Had a rough weekend. Low grade fever, chills, sensitive skin, slept for hours. Finally got a lab test on Tuesday: positive for Covid. No Thanksgiving for me. You guys can split my share of the pie.
I’m fortunate to have a mild case. Four days of down time, about like we had in The Olden Days when somebody got the Flu, before Covid took over the entire world. Worked half a day yesterday and I’m “at work” today, sitting at my home computer pushing electrons around. Thank you, Lord, that I have an easy, indoor, sit-down job. This is why modern Americans survive at such high rates compared to other nations or historical times . . . I have paid leave, warm housing, plenty to eat. Prosperity does indeed save lives. If only the damned Liberals would quit trying to destroy it.
Joe Doakes
Get well soon, Joe.
And what you said about the left hosing everything up.
…to the crime wave currently sweeping the Twin Cities, it’ll likely be when parts of the state with functional two-party systems start catching slopover.
Which may be happening:
Deephaven Police Department shares that they are experiencing a record number of crimes in their suburban Minnesota city. pic.twitter.com/WFRvFDwQzu
Big Left and Big Media will spin this as racist, naturally – to them, suburbs = racism (says they, from their cozy strongholds in Crocus Hill, Kenwood and Edina).
And when enough exurban soccer moms get robbed at gunpoint, it won’t matter.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking through the Cub Foods on Larpenteur, gauging the level of shortage going on, when Avery LIBRELLE almost literally bumps into him.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Aw, ssshhhhhure enough, it’s Avery. How are you…
LIBRELLE: People going places where people don’t know who they are, and might be angered by their presence, should stay home. It’s just provocation!”
BERG: Are you talking about the Rittenhouse Trial, or the Ahmad Arberry trial?
LIBRELLE: Clearly, the…
(Stops)
LIBRELLE: Um…the…er…
BERG: (Slowly steps away as the wheels grind slowly to a halt.
…get the impression that the members of the power-clique known as “the Squad” – AOC, Ayanna Presley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar – got the way they are because they were the “Mean Girls” in Junior High, and either never grew out of it or recovered that inner character flaw when they got into power?
Did the Boston Celtics bench Enes Kanter for dunking on the Chicoms?
What a difference a year and a few tweets slamming China for slave labor make. Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter has seen his playing time severely diminished after posting a series of social media messages attacking NBA partner China for oppressing its peoples, leaving some wondering if Kanter is being punished for his advocacy of freedom.
The Celtics are denying it.
The correct answer is “of course they are””.
I mean, isn’t that what Kaepernick saga taught us? Allegation = guilt?
(Note: I apologize to those of you who had “never, ever” in the “when will Mitch write anything at all about the NBA?“ pool.)
“For those who got an issue with this critical race theory equity, this is something I fight for, for my children,” Austin reportedly said during the school board meeting . “How dare you come out here and talk about the things that my daddy and my grandparents went through,” listing things such as Jim Crow, lynchings, and the oppression…
“I’ll bring my soldiers with me next time … locked and loaded,” Austin stated as he was being escorted out of the meeting by officers. Plemmons reportedly questioned whether he had been addressing her, to which he replied, “locked and loaded.”
That’s “1,000 soldiers, locked and loaded”, coming out to defend Critical Race Theory…
NOTE: This blog’s editing tool, “Word Press”, just keeps getting worse and worse. It ate the lede, literally, for this piece. We’ll try again.
I’ll cop to a certain amount of Schedenfreud, watching the array of reliably “progressive” and utterly un-funny late-night talk shows sinking beneath Greg Gutfeld.
Four years of Donald Trump made conventional late-night “comedy” indolent and lazy. Writers – many of them not very funny to begin with – seemed to think anything with Trump in the punch line would earn ’em a laugh. The “A-list” “talent” hosting these affairs – dismal talking heads like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, whose careers peaked at parodying “Red” media and watching women jumping on trampolines, respectively – aren’t helping much.
And few stories of of this decline make me happier than Trevor Noah’s Daily Show, which traded the (relative) wit and charm of Jon Stewart for…
…well, Trevor Noah. I’d normally tell a joke at this point at Noah’s expense, but it seems fitting to remain un-funny.
And between a lame host and “writing” that can’t quite find, well, any traction in any way, the Daily Show is sinking fast.
The “Daily Show” host is as reliably progressive as his peers, although he occasionally will smite his own side (at least far more than Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel). Still, his show’s most recent ratings snapshot isn’t bad
Noah has sunk below the unctuous, priggish John Oliver. Below the hapless and abysmal Samantha Bee. Ahead of the pointless, Colbert-produced “Charlemagne Tha God”, and nothing more.
Speaking as a person of honk, I wish them all well in their oddly segregationist but utterly legal effort.
Indeed, there are notes of free-marketeering to be found in between the lines in the story.
Which brings me to my actual response..
“Go with God, Freedom, Georgia. Hold that free-market thought, and you have every chance of doing very well. But if you wind up going with the soft-socialism that much of the Black Democrat political mainstream pushes, you might – will – have problems. Try to avoid that”.
Which is better advice than NPR or most of its listeners are going to give.
…that Duke Ellington HIgh School in Georgetown, DC is going to regard this as a, er, tactical error; they’ve canceled a fundraiser involving one of their alums, Dave…
The students said they were uncomfortable supporting Chappelle because many of their classmates identify as LGBTQ+. In his new Netflix special, The Closer, the comedian compares being transgender to wearing blackface, says “gender is a fact” and says that he’s a member of “team TERF,” meaning “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.”
I’m hoping I’m around in 30 years to see what comedians say about this era.
On one hand, a round of applause for the locals who grabbed the guy.
The good news: People are getting sick of criminals.
The bad news: Perhaps they’re also getting sick of a system that coddles criminals, and are ready to start doing order (if not justice, in the sense we’ve come to expect) themselves.
But there’s more.
As of when this post was written (Saturday morning), Minnesota had 84 homicides – two more than for all of 2020.
Let’s put that in context. In 2016, there were 82 unjustified homicides.
In the entire state of Minnesota. Minneapolis had 30-.
A federal appeals court has upheld its stay on President Biden’s vaccine-or-test mandate for companies with at least 100 employees.
In a 22-page ruling on Friday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the mandate was “fatally flawed,” and barred the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from enforcing the mandate “pending adequate judicial review” of a motion for permanent injunction.
OSHA shall “take no steps to implement or enforce the mandate until further court order,” the ruling stated.
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The mandate, which was supposed to take effect Jan. 4, requires business with at least 100 employees to mandate their workers get vaccinated or undergo frequent testing.
Two predictions:
Biden and co. will ignore the court ruling; and
The chorus of MSM scolds will try to justify whatever Biden does. Constitutional crises are so 2020, doncha know.
And to think some say the “elite” media is utterly delusional:
I mean, I get the theory – it’s not quite the puffery it appears to be at first glance. A media that conscientiously checks and balances government is, in fact, vital – not only to democracy, but to the functioning of a free society.
Quick example: In the history of the world, there has never been a famine in a place with both a relatively free economy and a relatively free press; the market evens out the economic distortion, and a free-ish media allays the panic-hoarding and the corruption, that are behind most modern famines.
Now – looking at the shortages creeping up around us today, do you think our media could be doing a better job of reporting on the causes?
As opposed to puffing up the Administration -and themselves?
The Kyle Rittenhouse case – involved in jury instrucitons today, and going to final attorney summations today – is plenty complicated, but about some fairly simple questions:
Did Rittenhouse instigate or participate in instigating two different deadly-force incidents in which he used lethal force on four people, with two dead, one seriously injured, and one missed (who has disappeared from public view)?
Was his fear of death or great bodily harm reasonable?
Was the threat to his life immediate?
Was his response reasonable – enough to end the attack on him?
DId he make a reasonable effort under the circumstances to disengage?
Proving or disproving those five points for two incidents and four shootings has taken eight days of testimony and over a year of pre-trial wrangling – all very complicated – but the questions themselves are fairly simple.
But as far as the media and the large culture are concerned, this trial isn’t really about the facts of the case.
“Smart” America, the Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton crowd, see in Rittenhouse the bitter gun-clinging Jeezuz freak they picture that other tribe of Americans being; they earnestly exclaim “Nobody needs a gun like that” (ignoring the fact that four people tried to kill him). They think Rittenhoue is an intellectual symbol of all they detest about that other America. This includes most, but not all, media coverage; Big Media has cast its lot with “Just America”, and it shows in much of the coverage.
“Real” America seems. him as a lone sentinel of freedom, fighting back against the (politically favored, socially immunized) mob that is ravaging our centers of thought and commerce (and Kenosha). A kid from bedrock America, good and true, a bone to be chewed by a “blue” culture and media (ptr) who are siding with the rioters
“Free” America sees this as another show trial, like Bernard Goetz, a symbol of a state run amok that is actively crushing liberty.
“Just” America, naturally, sees Rittenhouse, the person and the case, as a symptom of “white supremacy” and the base, violent nature of the army of straw cis-men they face.
Indeed, with few exceptions, the higher the social status of the person commenting on Rittenhouse, the less their commentary actually has to do with the shootings in Kenosha or the facts at trial.
Everyone and everything in our society today is a metaphor, it seems.
“But wait, Mitch – the fact that you didn’t say anything against the Texas abortion law’s incentives for filing actions against abortion providers or customers speaks volumes“.
It sure does. I’m not necessarily wild about that part of the Texas law – although the decision to abort affects more than just the mother; in many cases, more than just the mother and child, as well.
But in this case? If you loved East Germany under the Stasi, you’ll love a second Biden term.
People filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Data Practices Act (DPA) requests over the past few years have wondered how it is that Governor Walz leaves such a light state-documented electronic trail.
Could he just be old fashioned? Or, like Paulie Cicero in Goodfellas, maybe he just never does business electronically?
Well, no:
PRM statement (12 of 19) “In May, we were provided information by a source … and the claim they made to us was that the Governor uses a secondary state e-mail address for correspondence.”
This blog was founded primarily to lend my small, relatively insignificant voice to pointing out the growing bias and ethical turpitude the mainstream media.
That was in 2002 – a much more innocent time, relatively speaking.
Local media is no better; most ran headlines similar to the above during Monday’s proceedings – only Channel 11 made a quick headline reference to the fact that Grosskreutz incriminated himself and upheld Rittenhouses self-defense claim against him (without saying it in as many words, naturallly).
Public media? NPR and MPR this morning ran a report from Wisconsin Public Radio about yesterday’s proceedings that focused on a dispute over whether the owner of the used car lot where the incident started did or did not pay, or even ask, civilians to provide security – which will have no impact on the verdict, other than perhaps gulling any potentially dim jurors…
…and ignored the county Medical Examiner and photographer Nathan DeBruin, who largely upheld Rittenhouse’s self-defense claim.
I tend to give people the benefit of a doubt. Reporters aren’t largely lawyers. Many of them aren’t curious enough to go much past the press releases that seem to make up so much of one’s morning newscast.
But this goes way past ignorance, and given the amount of reliable information that is available, incompetence as well.
They are pushing a narrative; protesters good, protests mostly peaceful, resistance entirely depraved and motivated by white supremacy.
To the narrative, the battle is a reductionist cartoon with white hats on one side and MAGA caps on the other, counting on news consumers to be too dim to know the difference.
As the 2020 elections, the California recount, and the recent election in Austin Texas show, its not wrong.
