Heard in passing; this morning in an interview on NPR, Democrat congresswoman Debbie Dingell says Democrats can “eat and chew gum at the same time”.
I’m gonna let that sit there for a second.
Wisconsin company gives its employees their choice of handgun (reporter apparently thinks all handguns are “revolvers”) as a Christmas gift:
The business has 16 full-time employees, including several veterans. But the business also has employees who had never fired a gun, he said.
This is the first time his company has done anything like this, Wolfgram said. The father-son business was started in 2015 in a small garage workshop in this village of about 3,000 residents 100 miles northwest of Milwaukee.
Most workers were excited at the prospect of receiving their handguns, he said.
Employee Chelsea Priest of Green Bay said she feels as if the gift will empower her and will help keep her safe.
“I’ve never been a part of anything like this,” she said.
At least two employees initially declined the gift but are considering accepting it after taking a gun-safety course that company executives required before giving the guns, Wolfgram said.
Every time a person, and especially a company, sticks a finger in the eye of the likes of “Protect” MN, an angel gets its wings.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Activist medical doctors want to make public policy as if it were infectious disease policy. They advocate limits on sale of firearms. The National Rifle Association advised them to ‘stay in their lane’ and the doctors are indignant that their opinions are not being sufficiently venerated. The NRA was right. There’s a reason the Founders didn’t delegate drafting the Constitution to blood-letters and leeches.
Being awarded a medical degree give no special insight into the effect of solar radiation on atmospheric conditions; we need not listen to doctors about laws relating to climate change. Practicing trauma medicine gives no special insight into whether the Book of Ruth was inspired by the Holy Spirit; we need not listen to doctors about matters of religious doctrine. Being shot gives no special insight into the historical underpinnings of the rights of Englishmen to keep and bear arms, or the intent of the Founding Fathers in writing the Constitution; we need not listen to doctors about gun control legislation.
Even if medical doctors had special insight, they’re not applying it to this debate. The public health model of infectious disease control requires doctors to identify the cause of the disease (bacteria or virus), quarantine the carriers to minimize outbreak, and devise behaviors to avoid spreading it (sanitary sewer, wash hands, wear a mask, get a vaccine).
Being shot is not a “disease.” There’s no virus causing it. There’s no vaccine to prevent it. It’s strictly a behavioral problem but doctors are not advocating quarantine of the people mostly responsible for spreading it (longer prison terms) or ‘vaccinating’ people likely to spread it (change the culture of underclass youth). Instead, they want everyone to give up cupcakes because the obese ate too many of them.
They see coattails to latch onto.
Roger Daltrey has a new autobiography, Thank You Mr. Kibblewhite. It sounds like…
…well, exactly what one would expect of a Daltrey autobio.
Excerpt:
The band that would become The Who began in 1961 as the Detours, when Roger Daltrey, then age 17, talked bassist John Entwistle into joining his group. A few months later, guitarist Pete Townshend would join. During that period, Doug Sandom, a decade older than the rest of the members of the Detours, served as their drummer. He would leave the band in 1964, and be replaced by the now legendary Keith Moon, then age 18.
All during this time, Daltrey was driven by a statement from his headmaster at Acton County Grammar School, Mr. Kibblewhite, who told him on his 15th birthday that “you’ll never make anything of your life, Daltrey,” after expelling him for truancy. Determined to escape his lower-middle class existence in the west London district of Acton, Daltrey was driven to be the lead singer of a rock and roll group. What he couldn’t know is that he had stumbled into the rock and roll group, one of the most influential bands of the 1960s and 1970s.
And it’s off to B&N for me.
“Jewish Leaders” in the Twin Cities – who vote overwhelmingly Democrat, and likely played the role they needed to play in getting her elected last week – express dismay that Ilhan “Minnesota Socialist Barbie” Omar lied through her impeccable teeth at them:
U.S. Rep.-elect Ilhan Omar this week reaffirmed her support for a pro-Palestinian movement to pressure Israel, rankling Jewish community leaders who say she contradicted remarks made at an August candidates forum.
Omar’s office told the website MuslimGirl.com on Sunday that she supported the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel but expressed “reservations on the effectiveness of the movement in accomplishing a lasting solution.” The Minnesota Democrat later reiterated her position in a series of text messages exchanged with a reporter for TC Jewfolk that were posted on its local news site.
Jewish community leaders previously expressed optimism after Omar criticized the BDS movement during an Aug. 6 Democratic candidates forum at Beth El Synagogue in St. Louis Park — about a week before Omar defeated four other candidates in the party’s primary. Omar said she supported a two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine conflict and that the BDS movement wasn’t helpful in trying to achieve that goal. Pressed by moderator Mary Lahammer to specify “exactly where you stand on that,” Omar replied that the BDS movement was “counteractive” because it stopped both sides from coming together for “a conversation about how that’s going to be possible.”
Why, it’s almost as if she knew she’d never be held accountable for any lies she tells to get elected.
How might this have manifested itself elsewhere in her life?
Hmmm.
If only we had an institution – perhaps one with printing presses, and transmitters – staffed by people who considered “telling the truth about politicians to people” to be a monastic calling, or something like that?
You mean to say that Alexandria Occasional-Cortex…er, Ocasio Cortez, was making a cheap “Affordable Housing” sympathy ploy with her “I can’t afford an apartment in DC” schtick last week?
Well, shut my mouth.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
A colleague at work is a Liberal who buys into all the progressive talking points. I keep wanting to ask: “So, when’s your last day?”
Look, if you didn’t earn your job but instead it was handed to you on account of your race, then you don’t deserve to keep it. And in a country with such a shameful history of racial injustice, surely a person of conscience would have the self-dignity to resign so a less qualified but more morally deserving person have the job.
I’ll do you the courtesy of assuming you are an honorable person who has the courage of your convictions and will act on them. Because if not, then you’re just a hypocrite mouthing platitudes to signal your virtue while actively working against everything you claim to believe.
So, when’s your last day?
Conscience is so very very malleable these days…
I went to a League of Women Voters’ panel forum on “Gun Violence” in Burnsville last night.
It was actually a fairly even-handed forum; the LWV volunteer who did the initial setup of the topic, “Emily” (didn’t catch the last name) gave an incredibly even-handed presentation on the facts of the “gun debate” – most of which made Reverend Nord Bence visibly hot under the collar, as an even-handed factual appraisal makes her look completely detached from reality.
The forum included Rev. Nord Bence and soon-to-be former legislator and no-doubt soon-to-be non-profit exec Erin Maye Quade, against Bryan Strawser of the MN Gun Owners Caucus and Rep. Steve Drazkowski of Mazeppa, one of the stronger pro RKBA voters in the legislature.
It went about as expected: Nord Bence’s record of never having made a statement about guns, gun owners, gun laws, gun facts or gun history that is simultaneously original, substantial and true remains undisturbed.
And she showed the sense of entitlement during the forum, repeatedly interrupting Strawser and Drazkowski, so often and flagrantly that she LWV organizers had to chide her (to a round of audience applause).
But at one point, Bence’s Maye Quade’s bully-girl fabulism collided with her inner ghoul: when Rep. Drazkowski noted that the best response to a bad guy with a gun was a good guy with a gun,, Bence Maye Quade responded by telling a story about a man who’d responded to a violent attack, and gotten shot for his troubles.
I had to go find that story Here it is. And as usual, it shows that Bence and Maye Quade, like all gun control activists, is lying, wouldn’t know context if it bit them, and are a ghouls to boot.
When police arrived after reports of a shooting over the weekend at a bar outside Chicago, witnesses say Jemel Roberson, a 26-year-old security guard who worked there, had already subdued the alleged assailant, pinning him to the ground.
Adam Harris, who was at Manny’s Blue Bar in Robbins at the time of the incident on Sunday, told WGN-TV that Roberson was holding “somebody on the ground with his knee in his back, with his gun in his back” when officers from neighboring Midlothian got there early Sunday.
Midlothian Police Chief Daniel Delaney said that’s when one of his officers “encountered a subject with a gun” and shot him, according to a statement given to the media.
But the “subject” was Roberson, not the suspect in the bar shooting.
It’s every carry permittee’s worst nightmare – being mistaken for the bad guy when a cop, arriving at an incident they’ve only heard about on the radio, under life-or-death stress, decides any gun is a threat and shoots you.
Which happens.
And is vanishingly rare.
And appears not to have even been the issue in this incident – the gun wasn’t Roberson’s so he wasn’t the good guy with the gun; he was the good guy who seized the gun from the actual perp.
For Bence Maye Quade to use this episode to try to impugn the “Good Guy With A Gun” idea is loathsome. Clearly “shame” is a lot to ask after a career as a serial liar.
I guess we should expect no better for this used car saleswoman in Lutheran minister’s robes.
CORRECTION: I was wrong. It was Erin Maye Quade. Doesn’t change the point.
Jon Stewart – the former TV host, not the former Twin Cities blogger – has a few words for the media – and they’re mighty close to the words I have for them, as luck would have it.
Stewart calls them narcissists. I’ll stick with “whiners”:
Amanpour pushed back against Stewart’s suggestion, saying journalists react to Trump’s attacks this way because it’s “hard for us to be dispassionate when words from the White House are aggressive against us.”
“You’re not used to it,” Stewart replied, saying journalists should keep in mind the other struggling communities in U.S. before making the fight all about themselves.
“Think of the communities of color, think of Muslims, think of the black community. When journalists rise to this outrage of ‘How dare you say that about us,’ think of the lives that they’ve been leading under this and what they’ve been put under,” he said.
The problem with the media in recent years is their mission has morphed to “Afflicting those who are comfortable afflicting the media, and comforting those who comfort the media’s afflictors”.
Stephen Colbert – as much a symptom of everything annoying about America’s culture of Urban Progressive Privilege as he is a celebrity in his own right – made a semi-rare sensible post on his Facebook page.
There were consequences:
Is anybody else getting flashbacks to the Citizens Committees of the French revolution?
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I get it now. I understand. It’s hard to change a lifetime of thinking one way, the wrong way, but I get it now.
I hope my children do worse than I. I hope their prospects are dimmer, their fortunes poorer, their deaths early.
You see, I once believed that by staying in school to get an education, working hard in my job, spending frugally and investing wisely, that I was making a better life for myself and my family. But now that I’m woke, I see that I never earned anything, I didn’t build my career, it was all handed to me because my parents weren’t divorced and my Mother read to me.
I have White Privilege.
Oh, sure, I saw the brown, black, red and yellow kids outside the razor wire, watching us White kids go to the school where they were denied admittance. I saw them sitting against the wall of the supermarket, their bellies distended, flies buzzing around their heads, because they life in a food desert. I thought that was the natural and inevitable consequence of their parents’ cultural choices. I thought White culture was better at protecting women and children while building and conserving wealth.
But I understand things now and I’m not going to let my children make the same mistakes that I made. I’m pulling them out of STEM school and getting them hooked on drugs to ensure they never go back. I’m squandering my savings on a tricked-out Yukon with 20-inch Spreewells. I’m quitting my job and committing a few felonies, to ensure I can’t get another. When my kids’ lives are as bad as the kids in the lowest strata of society, then things will be fair.
I know they’ll thank me someday.
Equality!
I’ve been a little slow getting to this story – it’s a few weeks old, and it’s been a busy November so far
One Gregory Bush walked into a Kroger in Louisville, KY, and killed one black man, apparently yelling racial slurs as he did so.
There is some evidence – albeit only in an incredibly badly written alt-media story – that he was confronted by one armed man inside the story, after murdering 69 year old Maurice Stallaard:
The suspect is also reported to have said: “Whites don’t shoot whites.”
Busy left the Kroger, went to the parking lot, and shot Vicki Lee Jones, 67, bebore turning his attention to Dominic Rozier and his family.
Dominic Rozier. Hero.
Rozier, however, was also a carry permittee – and he engaged Bush, forcing him to disengage and flee. He was caught, and has been indicted on two counts of capital murder, with very likely federal hate crime charges on deck.
The racial angle of this story has gotten all kinds of coverage. Bush was prohibited from owning firearms legally due to a variety of previous violent violations – so clearly the shooting never happened. His state of mind is certainly in question.
What is not in question is that two good guys – one white, one black – with legal firearms and the right and will to use them – defended themselves, their families (in both cases, literally, then and there), and their community; they did it judiciously (as almost all citizen in this situations do), and they did it successfully.
The Minnesota Democrat “Farmer” Labor party wants to make that impossible. Don’t ever forget it.
To: The Abovementioned
From: Mitch Berg, Cranky Peasant
Re: The Above Mentioned
All,
You might want to see to this. The Growth Fairy is going to have to move to double digits pretty dang quick here.
I could write six thousand words about Berg’s Seventh, Sixteenth and Seventeenth laws if I wanted.
Or I could just display this:
Either way. Mission accomplished.
And lest one think our veterans only bought our freedom, there are a lot of people around the world free today to remind you otherwise.
Poland became independent 100 years ago today. The events were not unrelated:
Freedom isn’t free, and recent history shows it’s not contagious, either. But it can certainly splatter.
Michael Brodkorb and Allison Mann‘s book The Girls Are Gone – the true but still-unbelieveable story of the Grazzini-Rucki divorce, kidnapping and legal goat rodeo – is on sale now.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is browsing for saw chains at Menards’ in the Midway, when Fudd GLUNK, vice chair of the Ramsey County chapter of “Sharia is Coming! Sharia is Coming!”, walks around the corner.
GLUNK: Merg!
BERG: Er…hey, Fudd…
GLUNK: Islam’s goal is to impose Sharia Law on all of us!
BERG: [Looking as if he knows he’ll regreat asking] And we know this how…
GLUNK: Because the Koran say so!
BERG: And because Muslims, like all the the world’s major faiths, always follow their holy texts to the absolute word, in exactly the same way.
GLUNK: Yes!
BERG: Which is why you will never, ever find a Catholic gettng divorced, a Jew eating bacon, an Evanglical protestant fornicating, or a Hindu eating beef, ever.
GLUNK: They’re different.
BERG: Different how?
GLUNK: Because the Koran tells them exactly what to do.
BERG: As opposed to the BIble, the Torah…
GLUNK: Their goal, every last one of them, is to impose Sharia on the world. By force if needed, by guile if possible. They Koran allows no exceptions.
BERG: So Muslims, unlike all the world’s faiths, are unanimously diligent in obeying their various holy texts.
GLUNK: Yes. The Koran says so. There is only one Koran.
BERG: That’s pure baked wind. There are six major branches of Islam, and probably six dozen minor ones – they may be more fragmented even than Christianity with its 3-4 major divisions. And one of the things they fragment over is waht “Jihad” actually means. To radical fundamentalist Sunni like ISIS, and radical fundamentalist Shi’a like the Iranians, it means “impose Islam by all means necessary”, while Sufis are downright pacifistic, and have gotten clobbered through the centuries by their Sunni and Shi’ite neighbors for the trouble.
And pretty much any imam can tack on his own interpretation beyond that – which was why the Imam at exactly one mosque in Minneapolis decided that touching pork, not eating it, and being in the presence of dogs rather than owning and being in contact with them, was a sin, thus becoming the only Muslims in America to actually practice such beliefs.
GLUNK: Haha, Merg. The Koran says that all apostates must be killed!
BERG: And among the acts that qualify as “apostasy” in purist Islam are living in a non-theocratic country – Muslim or not – much less voting for a government, since the only non-apostatic government is the Caliph. And all those Muslim girls in our public school systems? They and their parents are all in biiiiiig Koranic trouble, since educating girls is trayf.
GLUNK: Trayf?
BERG: Never mind.
GLUNK: The Koran allows Muslims to deceive the infidel! It’s called tak…er, takk…
BERG: Taqqiya.
GLUNK: Yeah!
BERG: So every Muslim in a non-theocratic Muslim country is a sleeper agent?
GLUNK: The Koran says so!
BERG: You’re aware that the Christian churches of Europe, after decades of free fall, have finally plateaued, almost entirely from Muslims converting?
GLUNK: They are just laying low until they get their opportunity.
BERG: Yeah, that must be it. Interesting fact; the first mosque in the United States was in Ross, North Dakota; the Syrian/Lebanese community that built it pretty much intermarried with the local Swedes and Germans, and is pretty much indistinguishable from the locals 120 years later – in fact, I went to high school with some of their descendants and didn’t even know about it.
If they’re sleeper agents, they’re pretty dang effective.
GLUNK: You must be some kind of Muslim accomodationist!
BERG: Not at all. I’m a Christian, a conservative, and an American nationalist and exceptionalist. I’d never convert to Islam, and I can argue articulately exactly why. Our nation needs to accept immigrants – and insist that they assimilate. Which is why when we get a Muslim coming to the GOP, I welcome them – because “going to a Republican party event” is as assimilatory as buying a house in Burnsville with a freaking white picket fence.
GLUNK: You’re just a useful idiot for Sharia Law!
BERG: About half a percent of Minnesota’s population is Muslim. If we get Sharia imposed on us by half a percent of the population, we’ll probably deserve it.
But think about this for a moment. Radical Islam – the Wahhabi, the Shi’ite fundies in Iran – that is most definitely a danger.
But progressivism is a danger to this country right now – and if we take every single new immigrant to this country and, via ignorant intolerance, turn them into Democrat / “progressive’ voters, we’ll be doing for our enemies what they could never do for ourselves.
GLUNK: I suppose now you’re going to come up with some clever punchline to end this sketch?
BERG: At this point, it’d be redundant, wouldn’t it?
And SCENE
Florida candidate tweets out an explicit solicitation to election fraud:
Tweet was removed. Of course.
When Dems talk about “vote suppression?” They’re projecting. Every f*****g time.
“Anti”-Fa thugs terrorize Tucker Carlson’s family.
And then journalistic Dash OK, “journalistic” Dash thugs justify it:
The reason Big Left talks so much about the “wave of right ing terror” that’s sure to be coming any day now for the past twenty years is that they desperately need something to actually fit their narrative; raw projection alone only carries you so far outside the Democrat base…
Barack Obama was on the campaign trail in the weeks leading up to mid-terms…
…and it’d seem he had the same results at mid-terms that he did as president:
TREND:
Over the past 5 days, President Obama flew into the states of Georgia, Florida & Indiana to personally campaign for big-name Democrat candidates in those states.
Here's how they did:
Joe Donnelly: Lost
Andrew Gillum: Lost
Bill Nelson: Lost
Stacey Abrams: Lost— Benny (@bennyjohnson) November 7, 2018
Now – if only we can get the Dems to endorse Elizabeth Warren, and get Obama to stump for her…
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Fox News reports that the ‘caravan’ migrants are boarding busses chartered by the local government in Mexico. They don’t want the migrants in their area so they’re paying for busses to ship the migrants North, passing the buck to America.
Can’t blame them. Can we hire busses to ship them to Canada?
Nice idea – but the Canadians actually enforce their borders and immigration rules.
It’s rapidly becoming a Berg’s Law – liberals are usually good for one round of “debate”, until the one round of chanting points they “know” about the subject (they don’t actually know them; they’re regurgitating) get struck down. Then they switch to ad hominem, ad hominem, ofay mockery, and worse. .
It’s true on most subject – guns, sexual harassment, gay marriage, whatever – but healthcare is far from an exception.
And in the chanting points that make up their world, “Single Payer Healthcare” is an immaculate, unimpeachable concept. None have ever been shown the drastic falloff in outcomes (as opposed to coverage – which is the easy part.
Consider one nurse’s letter explaining why she quit the profession. She described horrific working conditions. Medical professionals worked 12-hour shifts with little time for necessities like bathroom breaks or food. Managers felt they couldn’t do anything to change unsafe conditions created by overcrowded hospitals. “You cannot safely practice under such conditions,” she wrote. “Mistakes will be made and people will be harmed, some fatally.”
The shortage of providers has resulted in longer wait times for patients. In May, 4.3 million people in the United Kingdom were on waiting lists for surgery, a 10-year high. Adjusting for population, that would be like having everyone in the state of Florida on waiting lists. Roughly 3,500 British patients have been on hospital waiting lists for more than a year.
More than one in five British cancer patients waits longer than two months to begin treatment after receiving a referral from a general practitioner. In Scotland, fewer than 80 percent of patients receive needed diagnostic tests — endoscopies, MRIs, CT, scans and the like — within three months.
These delays are deadly. An analysis that covered just half of England’s hospitals found that almost 30,000 patients died in the past year while waiting for treatment — an increase of 57 percent compared to 2013.
Looking at how patients actually do on NHS should be enough to cure any reasonable, informed, logical person of their infatuation…
…but I guess I just summed up the problem, didnt I?
Rachel Packer at Marie Claire tells us that Trump makes her regret adopting her Chinese daughters:
But now I worry that we made a tragic mistake.
I pulled those two beautiful babies away from a rising power and into a damaged democracy. I brought two girls of color into a society where it’s clear that their word and their bodies are worth less than a man’s—and where open, overt racism has become even more likely now than it was a decade ago. And unfortunately, my worries aren’t exactly tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoia.
After which she carries on with a couple column-feet of tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoia and unhinged virtue-signaling.
I bring this up not so much to castigate Ms. Packer’s dubious grasp of reality, but to illustrate what seems to matter to liberals; freedom from want, from cognitive dissonance, from opposition, rather than, well, freedom.
Lord, I hope those girls grow up to be conservatives.
In the past few months, I’ve been treated to the sight of Saint Paulites – almost all of them people who’d never dream of voting for anything but a DFLer – reacting with Major-Renault-like shock, shock, that…
And, now, Saint Paul’s school-building spree turns out to make the Pentagon look like a Bemidji Norwegian Lutheran church’s decoration committee.
St. Paul Public Schools vastly underestimated the cost of an ambitious 2016 plan to improve the look and function of every building it owns.
Eight major school projects that got underway last year will cost the district a total of $214 million, according to the latest figures from the school district.
That’s $63 million more than the district estimated in 2016, a Pioneer Press analysis has found, a difference of 42 percent.
New estimates for the next eight large projects, all scheduled to break ground in the coming five years, total $220 million. That’s $91 million, or 70 percent, higher than the 2016 estimate.
There will be shock.
And then a majority of them will vote for an even further-left Democrat next election. ∂
Anti-bullying programs seem to result in…more bullying?
Seokjin Jeong and Byung Hyn Lee set out to discover how bullying prevention programs could be effectively transferred from individual schools to schools on a national level. To their surprise, they discovered that bullying prevention programs don’t always produced the expected results:
“Surprisingly, bullying prevention had a negative effect on peer victimization. Contrary to our hypothesis, students attending schools with bullying prevention programs were more likely to have experienced peer victimization, compared to those attending schools without bullying prevention programs. It is possible that bullies have learned a variety of antibullying techniques but chose not to practice what they have learned from the program.”
Such findings bring up an important point. We spend a lot of time promoting awareness of different issues today. But while awareness of a problem should be raised, is it possible to fixate on that problem so much that we actually increase it?
The fact is, high attention on any one issue can work both ways. On the one hand, it raises focus on the victim. Being able to come out and say, “Yes, I’ve suffered, too,” even for the smallest thing, can be oddly gratifying and status boosting. On the flip side, perpetrators also stand to receive a certain level of prestige and attention for their actions, however wrong they may be.
In much the same way as saturation coverage of mass shootings creates more mass shootings I suspect.
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