This blog very rarely endorses political candidates; I believe the practice of media outlets endorsing candidates is much more harmful than good, and I think I’ve done it twice in fifteen years, only in circumstances that were dire enough to warrant it.

And those are the circumstances today.

Minneapolis is holding a mayoral election – one of the more important in its history.  There are quite a few candidates in the running.   But only one of them is exactly perfect for Minneapolis at this stage of its history.

Shot in the Dark endorses…

(more…)

John Gilmore at Alpha talks about the left’s parade of garment-ripping over last week’s anniversary of Paul Wellstone’s death.  Hint:  it’s worthy of a North Korean or Cuban flood of ritual garment-ripping.

The whole thing is worth a read – but the pullquote is:

Yet the forced remembrances, the public displays of sadness and the brittle wistfulness for what could have been, only serves to highlight the bankruptcy of the Left, both in Minnesota and nationally. Paul Wellstone deserves another kind of memorialization, something other than the politicization of every aspect of modern day life.

Because the truth is, while Wellstone would never have voted for Donald Trump, he would have understood precisely why he won. Indeed, by this time, had he lived, he would likely have been seen as a Cassandra, cursed to speak true prophecies that no one believed, by his fellow democrats.

More unfortunately for democrats, Wellstone would have been able to advise them how best to recover from last year’s loss. Without him, they are left to look only to the past in their remembrances of his untimely death. Wellstone would have been the first to admonish them to look to the future.

Here’s the part I wonder about:  Wellstone was someone who was rare in his day, and has almost vanished today – someone who respected and befriended people across the proverbial aisle who shared his passion for…whatever they did.  He was friends in the Senate with Barry Goldwater, and attended his funeral; he was a friend and occasional guest-host for conservative talk show host and now CD2 Congressman Jason Lewis.

I’m wondering what the Dems’ purity police would do with him today, if he weren’t careful?

…that liberals never suffer consequences for bad actions.

As allegations of unwanted sexual advances in 1986 by Kevin Spacey against a then teenage Anthony Rapp have emerged, Netflix today has decided to pull the plug on House of Cards after the upcoming sixth season next year.

Well, sort of, anyway.

To:  Melvin Carter, DFL Candidate for Mayor of Saint Paul
From:  Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re:  Gandered

Councilman Carter

I’m Mitch Berg.  I’m one of Saint Paul’s tiny film of conservatives, so you’ve never had the faintest hint of a reason to pay attention to me, and you likely never will.  And it – like everything about Saint Paul’s governance – shows.

But I come today not to bury you, but to show you some common ground.

Councilman Carter, you may be a politician, but otherwise you are by all accounts a law-abiding citizen.    There’s no indication you don’t follow the rules [1].

And yet here you are, getting smeared by the police union (an integral part of the Metro DFL establishment) that you are also a loyal, elected part of) for things that are not you fault, that you’re not responsible for, and that you have nothing to do with [2], *even as* the person who allegedly burgled your house – the bad guy, here – slides anonymously and without ceremony toward his eventual, inevitable catch-and-release date.

In other words, Melvin Carter, yoiu on the business end of the same collective smear Big Left dishes out to *all* law-abiding gun owners; blaming the law-abiding for the actions of the criminal;  burdening the law-abiding but ignoring the criminal.

(“But wait!  It’s not bigotry against gun owners!  It’s racism!”, someone will say.  Why choose? It’s both; the roots of gun control are intensely racist).

Welcome to the party, Councilman Carter.  Perhaps you might want to rethink your party’s assumptions about the rest of us?  [3]

Mitch Berg
The Midway

[1] Including the laws and rules about securing the guns;   the law is about safeguarding kids, not burglarproofing your collection; a trigger lock or locked gun box is ample to meet the law’s requirements.  If the law required us to make every potential danger in our houses theft-proof, we’d all live in fortresses, and we’d all *still* be criminals one way or another.

[2] Other than, of course, the culplability he shares with this city’s current government, ruling party and political class of which he’s a part, of course.

[3] Speaking conceptually, here.  I don’t own guns.  They terrify me.

As I noted last March, I’ve been playing guitar for 40 years.

I moved to the Twin Cities 32 years ago, largely to try to be a musician.

And since either or both of those events, I’ve been dreaming about making this announcement:

My first single [1], “The Wonders Each New Day Brings”, is out today.  It’s on most of your major music vendors:

Amazon.

iTunes

(It’s also on Pandora, Spotify and any number of other music services)

The album See Red is also available for pre-order; it will be released 11/10.

[1] OK, it’s technically a “Teaser Track”, not a single.  I don’t care.

…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.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Never-Trump senator from Arizona, retiring.  Blasts Trump for setting a bad tone in politics.

The Washington big-shots still don’t get it.  We didn’t vote for Trump because he was crass, we voted for him even though he was crass.  We voted for him because he wasn’t Jeb or Mario or any of the other appeasers quietly going along with Hillary’s coronation.  We voted for him because he was willing to push back against the endless slanders issued by Democrats, the media, academia and Hollywood against ordinary, decent, law-abiding, hard-working, tax-paying Americans.

Trump is not the swamp, senator, he’s the guy we hired to drain the swamp and you’ve been standing in his way.  Don’t let the door hit you . . . .

Joe Doakes

Hard to pick who to like less.

Dave Osmek is running for governor; here’s his campaign site.

Today, I’m filling in for Brad Carlson from 2-3PM on the Closer edition of the NARN!

Today on the show:

• Senator Dave Osmek, GOP gubernatorial candidate, on this year’s Legacy Funding howlers, Southwest LRT funding, and the governor’s race.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Bruce Lundeen’s website page. .

Joe Kovacs’ website.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is back in the studio, making talk radio great again!

Today on the show:

• Bruce Lundeen and Brian Kovacs, GOP candidates for Minneapolis City Council.
• My open letter to Saint Paul mayoral canddiate Melvin Carter.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

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.

Why, it’s almost like…

… Big Media is trying to pick winners and losers or something…

Back in the eighties, in a conversation with a “progressive” of the time, I called “BS” on her use of the term “Holocaust” to describe…

…welfare reform.

It was a pattern thirty years ago.  Today, given the newliy-broad use of the term “white supremacy”, it’s turned into utter depenDence: berg

The term was popularized by academic race theory, where it seems to have largely replaced previous terms of art like “institutional racism” or “systemic racism.” Now it is migrating out of the ivory tower and into everyday discourse, puzzling the millions of Americans who are used to an older, narrower meaning.

It’s all in the marketing:

It’s easy to see why writers and academics find the term appealing. “Institutional racism” conjures up images of beige-carpeted offices and rows of desks; “systemic racism” sounds like some sort of plumbing problem. “White supremacy,” on the other hand, packs a visceral punch that commands the reader’s attention. Because they’re describing something that needs attention, it’s useful to have a phrase that does the job.

Of course, there’s the little matter of crying wolf:

Nonetheless, using “white supremacy” this way is a mistake. It leads to confusion in the national conversation, because opposing sides are using a critical term in very different ways. It hampers our ability to discuss the phenomenon that the anti-racists actually want to discuss. And ultimately, if we continue to use it this way, it will lose the very emotional resonance that made it an appealing substitute for more clinical terms.

The whole thing is worth a read.

And some concerted pushback.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Should breakfast cereal art reflect reality – the brown guy is the janitor – or should it be fantasy, like every college publicity photo showing a perfect balance of beautiful people smiling for the camera on a beautiful sunny day?

What is Kellogg’s obligation: to teach children about the world that is, or to imagine a world that never was and never will be?

I suppose there’s a third possibility.  It’s possible their obligation is to sell breakfast cereal to make money.  If that were the case, marketing should use whatever imagery motivates customers to buy the product.  Anything less would be a breach of their obligation to their shareholders.

In the olden days, a syndicated columnist often advised readers “Mind Your Own Business.”  Still good advice.

Joe Doakes

I pretty much just make eggs.

Employment site Dice asks  “Is Flat Design Actually Awful?”, referring to the new “flat design” user interface fad.

The simple answer is “Usually”:

Jakob Nielsen, a Danish web usability guru, has co-authored a number of books on the subject of design. He is part of the Nielsen Norman group, which sparked quite a stir with a recent article about Flat UI elements causing uncertainty among users—a huge no-no. If that wasn’t damning enough, Nielsen also termed flat design a “threat to tablet usability.”

What does Nielsen mean by “uncertainty”? The firm conducted an experiment in which 71 respondents read nine pages from six different websites (topics ranged from e-commerce and non-profits to technology and finance). With some of these pages, the firm added shadows and gradients to make design elements stand out; with others, they “flattened” the design even more. The respondents found the pages with flatter design more confusing to navigate, taking an average of 22 percent longer to find a specific target.

That’s a pretty miserable result. But is flat design a pretty-looking sham? Has the entire technology industry gone down the wrong path when it comes to UX and design? Others don’t think so.

I design this stuff for a living – and when I find myself trying to guess where it is I’m supposed to “type” thing or what I’m supposed to do (the “uncertainty” mentioned in the article, which is a big black mark when it comes to system usability), I wonder;  if it were an application aimed at someone like my dad, who doesn’t know or care much about computers but is being forced to interact with them more and more, how would this fly?

On the other hand, it’s good to have a mission.  Vanquishing flat design is a good one.

…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.

News Flash:  The citizens, taxpayers and parents of Osseo, MN have discovered what the parents of Saint Paul, Edina and some other Twin Cities’ area communities have found out:  focusing to exclusion on “white privilege” as the reason for the achievement gap doesn’t actually change, or even affect, the achievement gap.

Unlike other Twin CIties communities, Osseo’s actually been able to do something about it; they’ve bagged their contract with Pacific Education Group – the company that has turned privilege-shaming into an eight-figure business model – the company:

In 2012, the Osseo Area School District hired Pacific Education Group (PEG) to help with the high suspension rate amongst its non-white students and achievement gap issue the schools faced. Last year, the school board cancelled its contract with the racial equity consultants after abiding by its suggestions for five years and watching the racial achievement gap grow.

Wait – grow, you say?

What is clear for Osseo according to statistics obtained from Minnesota’s Department of Education, math scores for black students in the School District have steadily declined, dropping from 33 percent in 2014 (which was above the statewide level) to 29 percent in 2017. In the same time period, math scores for white students remain largely unchanged at 73 percent. In reading, black students maintained a 36 percent proficiency in the same time period, while the gap with their white counterparts grew from 73 percent in 2014 to 74 percent in 2017.

No huge surprise – it’s pretty much true everywhere.

The surprise?  We’ve actually found a school board that’ll tell the Emperor he’s walking around naked:

“The problem is hard to fix when you have good teachers who are thinking about quitting, but you can’t help them because you’ve been sworn to not reveal their names,” Gerhart told Alpha News. “We have a staff that is currently about 80% white, so in effect we are using taxpayer money to systematically shame 4/5ths of our staff for simply being born.”

Gerhart describes an environment where teachers were afraid to step forward – teachers who were physically and verbally threatened and abused on a daily basis by their students.

The problem, of course, is that like most “progressive” “efforts”, the end results end up being indistinguishable from Stalin’s CHeKA, or the Spanish Inquisition:

“PEG has instilled a culture of fear among a number of teachers,” Gerhart states. “PEG likes to talk about having ‘courageous conversations,’ however in reality they have a number of ‘protocols’ in place that you have to agree and adhere to before taking part in the ‘conversation.’  These protocols frame the context of the discussion before the conversation even takes place, in essence disallowing true discussion much less debate or disagreement. If a person does not agree to these basic protocols, it is regarded as evidence of that person’s inherent racism. And remember, according to PEG, all white people are inherently racist no matter what, so a number of our teachers simply keep their mouths shut for fear of being labeled “racist” and getting fired or bullied out of their jobs.”

The “Conversation” is always defined by them.  Which means it’s never a conversation.

Congratulations, people of Osseo.  Your elected officials have exhibited just the faintest shred of courage.  It almost beggars the imagination.

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…

Berg’s Seventh Law reads “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”

So when Democrats accused Donald Trump of collusion with the Russians, I naturally assumed…

…that Donald Trump, being “different” than your average politician, might bring us a situation that is that rarest exception to the rule.

Chalk it up to excessive modesty about my own prescience.  There’s a reason they’re called “Berg’s Law” and not “Berg’s Joke”;

And that reason is, with no exceptions, it’s always right.

UPDATE:  Oh, yeah – remember when colluding with Russians to dig up dirt on your presidential opponents was “treason?”

The media hopes you don’t.

When gun-grabbers can’t win arguments on the facts – and it takes a really, really dumb 2nd Amendment activist to lose an argument on the facts, since every last one favors us – they go for the emotion.

And to back up the emotion, they’ve got fake facts.

Which is not to say the facts themselves are fake; it’s just that they are tortured into a form that leaves a false conclusion.

To wit, this graph from lefty propaganda organ “The Trace”, showing “gun violence” rates in a particularly violent neighborhood of Saint Louis:

More violent than Honduras?  The most violent country in the world?

Well, yeah.  The neighborhood in question is what’s technically known as a “Crime-Ridden Hellhole”.  Gangs, every variety of urban blight, decades of use by the city’s welfare system as a “warehouse for the poor”.

And it’s got a population of about 6,000.  . So a murder rate of 290/100,000 in a population means that there were (doing math in head) 14-15 murders in the area.   (Note;  Saint Louis is a violent place).

The intended effect on the ignorant and gun control activists (pardon the redundancy) is to have them go “Wow – part of Saint Louis, more dangerous than Honduras?  Time to ban guns!”

Of course, it’s dishonest.  North Minneapolis – at 30,000, five times the size of Grand Ville – had 30 murders in 2015, which boils down to a murder rate of 100/100,000 – higher than Honduras, six times higher than Chicago.

And if you look at the intersection of Prior and University in Saint Paul in 2015, the murder that took place out in the street one Saturday night, in a n area of four square blocks with a population of maybe 50 people, gave the area a murder rate of 2,000/100,000.

What really matters is this:   can people live, work and raise kids productively in an area?     And by that measure, places like San Antonio and Boise and Cheyenne and Salt Lake City, where the ratio of guns to people is over 1:1 and the crime rate is almost too low to bother measuring, stack up pretty well.

The answer – in Democrat-dominated hellholes like the Grand Ville and the North Side – is “What, are you kidding me?”

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The case for mandating gun ownership.   Why serving in the militia should be compulsory.
As a general rule, I react negatively to the suggestion that I should be required to do anything for the federal government.  But the point about civic virtue is important.  In a world where people think bacon comes from a store and cops shouldn’t be so mean when they arrest murderers, a little time spent patrolling the streets of your own town might open some eyes.
Joe Doakes

Until 1972, the Swiss directly tied serving in the militia to the right to vote.  There are times the idea resonates…

You might ask yourself;  how does someone like Heidi Heitkamp – a liberal Democrat Senator, in a party that is almost extinct outside Fargo, Grand Forks and Minot, and whose state legislative caucus doesn’t have enough elected members to fill all the party’s committee assignments – keep getting elected in a state that Trump carried 68-32?

It’s easy:  Lots lots of Democrats on the coast who are desperate to hold a Senate seat that was in Democrat hands for generations, and which, once lost, will likely never be Democrat again (emphasis added):

Heitkamp, currently gearing up to run for reelection in a state President Trump carried by 36 percent, was heavily reliant on sources outside North Dakota during the last fundraising quarter, during which only $21,318 of the $739,218 raised came from North Dakotans.

Nearly twice as much money—$39,600—came from employees of financial giant Goldman Sachs alone, including a maximum contribution from Harvey Schwartz, the firm’s president.

Also outpacing North Dakotans were New Yorkers, who supplied $191,408 to Heitkamp, and Californians, who supplied $124,452.

Overall, the $717,900 Heitkamp received from donors outside the state accounted for more than 97 percent of its fundraising during the quarter.

Heitkamp earlier this year attacked the idea that “billionaires outside North Dakota who don’t know anything about our state” have an impact on its elections.

Perish the thought.

Hollywood is afflicted with the flops:

This weekend, for example, Warner Bros. is putting out a white flag on “Blade Runner” after three tough weeks. They’ve cut the number of theaters showing Denis Villeneuve’s beautiful film by 855. So far, “Blade Runner” has made just $66 million.  Audiences have not clamored to it. And now, week by week, Warners will quietly take it away.

Warner’s isn’t alone. Universal is pulling Tom Cruise’s  “American Made” from 539 locations after a month in release. The Doug Liman directed thriller has made just $43 million. Good reviews haven’t helped push Cruise fans to theaters. One problem was lack of promotion since Cruise wasn’t available. Also, audiences may have just soured on him after “The Mummy” and other flops. With both studios, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

It could be that America has just discovered it has options to be lectured by out-of-touch coastal millionaires, be they on the silver screen, a news program set, or the silver screen…

…nah.  That’s crazy talk.

A report from the Cult of Personality front: Millennials love President Trump’s tax cut plan…

…when they think it’s Bernie Sanders’ plan:

That’s the bad news.

There’s good news? Well, maybe; it seems that as people grow up and learn more, they do, in fact, get more conservative; at the  moment, both red and blue states are getting redder in terms of voter registrations (although urban areas are still solidly blue)