SCENE:   Mitch BERG is fixing some broken chain link fence.   Avery LIBRELLE pedals down the alley on a recumbent bike, catching him by surprise.  

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG: Ugh…er, hey, Av…

LIBRELLE:  Shut up.  Billionaires are evil. 

BERG:  Huh.  So why’s that…

LIBRELLE:  They pay no taxes! It’s wrong for a billionaire to pay less taxes than a teaching assistant!

BERG:  Their employees and subsidiary businesses pay immense taxes – and they personally defray taxes by using deductions and business losses – same as your progressive plutocrats.  

LIBRELLE: That’s just wrong.  

BERG: OK.  Put a pin in that.  Did you see where Ilhan Omar’s personal fortune dropped from $30 million down to well under $100K?

LIBRELLE:  Yeah?  So?  It was an accounting error.  

BERG:  Right.  The error being that the accountant didn’t consider…what, now?

LIBRELLE:  Deductions and…

BERG:  Go on?

LIBRELLE:  (Mouth flaps like a trout on the dock)

BERG:  Same as the billionaires, right?

LIBRELLE:  Pouncer!

BERG:  Nah.  But if we find out that her and Hubby Number Four used that “mistaken” valuation to get credit, I’ll be pouncing….

(But LIBRELLE has already pedaled away)

And SCENE

At Columbine, it took four hours for the SWAT team to enter the building.   There’d been reports of bombs – half-true – and protocol was to make sure the bomb squad had had its say before sending the SWAT team in.  By the time SWAT got into the school’s library, the victims and shooters had been dead for hours.  

Police training changed after that, as Federal law enforcement studies showed that the most successful deterrence to spree killers was to try to kill them.   It threw off the careful planning that almost all of them put into their attacks. 

Nevertheless, the police at Parkland dawdled for long enough for the murderer to have enough time not only to kill 17, but to leave the premises.  Uvalde was even worse – cops not only stalled for an hour, but threatened to arrest parents to wanted to take matters into their own hands while it still mattered; it took a team of Border Patrol to end the standoff.  

And now comes news that the Brooklyn Park police knew what was going in the Hortman residence for half an hour before they went in – by which time Vance Boelter was halfway to North Minneapolis on the bizarre chase that led to his eventual arrest.  

Some are hollering “cowardice”.  As my first carry permit instructor Joel Rosenberg said about civilian self-defense shooting, “a life or death decision you make in a split second in the dark is going to get analyzed to a fine sheen by lawyers sitting in a warm, well-lit, secure room for as long as they need”., and I suspect that’s true for police as well; room-clearing against someone who’s expecting you is frightfully dangerous, body armor ain’t perfect and even when it does stop a bullet it leaves you pretty banged up.   I’ll wait for a more thorough investigation (and I may be waiting a while) before I judge anyone’s character.  

But for those crying “cowardice” – this seems like a fine time to point out that people in our society consider our own lives  to be of incalculable worth, needing to be preserved no matter what and defended…

…by cops, who are expected to put their lives on the line for what a cop makes – an average of about $68K in the US today.  

So – what is it that makes your life of infinite value, but a cop’s worth risking for $68,000?

That’s the central thesis of Geoff Snyder’s classic “A Nation of Cowards” – a seminal article on the moral imperative to see to one’s own defense first before blithely expecting society to do it for you.  

It is, of course, a personal choice – but like most personal choices, there’s a moral component to it as well. 

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

New York City Mayor Mamdani: Free Day Care for All!

Minneapolis Somalis: One-Way Ticket to New York, Please.

Joe Doakes

 

I suspect a few unindicted fraudsters are dusting off their resumes.  

Joe Doakes, no longer of Como Park, emails:

Police investigating an adult enrolled in high school.  You’d think they would encourage adult education.  

 

Claiming to be 17 but actually 21.  So he’s a little older than his classmates.  Maybe he’s turning his life around.  He identifies as 17, what’s the problem?  He can reinvent his gender or his species but not his age?  Does that make sense?

 

Did I mention he was also on the roster of the football team?  Wonder who turned him in?

 

Joe Doakes

I can’t pretend this is a comprehensive list.  I don’t think humanity can measure this level of stupidity. 

But I gotta try. 

I’ll save the worst for last. 

Well, gosh, “Kalvan”, I think the difference might be that literally the entire state of Minnesota including the entire GOP closed ranks around the families’ survivors, and the GOP repudiated everything to do with the guy when it turned out that even though he was nuts, he was a nut who spouted some right wing chanting points. That, and the fact not a single significant person said “Well, political murder is baaaaaaaad, but when you jam down abortion mandates and kid-transing and gun control you gotta expect some blowback…”

Can you see the difference, “Kalvan”?

I keep asking progs who parrot this to tell me – what evil things did Kirk say?

And I’ve gotten a few back – every one of which was ripped completely out of context, context which is available out there.  

I don’t love the whole “get people fired” thing, personally.

But forget for a moment that progs have been going after conservatives’ jobs (also shooting them) for years. It’s not the government “censoring” people. And maybe, just maybe, “it’s good someone I disagree with died” is an “opinion” that deserves some opprobrium.

And in the responses to that one:

Make you first shot count, Sparky.

Is the point that “pageant winners are promiscuous?”

And the mangling of the whole doctrine of “submitting”

Is this a Richard Carlbom burner account?

Now, most of the above are dolts, rage farmers and Don Lemon.

But these? These (read the whole thread) are elected DFLers:

Make sure you scroll down to check out Ilhan Omar’s contribution, on Mehdi Hassan’s podcast.

And Richard Carlbom, executive director of the MN DFL:

So “Hey, Fascist, Catch” was an ingenious hipfake.  Got it.  

It’s been a depressing week for observing humanity.  

Apparently having an open, honest debate with people who disagree with you rates a death sentence.   

Even some Democrats realize things have gone too far:

As this is written, the shooter is still apparently at large.

But who knew – when the leaders of a party full of mentally unstable people chant that their opponents are “Nazis” and “Fascists”, people my grandfathers’ generation spent the best years of their lives killing and trying not to be killed by, that someone in that mass of unstable weirdos would take it seriously?

And the giggly, tingly, school-girly response by so many Democrats, including prominent ones, to Luigi Mangione should be a bigger warning; their inventory of nutbars who think homicide is OK is nowhere near exhausted.

And no, it’s not a “both sides do it” thing. 

The nation needs the same level of commitment to rooting out left wing terrorism today that we put into eradicating the Klan 60 years ago, or the mob in the ’80s.  

We won’t get it, but we’ll need it.  

The one silver lining?  The Democrats’ ill-gotten right to throw out “January 6!” like a badly-trained parrot is forever null and void. 

Can a civil society survive when society spends more time and effort protecting criminals than the law-abiding citizen?

The Mayor of Boston just made her, and presumably her city’s, priorities pretty visible:

Now, you might say it costs nobody anything – the victims are alive, the attacker dead. Expressing (misplaced) sympathy isn’t going to kill him again, or endanger the victims. Is it?

I see your logic, and raise you Mary Moriarty (open and expand the thread):

But here’s the money quote:

A source familiar with the case told us that charges were declined by Mary Moriarty’s office because the victim was able to fight back.

Got that?

If you defend yourself, that’s all the justice you need.  (How much do you want to bet the intended victim only evaded assault charges because he was a teenager?)

We are getting to the point where the lesson is the one people in all low-trust societies eventually get to; it’s better to handle “Justice” by yourself.  To do the job, to not talk to the police – even enforce the practice – and make offender examples on your own.  

I’d ask “is this what you want”, but this is  the DFL we’re talking about. 

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

What SHOULD a person do in that situation?  

 

 I’m curious to know what SITD readers think the result would be in Minneapolis versus Greater Minnesota?  Charges or no?

 

Joe Doakes

Joe asked for thoughts. 

Mine:   This is one case for which Mary Moriarty could be stirred from her stupor.  

Greater MN?   Depends on the county, but there’s a decent chance of actual justice. 

How to make it in America:  Come to America via the immigration system.  Adopt the values that made America great.  Work hard, raise good kids, give a good value for the money. 

How to make it in Minnesota:  Come to America and, in apparently no particular order:  Commit a crime, ingratiate yourself with the bureaucracy, make get lots of taxpayer money.  

Wilson Tindi holds a director position at the Minnesota Department of Education, where he audits taxpayer spending and oversees internal accountability.

…

Tindi was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to register as a predatory offender. His sentence was stayed for five years, but he was also sentenced to 210 days in the workhouse, records show.

However, despite the felony conviction and offender status, Tindi serves as Director of Internal Audit and Advisory Services at MDE, according to public records and his LinkedIn profile.

 

Wonder if there’ll be a riot if he’s fired?

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

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

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.  

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.   

I’ve said it quite a few times; I support capital punishment for every reason but one – the inevitability that the state will execute the wrong person.  And given that that is one of the ultimate wrongs – an innocent person dies, the guilty party goes forever free – that’s all the reason I need to oppose capital punishment.  

And it’s not just an intellectual parlor game; we’re fairly certain one innocent guy was executed; there are suspicions about many other such cases. And the fact that well over 100 people have been freed from death row because their convictions were overturned, in most cases because they could not have committed the crimes for which they were convicted and sentenced to death, usually after sitting on death row for many years, as some conservatives demand the curtailing of appeals, which would have led to several more executions of the innocent?

Color me unconvinced.  Or, rather, utterly convinced. 

So, with all that said:  a “botched” firing squad execution in South Carolina left a convicted murderer not quite dead, for a while anyway:

There wasn’t much chance Mahdi didn’t commit his crime.  Or, rather, crimes; he was convicted of three murders – the stabbing of Greg Jones in a drug deal gone bad, then shooting a convenience store clerk  Christopher Jason Boggs in the face and finally shooting police officer James Myers 9 times. 3 to his head.

Any of which, but especially that last, might explain why three expert riflemen firing at fifteen feet missed a three inch target – a grouping I get with a handgun without a whole lot of ceremony at that range – leaving Mahdi in “excruciating pain” for about a minute. 

I imagine there’s going to be an Eighth Amendment civil rights suit against the marksmen – if anyone has standing to take it to court.

Minneapolis deputy police chief Katie Blackwell’s defamation suit was thrown out, and she’s been ordered to pay back part of Liz Collin’s legal fees:

This may be the biggest backfire I’ve seen in a defamation suit – and the subject is by no means academic to me.

In a move that finally brings truth to the matter, Blackwell also signed a written declaration, stating:

“I, Katie Blackwell, acknowledge, agree, and affirm that everything in the Honorable Edward T. Wahl’s Order Regarding Special Motion for Expedited Relief Under Minn. Stat. § 554.09 and for Fees and Costs Under Minn. Stat. § 554.16 dated April 8, 2025 is accurate, true, and correct.”

So, despite her initial claims, Blackwell has now affirmed that all of Judge Wahl’s findings are “accurate, true, and correct.”

So this brings up all sorts of questions about Blackwell’s testimony in the Chauvin trial – including her assertions that the restraint technique Chauvin used on Floyd, which appeared to have been straight out of the department’s training manual as affirmed by several Minneapolis cops interviewed in Collin’s movie, was no-how, no-way, ever part of the MPD’s training canon. 

Read the whole article.  And buckle up.  This next year or two is going be a doozie in Minnesota courts. 

The Homicide rate in Minneapolis was way below recent trends…

…well, “was” is the operant word, here, isn’t it?   Shootings in the past 36 hours killed five, and left five more injured, several critically:

The shootings occurred at the following locations.

• 25th Street and Bloomington Avenue, just before midnight on Tuesday.
• Cedar Avenue and 17th Avenue at 1 p.m.
• 3300 block of Harriet Avenue at 2:25 p.m.
• Girard Avenue North around 3:50 p.m.
• 15th Avenue South and Lake Street around 7:45 p.m.

In the first shooting near 25th Street and Bloomington Avenue, police say two men, two women and a teenage boy were found shot at the scene: Four were inside a vehicle, and another was on the sidewalk.

The 17-year-old boy, a 20-year-old woman and a 27-year-old man were pronounced dead at the scene, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said. The remaining man and woman were taken to Hennepin County Medical Center with life-threatening injuries.

Welcome to Spring in Minneapolis!

Is Nicole Mitchell the most self-unaware person between Chicago and the Sierra Madre?

Or is the Senate DFL’s social media intern in the dark about Minnesota news because she’s working in as boiler room in Manila?

I was out at the Mall of America a week or two ago, perhaps for the second time since 2020. 

And as with the other time, I wondered – whatever happened to Landen Hoffman?

Yep, I remembered the name – the little kid hurled off the third floor balcony at the MOA six years ago by a deranged man. 

Turns out he’s doing pretty well. And as with most Twin Cities crime and political news, you have to go to London to get the news. But the kid’s doing well.

‘So many miracles happened [since then],’ Kari said in a phone interview Friday with DailyMail.com. ‘It was a big, long journey.

‘It took time for him to be back to him… He had to learn who he was again.’

That journey of getting Landen ‘back’ took around three years and was rough on the whole family. Kari watched her son’s personality change from sweet and kind to angry and mean to back again.

Read the whole thing. The kid’s mother wrote a book about it. Can’t honestly say I blame her.

That kind of episode had been exactly my worry when I used to take my then-little kids to the Mall. I saw those third-level balconies and thought “this is a headline waiting to happen”. I made sure the kids and I walked across the concourse from those not-nearly-tall-enough railings, or that I was watching everyone around me very carefully. And this was 15-20 years before the Landen Hoffman episode.

The lunatic who threw him over the edge is up for parole in seven years, by the way.  Five’ll get you tel Mary Moriarty helps the perp sue the family for a share of the book revenues.

Even as the “Feeding Our Future” scandal appears to shift into a new gear with the release of the recording of Keith Ellison appearing to:

• put the lie to several of his statements about when he did or didn’t know about the fraud scandal
• tell some future defendants that the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) could “chill” the ardor of other agencies to investigate them
• accept campaign donations for his son and himself,

…it appears we’re nowhere near done with scandals in DFL-run Minnesota:

And while Feeding Our Future is just pedestrian stuff like fraud, jury tampering and maybe racketeering, this one gets into TMZ-fodder:

Gabriel Adam Alexander Luthor (a.k.a. Langford), 39, and Elizabeth Christine Brown, 42, were arrested in Las Vegas, where they made their initial court appearances in U.S. District Court in the District of Nevada earlier this week.

The indictment alleges:

Luthor and Brown intentionally devised and carried out an overbilling scheme for medical services provided through their neurofeedback therapy business, Golden Victory Medical, LLC (GVM). Luthor and Brown were in a relationship and together founded GVM in 2018…In total, GVM submitted hundreds of thousands of false claims to insurers, many of which the insurers paid, resulting in an estimated loss of over $15 million. Millions of dollars in fraudulent proceeds were transferred from bank account to bank account and ultimately retained by Luthor and Brown. Luthor and Brown used the funds to purchase a 9000-square-foot mansion in Eden Prairie and to pay their living expenses and the living expenses of other girlfriends of Luthor’s, who lived with Luthor and Brown and assisted in the fraud scheme.

 

It’d sure be a great time to have a functional state GOP with an election coming up, wouldn’t it?

To: The MNDFL
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Pick A Side

So, profiles in courage that you are, you’ve decided to take a bold stance against (checks notes) iopeople attracted to minors. https://x.com/MinnesotaDFL/status/1902478708142702817

Pretty icky.

But wait – it was just two years ago that the DFL-controlled legislature passed a law, signed by Piglet, that removed “Minor Attraction” from the list of exceptions to the MN Human Rights Act.

The media’s Democrat-fluffery industry breathlessly told everyone it didn’t “protect pedophilia“.

And that’s true – technically.   It doesn’t make sex with underage people legal.  

What it did was open the door to litigation the next time someone who is attracted to minors suffers any form of discrimination if their attraction becomes public knowledge. 

Which is, let’s be honest, where slippery slopes start.

So – the DFL is being hypocritical about this one two levels – they started paving the way to make this sort of behavior acceptable (in Democrats), and as the GOP leads the way to expelling Eichorn, Nicole Mitchell – equally accused of a couple of felonies – remains covered by the DFL’s code of omertá and the network of DFL judges.   

While the fracas in the MN House is getting all the attention, the DFL is having to battle for their electoral lives in the Senate, where their one-vote rests on Senator Nicole Mitchell.

The reasoning is getting clearer and clearer:

Becker County Attorney Brian McDonald added a second burglary charge Monday against state Sen. Nicole Mitchell focusing on items she had with her when police encountered her stepmother’s home in April 2024 in Detroit Lakes….Mitchell’s case was supposed to go to trial in late January, but her defense team invoked a Minnesota law saying lawmakers cannot be required to attend court proceedings during a legislative session. That delayed Mitchell’s case until June and possibly later, depending on when the 2025 session wraps.

The new complaint includes more details about her alleged interaction with police. It says Mitchell told an officer “I’m just hoping this mistake won’t completely f*** up my life” and that she voiced alarm about affecting her military retirement.

She’s gonna leave the Senate, one way or another, and while two tied chambers isn’t any bigger of a hassle for the Governor and DFL and their agenda than one tied chamber, Woodbury isn’t so utterly safe that they can take anything for granted. 

…is law-abiding citizens buying guns at gun shows. 

Not guys like this:

For those who don’t scroll down in these attached Tweets:

Thompson was sentenced to a “mandatory” 5 years for felon in possession of a firearm in Sept. 2023.

[counts on fingers and toes…] that means he should still be in prison, right??

Nope, not in Minnesota. He was released early by the UNELECTED MNDOC Commissioner Paul Schnell (appointed by Timmy) after just one year, in Oct. 2024, despite the fact that he’s a repeat violent offender, who already had THREE prior convictions on gun cases, including machine gun possession.

Wonder if he took a “universal” background check?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

End foreign aid handouts.  Begin foreign aid employment.  New slogan:  “Do the crime, do the time . . . in Hell.”  

Still not tired of all the winning.

Joe Doakes

 

The ACLU might have an Eighth Amendment suit, and they might be right.

But it’s a fun thought. 

So – AlphaNews and Liz Collin released Minneapolis has Fallen a little over a year ago.

One of the signal scenes in the movie happened when Assistant Chief Blackwell testified that the “Maximal Restraint Technique” – which a series of current and former MPD officers testified was part of MPD traininig, and which Chauvin’s mother pointed out in her son’s MPD training manual – was not part of MPD training.

Blackwell is suing Collin and Alpha over this claim. 

To wit:

I’m more against police brutality than most conservatives – but to a non-lawyer, it seems like the evidence pointing toward a new trial is approaching critical mass.

Minneapolis boosters have been chanting, non-stop, that “crime is down in MInneapolis”.

Seems everyone got the memo but the criminals:

And it wasn’t just homicides – a quick look at the Minneapolis crime dashboard (before they rolled the data over for the new year) showed:

• 3 more non-justified homicides (Minneapolis’ dashboard lumps justified police and civilian shootings together, and there was one more justifiable homicide last year than in 2023).
• Robberies up 10% in past year.
• Vandalism up 14% in year, 31% in three years.
• Assault has been steadily rising over past three years.

And the categories that *are* dropping are doing it very slowly.

A friend of the blog emails:

Like Justine Bateman, I was thinking that I would see a flood of posts declaring that it wasn’t a host of other issues, but that it was the guns. Nope. Didn’t see a single post.

Saw a few people say no one deserves this, not even an insurance CEO with a lot of “but he’s killing people every day” responses.

I work in healthcare. I see the occasional sad case of someone who is underinsured or uninsured. We don’t let them die. In fact, we do a lot of work for those groups of people in the hospital to try to get them to a point where they can manage outside of the hospital. If they won’t get to that point, we usually find a transitional home for them. There are the even smaller groups of people who actually have a little net worth that would lose everything if they went to a transitional place and we continue to treat them to get them stable for home with the minimal resources we can find.

Yes, there are insurers who make care for patients extremely difficult. There is one Medicare Replacement insurance that many regional facilities will not accept as payment. I don’t know too many people with employer provided insurance, however, who dislike their plans. I’m sure there are some bad plans out there. But, I would guess even in those cases, it is a small minority.

Yet, I look at other areas around the world – I have a friend who in his 40s died in a hospital in Mexico from a heart attack. He was on vacation. Maybe he would have died here, but I feel like the hospitals here would have tried harder. I think of the Chinese father in law of a friend who had a stroke and was sent home to die 3 days later in China. By all accounts of what I heard, he likely wouldn’t have died that quickly here. I think of a Parisian friend who wasn’t well. But, she didn’t fit the narrative of someone who needed medical care, so she wasn’t being treated for anything when she died of a heart attack on a plane. She probably had something that here we might have caught early enough to treat and save her life. By all appearances in these cases, it seems socialized medicine said “we aren’t going to give costly tests and treatments to this person because they don’t fit the formula for those procedures.” So, they died. Is that any different than some private insurers here? The difference is that many of us have a choice in insurers and can choose an insurer that won’t deny that care to us. And while prices are negotiated between care providers and insurance, there is probably a bit of good insurance paying a bit more than is necessary which helps cover the cost of bad insurance/underinsured/uninsured.

Americans could do more to reduce healthcare costs, like manage or avoid some chronic illnesses like obesity, diabetes, heart disease. But, even when Americans get a chronic illness and even when they refuse to follow any medical advice to get it under control and stay out of the hospital, regardless of income or insurance, we still treat them and value their lives. Despite their own doings and despite some insurance companies. That is truly a difference that I think distinguishes us from much of the world. It is a distinction that I think few on the Team Shooter realize. Or maybe they do realize – maybe to them, not all life has value, much like socialized medicine around the world believes.

Sort of like the parables about democracy, our justice system and the free market – our health insurance system is the worst in the world, except for all the others.