Is there anything “climate change” (TM) can’t do?

Like, spawn a zombie apocalypse?

No, it’s no the Babylon Bee:

Of course it’s Berg’s Seventh Law in effect; most adherents to the Religion of Climate are pretty much the Walking Intellectual Dead already.

To: Rep. Liz Cheney
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: It’s Not Me, It’s You

Rep Cheney,

I’m not the biggest fan of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

For that matters, I’m not the most passionate of your detractors.

But on this issue?

So let me make sure I’m clear on this; if our government is violating the Constitution you’re wrapping yourself in, how long are we supposed to go along with it?

“Our country is governed by the Constitution”

One might hope. But when the government turns the executive branch institutions – the FBI, IRS, BATFE, CDC – against the peoples freedom? When the government trashes the separation of powers and undercuts federalism, and proposes violating the contract under which small states agreed to share some of their sovereignty with big states by eliminating the Electoral College and making the Senate reflect popular rather than state votes…

…how long before dismissing those usurpations with an ofay “Well, the Constitution” isn’t by itself an answer?

“Secession is unconstitutional“

So?

So was the American Revolution.

Saying “secession is illegal” is like trying to end a moral argument with “…because the Bible said so”. It’s vapid and cowardly. Is it illegal even if the Constitution has been rendered moot? Because saying that is like saying the preservation of government is the point, not the system the Constitution establishes and the eternal rights it enshrines.

Which do you think it is, Rep. Cheney?

That is all.

One of the symptoms of a strong, thriving downtown, is when multiple outlets of a popular store chain, selling a common addictive product to locals and passersby, close en masse.

Haines – good news! – that’s exactly what’s happening!

Minnesota-based Caribou Coffee is reportedly closing some of its downtown Minneapolis shops in the near future.

Four stores, including three in the skyway, will be closing at the end of next month, as a part of Minneapolis’ continued renaissance.

Fentanyl is killing like crack only dreamed of killing.

We could be on the brink of a couple of World War IIIs.

The national debt is unsustainable.

People can’t afford things from rent to eggs.

President Biden:

Up next: tax relief for high end restaurants and professional espresso machines.

Not long after the FBI put Catholic worshipers on its politically, motivated watchlist, this happened:

Not jumping to conclusions, here – because I don’t think there’s any need to jump. As we continue to wait for the “epic wave of right wing violence“ that Obama promised us, the epic wave of left-wing violence continues.

To: Keith Olbermann

I see you’re back at it.

What is it about you morons who got you starts writing about grown men chasing balls around fields, that makes you all such dim bulbs about politics? Eddie Schultz, Mike McFeely, Jim Souhan, Bob Costas…

Anyway – go ahead. Declare “Economic Civil War“.

See how California does having to import all of its water from the rest of the country.

See how New York City and DC do, paying import prices for food.

What could possibly go wrong?

Remember learning to read?

I do.

We’ll come back to that.

Years ago, when I was looking for alternative ways of schooling my kids, I ran across the Sudbury Schools . The Sudbury model makes kids responsible for their own education. Radically so – nobody tells them what to learn and when. Literally – there is nothing saying “Kids have to be able to read or do math at a specified level by the time they’re X years old”. Teachers are there to help the kids learn what they ask to learn.

Nobody tells kids “Today it’s reading time”. The kids learn to read when they learn to read. Some learn by asking teachers to show them how; some, by asking other kids; others just translate the alphabet.

But while nobody tells Sudbury kids when or how to learn to read, they all do – by the time they’re eight, all of them read at or well beyond “grade level”.

One Sudbury advocate pointed out – i’m paraphrasing, here – that by age five, children learn a whole language, often more than one, along with a world of other material, all by absorbing it from people and the world around them, in their own ways.

Indeed, you have to work hard to prevent children from learning.

And at age six (or earlier, now), that’s exactly what the system does for most kids; forces them to abandon their own style of learning, and learn by sitting in straight lines and listening to someone tell them what and how to learn.

They point out that if kids learned how to speak their native language/s the way they are taught to read or do math or science, we’d have a generation of kids with “Speaking Disabilities”, complete with a class of clinicians earnestly treating it.

Anyway – learning to read.

Dad was an English teacher, and Mom read to me a lot as a kid. I learned my alphabet, and learned how letters and sounds corresponded, and one day when I was four, I clearly remember driving down I94 to pick up Dad at grad school at North Dakota state in Fargo, and seeing the word “FAR-go” on the sign on the freeway, and saying it out loud to the amazement of my mom and grandparents (but not, I suspect, my infant sister).

Come to learn there are three schools of thought for teaching kids how to read.

• Whole Word: If you’re a certain age, you might remember the “Sally Dick and Jane” books? They taught kids to recognize words by repeating them over and over, and associating them with sounds they recognized. It was probably what I did in the car that day on the way to Fargo – associated some sounds and letters with a word I’d been hearing a lot, since it’s where Dad had spent the summer.
• Phonetic: Learning to sound words out. OK, I’d done a bit of that in reading the sign. F sounds like “Eff”, “A” can be “ah”, and I sorta wung it. Better example: in third grade, my teacher pointed at a map to an island in the Pacific and asked who could tell her what she was pointing at. I raised miy hand, since even then I believed in faking it ’til I made it – and then started sounding out the unfamiliar and frankly weird word. “Huh Ah Wah…Yiy?” “Yes! Hawaiii”, she cheered, as I sat there, amazed, feeling like I’d broken a secret code by accident.
• Whole language: teaching kids to guess until they get it right.

I’m being a little flippant with that last, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

We’ve known for decades that people have different learning styles. Some learn by doing, some by watching others do, some by doing while being supervised, some by reading and analyzing, and so forth. It’s utterly uncontroversial.

But somehow, when it comes to children, educational theorists throw that out the window. I’ve written before about the dismal failiure of the “Park your ass in a seat for six hours a day and move when you’re told to” model of education in teaching boys.

Now, it turns out we have an epidemic of children who can’t read – and it appears to be linked to an educational fad related to the third bullet point, “Whole Language Reading” – and the wholesale logrolling of teachers by “experts” and a thriving, well-oiled consultant class.

I listen to NPR so you don’t have do – but there are some pearls among the swine. And one of them is this piece, from one of NPR’s “investigative reporting” podcasts. about the history, effects, and star power of “Whole Language” learning, and the way a whole lot of NPR-listening, laptop-class parents discovered the whole scam when they were stuck at home watching their teachers flail away on Zoom.

It’s – trust me on this – worth a listen:

To sum up: For decades, teachers essentially ignored the fact that kids learn reading the same way humans learn everything – via combination of methods unique to most every individual – and imposed a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching reading based on one scholar and “expert’s” very striated study of child cognition. The consultants latched onto the experts, and sold the schools on their, for lack of a better word, product.

And today, a staggering percentage of kids can’t read – far, far worse than when “Why Can’t Johnny Read” first came out and started the furor over failed education…

…68 years ago.

Remember this, by the way, as the DFL moves to destroy home schooling.

Rep. Winkler is no longer alone at the top of the list of casual racists in government:

“Depraved” on the left is a hole that’s got no bottom.

And Berg’s 8th Law is universal.

A friend of the blog emails:

I got this link in an email from a woke acquaintance this morning who believes that if she can find my mental health records she can use the pending Red Flag laws to take away my guns.

Now for sale: Data on your mental health

Now for sale: Data on your mental healthFor years, data brokers have collected and resold Americans’ personal information. But the pandemic-fueled rise …

she suggested that while it might be problematic for Keith Ellison’s office to purchase and act upon this list directly it would be an ideal synergy for a NGO run by someone like Nancy Nord Bence; 

to buy the list,

winnow through all available social media targeting the non-woke,

and “possible” gun owners,

then presenting the courts with Red Flag requests for their political enemies.

She sees this possibility as a promising growth oriented cottage industry.

Count on it.

They want to make owning a firearm too personally, socially and legally dangerous…

…for minorities first. Then, peasants.

Joe Doakes, no longer from Como Park, emails:

“Return of the Rifleman” is the title of a big write-up in the NRA magazine on the subject of the Army’s new rifle.

You didn’t know?  Neither did I.  Turns out the Army has been looking for a new rifle and cartridge since WW II when the M1 with its 30.06 bullets in stripper clips was determined to be too slow and too heavy.  “Lighter weight” and “capable of fully automatic fire to saturate close range targets” got us the M16 but now the Army is looking for an upgrade again.  

6.8 x 51 mm cartridge at 80,000 psi chamber pressure gave better ballistics than the .223, 308, 30-06 or even the 6.5 Creedmore.  Slightly smaller diameter than the 7.62 x 51 NATO round but same length cartridge requires an AR-10 sized platform.  Steel jacketed cartridges weigh slightly less than brass and are cheaper to make but cartridge size is the same.  No reduction in total size or weight, no gain in rounds carried, so the deciding factor was effective range: 800 yards.

I have trouble believing new recruits will be able to hit anything shooting that far.  Current Army rifle qualification course shot with an M16 is a series of 40 pop-up targets from 25 to 300 yards.   That’s a far cry from the 800 yards the new gun was designed for.   Also, the whole point of switching to the 5.56×54 M16 rifle and 9mm pistol ammo was standardization with our NATO allies.  Is that out the window now? 

My question: does this signal a change in strategy?  What war are they anticipating?  Where will combat troops be expecting clear fields of fire half-a-mile long to make use of a new cartridge?  Not in Europe, not interchangeable with our allies.  Not in the jungle, that’s for close range weapons.  Not in the desert, that’s what the Barrett is for.  Where does the Army anticipate it will be fighting?

Russia?

China?

America? 

Makes me think conspiracy theory thoughts about the military industrial complex wanting a change merely so it can sell new hardware and ammo; and the administration wanting to ban sales of AR15 ammunition to civilians to preserve manufacturing capacity for the Army to supply its new guns; and whether the newest woke recruits wearing red high heels and rainbow arm bands will be able to use the new gun/ammo to full effect. 

I’m a big believer in Chesterton’s Fence.  Color me skeptical about this change.

Joe Doakes, formerly in Como Park

Not that I disagree with Joe – it’s hard to be too cynical about any branch of today’s American government – but there are rationales for the caliber change.

This particular Youtube account – by a former admittedly mediocre infantryman, who does some really good open-source intelligence stuff – explains some tactical rationales from a grunt’s-eye view.

As to the caliber thing? I do feel a little awkward as an American. In the sixties, we jammed 7.62.51 down on NATO, over the objection of the Brits, whose 7x43mm round had immense potential to be the sort of “intermediate” cartridge that modern “Assault Rifles” needed; America believed in long-range marksmanship, which required the full power cartridge…

…until Vietnam, when it turned out long range marksmanship was largely irrelevant, and the US jammed down the 5.56x45mm.

Which brings us to another jamdown, today.

So we learned – after the 2020 eection, naturally – that if the whole population had heard about the Hunter Biden laptop story, enough Biden voters would have switched to Trump to have created a bit of a landslide.

So, whew, good thing the media and big tech hushed up the story, right?

Of course, the Minnesota media did cover Mark Dayton’s myriad physical and mental health issues – in January, 2010, about nine months before anyone in Minnesota cared about the election, which Dayton won over Tom Emmer, largely due to the presence of potemkin Republican, Tom Horner, but significantly because the media refused to report anything non-regal about Dayton other than long before anyone cared or long after it mattered anymore.

Ilhan Omar’s family and financial issues? Mitch, please.

And now, we learn that the media – this is shocking, I know – sat on the details of John Fetterman’s stroke until Pennsylvania was safe from the scourge of (checks notes) Mehmet Oz.

Mr. Fetterman declined to be interviewed for this story. But aides and confidantes describe his introduction to the Senate as a difficult period, filled with unfamiliar duties that are taxing for someone still in recovery: meetings with constituents, attending caucus and committee meetings, appearing in public at White House events and at the State of the Union address, as well as making appearances in Pennsylvania. 

The most evident disability is a neurological condition that impairs his hearing. Mr. Fetterman suffers from auditory processing issues, forcing him to rely primarily on a tablet to transcribe what is being said to him. The hearing issues are inconsistent; they often get worse when he is in a stressful or unfamiliar situation. When it’s bad, Mr. Fetterman has described it as trying to make out the muffled voice of the teacher in the “Peanuts” cartoon, whose words could never be deciphered. 

Nick Coleman used to claim the conservative bloggers that so bedeviled him were “trying to shut down the Strib”.

It wasn’t entirely true – back then.

Today? That’s the kindest possible interpretation.

Staffer for conservative GOP Latina congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna discusses how loving and accepting the left is:

Berg’s Eighth Law has no exceptions.

The Minnesota police officers standards and training board will no longer allow law enforcement to belong to extremist groups.

Remember 15 years ago, when the Southern Poverty Law Center” branded the Taxpayers League of Minnesota a “hate group”?

Since 2009, the Feds have branded land rights protesters, mens rights groups, gun rights groups, and today every single Republican an “extremist”.

And while we’re talking about law enforcers and extremism…

So yes, POST board. Let’s talk.

I guess everyone is just finding ways to economize, these days.

I suspect that’s one of the radionaliztions batted around the Strib, WCCO and MPR newdsrooms after learning that questions about the ethics of pouring “consulting“ money into a firm owned by her husband, Omar has been spending a lot less on consultants:

A lot.

Fox News is reporting that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign has paid out comparatively little in consulting fees after cutting ties with a firm co-owned by her husband.

According to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings reviewed by the outlet, Omar’s payments to political consultants fell to around $1 million during the 2022 midterm election season.

That is a two-thirds decline from the nearly $3 million she had paid to E Street Group, a firm co-owned by her husband, Tim Mynett, during the 2020 election cycle, when she faced a far less competitive primary challenger.

By the way, they’re referring to her current husband. Not the guy who was no way, no how her brother, you racist.

Whenever your “progressive“ friends condescendingly coo “nobody’s coming after your guns“, just remember that career bureaucrat and St. Paul, representative Dave Pinto is out there plying his trade:

School counselors.

Leftist ministers at “progressive“ churches

Marriage counselors, with six hyphenated last names.

These are a partial listthe people that today’s DFL wants to give control over your civil rights.

By the way – where to fight that mental health crisis, making half the population distrust the mental health industry.

To: Madonna
From: Mitch Berg, Former Club Jock, Current Irascible Peasant
Re: Things I Find Threatening

Ms. Ciccone,

The world is full of threats. Nuclear weapons. Crime. “Anti”-Fa. Baggage fees, resort fees, airline fees (or so the President told me during his State of the Union).

But while you were, in your prime (30-40 years ago) a very influential pop star, and were a reliable floor-packer when I was a club DJ, one thing I’d never, ever call anything about you is…

…uh…

…a “threat”.

I wasn’t aware that filler caused excessive grandiloquence.

That is all.

…when those 87,000 new IRS agents were “only going to go after rich tax cheats“.

The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service today issued Notice 2023-13, which contains a proposed revenue procedure that would establish the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program, a voluntary tip reporting program between the IRS and employers in various service industries. The IRS is issuing this guidance in proposed form to provide an opportunity for public comment.

The proposed SITCA program is designed to take advantage of advancements in point-of-sale, time and attendance systems, and electronic payment settlement methods to improve tip reporting compliance. The proposed program would also decrease taxpayer and IRS administrative burdens and provide more transparency and certainty to taxpayers. The proposed program includes several features:

Politicians lie. It’s a fact that was building careers for editorialists, humorists and satirists since long before it made WIll Rogers a well-known man.

But today’s Democrats seem to be counting on, not just gullibility, but active willful ignorance, on a titanic scale.

Secretary of State Simon wants to throw away whatever a little relevance Minnesota has in presidential elections.

No, really. He said it in as many words on Monday:

Let’s be clear about this: the Electoral College exists because smaller states realized that a national popular vote for President would essentially leave the Executive branch of government to be elected by the voters of the most populous states. All the decisions the President and his branch make – the enforcement of all laws, the spending of all budgets – would be determined by the residents of the most populous parts of the country, and those parts would be who the President answered to.

The Electoral College was part of a contract – our Constitution – by which smaller states avoided getting logrolled, and thus consented to join the union.

If they abolish the Electoral College, there is literally no reason for any states other than California, New York, California, Texas, Florida, Illinois and maybe Pennsylvania, and the de facto mono-state of New Jersey/Connecticut/Massachusetts/Rhode Island, to remain in the union, since everyone else will be vassals.

Simon is calling for Minnesota to become irrelevant to Presidential politics. .

Let’s be clear: abolishing the Electoral College is, i’ll be charitable, at least as great a threat to American democracy as January 6. And that’s being charitable and meeting the Sixers halfway.

And before anyone responds in the comments with “Hahaha that was settled in 1865” – no. It was settled in 1776.

…and the enemy was nothing but a bunch of snot-nosed eighth graders…

…with firebombs and deep political connections?

Oh.

The art dealer representing Hunter Biden said the president’s son had the potential to be one of the most influential painters of the modern era, but declined to say whether he’d cooperate with a congressional investigation into sales of the art.

Georges Bergès, who has been overseeing the sale of Biden’s paintings, said the 53-year-old would ‘become one of the most consequential artists in this century.’

His comments came as the New York Post pressed him on whether he would comply with requests from the House Oversight Committee, which asked to see the names of individuals who purchased Biden’s artwork and the price they paid for it.

It’s art. You wouldn’t understand, peasants.

When The Post asked Bergès whether or not he intended to cooperate, the art dealer declined to comment and instead waxed poetic about the heights of Biden’s artistic prodigy.

‘I represent Hunter Biden because I feel that not only his art merits my representation, but because his personal narrative, which gives birth to his art, is very much needed in the world,’ he said. 

‘His is a story of perseverance; Hunter’s story reflects what I believe is the beauty of humanity, judged not by the fall, but by having the strength to rise up, by having the character required to change and the courage to do it.’

The worst thing about current events is, unlike books, you can’t skip to the end to see how i t

Backstreets magazine, which has been covering all things Springsteen and setting the standard for high-music fanzines since 1980, is going out for a ride and not coming back.

Like so much in modern music, it’s Ticketmaster’s fault:

If you read the editorial Backstreets published last summer in the aftermath of the U.S. ticket sales, you have a sense of where our heads and hearts have been: dispirited, downhearted, and, yes, disillusioned. It’s not a feeling we’re at all accustomed to while anticipating a new Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour. If you haven’t yet read that editorial (“Freeze-out,” July 24, 2022), or the crux of Springsteen’s response to Rolling Stone in November, we encourage you to do so; we don’t want to rehash those issues, but we stand behind our positions and points.

We’re not alone in struggling with the sea change. Judging by the letters we’ve received over recent months, the friends and longtimers we’ve been checking in with, and the response to our editorial, disappointment is a common feeling among hardcore fans in the Backstreets community.

Side note: loath as I am to either commend Senator Klobuchar for, well, anything, or to recommend anything from WNYC’s generally loathsome On The Media, this past week’s episode breaks down the history of Ticketmaster’s toxic impact on music. Don’t tell anyone, but it’s worth a listen:

As to Springsteen?

I’ve seen him probably half a dozen times over the years. I’m not sorry to say some of those shows were pivotal moments in my life – in some ways, I wouldn’t be who or where I am today if I hadn’t been there.

While my interest in his music has waxed and waned over the years – his first two and 2-3 most recent albums are very good, most of his stuff since about 2005 sailed right past me, the records from his break from the E-Street Band (Human Touch, Lucky Town and Ghost of Tom Joad) were a swing and a miss, and the “Holy Trinity” (Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River), Nebraska, Tunnel of Love and The Rising are as good as popular music gets, and in comparison Born in the USA is merely great – underneath it all i’ve been fascinating to watch how Springsteen has kept himself and his fans in a state of creative churn trying not to turn into a nostalgia act dragging a troupe of nostalgia act fans around the world. And even though I might go ten years without enjoying (or buying) one of his records, for that, I’m grateful.

So I’m not going to say I’m not going to keep an eye peeled for a much, much better price for next month’s shows at the X, for old times sake. He won’t be touring forever.

But the extent to which even Bruce – who, 40 years ago, was gutting Big Scalper before there was a Pearl Jam – has been assimilated is…

…well, Backstreets‘s op-ed calls it ‘disappointing”, and I can’t disagree. Bruce sounds a lot like a politician in explaining his position, stuck between the most loyal fan base in music and Ticketmaster and Live Nation…

…who are no less greedy and soulless a bunch of “bosses” as the musachioed villains in the Pete Seeger songs Bruce memorialized (checks notes) 17 years ago.

Disappointing. I’ll stick with that.

(Note: Don’t like Bruce? Take it up elsewhere. Bruce hate will be culled without mercy or comment. Take it up with JB Doubtless – if you can find him. As the sage said, I’m still here, he’s all gone).

Back when I worked in downtown Saint Paul, I commuted down Summit Avenue.

There’s a bike lane down the entire length of the street. And while the condition of the lane is the same as the condition of the street itself (I’m looking at you, Summit and Oakland) it’s already one of the most beautiful urban corridors in the city.

Let’s review: for the price of the paint it took to create it, two-way bike lanes co-exist with two lanes of traffic each way, down a gorgeous parkway. It’s how biking should be.

“The City of Saint Paul” wants to spend $`12 million to build raised lanes on both side of Summit, reducing the street to one lane each way. And by “the City of Saint Paul”, I mean a thin, entitled, smug, innumerate veneer of smug upper-middle-class members of the laptop class – the peolple who run the city.

The city can’t hire cops. Its streets are a disaster. Every year, we hesitate to call the snow-plowing “the worst ever” because that merely temptes the next year.

And, make no mistake – the fact that this story is being publicized means the decision has been made. Oh, here will be “public hearings” and “listening sessions” – which are stamps on the procedural ticket to show they’ve done their due diligence before doing what they wanted to do anyway.

But speaking as a biker, I’d like to have a word with Zack Mensinger.

To wit:

People who use the phrase “…stand in solidarity” are almost always entitled, grandiloquent jagoffs who are speaking in support of horrible people who are doing wretched things”.

To wit:

Exhibit B…:

…which also suggests a link between the phrase and bad Latin Socialist Realist art.

Discuss.

Tide Pod Evita on Ilhan Omar:

And today’s music list:

…but Jude Russo’s description of a train ride from his home into the District of Colombia may as well be about the Twin Cities, from the post-Covid pathologies of the drivers on the freeways…:

I rarely leave the greater D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area, so I cannot speak to the case in other parts of the country, but here the drivers have simply become worse since the pandemic shutdowns.

In particular cases, it is clear what is happening—a 20-year-old Camry in the passing lane, going ten under the limit and reeking of the botanicals that the people of my state last year voted to legalize, holds no mystery. But we have also added speed demons and weavers and those inscrutable drivers who insist on going the exact speed as the cars in the lanes next to them, making passing impossible. The etiology of these pathologies, whether chemical or spiritual, is unknown to me.

…to the state of the state (or, I guess, district) overall:

It is difficult not to feel that something has come loose these past few years. Public standards for everything from dressing to doing your job to maintaining infrastructure have slipped. But the Maryland government ran a surplus last year, and may repeat the feat with the help of gambling tax revenue; Alstom is in the black, as is SP Plus.

Everyone has more money but is poorer; things are more profitable but worse; there are more legal ways to have fun than ever, but everyone is miserable. “The purveyor of rare herbs and prescribed chemicals is back. Will we never be set free?”

It’s worth a read…

…assuming you haven’t been living it,here or there.