Governor Walz is “turning power over” to Lt Governor Flanagan for a few hours while he has a colonoscopy.

I don’t not expect DFL goons to roam the streets looking for wreckers while she’s in power. Fingers crossed, everyone. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

However, if all goes well, hopefully we’ll get word as to whether the endoscopist found the code for the model that predicted 20-70,000 dead Minnesotans by July 2020.

SITD Bonus: Rejected names for the post:

• They Found Esme Murphy
• Endoscopy Discovers Every Metro Newsroom
• “Nurse, What’s With All The Lip Marks?”
• Governor’s Riot Strategy Found
• MN Media Metaphor Alert

But again – I’m trying to be a better person than that. 

To: All you Normies
From: The Elites
Re: Die, For All We Care

Proles/knaves/fyrds,

Your life, property and family, mere peasant, are not of enough value that we, your elites, should allow you a $500 handgun to protect them.

However, ours – we elites – are of such value that dropping double the income of a typical American household is perfectly fine:

Luxury real estate agent Branden Williams said protection dogs have become so popular among his mega-wealthy clients in L.A. that he’s now in the market for one himself, especially after a neighbor was robbed at gunpoint in Beverly Hills. Williams has tasked the same broker his mom used to buy her protection dog, a German shepherd imported from Germany, with finding him a suitable animal this year.

“I will say they’re not cheap; the ones I’m looking at are between $60,000 and $100,000,” he said. “It’s a whole other level of training; we’re not talking about doggy day care here.”

Just so you know the hierarchy of the universe.

(BTW – kudos to Lisa Bender, who at least got the spirit of things right, advocating gun control while getting private security on the taxpayer’s dime. Well done, Ms. Bender) .

Regards,

Your Betters

Here’s today’s music list:

A regular reader sent me this:

Social services get funding based on how much need exists – which means it’s in their interests to make sure people know to get their needs out, front and center.

No stone left unturned.

Question: what’s the difference between an ugly black assault rifle with a mega capacity, magazine designed to slaughter children, and…

… a firearm manifesting the righteous fury of a freedom fighter?

Why, the relative level of political correctness of the person holding it, of course!

We’re heading towards the 50th anniversary of the American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

And like the Che Guevara T-shirt and the hammer and sickle, and the guy with the AK-47 clone, shows us that to the left, the means justify the ends.

I’ve spent a fair chunk of the past 20 years telling people “there was a lot more to the 1980s than Flock of Seagulls hair and Members Only jackets and kitsch”.

“Cobra Kai“, the Karate Kid sequel, has been pretty brilliant at showing how those of us who grew up in the ’80s feel like fish out of water today – comically, often brilliantly.

But there was more to it than watching yesterday’s background noise turn into today’s “microaggressions”.

I could work at it for years more, and never nail it as well as this article, by Mark “Not Mike” Judge.

Its observations about how people were, and how kids grew up back then, puts a serious spin on “Cobra Kai’s” comic take. But it wasn’t all laughs. The whole thing is worth a read.

I could have pullquoted most of the article – but this bit here stuck out for me (with some bits and pieces of emphasis added):

“There were novels and short stories that were more literature than pulp fiction—The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Lonesome Dove, Love in the Time of Cholera, Neuromancer, the stories of Ann Beattie. There were films like “Wings of Desire,” “Cinema Paradiso,” “A Room with a View,” “Babette’s Feast,” and “Round Midnight.” Better known but no less intoxicating was the music: New Order, the Replacements, the Pixies, Public Enemy, the Smiths, U2, Suede, Talking Heads. Talk Talk began the decade as a synth-pop group and ended it with two art rock masterpieces, 1988’s “Spirit of Eden” and 1991’s “Laughing Stock.””

“In his book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Simon Reynolds notes that to be alive and young and culturally aware in those years was to have a bracing antipathy to nostalgia. We didn’t care about the hippies of the 1960s. The 1970s were there to make jokes about bad clothes and tacky disco. The idea of going back 20 or even 30 years to ape the styles of earlier generations would have been considered demented and embarrassing. We had our own thing. When director Spike Lee was about to release a film or the Blue Nile a new record, nobody had any interest in the big pot cloud that had hovered over Woodstock.”

The whole article is worth a read.

See, Millennials and Zeeps? You *weren’t* the first ones to get annoyed by Baby Boomers.

To: Lieutenant Governor Flanagan,
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Glad You’ve Discovered Light Rail Crime!

Of all the people who’ve been beaten, robbed and murdered on Twin Cities light rail platforms, it’s good to know you’ve paid attention to one of them, finally:

But clearly, you do not ride the light rail. I suspect you hitch a ride to the office with the state patrol, just like the governor. I’m gonna guess you haven’t ridden a train since long before you became Lieutenant Governor.

Just a quick tip from someone who rode the Vomit Comet (aka “Green Line”) day and night for a year and a half; when you’re out there on that platform, late at night, in the city you and the DFL created, you are absolutely, completely alone. Nothing there but you and God. None of your ex post facto happy talk is of the faintest bit of protection against The DFL’s Minneapolis.

To my credit, I figured it would be a victim like this, that got you to finally pay attention to street crime.

Sort of.

That is all.

Senator Smith took to Twitter to shill for “ESG“ – rules that require businesses to make decisions based on “Environment, Social Credit, [woke corporate] Governance l”practices.in other words, replacing fiduciary responsibility with “woke“ “social justice“ (read: Marxist) values.

there are really only two possibilities:

• Smith really is this ignorant.
• She knows she can count on a majority of her voters being this ignorant.

Given the last few elections in Minnesota, #2 isn’t the dumbest strategery .

I don’t know.

What makes him so good?

Happy 79th birthday to Roger Daltrey.

Attention, “fact-checkers” – yet again, we were right and you were wrong. The lab leak theory – which for over half the pandemic was labeled a racist conspiracy theory, repeating which could get you kicked off of social media and drummed out of polite society – appears to be true.

But if there’s one thing the American media does well, it’s come together to deflect attention away from its collective misdeeds. (emphasis added): .

Media outlets that had once definitively debunked the lab-leak theory innovated a new journalistic genre: the un-debunking. And yet, the explicit intention behind these retrospectives was to indemnify those who’d collaborated in the pressure campaign against the theory’s proponents — or, at least, to validate their good intentions. “Were news reports diminishing or disregarding the lab-leak theory actually ‘wrong’ at the time,” asked the very same Washington Post that had savaged Senator Cotton, “or did they in fact accurately reflect the limited knowledge and expert opinion about it?” You won’t be surprised by how the paper answered its own question.

In other words, “the truth may change, but it is always what we say it is”.

And nothing changes the definition of truth more than you-know-who:

In February 2021, Facebook lifted an arbitrary ban it had imposed on posts that included “false claims about Covid-19,” including the notion that the virus was “man-made or manufactured.” The decision was attributed to the “evolving nature of the pandemic,” but the pandemic had not actually evolved at all. What had evolved was the conventional wisdom. At the same time, Facebook reportedly tightened the regime restricting users’ ability to post “content that has been rated false,” or at least has yet to be deemed true. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the biases shared by those who “rate” relative factuality might extend beyond epidemiology. And in Facebook’s defense, ABC News absent-mindedly admitted, “the claims [sic] that the virus came from the lab was one often pushed by former President Donald Trump, though he never provided evidence.” Enough said.

Because to the – there is no better term – clique that sees itself as running America’s media and messaging, it’s not even the medium that’s the message. It’s the messenger:

In what must have been a painful concession in September 2021, science historian Naomi Oreskes admitted that the “lab-leak theory is plausible.” But even so, she qualified her mea culpa by calling “some of the people promoting the claim” — and Donald Trump, in particular — “irrational.” “We all judge messages by the messenger,” this distinguished voice in the field of science journalism let slip. Even the center-left columnist Jonathan Chait, who had been brave enough to buck the social pressures culminating in a consensus around the virtue of censorship, justified his colleagues’ prejudicial impulses after the fact, writing that the “idiotic conformity of the right’s pseudo-journalistic apparatus” had essentially incepted in the Left an equal and opposite reaction to its “propaganda.”

It’s hard to do anything but taunt big media anymore.

Lori Lightfoot, out as mayor of Chicago, after failing to advance to the runoff, in Yesterdays election:

The top two vote getters – the liberal endorsed by the police union, and the center radical endorsed by the teachers – will face off in the runoff:

Mr. [Paul] Vallas, an adviser to the Fraternal Order of Police during its negotiations with Ms. Lightfoot’s administration, used the crime issue against her on the way to his first-place finish, calling for hundreds of new police officers.

Turns out blue city Democrats can reach a tipping point.

Exactly what that means will be interesting to see, where “interesting“ means in the classic rural Scandinavian sense of the term.