As we watch the back an forth between dismal demographic news and media pollyannaism in Minneapolis, it’s worth looking at other cities that are having similar post-pandemic problems.

Which is most of Blue Urban America, to be honest – there aren’t many cities outside Florida, Texas, the Carolinas and Tennessee doing well these days – but Boston is a particularly interesting case.

Boston has one advantage – a media where someone, in this case Jon Keller of Boston Magazine – will actually do serious, sober, balanced reporting on the issue, a job that normally falls to Alphanews and the Center of the American Experiment here in the Twin Cities.

Boston had the advantage of not having had a bunch of riots at the height of the pandemic. It has the overcompensating disadvantage of being ruled by a mayor who may be worse than Minneapolis’s mayor and council (so far) put together:

Disaster movies involving skyscrapers are part of America’s cultural canon—and while the situation here isn’t quite as dire as the terrorist attack on the swanky Nakatomi Plaza in the classic Christmas movie Die Hard, neither does there seem to be much hope of a Bruce Willis–style miracle rescue by our elected leaders. After scoffing at the warnings, Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration stunned property owners this spring by proposing the one idea few outside of City Hall seem to think has even a chance of fixing the problem: a tax hike on the beleaguered commercial holdings themselves (which would likely get passed on to tenants, forcing them to downsize their office footprint or flee). It’s a move arguably more intended to curry favor with voters in the upcoming election than keep Boston safe from the doom loop. Coming on top of a string of initiatives deeply unpopular with real estate owners, including an attempt to restore rent control and adopting a surtax on property sales worth more than $2 million, the tensions between Wu and local developers have never been higher.

At the same time, other immediate options for averting catastrophe seem either politically unpalatable or unlikely. Extracting more money from relatively undertaxed residential properties? A politically toxic non-starter in an election year for the mayor, who has said, “I cannot have that happen.” Seeking relief from the state? Given the traditional strain between urban and suburban priorities, good luck with that. And while officials are exploring ideas to deal with the ever-increasing office-building vacancy rate, such as converting empty offices into desperately needed housing, the economic viability of that solution is somewhere between questionable and laughable.

The parallels are seductive – and perhaps a little misleading. And the whole article is worth a read.

But if you read about Mayor Wu’s approach to the collapse of downtown Boston’s commercial real estate market and the hole it leaves in the city’s budget and think “the beatings will continue until morale improves”, you and I think just a little alike.

Oh, yeah – Chicago, too.

To: Alvin Bragg,
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: You Did It!

I’ve never been coy about the fact that I’ve never cared about Donald Trump – or at least his dominant public persona. I don’t care for what his erratic and impulsive nature cost the GOP in 2018 and 2020.

Something I like far less than Trump? Debasing the justice system to harass poltiical opponents and try to rig elections.

Alvin Bragg’s goal may not have been to create someone who’s going to do whatever he can to push Trump over the top this fall.

If it were, I’m not sure what he’d have done differently.

January 6 was a riot – and the foundations of our representative republic were never in danger, any more than during Watergate or the Civil War.

The Trump trial – activities that according to the judge related to no crime, over charges that the FEC said weren’t crimes back when they were within the statute of limitations – is a direct assault on one of the things that tenuously separates America from the barbarians.

So far.

Congrats, Dems. You did it. You dragged me, kicking and screaming, into supporting Trump .

Let’s make America a constitutional republic with the rule of laws, not men, again.

Normally I’d call this evidence that Joe Biden is the worst president of my life time, Foreign Policy division:

Of course, that’s not quite true; Obama is still the president, in every way that matters.

So Obama remains comfortably ahead of Jimmy Carter.

You get no prize for having figured out how this was going to develop.

Ken Martin demands the resignation of accused ninja burglar, constitutional law genius and state Senator Nicole Mitchell…:

…after she served her purpose in hanging onto the “trifecta” and helping jam down the DFL’s demented spending and social engineering spree.

Why yes, I’ll be bringing this up again between now and November.

When President Potato promised, during his State of The Union address, to build a supply pier so the US could, er, “feed starving people in Gaza”, I’m sure my prediction at the time could have been seen as partisan and cynical. I’ve got the receipts right here.

I could have just as easily worded it like this:

We – and if we like it or not it is Uncle Sam and his taxpayers – inherited stewardship of the global system that cannot prosper when it’s primary force continues to demonstrate abject incompetence – from Afghanistan to Gaza – all the while holding no one accountable. Our enemies are encouraged and our friends disheartened. It is almost as if the humiliation and failure is the actual goal.

Provide another explanation if you have one.

We have three branches of government for a reason. Each branch is supposed to check the other.

Congress – this is in your corner. It appears the Executive Branch is incapable of policing its own competence. Do work.

…but they beat me to it, and brought the authority to support it.

The pier fell apart. Bits and pieces spent last weekend driving along the Eastern Med coastline.

That, of course, was the least of the problems – not just the easily-anticipated results:

From the time the first load came off the pier, the aid barely made it past 300 meters until it disappeared into Hamasistan.

But the overall concept:

An interesting note; this is not a Navy operation, but an Army operation. Remember what I told you about the fate of the East Coast Amphibious Construction Battalion TWO (ACB2) last summer? This story aligns well with the Anglosphere’s problem with seablindness we discussed on yesterday’s Midrats with James Smith.

As for my general thought on doing this? I’ll avoid the politics as much as I can, but I have concerns.

Generally speaking, no operation starts out on the right foot with a lie.

Read the whole thing.

It may feel like deja vu.

I may not have advanced the science of astrophysics in any meaningful way.

I’ll take the “L” there.

But I think I’ve got one thing on Steven Hawking:

Since he isn’t reiterating this theory to us in person today, it’s clear his theory is at least half-wrong.

If the Democrat party’s messaging machine were targeted at people who did critical thinking, I’d have a little sympathy for them.

They’d have to navigate a pretty tight logical hairpin turn.

To wit: they’d have to supervise the gaslighting of the people to believe the “experts” and not their lying eyes about the economy:

…and that workers have more buying power than they did five years ago…

…while simultaneously making them believe that public employee unions are doing less well:

As schools across the country struggle to find teachers to hire, more governors are pushing for pay increases, bonuses and other perks for the beleaguered profession.

Meanwhile, teacher salaries have fallen further and further behind those of their college-educated peers in other fields.

Remember – I said “if they had to convince people who could think critically”.

They don’t.

Steady as she goes.

…that at least some of the baby-boomers who protested against Vietnam have got to be looking at today’s mass of bobbleheaded students…:

…and thinking “dial back the crazy, kids”?

During the 2022 campaign and the 2023 legislative session, in the immediate wake of burning through a $19B surplus, that the DFL claimed that the spending binge would “Reduce Poverty by 30%”.

The sessions ended a year ago yesterday.

So how’s that going?

Well, apparently we won’t know for another couple of years. The MN Department of Health’s poverty numbers end in 2022 – when they were rising.

According to some sources generally aligned with the left, poverty was steady to up; to others, it was rising…

…as of the end of 2022.

But since the spending orgy?

No idea.

All I know is, the DFL has been incredibly quiet about the subject for this past year.

There appears to be an 18-24 month lag getting poverty numbers to the public.

Huh.

So they spent $19B, and raised the budget 40%, to “eradicate” something…

…that they couldn’t test until well after this fall’s election?

Weird.

Thanks as always to Brad for letting me sit in!

TC Pearson was here on behalf of “Defend the Guard” and “Bring the Troops Home”. His podcast is The Black Robe Regiment.

And here’s the music for today’s show:

Wanna piss off Erin Maye Quade? Donate to Pre-Born today!

Catch up with AK Kamara here.

And today’s song list:

Former representative Ryan Winkler has led us down a twisty, turny path with some surprises over his legislative and extra-legislative careers.

He’s swerved from the ridiculous to the, well, occasionally admirable, and back, and forth and back and forth, and backandforth…

And, well…:

Denying the industralized murder of 11 million people,

versus

Legitimate questions and doubts about everything government told us about Covid from the very beginning – remembering that many of the “conspiracy theories” of 2020/2021 turned out to be true: natural immunity works, and for longer than the vaccines; fomite spread didn’t happen; lockdowns were useless at best; the Great Barrington Declaration was right (the vaccines should have been targeted at the elderly and vulnerable), researchers lied even about the intended effects of vaccines or that “Zero Covid” was ever possible, masks made little to no difference, and there’s a pretty significant chance the virus did start as a result of Frankenvirus research in China.

Holocaust denial is a social pathology. Pandemic “denial”, at four years remove, is neither pathological nor especially denying any fact.

Someone needs to take a deep breath.

Notice how many Democrats and media people (ptr) are gaslighting working Americans about the economy lately?

The Dow Jones and the level of GDP is nice and all, but inflation is rising faster than buying power, and is going to get worse before it gets better, if it gets better.

The state legislature wrapped up on Sunday. Behind their moral leaders – an accused felon and a not-very-closeted authoritarian – they enacted one of the more shameful spectacles anyone has ever seen in the Minnesota state legislature:

The process – and all inconvenient parliamentary procedure – was ignored, as the DFL jammed down a 2,800 page omnibus bill that the DFL had crammed together at the literal last minute, dropping a printed copy on the floor with a half hour remaining (as the online version “unexpectedly” went down).

Representative Engen put it well:

“We did what we had to do”.

How are people not seeing this is every bit as destructive as “January 6?”

So – they continued squashing freedom and the economy.

But the accomplishments!

In the past two sessions, they squandered $19B in surpluses, jacked up taxes, set up a speech database and gun registration, turned on a firehose of funding for the fraud-prone non-profit/industrial complex, and trashed the rideshare market, among many other sins.

But hey. Junk fees.

What’s next session? Banning “shrinkflation” in potato chips?

Leftists, 2020: “Punch a Nazi!”

Leftists, 2024, being thwarted in their protests in support of actual modern-day Nazis [1]:

“Heeeeeeey! No fair punching!”

[1] In the “fascist dictatorship founded on racial obsession, focused on murdering Jews” sense of the term, rather than the “I’m a leftist and I don’t whatever it is” sense.

Holy crap.

US aid being supplied to Gaza via the potato’s “pier from nowhere…”

…is being looted.

Unexpectedly!

…people like this…:

…get angsty about American flags on beaches because, two generations ago, they were the ones shooting down at them from the cliffs.

MITCH: Go Timberwolves!

CRITIC: But hey, Mitch – since when do you care about pro sports?

MITCH: Outside the Bears, Cubs and Twins?

CRITIC: Right. Since when?

MITCH: Since never. Don’t usually care. But I DO care about having fun, and being in a place where one of the teams is doing well is kinda a blast, even if you don’t care that much about the sport. See also the NDSU Bison.

CRITIC: But you haven’t been a loyal Timberwolves fan!

MITCH: Yep.

CRITIC: That makes you a fair weather fan!

MITCH: Dang skippy it does. Why waste time on losers?

CRITIC: But you’re a Bears fan.

MITCH: Yep. And they’re going to the Super Bowl this year. Or next, if that doesn’t work out. The weather is *always* fair, here.

CRITIC: But doesn’t this violate Berg’s Fourth Law?

MITCH: Close. But here’s the statutory technicality: I’m not saying “they’re gonna win!”. I’m being hopeful but pessimistic. So we’re good.

CRITIC: That don’t make no sense

MITCH: Shut up cheer. Sheesh.

Joe Doakes, no longer from Como Park, emails:

Seems that Cracker Barrel is in financial trouble after inviting restaurant patrons to celebrate Gay Pride.  Go to https://ace.mu.nu/ and scroll down to “The Morning Rant: Cracker Barrel Went Woke and Now It’s Going Broke” for a nice recap. 

Sometimes I wonder if every big company is working from the same “How to Destroy Your Business” cheat sheet, but that cynically paints with too broad a brush.  It’s not “every big company” but “every company that ought to know its customers better.”  This isn’t a woke failing, it’s a management failing.  Figure out what the customers want, figure out how much they’ll pay for it, figure out how to sell them what they want at the price they’re willing to pay, then get rich doing it.  It’s been the business model of civilization for thousands of years.  How hard is it to understand?

I could see Target deciding to go woke.  They’ve been on the cutting edge of liberal silliness forever.  They were leaders in the trans bathroom issue.  They refuse to sell spark plugs because gas lawn mowers kill Mother Nature.  For them to put penis shorts in girls’ clothes should have made perfect sense, given the liberal woke crowd they’re marking to.  It only blew up because they failed to understand that Woodbury Soccer Moms are all in for gay rights and saving the planet when the issue is theoretical but some of them become Mama Bear protecting her little girl cubs when the issue is personal.  “Woke” is fine until their own daughter is at risk of being raped by the trannie in the girls’ bathroom at school, or shot by the vibrant kid who be jus bout to turn his life t’roun, or beat up by the diversity princess because the daughter didn’t respeck her.  Then, old fashioned law-and-order values are in hot demand.  Not enough to sustain a serious boycott to cause serious damage to the brand, but enough to be noticed.  Okay, that’s Target.

 Cracker Barrel, on the other hand, should know better.  Their customers are Southern church-goers and senior citizens.  It’s the Denny’s crowd, one economic step up from the Waffle House rabble.  They’re willing to tolerate queers and trannies but they’re not the least bit interested in celebrating them.  If you’re going queer, we’re going elsewhere, same as the Bud Light drinkers.

 Personally, I’m waiting for Remington to announce its new Rainbow Pride Rifle to completely finish off the brand forever.  Can’t be long now, can it? 

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

Personally, the problem is that so many of these brands we’re avoiding are ones I haven’t patronized in forever.

Cracker Barrel? In the ’90s – when my budget made a trip to CB a treat for special occasions – it was an event. A destination. The biscuits alone were something I looked forward to.

The last time I ate at a CB – maybe 2017? – it was like eating at a Perkins that’d given up. Them going “woke” was a market anticlimax for me.

Minneapolis is increasingly run by showy, shrill, demogogic “Democrats Socialists of America” radicals intent on rebuilding the city in their image.

Saint Paul, as long as I can recall but even moreso in the past 15 years has been run by an informal assembly of white NIMBYs from the various Parks (Highland, Merriam, Irvine, Saint Anthony) and Crocus Hill. They mostly bring ideals from the sixties and money from the fifties to the 2020s.

I’ve long joked about them – but darned if they aren’t generally just a tad less oppressive

I said “a tad”.

I did mention they are NIMBYs, right? These are the people who shut down the “Back to the Fifties” hot rod cruise on Snelling and University, because while they want all the amenities of living in a major city, they also want it to as quiet and placid as an Iowa pasture. They jammed down the city’s “Tony Soprano”-style trash collection system because they – who don’t apparently need to leave home much – got tired of hearing different trucks going through their alleys and down their streets every week. Given a choice between every other possible option willing to redevelop the old Snelling Bus Barn, they wanted a soccer stadium, and got…a soccer stadium (surrounded by a vast vacant field).

Crime – while significantly lower than Minneapolis, then and now – is a serious problem.

There’s a perception among some who don’t live here that people, especially business owners, are either OK with that, or helpless to fight it. Neither is true. For example, one property owner along University Avenue has taken to playing classical music, outdoors, on loudspeakers. It’s a measure that actually has an effect on crime where it’s been tried.

Which, for the NIMBYs, isn’t good enough, as a friend of the blog points out:

The Hamline Midway Facebook page was lit up with hyperbolic comments about the classical music coming from some parking lot, “it startled my cats!’ “it’s not good for the birds” “we have young kids” “those businesses are so rude”-

Turns out the decibel level was only 70. About as loud as a vacuum cleaner.

Did sound travel a bit with the wind, the air of the particular night? Possibly. Were the NIMBY neighbors likely piling on the hate and hyperbole because of who was playing the music and why? Most definitely.

No word yet on how many sleepless nights these very same neighbors have when some crazed homeless person is screaming through the night, or some gang banger is ghetto blasting the stereo, or any of the many other normally heard sounds way above 70 dbs in Hamline Midway. No, if anyone would be as hysteric over those noises, there’d be a slew of anger bestowed on that person. The rage would find its way to the poor soul’s boss and the person would be fired because who wants and angry mob screaming “fire the bigot” showing up at any business?

The path between dotty but well-connected Merriam Park biddies (aged 30-90) and policy in Saint Paul is short, paved better than any Saint Paul street, and has no bike lanes or speed bumps.

To: DFL Parents
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Your Kids

DFL comms guy Ryan Faircloth [1] had himself a chuckle in the lobby of the GOP convention last Friday:

The sign, naturally, is a just a tad tongue-in-cheek.

But the MNDFL – the party of “comedians” who aren’t funny and people with no sense of humor, to sa nothing of the party of Judd Hoff and Nicole Mitchell – forgot about Judd Hoff, Nicole Mitchell and “Anti”-Fa long enough to post this:

Now, let’s focus on the sign.

DFLer parents: how about teaching your kids that hitting people with skateboards and shooting golf balls and frozen water bottles from slingshots isn’t actually political speech?

That is all.

[1] CORRECTION: Ryan Faircloth appears to be a reporter for the Strib, not a DFL comms guy.

We regret the error.

To get in touch with the Minneapolis GOP BPOU, go here, or email at info@mplsgop.org.

And here’s today’s music list:

Among Big Left’s great crimes against history is the complete devaluation they have achieved against the term “Fascist”. To much of the parts of society that routinely use the word, it now means “anyone not on board with today’s left’s narrative”.

No, really:

And Big Left knows what it’s doing, since the other options have also been hijacked. Call someone a Nazi, and you’re overwrought. Call someone a Communist, and people start jabbering about the Red Scare.

“Authoritarian” works, but it doesn’t have quite the same emotional impact – and Big Left has been diluting that one by associating it with Trump – a demonstrably less authoritarian president than Obama or The Potato.

So given the options, what does one call a political figure or party that:

• Their ends justify their means – including the use of government force to secure compliance
• Tries to co-opt the institutions of society to further their political ends, starting with government and schools and ending with the family itself?
• Aggressively “sorts” society into “good guys” and, especially, “others” to use as scapegoats and deflections from one’s own actions – up to and including creating an official version of “reality” that may or may not have much in common with the real thing.

Let’s take a thoroughly educational look at a politician who seems to check off all the boxes for…well, the “A” word. And maybe some definitions of the “F” word.

The Real Authority

Maye Quade is a fully-fledged creation of leftist institutions – and pays obeisance to them:

But she certainly has no love lost for society’s actual institutions.

Like parenthood.

She wants to nullify parents trying to teach their children morality and ethics, so her side doesn’t have to work quite so hard to uproot them. j

This is, of course, on top of her very casual relationship with telling the truth if it’s not in her political interest.

Might Makes Right

Maye Quade may not actually have the executive power to sicc government and its monopoly in the use of force on her political (and finanncial?) enemies.

But she sure thinks about it:

“I would love to eminent domain all 98 of these crisis pregnancy centers and turn them into affordable housing for people who do have children,” said Sen. Maye Quade. “I would love to turn them into food banks and diaper banks and formula banks. Like, these are things that actually support people having children when they decide they would like to have children, and everything that crisis pregnancy centers are doing is not that. None of it is that.”

Aggressively Sorting

Maye Quade has a staffer who’s got a bit of a “virulent anti-Semite” vibe.

This is, of course, shocking in that the aide is more antisemitic than Maye Quade’s own equivocating weasel-word-larded antisemitism:

Your tax dollars are paying for this.

It should go without saying Senator Maye Quade, like all leftists, is more aggressively yet casually racist about “othering” apostates – in this case, Senator Tim Scott, a Republican and African-American:

…which is a perfect invocation of Berg’s 11th Law.

And, like every good gaslighting abusive partner, it’s all really your fault:

Hard to miss the fact that the “consequences” in her “culture” are entirely one-sided. But that’s the nature of the abusive gaslighter. But then, I did mention creating an alternate, “official” reality, didn’t I?

No, really – an actual alternate reality…

…deviance from which is considered heresy.

I mean, a Republican with a similiar record of shilling for naked authority, advocating the co-option of instutions and relentlessly cutting out “others” to use as enemies would be called an “authoritarian” at the very least.

And yet it’s Senator Maye Quade that walks the walk

The deficit bomb is ticking away.

Illegal immigration is crushing working-class incomes.

But we get the representation we deserve, apparently:

It took me a couple of beats to realize it wasn’t the “Congress” scene from “Idiocracy”.

Have to wonder what the suffragettes would think.

Heather “Lawnmower Barbie” Edelson, beat Marisa Simonetti, 54-45.

In other words: A woman with near 100% name recognition, especially among people who come out for special elections, beat someone nobody had heard of three weeks before the election.

By nine points.

In a district Keith Ellison won by 20, and Governor Klink by 30:

There’ll be another round in November.

While the district is a little less “blue” than most of Hennepin County, this can’t be great news for the DFL headed into the fall