POTATUS – or “Doctor” Jill, or the social media intern – spoke last week:

Question: do any of them know how this nation started?

Or why?

In the immediate aftermath of declaring that realizing the non-charges against Trooper Londregan were “anti-queer” (???), Henco Attorney Mary Moriarty tells us that all that talk about crime in her jurisdiction is fearmongery:

During a May 28 event, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty explained she believes there’s an effort to cause the public to fear crime.

“Moderate Democrats have done a lot of work in making people afraid of downtown Minneapolis,” she said. “There is a concerted effort to make people afraid of crime.”

The conversation took place between Moriarty and Dr. T. Anansi Wilson, a Mitchell Hamline School of Law professor. The discussion centered around being “good trouble” and activism.

Quick – which “protected class” suffers least from society”s alleged intesectionalities – a lesbian county attorney or a black tenured law professor?

“Crime is down”

VIolent crime? In Minneapolis? Not as of yesterday, it isn’t:

This is the sort of thing they talk about inside the echo chamber:

She also discussed her advice for current law students, which was to ask more questions. “You talk about the rule of law, it’s like, what is that? I mean, I kind of wonder how anybody talks about the rule of law now. Wasn’t Roe v. Wade rule of law? I mean, what happened to that?” Moriarty said.

To the modern ultra left,

• “innocent until proven guilty” is “anti-queer”
• “democracy” is “getting what we want”
• “rule of law” is “making sure we get what we want”.

The only upside? If today’s generation of Henco voters actually do replace Moriarty, it’ll be with someone worse.

Perhaps you heard – conservatives won big in EU elections last weekend.

You might have missed it, because the news only referred to “the far right” – as if Francisco Franco were back from the dead.

Indeed, it’s yet another term that today’s left have rendered meaningless:

Let not pretend this is accidental. Big Left has been working for decades to gain control of the language and its perception. The systematic turning of all “right wing’ thought into some neo-fascist aberration shifted into high gear in 2009, when Obama’s Homeland Security czaritsa Janet Napolitano told the nation’s law enforcement “don’t mind all those leftist terrorists, watch out for all that right wing terror which is going to come out of nowhere someday, pinky swear!”.

Just watch – in a month, NPR and the NYTimes will furrow their brows and wonder why society has had a “Big Sort”…

The good news: these sorts of results usually bode well for elections in America, at least for the upcoming cycle.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Classic literature instructs us:

*** 

Said the Mock Turtle with a sigh, ‘I only took the regular course.’

‘What was that?’ inquired Alice.

‘Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,’ the Mock Turtle replied; ‘and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.’

‘I never heard of “Uglification,”‘ Alice ventured to say. ‘What is it?’

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. ‘What! Never heard of uglifying!’ it exclaimed. ‘You know what to beautify is, I suppose?’

‘Yes,’ said Alice doubtfully: ‘it means—to—make—anything—prettier.’

‘Well, then,’ the Gryphon went on, ‘if you don’t know what to uglify is, you ARE a simpleton.’

Minnesota Democrats know what it means and they are hard at it

I don’t like it.

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

The problem with the flag – and to a lesser extent the license plate – is that they were designed by graphic designers, judged by people whose background was graphic design (filtered through politics), by criteria that make sense only in graphic design terms.

And while graphic design is one of many tools used to get ideas across to people, when applied for its own sake it’s an intensely myopic discipline. It certainly doesn’t help that so much of my own field has been dragged down by visual designers masquerading as problem-solvers.

Take all that and filter it through politics, and you get the same effect as when you filter science through politics; bad design and/or politics.

The Minnesota DFL destroys everything it touches.

The Strib’s editorial cartoonist accidentally took a chunk out of DFL policy.

And that could not be tolerated:

That’s right – Grove apologizes to the DFL for his paper telling the truth.

Heads will no doubt roll.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is waiting at a local bar for a small debate society. He’s reading the menu, and doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE has entered the bar, carrying a protest sign reading “Debate Is White Supremacy”. BERG doesn’t notice LIBRELLE – but LIBRELLE notices him.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Ah, sssshhhhiiut the front door, it’s Ave…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. The verdict against Hunter Biden shows that we do not have a two-tiered justice system! Nobody is above the law!

BERG: Sure.

LIBRELLE: Hah. I thought you’d say…(stops) Er, what?

BERG: If you ignore the fact that the Department of Justice made a concerted effort to slow-walk the tax evasion and corruption allegations so that the statutes of limitations expired, especially on the allegations that could have led investigators to “the Big Guy”? Yeah. Perfectly just.

LIBRELLE: (Uneasily) Er…right. Right?

BERG: As far as you know, yes.

LIBRELLE: Whew. I thought so. (Walks away, waving sign and trying to disrupt the debate)

And SCENE

Minnesota’s gross domestic product growth – which has long run far ahead of national averages – isn’t anymore:

I’ve been observing this for a while now – when I decided to move to Minnesota, the state was simultaneously a mecca of opportunity in the Midwest, a place that Fodor Travel Guides called “The Athens of the 20th Century” in a fit of not-excessive hyperbole – that was nonetheless modestly affordable for a 22 year old guy with a BA in English, as opposed to an MBA or a software engineering degree.

And that is just not true anymore.

And it might seem rote and predictable to follow that with “and it’s the DFL’s fault”.

But, honestly, who else has been driving the ship for the past 16 years?

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

I suggest a contest for readers to give new slogans to the Republican party

Trump or Biden, handcuffs or Depends. You decide.

Trump or Biden, mean tweets or elder abuse. You decide.

Want to kill your baby?  Vote Democrat.

Democrat dilemma, taxes or groceries?

 Have you been discriminated against? You may be entitled to compensation.  Unless you’re White. Then you’re just a hater. Vote Democrat. 

Cast your votes in the comments

This needs to be said.

Dennis Prager says “everything the left touches, it destroys”. The language is one of those things, and the left’s been actively working on it for decades.

The left has made so many words meaningless:

• (Toxic) masculinity
• Fascism
• Treason
• Racism (and its meaningless analogue, “anti-racism”.
• White Supremacy

And, in this campaign, “Democracy” – which has come to mean “everything the Democrat party wants”.

This was the “white nationalist rally” in Charlottesville seven years ago looked like:

Kind of a cantina band scene, a grab bag of endomorphic remainders from a dozen states, waving tiki torches and chanting.

Now, here’s another “white supremacist group” – the “Patriot Front” – marching in NYC.

Fit-ish looking.

Matching uniforms.

Marching in step.

And no reporter has ever tried to interview them.

No crowd of “counterprotesters” in sight – odd, considering every time ten “KKK” members gather outside a Speedway, they draw hundreds of opponents.

Huh.

What a difference wearing a mask makes.

As I noted a couple of years ago, I lost my mother to Alzheimers.

There was no treatment that seemed to do anything useful. She went from first really noticeable symptoms to gone in about six years.

Research on the disease has been heavily focused on exploring brain-protein anomalies noted in a paper led by a U of M researcher 18 years ago.

The paper has been retracted – perhaps the most-cited research paper ever to have been completely retracted:

Authors of a landmark Alzheimer’s disease research paper published in Nature in 2006 have agreed to retract the study in response to allegations of image manipulation. University of Minnesota (UMN) Twin Cities neuroscientist Karen Ashe, the paper’s senior author, acknowledged in a post on the journal discussion site PubPeer that the paper contains doctored images. The study has been cited nearly 2500 times, and would be the most cited paper ever to be retracted, according to Retraction Watch data.

“Although I had no knowledge of any image manipulations in the published paper until it was brought to my attention two years ago,” Ashe wrote on PubPeer, “it is clear that several of the figures in Lesné et al. (2006) have been manipulated … for which I as the senior and corresponding author take ultimate responsibility.”

David Strom at HotAir is covering this:

What makes this retraction so significant is that it has driven research into Alzheimer’s treatments for nearly two decades, and treatment approaches based on its conclusions have failed to yield results. 

If the hypothesis that amyloid protein buildups cause Alzheimer’s symptoms is wrong, Lesné is responsible for perhaps billions of wasted research dollars and two decades of scientists following a false lead. 

Scientific research makes mistakes; lobotomies and phrenology were “settled science” once upon a time, before they weren’t. The application of science goes down rabbit holes, sometimes with perfectly good intentions.

But fraud?

That’s what Science magazine is asking about:

Lesné, who did not reply to requests for comment, remains a UMN professor and receives National Institutes of Health funding. The university has been investigating his work since June 2022. A spokesperson says UMN recently told Nature it had reviewed two images in question, and “has closed this review with no findings of research misconduct pertaining to these figures.” The statement did not reference several other questioned figures in the same paper. UMN did not comment on whether it had reached conclusions about other Lesné papers with apparently doctored images.

It’ll be interesting to see if the Strib or MPRNews cover this, and how. Both outlets seem to feel a vested interest in helping the U uphold the Ski-U-Mah Curtain.

Coming in the wake of the celebrations of the 90th anniversary of D-Day, it’d be easy to get hypoerbolic about this.

But in today’s academic culture, making an announcement like this is a little like running off a Higgins boat with a BAR and running toward the muzzle flashes:

“But they’re a small conservative group! They’re not the big pediatrics group!”

Abolitionists were a tiny minority too.

And if you want to go on from there and say the national healthcare authorities of the UK, Norway, Germany and – this is kinda big – Sweden are “little conservative groups”, we need to talk.

I’m predicting the entire “transing kids” social contagion ends in a tsunami of medical malpractice cases.

I’m no expert, but this seems like an important step.

We’re assured that President Biden is the most on-top-of-it president in history.

This was him, getting ready to attend yesterday’s D-Day ceremony in Normandy:

Looks like he could’ve jumped out of a Higgins boat then and there!

And this was him later:

And right after that:

To be fair, I don’t think the President was the only one filling a pants. I have a hunch Taiwanese citizens, and maybe the leaders of Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Estonia, might need a change right about now.

Just to make sure we’re clear on this? Here’s a President not crapping his literal pants and figurative bed:

Mean tweets are not looking so bad.

I first wrote this piece in 2009.   I’ve updated it, bit by bit, on successive D-Day anniversaries.  I’m reprising it today:

It was sixty-seven years ago today that the Allies started taking Western Europe back from the Nazis.

The first, inevitable step was to get past the Westwall – perhaps the most immense set of fortifications ever built, with the intention of making the beaches from Denmark to the Spanish border a bloodbath for any troops trying to cross the beaches.

In places, it worked:

In some places, the troops had to overcome the near-impossible:

And yet by the end of the day, nine allied divisions were ashore, a toehold for a bridgehead that would eventually expand, ten months later, across Western Europe.

There were troops from the US, of course, on the two western beaches…

…and farther east, beaches with Brits…

…and Scots…

And in the middle, linking the two and meeting the worst resistance other than Omaha, the Canadians:

…along with troops-in-exile from elsewhere in occupied Europe; French commandos – some of whom had spent four years in exile, and who spent the next year belying the notion that the French were cowards…:

…and Norwegians, who’d been without a homeland for four years…

HNoMS Svenner – sunk by German gunfire off Sword Beach.

…and Poles, who’d been in exile for five years and would, in some cases, remain there for forty-five more:

The world may see nothing like it again.

So – thank a D-Day veteran.

Here’s President Reagan’s address to the survivors of the US 2nd Ranger Battalion, thirty years ago today…:

…who at this time seventy years ago, French Time, were still a day away from being relieved by the troops coming in from Omaha Beach.

The city of Minneapolis just released the dispatch report re the Officer Jamal Mitchell shooting.

A good guy with a car [1] apparently rammed shooter Mustafa Mohammed, who was apparently attacking a bystander on a scooter, possibly breaking his leg and immobilizing him:

According to the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) report, before police arrived on the scene, the driver of a Subaru came across the Suspect, Mustafa Mohamed, outside the apartment where he’s reportedly just shot two people. 
ossibly breaking his leg.

The witness says after he hit him, Mohamed reached into his waistband and pulled out what was possibly a gun, and started firing. Police arrived shortly thereafter.

I’d bet a shiny new quarter Moriarty charges the good samaritan driver, but I don’t think anyone’ll take the bet.

[1] whose name is clearly visible in Fox9’s video on the story.

To: The MN DFL
From: Mitch Berg, Deplorable Peasant
Re: Positioning w/r/t “The Law”

DFL,

The other day, your social media intern reiterated a chanting point the entire left was prattling lasdt week:

“Nobody’s above the law” – with the apparent exception of the following:

• Hillary Clinton
• Nicole Mitchell
• John Thompson
• Hunter Biden
• Epstein and his clients
• Julie Blaha
• Every group favored by the left that blocks freeways
• Campus antisemites
• Rioters at Ben Shapiro, Riley Gaines and Turning Point USA events.

Circumstantial evidence indicates they are, indeed, “above the law” .

That is all.

Governor Klink – or his social media intern – turned the gas on the living room lamp down:

Biden may be a good man – signs say “no, not really” – but the “steadiness” of his “leadership” have left the Middle East and Ukraine in flames, and I’m not betting against bad things happening in Taiwan.

But let’s focus on Klink’s other bit: how Trump is “fascinated with dictators”.

Governor Klink:

• Set up a snitch line
• Presided over setting up a “badthink” database with no public visibility whatsoever
• Classified people as “non-essential” – along largely political grounds
• Enriched his and the Democrat party’s donors while squashing small business
• Hid the math by which he justified his “emergency powers”…
• …which, speaking of which, he kept for a solid year after the “emergency” was over.

I’m no Trump fan – but Klink is the one who actually cosplays dictator in office.

Mayor Melvin Carter – who makes $132K a year – thanks “the President”…

For wiping out his student debt transferring his student debt to America’s plumbers, truck drivers, waitresses and warehouse pickers:

I’m not sure what bothers me more:

• The President ignoring the SCOTUS and just going ahead and buying the votes
• Doing it for a vote that was never going to go to anyone but Biden anyway.

Graft is bad. Redundant graft is worse.

Modern progressivism is a social chameleon; it turns itself, and its history, into whatever it needs to to accomplish its ends.

Modern media, for the most part, are oblivious, if not downright supportive.

But there are exceptions.

David Mikics at “Arts and Letters” reviews Nellie Bowles’ Morning After the Revolution, a brief history of modern American progressivism’s contortions since the death of George Floyd.

The latest litmus test goal for progressives, erasing Israel from the map, will prove to be no more achievable than eradicating whiteness. But the movement has never been about actual results, only the public display of righteous intentions. Lately the righteousness has been serving evil ends, but few leftists are willing to admit this. Instead, they say that students demanding justice is a noble thing, whether or not what they are demanding is actually just; or that there really aren’t many extremists; or that they oppose genocide in Gaza, whether or not a genocide is actually happening, and while ignoring the actual genocidal rhetoric and actions of Hamas; or mostly, that you should be denouncing Trump instead.

Michelle Goldberg, in her Times op-ed about Bowles’ new book, wistfully yearned for the return of the “progressive urgency that marked the Trump presidency.” Except, the urgency is still there—not this time smashing the windows of minority business owners, saying that math is racist, or championing the right to shoot up in public, but applauding the murder of Jews, past and future. Putting progressive urgency in the past tense is a way of closing the book on that past while at the same time erasing what progressives are saying and doing in the present, in order to avoid any moral or practical responsibility for a political program that has clearly gone off the rails.

Progressivism’s moral bankruptcy is hard to overlook. Unless, of course, you write for The New York Times, in which case your strategy is to pretend that the left extremism of the past few years either didn’t happen or doesn’t matter. Luckily, we have Nellie Bowles to show us otherwise.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Block a freeway? Burn down a neighborhood? Jack a car, rob a store, shoot up on a train, b**w a john on a bus, attack someone on a train platform?

Mary Moriarty’s got your back.

Exercise your first amendent right to demonstrate for Mary Moriarty’s enemies, whoever they are, wherever you are?

You’re a threat to democracy:

Mary Moriarty is the real authoritarian – or “fascist”, as the kids are calling ’em these days.

UPDATE: Here’s Londregan’s attorney, Chris Madel’s response.

And let me tell you…

…it may be the best press conference I’ve seen since Norman Schwartzkopf’s wartime pressers. More drop-mic moments than a “Freddie Mercury” night at a karaoke bar.

Wish we could get this guy to run for Senator or Governor, if he’s GOP.

To: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
From: Mitch Berg, Opstandige Boer
Re: The Holiest Time Of The Woke Year

Voor Wie Het Aangaat

Did anyone consult with the flight attendants about this?

Follow-up question: Would the plane take off if I were to buckle my seatbelts as shown above?

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

Dat is alles.

As if ther’s not enough to talk about today already.

It didn’t take a legal expert to know that the charges against State Patrol trooper Ryan Londregan were unsustainable.

Mary Moriarty had to spend a million bucks [1] to find that out.

Which, we found out during the weekend news dump, she apparently did:

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said Sunday that she will dismiss murder and manslaughter charges against state trooper Ryan Londregan in the shooting death of motorist Ricky Cobb II last summer.

Moriarty told the Star Tribune that her unexpected decision comes in response to a prosecution expert’s new analysis of video from the scene and recent statements by Londregan’s defense attorney.

But rest assured, progressive base – it’s not because she doesn’t want to stick it to a copper:

“We could theoretically prosecute this and just let the jury decide,” she said. “However, we ethically can’t do that because we don’t believe at this point that we can disprove that affirmative defense.”

“This is not a situation of us backing down,” Moriarty said, adding that the killing last week of Minneapolis police officer Jamal Mitchell did not influence her decision.

“It is a situation of recognizing that, given all the barriers that are put in place in these types of cases and the new information that came up, we just can’t ethically go forward.”

Londregan’s attorney was refreshingly un-lawyerly in his comments:

“It’s about goddamn time,” [Attorney Chris] Madel said. “That’s going to be about my only on-the-record comment.”

Everything Mary Moriarty touches turns to crap.

Almost-and-hopefully-future Attorney General Jim Schultz spoke for many of us:

Actualy justice, of course, would involve Mary Moriarty filing for unemployment, and possibly lawyering up to face litigation for the damage she’s caused.

Yet she will win re-election with 85% of the vote, unless an actual political opposition erupts in Minneapolis.

It has become an iron clad fact that the only actual “reporting” going on in Twin Cities media is from the “alternative” media.

And while I riff on the “MN Reformer” – which is paid for by leftists with deep pockets – I’ll include them as well.

“Bags of Cash” allegedly offered to “Feeding Our Future” juror:

But…why?

Scott Johnson at Powerline is in the courtroom:

According to [leader prosecutor Joe] Thompson, the juror called 911 and the Spring Lake Park Police have taken custody of the cash — [update: the amount is $120,000]. It will be retrieved by the FBI.

Much more to come.

To: Jon Collins, Senior Reporter on Race, Class and Communities, MInnesota Public Radio
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Anniversary + Findings

Mr. Collins,

As I have every year since 2021, I hope this day finds you well.

It was four years ago yesterday you sent this out on your listener mailing list::

“South Minneapolis: I know this sounds crazy. But it’s 2020. And I’m working on story now about white supremacists coming to Minneapolis to foment race war under cover of the protests. I need your help, and your friends help. Please refer anyone with real, credible info (not rumor or speculation) or sources to me at (I’m gonna redact that)

What the heck – let’s give this a shot:

Now, I know MPR reporters don’t generally deign to respond to the peasantry – in fact, I know MPR News management specifically tells staff not to engage with the unwashed masses. In fact, I have the receipts.

But I’m genuinely curious – did you find anything?

It’s not of idle interest to me.  Mine was one of the neighborhoods that got burned, looted and vandalized in May of 2020 (noting at the time that I saw a lot of “AmeriKKKa” and “Destroy the 1%” graffiti, but not a single swastika or “14 words” reference, I’m thinking the Twin Cities either got the most inept “white supremacists” in the history of bigotry, or they were the most ingenious – fiendishly tricking a whole city full of leftists into doing the job for them – the sort of fieldcraft that’d make a Mossad agent envious).     

While I am a very overt conservative (I went from Bob Collins’ Christmas Card list to…well, very much off of it during his unfortunate unpleasantness a few years ago), I also spent time covering radical groups of all stripes back when I was in the mainstream media.  

I ask because a not-so-cursory look through the last three years of your reporting doesn’t seem to show anything.  

And as I do every year on the anniversary of this event, I’d like to invite you on my show (Saturday, 1-3PM) to talk about your findings.   Because it’s everyone’s city. 

Thanks,

Mitch Berg
Host, WWTC-AM

Berg’s 18th Law is still well in effect, and will be for another day or two.

But while no details have been released yet about the killer of Minneapolis officer Jamal Mitchell, I’ll wager a shiny new quarter that he/she:

• has a long rap sheet
• has multiple unprosecuted arrests in Hennepin County.
• Will have been prohibited from possessing firearms.
• when the above is made public, this case will disappear from the media.
• BLM will be utterly silent on the murder of a black cop.

Any action on that bet?

PS: It’s days like this I miss the “Reverend” Nancy Nord Bence. By this time, she’d have already posted some bit of hilariously inappropriate and unjustifiable social media bilge that (further) humiliated her and her organization.

I miss the comic relief.