A friend of the blog emails:

Like Justine Bateman, I was thinking that I would see a flood of posts declaring that it wasn’t a host of other issues, but that it was the guns. Nope. Didn’t see a single post.

Saw a few people say no one deserves this, not even an insurance CEO with a lot of “but he’s killing people every day” responses.

I work in healthcare. I see the occasional sad case of someone who is underinsured or uninsured. We don’t let them die. In fact, we do a lot of work for those groups of people in the hospital to try to get them to a point where they can manage outside of the hospital. If they won’t get to that point, we usually find a transitional home for them. There are the even smaller groups of people who actually have a little net worth that would lose everything if they went to a transitional place and we continue to treat them to get them stable for home with the minimal resources we can find.

Yes, there are insurers who make care for patients extremely difficult. There is one Medicare Replacement insurance that many regional facilities will not accept as payment. I don’t know too many people with employer provided insurance, however, who dislike their plans. I’m sure there are some bad plans out there. But, I would guess even in those cases, it is a small minority.

Yet, I look at other areas around the world – I have a friend who in his 40s died in a hospital in Mexico from a heart attack. He was on vacation. Maybe he would have died here, but I feel like the hospitals here would have tried harder. I think of the Chinese father in law of a friend who had a stroke and was sent home to die 3 days later in China. By all accounts of what I heard, he likely wouldn’t have died that quickly here. I think of a Parisian friend who wasn’t well. But, she didn’t fit the narrative of someone who needed medical care, so she wasn’t being treated for anything when she died of a heart attack on a plane. She probably had something that here we might have caught early enough to treat and save her life. By all appearances in these cases, it seems socialized medicine said “we aren’t going to give costly tests and treatments to this person because they don’t fit the formula for those procedures.” So, they died. Is that any different than some private insurers here? The difference is that many of us have a choice in insurers and can choose an insurer that won’t deny that care to us. And while prices are negotiated between care providers and insurance, there is probably a bit of good insurance paying a bit more than is necessary which helps cover the cost of bad insurance/underinsured/uninsured.

Americans could do more to reduce healthcare costs, like manage or avoid some chronic illnesses like obesity, diabetes, heart disease. But, even when Americans get a chronic illness and even when they refuse to follow any medical advice to get it under control and stay out of the hospital, regardless of income or insurance, we still treat them and value their lives. Despite their own doings and despite some insurance companies. That is truly a difference that I think distinguishes us from much of the world. It is a distinction that I think few on the Team Shooter realize. Or maybe they do realize – maybe to them, not all life has value, much like socialized medicine around the world believes.

Sort of like the parables about democracy, our justice system and the free market – our health insurance system is the worst in the world, except for all the others. 

So, here’s a picture of Governor Walz with Lt. Governor Flanagan, taken back during the “trifecta”.

She was inescapable. She was in every photo with Walz. Her name may have been more prominent on their campaign signs.

The media actively dolled her up:

The camera and their photo selection didn’t do half bad by her.

At times it seemed as if the local media were just as much her PR firm as Walz’s. 

And now – this:

And this:

That – combined with the Rochelle Olson/Ryan Faircloth piece we talked about earlier – makes it look like Walz is trying to distance himself from Flanagan.

Why?

Because polling isn’t showing “DSA whackjobbery” is doing well?

Or because they’re both going to be running for Governor?

Tim Walz is back

And he’s pissed. 

It seems a bit of a squabble has broken out between his camp and Lt Governor Flanagan‘s:

Walz was asked in a recent interview if there was tension when he returned given Flanagan would have succeeded him as governor if the Harris ticket had won.

“No,” Walz responded. “There would be time to figure out all that afterwards. I was solely focused on making sure the state of Minnesota was going, we were getting things done. The lieutenant governor was here doing the work that she needed to do, reaching out to community.”

Others who spoke on condition of anonymity said the Walz team was not pleased at steps Flanagan had taken to assume the governorship, conferring with potential key hires and preparing for a possible run herself in 2026. “If the people of Minnesota want me to continue to serve, I am absolutely open to that,” Flanagan said at the State Fair in August.

The Walz camp was especially irked because Flanagan had tapped Walz’s gubernatorial campaign fund without authorization for some work, multiple sources said.

Walz is claiming to know nothing, NOTHing, about the matter. But I’m not the only one thinking something’s amiss:

Steven Schier, Carleton College political science professor emeritus, said it’s not uncommon in Minnesota for the governor and lieutenant governor to maintain a distance from each other. “What is notable are the timing of this and the apparent reasons for it,” Schier said. “Peggy Flanagan and Walz were joined at the hip for six years and now they seem separated by their individual ambitions.”

Joined at the hip is an understatement. I rarely recall seeing Lieutenant Governors consistently appearing with the Governor before Walz. One rarely saw Tina Smith or Mae Schunk or Joan Growe outside the odd campaign event or the State of the State.

But Flanagan was in every photo this past six years.  They had hundreds of shots of the two of them cavorting about the Fair, her feeding him corn dogs and playing fetch with him.  Her name was arguably more prominent than his on their campaign signs:

And the optics – literally – are absolutely strange on this.

More later today. 

SCENE: The rotunda at the Minnesota State Capitol.   A press conference is underway.  Standing at the podium, in front of a “Satanic” display, are three members of the Twin Cities Church of Satan:

• Joshua Micah GUMPKE – a tall, morbidly obese 30-something man with thick, unkempt back hair,  and a black neckbeard.  His arms are covered with “sleeves” of occult-looking tattoos.  He wears a black occult-themed T-shirt, stained with cheeto dust, fresh and otherwise. 
• Eva BACHMANN-DUMPF – a morbidly obese twenty-something woman with long straight blond hair.  She is wearing a different black occult-themed t-shirt, and sports a small pentagram tattooed under her left ear. 
• Edmund POCKERT – A short, wiry man with a fringe of white hair snaking around the back of his head to meet his white beard.  He wears a visibly worn suit. 

A smattering of reporters are gathered.

POCKERT:   I’m Edmund Pockert, the legal counsel for the Twin Cities Church of Satan. 

GUMPKE AND BACHMANN-DUMPF: (awkwardly, loudly) Hail Satan!

POCKERT:  Mr. J-Talon666 and Ms. QueenOfTheDark will now answer questions.

CHANNEL 11:   Mr. and Ms. What? 

POCKERT:  Those are the names our representatives go by. 

CHANNEL 9:  So what’s going on with this display?

GUMPKE:  This display is ack-shu-ally our way of striking a blow for religious pluralism.

BACHMANN-DUMPF:  We love to notice the hypocrisy of Christians who melt down when other people exercise religious freedom. 

MPR NEWS:  When you say “melt down”…?

BACHMANN-DUMPF:  Christians always have a cow and melt down when we assert our rights. 

POCKERT:  Always. 

ALPHA NEWS:  So, how do you respond to allegations that the “church of Satan” is less about religious freedom and more about getting a juvenile rise out of mainstream Christians.

BACHMANN-DUMPF:  Well, it is their own fault.  They always have a cow and melt down and freak out go into emotional tailspin and get loud and crazy and deranged and lose their shi…

GUMPKE:  They are very predictable. 

CENTER OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT:   So a local blogger and talk host left this satirical response to your display:

(GUMPKE and BACHMANN-DUMPF stand, gobsmacked and confused, for a moment. )

GUMPKE:   (finally breaking the silence) Well, this is typical.   A Christian freaking out…

CHANNEL 4:  This doesn’t appear to be – what was your term – “freaking out”.

ALPHA NEWS:  Yeah, more like “satire” or “parody”, speaking to the notion that “Satanism” exist just to try to mock and ridicule regular Christians.

BACHMANN-DUMPF:  Is this even legal?  Can they do that?

POCKERT:  (nods silently)

GUMPKE:   It’s our view that this just contributes to the climate of hate against Satanists…

PIONEER PRESS:  But it’s just mockery – not a whole lot different than this display, itself

POCKERT:  OK, this converence is over.

(The three shuffle away from the podium).

And SCENE

Seems like barely two weeks ago that a couple of “transgender women” claimed they’d been attacked at a rail station in downtown Minneapolis (aka “MAGA Country”) as a bunch of people cheered.

I pointed out at the time the story seemed…implausible? A heavily-surveiled place in a leftist city – is this ringing any bells?

CrimeWatch is among the groups that are proving Elon Musk right in declaring the MSM dead.  And as usual, they’ve got the actual story; the video. It’s a short thread:

The bigger the hype of the reveal, the bigger the flop it turns out to be. Never fails.

You know who I’m talking about – the young humanities major at your job; the know-it-all lady witih ELCA hair in the PTA; the angry young relative who deigns to grace you with her presence at holiday dinners anyway.

This one goes out to you.  Use it wisely. 

Reasons American healthcare is expensive:

6. American pharmaceutical and device research and development can’t recoup costs overseas, due to rigid price controls in “single payer” healthcare systems (ironically making all “single payer” systems in effect dual payer systems).

5. Healthcare costs track gross incomes, worldwide. The inflation curve for healthcare is largely the same as the growth in a nation’s standard of living, whether it’s the US, Taiwan or Norway.

4. Americans are terrible drivers.

3. Americans are disproportionally very overweight.

2. As most Americans work during their prime earning years, older folks that used to stay with family in their 80s and 90s are now in assisted living, skilled nursing and memory care.

1. The “Affordable Care Act”, and the serial waves of government intervention that came before, stuffed a gob of unfunded mandates onto insurers.

Reasons American healthcare is expensive:

5. Healthcare costs track gross incomes, worldwide. The inflation curve for healthcare is largely the same as the growth in a nation’s standard of living, whether it’s the US, Taiwan or Norway.

4. Americans are terrible drivers.

3. Americans are disproportionally very overweight.

2. As most Americans work during their prime earning years, older folks that used to stay with family in their 80s and 90s are now in assisted living, skilled nursing and memory care.

1. The “Affordable Care Act”, and the serial waves of government intervention that came before, stuffed a gob of unfunded mandates onto insurers.

Not reasons that American healthcare is so expensive:

2. Greed.

1. Upper middle dilettantes haven’t shot enough CEOs.

Hope that settles that.

2. Greed.

1. Upper middle dilettantes haven’t shot enough CEOs.

Hope that settles that.

Governor Klink – who two years before had arrogated emergency powers that Francisco Franco would have envied, who sicced the Attorney General on anyone who defied him – as the trifecta started marauding: “You got political capital, you gotta use it”.

Two years later and facing two years of tie votes in the House: “I hear NOTH-ing! I see NOTH-ing”:

But wait – it gets worse.  

You may think this is just a matter of the Governor and his media noise machine working to transfer the DFL’s little massive fraud problem to the House, abetted by the DFL’s noise machine and the subservient media. 

And you’d be partly right. 

But it’s worse than that:

That’s right – the governor who arroraged to himself the power to cancel Thanksgiving, to pack nursing homes with sick people, and to sort Minnesotans into “essential” and “nonessential”, apparently gave away the power to actually control his own executive branch. 

Looking to get someone to explain this madness on the show after Christmas. 

Today’s music list!

Have a blessed Christmas!

Governor Klink is doing the rounds of the Twin Cities media, saying he’s not going to rule out further runs for national office.

Of course, to a leftist, “conversation” means “Monologue” – which is what Walz is used to here in Minnesota, with his constant stream of selfies and Twitter proclamations and straw men.

His foray into national politics was his first attempt at a “conversation”.

It didn’t go well.  See also his debate with JD Vance. 

But hope springs eternal that we can have an actual conversation with Walz and the entire DFL over his and their dubious record in office – especially given the news of yet another corruption scandal (more next week).

Speaking of “conversations”:

Hey – one person’s “rumors about dogs and cats” is another person’s “neighborliness”.

“Life is full of ironies – if you’re stupid”
 — PJ O’Rourke

Remember 2010-2012?   When Democrats snarled that there was no way, no how that there were “death panels” buried in Obamacare?

And those of us with some experience in the healthcare industry responded “of course, there are, and have been ever since government poked its nose into controlling the healthcare system”?

The “people” jumping for joy over the murder of Brian Thompson for running a company that administers the metaphorical institutional “death panel”, exacty as foretold, are the same class of gerbils who said that was no way, no how anything Obamacare was about. Ever!

1. Create a problem:

2. Keep on letting it stew. Let the “steam” build:

3. Go “I’m shocked, shocked that there’s a crime problem!

4. “Ride to the rescue” with a meaningless band-aid that doesn’t come close to addressing the cultural crisis you, yourselves, fomented:

Of course I’m not the first or only one to notice this:

Apparently “chaos” and “crime” aren’t polling well enough to overcome the loss of the ‘Trifecta’.

Am I the only one that heard about Taylor Lorenz’s “Joy” at the murder of Brian Thompson…

…and thought “that certainly puts a new spin on the Harris campaign’s theme?”

• Freedom is slavery?
• 2+2=5?
• Murder is joy?

One “joy” I try to deny myself is excessive schadenfreud. Pinky swear.

But I’ll confess, I feel quite a bit of it seeing Lorenz’s sociopathic level of self-unawareness splashed about the place:

Less schadenfreud, Mitch.  Less schadenfreud. 

Fun Fact #2:   The people angry about that insurance companies – UHG today, but surely all the other ones before long – want to force you onto national health insurance, which doesn’t “deny claims” so much as stall, ration and – well, deny treatment, and are actively exploring (and in some cases have arrived at) “euthanasia”, sometimes without asking any kind of consent at all, and above whom there is nobody to appeal.

Did I say “fun”? I meant “illustrative”.

The woke mob is doing its best to try to simpify the Daniel Penny / Jordan Neely case into a matter of “if we’d only given him what he needed, he’d be alive and impersonating Michael Jackson today”.  

For all its squawking about humanism, modern progressivism tries to boil humanity down into a series of material equation; if you give a “black or brown body” (as opposed to a human) food and a roof over their head and 12 years of an approved curriculum, they’ll turn out just fine. 

It’s a seductive reductionism at best, and kind of cynically inhuman at worst. 

But it’s not purely a product of our cultural left. 

Among the many offshoots of the Penny/Neely case is the emergence of Neely’s father – who by all documentary accounts was a pretty horrible excuse for a father, even by “father of mentally ill drug addicted street person” standards.  He’s come out of the cold to file a lawsuit against Penny.  It’s the New York way. 

Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire commented about it on his podcast last week, as the suit was filed. 

Walsh pointed out the fact that the senior Neely was, by all the available evidence, a bad, mostly absent father who appears to be looking to cash in on the misfortune of a son he didn’t seem to have made a whole lot of time for when he was alive. 

So far, so good.

But then he followed up with [paraphrasing closely, here] “kids who have good parents don’t grow up to be mentally ill crackheads harassing people on the subway”.

What “give people enough handouts or they’ll fail” is to the left, “living the prescribed life” is to the right; as if getting married at 23 and having a traditional household guarantees your kids will turn out just fine.

Don’t get me wrong – it certainly helps raise people whose heads are screwed on straight.  A traditional two-opposite-gender-parent family that prays together, stays together, eats dinner, celebrates holidays together (regardless of everyone’s politics) and keeps life in persepective ,  all other things being equal, is going have a way better than even chance of raising kids that turn into normal, healthy, productive, well-adjusted adults.  And that certainly wasn’t Neely’s chidhood.

But if you think it’s a guarantee?

Allow me to introduce you to mental illness, the world’s most merciless bitch. 

The serious, debilitating ones – crippling depression, schizophrenia, extreme bipolar disorder and the dog’s breakfast of others – don’t care about how you were raised. 

And for all the focus mental illness gets today, modern science still knows more about the dark side of the moon than about how the brain mis-wires itself.

You can be like this guy – from a well-off family, who grew up with all of life’s meaningful advantages, only for bipolar disorder to swerve him from an elite music program to a life of radical and sometimes violent personality swings, homelessness, occasional jail, living with his parents, gigging around a small town for extra money, and (after a brief flash of recovery when “they got his meds right”) an untimely death.

Or this guy, who grew up in a fairly normal if quite well-off family with both the means and the sincere motivation to raise a good kid – who slipped psychologically waaaaay off the rails and spent decades self-medicating, chemically and emotionally, to an extreme that harmed everyone within his personal blast radius, who eventually (and seemingly inevitably) succumbed, survived by parents who seemed broken hearted but to have seen and felt it coming for what must to any parent must have seemed an eternity. As I said five years ago:

And when I became a parent, his story – the whole family’s story, really – terrified me; it was possible, no matter how you loved your children, for the unreasoning, cackling spectre of mental illness and its sidekick, addiction, to take that kid from you no matter what you did and how hard you clung to the hope you could do something about it.

And I’m sorry to say I’m reminded of him in a story a family I know is living right now – a child who grew up in a pretty traditional, normal family, into a pretty normal traditional life. Married at 22, two beautiful and talented kids…

…who had a drinking problem.  Which they gave up some time ago.  Which seemed to allow a whole platoon of demons to come out to play.  This person has since spent the past couple of years chasing around the country seemingly at random, has “come out” as the opposite gender, and is clearly in dire need of a qualified, competent, and perhaps supernaturally wise intervention (from which the “opposite gender” thing will almost certainly shield them).

Is it because this person had bad parents?

No.  It’s not.  Quite the opposite.

Bad parenting and the disintegration of the traditional family have incubated a lot of pathologies in this society.  But not all of them.

So when Matt Walsh says Neely’s father was a disgrace – of course there’s no argument. 

But when the big lesson he takes away is “this doesn’t happen to children of good parents?”

It’s not just simplistic and reductionist.  It’s smug and ignorant. 

Luigi Mangione has been “questioned” in the murder of Brian Thompson.

“They also recovered clothing, including a mask consistent with those worn by our wanted individual,” Tisch said. “Also recovered was a fraudulent New Jersey ID matching the ID our suspect used to check into his New York City hostel before the shooting incident.”

Citing a law enforcement official, The Associated Press reported that along with the gun, authorities also found a silencer, fake IDs and writings that appeared to be critical of the health insurance industry, according to the law enforcement official.

The NYPD is sending detectives to Pennsylvania to question the person taken into custody.

His name only sounds like a character in Goodfellas:

Mangione was valedictorian of the Class of 2016 at the Gilman School, and he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. His family owns Turf Valley and Hayfields Country Club, NBC News confirmed.

This one goes out to all the social media detectives who solemnly swore he had to be a professional assassin, who was using a “Welrod” (a purpose-built silenced assassins firearm built for the CIA or MI5 or some such), and that he was just too L3Et to ever get caught.

If he’s the suspect, natch.

While we don’t know a lot more than that at the moment, I’m going to make a few fearless preditions:

• Like most radicals, he’s a little upper middle class prick who got radicalized at school.
• He’ll be lionized as a folk hero on the left.

Daniel Penny acquitted on the last of his charges:

Penny was cleared of criminally negligent homicide in Neely’s death. A more serious manslaughter charge was dismissed earlier in deliberations because the jury deadlocked on that count.

I suspect there’s a critical mass of New Yorkers of all races who’ve had enough of the crime wave engulfing the city – much as they seemed to be during the Bernhard Goetz episode, 40 years ago, the last time NYC was mired in Democrat-coddled criminality

Of course, this time not everyone agrees who the good guys and bad guys are:

Barack Obama’s legacy is a gift that will keep on giving for a generation, at best.

Paul Krugman is leaving the NYTimes. 

Podhoretz sums up my thoughts on the matter.

I can’t speak for Krugman’s career as an economist – I wish King Banaian was still blogging, and hopefully he’ll talk about this in his show one of these days. 

As for me? Fact-checking Krugman – the guy who said the Internet was a passing fad – has been a fairy steady pastime on this blog for a long, long time.

So while his retirement leaves me with one less source of material, [1], it is enough for today to rejoice in the fact that for a moment, America will be incrementally less dumb by omission.

[1] Although the Cano Corollary to Berg’s 21st Law warns us to not celebrate too hard: ” “blue” never gets “lighter” or less “progressive”.  There is only one electoral direction – more “progressive”. While written about elections, the New York Times would seem to be germane.

Social media has helped create a generation of amoral monsters:

And a special note to Millennials and Zs who yap about the crimes of “Boomers”: You are well on your way to being worse, and more hated, than they ever were.

“But Mitch”, you may ask, ” how can you tell the writer is a Millie or Zoomer?”

Please. It’s a Millie or Zoomer.

Nathan Seabrook talked about the Brian Thompson murder, and security in general. Here’s his company.

And here’s today’s song list:

They warned us that if we voted Republican, extremists would roam the streets murdering their enemies, as their fellow extremist droogs rejoiced.

And they were right.

The meme has traveled about that UHG denies claims at double the national average. That may be true, and that may be utterly without context, and neither I nor the gerbils posting the memes know one way or the other.

Of course, most of the people rejoicing (not exaggerating) Thompson’s murder do it by way of saying it’s high time we adopt “single payer” government healthcare.

Of course, if they think a UHG denial causes problems, wait’ll they get a load of the “cost cutting” measures single-payer systems are moving into.

The big that confuses me so much about this story – the DFL jamming down a $10K appropriation to help one of their colleagues settle an issue with her “day job” outside politics – isn’t that the DFL is basically pickpocketing taxpayers to help one of their own with a private matter. (Emphasis added):

This all started when Rep. Bianca Virnig of Eagan was elected to the House as a Democrat in a special election and sworn in last January serving a district in the Eagan-Mendota Heights area. Her new position as a state lawmaker created a conflict with her employer, Brightworks, a non-profit established by the Minnesota Legislature in 1976 to provide services to public schools and school districts, according to its website.

“When she returned to her employment her employer dramatically cut back her hours and her pay based on her new job she held as a part-time state legislator,” Rep. Jamie Long, DFL Majority Leader, said at a House Rules Committee meeting Tuesday. “Since this was related to her work as a Minnesota representative we are proposing we pay for those legal costs.”

No, after years of DFL corruption eating up hundreds of millions of dollars, seeing something in five digits almost feels like watching “The Andy Griffith Show”.

The part that fairy astounds me is that, after getting elected to the legislature, either Rep. Virnig or “Brightworks” had a problem with the arrangement.

The DFL set up the non-profit/industrial complex specifically to serve as a farm team and lobbyist ranch for their regime.  A potential politician starts working with one of the state’s maze of public unions, pseudo-parties or poiltical/social non-profits, spends a few years making contacts and learning who buried the political bodies, and then run for office, already fully groomed as a DFL candidate – who goes on to do their mentor group’s bidding, and eventually to lobby for them and/or groups like them when and if they leave office

So the corruption doesn’t confuse me. The fact that either Virnig or Brightworks had a problem with each other does.

I’ve been doing this blog for a long time – 23 years in February. 

It’s still a part of my day every morning – I’m usually up doing some kind of writing or another,  before 6AM every weekday.  And it’s the bulk of my radio show prep.   And it’s also kind of a quick reference for the past 23 years of my various goings-on.  

That makes me sound like a creature of habit.   I guess it  is a habit of mine – the gnawing urge to get something down, profound or pathetic, wakes up with me every day. 

But notwithstanding that, I’m a fundamentally restless person.   I’d like to keep doing what I do – only better. 

Now, this old WordPress site is getting a little long in the tooth.   The “template” on which it runs is almost 15 years old.  Things are breaking – and I have a hunch, given WordPress’s fundamentally chaotic nature (like I should talk) that upgrading would be…sporty. 

And I have some new ideas for content in mind – blog writing, yes, but there’s at least one other book project, maybe two, in mind (not to mention an update and print edition of Trulbert).    And I have some other content ideas rattling around in my head that could finally come to fruition over the winter.  

And I’m starting to think a different platform might be useful – one with a little more flexibility, and the ability to make a little money off these ventures baked in. 

Not that I’m going to charge for the blog – what’d be the point?  But some of the other ideas might have the opportunity to put a little money in the pot. 

I don’t qualify for OnlyFans, and I’d rather gargle razor blades than use Medium. 

So I’m pondering moving the blog to Substack. 

I’m leery of the idea, of course – I remember all the bloggers who moved to Facebook and Twitter, and regretted it shortly.   I’d keep shotinthedark.info for…something.  Special projects?

But Substack is arguably a better, better-connected platform for both exposure and money, even if I don’t make the blog pay-per-view.  Which I won’t. 

It’s winter.  A time for huge projects, after all!

Not sure its directly related to the Trump election – but if there is a cultural realignment going on below our society’s electoral surface, this new ad from Apple is a sign of it.

For the past couple of decades, the only acceptable way to present fathers – of any race, of late – is as incompetent boobs who are married to improbably gorgeous and capable women.

And what this said about America is…not good.  Advertisers get paid to read the zeitgeist correctly.  And for most of this past several decades, that zeitgeist, as apparent to advertisers of products directed at women, was “Men are to social and personal life what waxy yellow buildup is to your kitchen floor”.  The notable differences were in products aimed at men – mostly beer and home improvement stores, which treated men as, well, potential customers.

A few years ago, I ran a home-made study of TV ads, measuring the percentage of ad characters by their role in the ad:

• Protagonists/customers/”everyperson” characters
• Buffoons/Comic Relief
• Antagonists
• “Experts”

Not sure I even need to tell you what the gender and ethnic breakdown was. 

The problems is, of course, that these are the messages by which our society socializes children.   Is it any wonder GenZ boys are checking out of social engagement?

And that they voted disproportionally for Trump?

Hoping this is a sign that the ad industry is seeing that cultural swing too.

In 2022, I predicted $17.6B “surplus” would disappear under DFL rule.   

I’m not wrong on the inevitable end result. Just the timing:

Revenue dropping. Spending ballooning. And the productive class “going Galt” and moving to Texas, Florda or Tennessee.

Things didn’t get quite as bad quite as fast as I thought – but it’s really just teasing us.

PS: Whoah. I spoke too soon – but boy, was I correct:

So I’d figured $2-3 Billion. $5B plus?

Oh, the hits do not quit:

Great job, #MNDFL

As I noted the other day when an NPR reporter tried to go all “Boss Lady” on President-elect Trump, the President had a snappy comeback:

According to Victor Davis Hanson, Mexican president Sheinbaum walked the idea of compromise back a notch:

But given long-standing, de facto Mexican policy to rely on and profit from an open U.S. border, it was not long afterwards that Sheinbaum claimed she had not been so accommodating.

Or, as she now put it of the Trump conversation, “I give you the certainty that we would never—and we would be incapable of it—propose that we would close the border.” And of course, she is right: Mexico never would wish for a secure U.S. border, although it is wrong that she is incapable of guaranteeing one should she choose to do so.

What, then, is going on?

Hanson goes on to explain what, indeed, is going on. Turns out the open border is in fact a key element of Mexican foreign and domestic policy:

While in office, former President Obrador often said strange things. Two of the most pugnacious were his high-five boast that some 40 million of his own citizens had fled Mexico to cross the border: “Just imagine. There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States—40 million who were born here in Mexico, who are the children of people who were born in Mexico.” (Obrador never explained why his own citizens would willingly flee their own country to a nation habitually caricatured in the Mexican press as racist and exploitive.)

Obrador also periodically delighted in interfering in US elections by urging Mexican expatriates in the U.S. to vote against all Republicans, presumably because they seemed at times to threaten to kill the Mexican golden goose of illegal immigration.

Indeed, in 2023, Obrador urged American Hispanics to never vote for Ron DeSantis’s presidential primary campaign—an irony given Mexico’s chronic complaint of Yanqui interference in Latin American politics.

Obrador believed, as many presidents before him no doubt concurred, that the 40 million expatriates and Mexican-American children, if they were distant from Mexico long enough, would romanticize the country, and so, like most immigrants, become a powerful lobbying force on Mexico’s behalf.

…

And it is also increasingly likely that Mexican-Americans will be more prone to vote for border security than open borders—again further proof that their self-interest as patriotic Americans trumps Mexico’s cynical attempts to use them as political pawns. If those trends continue, the American Left and the Mexican government may well lobby for a secure border, in fear they are only augmenting a growing MAGA constituency.

But it’s possible this past year has seen not just a sea change among Anglo voters, but among those millions of migrants:

But, given the huge numbers of human trafficking, the chaos, the drugs, the violence, and the financial costs of supporting millions, an open border is increasingly seen by Americans as not to their advantage—as we saw in the recent Trump victory. That reality, not the rhetoric of Mexican presidents, will govern all future negotiations—a truth that President Sheinbaum should digest before she sounds off about a border that she knows her country has done so much to deliberately destroy—and to America’s detriment.

If Trump and the GOP don’t follow through on this momentum, they all deserve to get washed out of office.