Author Archives: Mitch Berg

Pretty Much Any/Every Day On Twitter

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THEM: “You are a Christian. You believe in an invisible man that controls everyone and everything. A flying spaghetti monster. I, on the other hand, am a creature of pure reason! I believe in an evidence-based life!”

ME: “I *am* a Christian.”

“And you believe that a fetus isn’t human until it is born, that there are hundreds of genders, that the remedy to climate change is to hand the keys of the world’s economy over to the same people that can’t manage the Drivers License office, that men can menstruate, that the “elite” media doesn’t serve an institutional narrative, that there’s an impending wave of “right wing domestic terror” coming any day now but “Anti”-Fa is just a bunch of idealistic kids.

“You believe that Western civilization for all its faults has no more merit than Iranian or Chinese or Nigerian civilization, that Bjørn Lomborg and John Lott are hacks but Greta Thunberg and David Hogg are voices of reason, that gun control saves lives and that the law-abiding gun owner is a massacre waiting to happen, hat socialism in large, complex, heterogenous societies isn’t a vortex that leads to poverty and massive wealth inequity and death, that open borders lead to freedom, prosperity and justice, that American democracy is defined by and inextricable from slavery.

“You think that our election system is simultaneously run by the Russians but not at all no way no how chock full of domestic election fraud, that all Christians are young-earth Creationists and that faith is the opposite of reason – which would mean that Ben Carson knows less about science than some pinhead reporter at CNN.

“Tell me again about that evidence-based life?”

Hang Onto Your Plumbing

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So let’s see if we follow the progression, here.

Years ago, Big Left, via Big Media, started telling us that:

  • Greenhouse gases were going to kill us
  • Using energy causes greenhouse gas
  • Compact fluorescent lights use less energy.

And as quick as 1-2-3, compact fluorescents became the law of the land (just in time for compact LEDs, which use less energy, provide better light, and are much cheaper, to come along).

In recent years, Big Media has been:

  • telling us that current industrial meat production contributes to greenhouse gases, ergo will kill us all.
  • trumpeting the virtues of eating insects and caterpillars.

Thus, you can count on someone in Big Left pushing policy that’d encourage, and eventually mandate, the eating of bugs for protein.

Of course, “urban sprawl” didn’t fall far behind:

  • It encouraged a car-based lifestyle!
  • Big Media promptly started pushing the virtues of transit-based, high-density life.

And cities run by Big Left are doing their merry best, as we speak, to abolish the single-family home, the private yard, and the car.

So – the progression is:

  • Big Media notes that something we commonly accept is going to kill us.
  • Big Left’s apparatchiks push to make a noxious, degrading, expensive alternative mandatory.

I couldn’t help but think of that pattern when read this.

When Making Your Evening Plans In The Northwest Metro

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My band, “Elephant in the Room”, is playing at Neighbors in Albertville tonight from 9PM-1AM.

Santa was just sitting in the night that pic was taken; Jon Heyer will be back tonight.

And for all you long-time NARN listeners – that’s my old producer, Tommy Huynh, singing. The guy can do Robert Plant, Dexter Holland and…Brad Delp?

Oh, yeah. Brad Delp.

Hope you can stop out to our favorite bar in the far northwest subs!

Nothing Good Happens After Midnight 6PM

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One man stabbed to death in an incident on the Ventura Trolley (Blue LIne) by the Mall of America Wednesday night:

tro Transit police and Bloomington police were called to a Park & Ride just north of the Mall of America station shortly before 1 a.m. 
Metro Transit spokesperson Howie Padilla said video shows a fight between two men on the Blue Line ended after one of them pulled a knife. 

Will the city’s “Resiliency” Department handle this? Or will it be the Bikeability director?

Not sure the people who run these cities realize what “quality of life” problems are going to do to this city’s future.

Service Of Convenience

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Pete Buttigieg – whose race for president this cycle may be distinguished by “lasting longer than A-Klo’s” and not much more – stood out from most of the rest of the Democrat field by being a veteran.

This stands out among typical Democrats in more or less the same way a nun at a Mormon missionary at a Slayer concert does.

And, like those Slayer fans, they don’t really know what to do about the interloper from another universe – what questions to ask, what lessons to learn?

Which, Kyle Smith notes, conceals a lot of problems:

Three things stand out about his brief sojourn in the Navy: One, he joined via direct commission. This, to most veterans, is a jaw-dropper. To say the least, this isn’t the way it’s usually done. Many of us recall the intensive pre-commission training (in my case, four years of ROTC in Connecticut and Advanced Camp with the 82nd Airborne in Fort Bragg) as the most trying intervals of our careers. Others spent four years at Annapolis or West Point. Buttigieg just skipped all of that. He passed a physical. He signed some papers. Voila. To put this in terms a liberal might understand: Imagine you heard that someone got a “direct diploma” from Harvard but didn’t actually have to do four years of papers and tests. You’d never forget it. You’d probably think of that person primarily as a short-cut specialist for the rest of your life.

Then there’s the little matter of his political role model – John Kerry. As in, someone who explicitly used a brief tour in the service as a stepping stone to politics, over the bodies of his erstwhile comrades.

And Smith notes how “off” some of Mayor Pete’s schtick feels to peolple who have been there: Like Buttigieg’s references to the nujmber of times he left his camp in Afghanistan:

Has anyone who has ever served the U.S. military on overseas land not driven around? When he launched his campaign last April he bragged about “119 trips I took outside the wire, driving or guarding a vehicle.” That’s . . . not a thing. There are no such stats. Sorties in aircraft are an official military statistic. Motor-vehicle trips are so routine no one would bother to keep track, any more than someone would log how many times Pete Buttigieg took a shower. No one cares. So Buttigieg himself created this phony statistic. Picture it: He made himself a little Hero’s Log but all he had to put in it was “routine trips.” It’s pathetic. It’s hilarious. It’s apple-polishing, resume-buffing, box-checking, attention-seeking vaporware. Just like his whole career.

Democrats are well aware of the reverence most people have for veterans, and especially the reticence people have , after 18 years of war, for criticizing veterans of any kind in any way.

As someone who’s a fairly committed student of military history, I’m every more so.

But I read, and I listen, and I absorb things. And this passage in this account from Buttigieg’s book (related here) caused my BS detector to…,,well, not howl. Maybe chirp a little. I’ll add emphas

Buttigieg has talked about the 119 times he says he crossed “outside the wire,” leaving the relative safety of the base as a vehicle commander on convoy security detail in dangerous parts of Kabul.

And then…:

“In a ritual to be repeated dozens of times, I would heave my armored torso into the driver’s seat of a Land Cruiser, chamber a round in my M4, lock the doors and wave a gloved goodbye to the Macedonian gate guard,” Buttigieg wrote. “My vehicle would cross outside the wire and into the boisterous Afghan city, entering a world infinitely more interesting and ordinary and dangerous than our zone behind the blast walls at ISAF headquarters.”

I don’t know much – and I’ll defer to any combat-arms vets in the house – but I’m fairly sure that “vehicle commanders” don’t ride in the driver’s seat. Drives drive. “Vehicle commanders” in convoys in combat areas don’t; they focus on navigating, communicating, and above all maintaining situational awareness.

So yeah – I’ve got questions,.

Fake Reporting

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The success of the Babylon Bee has apparently caused the mainstream media to try to horn in on the “Real-sounding fake news” thing, without quite getting what “satire” is.

CNN “reporter” Joe Lockhart on Twitter yesterday (via Hugh Hewitt, who’s noted the “Retweets” the “Reporter” got.

Moments later:

You just know that TV stations, local NPR affiliates and newspapers around the country are going to run the former and ignore the latter.

Fair Warning

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I can listen to people scrape their fingernails on chalkboards (kids, ask your parents) all day long.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t sounds and words that make my teeth hurt and make me nauseous.

My example I have always hated the word “Document”, and all its uses and derivatives. Document? Documentation? Documentary? All of them. The only exception is the sentence “I just watched someone who overused the word ‘document’ get eaten by mice”.

My worst boss ever was a (I’m not making this up) near-functional illiterate QA manager to whom the company’s benighted tech writers had to report. And she once described the tech writers’ job as to “document the documentation in the documents”. It wasn’t *that* episode, or the fact that she advocated changing the job title to “Documentalist”, that made her the worst boss ever – oh, Lord, no – but it put a cherry on top of the crap sundae that was that job.

Which is one of the reasons I tune out the radio when impeachment talk comes up Part of it is because Adam Schiff justifies retroactive bullying – but largely because if I hear another smug, sanctimonious voice saying “documents documents documents documents documents…” again I’m going to kick a puppy.

Since All Of Minneapolis’s Problems Have Been Solved

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Minneapolis: fighting the battles that matter.

Crime? Achievement gaps in terrible schools? Disposable bags? Gentrification and zoning causing housing to become unaffordable to the middle-class?

Nope. Minneapolis is tackling the scourge of fur.

The ban would not force any Minneapolis businesses to close. Instead, companies which currently sell animal fur will have a phase-in period, during which they can transition to selling fur-free products. There is also an explicit exemption in the ordinance which protects the rights of Native American tribes to sell fur for traditional and spiritual purposes. Secondhand stores too are exempt from the ban.
According to the Humane Society, more than 100 million animals are killed every year for the primary purpose of using their fur. It is estimated that 85% of these animals are raised in factory fur farms, while the other 15% are killed in the wild.
If the ordinance passes, Minneapolis would join Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, and West Hollywood, which have taken similar stances. New York City has also introduced an ordinance to end the sale of fur.

Why, yes – now that you mention it, it was sponsored by Alondra Cano, the intellectual standard-bearer of modern MInnesota progressivism.

Nothing. Is Everything.

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Big Media and the left seem disappointed that yesterday’s gun rights rally at the Virginia state capitol in Richmond passed not only without incident, but in fact exactly as every *knowledgable* commentator on the subject predicted – utterly peacefully, nothing close to violence, and despite weeks of media gaslighting about “white supremacy”, a crowd that was probably more racially integrated than a “Protect Minnesota” or “Moms Demand Action” or “Minnesota Reformer” meeting.

I’m getting a feeling of deja vu.

This all feels like the Tea Party days, ten years ago – when the establishments on both sides of the aisle, terrified of a unregulated, organic grass roots movement, gaslit the public into thinking the most inclusive, idealistic political movement in my lifetime was either “racist” or “establishment”, depending on the targets.

The gaslighting? Oh ,yeah ,it’s back.

Virginia governor Blackface McMinstrel, presiding over the most ghastly bit of government overreach I can recall, desperately needed to paint the vast, law-abiding majority of gun owners as depraved evildoers just waiting for their moment to cut loose

But every last g****mn word of it was a lie. As predicted. A smear. Collective defamation.

If you know anything about the subject you predicted this – because nationwide, carry permittees are about 1/6 as likely to commit *any* kind of crime…

…as are the police. Who are, themselves, 1/7 as likely to commit any sort of crime as the general public.

Statistically, you are safer in a room full of carry permit holders – people who’ve passed background checks, and in Minnesota, have had to prove they know the law – than you are in a room full of cops.

White supremacy? B***s**t. It was the police that denied the Reverend King a permit to carry a gun – as they denied *every* black applicant in Birmingham in the fifties – even though he and his families lives were being threatened constantly.

It was the eeeeeeeevil NRA that stood with Dr. King – allowing his volunteer bodyguards to train at their firing range (the only desegregated one in the DC area at the time), giving them ammunition at cost.

No, the Richmond rally was peaceful. Were there “white supremacists” there? Other than Governor McMinstrel, I mean? Well, sure – in the sense that *everyone* that dissents from Big Left’s narrative is a “white supremacist” these days. Actual “white supremacy”, as in “hatred for non-whites?”

Mark my words – less than among the general public.

Look – I get it. A fair chunk of our society was raised to be terrified of guns. I grew up in a non-gun-owning, gun-control-supporting Democrat home. The TV shows I grew up with in the seventies and eighties treated gun ownership like a character flaw.

I changed. “Elite” culture and politics didn’t.

And Governor McMinstrel is clearly terrified by the genie he let out of the bottle. While the law-abiding gun owner doesn’t have much political killer instinct, when he or she is threatened, they – we – can not be stopped.

If it’s about guns, and the media says it, distrust but verify – and then, almost without exception, keep right on distrusting.

And by the way – for all my gun-rights brothers in arms who are treating Virginia like the final Mexican assault on the Alamo – take a deep breath. Cam Edwards notes that your – our – voices are getting through even to some of the Democrat villains in this story.

So, for all my “progressive” friends? This is what Democracy looks like. Lots of imperfect schlubs, workadaddy hugamommy people of all races, orientations, creeds and faiths, the very backbone of this country, showing you that *we are not for turning*.

Here we stand. We’ve compromised enough. We’re done.

All due respect to my “progressive” friends – but if you bring nothing but emotion or Big Left’s chanting points to this discussion, you will not fare well. God have mercy on your argument, for I shall not.

Now, Let’s Watch The Saint Cloud Times And Star/Tribune Hyperventilate

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A proposal to make Sherburne County a “Second Amendment Sanctuary” has been floated.

If you live in SherbCo, your mission is clear.

The proposal, from State Rep. Shane Mekeland, from the “New House Republican Caucus”, would commit SherbCo and its law enforcement to defying any future oppressive gun restrictions:

The Saint Cloud Times has Mekeland elaborating:

In a phone interview Monday afternoon, Mekeland said the resolution is basically the county board saying it will not support perceived threats to Second Amendment rights should they come from the state level.

Will SherbCo go through with it? I think it’s doubtful. And I don’t think it matters.

I think the real payoff was what we saw in Richmond yesterday – the movement gives the silent majority a coherent focus for their political power.

There may not be any Second Amendment sanctuaries in MInnesota this time next year – but a lot of Real Americans will come to the polls because of the movement.

Expect much tut-tutting from the Saint Cloud Times, the Strib, MPR and Ryan WInkler.

The Steady Drip Drip Drip

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Downtown Minneapolis mainstay Ike’s is shutting its doors.

The owner doesn’t chalk it up to any single cause. Rather, it’s the slow drip drip drip of urban decay:

According to Winstead, the negotiations were meant to “address restaurant and market conditions” impacting Ike’s bottom line, including “labor costs, operational costs, maintenance costs and taxes.”
“There are so many issues, not any one of them a restaurant killer on its own, but taken altogether it adds up,” [owner Gene] Winstead said. 

And, naturally, the elephant in the room, the bit of blight whose name Minneapolis DFLers dare not speak:

Winstead “also cited a perception of downtown Minneapolis as unsafe for evening diners. ‘There is a little truth to it, but it’s mostly perception,’ he said.”

And it is – there are a lot of suburbans, by no means all conservatives much less Trump voters, who get hysterical about downtown crime.

But it’s not all hype. Unlike Saint Paul, which has its own perception problems, violent crime in general was up sharply in Minneapolis last year, along with a hike in homicide that is lower than Saint Paul’s, but started from a 2018 figure that was already higher.

But let’s back up to economics. When you point out that establishments in MInneapolis and Saint Paul are closing, they’ll respond “There’s always attrition in the hospitality industry”.

It’s not inaccurate.

It’s just that Ike’s other locations are booming right along.

As are suburban branches of other establishments that’ve packed it in in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

A Good Black Guy With A (Machine) Gun

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An African-American sailor who received the Navy Cross for his actions during the Pearl Harbor attack is getting what may be, in recent years, the ultimate honor – getting an aircraft carrier named after him. 

Dorie Miller was a Mess Attendant Third Class – which, along with cook and wardroom steward (basically a butler for a ship’s officers) was one of very few trades open to black silors – from Waco Texas.  During the attack, he was stationed aboard the battleship West Virginia, and helped haul the mortally-wounded captain to safety, and helped injured sailors move out of danger – and entered legend by taking control of an anti-aircraft gun on which he’d never been trained.    Miller’s earned the Navy Cross for his actions.  One could say that decoration was in part due to political pressure in the States pushing against a Navy that direly needed black recruits – but there is no question that Miller deserved the honor.  

HIs example – the first black sailor to earn a Navy Cross – earned him a trip back to the states to sell war bonds and help recruit black sailors.  He was promoted to Mess Attendant First Class, and was killed in 1943 aboard the escort carrier Liscome Bay, when it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine.  

The Navy has announced that the fourth Ford-class carrier will be named after Miller.  The USS Doris Miller will be laid down in three years, and should be completed in 2028.  If all goes according to schedule it’ll join the fleet at the turn of the next decade.  

It’s worth noting that Miller’s most iconic action during the attack may not have happened.  At the height of the attack, Miller came upon an unmanned .50 caliber antiaircraft gun – and, notwithstanding the fact that he’d never been trained in the weapon, blazed away at Japanese aircraft until he ran out of ammunition.   Various legends, and Michael Bay’s 2000 movie Pearl Harbor, have him shooting down as many as four Japanese planes.  None of the victories are confirmed.  

But Navy policy in 1941 was that black sailors shouldn’t be shooting guns at all – their battle station usually involved hauling ammunition and working on damage control parties.  They weren’t supposed to be at the trigger;  then as now, it was “gun safety policy”.  

Until a person has all the rights and powers, in microcosm, that their government has – including the right and power to defend themselves, their families, property, community, freedom and yes, shipmates from aggression, they’re not really citizens.  They’re subjects. 

Black Americans in 1941, especially in the armed services, were most definitely subjects.  

And while there are many things to salute about Miller’s actions during the war, that’s the one that a whole lot of black Democrat voters need to hear more about during this political year. 

 

Trial And Tribulation

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Chief Justice Roberts, whom President Trump has taken no pains to avoid offending, now presides over the impeachment trial. The chickens are coming home to roost.
This is an excellent opportunity for Roberts to prove how impartial and non-partisan the court system is. I doubt it will happen. My guess is he’ll be a Rino squish, ruling in favor of the Democrats every time to show how fair he is, which will prolong the agony and give the Democrat controlled media a chance to work on Squishy Republican Senators. 
Remind me again, how many votes do they need to convict? And what’s our margin of safety?
Joe Doakes

Our margin of safety is going to be Joe Manchin.

I’m being facetious. But only a little.

Gleiwitz, Virginia

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On August 31 1939, a team of SS propaganda operators dressed as Polish soldiers “captured” a German radio station near the town of Gleiwitz (today the Polish town of Gliwice), close by the Polish border. They did a quick broadcast in Polish, and then fled – dumping the body of a local, loaded with sabotage paraphernalia, as well as those of a group of Dachau inmates that’d been dressed in Polish army uniforms and then shot to make it look like the Germans had repelled a Polish assault. It was one of many false-flag “attacks” along the German/Polish border that morning used by the Nazi regime as a potemkin casus belli for the invasion that started pretty much before the bodies were cold.

I couldn’t help think about that when I heard that Virginia Governor Blackface McMinstrel was banning legal civilian carry at the Virginia State Capitol during this weekend’s gun right lobbying rally, because of “threats of violence” on the part of (naturally) law-abiding gun owners.

I figured this was more or less like Ilhan Omar’s “death threats” last summer at the State Fair – a few of the usual loonies who make threats from the comfort of their mom’s basement, a steady drizzle of which accompanies most public life, but whose timing, in some cases, is just perfect for diverting attention from an inconvenient reality. In Omar’s case, I have little doubt there was a threat, somewhere, from someone. Credible? No – but enough to throw out there to divert the media’s attention from the gathering storm of allegations against her.

And in the case of Governor McMinstrel, something to cast him, his Democrat legislative majority, and the thin little film of Bloomberg-funded victim disarmament activists standing between him and defeat in the next elections, as the victims – after spending their first term trashing the rights of law-abiding Virginians.

Notwithstanding the fact that law-abiding gun owners, as an absolute rule, are better behaved, singly and collectively, than the general public.

Well, there has been arrest of some people ostensibly headed to Virginia for something. Maybe. That’s what we’re told, anyway. Which, given the electoral fury that McBlackface’s coup on liberty has stirred up (and he may not have seen anything yet), and which may have not yet crested, may may have made the three saps that got arrested the most perfectly-timed patsies since the “North Vietnamese Torpedo Boats” in Tonkin Gulf.

Further Proof, If Any Were Needed…

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…that only does Democrat messaging make no logical or intellectual sense, but it isn’t intended for consumption by an audience that worries about moral and intellectual sensibility.

The idea – presented here – that forcing Congress to stop abrogating its responsibility to write laws and stop slothfully fobbing the job off on the Executive Branch, should be fairly uncontroversial.

Not – as the piece posits – a threat to the general order.

“Best Interests”

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California’s new “gig worker” “protection” law, “AB5” – essentially requiring companies to treat anyone working for them above a certain, fairly low, threshold as a full-time employee, complete with benefits – is shredding jobs in a plethora of sectors; free-lance technical and design talent, writers…

…and the original, literal “gig workers”, musicians.

An organizer of a California Jazz festival – while allowing (as one suspects someone in California arts administration might) he supports the basic idea – testifies to the damage the new law is causing to his organization:

Under AB 5, we will be required to inform all U.S.-based musicians that they must now become employees of San Jose Jazz, or incorporate themselves before they will be allowed to perform for us. 
If band leaders choose to pursue incorporation, they will then need to take on the responsibility of payroll and HR administration for the rest of their band.
In many performing arts disciplines, such as jazz, musicians are constantly reconfiguring line ups, performing as sidemen in various bands, and as one-time special guests for specific performances. 
We will now be obliged to devote tremendous time and resources to constantly hiring, managing and tracking of musicians through this cumbersome process. 
AB 5 unnecessarily complicates other work arrangements found in community cultural programming such as small festivals, neighborhood street fairs, parades and summer music series in our local parks. 
San Jose Jazz is best known for producing our large Summer Fest which brings tens of thousands of visitors and requires hundreds of temporary roles to execute. 
The vast majority of previously contract work roles will now be required to be employees. 
For instance, we are required by the City of San Jose to hire off-duty police officers through their Secondary Employment Unit program to insure a safe and well-run festival. Under AB 5 we will be required to classify these moonlighting officers as San Jose Jazz employees with the attendant oversight and administrative requirements. 

But of course, as in all “progressive” societies, some animals – and gig workers – are more equal than others:

Typical of such legislation, AB 5 comes with a hefty list of exempted categories that are a Who’s Who of the politically connected and well-funded: lawyers, doctors, accountants, brokers, builders, and others. 

“New Urbanism”: Letting The Gini Out Of The Bottle

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Everyone else is posting Jordan Peterson videos. Why not me?

With Saint Paul experiencing a three-digit jump in homicides, and Minneapolis tripling down on pumping up high-density, high-income housing (with token “affordable” housing sprinkled hither and yon), I think this one is well worth a thoughtful couple of minutes:

If you don’t have ten free minutes, I’ll help out:

  • Poverty doesn’t cause crime. It’s not even up for rational debate.
  • Income disparity causes crime – it can be measured via a “Gini Coefficient” calculated for any given area and group of people. The Coefficient is, by social sciences standards, apparently incredibly robust, and gives you a pretty solid correlation between income disparity and crime.
  • The reason income disparity causes crime: when young men have no way to try to exert social dominance (i.e. make themselves more attractive to young women) because the social hierarchy is solidly established, they turn to less socially-acceptable forms of aggression – which, from a standpoint of evolutionary psychology, work. The capos of a New York mafia family may not have fit in with Upper-West-Side Manhattan society, but they were at the peak of their own societies – which led to them actually finding women who’d help them propagate their species.

Now – I’m not saying that the “New Urbanism” that afflicts urban planning authorities in places like Portland, San Francisco, and the Twin Cities’ Met Council is intended to create a social Petri dish designed to cultivate a more virulent criminal underclass.

But given what we know about evolutionary psychology, if they were trying to create a permanent criminal mindset, what would they do differently?

DFL Doublespeak

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The DFL, 2019: “Guns are out of control! Our cities are victims of “gun culture’s” love of guns over the children! Blood is running in the streets directly onto your hands!”

The DFL, 2020 (in response to the Senate GOP’s recognition of the crime problem in the DFL-controlled Metro area): “Oh, quit being tribalist and divisive. It’s not that bad”.

No, really:

Democrats who control the House said the GOP was trying to stoke fear among Minnesotans.
“It’s unfortunate that the playbook from Donald Trump and the Washington, D.C. Republicans is demonize and divide,” House Speaker Melissa Hortman said in an interview. “I’m really disappointed to see Minnesota Republicans going down that same path.”

Thing is, the MN DFL can have it both ways – at least with our media.

Selective Indignation

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I was listening to NPR’s “Fresh Air”, with Teri Gross – the most overrated interviewer in the history of radio, by the way, but I digress – talking with the authors of a book, The Fixers: The Bottom-feeders, Crooked Lawyers , Gossipmongers, and Porn Stars Who Created the 45th President.’

The interview – and, one presumes, the book – beats heavily on the “fake” media, in this case the National Enquirer (Call for Captain Obvious – you’ve been skipped directly to Lieutenant Colonel). The authors – a couple of MSMers putting out the obligatory book on “Why Trump” – riff hard on the atrocious standards, dubious ethics, and penchant for running with implausible stories and willingness to buy and bury real ones…

…at The National Enquirer.

And boy, it sure sounds like the pro-Trump media works hard to shape the narrative! And a media that runs its preferred narrative in preference to the truth is an awful thing!

But being radio, a one-way medium, I couldn’t ask the authors, or the terminally annoying Gross, about:

  • the media’s treatment of Nick Sandman (who got a nice settlement from the first of his many defamation suits last week) and the rest of the Covington kids
  • Jussie Smollett, and the rigged “justice” system that allowed him to walk relatively free after lying not only our idiot media (dog licks dog) but the Chicago police
  • The Mueller Report, which the media breathlessly anticipated as an indictment of Trump, and in fact wiped out the left’s case.
  • The ongoing #MeToo moment that is Joe Biden
  • The glowing obits the media ran for Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi – the “Austere Scholar”; one might have hardly known from the first round of MSM obits that he ran a murderous theocracy
  • The Jeffrey Epstein story, buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa
  • The media’s embrace of the Steele Dossier, long after the DOJ IG report showed it was absolute garbage.

That was one year’s worth of media miscarriage. None of which Teri Gross, or anyone at NPR (or NPR’s pet media cheerleading show, “On The Media”) have touched.

They live in a world all their own.