Dad had the most amazing book collection. One bedroom of the house I grew up in was Dad’s office and study, and it had bookshelves from floor to ceiling. 

And the variety was astounding. Not just the usual English teacher stuff, classics of western literature and all the major contemporary authors – although it had all of them. 

It also had books that reflected pretty much any subject Dad had had even the most passing interest in. 

For example: I learned at least the basics of how to navigate on the open sea using a sextant, compass and chronometer, from a book on celestial navigation he had amid a collection of books about boats, seafaring and the great ocean explorers, which I pretty much completely vacucmed up by the time I was 12. 

From that same section, when I was nine or ten he gave me a copy of “Endurance”, the story of the Shackelton expedition – a group of of British Antarctic explorers whose ship had gotten crushed in the ice on the Ross Ice Shelf in 1916, and had to survive for two years on an ice floe before sailing lifeboats across the stormy South Atlantic (why, yes, life lessons were involved), but one of many books about people who conquered mountains, oceans, space, the unknown, the human condition, and every manner of art. 

He was fascinated by stories of people stretching far beyond themselves and conquering the impossible – and passed that fascination on to me. 

Dad also *hated* traveling, detested the cold, and was terrified of water. He taught me, and three generations of students, the infinite sprawl of the human mind – but was so terrified of “big city traffic” that he let my mom do all the “city driving”…

…when we went to Fargo or Bismark. 

It was one of many conundrums about my dad.

——————

I’ve always chalked his hatred of cold up to the fact that he was born in the hottest summer in North Dakota history – July 5, 1936, deep in the heart of the dust bowl. It was 120 the day he was born; my grandmother once told me it was 108 degrees in the house when they brought Dad home. I used to marvel that he could play three sets of tennis on a 90 degree day, have a cup of iced tea and go shoot 18 holes of golf without breaking a sweat, while if the morning temperature was below 40 he started like a Fiat Spyder. 

His parents, Oscar and Beatrice Berg, ran a little photography studio in Jamestown. They were an older couple – Grandpa was 47 and Grandma 32 when Dad was born – so dad wound up being an only child. 

Grandpa Oscar had a cardiac arrest and died suddenly while shoveling snow at the studio when Dad was five, in March of 1942 – the darkest days of World War Two, when people genuinely worried about the country getting invaded. I can’t imagine what it was like, being five and having to absorb all that – but my siblings and I never had to imagine the after-effects. Grandma had to keep the studio afloat, sometimes working sixteen hour days; my Mom once said Dad had a lot in common with orphans, including a lot of anxiety; for his mother, and for things that were unknown and out of his control. With the exception of five years starting his teaching career in Rugby, North Dakota, and this past seven months in Billings, he never lived more than a mile from where he was born. 

He graduated from Jamestown High School, then went to college in Jamestown, got a BA in English, and started his teaching career. 

——————

And Dad was a *great* teacher. .One of the two best teachers I ever had. If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty decent chance you were a student of Dad’s – most everyone in Jamestown had Dad in school, or had kids, or parents, or in at least one case both, who took Dad’s classes – Writing, Literature, and his marquee class, Speech. I took all three classes from him – and they may have been the hardest “A”s I earned in high school. Dad was always worried (!) about being perceived as giving a kid of his favorable treatment, and I think he may have tried just a *tad* too hard, sometimes. 

But he was the most amazing teacher. Even as a snotty adolescent, I was agog at how good he was at getting a room full of kids like me to pay attention, to learn, and to love it. 

Dad had an amazing talent for saying preposterous things, and convincing people they were legitimate. I may have inherited the talent [1] but Dad was the master. He used that talent to play elaborate pranks on his classes. My favorite: one day when we walked into class, he gave each of us a piece of fanfold paper (kids, ask your parents) with a bunch of official looking mumbo-jumbo on it, and a number, circled in red ink. Mine was “68”. 

As we took our seats, Dad explained that the government was starting a new program; since there weren’t enough resources for everyone to go to college, the government had been tracking our test scores, aptitude and IQ scores since kindergarten to gauge our suitability for different careers. And it all boiled down to a score, a number between 1 and 100. 

If your score was over 90? You were going to university, going into management, becoming lawyers and engineers and doctors and officers in the military. 

70-90? Trade school. Foreman on the job site; sergeants in the Army, produce manager at the grocery store. 

Below 70? Well, society needed farm labor, hot tar roofers, shelf-stockers and Army privates, too. 

Naturally, nearly everyone’s score was below 70 – I don’t think anyone had more than a 75. And kids took it seriously – kids who thought they were en route to law school or engineering or education suddenly were thinking they were going to be stocking shelves at Red Owl for the rest of their lives. 

The goal, of course, wasn’t *just* to prank the kids (although he loved a well-crafted ruse, and played many on my siblings and I just for the pure love of the game). It was to teach kids about discrimination – having your life sandbagged because of something arbitrary that you djdn’t control. And it was effective. 

Another thing he mastered that still boggles me; the first day of every class, every semester, he spent learning the name of every kid in every seat. He had some elaborate internal mnemonic that I still don’t understand, that allowed him to get the combination of period (he usually taught 4-5 classes a day), seat and name hammered into his long-term memory. It was a long, slow first day – but he he considered it a base level of respect, to actually know all the students name. 

And at reunions well into the 2000s, he would meeting former students, even from the early 1960s, and remember where they sat. He taught for about forty years – five or so in Rugby, and the rest in Jamestown – and he remembered every kid and their seat. 

I still can’t imagine. 

—————0—

If was while living in Rugby, but visiting his mother in Jamestown, on a double date (with his lifelong best friend, Daniel “Buddy” Buchanan, whose daughter is a Facebook friend) that he met my mother, Janice Hall – who was out with Bud. Dad and Jan wound up talking, and going out, and in fairl8y short order getting married in July of 1961. I came along a couple years later, not long before we moved back to Jamestown (born during a blizzard; it was -25 with a howling wind when they took me home from the hospital. There’s some foreshadowing for you). There, there were more kids – Susan (who died at about ten days old), Barb and Jim. 

—————

Another of Dad’s conundrums – for a guy who was so seriously enthralled by the adventures of others, he could never imagine living anyplace *but* Jamestown. But he also wanted to be a writer, a playwright, an impresario. 

Seems like a hard plane to land in a town of 15,000. But not for Dad. 

In the early ‘80s, with a couple of other teachers and staffers from the local college, he started “Jamestown Performing Arts”, a group dedicated to producing and promoting local theater. And then they set to work writing and producing plays – one-acts, full-length, whatever – and recruiting casts, and putting on the shows and, starting in about 1984, the “Last Annual Comedy Review”, a yearly comedy production featuring entire local talent, material and production. Dad produced and MCed it every year for something like 34 seasons – every one of them a different show. 

If you think that sounds ambitious for a town of 15,000 – you’re right, It is. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in towns that size. 

Dad’s attitude was, since I don’t wanna go to Broadway, I’m going to create my own. 

So when I walked into a radio station in 2004 to ask them to give a bunch of bloggers some airtime every week, it may not have seemed *quite* as crazy to me as it did to everyone else. It runs in the family. 

—————

Dad retired in 1995. The school bought out his contract so they could hire a cheaper teacher. And that was OK – he was ready to move on to the next chapter. He started writing books; his first, self-published in 1996, “Common Ground” was the story of Jamestown’s baseball stadium, which had been home to an amazing tradition of small town baseball that included many of the stars of the old Negro Leagues. 

He always sold enough of each book to pay for publishing his next book – which kept him chugging along until a couple of years ago. He was also wrote columns for the Jamestown Sun, and recorded editorials for the public radio station in Fargo for 25 years or so. I used to joke that Dad had had a longer radio career than I did. 

He stayed very active as long as he could; he played tennis into his sixties, and shot his first hole in one at 72. And he always loved having an audience. 

—————

My parents split up in 1990 (although he was abidingly grateful to be able to stay close to his inlaws, my grandparents, aunts and uncles). My Dad was more than happy exploring the world in his mind, and creating his own right where he was. Mom wanted to actually see it – and she did. That’s another whole story – but Dad’s anxiety about things “being different* was a problem. 

And it was for me, too. 

Many sons, especially oldest sons, wrestle hard with getting out of their father’s shadows to have their own identity. I certainly did. As long as I can remember, Dad was a pillar of the community, one of the most admired people *in* that little world. He was a big, universally venerated fish in a small pond – and I was Bruce Berg’s Son. I’m pretty sure he wanted me to follow in his footsteps and “take ove the family business” as a high school teacher, preferably in Jamestown. Teaching is stable, and the benefits are good, and there’s a pension. 

And I was simultaneously proud to *be* Bruce Betg’s son, and still couldn’t imagine spending my whole life in that shadow. I’ve told the story elsewhere – I left Jamestown and moved to Minneapolis; ostensibly to be a musician, but really just to get to someplace where I was Mitch Berg, full stop. 

My mom once told me that Dad admired me for doing it, but was also terrified that one of his kids had left the world he knew and jumped into the deep end of the social pool. I was well into my forties before he stopped reminding me I could still be high school teacher. 

Dad remarried a few years later, by the way, to Rowena “Roni” Bye – who also loved being nestled into Jamestown life; they shared a lot of long walks and movies and Roni’s amazing cooking. They were both very lucky to find each other. 

—————

Dad taught me a lot of things that are fundamental to my life – how to write, how to speak in public, how to debate fairly and logically but incisively. 

He did *not* teach me how to fish, hunt, fix cars, build additions onto my house, track game, pack a bearing or any of the things other dads taught their sons. Growing up, I used to wish my siblings and I *could* have learned more of that at home (my mom taught me how to field-strip a toilet) – but growing up with a widowed single mom who was always working, he never learned any of those things, not to mention how to swim. Had Grandpa Oscar lived, that likely would have been different; Oscar was an outdoorsman, hunter, and we’re told kind of a hard guy; Dad may well have turned out *much* different had Oscar lived, and so might his kids. 

I was thinking about that a few years ago; being a father myself was one of the hardest things I have ever done. But throughout my adventure of being a parent of two kids, I was able to ask myself “what would Dad have done?” It didn’t always help – what does? – but the example was out there when I needed it. 

And it occurred to me; Dad raised three kids, and did a pretty decent job, *figuring it out on his own as he did it*, With no father’s example to fall back on. 

And that? That amazes me. 

—————

Dad passed away last night. He was 89. He died, pretty much, of what people used to call “old age”. Things just started falling apart, first slowly, and then very quickly. But he died last night, in his sleep, with my sister nearby, after a few days of visits from grandkids and great-grandkids, not really communicating but seeming to enjoy all he little kids giggling at how weird Mom and the uncles looked in the photo albums. 

There are many worse endings to stories like this. 

—————

The culminating moment of Bruce Springsteen‘s Broadway show was when he said he’d realized, well into his 50s, that all of the music he had written had been basically telling the story of his father , without really knowing it.

In some ways, I could say the same – as different as we are, we have both followed many of the same dreams, in very different ways . 

And I guess we all can say the same thing, in our own way; we are all the most important stories any of our parents ever get to tell.

———— 

[1] I’m afraid I may have convinced a few people that Nicole DID frame OJ. I don’t know my own strength. 

Tim Walz was unable to cajole, emotionally manipulate or bully the MNGOP into a very special session on guns, to help him never waste the crisis of the Annunciation School shooting last month.  Go figure – the guy who is a walking symbol of tyranny and whose wife gets tingly at the smell of burning rubber wants to gut the amendment that makes being a tyrant risky. 

So he’s going to take the show on the road.

The “town halls” will no doubt follow the DFL’s format for these things perfected during the Obamacare “debate”; attendees will be screened for loyal membership in the DFL.

But I think a little tailgate party outside might be fun.  I haven’t organized anything like this in a while; I’m a little overdue.  

If the Governor starts scheduling these things in the Metro – and there’s not snowball’s chance on a Dominican beach limbo party that they’ll be anywhere but the Metro, Duluth or Kim Norton’s Rochester – it might be fun to have a little tailgate party outside.  

Hm.  

Check back. 

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Governor Walz wants to call a special session of the legislature this Fall, but only if Democrats can get the legislation they want guaranteed in advance.  Might be worth a look, assuming Republicans get the same deal.  What do Democrats want? 

Assault weapons ban.  High capacity magazine ban.  Binary trigger ban. 

Um, say Democrats, have any of you heard of the Bruen case?   Supreme Court held that the right to bear arms existed before the Constitution was adopted, so only regulations on firearms which existed prior to the Constitution can pass muster.  None of your gun control ideas existed in 1789.  All of your ideas are unconstitutional.  Why are you holding up a special session to pass laws you know are unconstitutional?

Joe Doakes

 

To squeeze engagement out of their emotional, gullible base? 

The Governor is clearly trying hard in his campaign for third term.  He’s actually putting out tweets involving things other than being fed corn dogs by Peggy Flanagan.  

But I saw this, and I gotta say, I’m nervous:

If you’ve been watching the Walz administration, this is a sign to start watching for stories about fraud in the MN Department of Transportation. 

I’m joking.  But with this administration, and this DFL, jokes become reality all too often.  

Hence the Berg’s Laws.  

Omar Fateh, socialist candidate for Mayor of Minneapolis. 

He supports gun control. Like, eventually, all of ’em. 

He supports abolishing the police, and replacing them with “violence interruptors”. 

But for him?

BTW, Berg’s 20th Law is in effect.   I’ll let you be the judge as to whether this vandalism is legitimate.  

Thoughts?

I don’t throw this kind of talk around lightly – but the DFL’s approach to this “special session” is intensely, profoundly, corrosively evil. 

Watch Walter Hudson’s video:

To run the story down:

1. Rep. Elliott Engen proposed language in the “Shield Act” that would have provided money for school security
2. The local rep for “The Ted Nugent Fan Club” sent a letter endorsing the proposal. 
3. Just kidding.  It wasn’t the Ted Nugent fan club.  It was the regional rep for Moms Demand Action.  A Bloomberg-funded gun grabber group.
4. That regional rep got her nose whacked with a news paper by the National Moms and the DFL.  Why?  Because they didn’t want a GOP freshman get a win when they wanted to take that district back.  

This whole charade is about headlines and votes.  This is what Richard Carlbom (who looks in NO WAY like a young Herman Göring, pinky swear) specializes at.  

Joe Doakes, late of Como Park, emails:

The American judicial system is obsolete.  It was never intended to handle the kind of mass cheating we see today.  We need a new system.

 

For example, the law is set up to adjudicate the validity of individual ballots.  If the challenger cannot prove a specific ballot was invalidly cast, then the presumption is the ballot is valid and must be counted.

 

What about a suitcase full of ballots, or a box of ballots in the trunk of a car, or let’s think big: suppose someone backs up a dump truck to the counting office and dumps 50,000 ballots on the floor.  Can we prove that any individual ballot is invalid?  No. Then they all must be counted?  Hell no, they’re obviously fraudulent and everyone knows it, but the law is simply not equipped to handle fraud on such a massive scale.

 

We need a better system.

 

Joe Doakes

Joe Doakes, no longer of Como Park, emails:

Police investigating an adult enrolled in high school.  You’d think they would encourage adult education.  

 

Claiming to be 17 but actually 21.  So he’s a little older than his classmates.  Maybe he’s turning his life around.  He identifies as 17, what’s the problem?  He can reinvent his gender or his species but not his age?  Does that make sense?

 

Did I mention he was also on the roster of the football team?  Wonder who turned him in?

 

Joe Doakes

I caught part of Secretary Hegseth’s speech yesterday.   

I can see where the whole “Make the military a military again” think might get liberals exercised – they tend to see the military as a social program with some regrettable weapons involved.  

The part I heard sounded like it could have been an answer to Edwin Luttwak’s “Pentagon and the Art of War”, in which the historian noted that the Pentagon was overgeneraled, and heavily focused on maintaining a bureaucracy capable of re-fighting World War 2.   

Over generaled?  At the height of the Cold War, the US millitary had roughly one flag rank officer (general or admiral) per 2,500 or so troops.  

Today it’s close to one per 1,000.   

The parts I heard – re-instating male-centered standards for combat arms troops (infantry/armor/cavalry/artillery/combat engineering and the like) in particular – landed with this non-veteran.

Although I suspect the real audience was in Moscow and Beijing (Teheran caught the early show).  

Now, Trump’s bit about sending the military to fight “in the city?”  

Shiny new quarter says he knows it’s preposterous – but he’s trying to get Democrats to support criminals against, ahem, the US military as well as the citizens of those cities.  Hard to see where that’s a bad ideal politically, even if it’s balderdash legally (outside the POTUS’s Article 1 Section 8 power to protect federal facilities and operations – which will no doubt get defined to a fine sheen in court). 

You can, of course, count on Big Left to get the wrong point…:

…although to be fair it’s only Rupar, and he’s too stupid to understand that here, Hegseth was right. The only military that deters aggression is the one people are afraid to test.

Russia didn’t give to farts in the breeze about the German, French or Italian militaries – full of overweight NCOs and planes that don’t fly and units without armored vehicles because NATO turned into a “peacekeeping” force from 1993 to 2020 – when he attacked Ukraine.  Poland, maybe, but Poland can’t wage an independent war against Russia by itself, much to Poland’s chagrin, I suspect.  

Joe Doakes, ex-Como Park, emails:

One of the most common ways to refute any conspiracy theory is to point out that with that many bad actors, surely someone would have talked.  

 

https://x.com/MattForVA/status/1971575908424151298 

 

 Now let’s talk about the stolen election.

 

Joe Doakes

Joe’s not wrong – although it did come out in only (?) four years.

Here’s Jennifer Emick’s piece, “Debunking Alex Nowrasteh“

And today’s song list:

I’m not sure what Walter Hudson’s political plans are.   

But this particular video reminds me of Reagan’s “A Time For Choosing”:

It’s a difference choice – good vs. evil, as opposed to freedom vs. communism.  

And so maybe not all that different at all.  

A reliable source tells me they’ve heard from another reliable source that we’re nowhere near done finding fraud in Minnesota – and that upcoming revelations about Personal Care Assistant fraud and autism services may very well drive the total into the “multiple billions”. 

More to come.  

Much, much more. 

Joe Doakes, long ago of Como. Park, emails:

People keep using the phrase “go to the mattress” when talking about fighting. “Republicans must go to the mattress over this issue.”

 

No dummy, it’s “mat,” as in wrestling mat, as in “take your opponent to the mat to pin him.”  Didn’t your high school have a wrestling team?

 

 But of course some idiot didn’t understand that 20 years ago and wrote the dialogue wrong in a movie. So now the internet thinks that’s the origin of the phrase. Or possibly that it relates to 15th century Italians who hung mattresses on the walls to deflect cannon fire.  Really?  You figure people today know so much about Renaissance warfare that they use it everyday speech? Ridiculous.

 

 How does society recover a lost idiom?

 

Joe Doakes

By doing more wrestling. 

(And I think it was Clemenza, not Puzo, that got the term wrong.   Which, if true, I think is hilarious).  

“Haha! The FBI says there’s no evidence that Taylor Robinson was a member of any group! That means the killing of Charlie Kirk was non-political!”
So here’s an incomplete list of politically or socially-with-plenty-of-politics-motivated spree killers, terrorists and assassins who *weren’t affiliated with any group*:

• John Wilkes Booth
• Charles Guiteau
• Leon Czolgosz
• Lee Harvey Oswald
• Luigi Mangione
• Richard Reid
• Elias Rodriguez
• Nidal Hasan
• Ted “Unibomber” Kaczinski
• Ryan Routh
• Dylan Root
• Vance Boelter
• Payton Gendron
• Anibal Hernandez-Santana
• Every rioter at the Capitol on January 6
• Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik,
• Thomas Crooks
• Mauricio Garcia
• Micah Xavier Johnson
• Ryan Palmeter
• Robert “Robin” Westman
• Anderson Lee Aldrich
• Audrey “Aiden Williams” Hale
• Omar Mateen

And, let’s be honest, Timothy McVeigh, who *had* been part of a group, of which he and Terry Nichols were pretty much the two remaining members.
The problem is, it’s a big country with a lot of people with mental health issues, and when you spend enough time and effort telling unstable people that “speech is violence” and that some inscrutable murky sinister evil force is going to “erase” you/destroy democracy/steal your future/commit “genocide”/are “Nazis” or “fascists” – people against whom we fought a life or death war two generations ago – eventually someone’s going to connect the dots and start shooting people.

And if you ARE part of a group whose goal is to destabilize society, having people who *aren’t* in your group do the dirty work is a feature, not a bug.

So don’t believe the hype.

Joe Doakes, ex-Como-Parker, emails:

Was the Biden administration THE most corrupt presidency in American history, or merely Top 10?

Whose was worse?

Joe Doakes

Thoughts?

I

I wonder if the DFL really thought this through?

We’ve seen what is possible, all right.  

Squandered surpluses.

Erased civil liberties – snitch lines, thoughtcrime databases, and a precedent of abusing emergency power.

Burned neighborhoods, including mine.

A productive class that’s fleeing the state.  

A per capita state product that was in the top 10 nationwide that has fallen to the middle and isn’t done dropping.

Catastrophic social division.

A collapsing Minneapolis  once called “the Athens of the 20th century”, now just another blighted city with nice lakes.

Educational outcomes that just keep getting worse and worse. 

Contempt for the rule of law – by prosecutors.  

The worst Covid aid fraud in the country.

An emerging reputation for corruption. 

Humiliation after his awful VP run.  At least Walter Mondale wasn’t an embarassment.

Eight years of sloganeering and double-talk. 

Yes, MNDFL.  We have indeed seen what is possible.  

I, for one, would love to get unburdened by what has been. 

Yep, the technical problems with this new iteration of the blog are if anything worse than the old ones.  I get kicked out, for crying out loud. 

I have thought about moving it to Substack or Medium.  The problem with both is that while I’d own all my own material, I wouldn’t have the same control that I currenly do.  Which may not be the worst thing in the world, but I’ve got 23 years worth of stuff – some of which I know I want to maintain control over, much of which is irrelevant anymore, and some of which I just…don’t…know.  

It’s not entirely that I’m a digital packrat, but I can see it from here.  

Working on it. 

Tim Walz is running for Governor again.  

The governor who, at best, ignored well over $1B in fraud, set up a snitch line and a badthink database, squandered a $19B surplus, ran one of the most club-footed Covid responses in the country, and supports censoring people like me, wants another go-around.

Even some DFLers have had enough…

…although if Walz doesn’t get the nomination it’ll be because someone to his left beats him.

It’s the law.

SCENE:  Cat SCAT is out patrolling for Republican lawn signs to rip down when he sees Mitch BERG weed-whacking his row of barberry bushes.  It’s too late for BERG to evade. 

SCAT:  Hey, Nazi. 

BERG:  Oh, great…

SCAT:  Shut up.  We’re flying flags at half staff nationwide for the Nazi Charlie Kirk, but we didn’t for Melissa and Mark Norton. 

BERG:  Hortmann. 

SCAT:  I fact check you.  Norton.  

BERG:  OK.   So as with so much of what’s wrong in Minnesota, it’s Governor Walz’s fault.  

SCAT: I fact-check you and prove you false. 

BERG:  Because…

SCAT:  I’m a fact-checker.  

BERG: OK, so how about this:

During the afternoon news conference, Trump said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz never asked him to have flags at the nation’s capitol be placed at half-staff after Melissa and Mark Hortman were fatally shot. 

That same morning, Minnesota lawmaker John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot several times at their Champlin home in a politically-motivated attack.

What Trump said:

“Well if the Governor had asked me to do that, I would’ve done that. But the Governor of Minnesota didn’t ask me. I wouldn’t have thought of that, but I would’ve if somebody had asked me. People make requests for the lowering of the flag. Often times you have to say no because it would be a lot of lowering, the flag would never be up. Had the Governor of Minnesota asked me to do that, I would’ve done that gladly.”

The flags at the Minnesota State Capitol were placed at half-staff after the shootings.

BERG:  Which fits with Walz’s pattern of not really paying attention to the administrivia of running a state – like sending in the National Guard during riots, or paying attention to the tsunami of corruption on his executive branch’s watch, or , well, this. 

SCAT:  LIke I always said, Walz forgot and Trump didn’t do it for him because he’s a Nazi.  

BERG:  Huh.  So what you said earlier…

SCAT:  I never said anything earlier. 

BERG:  Ah.  Gotcha. 

And SCENE. 

Joe Doakes, once but no longer of Como Park, emails:

Suppose you are playing a game and your opponent cheats. You point it out and he denies it. You insist you saw him cheat and he admits doing the act but claims that wasn’t cheating.  When you show him the rule book, he asserts those rules don’t apply to him. You insist he follow the rules and he declares you are a fascist so he’s justified in murdering you to win the game.

 

What should you do?

 

If you refuse to play, he will win by default.

 

If you continue to play by the rules, he will win by cheating.

 

 Somehow you must convince him to play by the rules. Game Theory suggests the best way to do that is tit-for-tat. When he cheats, you cheat and offer to quit cheating when he quits cheating. When he cheats harder, you cheat harder and repeat the offer.

 

 Yes, that means stooping to his level. It means betraying your principles because cheating is not who you are.  Game theory is not about morals, it is about tactics. It is not about salvation, it is about winning.

 

 Eventually one of two things will happen:  he will quit cheating and the game will be played by the rules; or the game will end,  probably in violence.

 

 The theory applies to the simplest games and to the most complex. Life is the most complex game of all. Conservatives have been playing by the rules but the Left is cheating. 

 

What should we do?  

 

Joe Doakes

I suppose “amicable-if-possible divorce” isn’t an option?

I can’t pretend this is a comprehensive list.  I don’t think humanity can measure this level of stupidity. 

But I gotta try. 

I’ll save the worst for last. 

Well, gosh, “Kalvan”, I think the difference might be that literally the entire state of Minnesota including the entire GOP closed ranks around the families’ survivors, and the GOP repudiated everything to do with the guy when it turned out that even though he was nuts, he was a nut who spouted some right wing chanting points. That, and the fact not a single significant person said “Well, political murder is baaaaaaaad, but when you jam down abortion mandates and kid-transing and gun control you gotta expect some blowback…”

Can you see the difference, “Kalvan”?

I keep asking progs who parrot this to tell me – what evil things did Kirk say?

And I’ve gotten a few back – every one of which was ripped completely out of context, context which is available out there.  

I don’t love the whole “get people fired” thing, personally.

But forget for a moment that progs have been going after conservatives’ jobs (also shooting them) for years. It’s not the government “censoring” people. And maybe, just maybe, “it’s good someone I disagree with died” is an “opinion” that deserves some opprobrium.

And in the responses to that one:

Make you first shot count, Sparky.

Is the point that “pageant winners are promiscuous?”

And the mangling of the whole doctrine of “submitting”

Is this a Richard Carlbom burner account?

Now, most of the above are dolts, rage farmers and Don Lemon.

But these? These (read the whole thread) are elected DFLers:

Make sure you scroll down to check out Ilhan Omar’s contribution, on Mehdi Hassan’s podcast.

And Richard Carlbom, executive director of the MN DFL:

So “Hey, Fascist, Catch” was an ingenious hipfake.  Got it.  

It’s been a depressing week for observing humanity.  

Apparently having an open, honest debate with people who disagree with you rates a death sentence.   

Even some Democrats realize things have gone too far:

As this is written, the shooter is still apparently at large.

But who knew – when the leaders of a party full of mentally unstable people chant that their opponents are “Nazis” and “Fascists”, people my grandfathers’ generation spent the best years of their lives killing and trying not to be killed by, that someone in that mass of unstable weirdos would take it seriously?

And the giggly, tingly, school-girly response by so many Democrats, including prominent ones, to Luigi Mangione should be a bigger warning; their inventory of nutbars who think homicide is OK is nowhere near exhausted.

And no, it’s not a “both sides do it” thing. 

The nation needs the same level of commitment to rooting out left wing terrorism today that we put into eradicating the Klan 60 years ago, or the mob in the ’80s.  

We won’t get it, but we’ll need it.  

The one silver lining?  The Democrats’ ill-gotten right to throw out “January 6!” like a badly-trained parrot is forever null and void. 

I don’t wish anyone trouble with their jobs.  

And that includes the poor saps who work at the Strib’s printing plant. 

Well, worked.  Or will have worked…:

I mean, the schnooks in the plant don’t set the editorial policy.  They’re not the ones painting Ilhan Omar’s toenails in the boardroom, or telling Rochelle Olson what hit pieces to write.  

So I’m sorry about the jobs, guys ‘n gals. 

But if it’s another step on the Strib’s road to extinction?  That’s a silver lining.  

The paper will be printed in Iowa – presumably the day before it reaches the newsstands (or wherever you get paper papers these days – I dunno).  

Next stop Mississippi.  

Anyway – turns out the late Nick Coleman may have been right about something.  I wasn’t rooting for the demise of the Strib back when he was accusing us bloggers of doing that. 

But I sure am now.  

Yeah, I hate it too.  

I’ll be changing the template again soon.  I don’t like it.  

Stay tuned.