This is what “Restorative Justice” looks like:

The crime – the victim’s ex-boyfriend bought a gun for two juveniles to kill her new boyfriend and, if she got in the way, her as well – was egregious enough that even the fairly useless Mike Freeman was trying to charge the juveniles as adults.

The “boys” will now be out after a couple years in the Red Wing juvenile facility.

I’m offering the parents (and/or their advocates) an hour on the NARN to tell us how “restorative” they find Mary Moriarty’s idea of “justice”.

Today is the 19th anniversary of the Northern Alliance Radio Network.

I’ll probably save the whole “waxing philosophical about it” thing for (God willing) next year – and for those of you who like that sort of thing, I have a hunch it’ll be a doozy.

But like this blog, that two hours a week has been a steady, constant thing over the course of a couple of mind-warpingly turbulent decades, personally and for the nation.

Back in October of 2003, asking Chad the Elder, John Hinderaker, Brian “Saint Paul” Ward, Ed Morrissey, Scott Johnson, Atomizer, King Banaian and JB Doubtless (and eventually Michael Brodkorb) if they wanted to do a radio show was a little like making a burger with four patties; you realize it’s probably going nowhere, and the world will not change if it fails completely, but that’s no reason not to try.

And the fact that it worked – of which more below – is further evidence of what may be the biggest axiom of my life: the things that start as jokes, whimsical experiments or drunken pranks on myself, tend to be the things that are the most rewarding. I’m going to have to do a post on that phenomenon sometime in the next year.

Of course, for that little flight of fancy to become what it did has taken the connivance of a lot of people. Three generations of general managers (John Hunt, who originally OKed the idea along with Ron Stone and current GM Nik Anderson), and four of operations managers (Patrick Campion, the first person I talked, along with his successors, Nick Novak, Lee Michaels and John “Consigliere” Berg, no relation) had to agree to put us on the air, schedule staff to keep us on, and take the risk of having a bunch of noobs on their air.

How many generations of producers did it take to make us sound passable? The late, unforgotten, great Joe “The Jackal” Hanson, Tommy “The HBomb” Huynh, Matt Reynolds, Irina Malanina, The Consigliere, Terminator N, Megan Fatale, G-Money, and a whole bunch of Brad and King’s producers I can’t even begin to remember…

…and of course Brad Carlson ,King Banaian and Jack “The New Guy” Tomczak.

Not to mention the audience.

Not sure who or what I’d be today without the result of the – not sure what to call it, joke or prank or unhinged scheme – that got hatched 20 years ago this coming fall. But I do know I doubt I could navigate the insanity of today’s world without it – not to mention the blog that started it.

Anyway – thanks!

Governor Walz is “turning power over” to Lt Governor Flanagan for a few hours while he has a colonoscopy.

I don’t not expect DFL goons to roam the streets looking for wreckers while she’s in power. Fingers crossed, everyone. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

However, if all goes well, hopefully we’ll get word as to whether the endoscopist found the code for the model that predicted 20-70,000 dead Minnesotans by July 2020.

SITD Bonus: Rejected names for the post:

• They Found Esme Murphy
• Endoscopy Discovers Every Metro Newsroom
• “Nurse, What’s With All The Lip Marks?”
• Governor’s Riot Strategy Found
• MN Media Metaphor Alert

But again – I’m trying to be a better person than that. 

To: All you Normies
From: The Elites
Re: Die, For All We Care

Proles/knaves/fyrds,

Your life, property and family, mere peasant, are not of enough value that we, your elites, should allow you a $500 handgun to protect them.

However, ours – we elites – are of such value that dropping double the income of a typical American household is perfectly fine:

Luxury real estate agent Branden Williams said protection dogs have become so popular among his mega-wealthy clients in L.A. that he’s now in the market for one himself, especially after a neighbor was robbed at gunpoint in Beverly Hills. Williams has tasked the same broker his mom used to buy her protection dog, a German shepherd imported from Germany, with finding him a suitable animal this year.

“I will say they’re not cheap; the ones I’m looking at are between $60,000 and $100,000,” he said. “It’s a whole other level of training; we’re not talking about doggy day care here.”

Just so you know the hierarchy of the universe.

(BTW – kudos to Lisa Bender, who at least got the spirit of things right, advocating gun control while getting private security on the taxpayer’s dime. Well done, Ms. Bender) .

Regards,

Your Betters

Here’s today’s music list:

A regular reader sent me this:

Social services get funding based on how much need exists – which means it’s in their interests to make sure people know to get their needs out, front and center.

No stone left unturned.

Question: what’s the difference between an ugly black assault rifle with a mega capacity, magazine designed to slaughter children, and…

… a firearm manifesting the righteous fury of a freedom fighter?

Why, the relative level of political correctness of the person holding it, of course!

We’re heading towards the 50th anniversary of the American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

And like the Che Guevara T-shirt and the hammer and sickle, and the guy with the AK-47 clone, shows us that to the left, the means justify the ends.

I’ve spent a fair chunk of the past 20 years telling people “there was a lot more to the 1980s than Flock of Seagulls hair and Members Only jackets and kitsch”.

“Cobra Kai“, the Karate Kid sequel, has been pretty brilliant at showing how those of us who grew up in the ’80s feel like fish out of water today – comically, often brilliantly.

But there was more to it than watching yesterday’s background noise turn into today’s “microaggressions”.

I could work at it for years more, and never nail it as well as this article, by Mark “Not Mike” Judge.

Its observations about how people were, and how kids grew up back then, puts a serious spin on “Cobra Kai’s” comic take. But it wasn’t all laughs. The whole thing is worth a read.

I could have pullquoted most of the article – but this bit here stuck out for me (with some bits and pieces of emphasis added):

“There were novels and short stories that were more literature than pulp fiction—The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Lonesome Dove, Love in the Time of Cholera, Neuromancer, the stories of Ann Beattie. There were films like “Wings of Desire,” “Cinema Paradiso,” “A Room with a View,” “Babette’s Feast,” and “Round Midnight.” Better known but no less intoxicating was the music: New Order, the Replacements, the Pixies, Public Enemy, the Smiths, U2, Suede, Talking Heads. Talk Talk began the decade as a synth-pop group and ended it with two art rock masterpieces, 1988’s “Spirit of Eden” and 1991’s “Laughing Stock.””

“In his book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Simon Reynolds notes that to be alive and young and culturally aware in those years was to have a bracing antipathy to nostalgia. We didn’t care about the hippies of the 1960s. The 1970s were there to make jokes about bad clothes and tacky disco. The idea of going back 20 or even 30 years to ape the styles of earlier generations would have been considered demented and embarrassing. We had our own thing. When director Spike Lee was about to release a film or the Blue Nile a new record, nobody had any interest in the big pot cloud that had hovered over Woodstock.”

The whole article is worth a read.

See, Millennials and Zeeps? You *weren’t* the first ones to get annoyed by Baby Boomers.

To: Lieutenant Governor Flanagan,
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Glad You’ve Discovered Light Rail Crime!

Of all the people who’ve been beaten, robbed and murdered on Twin Cities light rail platforms, it’s good to know you’ve paid attention to one of them, finally:

But clearly, you do not ride the light rail. I suspect you hitch a ride to the office with the state patrol, just like the governor. I’m gonna guess you haven’t ridden a train since long before you became Lieutenant Governor.

Just a quick tip from someone who rode the Vomit Comet (aka “Green Line”) day and night for a year and a half; when you’re out there on that platform, late at night, in the city you and the DFL created, you are absolutely, completely alone. Nothing there but you and God. None of your ex post facto happy talk is of the faintest bit of protection against The DFL’s Minneapolis.

To my credit, I figured it would be a victim like this, that got you to finally pay attention to street crime.

Sort of.

That is all.

Senator Smith took to Twitter to shill for “ESG“ – rules that require businesses to make decisions based on “Environment, Social Credit, [woke corporate] Governance l”practices.in other words, replacing fiduciary responsibility with “woke“ “social justice“ (read: Marxist) values.

there are really only two possibilities:

• Smith really is this ignorant.
• She knows she can count on a majority of her voters being this ignorant.

Given the last few elections in Minnesota, #2 isn’t the dumbest strategery .

I don’t know.

What makes him so good?

Happy 79th birthday to Roger Daltrey.

Attention, “fact-checkers” – yet again, we were right and you were wrong. The lab leak theory – which for over half the pandemic was labeled a racist conspiracy theory, repeating which could get you kicked off of social media and drummed out of polite society – appears to be true.

But if there’s one thing the American media does well, it’s come together to deflect attention away from its collective misdeeds. (emphasis added): .

Media outlets that had once definitively debunked the lab-leak theory innovated a new journalistic genre: the un-debunking. And yet, the explicit intention behind these retrospectives was to indemnify those who’d collaborated in the pressure campaign against the theory’s proponents — or, at least, to validate their good intentions. “Were news reports diminishing or disregarding the lab-leak theory actually ‘wrong’ at the time,” asked the very same Washington Post that had savaged Senator Cotton, “or did they in fact accurately reflect the limited knowledge and expert opinion about it?” You won’t be surprised by how the paper answered its own question.

In other words, “the truth may change, but it is always what we say it is”.

And nothing changes the definition of truth more than you-know-who:

In February 2021, Facebook lifted an arbitrary ban it had imposed on posts that included “false claims about Covid-19,” including the notion that the virus was “man-made or manufactured.” The decision was attributed to the “evolving nature of the pandemic,” but the pandemic had not actually evolved at all. What had evolved was the conventional wisdom. At the same time, Facebook reportedly tightened the regime restricting users’ ability to post “content that has been rated false,” or at least has yet to be deemed true. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the biases shared by those who “rate” relative factuality might extend beyond epidemiology. And in Facebook’s defense, ABC News absent-mindedly admitted, “the claims [sic] that the virus came from the lab was one often pushed by former President Donald Trump, though he never provided evidence.” Enough said.

Because to the – there is no better term – clique that sees itself as running America’s media and messaging, it’s not even the medium that’s the message. It’s the messenger:

In what must have been a painful concession in September 2021, science historian Naomi Oreskes admitted that the “lab-leak theory is plausible.” But even so, she qualified her mea culpa by calling “some of the people promoting the claim” — and Donald Trump, in particular — “irrational.” “We all judge messages by the messenger,” this distinguished voice in the field of science journalism let slip. Even the center-left columnist Jonathan Chait, who had been brave enough to buck the social pressures culminating in a consensus around the virtue of censorship, justified his colleagues’ prejudicial impulses after the fact, writing that the “idiotic conformity of the right’s pseudo-journalistic apparatus” had essentially incepted in the Left an equal and opposite reaction to its “propaganda.”

It’s hard to do anything but taunt big media anymore.

Lori Lightfoot, out as mayor of Chicago, after failing to advance to the runoff, in Yesterdays election:

The top two vote getters – the liberal endorsed by the police union, and the center radical endorsed by the teachers – will face off in the runoff:

Mr. [Paul] Vallas, an adviser to the Fraternal Order of Police during its negotiations with Ms. Lightfoot’s administration, used the crime issue against her on the way to his first-place finish, calling for hundreds of new police officers.

Turns out blue city Democrats can reach a tipping point.

Exactly what that means will be interesting to see, where “interesting“ means in the classic rural Scandinavian sense of the term.

The Strib notes that the DFL is going on exactly the orgy of “progressive” legislating I (and everyone with a brain and a useful education) knew they would.

But I come not to talk policy.

I come to take optics.

Look at the photo:

I’ve got a couple of questions:

• Is this the most badly posed “joy” photo you’ve ever seen?
• What’s Lt. Governor Flanagan doing, not in costume?
• Am I the only one who thinks these dailiy photo ops, with staged crowds of grinning rent-a-constituents, are starting to look just a liiiiitle North Korean?
• Why does the governor look like his endoscopist told him he’s going to have to do the two-day cleanout process for his next colonoscopy?

Never let it be said the DFL isn’t on top of the important issues.

Democrats have introduced a bill in the Minnesota Legislature that would ban the sale of bottled water in the state.

Introduced earlier this month by Rep. Sydney Jordan, a Democrat from Minneapolis, the bill would prohibit manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers from “selling or offering for sale bottled water in Minnesota.”

The bill defines bottled water as “water contained in a formed or molded container” that is “comprised primarily of plastic resin, sealed, and holds less than two liters when full.”

They’re not on top of them.

But the powers that be will never let it be said.

I was reliably informed that stories of teachers subverting parents will to “transition” or otherwise influence (but don’t you dare say “groom”) children were “paranoisa”, misinformation and right wing hate speech:

A family in New York has filed a lawsuit against the Brookhaven-Comsewogue School District, Terryville Road Elementary School, and 5th-grade teacher Debra Rosenquist because they allege that Rosenquist attempted to secretly transition the gender of their 10-year-old daughter without notifying the parents.

The student – who is identified as A.V. in the complaint – became confused as to her gender during the 2021-2022 school year because Rosenquist insisted on using a male name and male pronouns to refer to the student.

Weird. I’m reliably – and very angriliy – informed this can not be:

In October 2021, the teacher began to call A.V. by the name “Leo” and use he/him pronouns for the child. No one in the district informed the parents (referred to as L.N. and E.V. in the complaint) of these changes.

Several months later, in January 2022, the school’s principal informed the parents that the child had met with the school psychologist (without the parents’ knowledge) and had drawn a girl with the words “I wanna kill myself” and “I feel sad a lot.” The psychologist determined this was because A.V. was confused about her gender identity.

This was the first time A.V.’s parents had heard anything about the confusion regarding A.V.’s gender identity or new name and pronouns forced on the child by the teacher.

Here’s the entire complaint against the Suffolk County schools, over the episode…

…that can not possibly have happened.

To: The Minneapolis City Council
From: Mitch Berg, Unruly Peasant
Re: Threats

Minneapolis City Council Members,

In this Channel 4 story, you are individually and as a body shocked, shocked, that “activists” are getting more angry, even borderline-violent, in their interactions with…the City Council.

In this case, it was over a vote re…it doesn’t matter that much, except it’s something moderately routine, except for the “activists” involved.

Anyway (with emphasis added by me):

After the failed vote, protestors began to shout and scream at councilmembers and approach the dais. The meeting had to go into recess and the protestors were removed before it continued.

During the shouting, an aide for Councilmember Michael Rainville says specific threats were made against Rainville’s family. Councilmember Emily Koski joined Rainville in filing a police report against the protestors.

“You can’t have democracy if you don’t allow the democratic process to happen and if you have someone that is fearful for their lives or that of their families because of a vote that they took, that is wrong,” said Mayor Jacob Frey.

Anyone but me remembering when Mayor McDreamy all but told the police to stand down in the face of threats to Trump supporters when they rallied at the Target Center?

Democracy didn’t matter so much then, I guess…

…but that’s a matter for another rant.

The answer comes from Economics 101 – a class no Minneapolis City Council person passed before the class (like the City Council) was taken over by the people from the Grievance Stuidies department; when you reward, or fail to provide negative consequences for, negative behavior that someone sees as benefitting them, you will get more of that behavior.

The Twin Cities “activist” class blocked freeways – and those who objected got the negative consequences.

They attacked Trump supporters at rallies – and were practically feted by the city.

Then, after they ran riot after the death of George Floyd, and the Mayor and Governor decided to follow Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s dubious example and give the mob “space to destroy” Baltimore, they threw the mob a bone; not just an entire (majority black, Latino and immigrant) neighborhood, but an entire police precinct, thinking the mob was some toddler that needed to work out his aggressions, and was shocked, shocked that they just kept going?

In confrontation after confrontation, the city o Minneapolis, and the Walz Administration, has shown those who were willing to resort to violence that not only would there be no consequences, but it would positively help them get their way.

You sowed the poo-storm. You are reaping the poo-storm.

Well, you’re starting to. You’re discovering that, in a Minneapolis (and Minnesota) run by the Grievance Studies department, expecting to be safe is a privilege.

Unexpectedly

That is all.

A friend of the blog emails:

I was at Pheasant Fest last week and the American Petroleum Institute had a booth. Not sure why, but I believe it’s because so many pipelines cross pheasant country.

Well I told the guys I want a tee shirt that says ” I like fossil fuels!”.   

He told me, “That’s great! My idea was “The oil industry saved the whales!” 

I’d take that shirt too

Someone get a business card to that guy.

1950: The “Expert” class pushes “Urban Renewal” – the freeway system was part of it. Neighborhoods destroyed, downtowns gutted, replaced with inorganic bauhaus canyons – because Big Government and the Expert class said it was for our own good.

But it sure transferred money into the hands of the political class!

2023: Sure, let’s try it all again.

Big Government is the problem behind every other problem.

Controversy over across the pond, as Sir Bob Geldof “misgenders” Sam Smith, the (checks notes) “nonbinary” singer most famous for invoking Satan at the Grammies last month, on a British morning TV show.

Although there’s plenty of anger to go around, as the press asks why the hosts of the TV show didn’t step in to stop the tragedy:

Fans have questioned why Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield didn’t step in after Bob Geldof repeatedly misgendered Sam Smith on Wednesday. 

The singer appeared on Wednesday’s episode to discuss his thoughts on the cost of living crisis and pay tribute to late Boomtown Rats bandmate Garry Roberts. 

Yet talk later turned the upcoming 40th anniversary of Band Aid when he mentioned Sam and their part in the song which was released back in 2014.

Sam revealed they were non-binary in 2019 and asked people to use the pronouns they/them. Yet Bob repeatedly referred to Sam as ‘he’.

Thoughts and prayers to the people of the UK.

I worked in radio long enough that I make a point of never revelling in the job misfortunes of others.

So yesterday’s news – 10% staff layoffs at National Public Radio – don’t provoke a happy jig. I wish em all luck, even the most useless mid-level bureaucrat among ’em.

But…has the organization learned the right lessons?

(Emphasis added):

When asked about his priorities, Lansing invoked what he has called the network’s “North Star” since his arrival in the fall of 2019: a push to ensure the network has a bigger and broader audience base, rooted in younger and more diverse listeners, readers and consumers. The emphasis, he says, must be on drawing in “the future audience to make NPR sustainable for the next 50 years.”

“Younger”? Well, over the past decade, the network has sure jammed down more than its share of breezy mediocrities (“It’s Been a Minute”, “The Moth Radio Hour”) – not sure if yesterday’s news is a verdict on that.

As to “more diverse” – they’ve tripled down on antagonizing half their audience. Even their “game shows” carry the message; the once excellent “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me“, which used to include the late PJ O’Rourke as a regular panelist, has become as lively and politically unpredictable as “Late Night with Steven Colbert“.

But you remember above, when I said I didn’t take joy in others misfortunes?

Well, I’m going to ask forgiveness for this, since I’m going to make an exception. Emphasis added:

The layoffs are in keeping with an increasingly grim landscape for media companies over recent months. Vox Media cut jobs by 7%; Gannett and Spotify by 6%. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, eliminated its Sunday magazine and a handful of other jobs. After becoming part of Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN cut hundreds of jobs and killed off its brand-new streaming service, CNN+.

Maybe it’s not “joy”. Maybe more “I told you so”.

Except Vox. That’s pure childlike joy.

I mean, it’s a grand jury, intended to allow prosecutors to indict ham sandwiches, etc etc, bla bla.

But looking at this interview with the forewoman of the Trump grand jury in Fliorida…

…it’s hard to be filled with confidence in the future of one of the most important institutions in our democracy.

To: Senator Omar Fateh
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Bad Look

Sen. Fateh,

You said this:

I suspect you, like all DFLers, know your voters don’t know any better, and wouldn’t think about it critically if they could, which they can’t, but perhaps you’re not the one to be yapping about your colleagues’ propriety.

That is all.

Berg’s 8th Law is universal and omniscient.

American progressivism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder.

To wit:

Presidential candidate Nikki Haley was accused of using “her Brown skin to launder White supremacist talking points” during a racially charged interview on MSNBC Sunday night.

“I see [Haley] and I feel sad,” Daily Beast contributor Wajahat Ali told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, “because she uses her Brown skin as a weapon against poor Black folks and poor Brown-Black folks.”

“[S]he uses her Brown skin to launder White supremacist talking points,” Ali added.

There is no harder job in America than to be a female, black, Latino, Asian, gay or Muslim conservative.

It was 43 years ago today that this happened:

It was one of a short series of events that blasted the US out of its post-Vietnam, Watergate-era funk, and played a role, at least psychologically, in ushering in one of the greatest eras in American history.

To paraphrase Sydney Greenstreet in that other great American moment, Casablanca, “It’ll take a miracle to bring the USA back, and Big Left has outlawed miracles”.

Which is all the more reason to believe.