Tuesday, while participating in a dog and pony show for a Gabby Giffords visit to support gun grab legislation that was dead weeks ago in the legislature, Ron “I Went To Harvard.  You Do What Harvard Is”” Latz introduced things with eleven seconds of distilled fabulism.

Courtesy of MNGOC, here it is:

As befits a DFL / Minnesota Left statement about guns, the Second Amendment, gun control and gun owners, it’s a lie.

Because remember:  their motto is “Lie First, Lie Always” ^1. 

Minnesota is in such a “gun crime crisis” that the gun murder rate has dropped to its lowest level in decades.  In fact, if you leave out DFL-strangled North Minneapolis, with its Baltimore-like murder rate, from the state figures (a third of the state’s murders happen in Near North), Minnesota has a murder rate half that of Norway.  Competitive with the rural west.

Low.

I could write “It’s low and dropping” 250 more times – or capture the whole thing in a 1000-word picture:

Courtesy MN Gun Owners Caucus

And except for the DFL-addled inner cities, it’s continuing its drop, as the number of carry permittees in Minnesota rockets toward and past a quarter million.

More such crises, please.

And stop lying, Senator Latz.

¹ Well, no – it’s not literally their motto; they didn’t pick it.  I wrote it for them.  But they observe it in every particular.  Every time.  And it’s been keeping this blog in material for years^.  

Ever notice how many liberals say they’re “moving to Canada” if Trump wins?

Why do none of them say “I’m moving to Mexico?”

(Hat tip to a meme from Facebook)

…about nuclear power plants.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals claim the economy has been turned around for years, big recovery going on, stock market booming, unemployment at all-time lows.  I don’t believe the government’s statistics; I think bureaucrats manipulate the numbers to make the administration look good. 

 How about a more concrete number: vacant buildings in St. Paul.  856.   Economy is in a huge rebound thanks to the libs who have fixed all Bush’s errors but 856 vacant properties remain?  That’s nearly as high as during the bad years.  People generally don’t just walk away from their homes, their businesses, their investments, not without a damned good reason and in recent years that reason has tended to be “can’t afford to make the payments.”  That is not a sign of prosperity.

 When the city is littered with vacant buildings, businesses are moving out, restaurants are folding up, but the government statistics say everything is rosy, who are you going to believe: them or your lying eyes? 

Joe Doakes

There’s a place for “fake it ’til you make it”; the old Hungarian saying “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are” is one of the guiding principles of my life.

But not for “journalism”, thankewverymuch.

So it looks like, barring an untimely heart attack or convention insurrection, the GOP’s nominee will be Donald Trump.

It’s worth noting that early last September, when the GOP was looking at its biggest, deepest field ever, with seventeen accomplished governors and high-profile conservative Senators throwing their hats in the ring, not a single member of America’s landed punditry predicted Trump would get to the nomination.

With one exception.

Scott Adams.  Of “Dilbert” fame.

Adams chalks Trumps success up to his love of not merely beating, but humiliating, opponents – and, quite frankly, his genius at it:

[Adams] remembers just how the game turned. He was young and improving at chess, but the masterful kid across the board would outmaneuver Adams till the game seemed a runaway. Now, this kid didn’t want to just beat Adams; he wanted to embarrass him. “So after he’d picked away three-fourths of my pieces and I was discouraged,” Adams recounts, “he would offer to turn the board around and play with my pieces.” And then effectively “win” again.

On those occasions, Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,” got insight into the type of personality that loves not only the challenge of game strategy, but also the thrill of overwhelming the competition. It is the sport of meticulously plotted domination.

And that is part of why Adams believes Donald Trump will win the presidency. In a landslide.

Time will tell.

As to what I think about the nomination?  I think I’ll phrase my answers in the form of a not-remotely-Socratic dialog with my favorite opponents – my caricatures of people I disagree with!

More, obviously, in coming weeks.

The government of Minneapolis under the last (note to Mitchell: find the number of consecutive DFL mayors the city has had) has observed that old Scarsdale ritual:”Take care of the luxuries, and the necessities will take care of themselves!”

And it’s working about as well as it does for any entitled Insurance salesperson’s spouse:

According to the city Finance Department, Minneapolis is on the hook for about $1.6 billion in debt and operational costs for the convention center, the Vikings stadium, and the Timberwolves arena over the next 20 years.
Broken down, that’s an annual three checks adding up to $80 million, money that’s off the table for paving East Franklin Avenue, fixing swings at Kenwood Park, or financing low-interest business loans on West Broadway.

Instead of economic development, a city chose rich man’s stadiums.

That also explains why the City Council today is expected to approve spending another $800 million to fix crumbling roadways and haggard parks over the next 20 years.

Simply put, a lot of money is already gone

The funny part; while the situation in Minneapolis no doubt will spawn a few instant budget hawks, five will get you 10 the thin trickle of media that do bother to cover the story will be back shilling for the DFL by Labor Day.

…that our current administration is from Planet Progressive.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Whole Foods suing the hoaxer who lied about the cake.

It was all a lie, just like “hands up don’t shoot” or “he was cuffed when they shot him.,”  Why does the media believe it’s okay to substitute a desired result for objective truth?

I’m not talking about mindlessly parroting The Narrative on climate change, or gun control.  We expect that.  I’m talking about breathlessly reporting gay-threatening rainbow nooses (turned out to be an art project to raise awareness of LGBT suicide) or campus rape hoaxes, like Mattress Girl.   Their attitude seems to be that the fact the incident did not occur doesn’t mean it might not have occurred.  So falsely accusing someone of rape is simply a way to raise awareness of a problem that doesn’t exist, but could exist. 

Same idea with forged documents claiming Bush not serving in the military – fake but accurate, per Dan Rather.

And now gay-slur cakes.  Same idea.  Didn’t happen.  But could have.  So it’s all good.  The fact that an honest business had its reputation trashed doesn’t even cross their radar.

Liberals seem to believe an untruth told in furtherance of The Narrative is not a lie, it’s a Greater Good than the actual, verifiable truth, so you should be happy to be slandered. 

I hope Whole Foods pounds this guy into the dust for spreading lies about their business.

Joe Doakes

I expect an eventual, not-too-onerous settlement.  Fellow travelers and all.

So I guess the withdrawal of Ted Cruz from the presidential race means November will be a contest between an ignorant, cynical, morally bankrupt New Yorker who has accomplished nothing and been obscenely overpaid for it…
… And Donald Trump.

City Pages turns on Alondra Cano.

Which is not unusual – the City Pages, as always,  loves throwing dirt around.

Perhaps more telling? Other members of Minneapolis is DFL-strangled city Council are turning on Cano:

“She’s always late to meetings. Sometimes she doesn’t show up at all,” says a council member, who spoke to City Pages on the condition of anonymity to maintain their working relationship. “When she does, she hasn’t done her homework and has to wing it. That’s what she was trying to do here. The problem is this is stuff she’s supposed to know. It’s city council 101.”

Cano also didn’t have a printed version of her amendment. For 13 minutes, Cano grasped as she tried to figure out how to add her amendment. In other words, what should have been as simple as adding a couple words became a Laurel and Hardy skit.

“Why don’t you try to walk us through what you would like to do,” suggested colleague Elizabeth Glidden.

“I guess should I just read it?” asked Cano.

” — if you’d like me to assist you a little bit,” Glidden offered.

The problem with Cano isn’t so much that she’s absentminded, or apparently thinks that staying in a Holiday Inn Express actually does make you an expert.

No.  It’s the fact that while she bills herself as a “Third World Feminist”, she tends to act more like a “Third World Banana-Republic Tyrant” in real life.

The City Pages has decayed into “bad high school newspaper” territory in recent years.  The only real interesting question in this fracas is “which Minneapolis DFL ward heeler is using the ‘Pages to undercut Cano, and why?

My guess:  whichever councilor besides Cano that files for Mayor in the next city election.  `

Briefs have been filed in support of a challenge to Paramount Studios’ trademark on the Klingon “language”.

The briefs have been filed in Klingon.

“Christian” chuch.  Atheist pastor:

“I do not believe in a theistic, supernatural being called God,” says Gretta Vosper, the United Church of Canada minister who has led West Hill since 1997. “I don’t believe in what I think 99.99% of the world thinks you mean when you use that word.” Tor [sic] her, God is instead a metaphor for goodness and a life lived with compassion and justice.

The Church of Canada, of course, makes the ELCA and the Episcopals look like Southern Baptists.

Question:  If you believe God is a metaphor, shouldn’t you just call yourselves Unitarians and be done with it?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I got sick of Microsoft pelting me with emails so I downloaded the free upgrade to Windows 10.  Naturally, the software developers couldn’t resist “helping” and “improving” by moving things around.

 Control Panel still exists, but it’s not called that.  It’s in “Settings” and you get there by left-clicking the “Windows” icon in the lower left (formerly the “Start Button”) to bring up the “Life at a Glance” panel of icons that includes the “Cog” which looks like a gear wheel to me.  Left-click that to get to another page of groupings and click around those icons until you find the Control Panel feature that you wanted in the first place. 

 Not an improvement, in my opinion.  They’ve made it harder to find, probably intentionally, so that mere users don’t change the default settings approved by the god-like geniuses who set up the new user interface.  After all, I don’t own the software, I merely have a license to use it, when it feels like working, which is not all the time.

 “Task Manager” doesn’t show up at all and I can’t figure out why not.  What – the developers think the apps will never hang up?  I’ll never need to crash a program to get out of it?  Nonsense, it’s Windows, of course they’ll hang and of course I’ll need to crash them.  Already have.  But to get that power, you must to right-click the black stripe at the bottom of the screen (the “Task Bar”) to bring up an alternate context menu in which Task Manager is one choice.  Nobody tells you that, it’s not in the help menu, I had to find it on YouTube.  Windows REALLY doesn’t want the mere operator messing around with useful stuff like how to get the computer working again.

 I know, I could spend the money on Apple which would work first time, every time, but I hate how fascist they are (Ve haf made ze settings unt you vill use zem unt you vill like zem and you vill not change zem, verstehen sie?).  Or I could learn to use Ubuntu or Red Hat or Linux and spend the rest of my life fighting with incompatible software workarounds.  Or buy a Chromebook and give my every thought to the Democrats (technically the federal government bureaucracy, but that’s pretty much the same thing nowadays). 

 I just want it to work.  It doesn’t seem like so much to ask.

 Joe Doakes

I work in “User Experience Design” for my day job – it’s a fancy term for “making software suck less for real people”.  I read stories like this, and hear “permanent job security”.

There is an actual, credible move underway to privatize air-traffic control (ATC) – a long-overdue move to modernize a system where government’s hide-bound, politically-driven intellectual sclerosis isn’t merely slow, annoying and exquisitely expensive, but directly threatens lives:

Air-traffic control (ATC) is operated by the Federal Aviation Administration and funded by a combination of aviation taxes and a subsidy from general revenues. Ever since the Reagan administration, the FAA has been trying to modernize the ATC system, taking advantage of new technology to unclog the congested airways. Yet the system still relies on 1960s technology: radar instead of GPS to keep track of planes, paper flight strips with handwritten changes instead of electronic data on controllers’ screens, and unreliable voice radio instead of digital communication. Tens of billions have been spent on new computer systems and minor technology upgrades, but three decades of reports by the GAO and the Department of Transportation’s inspector general have documented repeated cost overruns and late deliveries and an ever-receding target date for true modernization.

The push isn’t new:

Dating back to Reagan’s transportation secretary, Jim Burnley, a growing consensus has emerged that air-traffic control is better viewed as a 24/7 high-tech service business than as a tax-funded, federally subsidized bureaucracy. National commissions, think-tank reports, and industry studies have all reached this conclusion, but reform efforts have gotten nowhere in Congress — until this year. In February, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed a bill that would remove the Air Traffic Organization (the operational arm of the FAA) from the FAA and reconstitute it as a self-funded, nonprofit, private company. It would be governed by a board representing all segments of aviation and regulated for safety — at arm’s length — by the remaining FAA, just as that agency regulates airports, airlines, and private pilots.

Read the entire article – which notes that many of the other nations that both the left and right admire have done the same, with great success (and arrested and diminishing cost (!) in recent years.

And then stop and think – where else would this work?

A friend of the blog writes:

…will be the first to propose that women all wear full burqas in order to protect us from any man we might encounter in public? I mean, it isn’t that much of a stretch when someone is already suggesting segregated transit.

I, for one, predict a system of separate but equal schools…

An 80 year old woman in Sultan, Washington shot and killed a man who was trying to go all teppanyaki on her husband:

The woman called 911 at about 8:30 p.m. from the home in the 13700 block of Woods Lake Road and said “she had shot an intruder after he broke into her home and stabbed her husband,” Ireton said.

The suspect, a 25-year-old Gold Bar man, died at the scene.

“At this time, detectives do not believe the suspect was known to the residents of the home and that this was an attempted home burglary,” Ireton said.

Note to Kim Norton, Ron “I Went To Harvard” Latz and The Right Reverend Nancy Nord Bence; maybe if the woman took a background check, the guy wouldn’t have broken in?  Right?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

New article in Nature says the Earth is getting greener, more plants sucking more CO2 out of the air.
The article mentions that elevated atmospheric CO2 explains some of the greening but carefully avoids linking CO2 levels to temperature. But if green plants suck CO2 out of the air, then shouldn’t global greening lower atmospheric CO2? And if global warming is caused by CO2, which more plants are now sucking out of the air, shouldn’t that mitigate global warming?
I wonder if the computer models used by climate scientists incorporate enough CO2 reduction due to global greening?
Joe Doakes

The models do what they’re told to do.