A guy who started a snitch line, enacted a thoughtcrime database, sicced the Attorney General on businesses that tried to survive his draconian and capricious Covid regulations and turned radical protesters into a fourth branch of government when he wanted social policy done…
…is lying to warn us about authoritarianism.
Call me old-fashioned, but I’d think a governor who’s built his entire career out of rigorously-contolled optics – lots of photos of eating fair food and holding animals and social media strawmen, no uncontrolled press conferences or public debates – would know better than to do…
…that.
Last week, I ruffled some of the usual feathers by posting a link to this video by Ryan McBeth.
McBeth is a former anti-tank grunt who now does open-source intelligence and systems work. His Youtube and Substack channels are interesting; he doesn’t get everything right (he is still claiming Mossad figured out how to remotely blow up lithium batteries, although his reasoning for getting to that conclusion isn’t wrong), and he certainly runs in official-ish circles, but he shows his math.
I pointed this out, not to “run cover” for officialdom (wtf?) but out of awareness that all “sides” of every issue on social media are farming engagements to draw clicks, eyeballs, and of course the mother of all motivations, “monetization”.
The real lesson? Waiting for government to help you out after an emergency is a sucker bet. Government may mean well but be incompetent; it may do its best but be overstretched; it might be actively undercutting you; it might be all three and then some. But one way or another, example after example in the real world shows us you, the regular schnook, are likely to have to see to your own well-being after a disaster.
Seeing to that well-being is either a waste of time, or absolutely vital – and you won’t know which until it’s too late.
This note comes from a friend of a friend:
“I’m in Asheville, NC right now and we were devastated by the hurricane. Day 5 of no power, water, internet, or even cell service. We are cut off from the world. Here’s what has mattered so far and what hasn’t in my particular situation:
Life saver #1 = Starlink internet. All our phones say SOS. Can’t text for help. Don’t know what’s going on. I plugged in my satellite internet and have been helping the whole neighborhood call loved ones. Everyone is offering me anything from their supplies because it’s so valuable.
Life saver #2 = Solar panels and 3000w battery pack. I can run satellite internet, electric kettle to purify water, charge headlamps, electronics, instant pot for cooking, ice maker for the cooler, everything I need. I’ll won’t run out of the sun like I would propane or gas if this extends a lot longer.
Life saver #3 = Gas cans and extra gas. These are sold out everywhere and are harder to get than gas itself. When power goes out so do gas station pumps. When you have portable gas you can run a generator, evacuate, drive to where the supplies are, check on family members, etc. People are stranded and sleeping at gas stations for days in their car waiting for power to come back on so they can get home.
Life saver #4 = Knowledge on how to survive without a huge stash. Some preppers spend too much on stocking up and not enough on education. None of us knew the hurricane was going to be this bad. Some people lost their entire house including supplies. Those who know multiple ways to collect water, purify it, start a fire, find food, are the ones still alive that haven’t been rescued yet. I could go for another month if I had to with nothing but my backpack and tools.
Life saver #5 = Hand sanitizer. Sanitation is rough here and the hospitals are out of power, food, and water. People are starting to smell and after you touch something you do not want to get sick and go to the hospital because it’s bad there too. The water you do find may not be safe for hand washing without purification. I wash my hands with soap and water and then do hand sanitizer after to stay healthy.
Other things I’ve relied on:
Cash. No power means no debit cards can be used
Disposable cutlery and plates
A 4×4 truck that can drive where others can’t or help tow people to safety
Solar/battery radio
Dogs for company and to alert if someone is outside
Hasn’t mattered as much as I thought:
#1 = Guns! I haven’t even thought about needing my gun and realized I put too much on this. Strangers have come together in our area and are taking care of each other like you wouldn’t believe. Each person has a surplus of something and is missing something else. We all share while still respecting boundaries and only sharing what we choose. Again, this can depend on the area but here if you are acting paranoid/standoffish of others and open carrying a gun, the nice innocent people are going to avoid you and you will be isolated without community or resources. I’m still glad to have a gun but I wish I spent more time on other skills too instead of putting so much emphasis on shooting. (And to anyone who says, “it only takes one time and you will be glad for your aim”, you’re missing the point I’m trying to make here.)
#2 = Food. This is easy to find for me but it may be due to the part of the country I’m in. I can also fish, forage, and don’t cook much because I don’t want to waste water on dishes. I had shelf stable food prepped and lll probably end up only using 25% of it in a month. As people’s freezers start to thaw we’ve had big cookouts so it doesn’t go to waste and I’ve been full most nights.
Again, this list could be based on location, type of natural disaster, weather, etc But it’s interesting to me because I’m actually living it instead of preparing and wanted to share.”
As the correspondent notes in the last graf, it “could” be based on location. And it most certainly is based on the relative health of the social fabric in the area.
“Grassroots”: When a candidate who has never earned a primary vote, and only run one seriously contested election in her life, gets installed by the troika of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama after defenestrating the current President for being unfit to run a campaign (although apparently not to be President of the United States).
Example:
Hope this resolves any confusion.
How It Started
This, of course, is the campaign Tim Walz is used to running: carefully curated photos of him holding animals, being fed corn dogs by Peggy Flanagan, and occasionally spouting risible strawmen via social media.
An “Instagram” Governor.
The bit above may be the perfect metaphor for Tim Walz, 2004-2023.
How It’s Going
Klink, while pheasant hunting with “influencers” over the weekend:
Now, I’ll give him half a pass on this: automatic shotguns are a pain in the ass. I hate ’em. And they are nothing like handling an M16/M4, the “weapons of war” Walz carried in the Guard and on the war-ravaged (checks notes) airfields of Italy.
But only half a pass.
Because when you’ve curated your entire public image as being a “progressive” who also fixes gutters and eats Fair Food and dresses like Elmer Fudd and shoots things for fun, one might think you’d take a little care – maybe check the piece over before the cameras show up – and maybe get it right when doing…
…y’know…
…your big instagram op.
Paul Donohue is running for MN House in 64B, against Dave Pinto.
Brad Olson is running for the House in 38A.
And here’s today’s music list!
“White Dudes for Harris” – the collection of online man-buns, barristos and Soho cliches from earlier in the summer – didn’t do it.
Picking Tim Walz – a thinly-closeted authoritarian with penchant for dressing up in Elmer Fudd costumes and eating Pronto Pups on camera – didn’t do it.
But this? This ad should solve Kamala Harris’s woes with men:
It’s like someone thinks the modern advertising and entertainment industries’ collective caricatures of “men” that you see in every ad or TV show that doesn’t involve an “A”-lister – either neutered, incompetent, buffoonish clichés or “men” who are “Masculine” in the same way trans men are “really women”.
This should really do it this time!
More on Harris/Walz’s male problems here.
Berg’s Seventh Law has been getting quite a workout over the past nine years:
When a progressive issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.
When leftists warn of waves of “right wing violence”, you can bet that either:
John HInderaker has an example ripped from the headlines:
Here is another instance: a death threat against Judge Aileen Cannon, the Florida federal judge who correctly dismissed the classified documents case against President Trump. She has been the object of a campaign of vilification by Democrats:
Democrats and their media allies have been lambasting Cannon, a Trump appointee, since she was assigned to preside over the Biden-Harris Justice Department’s prosecution of Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, and they have been apoplectic since July, when Cannon dismissed the indictment.
This past Thursday, Eric James Rennert was arrested based on a six-count indictment charging him with threatening to assault, kidnap, and murder a federal judge and that judge’s family in Florida’s St. Lucie County. The indictment does not name the judge. Nevertheless, as the New York Post reports, Cannon is the only judge who sits in the Fort Pierce courthouse in St. Lucie County.
At the link, Andy McCarthy details the Democrats’ shameful smear campaign against Judge Cannon, which has culminated in this assassination threat.
If Trump wins – what are you predictions?
Shot: Democrats act like there’s an exception in the First Amendment for “misinformation”, a term so broad literally nobody can define it (emphasis added):
Did someone send out a memo? Or has the shock of encountering the wild variety of views visible on Elon Musk’s X just been too much for grandees used to moving in circles where the acceptable boundaries of disagreement are narrowly drawn? When John Kerry recently spoke of “dislike of and anguish over social media,” he was presumably referring to how he and like-minded others (among them, it turned out, another failed presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton) reacted as they watched the wrong sort of ideas openly discussed on major online platforms.
For his part, Kerry was talking about climate “misinformation,” a word that, in the hands of those who manipulate its meaning, can encompass not only a misstatement of fact but also, all too frequently, nothing more than the expression of a heterodox point of view. Such fine distinctions, we suspect, are of little interest to Kerry. Instead, he bemoaned the way that people no longer turn to “the referees we used to have” to determine what’s true, but — the horror — “self-select where they go for their news, for their information.”
Chaser: The “Referees” we once had to tune into for information are, not misinforming, but actively disinforming us:
After Rathergate, and seeing Lesley Stahl humiliated while covering for Hunter Biden in 2020, you’d think CBS might learn, mightn’t you?
Of course not.
Chalk it up to a self-referential information feedback loop, but when Democrats started yapping about “misinformation”, I’d have bet a roll of quarters something like this was in the offing.
From a Trump rally last night
The decline of the American military is a serious problem.
Crude but merciless satire may not be the solution. But hopefully it helps lead us there.
University of Kansas prof says that men who don’t vote for Harris/Klink should be…
Well, it’s all right here. Go for it.
Not that this is news, necessarily.
The University issued one of those “Oaaaaakaaaay, we’ll look into it, because hypothetically that’s not the kind of thing we approve of here, if it happened…” statements that says between the lines “our PR department is working overtime on this one…”
Can Kamala Harris ride “Vibes” and “Rizz” all the way to the White House?
Pessimistic as I am about the collective intelligence of half our population, I’m not always optimistic.
But Jim Geraghty has his doubts:
The Harris campaign’s entire theory of the case is wrong. Reminding people about what they couldn’t stand about Trump and emphasizing “joy” and “vibes” is not sufficient to close the deal with an electorate. It completely misreads the mood of the voters, who have been coping with runaway inflation and a high cost of living for most of the past four years, who have a growing sense that no one is in charge at the border, who worry about a genuine post-Covid rise in crime, and who see an international scene beset by invasions, terrorism, and massacres, all presided over by a doddering old man who was hidden from the public by a staff that took Edith Wilson as a role model.
This past weekend, Peggy Noonan asked the question the Harris brain trust should have asked: Is this the right moment in American life to proclaim a new politics of “joy”? “Do you want to feel joyful?” is the wrong question; almost all of us would prefer to be happier. The question is: Do you look around at the state of the United States and the world today — and the performance of this administration for the past four years — and feel like joy is the appropriate response?
My semi-related theory: Democrats have been using Minnesota as a testbed for their approach in campaigning; running for high office on pure social media happy-vibing and platitudes, abetted by a mostly-in-the-tank media, worked well for Walz and Flanagan (and Dayton before them).
Why wouldn’t it work for Harris?
The answer – the fact that a few reporters, and “reporters”, didn’t get the message: Harris could screw up scrambled eggs:
(As noted on yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, let’s just take a moment to savor the irony that Sunny Hostin asked Harris the question that did so much damage.)
Much more in the next couple of weeks.
I mean, Esme Murphy doesn’t tongue-bathe Democrats like Stephen Colbert does.
And yet Kamala Harris botches even that:
If you’re one of the world’s dictators, it’d be negligent of you not to the trying to influence the election in Harris’s favor.
After well over a week, the Administration is putting our money where it’s mouth is as re Hurricane Helene.
Just kidding:
It’s sending money to get Hezb’allah back on its feet.
During the last couple of legislative sessions, the DFL wrote a whole bunch of moral checks.
Since we’ve got an election coming up, how about we see how many of them bounced?
Abortion
Unrestricted abortion is one promise the DFL trifected promised and delivered on.
Perhaps very very overdelivered.
The DFL brought a certain brusque brutality to the issue:
And delivered on it with teutonic precision, leaving no potential abortee behind:
And have brought a certain totalitarian panache to trying to erase all dissent
Green Energy
Was your powrer cheaper?
Why, no. It is not.
Social Security Taxes
Remember when the DFL ran on eliminating taxes on Social Security?
They are certainly hoping you don’t:
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – For the second time this month, Minnesota Senate Democrats voted against eliminating the taxation of Social Security benefits – despite a massive projected budget surplus of $17.6 billion. Five of those Democrats have also already broken promises to end the taxation of social security benefits and did so again today; Sens. Hauschild, Gustafson, Kupec, Putnam and Seeberger all voted to maintain the tax again after doing so earlier this month. The Republican Party of Minnesota issued the statement below in response:
“This latest vote shows that Democrats in St. Paul are only interested in one thing – partisan politics. Instead of voting to provide much-needed tax relief to seniors by ending the tax on Social Security benefits, the Democrats voted to kill this bill for the second time this month. Meanwhile, Democrats in the legislature along with Gov. Tim Walz continue to push tax increases and one-time political gimmicks. With a budget surplus of more than $17 billion, Minnesota taxpayers deserve more than petty partisan games. Democrats need to stop the petty politics and work with Republicans to pass real, permanent tax relief for Minnesota families and businesses.” – Republican Party of Minnesota Chairman David Hann
“Fully Funding Education”
The term was intentionally misleading – when you finally got a DFLer to admit what this little word salad starter meant, it boiled down to rolling back a Pawlenty-era accounting shift.
Forget for a moment the flurry of teacher strikes and headlines about districts running out of money – as the DFL wants you to forget them – because it was never intended as anything but a campaign slogan to gull the gullible.
The results are self-explanatory…:
…provided you can read and do math which, fortunately for the MNDFL, more and more Minesotans can’t.
“Reducing Poverty 30%”
That was a promise they made before the 2023 session – and abruptly stopped once they started legislating.
Because while the stats aren’t in for this last few years yet…:
…the leading indicators just aren’t that good.
Just want to keep that memory hole exhumed for election time.
As a rule, I treat the axiom “government is the things we do together, stupidly” like a well-tested law of physics. Politics – which is what drives government – is the worst possible way to allocate limited resources of any kind.
And FEMA’s record is…checkered.
But some of the stories coming from the Carolinas, Georgia and Virginia seem…
…stretchy?
Here’s a POV.
As grandma used to day, “trusting anyone is always a sucker bet, especially online”. Since Grandma died 15 years before anyone but Algore had the internet, she was pretty savvy.
Submitted without comment, here’s Governor Walz’s appearance last Sunday on Fox.
Did I say “submitted without comment?” You know me better than that.
He does not come off well.
I’d like to make sure as many Minnesotans as possible see this – not only for the Presidential tilt, but as people assess the DFL’s performance this past six years.
It’s been a year since the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 Israelis – the worst pogrom since World War 2.
It’s a year that’s made me even more ashamed of America’s foreign policy than the previous 2.5 years of POTATUS and Harris had managed to do.
But it tracks with the same I feel when I look at what the American left has done:
The number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. has surged over 200 percent this past year, as Israel’s war against Hamas sparked an outpouring of Jewish hatred on college campuses and elsewhere.
From October 7, 2023, to September 24, 2024, the U.S. saw more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents, an increase of over 200 percent from the same period a year before, which saw 3,325 incidents, according to preliminary data released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a left-wing antisemitism watchdog…
…On college campuses, roughly 1,200 antisemitic incidents took place, a 500 percent increase from the year before, when the ADL had recorded about 200 of them. Earlier this year, anti-Israel demonstrations and tent encampments formed on college campuses nationwide, especially after Columbia University’s anti-Israel encampment received national attention and required the NYPD to break it up.
Antisemitic activity and outright advocacy for the extermination of Israel were common around the encampment sites. A prominent example was the Jew-free zones at the University of California, Los Angeles. A judge ruled in August that UCLA must stop aiding and abetting the antisemitic campus activists who attempted to prevent Jews from passing by certain parts of campus unless they disavowed Israel. UCLA initially decided to fight the ruling but quickly pulled its appeal.
Outside of college campuses, rallies across American cities often featured terrorist banners and chants calling for the destruction of Israel. The ADL found that more than 3,000 antisemitic incidents occurred at anti-Israel demonstrations, where protesters chanted in support of Hamas and other terrorist groups.
The potential of a Harris/Walz administration that continues passive-aggressively coddling Iranian aggression seem to be prompting the Israelis to swing for the proverbial fences, to try to resolve the issue before Harris screws it all up, if worse comes to worst.
Which is a good thing, since the Democrats and Media (PTR) won’t say it.
Shot: Harris was on board with #MeToo:
Chaser: until she wasn‘t:
Vice President Kamala Harris‘s husband assaulted his ex-girlfriend, three friends have told Dailymail.com.
The Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, 59, allegedly struck the woman in the face so hard she spun around, while waiting in a valet line late at night after a May 2012 Cannes Film Festival event in France.
One of her friends told DailyMail.com that the woman called him immediately after the incident, sobbing in her cab, and described the alleged assault.
Thing is, I’m all about people being innocent until proven guilty.
But given that Emhoff – a guy who knocked up his nanny during his first marriage, not to mention the new allegations – is being actively promoted as the model for modern masculinity – it
But given that Emhoff – a guy who has admitted to knocking up his nanny during his first marriage, to say nothing of these allegations – is being actively promoted as the very model of modern masculinity (by institutions that have little institutional knowledge of the concept), it’s certainly worth validating.
Soon.
David Strom has a results of VP debate.
In short, I have revised my opinion about the debate. Not about what happened–I thought Vance was clearly better than Walz, but that it wouldn’t matter. Now I think it very well might, not because Vance won the debate but rather the manner in which Walz lost it.
Walz lost it by looking deranged at times and like a liar. The visuals mattered and Walz’s dancing around on his personal lies mattered even more.
So I was wrong…I think. The aftermath of the debate has the potential to be devastating to Tim Walz.
The ghosts of Richard Stockdale and Richard Nixon are calling back from the great beyond thanking Walz for making them no longer the easiest “presidential debate flop sweat” joke.
Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:
President Biden blamed Hurricane Helene on climate change and said anybody who disagreed must be brain dead.
Formerly, hurricane were “acts of God” which Were Not covered under ordinary insurance, special coverage was required, whereas damage resulting from actions of other people Were covered.
So . . . does this mean all our insurance premiums are going up, because hurricanes are now torts?
Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park
Uh…lawyers?
We’ve recently seen evidence of the Israeli intelligence service’s (“Mossad”) skill in penetrating their enemies’ operations; from spectacular, “James Bond”-style coups like Operation Grim Beeper to, incredibly, apparently penetrating the heart of Iran’s anti-Israel intelligence efforts up to senior leadership levels.
Mossad has developed, over almost 80 years of fighting for Israel’s survival, an almost superhuman reputation.
As with much of Mossad’s history, it’s an awe-inspiring display of what intelligence people call “fieldcraft – the nuts and bolts of running intelligence and clandestine unconventional warfare operations.
But I’m going to suggest there’s a group whose fieldcraft makes Mossad look about as subtle as a P Diddy houseparty.
And they are (we are told) operating among us even as we speak.
The Phantom Menace: We are told in one breath that American “white supremacists” are a mass of pasty, addled losers with sub-90 IQs, living in their parents basements, who live in their parents basements, stock shelves at Dollar General and have permanent Cheeto-dust stains on their fingers and the t-shirts that stretch to try to cover their obesity-stretched frames.
Indeed, some of the times they’ve come out into the open, they’ve seemed to fit that stereotype:
And yet since then, the record has been a little more muddled.
Much of the Minnesota DFL establishment leaped to trying to blame “white supremacists” for the Minneapolis riots of 2020.
And while this was obviously true, a few chilling facts remain:
So apparently the mouth-breathing incel defectives destroyed two neighbhorhoods – and then disappeared without leaving so much as a footprint.
Which brings us to today.
WIthout A Trace: We are the most videotaped society in history. People record the the most mundane of life’s activities. And if there’s something exciting – a car crash, a fight, someone acting out in some way – it seems almost inevitable that someone will break out their phone and start recording .
So when a series of WNBA stars started complaining about the wave of racism accompanying the surge of people actually becoming interested in the league – perhaps the most “niche” of all sports…:
“The WNBA is a competitive league with some of the most elite athletes in the world,” read the statement. “While we welcome a growing fan base, the WNBA will not tolerate racist, derogatory, or threatening comments made about players, teams and anyone affiliated with the league. League security is actively monitoring threat-related activity and will work directly with teams and arenas to take appropriate measures, to include involving law enforcement as necessary.”
and describing what they’ve encountered…:
“We’ve seen a lot of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia throughout the course of our country,” [Connectict Suns coach Stephanie] White said. “Sport is no exception, and it’s unacceptable. The thing that frustrates me the most is that we — I say we because I work in television as well — what we in the media have to do a better job of (is) not allowing trolls and social media to become the story. I feel like we have allowed trolls in social media to frame the narrative of what the story is. We have to do a better job. I applaud our team for maintaining their professionalism.”
Now, I have little doubt that there’s bad behavior in the hellscape of online and social media fandom. Social media doesn’t just foster bad behavior, it rewards it.
But some of the WNBA players say they’re encounting open racist behavior, at games, in public, in the open.
And yet in a society, and sport, where it’s hard to go to a concession stand without someone doing a TikTok, with stands full of people for whom women’s hoops is as much an ideological commitment as a sport, there doesn’t appear to be any video evidence of this kind of behavior. And we know how important that is, legally speaking.
So – are White Supremacists a bunch of doughy retrograde losers? Or operatives who do their work and dissappear into the ether without leaving a trace?
Or both?
I’ve been meaning to come back to this. A Harris/Klink op brought it up with a high hanging curveball:
Being corralled into a staged propaganda exercise?
I’ve never been a big Tim Walz fan. Quite the opposite.
But is anyone else getting some…1930s vibes?
Or perhaps more appropriately to Walz’s time in Omahongkong:
I can’t be the only one that finds that photo a little #weird in and of itself, in addition to the historical allusions (especially when you add in Walz’s “One Minnesota” slogan), can I?
People can vote for whoever they want to. It’s still a fairly free country.
But I have a fair number of people in my social circle – co-workers, high school classmates, former teachers and professors – who are declaiming that they’re voting for Harris and Walz “to save democracy”.
And I read that and try to grasp how much one must ignore – willfully or not – to believe that Harris and Walz support the American republican (small-r) system of popular, federalist government:
Against that:
What am I missing, here?
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