Comments on this blog are temporarily turned off.

My friend, advice columnist and author Amy Alkon, has been chronicling the orgy of antisemitism bursting out in the Los Angeles area.

She filmed this encounter over the weekend:

Let’s take Judaism, Antisemitism and the Middle East out of this incident. Let’s say this was a domestic altercation. A man Two men use their physical bulk and subtly aggressive invasion of personal space to force a woman out of the way? That’d be considered abuse in court, and justification for a restraining order and, likely, loss of child custody if the woman really wanted to put her back into it, legally .

When I was working in bars, if I saw a man behaving like this around a woman, I’d have called the bouncers in. And there’s nothing those bouncers liked more than having a pretext to pummel guys who were threatening the ladies.

Big Left – maybe 5% of the population – is trying to intimidate the 55% that passively or actively disagree with them into submission.

And the subtle threat of violence implicit is there, in this “man’s” delivery and in Big Left’s approach to every issue today – be careful, or you’ll get Swatted/a visit from “Anti”-Fa/doxxed – is waiting out there for everyone – especially if you try to rally in response.

I’ll be interviewing Amy on my show this coming Saturday.

This blog has had a constant, self-imposed tension to it, at least to me.

Idealistic, Small-L Liberal Mitch is a free speech absolutist for reasons not the least of which being when people who find not only disagreeable but hateful are speaking in the open, then they’re doing less skulking through back alleys and plotting and scheming.

UX Pro Mitch sees the data, and knows there are four kinds of online forums:

1. Small forums that take care of themselves, because the participants fundamentally agree on everything they talk about. . And I do mean everything. A forum on bird-watching can turn into an online barroom brawl over punctuation, or Trump, or the Green Bay Packers.
2. Large forums that police their traffic pretty relentlessly. Aggressive moderation keeps things under control.
3. Forums where the “owners” don’t really care, and degenerate into a nonstop flame pit. See: The Strib comment section.
4. Forums that don’t exist anymore, because the owners got frustrated with the un-usable maelstrom they’d turned into, and shut them down. See the MinnPost comment section.

I’ve been running this blog for almost 22 years, and installed the comment section over 20 years ago – and for that entire time, I’ve striven to keep things in the #1 category above; to keep a light hand on moderation, sticking to the ideal that the best defense against bad (or annoying, or dumb, or trolling) speech speech is more good speech.

Part of that is principle. Part of that is, honestly, I don’t have the time to be a heavier hand. I don’t make enough money off this blog to hire moderators, like Powerline or Hot Air. I do 90% of the writing between 5:30-7AM – and then I go to work. All day long and, given that the team I lead stretches from the Bay Area to Bangalore, sometimes into the wee hours of the late night. I don’t want to exert a heavy hand on the comments, because I can’t.

In all that time, I can list the number of people I’ve banned on two hands, and list most if not all of them by name. And as a very general rule I’ve only banned people for three reasons:

• Picking personal fights with me that involve some variant of stalking or other hyperpersonal attacks. That’s why Bill Gleason, Dog Gone and a few others wound up pining for the electronic fjords.
• Genuine worries that letting them air their inner monologues here was harming their mental health (and, possibly, my actual health). “Doug” was one of those.
• Thinking they could take the blog over from the comments. Mitch, please.

There’s been tension between order and chaos – but the de facto “gentlemen’s agreement” to speak freely and meet bad (or dumb) speech with more better smarter speech worked for a long time. There are some blazingly smart people here, and I have learned a hell of a lot from many of you. And there’ve been some unintended but salutary consequences; for example, the impetus to turn a couple of sarcastic posts about Twin Cities Ron Paulbots into a Dickensian serial, and then a book, came from several of you in the comments.

The “gentlemen’s agreement” worked for probably 19 of the past 20 years.

Because for most of that time, while I don’t have a lot of time to read what goes on in the comment section, when I did it was almost always fun.

But it’s not fun anymore. Worse than that, it’s not especially interesting.

My hands-off approach has stopped working. The comment section has gone from a #1 to a #3.

#2 isn’t really an option. Not only do I not want to be like Sally Jo Sorenson, manically (and, it seems to me, dreadfully insecurely) screening e v e r y single comment to keep things on track – I literally can not do that. There aren’t enough hours in the day to produce and police the blog, and everything else that needs doing.

But for all that, #4 is off the table. It matters too much to me for that. Between the show prep it provides, the zen-like self-discipline of getting up early and going this every weekday, the interactions that I do like and value, and maybe (who knows?) some “sunk costs fallacy”, this place is important to me.

But there are going to be changes.

In fact, they’ve happened.

Brass Tacks: I’ve shut down the comment section. It’ll stay shut down – not permanently, but for a bit. Maybe a day, maybe a year, most likely somewhere in between.

When it comes back, things will be different. Not radically so – but different.

More later.

This post originally appeared on November 11, 2007.

When I was a little kid, I remember going to see a parade on First Avenue in downtown Jamestown. One of the highlights for the five-year-old me was walking down by the Armory building (where, a decade or so hence, my first bands would play their first gigs) and watching the National Guard guys in their olive-drab uniforms getting their gear – trucks, jeeps and so on – read for one parade or another.I clutched my first book – a book of World War II airplanes that had been my dad’s when he was about my age – and looked on in awe as the guys, middle-aged pillars of the community, milled around waiting to roll out for the assembly area.

I walked up to one of them and showed him my book. He laughed. “I was in that war!”, he said, chuckling at the awe that must have stricken me.

On the arch above the armory entrance “Co. H 164th Infantry” was carved in stone first placed during the First World War. It’d seen Jamestown boys off to war in WWI, WWII and Korea.

One of the guys who’d left that armory in 1917 for France was Frank Newberry. He lived next door to us at the corner of 3rd Avenue and 8th Street SE in Jamestown; already 80ish when I was in elementary school. Photos of him in his uniform, with his cloth puttees and “tin hat”, hung around the house; his ’03 Springfield was in a case in his basement. He’d fought in H Company at Cantigny, Soission, St. Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne (I found much later, reading the unit’s history), the places where the US entered the modern world with all its horrors. He came home, married, raised a family, shot squirrels in his back yard with a .22 rifle, and, one day in probably the mid-’60’s, built a model of the WWII destroyer USS The Sullivans.  He gave me the model when I was maybe six years old.  I was thrilled – and I still am.  The old model, still together, slightly the worse for wear after enduring three boys (my stepson, son and I), sits on my library shelf, across the room from me, as I write this. 

———-

Of course, the WII veterans were everywhere. They didn’t talk much, that I recalled; I did my researching later. The North Dakota National Guard website narrates concisely:

1941 – The North Dakota National Guard’s 164th infantry Regiment and the 188th Field Artillery Regiment were mobilized for service in World War II. 776th Tank Destroyer Battalion formed from batteries F and H of the 188th Field Artillery Regiment. The 776th went on to spend more then 550 days in actual combat in Tunisia, Italy and Central Europe.

My high school civics teacher had been a member of the 776th, if memory serves. A few of the less-bright lights in my high school used to amuse themselves by popping blown-up paper bags or throwing fireworks nearby as he walked. In his fifties, he would still throw himself flat on the ground, if he was having a bad day, if the “bang” was loud enough. Later, of course, some of us learned why; the 776th’s 550 days in action included some of the bloodiest, ugliest fighting in US Army history; El Guettar, Salerno, the Rapido, the Volturno, Monte Cassino. Rumor had it that his tank destroyer had been the only survivor of his platoon in one ugly engagement. Nobody knew, and he never talked to any of us.

He passed away maybe ten years ago.  On behalf of a couple of the ninth grade morons who didn’t know any better (and I’m happy to say I wasn’t one of them), I’m sorry.

———-

1942 – The 164th Infantry Regiment landed on Guadacanal to reinforce the First Marine Division at Henderson Airfield. The regiment became the first US Army unit to take offensive action against the Japanese during World War II.

Company H of the 164th, from Jamestown, was one of the regiment’s 12 infantry companies. In the dark days after Pearl Harbor, they were sent to the South Pacific, and in late 1942 they were shipped to the Solomon Islands to reinforce the first American offensive ground action of the war, the Marine invasion of Guadalcanal. 

The Regiment was the first Army unit sent ashore to reinforce the beleaguered First Marine Division. The NDNG’s terse prose belies the desperation of the Regiment’s action on Guadalcanal; this online forum captures some of the story, first-hand, including pages of scanned diaries from the era.

On one of their first nights in the line, in late October, the 164th and the Marines were the target of a massive Banzai charge – at a place known to history as Bloody Nose Ridge and the banks of the Matanikau River. Green farm boys just two years off the prairie, they held off the attack, earning (by various accounts I’ve read over the years) the admiration of the grizzled Marines that’d been there for an eternity – two months months – already. The Fargo Forum’s story on the unit relates:

The infantry was also given the nickname “The 164th Marines” for their bitter fight against the Japanese in the Battle for Henderson Field and the Battle of the Matanikau on the island, and became the first U.S. Army unit to take offensive action during World War II.

A bunch of the old guys around town were vets of Guadalcanal. They never talked about it – not at all; other people who knew the story passed the story on to us.  It was in the books; names of guys we knew from around town and the county popped up occasionally, attached to actions that we couldn’t picture from the grizzly fiftysomethings we knew.

———-

The Regiment fought on under MacArthur for the rest of the war:

1943 – The 164th Infantry spearheaded the Americal Division’s island hopping against the Japanese in the South Pacific. The 188th Field Artillery Regiment was split up into the 188th Field Artillery Group, the 188th Field Artillery Battalion, and the 957th Field Artillery Battalion.

Like Guadalcanal, the old vets of the 164th didn’t talk much about their time on Bougainville or in the Philippines, or on a brief stint of occupation duty in Japan after the war.

By the time the war was over, the 164th suffered 325 dead, and nearly 1,200 wounded out of about 3,000 men.

———-

The North Dakota Guard fought in Europe as well:

1944 – Members of the 188th and 957th Field Artillery Battalions landed on Utah Beach and participated in the Cherbourg Offensive and the Battle of the Bulge while driving onward to Germany.

Pete Schwab was a crusty old guy who ran “Pete’s Radiator Shop”, across from Radish Widmer’s house on Eight Street at First Avenue. He was a cranky but friendly old fellow who I remember bothering to try to find go-kart parts.

When I was in Junior High, on one of my patrols through the library, I found the unit history of the 957th Field Artillery – batteries of which had hailed from Valley City, Fargo and other parts of eastern North Dakota. I found a picture of “Pete Schwab” in the unit history; Pete the Radiator man, 30 years and a world of care younger, an ammo handler who’d won a commendation – Bronze Star, I think? – for action in France, where the battalion had beaten back a German tank breakthrough (155mm shells can be persuasive). The 957th fought through France, and fired in support of the 2nd Armored Division in the battle that put the cap on the Bulge, at Dinant and Celles, Belgium. They went on to help liberate the Nordhausen concentration camp, and ended the war in Bavaria.

And then…:

1945 – World War II ends with the surrender of Germany and Japan. North Dakota National Guard units are released from active duty and return home.

Where they built the city I grew up with freedoms I scarcely knew how to appreciate, thanks to the service they scarcely mentioned.

———-

The 164th served in Korea – more Jamestown boys shipped out, and most came home.  The high school put up a large wooden Honor Roll that hung over the entrance to the Junior High for decades, listing all of the Jamestown High School boys that fought in World War II and Korea – with a number of stars highlighting the ones that died.  As I got older and learned more about what the Roll meant, the number of stars on the Roll was daunting. 

The 164th Infantry Regiment was disbanded during the ’50s.  North Dakota’s National Guard was converted to Combat Engineers, for the most part.  And Jamestown’s Armory – in the old building and then, in the late seventies, in the basement of the new Civic Center – was turned over to the new Jamestown company, Co. B of the 141st Engineer Battalion. 

Many more guys from Jamestown served, of course.  One of them was Fred Jansonius, one of my father’s star’s on the Speech Team.  He enlisted in the Army, and was killed in the Tet Offensive, serving in the Ninth Infantry Division.  JHS’ Speech award is named after him.

———-

Years passed.  B/141st served in Iraq – and two more Jamestown boys died overseas, including Phil Brown, nephew of one of my high school friends and of my favorite Junior High teacher. 

Many more served and came home, of course, including my high school classmate Joey Banister, who started as a private in B Company during high school, and was a Major on the Battalion’s staff by the time the battalion went to Iraq; not bad for ol’ knucklehead Joey.  He was among many other Jamestown guys, many of them friends and classmates, who’ve served in one capacity or another in the war on terror. 

And to them, today, the Jamestown guys and everyone else; though it seems not nearly enough, I send my thanks.

(more…)

Let the record show that Poland was fighting the fight we currently face over 100 years ago…

…and is still a leader.

Happy 105th birthday, independent Poland!

Back when I was working in bars, I was working at this toilet bar in North Saint Paul. It was a boring Friday night in the middle of summer. Once of the bouncers left early, leaving the bar with one bouncer – a big guy with a curly perm that was trying to get into professional wrestling.

The other bouncer apparently went out to the parking lot and hoovered up a line of bad Bolivian Marching Powder, maybe spiked with PCP – because he came back into the bar, started bellowing at the room, and then throwing punches. He smacked the bartender, cutting his lip and knocking out a tooth or two. He also tangled with a couple of customers. throwing tables and chairs and bottles all over the place.

The rampage went on for a while. Five minutes? Ten? I’m not sure.

But the entire time, as the coked up loony was on his rampage, the Wrestler guy bouncer stood and bellowed “You want a piece of me? HEY! Do you want a piece of me?” over and over, like he was filming an interstitial bit for a pro wrestling tournament.

Nothing at all useful, mind you. Just bellowing ” You want a piece of me? Yeah, you! You want a piece of me“, as the guy trashed the bar and a few of its employees and patrons.

I wonder if that wannabe-wrestler isn’t working as a consultant for the GOP these days.

Conservative groups have been very susceptible to the siren song of tough, unyielding talk combined with poo-poohing actually affecting policy. One example particularly near and dear to my heart – “Minnesota Gun Right”, a group that’s not from Minnesota and will never affect gun rights, but does make a lot of tough-talking videos.

Democrats are phenomenally vulnerable nationwide – married to exploding debt, economic stagnation, genocide against Israel and “woke” decay.

And far too much of the GOP, appears to be heading to the election focused not only on talking the talk and ignoring the walk, but saying “the walk” is stuff “Establishment RINOs” do.

Ben Shapiro talked about this in the first couple of segments of his podcast a few days ago:

To much of the GOP, politics is a (picking adjective carefully) vicious cycle:

• “The swamp” needs to be drained.
• But the swamp has rigged the system to prevent us from draining it.
• “The Swamp” is the product of policy – which, like any policy in a democracy, can be changed, provided you win enough elections to push policy in the direction you want.
• But getting elected to office, and having to do the inevitable horse-trading and make the inevitable compromises that come with actually having to make policy in a divided government makes you “the swamp” (see: Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy). Indeed, talking in terms of “Moving the Needle”, as opposed to “draining the swamp” or otherwise “burning it dall down”, is itself considered being “part of the establishment”.
• But bellowing against the Swamp feels good (and is good for fundraising). Because…repeat from the top.

Conservatives used to be able to play the long game – indeed, conservatism used to be about society’s long game. The Left sought their immediate gratification.

Maybe it’s the most toxic possible result of the collapse of the societal attention span – “conservatism”, or at least the GOP, has become the party of emotion.

…coming Monday.

“But Mitch – why are you so intransigent a Second Amendment advocate?”

Glad you asked.

Growing up left of center as I did, the first real inkling I had that gun control was a stupid idea was reading about the Holocaust, and realizing that armed people don’t get shoved into boxcars.

And seeing the same story – modern Nazis trying to murder modern Jews – is a refresher.

Like this story, of three good guys with guns:

Seeing what’s going on in streets of the West today isn’t anything to make you feel like this sort of thing isn’t possible in the US.

Last month, as eighty years ago, the difference between death and at least a chance at life was having a gun.

From.

My.

Cold.

Dead.

Hand.

To: Millennials, And Maybe Some Zeepers
From”. Mitch Berg, Obstreperous Peasant, Millie Parent And Generational Agnostic
Re: Stop Digging

Dear Millennials – and many of you in Gen Z,

It’s not like I don’t understand the anger.

When I was in high school and college, the “Baby Boom” was barely entering its prime years. The oldest ones were in their mid-thirties. And they were sucking all the air out of the room. The world didn’t always talk about demographics, but when they did, they talked about the Baby Boomers, their shenanigans, their ways and customs and music and culture. They were the first generation in human history to not only have a “youth culture”, but to see their “youth culture” become society’s dominant social, artistic, media and eventually political culture.

And of course, the “Boomers” were having all the fun, earning all the money, getting all the cool jobs and thoroughly enjoying the soceital conversation being all about their demographic Long March.

As someone from the generation after them – whose only memory of the Beatles was hearing on the radio they’d broke up, for whom Vietnam and the Summer of Love were already history by the time I was old enough to learn about them, and who was keenly aware that I was going to be competing against an awful lot of them – I was already sick of hearing about them.

Not sick of them – per se. Just sick of all the constant overweening hyper focus on them, and the realization I’d be competing with them and their social publicity juggernaut for the rest of my life.

So, why all the background?

Because, Millennials? You are on track to be vastly more hated by your progeny than the Baby Boom.

And you Zoomers have plenty of time to do even worse.

You think the Baby Boom got entitled to having society rebuild itself around their needs, passions, dysfunctions and mistakes?

Millennials are no less entitled – and tack on a layer of manic hypersensitivity and victorian censoriousness, not instead of, but on top of all that entitlement. And where the (stereotyped versin of the) Baby Boom obsessed on and define themselves by their material achievements and accomplishments, the Millennial stereotype is people suffocating everything around them with their maladies; no crowd of Fort Lauderdale yentas complaining about their rheumatism compares to an office full of millennials with their lactoses and glutens and dysthymias and celiacs and I’m feeling depressed just writing about it. And the whipsawing of Baby Boom politics – from hippies to Reagan voters – was a lot more interesting than the mushy gullible center-leftism that had you all voting for Obama – a decision we’ll be paying for for a generation.

You’ve been warned. .

That is all.

Lest anyone doubted that Big Left today is Marxist to its foetid roots, we now join a white, uppser-middle class white progressive member of the Saint Louis Park School Board pulling intersectional rank on….

…Muslim parents objecting to porn in elementary schools:

That’s the thing about intersectionalism; while more virtue attaches to people the farther they go out on the intersectional tree (the transgender Afro-Muslim handicapped lesbian is the peak), the actual executive authroity is supposed to remain toward the center, with the white “prog” women.

The Cano Corollary to Berg’s 21st Law is a new addition to the canon – and like all the Berg’s Laws, it is an observation that started as satire.

To wit:

In Blue city electoral politics, “blue” never gets “lighter” or less “progressive”.  There is only one electoral direction – more “progressive”.

It’s named for the former Minneapolis 9th Ward council woman, dotty dimbulb and “third world feminist” (a term almost as grimly hilarious as “queer for Palestine”) who, in retrospect,not only seems moderate, but likely would have a hard time getting nominated for office in MInneapolis, due to being “too centrist”.

It was in full effect in Minnneapolis and Saint Paul last night, Democratic Socialist-endorsed DFLers Aisha Chughtai and Aurin Chowdhury swept to wins. Depending on the machjinations of Ranked Choice Voting, it appears Soren Stevenson – another DFLer with DSA endorsement – might eke out a win over council president Andrea Jenkins – the leftist transgender black woman who, not so long ago, seemed like the left edge of the Overton Window, and may as well be Jesse Helms today.

I’ll point out that not only did I predict this after 2021, but so did Big Left; after the “Defund” question went town to humiliating defeat, Big Left swore they weren’t going to let that happen again. The DSA – which is now well within the left edge of the Overton WIndow – started pumping money and resources and lots and lots of noise into the race the week after the 2021 election.

Expect everything in Minneapolis to get worse, coarser, less civil, uglier and more stupid – until 2-4 years out, when a group comes along, refers to the DSA as “centrist” and the mainstsream DFL as “Republicans”. I wouldn’t rule out an overt Communist party, to the extent there’s actually a meaningful distinction anymore.

Saint Paul? Well, call it a split: DSA-endorsed Hwa Jeong Kim appears to have won in Ward 5; the DSA’s Pa Der Vant appears to have lost – but narrowly – in Ward 7.

The 1% sales tax hike to pay for the things the city was already supposed to be paying for with its ridiculous taxes, and perhaps to try to compensate for the gutting of the city’s retail sector? It passed overwhelmingly. There was never any action on that bet. The most regressive tax there is just got increased on a city full of people who are less able to pay it every day (thanks, “Bidenomics”).

School board? Garbage in, garbage out.

The closest thing I have to good news in the Cities proper? In my ward, Ward 4, people expressed their dissatisfaction with the “choices” – the unknown Bob Bushard and incumbent Mitra “Chasing Intersectional Perfection” Jalali by submitting about as many write-in votes than the rest of the city put together.

Other news that might, depending on what happens, be good? Duluth turned out Emily “Turbo-Karen” Larson for explicitly more moderate DFLer Roger Reinert. Will he be able to moderate the Duluth City Council – about whose results I know nothing. While you can’t judge a book by its cover, the winners last night all have names that scream “Progressive Karen” to me. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. .

Action on that bet? Step right up.

The incredibly aptly named Representative Debbie Dingell lectures us on semantics:

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free“ means different things to different people in different times!“, says the font of wisdom, in rising to the defense of the loathsome modern Nazi Rashida Tlaib.

And she’s right, in a sense.

The phrase “the final solution” can mean a lot of different things; it can be the formula that gets rid of your Creeping Charlie, or solves your credit card debt. So, too, can the German phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei”, or “work will set you free” which, set free of other context, seems straight out of Horatio Alger

Except.

Except when you’re talking about people who wanted, or want, to remove Jews, from some corner of the world.

Then, they mean exactly one thing, and one thing only. And anyone who pretends otherwise is being disingenuous, precious, a useful, idiot, or lying like a sack of garbage.

And if Dingell is capable of being anything, it might very well be all four.

This is this sort of thing that should send Americans to be barricades. This is ample reason to block freeways (in DC and Silicon Valley and Saint Paul’s Government Canyon anyway). This is a reason to break out tar and feathers and lots and lots of harsh tweets.

It’s a thread. Click through in Twitter.

Not that this is news – but here’s one of a wallet full of money quotes:

-EIP [Election Integrity Partnership – Ed.]“stakeholders” (including the federal gov’t) would submit misinformation reports

-EIP would “analyze” the report and find similar content across platforms

-EIP would submit the report to Big Tech, often with a recommendation on how to censor

If you’d told me 15 years ago that voting for candidates attitudes about censorship, lockdowns, mandates and enforcing top-down social cohesion would be as important as stances on spending, immigration, healthcare and foreign policy, I’d have shaken my head and wondered “what else are they going to tell me – CD8 will someday be Republican?”

Whatever opposition I’ve had to deportation of illegal immigrants is waning fast:

I’ll work my ass off for the first Presidential candidate to promise to deport aliens who are actively hostile to everything this country stands for.

I said “actively”.

And if the people in this mob are citizens? Deport whatever immigration official or politician OKed their naturalization.

Or at least tar and feather them.

I wish more American – especially Minnesota DFL – politicians could speak with the moral clarity that German vice-chancellor Robert Habeck does:

While allowing that the Germans have a tighter definition of free speech than we do – when you let the depraved speak out loud, you can see what they’re doing in a way you can’t in Europe, and I vastly prefer the American way – this would still be considered pretty daring in the US.

And he’s a Green.o. Talking like a classical liberal, on this issue at least.

This is apposed to the avatar of modern left-liberal left-center-leftism, President Obama…

…who is right at the top of the short list for worst president ever, with Woodrow Wilson, and far and away the worst of my lifetime.

When Germans out-do Amercan pols on this subject, it’s time for some electoral bells to be rung.

(Links bogarted from Powerline).

Today’s music list:

“The Devil’s greatest achievement was convincing the world he didn’t exist”
— “Keyser Söze”, The Usual Suspects

One of the greatest achievements of the modern Big Left is convincing the world, and itself, that the Nazi movement of the 1920s and 1930s was, like today’s “American” “Nazi” party, a movement of ignorant blue-collar and no-collar losers.

It was in fact a youth movement, led by academics and artists. Besides Hitler himself, most of the cabinet that ran Germany from 1933 to 1945, much of the party’s senior leadership were writers, playwrights, journalists, painters and academics.

Same as the Communists before them.

And same as today’s Big Left. This is Judith Butler,

And if you wonder if today’s Big Left is bigger and more powerful? You’re not alone.

SCENE: It’s September 1, 1939. In the command post of the Republic of Poland Armed Forces. Poland’s Minister of War, Jozef BECK, and the Marshal of the Polish Military chief Marshal Edward SMYGŁY-RYDZ, General Szymon NOWACKI of the Armored Force,, are at the center of a gaggle of staff officers, poring over a wall full of maps showing a dire situation.

SMYGŁY-RYDZ: The Germans have cut off Gdańsk, have broken through west of Krakow, and are threatening to cut off the Poznan Army.

GENERAL NOWACKI: Marshal, we’ve got the Seventh Armored Brigade in reserve. They could hit the breakthrough from the flank.

SMYGŁY-RYDZ: We’ll need the Sixth Corps to support them on the left.

STAFF COLONEL: They’re in OK position for that.

Corporal Filip PRZYBYL, the headquarters Administrative assistant, enters the command post and salutes.

PRZYBYL: Marshal, the MInister of Social Justice has arrived .

(The officers groan)

SMYGŁY-RYDZ: Show him in.

(Social Justice Minister Evgeny LYBRZELSZ enters the room and doffs his French-style top hat)

LYBRZELSZ: Marshal Smygły-Rydz? I’m told you’re planning a counterattack against the Germans.

SMYGŁY-RYDZ: Well..yeah, The Niemcy attack threatens Poland’s very existence.

NOWACkI: If they break past Poznan, there is no obstacle between them and Warsaw.

LYBRZELSZ: We can’t launch the attack.

SMYGŁY-RYDZ: (Stops short, dumbfounded) What now?

LYBRZELSZ: There is no humanitarian corridor for German civilians.

(As an air raid siren goes off in the background, the officers stand, agog).

NOWACKI: What on earth are you talking about?

LYBRZELSZ: Attacking the Germans when there’s no allowances for humanitarian aid to German civilians is immoral.

SMYGŁY-RYDZ: This is a literal threat to our existence, by a nation that’s completely mobilized for war.

LYBRZELSZ: So you are committing genocide against Germans.

Entire room falls silent. The sound of bombs in the distance swells.

SMYGŁY-RYDZ: So, see to the destruction of Poland, then

LYBRZELSZ: What are you, a bigot?

And SCENE

Big Feminism – in this case, the always-puerile Jessica Valenti – is going after Idaho with the same nuanced grace as a Rashida Tlaib press conference.

They’re attacking over Idaho’s first prosecution in an “abortion trafficking” case:

Unmentioned (but for community notes) – the woman was impregnated by a rapist. The accused rapist and his mother allegedly kidnapped the pregnant woman and drove her to Idaho to destroy the evidence.

If they’d only driven to Minnesota…

SCENE: Mitch Berg is dumping flashings from pick up truck at the county yard waste site. Bill Gunkel, former Republican who is now chairmain of the Inver Grove Heights chapter of “Former Republicans for Ron Paul”, pulls up next to him, towing a trailer full of leaves.

GUNKEL Merg!

BERG: Hey..

GUNKEL: Shut up. You eternal war people have really stepped in it with Ukraine.

BERG: Not sure I’ve actually stated an opinion about…

GUNKEL: You know that the Ukrainians are Nazis, right?

BERG: There are some peolple who identify as Nazis, that’s true. In a country of forty million people that was brutalized by the Commuists within living memory, you’re going to find people who equate “Nazi” with “anti-communist”.

GUNKEL: So you’re OK sending money to Nazis?

BERG: Not sure that I said anything of the sort…

GUNKEL: You’re OK supporting Nazis, at all?

BERG: Let’s accept the fact there is a small minority of Nazi symps in Ukrainian society.

GUNKEL: OK…?

BERG: How do you suppose it compares with the number of Stalinists in Russian society?

GUNKEL: Who?

BERG. Stalinists. Symps of Josef Stalin, most murderous dictator in European history.

GUNKEL: Never heard of him.

BERG: Huh.

GUNKEL: But was he a Nazi?

BERG: Uh…no…

GUNKEL: So – Ukraine, Nazis.

BERG: Right.

And SCENE

The GOP controlled US House did its job – passing aid to Israel along with a proposal to slash the funding bounty the IRS picked up during the pandemic.

Ryan Winkler did his job – pimping for Mother Government:

When it was pointed out that hampering the IRS and supporting the IDF were both blows for freedom against tyranny, and that criticizing government is a constitutional right and obligation, while stifling that right is the actual “extreme” view, Winkler…

….well, he Wilnkered:

Where to start?

Once you reject the straw man (no, not “All” laws. Just the stupid an tyrannical ones, by your indulgent leave), just because a law was “validly (sic) enacted” doesn’t make it good.

Jim Crow laws were “valid” – enacted by due process by an elected government. So,, in a sense, were the Nuremberg Laws – the Nazi Party took power until the color of German law.

And I’d ask WInkler if he’d be so sanguine if the IRS was sandbagging the Democrat Socialists of America rather than the Tea Party, but that – either that bit of oppression, or WInkler giving a straight answer to a question, both – are about as likely as Ray Charles getting a called third strike on Kirby Puckett.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is cleaning out his garden boxes. Busy hauling stalks to the truck, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE, patrolling the alley, looking for over-filled recycling bins to report to the city.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Hey, Avery…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. The GOP’s new Speaker of the House is anti-science. I have proof!

BERG: Huh. So since the Speaker’s job has nothing to do with developing theories, formulating hypotheses, designing and conducting experiments and documenting results, much less trying to figure out how the universe “really” formed, what difference does it make?

LIBRELLE: Who wants our leaders to believe fairy tales?

BERG: Let’s ignore for a moment that theology, like mathematics, logic, physics, even history, are different ways of analyzing different evidence about the universe. Let’s say that you have a brain tumor, and you need brain surgery, or you’re going to die, but quick. So you go to the world’s leading brain surgeon – the one person who can save your life. So far so good?

LIBRELLE: OK…?

BERG: That person has got to be a person of impeccable scientific credentials, right?

LIBRELLE: Of course.

BERG: So you meet that surgeon, and he explains his record – overwhelmingly successful – and his technique, his reasoning, and his plan. And everything sounds right. So far, so good?

LIBRELLE: Right…?

BERG: Then he tells you he believes the universe is 6,000 years old and was created in six days by an imnipotent God.

LIBRELLE: Oh, I’d cancel the surgery instantly!

BERG: Why?

LIBRELLE: He clearly doesn’t believe in science! But why are you wasting time with a hypothetical example?

BERG: Nothing hypothetical about it.

LIBRELLE: When I know more about science than the world’s leading brain surgeon…

BERG: Your degree was in what?

LIBRELLE: Grievance studies with a minor in Sociology!

BERG: Right. Hey, look (points down the alley) I think the Gruenbergs mixed green glass in their clear glass…

LIBRELLE: (Looks down the alley. BERG makes his escape. LIBRELLE doesn’t notice, heading down the alley and getting his…er, her…er, a smart phone camera ready to go…).

And SCENE.

I asked a question last week that no Twin Cities “journalist” can seem to being themselves to ask: if food shelves are running short, what could the half billion dollars embezzled by DFL-affiliated non-profiteers have done to help things?

Now, I was in the middle of a brutal week of work last week, so I missed a few other questions that were, in hindsight, begging to be asked:

• The DFL tells us, relentlessly, that Minnesota’s economy is just humming along. So – why is demand for food shelves do high?
• The Biden Administration tells us “Bidenomics” has the nation’s economic blender set to “puree”. So all of us who are seeing evidence like this to the contrary – are we just believing our lying eyes?
• If we’re providing “free” breakfast and lunch to every PreK-12 student in the state, that should take an immense burden off the state’s food shelf system. But it seems it’s not.
• And the biggest, best question of all – In a state clogged with entitled, preening people with little tin “journalist” badges, why is a schnook blogger and talk show host from Saint Paul the only person asking these questions?

If the people of Minnesota were to start asking these questions for themselves, this would be a very different place.

Professor Galloway: I hear what you’re saying.

I do.

And on behalf of all the small businesses strangled by your mistake, all the parents who watched their kids slowly go crazy and stupid, and felt their personal, social and business relationships fraying and breaking?

I reject it.

Forgiveness without atonement is meaningless.

Try again.

Find out more her about the American Veterans Memorial Park, hopefully in Cannon Falls.