife, Connie. However, it is inferred that a miscommunication between Stevie's and Eric Clapton's management happened, as three members of Clapton's management took three seats. This meant that there would be one seat on the helicopter. Stevie was anxious to get back to Chicago, so, as the helicopters were starting their engines, he asked his brother, Jimmie, if he could take the last seat on the third helicopter. Since he didn't want to be separated from his wife, Jimmie told him that was fine. Jimmie and Connie would just catch the next flight.

In the pitch-black night, in very dense fog, the helicopters were clear for lift off at 12:40 a.m. Just past the lift-off zone was a 300-foot hill. Vaughan's helicopter was piloted by Jeffrey Browne, who was unfamiliar with the flight pattern for exiting the area over a high altitude and in dense fog. The helicopter was guided off the landing zone, flying at a high speed about a half-mile from take-off. It then, however, veered off to one side, disappeared into the darkness, and the helicopter crashed into the hill. Everyone on the rest of the helicopters made it to Chicago safely, unaware that one of the helicopters failed to return. The only people who were aware of the crash were officials at the Federal Aviation Administration, who had been notified that a helicopter was down.

At 7:00 a.m., sheriff's deputies arrived at the site and located the wreckage. According to observations, the helicopter had slammed into the hill at such a high rate of speed and it happened so quickly that Stevie and the passengers never knew what hit them. Their bodies were thrown across a 200-foot slope.
It wasn't the first time a talented performer had died in Wisconsin airspace -- Otis Redding had met his maker in the frigid waters of Lake Monona in 1968. I was just a kid then and it didn't mean much to me. Death means more when you are old enough to understand its implications. And we would have to contemplate the implications in a much greater way a few days later. But that's another post.

It's hard for me to believe that 20 years have passed since this tragedy. You can still hear plenty of Vaughan's music at our house. One of the songs he recorded with his brother Jimmie, only weeks before, contained the following simple chorus:

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' away
Remember that
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' awayAnd we don't know the half of it. Better not take things for granted, because it can all disappear in a hurry.

Blogging has become one of those curious life distractions. Back when I started blogging in 2002, it was still a fresh and exciting medium, a medium from which I could potentially launch a lucrative career IF ONLY enough people would notice my brilliant and occasionally unspeakable hilarity. Now, everyone has a blog, or everyone has disappeared into FaceBook, or everyone has jumped into the increasingly bizarre vernacular of Twitter, which has become something akin to shorthand swearing, what with it's omnipresent @ and # symbols. But, that's the Web. Every month is a shake of the Internet Etch-A-Sketch, and we begin anew. My blog never caught on the way I had secretly hoped, but what did I actually expect from an eclectic mix of whatever the hell this blog has been about for nearly a decade? I don't have the regular ambition to be a Bleat, and I'm not curious enough to hoover up and link to all the news and opinion of the day of an Instapundit. Well, whatever. My blog is what it is. And it is a THUNDERJOURNAL. I used to bemoan the fact I never learned a different language (I knew enough Japanese during my year living there to get through shops and restaurants), but the fact of the matter is I've learned and relearned the language of the Internet, and frankly it's getting tiresome. And it's not just tiresome because you have to relearn the...

It’s really difficult to grasp what passes for ‘Letter of the Day’ honors at the Star-Tribune. Today’s selection reads as follows:

Letter of the day: In English-only debate, recall our Minnesota ancestors

The folks who carried multi-language welcome signs in the Lino Lakes parade are simply heroic (”Lino Lakes parade attracts an act of ‘civil obedience,’” Aug. 22). I applaud them for proclaiming a message of inclusivity rather than the “English-only” propaganda. They are a group of astute Minnesotans who remember that their ancestors came over speaking German, Swedish or other languages. Clearly, many other Minnesotans have forgotten.

Where to begin? First of all, while our Minnesota ancestors arrived speaking other languages, they committed themselves to learning English.  I’m willing to bet the above author’s ancestors were immigrants who did not speak English; ironic that she writes it so well.  Second, the practice of ‘inclusivity’ was displayed in this country’s acts of accepting their immigration and assimilation.  ‘Inclusive’ does not mean the place you moved to will change to suit your tastes.  Third, ‘English only’ is not propaganda or racism, but common sense. It is unreasonable to multiply taxpayer burdens by providing services in all imaginable languages.  Fourth, those who write such letters or march in such parades would do better to volunteer their services teaching ‘English as a Second Language’ courses.

Zach Rodvold – a campaign staffer – is upset about Michele Bachmann’s round of “Taxin’ Tarryl” ads. The problem is, the only thing he does is continue to repeat the same Big Lies the rest of the DFL is beating to death this campaign: If Michele Bachmann wants to talk about fiscal responsibility – let’s talk. Tarryl Clark [...]

A few weeks ago, “Politics in Minnesota” (PIM) made a splash by moving all of its content behind the “paywall” – pay for read – decided that yesterday’s piece by Paul Demko on the farm family Tom Emmer uses as an example of state overregulation from the stump deserved to be a freebie. Why do you suppose [...]

I've been writing a lot, probably too much, about the things that divide us. Sometimes it's worth remembering things that we share. Music, for example.

I've read two very good books about American popular music this year: the first was a book that Night Writer tipped me to, Lone Star Swing, a funny and affectionate travelogue written by a Scotsman, Duncan McLean, who is a huge fan of the devoted style of music that is best known as Western Swing. The most notable figure in Western Swing was Bob Wills, who performed for many years with a group of musicians known as the Texas Playboys. While much of Wills's music, especially to the modern ear, sounds like country and western, it was actually a lot more than that, as Wills had tastes as vast and the Texas plains he traveled throughout his career. If you doubt that, try this one:

Bob Wills Boogie

You can hear the jump blues of Louis Jordan quite clearly. This version of the song was recorded back in 1946, in a time when the music industry was as segregated as the rest of society and a band with the cowboy credentials of the Texas Playboys would have seemed an unlikely source for such a rollicking beat. But Wills wasn't one to sit in a musical silo and because he was adventurous enough to integrate influences beyond what might have been expected, he helped to get sounds into the ears of his audience that they might not have accepted otherwise.

I just finished reading a book about a very different group of musical figures, the habitues of the Brill Building in New York. The book, titled Always Magic in the Air by Ken Emerson, is more of a history of the era and is written in much more scholarly fashion than McLean's somewhat picaresque adventure, but it's equally instructive. Emerson details the lives of a group of individuals who held sway over much of American popular culture for a brief period in between the peak of Elvis and the arrival of the Beatles. Some of these songwriters, particularly Burt Bacharach, remain in the public eye all these years later, but many of them are now mostly forgotten, even though they made some very important records and their songs are now part of the Great American Songbook. Think about how well these songs have held up over the years:

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote songs of astonishing variety, with everything from the raucous rock of Elvis singing Hound Dog, the elegance of the Drifters with There Goes My Baby and the Kurt Weill-decadent reading of Is That All There Is that was the last great hit of Peggy Lee, a performer who was over a generation older than either Lieber or Stoller.

Burt Bacharach and Hal David went from working with Marty Robbins (The Story of My Life) to the precise, tricky readings of Dionne Warwick (I Say a Little Prayer), the cartoonish Tom Jones (What's New, Pussycat?) and the dulcet MOR of The Carpenters (Close to You).

Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil wrote three songs that would probably fit into the top 100 songs of the rock era, for three very different acts: the Drifters' version of On Broadway (the George Benson version is pretty good, too), the Animals' classic We Gotta Get Out of This Place and the greatest moment of the careers of Mann-Weil, Phil Spector and the Righteous Brothers, You've Lost That Loving Feeling.

Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman gave us classics from Dion and the Belmonts (A Teenager in Love), the Drifters (This Magic Moment and Save the Last Dance for Me) and fun kitsch for Elvis (Viva Las Vegas).

Carole King and Gerry Goffin, skewing younger, asked the eternal question (the Shirelles' Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow), threw us a dance craze big enough for Little Eva and Grand Funk Railroad (The Locomotion) and even helped get the Monkees off the ground (Pleasant Valley Sunday). King later went on to become an exemplar of the singer-songwriter movement with her album Tapestry in 1971.

Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich became the go-to songwriters for Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound, feeding the beast on behalf of the Crystals (The He Kissed Me), the Ronettes (Be My Baby) and even Ike and Tina Turner (River Deep, Mountain High), while also feeding the British Invasion (Manfred Mann's Do Wah Diddy) and some tough chicks from the Bronx (the Shangri-Las Leader of the Pack).

The book also spends time detailing the career of Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, who were successful but more of a self-contained unit than the other teams.

There were two things that I think matter about these songwriting teams:

• They were professionals, in the best sense of the term. They all saw their business as making people happy through entertainment. While it would be churlish to denigrate the brilliance of a songwriter like Bob Dylan, even in his moments of absolute brilliance there was always a hint of self-indulgence in Dylan's music and when lesser performers emulated Dylan, the results got worse over time. The Brill Building songwriters didn't have time for that. They didn't want to make a statement -- they wanted to make people happy. There's a lot of value in that.


• They were multicultural, in the best sense of the term. What you had were a bunch of Jewish kids, mostly from New York, writing songs that absorbed the influences of what they heard and saw. It is not coincidental that some of the most transcendant sides recorded here were for the Drifters, an African-American group with a constantly changing roster of singers, who managed to maintain an astonishing level of quality despite the repeated roster shifts. You also heard in many of these songs a recurring rhythmic motif, the Afro-Cuban beat known as the baion. Even though the nation was still suffering from the ravages of segregation during the early part of the 1960s, the music coming from New York was an amalgam of various life experiences, written to speak to people universally. The notion that this music would be something any racial or ethnic group couldn't understand is completely alien to what these people produced.

Even as we approach a half century of desegregation and civil rights for all, we find our culture balkanized in many ways. I think we could use the forward thinking of people like Bob Wills and the songwriters of the Brill Building. Music can reach anyone, if we are open enough to listen.