Hamline University in Saint Paul is an exquisitely expensive instution that seems to be not quite as prestigious as Saint Thomas, and always a couple of degrees behind Macalester in terms of the impeccability of their leftist orientation.

But they aren’t to be left behind.

Here’s their “pro-Palestine” neo-Brownshirt “encampment”, as a rainy night ended this morning.

So maybe we’ll have Hamline kids puking on their own lawns for a change this weekend.

Joe Doakes, no longer of Como Park, emails:

We all know how Minnesota Nice works.  Someone invites you to dinner, she’s serving Italian Spaghetti.  Everyone in Minnesota knows there’s an unspoken understanding that “Italian Spaghetti” is hamburger, onion, and Ragu from a jar ladled over Creamette spaghetti noodles sprinkled with Kraft Grated Parmesan from the green can.  If you get there and the recipe is anything else, Minnesota Nice requires you to Try A Bite To Be Polite and when asked, say something bland like: “Oh, it certainly was Interesting.  I’d never have thought of adding raisins, wherever did you get the idea?”  Under no circumstances may you demand: “Why the hell are there raisins in it?” as that may offend the hostess which she will immediately tell everyone in town and you’ll never hear the end of it.

Ah, for the good old days when the only lie we had to acquiesce in, was that the meal was edible.  Now we need to pretend to believe whatever mental illness anyone else at the party asserts.  That guy claims he is a pregnant woman so he’s about to go on pregnancy leave from work.  Isn’t that wonderful?  “Well, it certainly is interesting.  However did you discover your new gender identity?”  That woman is so emotionally unstable that she needs to bring a comfort animal everywhere she goes and the airline won’t allow her alligator on the airplane, can you believe the outrage?  “Well, that certainly is interesting.  Wherever did you get one?”

Which makes me wonder: what if we . . . didn’t?  What if we didn’t pretend?  What if we responded truthfully: “I don’t like raisins in my spaghetti sauce; in fact, I never heard of anybody who did,” and let the hostess be offended.  What if we told the guy: “That’s silly, you’re a man, you can’t get pregnant and besides, Monty Python did it better in Life of Brian.”  What if we told the airline woman: “If you’re so crazy you need an alligator to avoid hysterics, I don’t want you OR your alligator on my flight.”

Liberals claim to favor free speech but what they mean is you are free to agree with them.  You can agree in word or song, music, poetry, or interpretive dance.  But you can’t disagree because they hate that.  They say: “Hate speech is not free speech,” but what they mean is: “Your opinion offends me.”  Yeah, so?  What if the First Amendment guarantees a Right to Offend?  What if stix-and-stones is essential to the smooth functioning of an honest society and the Heckler’s Veto is the Devil’s Work tearing it down?  

If you’ve got a problem with my opinions, well then, You’ve got a problem.  I don’t have a problem.  I’m comfortable with my opinions and I’m entitled to express them in law-abiding manner.  You are not entitled to suppress them through unlawful behavior, not by yourself and not by proxy.  Students on campus, take note.

It’s one thing if polite manners suggest we should not needlessly offend.  It’s quite another to criminalize offensive speech, to doxx and de-platform and de-monetize it, and quite the worst thing when government is doing it to political opponents, by phony lawsuit or by pressuring social media.  Making the most-easily-offended-person the focal point of an entire society is a recipe for societal collapse into anarchy.  We’re well on our way.

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

Its hard to see this as anything but The Swamp killing freedom with a thousand petty little passive-aggressive cuts.

Count the number of jump cuts in this 14 second long video:

Not cuts to B-Roll. Not special effects. Not pans or zooming.

This is the audio equivalent of one of those ransom notes pieced together from letters cut from magazines. (Kids, ask your parents)

The good news: Minnesota’s new paid family leave law will cost 25% more than originally budgeted:

Minnesota’s new paid family and medical leave program will launch in 2026 with a 25% higher payroll tax than originally anticipated when the bill was passed last session, an assistant commissioner with the Department of Employment and Economic Development told lawmakers on Monday. 

Because DEED has been given legislative authority to raise the tax, the agency can do so without requiring a new law. 

“Wait, Mitch – I thought you said that was the good news?”

I did.

The bad news? The program doesn’t start until 2026. Like the Southwest LIght Rail and every other DFL spending boondoggle, this program is going to get more expensive before anyone ends up using it.

To: Canada
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporo<i>u</i>s Peasant
Re: Fires

Canada,

The haze in the air tells us it’s gonna be a big fire season.

May I propose the following:

1. Burn all you want
2. While you’re at it, burn Ottawa first.

That is all.

Mad props to this bloke:

Tangentially related: anyone unironically wearing a “Guy Fawkes” mask should be a legitimate target for tasing or thrown rubbish.

Mostly for leftists, naturally. But even if I agree with you, wearing one of those gawdawful masks knocks your credibility back by two orders of magnitude. .

At the beginning of this session, I’d have figured the DFL trifecta would get some portion of their gun grab agenda jammed down. Maybe not outright bans on semi-automatic firearms, or repeal of pre-emption – but most of the smart money said “safe storage” and “lost and stolen reporting” was going to get jammed down no matter what.

And yet here we are with a week to go, and there’s only one bill still on the table – the stupid binary trigger ban:

And this next week could be – and needs to be – a red zone stand for the ages:

Your phone calls matter. Grant Hauschild – DFL Senator from Tom Bakk’s old district – bailed on the “safe storage” bill, negating Nicole “The Ninja” Mitchell’s vote. It was a close call.

By the way – note that it’s the Gun Owners Caucus doing the work. Not “Minnesota Gun Rights”. If you’re not a member, you need to be. Get on it

Get on your phone. Kill the bills.

If you live in District Six in Hennepin County – this area here…:

…you need to get out and vote Marisa Simonetti for Hennepin County Commission in the special election being held today.

She’s an unknown conservative who ran in the runoff three weeks ago, spent about $700, and got 33% of the vote with no name recognition, running against Mary Moriarty’s spouse and at least one candidate who spent $70K to try to build name recognition, in a runoff. That took her to the final round, today:

Her opponent is Heather Edelson – a sitting Legislator whose sole “accomplishment” was writing a bill that would have banned gas powered lawn mowers in the state. “Lawncare Barbie” has name recognition – and literally nothing else.

Simonetti’s a dark horse – but given the tiny turnout in these special elections for county races, anything is possible.

So:

• If you live in the area in the map above – basically all of Henco south of 394 and west of 169 – get to the polls. Bring your family. Extort your kids. Whatever it takes.
• If you don’t live in this district, make sure any family you do have in the area turn out and vote for Simonetti.

This would really shock the world.

So let’s do it

So, about that “artificial intelligence…”

So, point for “techno-pessimism”…

To: Central Science Bureau, Planet Xymorg.
From: Forward Observation Base, Dark Side of Sole Moon, Planet Terra, Sol System
Re: Initial Observations

Central Bureau,

Enclosed please find the report on our observations of the inhabitants of planet Terra (aka “Earth”).

Methods

Our team observed the inhabitants of Terra via an extensive observation of “Advertisements” – a Terran form of content carefully calibrated to simultaneously reflect and suggest reality.

As Terrans accept this as reality, so shall this experiment.

Findings

According to statistics compiled from ten solar cycles of observation of Terran “Advertising”, we conclude the following:

Social Hierarchy: Terran social hierarchy appears to be organized, in descending order of social standing:

• Females of the species, of all ages and ethnicities. Observation of human advertisements indicates females of the species comprise the executive, management, professional, warrior and intellectual classes. They appear to be the sole capable decision makers.
• Children – again of all ages and ethnicities.
• Males of most age and ethnic classes, who apparently are considerably less capable as executives, managers, professional sand warriors than the women.
• Males of the “caucasoid” class. Analysis of “advertising” content indicates adult caucasian males are a highly specialized subspecies adapted to and adept in “home improvement” and “hardware stores” and shopping for beer, and otherwise of no value to human social structures.. A subset of this class appear to be predisposed to being masterminds of what terrans call “evil”..

Social structure: Terran families appear to fall into three categories, displayed in descending order of statistial occurrence:

• Matched pairs of males and females, from different ethnic categories. Regardless of respective ethnicity, the social dynamics observed reflect the observations above; the females are the decision makers, while the males of all ethnicities appear to be incapable of any executive function.
• Matched pairs of caucasian males and females. In these couples, again, the patterns noted above are observed; the female makes the decisions, with the males apparently unable to function in this capacity outside the aforementioned categories (“home improvement” and “beer”).
• Matched same-gender pairs, who are apparently the sole classification of coupling comprised of competent equals.

Manifestations of Society: Observations of the “advertising” content indicate that human activity is overwhelmingly focused on:

• Medicating ailments
• Preparing and Consuming food
  • An apparently constant, possibly ceremonial refabrication of their dwellings – roofs, windows, floors and waste removal facilities. This appears to take on religious significance .

Social Hierarchy: The Terran social hierarchy as observed in “advertising” content appears to be based around a triune religio-governmental structure:

• “Real Housewives” – these are apparently centralized councils of female rulers and their retinues of male drones (see observations above)
• An executive authority composed of a deified “Oprah”, with vice-deities “Beyoncé” and “Taylor Swift”

Further study is warranted.

It was six months ago today that I got tired of presiding over a junior high locker room in my comments section.

I shut down comments for two weeks. Some ‘problem’ commenters went away. So, unfortunately, did some memorably good ones.

The vibe is different. I think I’m OK with that.

Thoughts in the comments.

Alex Plechash is running for RNC National Committeeman. If you’re a state central delegate and want to find out more, we gotcha right here.

Marisa Simonetti is running for Henco Commission in District 6. If you live in the district, or know someone who does, Tuesday is election day.

And of course, today’s music list:

Believe me – the Biden Administration has kept on giving me moments; the Afghan debacle,, the Nurembadelphia speech; yapping about “shinkflation” of potato chips.

But this may be the big daddy of them all.

So far.

Biden, as we noted yesterday, is playing pattycake with military supplies to Israel as it fights an existential war against Iranian proxies in Gaza:

They are most particularly threatening to cut off supplies of the precision-guided weapons that make it feasible to fight an urban war without indiscriminately slaughtering the civilians that Hamas are using for human shields.

Biden defends his action by saying he wants to emphasize “Defensive’ weapons, like “Iron Dome”.

The problem with seeing defense as being entirely about defending is that it gives the initiative to the attacker.

Let’s say you are worried about a gang of 2-3 people who’ve been doing home invasions. You have two doors (and no windows large enough to let someone larger than Nicole Mitchell) into your house. You have your significant other. All covered, right?

Well, sort of. The home invaders control who comes, and when, and through which door or doors. You have to defend just as actively against them at noon on Wednesday at at 4AM on Sunday morning. And when they come, it’ll be at a time of their choosing, through the door (or, having read about Nicole Mitchell) window of their choosing.

So much better to hit the home invaders first – to choose the time and place of your showdown, and not have to worry nearly as much about your windows and doors, right?

Of course, if it was you and your significant other, literally, you’d be breaking the law – but the metaphor holds for nations. Saying a nation can “just defend their borders, using only defensive, not offensive, weapons”, is simplistic, even childishly naive. It presumes that attackers are stupid, and will attack you exactly when and how you predicted.

Unfortunately, attackers are creative; they’ll attack you in ways you never expect as you stand ready to defend against an attack they never intended to make, or never expected to see again, or by finding weaknesses in your defenses they can exploit at a time and place of their choosing.

“We’ll just defend ” is the fallback position of the illiterate at best, the deluded and bufuddled at worst.

Or, in the case of our current, vile administration, both.

A friend of the blog emails:

I don’t know how I feel about this one.

On one hand, I don’t think that what the developer wants to do is a bad design. I’m sick of the developers squeezing in tiny 800 square feet apartments everywhere and charging high rents and making places artificially trendy.

Also, I love that CM Noecker reminds everyone that the specific zoning for the area was asked for by the neighbors and that should mean something-

 “It’s this recent community process that says this should not be RM2, it should be RM1,” Noecker said. “There is a value and a status in plans that are community-created and then adopted by this body. … The community has said we specifically don’t want this parcel to be RM2.” 

The community process was a backlash against CM Jalali’s election to the council because those neighbors knew that Jalali has never met a developer that she doesn’t like on Marshall Avenue.

But, those Merriam Park Marshall Avenue neighbors are the same neighbors who constantly think that they run the entire city and they think that gives them the right to tell other neighborhoods what they need and don’t need. They meddle so much, that I think they kind of get what they deserve in their own neighborhood, too. If I were like them, I’d organize a loud group of people to shout at the council that Marshall Avenue needs this space to be 7 Townhomes with greater floor area ratio and if they don’t support it, they’re just racist.

I’m not them, so I won’t. But, the other reason that I don’t really know how I feel about this vote is that I don’t know if I want too much precedent set in the “community process” in this town. After all, those same Merriam Park Marshall Avenue residents who are the activists that are trying to remove I94 through “community process.” 

*Sigh* We just someday need better choices on the ballot- voting ought to be the community process.

These apartments are pretty clearly built on the cheap by developers with an “in” with the city council. In 50 years they will be slums.

And the people voting for our oh-so-special city council, and/or their descendants, will be turning Woodbury and Inver Grove Heights into blighted cesspools.

Brazil is going through an exaggerated version of the US’s current gyrations; between a “right wing” leader who, the expert class told us, “is going to destroy democracy“, to a left-wing oligarch who is actually destroying democracy in the name of “saving democracy”.

In particular, they – and their American, Democrat party (and American big-media allies) are trying to crush free speech, to, er…

…uh…

…”save” it.

Michael Shellenberger is on the front lines. Expand the tweet to read the whole thing:

Berg’s Seventh Law in action; the party that is (or was) the first to bleat about McCarthyism, is the McCarthyist party:

“Mr. Shellenberger,” [Rep. Kamlager-Dove, D-CA] said to me yes or no? Is it true that you have repeatedly published false information that defamed public figures who are dedicated to combating disinformation?”…

Long story short:

Remember this when NPR yaps about their “disinformation” efforts.

Once the colonoscopy removes all that smoke the DFL and media have been blowing into your distal colon, the news about Minnesota’s business climate just ain’t good:

Published last week, Chief Executive’s list of 2024 Best & Worst States for Business ranked Minnesota near the bottom at No. 41. The result isn’t much different from last year when Minnesota ranked at No. 40. Over 500 CEOs and business owners were surveyed across the U.S.

Turns out you can only pay so many taxes for so few badly-allocated “services” before you start looking into that “Galt” guy.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

US put a hold on an ammunition shipment to Israel.

The United States is now objectively supporting terrorism. 

Joe Doakes

When you remember that:

• Biden’s biggest funders (other than sending 10% to the Big Guy) are people like George Soros, who detest Israel, and
• Biden needs that “Uncommitted” pro-genocide vote to “come home” by November…

…it all starts to make sense.

I had Marisa SImonetti on my show the weekend before last. She’s a conservative candidate for Hennepin County Commissioner. She’s running for the District Six seat:

In the intervening weeks, she came in second in the run-off election to run against Heather Edelson to represent the southwestern part of Hennepin County:

“Heather Edelson?”, you may say. “Have I heard of her?”

Why yes. She was in the MN Legislature, defeating Dario Anselmo in the 2022 election. Her sole “accomplishent” was writing legislation that would ban gas powered lawn mowers. Because that’s the issue – unpleasant noises in bucolic Edina side streets – that keeps working Minnesotans up at night.

She wants to leave the legislature and bring that amazing freaking talent to the Henco Board.

Now, Edelson (and her record of stunning, courageous achievements) have a ton of name recognition.

But Simonetti got over 30% of the vote in the qualifying round. And with enough name recognition, and enough pissed-off people of all parties bum-rushing the polls next week, we could really shock the world, here.

Which is where you come in.

If you live in the district: Get to the polls. Bring friends and family. These county special elections are normally snooze fests; if people turn out, it’s winnable.

If you live outside the district? Call your friends who live there. Get them out to the polls. Drive them. Ply them with cigarettes and liquor, I don’t care.

I’ll be interviewing Simonetti on my show on Saturday.

Let’s send Heather back home, to listen to gas mowers all day long.

Trump is going to speak at the Lincoln/Reagan dinner – one of the MNGOP’s big annual fundraisers.

The DFL thinks they’re onto something.

It’s so cute that the DFL thinks that most Trump voters don’t know this – I know many who stopped holding their noses and switched to full-face respirators to vote for him.

But we – especially if “we” are working class Minnesotans whose paychecks are 20% smaller than they were five years ago, and whose food budgets have gone up by half – might be willing to give it another shot at this rate.

Why do Democrats have such problems with cognitive dissonance?

This Timberwolves season is a nail-biter. For my purposes, things like this are the issue:

This, of course, runs afoul of Berg’s Fourth Law:

A Minnesota sports team may be a contender until the moment the local media actually believes they will be contenders. At that moment – be it spring training, late November in the NFL season, or week 72 of the NHL playoffs – the season will fall irredeemably apart.

It’s been an amazing run so far for the TWolves. Let’s just say I’d be happy to repeal the law, ifi circumstances allow.

But no mistake about it – this is a test.

Clever anti-genocide activist and wag “counterprotests” at the Harvard pro-Final-Solution “encampment” in perhaps the most delicious way possible; interrupting “protesters” beauty sleep, not only with the national anthem…

…but one of the most cringey renditions of it imaginable, from one of those divas that has to ornament the bejeebers and the life out of the song.

Which brings up the question: what music should be on the “Loop” that people blast at these cretins all night long?

Various version of the national anthem, of course. All the coloratura divas, naturally, plus this one:

and this one for good measure:

This one’s a natural, of course:

And maybe a little, uh, hip-hop:

And, just to make it interesting, let’s make sure the punishment fits the crime:

We’ll see who “occupies” what by the end of the evening.

A couple of points in background:

• If you’re talking to someone, and you stare over at something in the distance, or at the ceiling without saying anything about it, they will eventually look over to see what you’re looking at.
• If you reward, not just bad behavior, but counterproductive and self-destructive behavior, you’ll get more of it. It creates a “perverse incentive”.
• If you have a child, you know this. You may have learned some of it too late – indeed (spoiler) many parents today are – but eventually…
• If you don’t have kids – like a growing share of our nation’s teachers, psychologists, and child-policy wonks – you might know it. Or think you know it.
• Social contagions exist.

We’ll come back to each of those.

I could probably quote half of this interview in this post. It’s Ben Shapiro interviewing Abigail Shrier about what’s wrong with kids today:

It’s a well-spent hour, although you can’t speed Shapiro up, since he already sounds like he’s talking at double speed.

We’ll come back to that.

I detest generational politics; the Miillennial / Zeeper taste for blaming “boomers” for their problems is both an evasion and ancient (I keenly felt I was in direct competition with Baby Boomers too, when I was in college, uh, twenty years ago). I might be early Gen-X. Or I might be from “Generation Jones“, the kids who don’t remember the Beatles and, let’s be honest, didn’t spend a lot of time obsessing over their generation – just learned that one last week. Or I might still hold the notion of generational “identity” and politics in sneering contempt.

But just because you detest something doesn’t mean it isn’t coming for you.

The memes are everywhere: Gen-Xers bragging about how they drank from firehoses, stayed out until dark, rode bikes without helmets, and are just plain tougher than the Millennials and Zeeps that followed with their helicopter parents and gluten allergies.

And there may be something to that. Not about the generations themselves, but about how they were raised, and how their feelings were treated.

I’ve joked with my kids, and other younger people, that some of my teachers were World War 2 veterans. My high school chemistry teacher had been a Navy dive bomber pilot, who was fond of telling us that his radioman and tail gunner, whom he trusted with his life, was maybe a year or two older than us, and that he wouldn’t trust us to get the donuts from the bakery.

More on point? “Feelings” weren’t the coin of the realm. If you hadn’t learned the meaning of the word “no” at home, a teacher would set you firmly straight, then and there; some of the men at the tip of a big wooden paddle if it were serious enough – as opposed to medevacing you to a therapist, writing up a special ed plan, and pumping you full of ritalin.

You didn’t get a pass for feeling, or being, bullied. You dealt with them – by hitting back, telling them off, or learning to ignore them (I did a little of all three).

And if you felt, in your adolescent anomie, like you were really, I dunno, Napoleon Bonaparte, you were not hustled to a (let’s come up with a name) personality dysphoria clinic and pumped full of drugs to make you shorter, Corsican and a military genius. You were told “No. You are Jonny Schmidt, and always will be. Now do your homework”.

Sometime in the past forty years, that changed. The emphasis on parenting focused less on community, “normalcy”, and coping. Parenting (and teaching, and child psychology) became therapeutic pastimes, focusing on validation, feelings and perceptions (and, paradoxically, teaching the skills that parents taught Xers/Jonesers and before because a discipline in psychology, “Cognitive Therapy”, that actually works and charges a ton of money);

Anyway – just as people will look at the ceiling when you stare upward, kids who are constantly asked about whether they’re depressed, or suicidal, or suffering “Trauma” from some hurt in their past, or feeling like they’re the wrong gender, are going to start thinking they’re depressed, suicidal or bound by trauma, or the wrong gender. Or at least utterly unable to deal with adverse feelings and events productively (without the help of a cognitive therapist, anyway).

Which leads to a generation of people who not only have a tough time dealing with life, but with each other. Meaning no couples, no kids, no future.

And as it turns out, this is all borne out by research.

Give the interview a listen.

Being stalked?

Living in a crime-prone neighborhood?

Have an abusive, violent ex in your life?

These upper-middle-class white suburban women have a message for you:

Suck it.

But at least you have a selfie!

Today’s leftists: “We should be more in touch with nature!”

Also today’s leftists (in this case, Briana Rose Lee’s understudy): “ZOMG! POOP! IT’S FREAKING POOP!”

The Minneapolis Left wants an urban life theme park, not a city.

Watching our “Best and Brightest” in action…:

…I’m reminded of a coach we had in college.

A famously blunt man, he would have likely looked at kids like this best/brightest and said “You’ve got a kind face. The kind of face I’d like to throw shit at”.

Let’s just say it resonates.

By the way – is it just me, or is “Best and Brightest” joining “Vibrant!” as a new sarcastic antonym?