To: MN Democrat Something Something Labor Party
From: Mitch Berg, Stochastic Moderate
Re: Truth In Advertising
All,
Many of us have been talking with you for years about removing the “farmer“ from your official party name.
With this speech by Rep. Lucy Rehm?
“Solar panels are the new corn?”
Its time. Lose it.
That is all.
80 years ago, 20 year old men pushed the Nazi juggernaut from Normandy to the Elbe, wrestled coral islands from dug-in Japanese, and went on to build the greatest society ih history.
Fast forward: 20 year old child fires a gun, heads for a safe space.
Fearless prediction: As much as people natter on about the evils of the Baby Boom, I have a hunch one day the children and grandchildren of the Millennials and Zeepers are going to hate their elders much, much more.
I’ve listened to a lot of vapid, trite radio in my life.
Janeane Garofalo’s attempt at a talk show. Most any “audio essay” by David Sedaris. Just about every local show on AM950, from Nick Coleman and Wendy Wilde and Two Putt Tommy and Steve Timmer through Bart McNeil or whatever his name is. Lots of dreadful stuff.
But I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything quite this stomach-pumpingly vacuous as this two year old episode of “Radiolab”, an NPR podcast [1] which combines an oppressive amount of cutesy sound editing with a programming lineup that captures all of the lows of “This American Life” with none of TAL’s occasional highs.
it’s a rebroadcast [2] from a couple of years ago, when the Covid pandemic had come and gone for most of America, but was still leaving the world a Camusian hellscape for the organically-fed fashionably angsty member of the Laptop Class that work for and listen to National Public Radio.
And in it, the plush-bottom yoohoos in the studio seem to be straining to make the case that 2020 and 2021 is a candidate to be horrible years in history, as compared to…
…536AD. When something, a bunch of volcanoes or comet dust or something blotted out much of the sunlight for years, causing a chain reaction of crop failures, famines, plagues (as hungry rats invaded granaries) and wars that led to the death of perhaps 20% of the people on the planet at the time.
But Covid’s pretty bad, too!
Here’s the neat (if nauseous) trick: Listen to it, and you can almost feel like you’re sitting in a “breakfast place” on Eat Street listening to a bunch of non-profiteers bitching about how lack of rent control is genocide.
NPR should really be funding itself.
(more…)Wednesday, I wrote about the dreary history of demoralized, rootless societies. I focused on France of 1940 – for whom the end of World War I was as recent as 9/11 is today.
France had an excuse, of course; out of 8 million Frenchmen that served in World War I, 3 million became casuaties; applied to America in World War II in proportional scale, that would have amounted to 4.5 million dead, wounded and missing. A million dead out of a 1914 population of 8 million, proportional to today’s United States, would amount to 11 million dead. Plus 20 more million maimed or disappeared.
That’d be a tough hurdle to get over.
America doesn’t have that excuse today – but we’ve been through similar emotional straits. The loss of about 58,000 in Vietnam, combined with a decade of social struggle and economic turmoil as America adjusted not-always-gracefully to being not the only functional economy in the world left us with a case of the national blues that was in full depressing fury when I was in junior high and high school.
Back then, America’s moral fundamentals were strong enough that when something came along to blast us out of the moral, intellectual and economic blahs, it was a little like the first bit of screen door weather in the spring:
And yes, even this, much as the interpretation mortifies both the singer and his more dogmatic critics…
…and it’s not just my opinion.
Of course, in 1980 America’s moral fundamentals were still strong. When Herb Brooks and Ronald Reagan and even Springsteen’s wild pitch hit, Americans were still patriotic – even our left of center 39th president believed in what America stood for, even though he was lost at the controls. America still oozed testosterone, metaphorically and literally.
If you believe that there’s a move among transnational “elites” to destroy western civilization and it’s crown jewel, it’s not a stretch to think they’ve been more careful this time around about gutting the fundamentals that could lead to a recovery of our national mojo.
It’s a WSJ survey from a few weeks back, that found among other things that:
The only value that went up? Money, up from 31% to 43% over the past 25 years:
“Aside from money, all age groups, including seniors, attached far less importance to these priorities and values than when pollsters asked about them in 1998 and 2019. But younger Americans in particular place low importance on these values, many of which were central to the lives of their parents,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
In the 2023 poll, just 19% of the respondents overall said they attend religious services once a week or more. Some 31% of younger respondents said that religion was very important to them, compared with 55% among seniors, the Journal reported.
Who knew – after decades of undercutting the traditions of family and virtue and idolizing an utterly materialistic view of the universe, family and virtue are undercut and people are crassly materialistic, even to the point of societal leaders calling material entitlements like housing “rights”?
Whether by accident or conspiratorial design, American society at large today is not fertile ground for another Morning, another Miracle.
And it gets worse. More Monday.
To: Seni. Kellty Morrison
From: Mitch Berg: Prole on a mission
Re: Opportunity, if you’ve got the guts to take it.
Senator Morrison,
I left a message and an email with your office about this subject earlier this week. I’ve heard nothing. I’m sure it’s just an oversight.
Anyway – let’s try to seek some common ground, shall we?
The other day, you twote about your…er, I’m not sure whether to call it a “job”, “assignment” or what.
I’ll let your tweet explain as far as we can:
So here’s what I hope: when you say “engage” you, as an M.D., mean “address some of the horrific unintended consequences of Minnesota’s current opioid policy, which involves non-medical bureaucrats almost literally bean-counting doctors’ prescriptions for opioids to compare them to a more or less arbitrary standard that doesn’t account for patients’ actual need for painkillers, which has left a staggering number of chronic pain patiens and cancer patients in life-altering, wretched constant pain, leading to an extremely disproportionate number of suicides and other serious long-term physical and mental health issues”.
I suspect it means you will continue the feckless avoidance many of your fellow legislators have practiced, trying to avoid the misguided wrath of the Fentanyl Fatality Families mob – who deserve sympathy, but not complete obeisance at the expense of other people who need pain meds…
…and can’t get them because bureaucrats can and do hold doctors licenses hostage for prescribing, responsible, medically indicated quantities that pain patients can easily absorb (there was a time I respected doctors enough to assume they knew things like “someone in horrific pain can absorb amounts of opioids that’d kill a healthy NFL lineman, becasue that’s how the body is built”, but after this past three years I assume nothing).
Any chance you could break with the medical know-nothings of, to be fair, both parties, and do some good, here?
Go ahead. Shock us all.
That is all.
Let’s talk about drag shows. Not the current hot-button politics of the whole genre today. Just the “art form” itself.
I don’t care for them.
No, not because it involves men cross-dressing. Guys wearing dresses and wigs to play a role? Mitch, please. All the female parts in Shakespeare’s day were played by cross-dressing men. Monty Python and Kids in the Hall were cross-dressing decades ago, and at least on the surface they did it for the same exact reason as drag shows do; Entertainment.
Which is the crux of why I don’t care for drag; it’s entertainment – and it’s just not entertaining.
To me, anyway.
Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve had friends who say “give it a chance!”. And I did. And I just…don’t…care.
Part of the problem is it appropriates [1] “burlesque”. And burlesque, as a genre, bores me stiff – especially the modern version of it. It’s not that I “can’t relate” – one of the points of art is to learn to relate to things that aren’t part of your life, or to get better insights on things that are *or* aren’t parts of your life. Art should challenge you, and I actively seek out art that is different from my personal status quo. I’ve learned a lot, and grown as a person, for the effort.
Just not from burlesque. Or drag, for that matter.
As far as drag shows showing school children a window to that culture? Fair enough. We have a lot of cultures; some involve snake-handling, debutantes, monster truck rallies, soccer, “Real Housewives”, ultimate fighting, eating ghost peppers off the vine, and drag racing. I personally can tolerate, even respect several of those cultures without feeling any need to learn more about them than I do, but this isn’t about me; in the interest of raising well-rounded children, shouldn’t we also let them participate in in-church 24 hour prayer vigils, three-gun shooting competitions and Turning Point USA rallies? Give them a view into lots and lots of cultures? Have your people call my people.
I mean, as far as culture goes, in for a penny, in for a dollar.
Of course, the current fracas isn’t about exposing kids to different cultures; it’s about undercutting the dominant culture.
Of course, drag has existed for well over 100 years; it’s a political subject to day, because none of its current hot-point status is about “exposing children to culture” for its own sake.
Just for purposes of argument, let’s forget for a moment that drag, like the burlesque of which it is a minstrel-show version, is inherently sexual in nature; all of the tropes of burlesque were ways to play peek-a-boo with the sexual mores of the Victorian era, and Drag is an “ironic” homage to that era, around the claim that men with “alternative lifestyles” today have to be as sly and coded about their preferences as the straight world did 150 years ago. Which, given the near supremacy of “alternative lifestyles” in today’s dominant culture is itself just a tad preposterous [2]. Saying it’s not a primarily sexual art form is like saying burlesque is nice and chaste; it’s preposterous, and would get you laughed out of any room not controlled by lunatics manifesting a social agenda.
Don’t be a moron.
But I set out to write about a genre, not a political fracas, and it’s to there I’ll return; you wanna dress up and sing? Go to it! No need to save me a seat.
(more…)In 1940, France had by most measures the most powerful military in the world.
More combat divisions, more (and by some standards better) tanks, more aircraft than its competition, including the Germans.
And yet when the German invasion came in 1940, the country collapsed in six weeks.
American conservative wags, often almost badly taught enough in history to pass as Democrats, chuckle and call them “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”. It’s wrong; the French at their best fought fiercely; the German after-action reports in the advance on Dunkirk gave them high marks for courage and skill.
American pseudo-intellectuals blame a “Maginot Mentality”, believing the French idea was to hide behind a line of fortifications that they didn’t yet know had been made obsolete by the Stuka and the Panzerkampfwagen. This, too, is myopic; the Maginot Line was built as a reaction to France’s horrific losses in World War I. The theory was, a line of elaborate fortifications backed by an artillery arm that had emerged from World War I as the best in the world, could enable a relatively small force of middle-aged reservists to hold most of the French frontier, including defending the French industrial heartland that’d been ravaged in 1914-1918, while the younger troops formed a mobile army that in theory had not much less progressive a doctrine than the Germans.
On paper, France should have been able to repel a German attack. Oh, there were problems; the French Army preferred the security of telephones and couriers to the flexibility of radio. Most French tanks had tiny crews – 2-3 men – featuring turrets where one man had a workload that German, British and American tank designer gave to two and eventually three men. There were problems.
But the biggest problem? France was physically and demographically exhausted. With catastrophic casualties among the generation generation that came of age during World War I, the birth rate had crashed. France staffed that large army by drafting nearly everyone and keeping them in the reserves for a long, long time. And yet the baby bust among men in their twenties was a major problem.
Perhaps worse? France was morally exhausted. The war had sapped the nation’s institutions, enervated its culture, left it roiling in two decades of internal political bloodletting – call it cultural depression, maybe the beginnings of slow cultural suicide.
That was exacerbated by near civil-war between Communists and the Right – strife that led much of France to put poxes on both houses (much as Germans did in 1933, when a strongman came along to make politics just go away and let them get along with their lives).
When the Germans attacked in June, 1940, many French soldiers fought ferociously. Not a single German soldier leaked through the Maginot line – only one small outpost fell. The few French tanks using modern doctrine held the Germans to a draw in head-to-head combat.
But the German breakthrough at Sedan, which hinged on many French weaknesses (couriers getting lost, telephone lines breaking) led dizzyingly rapidly to the fall of a France that was, behind the front lines, just not in the mood to fight for itself.
Viewed materialistically, France had everything it needed to resist Germany.
Morally, it collapsed so fast it still shocks the world.
It took four years of occupation, a national reckoning, and a couple of decades of the Francocentric influence of Charles De Gaulle to right the French cultural ship, at least as close to “righted” as France ever gets.
The parallels with America today are a little sobering.
More next week.
To: Steve Van Zandt
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant and Longtime Fan
Re: I’ll Meet You Halfway
Steve,
Earlier this week, you got into a bit of a flap over this:
You removed the tweet, but followed up saying that you meant “exterminate at the ballot box”, although you delivered it with all the subtle grace of Sean Penn on a three day bender.
But hey, I’ll meet you halfway. Ask Sarah Palin what it’s like, having something that was meant one way passed off as something completely different. That’s politics.
And given the number of unstable, armed people on your side of the political aisle, perhaps you should moderate your tone a bit.
But while others focus on your original rhetoric, I’m going to roast you for this:
It’s one of an endless series of tweets in your feed where you refer to Republicans as some variant of stupid.
Some of us sure are.
But none of us ever put “Princess of Little Italy” on an otherwise perfect record.
Humility is in order.
That is all.
(CLOSED CIRCUIT: Comments to the effect of “Why do you listen to music from people who hate you” will be mocked and taunted. We’ve been through this).
Everyone’s got something to kvetch about in the Daniel Perry case.
The usual crowd on the left is whinging that a white guy, just convicted of murdering a BLM “protester”, is getting pardoned by Governor Abbot.
Another, much smarter, crowd is reminding the world, “uh, the ‘protester’ was being ‘mostly peaceful’ by pointing an AK47 at Perry”.
For my part? While I don’t know all the specifics, it’d seem the main factor in Perry’s conviction – in Austin, at the hands of a Soros prosecutor, naturally – apparently happened not because of what he did during the incident, but because of what he said before:
Perry’s defense team argued that he acted in self-defense, but prosecutors contended that Perry instigated what happened. They highlighted a series of social media posts and Facebook messages in which Perry made statements that they said indicated his state of mind, such as he might “kill a few people on my way to work. They are rioting outside my apartment complex.”
While I don’t know the details, a zealous prosecutor can use such statements to impeach your “unwilling participant” status. It appears similar to the case of Alan Scarsella, who did many stupid things after shooting at people pursuing him and his friends at a BLM protest outside the Fourth Precinct in Minneapolis in 2015, but who appears to have gone to prison mostly because of a video he posted on the way to the event bragging about mixing it up with protesters. A good attorney could have possibly suppressed that “evidence” – but he had a public defender, so he might be out of prison now.
Which brings us to the proposed Berg’s Law of Armed Self-Defense:
“The first rule of armed self-defense is, you never talk about armed self-defense.
Don’t joke about it with your friends. Don’t brag about it on social media. Don’t have an angry outburst about protesters or rioters where unfriendly ears might hear you.
Keep it, like your firearms, hidden under the proverbial bushel basket.
Like I would, if all my guns hadn’t fallen into Mille Lacs. Which is fine, because guns terrify me and I’d never use one on a fellow human.
… is what fascism looks like; [1] San Francisco State University, thanks the student to Ryan, head against Riley Gaines (a bio woman, speaking out against having to compete against transgender athletes), hit several times (by a bio male), and forced to take shelter in the back room, protected by campus police until the riot cops showed up to escort her and the group she was with out of the building.
“I am also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully. These issues do not go away, and these values are very much at our core. ”
She even offered them counseling – for the fact that Riley Gaines exists, apparently:
[1] actual fascism. Not the meaningless, wiffleball college students and other leftists today keep referring to.
…when minstrel shows were considered bad form.
That’s apparently changed:
Jeffrey Marsh is enough to give me species dysmorphia.
The Good News, of a sort? The social media at Bud LIght, and its parent Anheuser Busch, have gone quiet since the Dylan Mulvaney flap.
Bud Light operates one of those fun, friendly social media accounts we see quite often from corporate giants these days. On March 30, it tweeted or replied to tweets over fifteen times, with messages on the order of “Win tickets to Stagecoach for you and a friend! Travel and hotel accommodations covered” and “Have a cold one for us.” On March 31 came twenty more tweets and replies, including “There’s still time to win beer money. Which women’s team do you think will win it all?,” and a reply to a well-wisher: “Bud Light loves you back.” On April 1 it was more of the same, but we haven’t heard from Bud Light since 8:50PM that evening, when it tweeted: “Beers on us? Must be game time. For a chance to win, cheer on your team with #EasyToEnjoySweepstakes in the replies.” That was the day that Mulvaney was revealed to be Bud Light’s new spokesdude. But isn’t Bud Light proud, like all LGBTQETC activists constantly insist they are?
It isn’t just Bud Light, either. The UK’s Daily Mail reported Sunday that “The famous beer also hasn’t posted on their main Instagram feeds since March 31 and have not posted to Facebook since March 30. Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, has also gone without posting since April 1.” This is unusual, for “while they have gone a few days without tweeting in the past, the @BudLight is typically fairly active, as are their other regular social channels.” What could account for this? It looks as if it’s because of Dylan Mulvaney.
So, “get woke, go broke”. Simple as . Bob’s your uncle, right?
Maybe. Maybe not.
As we discussed last week, Bud LIght’s chief executive, Alissa Heinerscheid, is a young, intensely “woke” woman, a product of a $60K/year prep school, Harvard and Wharton.
Now, we can joke about her background – as Dennis Prager says, “it takes an elite education to produce someone this stupid” – or the near term results of the decision.
But while Heinerscheid may not be “smart”, or “well-educated” in any holistic sense of the term, she is certainly well-schooled. And that brings us to….
The Bad News: What if Anheuser Busch knows this, and considers it an acceptable cost to build up its Environment and Social Governance (ESG) score – the American version of Red Chinese “Social Credit” score for business (and people, sooner than later, if they get their way)?
The Vice President flew to Nashville…
…to support the three legislators who bum-rushed the House floor to demand legislation against the law-abiding gun owner who had nothing to do with…
…the Nashville massacre that Vice President Harris ignored.
Because the three representatives are the real victims…
So, businesses are opening in a building that got re-opened after…uh, some unfortunate events, apparently:
“The 2020 fires”?
A bad streak of accidents?
Spontaneous combustion?
Flaming rocks from the sky?
In a city full of media that bellows “off what?” when the DFL says “jump”, KARE11 has lapped the field at going “woke”.
So I won’t try.
This is Shawn Holster – long-time friend of the blog, show and me personally:
It is indeed a short step from “Unhoused People” to “Un-Corralled LIvestock”.
Ownership culture is a mortal threat to progressivism – which is why Big Left is trying to ease its linguistic relics out of the language.
He called out America’s de facto Ministry of Information for what it is:
Big Media is rallying around their own – as they always do:
“Could undermine confidence”
NPR hosts actively pine for Marxism. They plot, in the open on the air, for ways to censor dissident media, not to mention using media to direct politics in their desired direction.
Anyone who sees the need for an impartial media that holds all government accountable should feel no confidence in NPR – Big Left’s PR shop.
That’d be a good start.
UPDATE : By the way – NPR’s “Fact check” of Twitter sniffs that the network only gets around 1% of its budget from government.
It’s technically true.
But the figure doesn’t count:
With that swag honestly counted, the total is by some counts well into the 30-40% range.
Qualifies as state media in my book.
Why do you suppose the lefty media headlines from Wisconsin have focused exclusively on the Supreme Court race, in which the libs seized a one vote majority?
Oh.
…like a resume that looks like this:
It’s the woman who made, uh, trans-woman Dylan Mulvaney the poster…um, person for, not Stella Artois, not even Blue Moon, but..
…Bud Light.
Beege at and our old friend David Strom at Hot Air run down the rest of the story.
Nothing says Bud Light like…well…
Thing is, I didn’t like Bud Light before this. It is barely drinkable. It isn’t even legally beer in Europe. It’s malted battery acid. Bilge drippings.
What the hell’s a guy supposed to boycott?
When I moved to the Twin Cities, not all that long ago, one of the key reasons was that I, a 22 year old with an English major and no marketable skills outside of a radio career I’d already given up on, could plausibly afford to live here.
The Twin Cities, particularly Minneapolis in 1985, was economically thriving, crime wasn’t especially scary (to a 22 y ear old 6’5 guy with a firearm or two), and in 1986 a writer for Fodor’s Travel Guides (kids, ask your parents) dubbed the Twin Cities “the Athens of the 20th Century”
Today? It’s hard to live in Minneapolis if you make anywhere below high five figures. My inflation-adjusted income from 1986 is likely around $35K, today. Not sure I could do it today.
Would I want to try? Well, that’s a great question. I suspect places like Nashville, Dallas and Phoenix would resonate, today.
As far as that “Modern Day Athens” thing?
Minneapolis in 1985 didn’t have any “stigmas” to deal with. Pretty much the opposite; there was a veneer of desirability about the place, for me and an awful lot of other kids my age.
If I were getting out of college today with the same background I did back then, would I make the same call?
Man tries to rob parking lot attendant in New York. Shoots him twice. Attendant nonetheless takes the gun away, and shoots the attacker.
Police arrest the victim, charge him with illegal gun possession. For taking the gun used to try to kill him.
[Attendant Moussa Diarra, age 57] was shot twice during a tussle with suspected thief Charles Rhodie at Carolan’s West 31st Street garage early Saturday before using the accused man’s weapon to shoot him back.
Diarra was initially charged by cops in the case, including with criminal possession of a weapon for having Rhodie’s gun at one point, but Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office Sunday dropped the raps. Rhodie still faces charges including attempted murder.
Bragg’s office dropped the charges after public outcry.
Let’s emphasize that properly – it took public outcry to get these morally depraved charges against an innocent man who defended himself dropped.
And just so I’m clear, by “depraved” i mean “evil”.
When governments goal is to make people more afraid of the consequences of protecting themselves than of being victimized, there is no other word for it.
SCENE: December 2020.
THE DFL: “The state has a $17.5 billion dollar surplus. This is a monument to the wisdom of the Walz/Flanagan Administration, and will be used to move forward as One Minnesota…
NORMIES: Uh, the “surplus”” is a combination of one-time or shor-time stimulus money from the Feds, and tax revenue driven by people spending all that stimulus money. It’s not permanent. But I bet you people are going to turn all this one time money into permanent spending, aren’t you?
THE DFL: The answer is, go forward, inclusive equity one people one leader one Minnesota!
NORMIES: That’s not an answer…
SCENE: March 2023
THE DFL: The “surplus” was always one time money, and we need to raise taxes”
NORMIES: Uh, that’s what we said.
THE DFL: As always, let’s go forward, inclusive equity one people one leader one Minnesota!
Up until 2020, DFLers could respond to conservative concerns about the state of the Twin Cities with “Hey, at least they’re growing”.
And yes, both Minneapolis and Saint Paul grew, after a fashion, between 2000 and 2020.
But all that has come to a screeching halt, and reversed:
Unstated: most of the people hitting the doors are the productive, taxpaying ripe suck class. Whatever growth is happening is among the class that consumes government revenue – in particular, the non-profit industrial complex and its clients.
Former Crystal city councilman and slap target emeritus Jeff Kolb responds, as usual, economically and precisely:
The Met Council has been running a demographic ponzi scheme, trying to plump up the numbers of the productive class to justify spending, taxing and playing infrastructure games like the cities are healthy and growing.
Like Detroit, I suspect Minneapolis and Saint Paul are about to find out what happens when the productive class hits the exits.
According to some reports, the Nashville Covenant school was not a gun free zone.
Where “some reports” = a call to the police:
A woman who was at the Nashville, Tennessee, school during the mass shooting on March 27 told police that a few staff members typically carry a gun on campus, according to a police call obtained by The Tennessean.
Some of the usual suspects are already trying to use this factoid to indict the idea of armed school staff:
It’s an astonishingly ignorant view.
I’ll explain.
Even in “Stand your Ground” states, self-defense law doesn’t as a rule allow citizens to close with and engage perpetrators, acting as cops or infantry.
The proper role for an armed staffer, according to the way actual self-defense law works, is to barricade themselves and the kids they’re responsible for into a room, and be ready to shoot at a perp who comes through the door with mayhem in mind.
Not go hunting for perp. More’s the pity.
Again, we know nothing about whether these people were in the building, or what they did.
Which won’t stop the orcs from orcing.
But those are the facts.
It’s a gloomy, cloudy Monday morning.
And yet my heart is dancing.
Because it’s another day alive in God’s creation? Sure. Goes without saying, but needs to be repeated anyway.
But beyond that? There’s this:
It’s the Anoka County Attorney slapping down Jamie Becker-Finn over the proposed “safe storage” bill, which would have required all guns to be stored unloaded, with ammo locked up separately from the guns, and required a carry permit to have an uncased, loaded gun in the home, allowing police wide latitude to barge in and check on the above.
It’s fairly clearly a Fourth Amendment shortcut. It would disproportionately affect Black and Latino gun owners. It’s patently unconstitutional.
And any day that starts with Rep. Becker-Finn getting water squirted on her nose is a good, glorious day.
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