Author Archives: Mitch Berg

Challenges

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The election’s over.

Maybe Biden takes office in seven weeks. Maybe one of Trump’s legal challeges gets traction.

For purposes of this post, I don’t know and don’t care.

Because the 2022 and 2024 campaigns have already begun.

The good news: without Trump, the Democrats are going to have to find someone to unify around. And it ain’t gonna be easy.

From New Republic – now, they have to try to focus on their own problems:

The coming weeks may see the reemergence in backrooms and boardrooms of the tensions that loomed over the 2020 Democratic primaries. Let us review the three power centers in the party as they existed then:

The new economy. Two titans of the finance world (Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer) sought to win the Democratic nomination by funding their own and various down-ballot candidacies. (Both would eventually back Biden.) There was also one impecunious primary candidate who had some original ideas about the tech world: Andrew Yang. The new economy provides wealth for so few people that it can never command the party’s rank and file. But it exercises a dizzying gravitational pull on its leaders.

Socialism. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were its candidates, the former in a doctrinal way (unions, benefits, income redistribution), the latter in a way adapted to strike more precisely at modern power relations (financial regulation, economic rights), which she denied was any form of socialism at all. Each was a more dire threat to the interests of people like Bloomberg and Steyer than anything the tax-cutting, deregulatory Republicans might produce. This is the great drama of the Democratic Party: They are the party of the 1 percent. They are also the party of expropriating the 1 percent.This is the great drama of the Democratic Party: They are the party of the 1 percent. They are also the party of expropriating the 1 percent.

Civil rights. The party’s glue is civil rights, broadly understood. Civil rights long meant looking out for the practical and principled interests of Black people—naturally a commitment on which cooperation with socialists is possible. But over the decades, civil rights has also become a regulatory and judicial system for advancing the interests of other groups, including immigrants (elite and mass), women executives, two-income gay couples, and lawyers—commitments more consistent with those of the Democrats’ plutocratic wing. The role of civil rights as reconciler-of-contradictions can be compared to that of anti-Communism in the tripartite Reagan coalition of the 1980s, which appealed in one way to Christians who thought the country ought to be more fraternal and in another to businessmen who thought it ought to be more rapacious.

Without a boogieman, can they boogie?

That’s the good news.

Now, the bad news: without Trump, the Republicans are going to have to find someone to unify around. It that ain’t gonna be easy.

The Trump “movement” is a lot like Ron Paul’s crowd, eight and 12 years ago – they pretty much came for a single personality, in whom a bunch of hot button issues coalesced; immigration, economic decay, identity politics. Like the Ron Paul crowd, they could easily disappear from the GOP for another generation.

Then there’s the remaining Tea Party, Reagan and even Chamber of Commerce Republicans – none of whom are big enough to put someone in the White House, all of whom are big enough to deny a nomination or scupper an election if they stay home.

The GOP needs a New Gingrich to articulate a vision that brings that throng together in time for midterms, when the reaction to the inevitable “progressive” overreach peaks.

Choices

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To download an app to my device that’d allow government to track my every move (even more effectively than they already can), and keep that information in custody of people who can’t even deliver data-access apps on time and on budget, much less secure things like personal data?

Or not to?

I’ll take “not”, thanks.

Deplorablx

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So why did Latinos vote for Trump in record numbers?

Because they’re a bunch of bitter Jesus Freaks, according to the guy who made “bigger Jebus freaks” a political class and social identity group:

.@BarackObama: “There’s a lot of evangelical Hispanics who…the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees— undocumented workers— in cages,they think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion.” pic.twitter.com/g13DHGcM7y

Is there a President in history who has so fully incorporated condescension into his brand as Obama?

BTW – GOP outreach to Latinos needs to lead, front-and-center, with this for the next four years.

Also with cooling it with the “Deport-em-all” talk.

More Orders

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emailed, again, about a week or so ago:

Saint Paul, Minnesota
November 21, 2020
For Immediate Release

Dictator-for-Life Walz, Peace Be Upon Him, today announced a new Executive Order intended to save Minnesotan lives from the deadliest virus ever known, Covid-19.

“Shocking new evidence has been discovered which completely changes our strategy for combating this deadly virus,” said Governor Walz. “We have learned that the Jewish ceremony of slaughtering and eating Christian babies takes place without masks, and without social distancing or hand sanitizing measures in place. These super-spreader events put everyone at risk and cannot be allowed to continue. Effective immediately, all Jews must present themselves to local authorities for removal to Permanent and Isolated Relocation Authority camps to be confined for the remainder of the emergency.”

In response to Republican claims that such an order lacked a factual basis and would somehow violate the “Constitution,” a spokesman for Attorney General Hakim X. stated, “The factual basis is clear: Jewish dietary practices are well-documented in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Since the Governor’s order is authorized by statute and has not been overturned by the Legislature, it is presumptively valid. There is ample legal precedent for this measure provided in the Supreme Court case of Korematsu v. United States. The notion that the Governor lacks the authority to suspend people’s so-called “Constitutional rights” during the time of state-wide emergency is absurd on its face.”

Local rabbis called a press conference to protest the order but were summarily arrested and have not been heard from since. It is believed they are the first Jews to be sent to the Relocation Camps, although that rumor cannot be confirmed.

In Saint Paul, Joe Doakes, reporting.

At some point, if things don’t start to improve, satire becomes journalism.

Blue Fragility, Part MMXMLCIII: Pious Fury!

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When it comes to state-level Covid restrictions – bans, shutdowns, snitch lines and the rest – the big media and the pundit class (pardon, more and more, the redundancy) act a lot like strict but blinkered Fundamentalists confronting two-for-ones at happy hour; the impenitent deserve any horrors that befall them, in this life or the next.

All through the summer, Big Media was fairly drooling at the notion that, while Covid was ravaging New York and Boston and Minneapolis, “it’s gonna hit the red states MUCH harder”, with a perceptible thrill in their voice.

Which is all I have to explain the way Big Media has covered the surge in Covid in the Dakotas. I’ve called the phenomenon “#BlueFragility” – the notion that no matter what goes wrong in a Blue city or state – crime, corruption, costs, Covid, bureaucratic legerdemain – it’s going to be worse in the Red areas, and it’s probably their fault besides!

The level of joy that came out a few weeks ago when North Dakota’s case load surged (after a cold, wet October – the same weather that’s gonna cause a surge everywhere else, before too long) had a pronounced “Scarlet Letter” vibe to it.

And it’s not just pseudomoral schadenfreud. It’s bastardizing both science and journalism (to the extent that benighted craft can still be bastardized). Remember the Sturgis rally? When snarky bobbleheads with tin “reporter” badges uncritically regurgitated garbage “science” tying every single case in the upper midwest to the Sturgis rally? That made the headlines. The clarification – it was more like 80 cases in Minnesota – got Section C page 16.

Oh yeah – being big media, pretty much everything they’ve written about the situation is wrong. To pick just one bit of misreporting – the story from a few weeks back that Gov. Burgum was asking infected but asymptomatic staff to keep working:.

“Anger in North Dakota After Governor Asks Covid-Positive Health Workers To Keep Working.” That does sound pretty dire – the state is so swamped that the sick are treating the sick.

Except this is a phenomenon in agricultural states generally because they rely on small rural Critical Access Hospitals, often with few beds and limited or nonexistent intensive care capabilities. “COVID-19 patients and other critically ill patients who need to be cared for in an intensive care unit are typically transferred to larger regional hospitals, which can be hundreds of miles from the small critical hospitals,” notes USA Today when it’s not berating the Dakotas. This adds extra pressure to city hospitals and can potentially increase case severity and death. In fact, the CDC spells out guidance for areas in such situations that allows such working situations precisely because unlike what we normally think of as a disease case, that is, an exhibition of a certain cluster of symptoms, many Covid-19 “cases” are asymptomatic and non-spreading. It’s just one of the many idiosyncrasies of how this disease is treated compared to others. 

While I chalk this up to a frenzy of secular-revivalist fervor, the author, Michael Fumento, adds another wrinkle to the diagnosis:

Say you’re a writer in New York or Los Angeles living in something approaching a coronavirus police state and fearing for your job and pining for a pint and you learn North Dakota ranked second in least economic distress from the pandemic while South Dakota also did quite well. Further, a U.S. Census Bureau poll found that the two states least suffering from anxiety and depression right now are, yup, the Dakotas. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s freedom!

I do urge you to read the whole thing.

By the way – unlike pretty much any mainstream media figure, I’ve spent time in the Dakotas since the pandemic started. A *lot* of time. Four times since March. While there was no state mask mandate, people *on their own* were wearing them, no less than in the Twin Cities.

And in a better contrast still? Listening to Governor Burgum addressing the state is a wonderful contrast to Governor Klink; he treats his audience like someone he has to respect as adults, puts the actual science out there, and doesn’t play stupid stunts like hiding his math, a welcome comparison to the gym teacher with his knobs and levers and vanishing models.

Moving as I did from NoDak to the big city 35 years ago, I’ve had an adult lifetime of dealing with “blue” stereotypes of the rural west. I’d say “I’m gonna enjoy watching them choke on them”, but it’s probably too soon.

“We’re All In This Together”

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“Science”, Minnesota Style

Governor Klink reminds us “we are all in it together“.

I thought about that as I was driving through Eagan after the show on Saturday. I drove past a Eagan Outlet mall – a clump of national big box outlet stores.

He was the parking lot:

Seems an off a lot of people are, indeed, “in it together”, doesn’t it?

Then, I turned around and took a look at Jensen’s supper club – a locally run, one of a kind small family run business that is an Eagan institution, as well as being perennially besieged by the ever expanding vagaries of Minnesota’s regulatory state and tax regime.

Here it was:

A sign on the door hopefully suggests “curbside pick up available“.

Normally at 3o’clock on a Saturday afternoon during the weekend after Thanksgiving – one of the biggest shopping weekends of the year under normal circumstances, and clearly a day seeing quite a bit of traffic at the state sanctioned “essential“ businesses across the street – there would be more than a few cars in the parking lot, with people grabbing dinner and or a cocktail or three after a day of dealing with the madding crowd.

Science.

Orders

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emailed a week or so back:

Saint Paul, Minnesota
November 20, 2020
For Immediate Release

Dictator-for-Life Walz today announced a new Executive Order intended to save Minnesotans from the deadliest virus ever known, Covid-19.

“It is well documented that Black people are more susceptible than Whites,” he said. “It stands to reason the more people who have the virus, the more people they can spread it to. We must prevent the spread of the virus which could overwhelm medical facilities and leave thousands of people to die untreated. Therefore, effective immediately, all Black people are required to present themselves to local authorities for removal to permanent and isolated Relocation Authority camps where they will be confined for the duration of the emergency.”

In response to Republican claims that such an order would somehow violate the “Constitution,” a spokesman for Attorney General Ellison stated, “Since the Governor’s order is authorized by statute and has not been overturned by the Legislature, it is presumptively valid. There is ample legal precedent for this measure provided in the Supreme Court case of Korematsu v. United States. The notion that the Governor lacks the authority to suspend people’s so-called “Constitutional rights” during the time of state-wide emergency is absurd on its face.”

Local Black Lives Matter and NAACP officials called a press conference to protest the order but were summarily arrested and have not been heard from since. It is believed they are the first Blacks to be sent to the Relocation Camps, although that rumor cannot be confirmed.

In Saint Paul, Joe Doakes, reporting.

It only seems preposterous if you haven’t been following Governor Fredo and Mayor Squiggy in New York.

Or, y’know, history in general.

Rebellious

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Jack Posobiec started the thread on modern ways to be a rebel.

I’m going to keep going:

  • Get a job
  • Don’t whine
  • Save money
  • Learn to protect yourself and your family
  • Learn what the scientific method actually is.
  • Learn logic
  • Learn to be a critical thinker, and practice it.
  • Read the Federalist Papers.
  • Become educated (as opposed to getting one or more degrees).
  • Learn why Western Civilization matters.
  • Learn your opponents’ arguments.

What am I missing, here?

My Checklist

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My “Black Friday” checklist:Wednesday before Thanksgiving:

  1. Make sure I’ve got groceries and essentials sufficient to get through ’til Monday. Check.
  2. Anticipate the places I need to go for the next three days, and map out routes avoiding major malls, Targets, Walmarts and commercial districts. Check.
  3. Switch on NPR and start counting all the “celebrities” and “newscasters” referring to this next four weeks as the most miserable, dysfunctional time of the year, full of family one hates because of their politics and the onerous nature of having to engage in forced civility while celebrating gratitude and humility while apparently feeling neither. Make sure I have a fresh set of legal pads, since it gets worse every year. Check.
  4. Silently ponder, for yet another year, converting to Russian Orthodox Christianity, at least in part to put Christmas off til January 6 and get some awesome savings on presents in the week between Christmas and New Years. Check.

OK. I’m good to go.

Happy Day After Thanksgiving, everyone!

The End Of The Beginning

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I believe there was massive fraud in this election. I believe President
Trump will fight it in the courts. I don’t know if he will win. But
even if he doesn’t, things are going to be okay.

Shouting aside, it seems each state makes their own rules on who can
vote, how votes are counted, and what it takes to set aside the results
of the election. I don’t know the standards of evidence required or the
procedures to be followed. None of the Instant Experts on the internet
seem to know, either.

Assuming the worst – that Biden is certified as the winner and sworn in
as President – what then?

Really, not much. I’ve lived under Democrat regimes pretty much my
entire life. They’ve always been morons and the younger ones are
getting worse, but I don’t think the people behind the scenes are ready
to let them destroy the country, yet. That’s why Bernie got the axe in
the primaries and Biden became the nominee. They needed someone
moderate-looking to hoax the yokels a while longer.

I still believe the Covid crisis was a political crisis manufactured to
justify mailed ballots to steal the election (I didn’t think it would be
so brazen). The lock-downs will continue during the Fourth Quarter to
make Trump’s economic numbers look bad. But when Biden is sworn in,
he’ll need to start generating good economic numbers to help Democrats
in the 2022 mid-terms. Covid will become just a bad flu, something we
must live with, restrictions will be lifted.

I assume Biden/Harris will resume meddling in foreign affairs. I’ll urge
my grandkids NOT to enlist because it’ll be too risky. Not risk of dying
in defense of our nation, that’s defensible; risk they’ll be sent to die
in some shit-hole Third World nation defending some pie-in-the-sky
notion of Utopia dreamed up by bureaucrats. At least President Trump is
trying to get us out of those places now, before he leaves office.
That’s a good start. If he can ram through a whole bunch more federal
judges before he goes, that’ll help a lot.

I assume Biden/Harris will be urged to raise taxes, ban guns, eliminate
cars, and endless other foolishness but I assume the adults in the
Senate will block that. As the pundit says, gridlock is the next best
thing to Constitutional government.

All in all, I’m not despondent. I think President Trump’s super-power
was to so enrage the Left they tore off their own masks, letting
sensible people see how bat-sh*t crazy they are. I think that opened a
lot of eyes, hopefully to continue in future elections as the cultural
pendulum swings back to sanity.

Fear not. This too shall pass.

Joe Doakes

I agree.

I also believe the natural “progressive” urge to overreach, combined with the customary crash at the polls for the President’s party in the 2022 midterms – which, given the burgeoning extremism of the left, could rival 2010 – has the potential to be epic.

What A Difference Four Years Makes

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The New York Times, 2020: “Our elections are unimpeachably honest and fair and not problematic at all”.

New York Times, 2016: “Not only did the Russians install Donald Trump, but we’ll show you how they probably did it by doing it ourselves:

I could keep saying “Democrats and the NYTimes (ptr) can reverse themselves all they want, because their target audience is unthinking lemmings”…

…but I’m starting to feel like I’m repeating myself.

Leading From The Rear

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Governor Walz was a National Guard noncommissioned officer.

As such, it’s not unreasonable to believe he knows one of the key principles of leadership – never ask those you’re leading to do something you’re not willing to do yourself.

I thought about that when I read this…

…the latest in an eight month series of such platitudes.

Is it plausible that someone presumably promoted by the Army for demonstrating some leadership skill actually believes that someone with a government income and benefits chanting platitudes like “we’re all in this together” to people who are losing, have lost or will lose everything is sound leadership?

Is he unaware?

Or given the Twin Cities’ obsequious media, does he just know it doesn’t matter?

Out Come The Long Knives

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What Tom Bakk and Dave Tomassoni did this week in Minnesota, it seems Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is doing, more or less, in the US Senate.

And progs aren’t happy about it:

While he would certainly never acknowledge it, Joe Manchin just took it upon himself to go on national television, and had the brilliant idea to singlehandedly throw away any reason someone in the state of Georgia would have to vote for a Democrat in order for them to take the Senate. If he has already positioned himself as someone more interested in catering to the right as opposed to the left, and it’s all but guaranteed he will act as a barrier to any meaningful legislation whatsoever that Democrats could pass, does he not understand he just essentially told people that nothing was going to get done if Democrats control the Senate? Does he not realize he essentially just told voters to go ahead and make the Democrats the majority, while at the same time telling them there was actually no reason to do so considering he has made himself the barrier to anything their base wants to see done?

However the George Senate runoffs turn out, Joe Manchin is going to be one of the most powerful people in the United State for the next two years, at least.

The Cure For What Ails Us

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The cure for election fraud is scrutiny.  Make sure every ballot is legitimate, then count all legitimate ballots.  The process takes place in two parts.

First, scrutinize the paper ballots, same as we did in the “hanging-chads” count in Florida.  This requires three steps:

Step A: segregate ballots where the chain of custody is unclear.  If the elections officials can’t prove that the ballots in this box were slid into the voting machine at the Como Precinct, transferred to a locked box by John, transported to the County Elections Office by Stephanie, opened there by Roger, scanned by Trudy and re-locked, then stored by Darlene until the recount; then we cannot be confident they are legitimate ballots.  They might have been fraudulent ballots smuggled in under cover of darkness.  Segregate them for separate counting when and if the court decides to include them.

Step B: segregate ballots that lack procedural compliance: missing signature, spoiled ballot, arrived late, back-dated, etc.  They might have been accepted in violation of the law.  Some of these might be allowed, some might be rejected, but they cannot be dumped into the general mix.  Segregate them for separate counting when and if the court decides to include them.

Step C: make the court decide which ballots to count, which to exclude.  It’s critical to do this BEFORE the counting begins, to avoid influencing the decision. The last thing the public wants to hear is: “It doesn’t matter because it won’t overturn the results of the election.”  We don’t know that yet; we haven’t done the manual recount.  Make an impartial decision on the merits of the ballots, not the results you anticipate.

Finally, do a manual recount of each group of ballots.  Do NOT scan them into the voting machines.  The machines have a known history of vote switching.  Senator Klobuchar complained about it.  And counting machines are vulnerable to errors caused by missed software updates, on-line hacking, fractionalized voting, and security breaches.  At this point, we have no guarantee the machine counts were correct so we must verify them by a manual recount, eyeballs on paper. 

Yes, it would cost a fortune.  Do you want an honest election or a cheap one?

Joe Doakes

This will require a clean GOP sweep at the polls in 2020. There is no other way. Steve Simon is hiding too much (on the behalf of the DFL, natch).

Housekeeping

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I really genuinely truly abhor echo chambers. They’re boring – and, more germane, conservatives don’t improve their arguments by vigorously agreeing with each other.

So I’ve encouraged dissenters to come to this site, to engage, to leave comments.

Now, from 2006 until about 2017, there was an extremely regular commenter who got into a bit of a habit of thread-jacking the comment section.

Initially, I told this person to go start her own blog. Which she did [1].

But it apparently wasn’t enough. She took to thread-jacking in my comment section again – successively ignoring waves of hints: I started with asking nicely. Then I started graying out her comments and annotating them with warnings [2]. Then I started deleting thread-jacks. Finally, I just banned her [3].

Shoulda done it four years earlier, to be honest.

Anyway – I still abhor echo chambers.

But I’ve been gently hinting to, well, some in the comment section for a while now, and it doesn’t seem to be sinking in.

So be advised that I’m going to start deleting thread-jacks.

Want to start your own discussions? Blogs are still free to start. Go for it.

That’s the rule. Enjoy.

[1] She kept it running for about 10 logorrheic years before petering out, apparently finding it was harder than it looked.

[2] Which, truth be told, I doubt she ever saw.

[3] Although the final straw there had nothing to do with this blog’s comment section.

Liberty Is Destiny

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An initiative to overturn a state ban on affirmative action in California…

…failed.

And it failed largely due to the votes of Latino and Asian voters.

Unexpectedly:

Yet on Election Day, the proposition failed by a wide margin, 57 percent to 43 percent, and Latino and Asian-American voters played a key role in defeating it. The outcome captured the gap between the vision laid out by the liberal establishment in California, which has long imagined the creation of a multiracial, multiethnic coalition that would embrace progressive causes, and the sentiments of many Black, Latino, Asian and Arab voters.

Variations of this puzzle could be found in surprising corners of the nation on Election Day, as slices of ethnic and racial constituencies peeled off and cut against Democratic expectations….Asian-American Californians opposed the affirmative action measure in large numbers. A striking number of East and South Asian students have gained admission to elite state universities, and their families spoke to reporters of their fear that their children would suffer if merit in college selection was given less weight. That battle carried echoes of another that raged the past few years in New York City, where a white liberal mayor’s efforts to increase the number of Black and Latino students in selective high schools angered working- and middle-class South and East Asian families whose children have gained admission to the schools in large numbers.

“There’s more texture to California blue politics than you might think,” said Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University and policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run. “Identity politics only go so far. There is a sense on affirmative action that people resent being categorized by progressives.”

Latinos, too, appear sharply divided. Prominent Latino nonprofit and civil rights organizations endorsed the affirmative action proposition even as all 14 of California’s majority-Latino counties voted it down.

The fact that some “POC” (and lord, do I hate that term) are defying their progressive overlords’ orders – most notably in the election – has got to be giving Democrats indigestion.

What gives me indigestion is wondering how the Minnesota GOP will screw this opportunity up.

Mistakes

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Clerk: “Here’s your change.”

First Customer: “Hey, you shorted me.”

Clerk: “Sorry, my mistake, here you go.”

Clerk: “Here is your change.”

Second, Third, Fourth Customers: “Hey, you shorted me.”

Clerk: “Sorry, my mistake. Here you go.”

All Customers: “There is something going on here.”

Store Manager: “No, we just make a lot of innocent errors, always in our favor.”

Policeman: “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

Reporter: “Haters claimed without evidence that the store systematically short changes people.”

Joe Doakes

When you bring an allegation, they say “bring it to court”.

When you bring it to court, they say “it doesn’t meet the standard set in a law that was written by the party that benefits from the corruption”.

I suspect when and if that gets fixed, it’ll morph to “it wasn’t peer-reviewed”.

Downstream From Culture

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To some observers, gun rights were on the brink of going viral, and in a positive way, before last March. Gun ownership, gun culture, and the notion that the right to keep and bear arms is not merely an essential, but a normal part of regular civic life, were on the ascendant.

One could even point out that the extreme anti-gun stances in “Blue” America were a reaction to that ascendancy in most of the country.

Then came the twin pandemics – Covid and violence tolerated with a nudge and a wink by Blue city governments…

…and it would seem gun control has, itself, been shot in the foot.

It’s not all good news – given that Biden has pledged to be a gun grabber, Big Left may well see that this may be their last decent chance to disarm the nation.

Follow The Money

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Downtown Minneapolis boosters are split over the news that Dollar General is putting a store on the ever-more-desolate Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis.

On the one hand, you’ve got the one that chortle at all the “People of Walmart”-style stories they associate with Dollar General – a chain usually associated with towns too small or neighborhoods too poor for a Walmart.

On the other hand you’ve got the “aren’t we better than this?” mob.

Rick Nelson at the Strib kinda straddles the line:

Yes, “tacky” and “depressing” are two words to describe the appearance of a dollar store on what is widely viewed as Minneapolis’ Main Street, a thoroughfare that recently underwent a $50 million makeover. “Distressing” could be another, since the appearance of this type of merchant might be an indication that downtown’s dwindling retail scene is taking yet another step in the wrong direction.

The store’s new home in the Andrus (the historic building formerly known as Renaissance Square) at S. 5th Street and Nicollet Mall won’t be sullied with a glaring yellow-and-black Dollar General logo. Instead, there will be a hip “DGX” marquee, reflecting Dollar General’s curated version of its discount store.

So what does it all mean, for a street that the city of Minneapolis just spent tens of millions of dollars refurbing (and BLM and “Anti”-Fa spent a couple of nights hacking away at)?

Why, it’s almost as if when you treat a major city like an urban studies lab, make driving onerous and parking prohibitive, and treat public safety as a sign of misbegotten privilege even if someone hasn’t burned down your favorite destination (or closed it forever via a hamfisted lockdown), the people from the outlying parts of the city that downtown used to depend on for all that juicy revenue will take their money elsewhere?

Follow The Absence Of Money

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A friend of the blog emails:

St Paul City Councilmember Mitra Jalali says that capitalism crushed a local alternative weekly.

I’m scratching my head at this because the print and online versions were free. So, if they couldn’t survive by giving away whatever they had, how did capitalism crush them? One would think something free would “crush” something more expensive. That’s usually what is said of Walmart- they offer things so cheaply that the small businesses can’t compete. In this case, what is the issue? Free publications can’t compete with more expensive subscription news? Or is it actually can’t compete with better sources online that are also free? Is that capitalism? I guess maybe it is because we here in the USA do have lots of choice and are also free to start another weekly in City Pages place. So, if that choice and opportunity bothers Mitra Jalali, just what alternative does she want for us? 

I suspect councilwoman Jalali – who was “Mitra Jalali-Nelson” until having a hint of Scandinavian became a negative in Metro DFL politics – knows this.

I suspect she, like all DFL pols, knows her voters don’t think about it all that hard, and that nobody in the media is ever going to make an issue of it.

Epidemiology

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This is the correct response to Covid: We’re going to treat it like any other respiratory virus.

It is simply not possible to stop a virus from spreading, or to prevent people from being exposed to it.  Instead, we must focus on protecting those most at-risk from the virus, and treating those sickened by it, as best we can. 

Everybody else – get back to work.

The existence of the virus is not a hoax; the panic response is a political hoax that deliberately sacrifices senior citizens’ lives to terrify voters into electing a man who promises to keep them safe.  It’s despicable.

Joe Doakes

Rahm Emanuel let slip the great Progressive commandment – “never waste a crisis”.

The pandemic was real. So was the Democrats’ adherence to Emanuel.

Further Proof…

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…not only that Berg’s Seventh Law is universal and immutable, but that Democrat politicians can and do count on their voters being unthinking lemmings who know neither history nor critical thought.

Barack Obama:

Barack Obama – who won a Nobel Peace Prize before spending eight years making “Hellfire” a more common precipitation in the Middle East than rain, and who did more to clamp down on critical media than anyone since Woodrow Wilson – bags on Trump, who made the first serious progress on Middle East peace in decades, and who ramped down military adventurism..

…the way the increasinly Wilsonian-looking Obama promised, and failed, to do.

Weight

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’m not a computer programmer and don’t pretend to be; therefore, this is a serious request for an answer from a person who was a knowledgeable computer programmer BEFORE the election (not an instant expert on computers today, the Constitution last week, and epidemiology the week before).

The State of Michigan admitted 6,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden in one county. They explained it was because the county clerk failed to install a software. The ballots were properly counted when scanned, but vote totals were incorrectly reported.

My question: if the software is a simple addition program, totalling up the number of votes for each candidate, what kind of a programming “glitch” could make it switch votes from one candidate to another, but not all of them, only some of them?

Also, if the software knows how many ballots were scanned, how can some of them be omitted from the total?

I ask because some people are claiming there are algorithms available to generate Switched and Lost ballots, which may have been present in the software used in the voting machines. Is that even possible?

Joe Doakes

I won’t claim to be an expert – but I’m trying to imagine the JAD session (because you just know it was a JAD session, amirite, geeks?) where they described the requirement for the system to be able to finesse totals for weighting, estimates of lost ballots, and other inputs derived from, er, modeling.