Perhaps the mind-numbing stupidity of its’ leaders?

…the bureaucracy – any bureaucracy – runs by rules of its own.  Those rules usually have  more to do with sustaining bureaucracy itself than to solving whatever problem or administering whatever service that bureaucracy is supposed to be doing.

On the other?  Read past the bureaucratese in this report and it appears that the Minneapolis Police Department has been shaving a lot of corners on psychological testing of its new recruits.

Does this have anything to do with, among other things, the Damond shooting?  Bureaucratic checkbox-checkers running amok?

Maybe a little bit of both?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Scene:  a cluttered office, a fat, balding man chewing a cigar, reading a script and scowling at it.  A young man steps into the doorway and raps on the door, three times, quickly.

Writer:  Boss, I’ve got a great idea for a new show.  It’s a political thriller, got action, intrigue, it’s great.

Boss:  Yeah?  Siddown and lay it out for me.

Boss tosses the script he was reading onto his desk and leans back in his chair, studying the young man.  Young man sits down, butt on the edge of the seat, and leans forward, speaking eagerly

Writer:  okay, there’s the guy, see?  And he works for the FBI.  He’s a true patriot, he hates the way the country is going and he wants to help a good candidate get elected.  He makes a donation like everybody in the office, but he wants to do more.  All the sudden, he finds himself assigned to investigate his favorite candidate for breaking the law.  But he doesn’t want to do it, see?  But he has to, see?  So there’s dramatic tension.

Boss: yeah, but the law is the law.  What’s he gonna do?

Writer:  that’s the cool part.  He interviews the candidate but he “forgets” to put her under oath.  So none of her answers can be used against her, right?  And there’s a suspicious death tied to the charges but he knows this candidate has a long trail of suspicious deaths and shady dealings so he’s afraid she might be involved with this one, too.  So he doesn’t want to investigate that, see?  But he’s torn about it, see, because maybe she really is as crooked as the rest of them.  But maybe she’s not, and besides, her opponent is a real jerk.  So he calls the death a “robbery gone bad” and when his boss is going to make a press announcement saying the candidate broke the law, our guy changes it to say she did NOT break the law.

Boss: wait, why wouldn’t the boss notice the change?

Writer:  the boss isn’t a cop, he’s a political hack, a time-serving moron.  So he goes along with the charade and the candidate gets away with the crime and stays in the election.

Boss: okay, weak, but we can work with it.

Writer: wait, it gets better!  His candidate loses the election.

Boss: what the hell?  How’s that help?  The show’s over.

Writer: no, no, it’s just getting started.  The candidate was supposed to win, see?  All the polls said so. All the experts said so.  She was so far ahead, she didn’t even campaign the last week, the election was in the bag.  She booked a hall and ordered fireworks and had her victory speech written and when she lost, it was stunning.  The talking heads on tv were stunned.  The losing candidate was drunk two days, couldn’t give a concession speech.  Total disaster.  And meanwhile, the smug jerk who won the election is all over Twitter rubbing it in, offering her five cents on the dollar for the fireworks she doesn’t need anymore.

Boss: yeah, so?  Sounds like a depressing show.  Nobody wants to watch that.

Writer:  Yeah, yeah, but our guy, remember him?  He’s in the FBI.  They see all kinds of wacko stuff, all kinds of nuts and goofballs with conspiracy theories.  So he’s devastated that his gal lost and the jerk won and he’s sitting at his desk moping when he glances at this file on his desk.  Some kook claims the jerk was in cahoots with the Russians to help him steal the election and he stayed in a Russian hotel where a team of hookers gave him a golden shower right on the hotel bed.

Boss: whoa, whoa, we can’t put that stuff on television.  Not in prime time.

Writer: okay, so maybe we don’t show it on screen

Boss: but maybe a special episode on cable?  Pay per view?  Hmmmm.

Writer: yeah, yeah!  Like that.  And anyway, so our guy, he sees this folder and he knows it’s bullshit but he thinks “If only the public knew what a jerk that guy is.”  Just then his boss walks by and says “I’m headed to brief the President-Elect, anything new I should know?” And all the sudden, on impulse, our guy hands his boss the folder and says “You might want to warn him this stuff is going around, so he doesn’t get blind-sided.”  The boss, being a dope, doesn’t realize it’s a set-up, he thinks our guy is being all noble and professional, so the boss goes right along.  But one of the long-term staff people in the President’s briefing sees the dossier is political dynamite and leaks it to his buddies in the press.  Ka-boom, huge political outrage, our guy’s losing candidate gets cheered up, the president-elect looks like an idiot, our guy is grinning like crazy.

Boss: and then?

Writer:  and then things get interesting.  The losing candidate’s political party seizes on the Russian Collusion angle and demands an investigation.  The new Attorney General is a another political appointee, not used to how the game is played in the bureaucracy, so he recuses himself.

Boss: excuses himself?

Writer: no, recuses.  He steps aside and lets the long-term staffers handle it.  And they all hate the new President.  So the staffers convince the new President the only way to clear his name is to appoint a special investigator.  And they recommend their old boss, who they assure him is a straight shooter, which he is – straight in your back.  But the new President doesn’t know that, see, so the new President goes along with it.

Boss: inside baseball.  boring.

Writer: no, wait!  The special investigator hates the new President, too.  And he hires a team of assistants to help him, all of them hate the new President.  And here’s the best part – he decides that for his top assistant on the team, he needs the guy who knows the most about the collusion.  He needs the guy who discovered the folder.  He needs OUR GUY!  Our guy is now the top assistant on the team investigating the new President.

Boss:  okay, more interesting.  Keep going

Writer:  so our guy is only part of the investigation, he can’t go after the President directly.  But he remembers that during the campaign, his team used a little “creative phrasing” to convince a judge to let them wiretap some people in the jerk’s campaign.  And one of those people is now the new President’s aide.  Our guy drops by the aide’s office to chat and just happens to ask some questions about one of the wiretapped conversations.  He doesn’t tell the aide he’s under investigation, the aide doesn’t have a lawyer present, the conversation isn’t recorded, but our guy goes back to the office and dummies up some notes in the file as to what our guy claims the aide said.

Boss:  so?

Writer: so our guy walks into the special investigator’s office and says “Hey, the President’s aide lied to me.  Here’s what he said on the wiretap and here’s what he told me in person.  He’s a liar.  We can prosecute him for lying and maybe get him to roll over on his boss, testify against the President.”  So the special prosecutor is liking that and ready to run with it but our guy screws up.  See, he’s married but he’s also having an affair with an FBI lawyer – that’s the love interest and we can get some steamy scenes out of that, too – and our guy sends his lover some texts bragging about his scam.  But somehow the texts leak

Boss: how?

Writer: I’m working on that.  But anyway, the texts leak and the special investigator finds out our guy is bent so his testimony is worthless,  but the special investigator really hates the President so he quietly reassigns our guy out of the way for a bit while he tries to finesse the aide into pleading guilty so he can get something to use against the President.

Boss: wait – what happened to our guy?  I thought this show was about him?

Writer: he’s reassigned to Human Resources to lay low until it blows over.  The special investigator temporarily becomes the star of the show.  It’s like when the main star is pregnant so the co-star gets a few episodes, you know?

Boss: yeah, okay.  Then what?

Writer: well, that’s as far as I’ve gotten.  But it’s great, right?  It’s got everything – sex, crime, politics, drama . . . so when do we start shooting?

Boss;  I gotta hand it to ya, kid, I really do.  Ya got a terrific imagination.  But this stuff, it’s too much.  It’s over the top.  One guy at the center of a conspiracy to take down the President?  Nobody would ever believe it.  And what the hell kind of name is Strzok?  Fuggedaboutit, kid.  Get the hell out of my office.

End scene

Joe Doakes

It’s only fiction if you ignore the real world.

Al Franken resigned so that the full weight of the Democrat noise machine can turn its attention to attacking Roy Moore – thereby returning the narrative to “The Republican War On Women”.

Speaking of which – has there ever been a better Berg’s Seventh Law violation than “The War On Women”?

Anyway – this past few months, our society’s been focused incessantly on the various grades of “Sexual Harassment” – the use of un-consented flirting, “blue” conversation, touching and more aggressive sexual contact, especially that which takes place in the context of a power disparity.    Whether it’s feeling entitled to grab a little “no go zone” anatomy without consent, to trading sex for advancement, to using the resources of the state you govern to silence people who complain about what you do, and everything in between, the genera consensus is “It’s bad”.

So our society’s been lingering for a few months on every possible permutation of sexual harassment, and how society deals with it (“due process”?  “Always believe women!”?  “Always believe women, unless they’re accusing men who are key votes for abortion rights legislation”?), I think it’s time to look at another version.

On The Plantation:  “Progressivism” heaps especial scorn on apostates – Afro-Americans, Latinos, Asians and women wno leave the Progressive plantation.

And no, the right doesn’t do the same thing.    Have you ever heard a conservative rip on, say, Paul Thissen or Tom Bakk for “betraying middle aged white guys” [1] by not being a conservative?   No.  And you never will.

But you do hear mainstream “progressives” tear into black, Latino, asian and female conservatives for, I kid you not, “betraying” their race and gender.  [2]

And if any of them run for office?  They turn psychotic (which brings us to Berg’s Eight Law).

In particular, I’ve talked with a number of female conservatives who’ve related a similar pattern to me; they’ve thought about running for office, or for higher office – but demurred…

…because they knew the Democrat smear machine was going to do in terms of splashing their private life, current, past and long-past, in public.

So let’s get this straight:  to “Progressive” “feminists”, “slut-shaming” women who have had more than one partner in their lives, or who’ve gone out in public dressed as someone other than Hester Prynne, is completely unacceptable –  unless one has:

• Accused a Democrat politician of some sort of impropriety, in which it will be used to discredit you
• Run for office as a non-Democrat, in which case it will be used to assassinate your character.

Which, put another way, is using sex to preserve disparate power.

[1] Their narrative about conservatives and conservatism.  Not mine.

[2] Conservatism is never, ever about identity.  Anyone who says it is is driven by narrative, not fact.

A long time ago, in a beautiful but cold place far far away, a communist dictator built a colosseum.  Being committed to the populist flim-flam most totalitarians use to get help in seizing power, he named it “The People’s Stadium” – although “the people” only got to use it with the permission of the dictator’s cronies.

And the dictator built a train – “The Peoples’ Train” – to bring people from the miserable, decaying, crime-sodden cities to The People’s Stadium.

The dictator and his cronies planned a massive rally to celebrate their power and perspicacity; the entire world’s media would be there to see the dictator’s work.

And the dictator worried: while he put on a slick facade for the foreign press, some of the locals were unruly, and parts o the city were falling apart.

So the dictator took steps to make sure The People wouldn’t screw up The People’s  Event at the People’s Stadium before the eyes of the world.  First, he barred The Hoi Polloi from the Peoples’ Train, to make sure they’d never encounter foreign visitors.

And then, to take no chances, he deployed his Army in the People’s City, to make sure the locals stayed in line.

Minneapolis officials are calling on Gov. Mark Dayton to mobilize the state National Guard for the Super Bowl, amid questions about whether the city’s police force has enough officers to effectively patrol neighborhoods and handle other demands.

Even with dozens of departments across the state pledging to send officers to help with security, Mayor Betsy Hodges and mayor-elect Jacob Frey wrote in a letter on Tuesday that the city’s police “cannot by themselves meet of all the safety and security needs of the 10 days of Super Bowl LII while maintaining public-safety operations for the entire city.”

When I wrote my book Trulbert:  A Comic Novella ab out the End of the World as We Know It, I wrote the scene in which a thinly disguised Roger Goodell-type NFL commissioner exacted concessions out of Minneapolis’ dictator, Myron Ilktost, to be as over the top as I could imagine; a complete NFL takeover of all civic resources, free transportation, prostitutes, whatever the NFL wanted.  And when I went back and edited and re-wrote, I massaged it to make it even more over-the-top.   I was satisfied that real life could never imitate my fiction.

Kudos, Roger Gooddell and Mark Dayton.  You’ve proven me wrong.

With the departure of Fast Eddie Schultz from the (American) national media, Cenk Uygur has taken sole possession of the role of dumbest person in American public life.

And every once in a while, when I need a little pick-me-up, I re-roll this clip of his election-night journey from entitled, Urban-Progressive-Privilege-sodden, illiterate profane smugness to prehensile, Urban-Progressive-Privilege-sodden, profane rage.

…or at least its’ “progressive” wing, was predicted 38 years ago:

Don’t believe me? Watch Pete eat Repeat.

(And at the risk of sounding ungracious, I have to say that watching “Pantsuit Nation” – a group of entitled, Urban Progressive Privilege-sodden Hillary supporters – squirting tears after Trump’s election was, alone, enough to make this non-Trump-fan smile a big, broad smile).

Dear progs:  if you wanna eat your own, I’ve got some vegan, gluten free salt you can have for a modest price.

It used to be that when you waited for the Green Line train, a little billboard on the platform told you how many minutes away the next train was.

Today?

The time is nice, if you have a schedule and the trains are on time (which you don’t and they’re not).

The track number?  There’s one track going in that direction.

But along with the news that mere citizens will be barred from the trains on Super Bowl week, I suspect it’s just another way of telling the peasants “be happy we grant you this much largesse, peasant! Be grateful!”

…”Mitch, why on earth did you write the character Avery Librelle?”

To which I respond “You mean, why did I create a ditzy, morally-flatlined person who seems to live in a world all hi…er, he…er, their own when it comes to the effects “progressive” policy have on real people?”

And my questioner responds “Yes!  Exactly!”

And I answer “Because it’s not even close to fictional”.

These are the people who claim to be non-violent – but not only tacitly support “Anti”-Fa, but ponied up a million dollars to defend a former terrorist who’d become a Highland Park liberal with impeccable credentials.

These are the people who say out of one corner of their mouth they worship science (especially that dreamy Neil DeGrasse Tyson) but reject everything evolution has wrought in regard to, to pick one example, gender roles.

And they are the ones who wrap themselves in feminism, up to and including the notion of scrapping due process when a woman accuses a man of any level of sexual harassment, abuse or assault…

…but only the wrong men.  Not the men that give us the legislation we like, or say the things we agree with.

On the other hand, Avery Librelle would have scoffed at the Strib’s letters to the editor about Garrison Keillor as being “too over the top”.

Selected quotelets about Keillor:  “Tears came to my eyes as I awoke Thursday morning, still partly in a wonderful dream in which I was going to an “A Prairie Home Companion” show. Garrison Keillor and a Walter Cronkite-type character were in the front seat of our carriage and we were in the back….They had unique takes on the world today, and past — and wisdom, hope and jokes to offer for the present and the future. Then, in real-word time, we discussed how incredibly sad we were, and my tears continued”.

“I’m convinced that in his professional life he was pure, mostly. That is all we can ask of anyone.”

“I think the knee-jerk response in this case is really over the top. Keillor really is the shyest guy in the room. I do not believe he ever knowingly committed any impropriety. This is becoming French Revolution stuff — just a single comment and it’s “off with his head!””

“The Star Tribune should step up and recognize that all mistakes have gradation — the kid who steals a Snickers and the bank robber are neither morally nor criminally equal. ”

“There is a significant cultural context to this issue. Keillor’s artistic creations added an important element to this state’s identity. So the steps MPR has taken not only diminish Keillor’s reputation, they also undercut what we believe to be good about Minnesota.”

True, he touched a woman in a place that isn’t her soul, and doing that wasn’t appropriate. But what he did isn’t fire-worthy. He’s apologized to her. We all have our foibles.”

Minnesota liberals?  I didn’t invent Avery Librelle.  You did.

Honolulu orders gun owners with medical marijuana prescriptions to turn in their guns:

Gun-owning cannabis patients in Honolulu, Hawaii, aren’t feeling like they’re living in paradise right about now. After all, many recently got a letter from the Honolulu Police Department demanding they either transfer their firearms or turn them over to law enforcement.

“The Honolulu Police Department has sent letters to local medical marijuana patients ordering them to “voluntarily surrender” their firearms because of their MMJ status.

The letters, signed by Honolulu Police Chief Susan Ballard, inform patients that they have 30 days upon receipt of the letter to transfer ownership or turn in their firearms and ammunition to the Honolulu Police.”

Honolulu being a one-party town, what do you think is going to happen?

Oh, yeah – the Feds are saying the same thing.

Hillary’s old campaign manager compares “Anti”-Fa with the men who went ashore on D-Day:

Also confronted the Nazis without a permit: pic.twitter.com/3c2f3X9slC

— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) August 16, 2017

Mr. Fallon has a point. “Anti”-Fa is like the troops at D-Day.

The ones that started the day at the top of the cliffs.

#NotMe

#NeverDidNeverWill

And #RealMenNeitherHarassNorAcceptGuiltByAssociation

And, for those who insist, #QQQQ.

I mean, as long as we’re communicating via the medium of the hashtag.

The #MeToo campaign is doing for sexual harassment what #BringBackOurGirls did for Boko Haram’s hostages; took a seirous issue and made it into a trite, temporal trifle; an “event” rather than either a social malady or a wartime atrocity, respectively.  In 21st century terms, the campaign “raised awareness”, which is a moderne way of saying “generated a lot of shrill chanting, shrieking and marching about, literally and metaphorically, in the interest of waving a bloody shirt”.

Genderquislings:  One of the most noxious byproducts of this bloody shirt campaign are the clumps of “feminist men” whose response to this past two months’ Robespierrian orgy of revelation is to throw themselves prostrate before the court of public opinion and demand mercy – for themselves (whatever) and every other man.

I come not to praise them, but to bury them and those who parrot them, especially via yet two more social media chanting orgies, “#YesAllMen” and “#ShutTheF**kUp”.

Among many other vague and morpheus sins of which they’d accuse their fellow guys is the notion of “toxic masculinity”, which in the hands of “feminists” [1] and their male hangers-on quickly turns into a synonym for “masculinity” of any kind.

My reply:  They – or the things they represent – are the real problem.  Not masciulinity – real masculinity.

Disc-lame-ers:  In an intelligent society that debated the merits of an argument, I could omit this section.

But I live in the “progressive” Twin Cities, so I have to treat much of the audience like ambulance-chasing lawyers.

The “First Wave” of feminism was right:  Women should be the equal of men in the eyes of the law.  They should face no discrimination due to their gender in the work place; they should be paid according to their qualifications, experience, credentials and other factors relevant to the job.  They should not have to accept non-consensual harassment and abuse due to their gender.

The “Second Wave” of feminism – AKA “Identity Feminism” – is wrong.  Women should also have no advantage over men in family court.  Their status as individuals should not be reverted to the Victorian era, where was assumed that a woman’s natural state frail victims (the term “potential victim” is used with a straight face by more than a few modern feminists) that must be protected from the male species, slavering brutes looking to pounce on the defenseless benighted damsels among us.

The Collective:  How this has manifested during the current sexual harassment crisis has been the notion that “#YesAllMen” are complicit in sexual harassment; that sexual harassment is a side effect of “toxic masculinity”; that harassment, abuse and rape are inextricable from being male.   That the world would be a better place if it were more like an anthill – where the women did the thinking and leading and designing, and the men just shut up and did what they were told, and contribute to the gene pool (until genetic engineering obsoletes that, too).

The males who’ve become the leading voices of this orgy of gender-abasement remind me of the people “convicted” of various thoughtdrimes curing the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward who, after weeks, months or years jammed into prison cells and gulags, beaten and sleep-deprived by the Red Guards, abased themselves with almost ritual fervor on film and before crowds, not “begging for mercy” so much as abjuring being worthy of it, before being shot in the back of the head or sent off to be worked to death in the Chinese gulag.

Call them “victims of toxic social work”.

If nobody else will do it [2], then let me be the first to draw my line in the sand and yell “Stop”.

#NotMe

#NoNotAllMen

#QQQQSnowflakes

It’s The Devaluation, Stupid:  Matt Walsh had a great piece in the Daily Caller earlier this week, in which he pointed out the real problem:  not the presence of men, but the lack of Men:

The problem is not that there is too much masculinity in our culture. On the contrary, there isn’t nearly enough. A man becomes an abuser and harasser of women when he rejects that which makes him a man. He is not expressing his masculinity when he strips naked and struts around in front of his unwilling coworkers and subordinates — a move that seems oddly common among these types — rather, he is expressing his almost complete lack of masculinity.

Not sure if he’s referring to Charlie Rose or Louis CK – and I”m not sure it matters at the moment.

These men are weird, desperate, self-debasing, and effeminate. If you say we should have fewer of those kinds in positions of power, I agree. Let’s have none at all. But we would do well to replace them with men who are actually men. What we need in our society are chivalrous, strong, respectable, productive, and self-sacrificial men. Real men, in other words. Men who protect, provide, and do all of the things that society has always depended upon men to do. If you are that sort of man, you certainly should not shut up, step to the side, or consider yourself “trash.” Our culture needs your input and leadership more than ever.

Of course, the dominant narrative from a good chunk of our society – Hollywood, academia, the educational/industrial complex, is that traditional masculinity needs to be filed down to sized, tamed.   Primary schools medicate it; popular entertainment castigates it.  Entertainment has combined a relentless, big-budget focus on “girl power” with a near-complete suppression of any notion of giving boys any impetus to be what was traditionally called a “man” – chivalrous, comfortable with but not abusive of his power, driven to defend his family, his significant other and his community, self-sacrificing but optimistic and prone to using his power for good.  Those parts of society mock and taunt those notions (until they need a cop)…

…and propagate them with an education system that systematically feminizes boys, a family court system that ensures boys’ only role models as children will be mothers (who most assuredly do serve a role in raising emotioally boys – but not the only role) and that love, for a male, is an exercise in self-destruction, and an “entertainment” industry that seems to have taught half a generation boys that pornography is sex.

In other words – if you want to create the stunted, anti-masculine caricatures that are Harvey Weinstein, Charley Rose, Al Franken and Louis CK [3], the modern education, entertainment, academic and social justice systems are the most efficient possible factory to create more of them.

The only “Toxic Masculinity” is the stunted variety of caricatured, one-sided, immature, hollow “Masculinity” hat Identity Feminism demanded, and that the feminized Education system and Academy, and Hollywood delivered.

#NotMe:  Well, I’m done.

If you want to signal your virtue by gender self-abasement, expect me to mock and taunt you with the derision you deserve.

If you think the way to achieve equality for women is to beat down men, expect me to punch back twice as hard, and do whatever my feeble best is to lead more men – not males, mind you; men – to do the same.

If your response to discrimination against women is to promote discrimination against men, expect me to point out the obvious; you’re just passing around more discrimination.

You have rotted the society enough.  Hell, it may be too late; you may have killed it already.

I don’t care.

(more…)

As we head towards another round of off year elections – including an awful lot of Democrat-controlled cities – a piece of re-usable narrative that is rapidly becoming a hallmark of the Trump age is starting to break out again; the notion that voting – or more precisely, “expecting your vote to affect anything”-  is “irrational”.– where “irrational” is defined as “your vote may not be the single vote that decides the election.

An expectation that seems, itself, a tad irrational.

Bear with me, here.

It popped up over the weekend before last on Minnesota public radio, on NPR’s syndicated “New Yorker Radio Hour”

Big Left has thrown out that particular notion in a couple of election cycles now – the idea of that voting is irrational and to the point of bizarre because one single, solitary vote it’s not the one that will determine the election. Which, if you follow it to its logical conclusion, leads to the supremely undemocratic idea that the only vote that doesn’t matter it’s the one that negates all other folks – the “vote” to overthrow democracy, consent and elections, and seize power for its oneself. Which, if you’re cynical – also supremely realistic – about Big Left, which seem to be their goal..

So far, the narrative seems to be about trying to deflect away from the idea of illegal voting. Especially if it illegal immigrants voting.

The narrative goes like this; given the irrationality of a voting, why would one risk capture, prosecution, conviction and deportation over a vote that, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter at all.

(Of course, it’s nearly impossible to convict anyone of illegal voting – and in the cities where illegal voting is most likely, illegal immigration is a pretty safe bet as well.

Which speaks to my theory – which is almost a Berg Law, I’ll have you know – that Big Left doesn’t even bother trying to tell the truth to its own people; the gobble up any crap that I slept in front of them. Because we all know it’s almost impossible to get arrested for voter fraud; it’s almost an unprosecutable crime, especially in any “progressive” – run jurisdiction – like Minnesota.

So there’s no need to tell all of those lavishly funded nonprofits that are busy getting out the vote, pushing to allow eagle illegal immigrants the right to vote, and to clear allA chance to win for us election integrity as “racist”. The people who run Big Left don’t believe it either.

It’s just aimed at people who take democracy, the franchise, and the notion of “government by the consent of the governed” seriously.

Glad we were able to settle that..

From social media yesterday:

Hey – anyone remember hearing about the Vegas shooter?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Do these numbers matter?  If not, why bother keeping track of them?

Treasury Department says that for the month of September (one month only) Social Security and other payroll taxes took in $96 billion, but Social Security and Medicare cost $158 billion, about three times as much as we spent on the entire Defense budget.  Are we buying so many beans that we can’t afford bullets?

For fiscal year 2017, we ended up being short $666 billion.  That’s not the total amount of debt owed, nor the total amount of future spending promised, it’s the amount we overdrew the checkbook at the end of the fiscal year.  We borrowed money to make the books balance.  Our loan balance is now $20,000,000,000,000.00.  It goes up a million dollars a minute.

Let’s be serious: it’s simply not mathematically possible to pay America’s debts in any reasonable amount of time while maintaining any reasonable level of taxation and therefore we can safely conclude they will never be paid.  One of two things will happen:  we’ll default and cause a world economic crisis; or we’ll convert to electronic money not backed by any tangible asset so the computers can continue to transfer electrons as if they were money and nobody will care that the entire thing is a polite fiction.

Maybe in the future we’ll run things as they did on Star Trek – money simply appears, just like your lunch shows up in the replicator machine or the red-shirted guy beams up from the planet.  Magic.

Joe Doakes

Our federal government makes me feel like a redshirt all.  The.  Time.

…that after shaking down taxpayers in their franchise cities for hundreds of millions of dollars, the NFL responds by being completely tone-deaf.

No sirree bob.

It was over a year ago that we carried the story of the Pillsbury Foundation’s buyback fiasco.   Which doesn’t narrow it down much; while the buybacks last year in Minneapolis were very poorly organized, their effect on crime was the same as any other buyback program.

Nil.

But this buyback was different in one way; unlike other buybacks that just sell guns for scrap (allowing criminals to dispose of crime guns without leaving a paper trail), the guns gathered were doing to be donated to “artists” to do “art” that was supposed to “raise awareness” about “gun violence”.

A friend of the blog writes:

more “gun art” that will never be displayed on anyone’s wall

The Pillsbury folks paid for this apparently

The only thing really on display (at least in the objects pictured) is the paucity of imagination in these “artists”

Look at the things that have created great art over the centuries:  Longing, anger, the search for justice, the search for God, the quest for beauty – lots of motivations.

“Spoiled, subsidized, entitled, Urban Progressive Privilege-sotted pseudo-“artists” barking like dogs on their political masters’ command” isn’t one of them.

…that Hillary Clinton twote this tweet:

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/791263939015376902

Why this isn’t up there with the Chicago Tribune’s “Dewey Wins” headline is simultaneously inconceivable and, given today’s media, unsurprising in any way.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump.  The research firm thenapproached the FBI about THEM funding more research which the FBI initially agreed to do, all this occurring in October 2016, weeks before the election, right about the time James Comey was smothering Hillary’s email investigation.

Now that it’s perfectly acceptable to use the might of government to help the party in power and punish its opponents, the next election should be a lot easier for Republicans to win.

Joe Doakes

It’s sort of like the Strib and the Minnesota Poll…

While MInneapolis’ mayor Betsy Hodges has spent four years diffusing her efforts over a bewildering jumble of social-justice virtue-signals, the poor woman will never top the list of “Mayors with Bizarre Priorities” list while New York’s Bill DiBlasio is in office.

Hizzoner’s latest target?  In a city with rising crime, infrastructure that’s crumbling faster than an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of Seven-Up, and a financial situation that is rapidly decaying, DiBlasio is…

…confiscating electric bicycles – which are booming in popularity, especially among delivery riders for stores and restaurants; they are in fact the most efficient way of navigating the most street-space-starved city in America:

On Thursday, de Blasio announced the nation’s largest city would start fining restaurants in addition to operators, expanding and formalizing a style of broken-windows policing favored by the NYPD, which has confiscated 900 e-bikes this year. His justification? E-bikes are “just too dangerous,” the mayor said at a press conference.

How dangerous are they? Nearly 70 pedestrians (and 13 cyclists) have been killed by cars, trucks, and buses in New York City this year. No one has been killed by a bicycle. As for e-bikes in particular? The NYPD has no data on e-bike accidents or complaints. Nor does the city have any information about how the crackdown affects restaurants or riders. De Blasio was acting on instinct: The crackdown began when a local cyclist, Matthew Shefler, called into his radio show to complain.

Slower, more expensive deliveries; more congestion; yet another handicap for small business, even the ones that don’t get fined.

Betsy has some huge shoes to fill in the “bizarre priorities” deparatment.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Those records of Bill Clinton’s meeting with Loretta Lynch right before she canned the investigation into Hillary’s email, the records that we insisted we didn’t have all last year and continuing through the election?

Just kidding.

Joe Doakes

Nothing wrong with that, nosirreebob.

Warehouse district “geek” bar Byte is closing next week after eight months in business.

And while restaurants and bars come and go fast, Byte had one feature that drew especial attention; they built their business model around a $15/hour minimum wage from the ground up.

And kudos to a company who does what they think is the right thing.  More power to ’em.

Problem is, they needed that “more power” more than they thought:

“While we have enjoyed a steady and loyal customer base, we’ve also struggled with getting the volume necessary to make our business model fiscally viable in this location,” the post said… [Co-founder Travis] Shaw told the Business Journal in Decemberthat the inspiration for Byte sprouted from their frustration of a majority of restaurant employees not being able to earn a livable wage. Byte hired around a dozen employees, each one making $15 an hour with benefits, plus vacation time.

“This was what motivated us to start out on our own,” Shaw said. “I’m passionate about food, but more passionate about the system and a business that can sustain its workers.”

Well, I guess your workers are going to have to “sustain” themselves, now, aren’t they?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The State of Minnesota is suing President Trump for ending payments that a federal judge has already ruled must be ended.  Attorney General Lori Swanson’s argument: President Obama started giving us illegal payments and President Trump continued the illegal payments while Congress worked on the problem.  We budgeted based on receiving illegal payments.  To suddenly end the illegal payments would inconvenience us by making us live within our own means, so therefore we’re entitled to continue receiving illegal payments, forever.

It’s illegal to follow the law.

Joe Doakes

To be fair to the Attorney General, it’s how the DFL has handled budgeting for the past six decades or so.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This article is an example of the Right trying to manufacture a victory.  The courts shut down the travel ban, repeatedly, until it expired.  If Trump attempts to resurrect it, we can bet they’ll shut it down again.  A victory would have been a ruling that he was right and the lower courts were wrong.

On the other hand, this is an accurate summation of the Left’s tactics: “In essence, elements of the “nonpolitical” branch are trying to reverse the result of the 2016 vote by denying the duly elected president the powers of his office.”  And they’re continuing to do so as Liberal judges issue nation-wide rulings that clearly stomp on Presidential prerogatives for the flimsiest of reasons. This ruling doesn’t change that but it does highlight the hypocrisy.  That never hurts.

Joe Doakes

Assuming anyone’s listening.

Maybe.