I’m old enough to remember Tim Walz saying we needed to change our political rhetoric.  

And if you’re older than a week, so are you. 

How’s that going?

So, back to normal. 

Hey – check this out:

Suddenly the media does know what a woman is!

Not long ago, in a discussion elsewhere,  I mentioned that I have a hard time deciding who I dislike more in re the situation in the Middle East – the antisemitic right, or American liberal Christians with academic to-the-point-of-infantile interpretations of “Just War Doctrine”.

Not much I can say or do about the former. 

But as to the latter?

Just War Doctrine outlines reasons that war might be morally justified. It requires a legitimate cause (like self-defense), proportionality in response (there’s your bugaboo right there), and due discretion to minimize harm to non-combatants. It also says you need a legitimate authority to declare war, a reasonable chance of success, and war as a last resort after running out of peaceful alternatives. The doctrine is an academic attempt to balance the moral complexities of armed conflict with the pursuit of peace.

I’ve seen a few of my liberal Christian friends dunk on the Israeli strikes on the Iranian nuke program and military, even though by any *rational* measure, the Israeli strikes satisfy all of these criteria.

Self defense? Iran has been bankrolling terror against the US (not to mention Israel)  for over forty years. The Marine Embassy bombing? Funding and arming Hamas, Hizb’allah, the Palestinian Authority, the Houthis and other terror movements throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia? Funding all the Intifadas, paying big money to the families of suicide bombers, funding decades of rockets attacks on Israel (and others), having their fingers directly on the October 7 pogrom, and having “eradicating Israel” as a foundational goal (inclding for their nuke program)?

Too many of my liberal Christian friends seem to have gone past “Just War” doctrine and straight on to “Groundhog Day Doctrine” – forgetting all of history when they wake up every morning and starting the entire Middle East conflict over from a clean slate every morning. Israel “attacked Iran” – 40-odd years of terrorism, direct attacks, and apocalyptic ,eliminationist rhetoric be darned.

Proportionality? Forget for a moment that it’s not only an academic concept when actual self-defense is involved – “proportionality” taking to the ridiculous extreme too many history-challenged liberal Christians do, it actually makes wars worse and less “just”. Think about it: a “proportional” response to Pearl Harbor would have involved sinking Japanese ships and calling it even; in 1939, the Allies should have retaken Poland and left everything else in place; Israel should presumably send goons into rural Iran on an anti-Farsi pogrom, taking hostages and killing 1200-ish people – in all cases, leaving the *root cause* of the wars (Japanese and German expansionism, elimination antisemitism) in place.

But you’d have a hard time showing a more “proportional” response in all of military history than Israel’s attack on Iran – thus far, at least. No carpet-bombing, no “Search and Destroy” missions through villages – no conventional ground troops at all. And hardly any contact with civilians outside the nuke program at all (it’s likely 90% of the Iranian population has had no contact with the war outside whatever media reports they’re getting.

They’re not a lot different than Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, in their own way.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Metro Transit Blue Line – the beginning, or re-beginning, of light rail transit in the Twin Cities.

So on this anniversary, let us remember the people who gave their lives – unwillingly and in most cases unwittingly – to further Minnesota’s political class’s obsession with feeling like a Big City.

It was a relatively quiet year on the rail lines – if you leave out crime at the train stations and on board the trains, of course. But the trains didn’t run over anyone new.

Still:

• The Blue Line has mowed down 20 so far – including a pedestrian and a cyclist on back to back days just a few weeks ago. That’s an average of almost one death per year.
• The Green Line has harvested 13 victims in 11 years – the first just six weeks after the train started operating, mostly pedestrians trying to navigate the badly-designed street-level crossings. Over the past year, the line clamed a pedestrian this past March. There was also a murder on a Green Line trade last November, right after Thanksgiving.
• The Northstar line has five fatalities so far. The last was in 2019 – which, to be fair, was about the last time anyone rode the Northstar.

That’s 31 dead, so far. 31 lives snuffed out so that the Met Council, the various governments, and other people who love to play with the dials and levers of government can feel like they’re “running” a big city with all the trimmings. 

Let’s take a moment today to remember these innocent victims of government narcissism and megalomania.

We’ve had a week of gyrations and caterwauling about “right wing violence” after the ghastly shooting spree carried out by Vance Boulter, who is tenuously associated with the Republican Party.  

We now return to regular programming:

Now, you might think the fact that no party was mentioned is a sure sign that he was a Democrat. 

And you’d be right:

The “expletive” in question was alleged to have been Rep. Jim Nash of Waconia.

So, to borrow a phrase from David Byrne, “same as it ever was”.

Mere months after DOGE took a chainsaw to fuzzy discretionary spending…

A party whose approval is in the 20s, clearly living on graft, and that seems to be having trouble keeping its own house in order?  

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. 

Don’t get cocky.  The Democrats still have all the money in the world, and plenty of “talent” in the wings.  

But I’m loving the flailing. 

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

 

Joe Doakes

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Devil’s advocate says: John Thompson wants to make sure Boelter gets competently prosecuted?

The man who was, for three terms, the worst president of my lifetime:

“Every single way but on paper”. 

“Look, Ms. Banker – my credit rating is 740- in every way but on paper.  Where, yes, it says 515”. 

“Why yes, I hold several records in sports from high school and college.  Not on paper, of course”. 

“Anna Kendrick and I are a thing.  Just not on paper”.  

“Officer, I’m a legitimate driver in every way but on plastic.  And my car is insured and registered in everry way but on paper.”

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

Why is there a rebate for electric bicycles, what’s wrong with the old-fashioned Schwinn bicycle?

 

Why do teacher pensions need a boost from the state, why aren’t they paid from teacher contributions?

 

Why do any illegal aliens get free healthcare whether they are children or not? Why do we want to encourage them to stay instead of encouraging them to leave?

 

Joe Doakes

The terms “perverse incentives” and “unintended consequences” is always the answer, one way or the other.

My eyes groaned and squeaked open around 6:15 Saturday morning, after a little less than four hours of sleep.  My band had been at a gig, and I hadn’t gotten home until after 2AM, and it took a while to get to sleep after that.  

A dim little echo rattled around my sleep-fogged mind: “I’ve got four ‘stop the presses’ stories to figure out how to talk about on the show today”.  Keith Ellison admitting he’d maybe talked with some Feeding Our Future defendants just a little; the “No Kings” group therapy sessions; the end of the special session; war between Israel and Iran.  

But I figured I could get another couple hours of sleep. 

But I made the mistake of checking Twitter, and saw “Minnesota Legislators shot” and, well, the day kicked off.  

So I need to do more radio. 

Berg’s 18th Law got its biggest workout ever over this past weekend.  

Nothing the media writes/says about any emotionally charged event – a mass shooting, a police shooting, anything – should be taken seriously for 48 hours after the original incident.  It will largely be rubbish, as media outlets vie to “scoop” each other even on incorrect facts.

 

Starting with the first roujnd of tweets at 6AM, the story morphed from:

1. A rabid Trump supporter must have done it
2. An insane narcissist who wanted to go out in a misguided blaze of glory did it. 
3. A DFL irate over the vote over the “healthcare for illegals” vote last week (which Senator Hoffman didn’t buck the DFL on)
4. A Dayton and Walz appointee did it!
5. A guy whose non-profit got gutted by USAID cuts did it. 
6. A Pro-Lifer did it!
7. A guy with a bizarre and incongruous resume did it. 

I started at #2, and due to the 18th Law, gravitated back there by late Saturday afternoon.  I just hoped we’d catch the guy alive. 

And they did:

But the questions are just starting.

This take seems very plausible, given what we know…

With the qualifier “given what we know” doing a lot of lifting.

And again, knowing what we know now, if I had to guess (and I don’t, but I will), I’m going to guess the Boelter is a grab bag opportunist with some vague right-wing trappings, a history of grifting, and a building wave of mental illness.  

One thing I don’t have to guess about:  he won’t be to the right what Luigi Mangione is to the left:

I might have met Speaker Hortman twice, and didn’t form much of a personal opinion – but although I disagreed with 150% of her policies, by all accounts she was a perfectly wonderful human being:

The boundaries of Berg’s 18th Law are arbitrary – 48 hours was a good place to start.   With Boulter in custody, we may start getting things in order.  

Speculation later.  

You’re a security guy. 

You’re securing a public figure – part of an administration brings out the crazy in the crazies, and who has herself gotten plenty of “admiration” from the “Professor Bill” set. She completely meets the criteria set down in Berg’s 8th Law.

You’re securing her in a crowded room full of people you have to keep your eye on.  

Suddenly, someone comes in the room, bellowing DO YOU KNOW WHO I AAAAAAAM?

You do not know who he is.  He looks like pretty much 100,000 other people within a 10 mile radius.   

But he just won’t shut up.  

So, with visions of John Thompson and Butler PA and Rand Paul in mind, you do your freaking job. 

And this is what you get:

The entire left – no, the entire left – is up in a snit about it. 

I mean, who does he think he is?  Someone trying to go to church in 2020?

Normies: “Happy Flag Day”

Droogs: “ACK-shyu-ally, BeTSy RoSs diDn’t sEw TEh flAg, AnD hTe wh0L3 story is a mYth”.

Normies: “Right. Nations and cultures have mythologies that encapsulate parts of what their cultures are about. Not just the USA. ALL of them”.

Droogs: “iT Is tEH Lie!”

Normies: “In the same sense that Hercules, the Knights of the Round Table and the Great White Buffalo are myths; they may not be documentable history, but they pass vital parts of the culture on to future generations”.

Droogs: “iT tELLs uS tEH cUlTuRE is teH LIERR!”

Normies: “It tells future generations that a humble seamstress – someone who other cultures ignored – had a vital role in the spirit that founded this nation”.

Droogs: “…”

Normies: “Yes?”

Droogs: “U r tEh whItE SpReMEcYst!”

The top-line number seems depressing, if you’re a Republican. And the DFL wants to double that down while it can:

I know, I know – it’s Survey USA. They oversample metro voters and Democrats.

It’s the second-tier result that’s interesting; on the question of whether he should run for Governor again:

He’s underwater among independents.  I think that’s a first; for some reason, “independent” voters have had a thing for the little Mussolini.  

So you can expect a huge PR effort to burnish his image as he tries to make that two year jump from 2026 to 2028 in some kind of office.  

Here’s the biggest takeaway to me:  you can ask youself who those 58% of idiots are.  Even if you write off a few percent because it’s a SUSA poll, that still means his approval is way above water.  

Which means that the “shut down the government and stick with pure conservative principle” crowd –  I’m looking at you, Action 4 Liberty – would be swimming up the PR stream from the word go, trying to convince voters of the merits of a government shutdown when they still don’t see what national voters plainly saw.  

I’m just the messenger.   

Is there another way to look at this?

Waymo moves all of its self-driving cabs out to the suburbs of Los Angeles:

It may be the most 2025 photo of all time. 

85 years ago this month, Winston Churchill unpacked the result of the Dunkirk evactuation and reminded the UK that evacuations don’t win wars.   

And fighting the DFL to stalemates doesn’t save Minnesota – not all by itself.  

But let’s make sure we’re clear on what happened:

The GOP – facing a DFL executive branch and a DFL controlled Senate with a one (possibly illegitimate, but whatever) vote minority – with only a tie in the House, managed to win a smaller budget.   

Not smaller than the one we had before the DFL’s spending spree in ’23-’24 – but that was never on the table with only a tie in one chamber.  The GOP could not pass anything remotely partisan (even HOA reform had its hiccups) – tie votes lose, and anything the House MIGHT have passed would died in a DFL-controlled Senate committee.  

But it was still a huge cut in absolute dollars, and – this is important – the first cut of any kind in recent memory.   Enough for the “burn it all down” crowd?  No, but nothing is.  

Doing better will require winning more elections.  

Can the MNGOP do it?  

I’m not sanguine about the state party – but they really only influence statewide elections (Governor, Senator, the Constitutional offices).  The  Legislative caucuses don’t depend on the state party, and the House and Senate Caucus Committees do a good job worthy of some hope.  

So suck it up. It ain’t over. 

If you were involved in any way in the 2020 riots in Minneapolis, even as a spectator, you know there was little organic and nothing spontaneous about them.  

With that in mind, I urge you to read this entire thread about the LA riots:

Babies getting tear-gassed?   

They’re just eggs for the greater omelette:

The MO points to “leftist NGOs with deep pockets”.

Who, how deep and how did they get so deep?

DataRepubliican (yes, another “X” thread) has more:

The major one appears to be “CHIRLA” (“Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights”). And yes, course you and I are paying for it:

And, oh yeah. don’t forget the leftist billionaires:

I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and guess that Big Left’s A-team was too busy planning in Los Angeles to turn last week’s fracas in Minneapolis into the riots some clearly so deperately wanted.

This past Tuesday, scads of feds – FBI, DHS, BATFE – raided eight different businesses around the Twin Cities, serving search warrants related to human trafficking.  

Seven of the raids went off without a hitch. 

But the eighth – at Lake and Bloomington, deep in the heart of white, progressive Minneapolis – was different.  The Feds rolled in in MRAPs and full battle rattle. 

And, in their own way, so did Minneapolis’s entire progressive power structure; the video is worth a watch:

Watching the woman at around 1:15 is enough to make me realize I sold Michael Savage short: progressivism certainly appears to be a manifestation of some kind of emotional trouble.

Around 3:00 minutes in, you can see the crowd – white, progressive, lots of tattoos and man-buns – starting to push and shove the feds.  It’s almost as if someone wants to institgate another riot.  

Around 7:00, the crowd starts to dump trash barrels on the street, apparently trying to keep the feds from leaving. Around 9:30, it gets even worse.

The mace comes out around 11:30. as the MRAPs leave the area.  

This was in defense of human traffickers. 

For all the sturm und drang, it doesn’t appear that anyone involved in attacking the feds or cops got arrested for obstructing justice. 

The reactions from DFLers were…predictable. 

Putative mayoral front-runner Omar Fateh:

Senator Fateh: under “no” circumstances?

Like , not even with active human trafficking?

Weird.

Councilman Chavez – who is the primary evidence not only of Berg’s 21st Law, but of the “Cano Corollary” to the 21st Law, named after the loony-left councilwoman he replaced because she was too moderate for the local DFL – sounded off. As usual:

Remember – this is against an investigation of human trafficking (not to mention drugs and latin gangs).

The Police Union responded:

It’s not like Jacob Frey – who, let’s not forget, was the “law and order’ alternative to Ray Dehn in 2017 – is going to be much better.  Minneapolis cops should have been hauling everyone who pushed the cops downtown.  It was pure incitement – and a sign of a department that gets no support from its prosecutor. 

Because they don’t:

Minneapolis is at a crossroads:  civilization, prosperity and sanity, vs. decay, anarchy and Lord of the Flies.   

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

That’s the new Democrat line about tariffs – Trump Always Chickens Out.  He proposes high tariffs then reduces them when the other side offers concessions. He chickens out

I get that Democrats have no experience in high-stakes real estate negotiations so they have no idea how The Art of The Deal is done.  But have they never been to Mexico?  Never bargained over a souvenir?  Hell, never bought a used car or anything at a garage sale?  The seller always starts high and comes down in order to make the deal, exactly as Trump has been doing with tariffs. 

And Democrats think that means he’s chickening out?  How stupid are they?  No, how stupid do they think WE are, that we don’t understand how the game is played? 

Unbelievable.

Joe Doakes

 

To: Jon Collins, Senior Reporter on Race, Class and Communities, MInnesota Public Radio
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Anniversary + Findings

Mr. Collins,

As I have every year since 2021, I hope this day finds you well.

It was four years ago yesterday you sent this out on your listener mailing list::

“South Minneapolis: I know this sounds crazy. But it’s 2020. And I’m working on story now about white supremacists coming to Minneapolis to foment race war under cover of the protests. I need your help, and your friends help. Please refer anyone with real, credible info (not rumor or speculation) or sources to me at (I’m gonna redact that)

What the heck – let’s give this a shot:

Now, I know MPR reporters don’t generally deign to respond to the peasantry – in fact, I know MPR News management specifically tells staff not to engage with the unwashed masses.

But for the fourth June in a row, I’m genuinely curious – did you find anything?

It’s not of idle interest to me.  Mine was one of the neighborhoods that got burned, looted and vandalized in May of 2020 (noting at the time that I saw a lot of “AmeriKKKa” and “Destroy the 1%” graffiti, but not a single swastika or “14 words” reference, I’m thinking the Twin Cities either got the most inept “white supremacists” in the history of bigotry, or they were the most ingenious – fiendishly tricking a whole city full of leftists into doing the job for them – the sort of fieldcraft that’d make a Mossad agent envious).     

While I am a very overt conservative (I went from Bob Collins’ Christmas Card list to…well, very much off of it during his unfortunate unpleasantness a few years ago), I also spent time covering radical groups of all stripes back when I was in the mainstream media.  

I ask because a not-so-cursory look through the last three years of your reporting doesn’t seem to show anything.  

And as I do every year on the anniversary of this event, I’d like to invite you on my show (Saturday, 1-3PM) to talk about your findings.   Because it’s everyone’s city. 

Thanks,

Mitch Berg
Host, WWTC-AM

A group of federal law enforcement agents – FBI, DHS – apparently served a warrant for drug trafficking and money laundering on a restaurant at Lake and Bloomington in South Minneapolis yesterday. 

And it’s almost – I say, almost – like Twin Cities Big Left is trying to coax a riot out of the situation:

I mean, a riot over ICE, or whoever, would certainly divert attention away from the collapsing schools, the crime, the downtown that is disintegrating and leaving a gaping maw of taxes that will wind up being made up by an increasingly beleaguered middle class, a dysfunctional city government and a state government run by a bunch wastrels that squandered a $18 Billion surplus, wouldn’t it?

It’s not news to anyone who’s been following the subject – education is in crisis.  

And the mainstream conservative response seems to be “let it burn!”   If you talk with a lot of mainstream conservatives, the kids should be heading straight out into apprenticeship programs and becoming electricians, HVAC techs, plumbers, truckers…

And I get it; the urge to chuck a mainstream education culture that has grown to hold most of “us” in contempt is tempting.  

But there’s a catch.  Someone’s gonna have to write the history books.  Someone’s gonna have to tell tomorrow’s cultural narrative what today’s cultural narrative was.   If politics is downstream of culture, and conservatives are doing the flooring and concrete finishing for the people that pass that information along, what do you think happens to culture in the future?

More of what is happeninbg tioday, that’s what.  

Which is what I thought when I read this piece by Joanne Jacobs, a Brit academic critic, about today’s woke fad of only teaching kids authors that are “relatable” to people today:

There is nothing compassionate about teaching an easier, more familiar, “culturally relevant” curriculum to disadvantaged children, writes Mark McCourt on EMaths, a British blog. It’s condescension.

Speaking the language of care, some argue that children in poverty “should be shielded from the rigour of canonical texts, or complex scientific ideas, or abstract mathematics, he writes. “That Shakespeare is beyond them. That Bach is meaningless to them. That the laws of thermodynamics belong to someone else’s world.”

School “is meant to offer new worlds,” writes McCourt. “It is meant to take the child by the hand and lead them to places they never knew existed, places beyond their post code, places they have every right to belong.”

Remember – “education” and schooling are very different things. 

And it seems to me if you want to make a society decline and collapse, you take away its imagination.  What could do that faster than focusing on the here and now?

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Members of the German Parliament have been talking tough about Trumps tariffs.The tariffs will hurt Americans worse than Germans. America doesn’t make anything anymore.  There’s nothing they need from us.  

 

Excellent. High tariffs are gone. And so are our soldiers, airmen, Marines.  Germany can have those empty bases to fill with their own soldiers to stare down the Russians.

 

 Peace, friendship, and honest commerce with all; entangling alliances with none. Wise words from one of our founders. Glad we have the opportunity to get back them. 

 

Joe Doakes

And it’s time for one of the great new Minneapolis summer traditions (X thread): 

One apparently dead, five more shot, and one woman injured in the brawl that inevitably followed at Hennepini County Hospital.

Early reports say it was ELCA vs. Missouri Synod.