Salon Magazine is the revealed voice is your hierarchical overlords.

Hear them and obey. I beg of you.

That is all.

The record number of background checks received by the National Instant Check System indicate – the second record in a row set on Black Friday – indicate enough firearms were sold in one day to outfit every single active duty Marine:

According to the FBI, over 200,000 background check requests associated with the purchase of a firearm were submitted to the agency on Black Friday, marking a new single-day record. The previous record was set on the day after Thanksgiving in 2016. In both 2017 and 2016, enough guns were potentially purchased on Black Friday to arm every active duty Marine.

Or, to put it another way, to outfit every single active duty service member in the Norwegian Army, Navy and Air Force ten times over.

Words fail me; I shall turn to music:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Here’s something you don’t see every day:  a political appointee reshaping his department to reflect the mood of the people who elected him, changing priorities, reversing interpretations, shuffling staffing.

Oh wait, yes, you do.  This is exactly what happens every time political power changes hands.  Only now it’s going our way instead of Obama’s way, so Liberals are sputtering with outrage.

I don’t see why.  Sessions’ changes to the Justice Department shouldn’t be surprising.  I seem to remember complaining about a radical change in direction eight years ago and hearing someone tell: “Elections have consequences and at the end of the day, I won.”

Sauce for the goose, baby  . . . .

Joe Doakes

We’ve got a generation of people – some in positions of some poiwer – who barely remember not having Barack Obama in power, and thus have no concept of anyone else ruling.

I mean, why?

We’ve fallen a little behind on our World War I series.  Over the next few months, we’re going to work to get caught-up to the calendar.

For the German prisoners of war in Souilly, a French commune in the Meuse near Verdun, life behind enemy lines hadn’t been much better than their previous life in the trenches.

Operating as unpaid laborers, the German POWs dug trenches and roads eleven hours a day, seven days a week.  A dysentery outbreak in the camp months earlier had decimated their ranks, as French supplies and medical care struggled to meet the prisoner’s needs.  Even the basic safety of the prisoners was willfully neglected as POWs were forced to perform their roles right on the frontlines, often under German shellfire.

News of such treatment had been suppressed in France – the army’s Commander-in-Chief, Robert Nivelle (who hadn’t taken much care with his own men’s lives in Verdun), brazenly lied to Paris about the practice – but news had trickled back to Germany.  In response, the Germans publicly announced that newly captured French POWs would no longer be transferred back to Germany but kept on the frontlines as quasi-human shield laborers.  If the French would move their German prisoners further back, and not expose them to gunfire, the Germans would do the same.  With German authorities allowing French prisoners to write letters home, detailing the conditions they faced at the front under their nation’s own artillery fire, public pressure quickly mounted in France to move the German POWs.

On March 27th, 1917, the French government agreed to Germany’s demands, despite objections from London and Nivelle.  By June of 1917, no POWs remained at the front on either side.  It was a small gesture of deescalation in the increasingly dehumanizing treatment of POWs in the Great War.

German POWs in France

European history had given relatively little insight into how to manage the problem of hundreds of thousands of enemy prisoners for an indefinite period of time.  Prior to the wars of the Napoleonic era, most armies were made up almost exclusively of professional soldiers, providing a sort of collegial basis for the treatment of those captured on the battlefield.  Prisoners were usually quickly exchanged via the “cartel” system, which placed monetary values on prisoners based on rank.  Thus those who surrendered would often find themselves soon back with their armies, having been traded for a man of equal rank, money, or both.   Read the rest of this entry »

The Nobel LIterature prize is now enmeshed in a sexual harassment scandal.   It’s actually pretty nasty looking, especially given Sweden’s strenuous efforts to paint itself as gender-neutral to the point of androgyny.

And the Swedish Academy that issues the awards is worried (emphasis added):

“When an institution which selects Nobel laureates finds itself in this type of situation then it of course risks affecting the Nobel prize negatively,” Lars Heikensten, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, told the daily Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

Don’t worry, Nobel peeps.  After Obama, Paul Krugman,Aung San Suu Kyi, the IPCC, Algore, Paul Krugman, Kofi Annan and Yassir Arafat, that boat has left the dock and cleared the lighthouse.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’d be worried if the State Department had a string of success stories, which the cuts threaten to end.  Does it?

These are the guys who stood around while our consulate in Benghazi burned, who sent pallets of cash to Iran, who got special privileges for Cuba.  These are the guys who stood around while the North Koreans developed nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles.

A Trump critic quoted in the article:  “These people either do not believe the U.S. should be a world leader, or they’re utterly incompetent,” she said. “Either way, having so many vacancies in essential places is a disaster waiting to happen.”

Considering what they accomplished while they were in office, how much worse can it get?

Joe Doakes

Funny how Democrats want to be a world leader, after the eight years of national self-abnegation we just went through.

Join me from 2-3PM today on the NARN, as I fill in for Brad Carlson!

Today on the show:

• “Toxic Masculinity” – the Big Lie

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!

Join me from 1-3PM today on the NARN!

Today on the show:

• Charles Manson – and his descendants today
• Why Al Franken Shouldn’t Resign
• “Toxic Masculinity” – the Big Lie

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!

I’m so thankful I live in a DFL-led workers paradise where unemployment is a fraction of that found in the GOP-run dystopias in North Dakota, Wisconsin and South Dakota!

Hoping for a US distribution deal for this one, sooner than later:

&

Need details? Here you go.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Minnesota Supreme Court held that Governor Mark Dayton’s veto of all legislative funding was perfectly okay, because despite his attempt to de-fund a co-equal branch of government, the Legislature has set aside money to cover unforeseen contingencies.   The Legislature’s fiscal responsibility rendered Dayton’s attempted coup irrelevant so we can just sweep his little faux pas under the rug.

I’m guessing next legislative session will be . . . contentious.

Joe Doakes

Given the confrontation-aversion the MNGOP showed in the 2017 session, I think Joe may be too optimistic.

#NotMe

#NeverDidNeverWill

And #RealMenNeitherHarassNorAcceptGuiltByAssociation

And, for those who insist, #QQQQ.

I mean, as long as we’re communicating via the medium of the hashtag.

The #MeToo campaign is doing for sexual harassment what #BringBackOurGirls did for Boko Haram’s hostages; took a seirous issue and made it into a trite, temporal trifle; an “event” rather than either a social malady or a wartime atrocity, respectively.  In 21st century terms, the campaign “raised awareness”, which is a moderne way of saying “generated a lot of shrill chanting, shrieking and marching about, literally and metaphorically, in the interest of waving a bloody shirt”.

Genderquislings:  One of the most noxious byproducts of this bloody shirt campaign are the clumps of “feminist men” whose response to this past two months’ Robespierrian orgy of revelation is to throw themselves prostrate before the court of public opinion and demand mercy – for themselves (whatever) and every other man.

I come not to praise them, but to bury them and those who parrot them, especially via yet two more social media chanting orgies, “#YesAllMen” and “#ShutTheF**kUp”.

Among many other vague and morpheus sins of which they’d accuse their fellow guys is the notion of “toxic masculinity”, which in the hands of “feminists” [1] and their male hangers-on quickly turns into a synonym for “masculinity” of any kind.

My reply:  They – or the things they represent – are the real problem.  Not masciulinity – real masculinity.

Disc-lame-ers:  In an intelligent society that debated the merits of an argument, I could omit this section.

But I live in the “progressive” Twin Cities, so I have to treat much of the audience like ambulance-chasing lawyers.

The “First Wave” of feminism was right:  Women should be the equal of men in the eyes of the law.  They should face no discrimination due to their gender in the work place; they should be paid according to their qualifications, experience, credentials and other factors relevant to the job.  They should not have to accept non-consensual harassment and abuse due to their gender.

The “Second Wave” of feminism – AKA “Identity Feminism” – is wrong.  Women should also have no advantage over men in family court.  Their status as individuals should not be reverted to the Victorian era, where was assumed that a woman’s natural state frail victims (the term “potential victim” is used with a straight face by more than a few modern feminists) that must be protected from the male species, slavering brutes looking to pounce on the defenseless benighted damsels among us.

The Collective:  How this has manifested during the current sexual harassment crisis has been the notion that “#YesAllMen” are complicit in sexual harassment; that sexual harassment is a side effect of “toxic masculinity”; that harassment, abuse and rape are inextricable from being male.   That the world would be a better place if it were more like an anthill – where the women did the thinking and leading and designing, and the men just shut up and did what they were told, and contribute to the gene pool (until genetic engineering obsoletes that, too).

The males who’ve become the leading voices of this orgy of gender-abasement remind me of the people “convicted” of various thoughtdrimes curing the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward who, after weeks, months or years jammed into prison cells and gulags, beaten and sleep-deprived by the Red Guards, abased themselves with almost ritual fervor on film and before crowds, not “begging for mercy” so much as abjuring being worthy of it, before being shot in the back of the head or sent off to be worked to death in the Chinese gulag.

Call them “victims of toxic social work”.

If nobody else will do it [2], then let me be the first to draw my line in the sand and yell “Stop”.

#NotMe

#NoNotAllMen

#QQQQSnowflakes

It’s The Devaluation, Stupid:  Matt Walsh had a great piece in the Daily Caller earlier this week, in which he pointed out the real problem:  not the presence of men, but the lack of Men:

The problem is not that there is too much masculinity in our culture. On the contrary, there isn’t nearly enough. A man becomes an abuser and harasser of women when he rejects that which makes him a man. He is not expressing his masculinity when he strips naked and struts around in front of his unwilling coworkers and subordinates — a move that seems oddly common among these types — rather, he is expressing his almost complete lack of masculinity.

Not sure if he’s referring to Charlie Rose or Louis CK – and I”m not sure it matters at the moment.

These men are weird, desperate, self-debasing, and effeminate. If you say we should have fewer of those kinds in positions of power, I agree. Let’s have none at all. But we would do well to replace them with men who are actually men. What we need in our society are chivalrous, strong, respectable, productive, and self-sacrificial men. Real men, in other words. Men who protect, provide, and do all of the things that society has always depended upon men to do. If you are that sort of man, you certainly should not shut up, step to the side, or consider yourself “trash.” Our culture needs your input and leadership more than ever.

Of course, the dominant narrative from a good chunk of our society – Hollywood, academia, the educational/industrial complex, is that traditional masculinity needs to be filed down to sized, tamed.   Primary schools medicate it; popular entertainment castigates it.  Entertainment has combined a relentless, big-budget focus on “girl power” with a near-complete suppression of any notion of giving boys any impetus to be what was traditionally called a “man” – chivalrous, comfortable with but not abusive of his power, driven to defend his family, his significant other and his community, self-sacrificing but optimistic and prone to using his power for good.  Those parts of society mock and taunt those notions (until they need a cop)…

…and propagate them with an education system that systematically feminizes boys, a family court system that ensures boys’ only role models as children will be mothers (who most assuredly do serve a role in raising emotioally boys – but not the only role) and that love, for a male, is an exercise in self-destruction, and an “entertainment” industry that seems to have taught half a generation boys that pornography is sex.

In other words – if you want to create the stunted, anti-masculine caricatures that are Harvey Weinstein, Charley Rose, Al Franken and Louis CK [3], the modern education, entertainment, academic and social justice systems are the most efficient possible factory to create more of them.

The only “Toxic Masculinity” is the stunted variety of caricatured, one-sided, immature, hollow “Masculinity” hat Identity Feminism demanded, and that the feminized Education system and Academy, and Hollywood delivered.

#NotMe:  Well, I’m done.

If you want to signal your virtue by gender self-abasement, expect me to mock and taunt you with the derision you deserve.

If you think the way to achieve equality for women is to beat down men, expect me to punch back twice as hard, and do whatever my feeble best is to lead more men – not males, mind you; men – to do the same.

If your response to discrimination against women is to promote discrimination against men, expect me to point out the obvious; you’re just passing around more discrimination.

You have rotted the society enough.  Hell, it may be too late; you may have killed it already.

I don’t care.

Read the rest of this entry »

The good news?  You’ve got people on the left defending free speech on campus, and defending it well, as Charles C. Cooke notes in the National Review about a piece in New York Magazine by Jesse Singal:.

But there’s still a bit of fact-checking to do, as Cooke notes – in this case, quoting Singal:

“The existence of white nationalist Richard Spencer, and other bigoted far-right figures like him, poses a genuine challenge to public universities. Conservative student groups invite these sorts of figures to speak fairly often, and the courts have consistently held that public universities can’t really interfere with such events.”

There’s just one thing wrong:

Having read this, you could be forgiven for thinking that “conservative student groups” have invited ”white nationalist Richard Spencer” to speak on campus, and that they have done so “fairly often.” This isn’t correct. Richard Spencer has indeed spoken on college campuses recently. But, invariably, he has invited himself.

After which the conservative groups do what they do – defend actual free speech, including the stuff that everyone hates, which is indeed why we need “Free Speech” in the Constitution in the first place.

So there’s that.

But there’s one other problem:  Singal refers to Spencer et al as “bigoted far-right figures”.   And he’s far from alone.

Thing is, as Michael Knowles points out in this superb Prager U video, the “Alt-Right” is not right.  It repudiates, in fact, much of what American conservatism believes:

To sum up, the “Alt-Right” – or “Alternative to the Right” – believes in:

• Relentless identity politics, just like Big Left does, only in  its case the identity is “White”.
• Atheistic.  Christianity important to the alt-right only as a motivator for Western European civilizzation – but rejects faith as a moral, ethical or spiritual force.
• A disdain for the value of the individual in favor of the primacy of the group.

Conservatism is focused on the individual, and the presence of a stable, higher order (even conservative atheists – they exist – generally believe in some sort of higher moral order).

I know, I know – they christened themselves “Alt-Right”, sparing the media the trouble of doing it for them.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

There is no violent crime in Baltimore.  And when I say “no,” I mean there is a certain amount, but violent crime definitely is not out of control and besides, it’s much worse in at least one other city.

Plus, following the Freddie Grey incident in which a Black man died in police custody whereupon a Black prosecutor wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on trials of police officers for crimes they didn’t commit, the police stopped arresting Black men and since then, not one Black man has died in police custody.  So Baltimore has that going for it.  Which is nice.

Joe Doakes

Maybe Ray Dehn was right after all…

You don’t find many things that unite nearly all Americans – but the death of Charles Manson is one of them.   Other than high school kids trying to get a rise ouf of their elders, not many people – especially those that remember the utterly legitimate fear his “familiy” inflicted for a time in the late sixties – aren’t happy to see this vile chapter in history fade to a halt.

Manson predated me and my consciousness – to me, there’s always been a Charles Manson – but the attempt by “familiy” member “Squeaky” Fromme on President Ford forty-odd years ago was certainly a punctuation mark in my early understanding of the weirdness of the world (and of the US in the seventies, which was a whole ‘nother level of weird).

I did read Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s masterpiece on the era, including his prosecution of Manson and his family.  If you’ve never read it, do; it’s not only the best explanation of the era, but one of the best lessons on the anatomy of a prosecution you will ever find.

Of ocurse, for a brief stretch of my life, Manson wasn’t just background; he was an assignment.

Back in 1987, after Don Vogel went to Chicago, I spent some time producing the Geoff Charles show at KSTP-AM.  And Geoff was obsessed with Manson.  One of my ongoing standing assignments; land an interview with Manson.  Didn’t matter how; by phone, in person, on tape; Charles would have flown himself out to San Quentin to put the interview on tape at his own expense, IIRC.

And so I spent the next three months making at least a couple calls a month to the California Department of Corrections.  Me and everyone else, of course; “an interview with Manson” was on pretty much every media person’s wish list at the time, and we may have been one of the smaller potatoes in the bag.  But we were a persistent small potato, at least.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Canada has national health care, guaranteed free to all citizens.  Free that is, if you can get any.

Canada has so few MRI machines that patients go on a waiting list.  90% of patients get their scans within 9 months, the rest take longer.  If you only had six months to live, you wouldn’t find out in time to worry about it – you’d die waiting for a diagnosis.

But if you could get treatment, it would be free.  So that’s way better than our system in the US, right?  We should change to their system at once, right?

Joe Doakes

I’ve noticed – and I’ll put this in the form of a progressive blog comments – that “proponents of single payer healthcare conveniently omit the terrible outcomes that people get in the UK and Canada”.

Chris Coleman – Saint Paul’s utterly undistinguished three-term DFL placeholder mayor for the past 12 years, and yet again a DFL candidate for Governor – released his gun control agenda.

That it’s a monument to DFL Metrocrat entitled ignorance should come as no surprise.

But there’s a dose of the kind of hypocrisy you only find in a one-party city thrown in as well.

Ignorance Is Chris:  The first point makes sense – if you know nothing about the issue.

Requiring background checks on every gun purchased or transferred in Minnesota. There should not be different safety rules for online gun purchases vs. in-store gun purchases.

You already need to get a background check – in stores, or at a federally license dealer if you buy online.

Either Coleman is aiming for the hysteric vote, or he’s being advised by the terminally ignorant, or – and my money’s on this – both.

They Blinded Him With Pseudo-Science:  Next, a bow to the DFLers who think they love them some science because Neil DeGrasse Tyson:

Allowing scientists to do their jobs by rolling back gun lobby restrictions on studying gun violence as a public health issue. We must invest in the Minnesota Department of Health and give researchers the tools they need to help address the epidemic of gun violence.

The notion that crime is a public health issue is balderdash, postulated by that rare breed of “scientists” who start with their conclusion before the actual experiment.  Government is right to withhold funding from this non-scientific “science”.

Guilty Until Proven Guilty:  This next one almost sounds like it makes sense:

Implementing a Gun Violence Protective Order (GVPO) law to create a legal path for family and household members, and law enforcement, to temporarily remove guns and prevent new gun purchases by those who pose a risk to themselves or others.

Sounds like a good idea, especially in the wake of last week’s shooting in California.

But be careful; if this proposal skirts judicial due process, then it’s a camel’s nose under the tent.  Before long, it’ll turn into the terror watch list – any government bureaucrat will be able to put your name into the database over some of the most abstract possible definitions of “risk”.

Among Friends:  But number four?  That’s the funny one:

Requiring mandatory reporting of all lost or stolen guns because we know the sooner law enforcement can identify and recover missing firearms, the more likely we are to keep dangerous people and criminals from perpetrating gun-related crimes. States with mandatory reporting laws report 33% fewer gun-related crimes than states without these regulations.

Does that include buddies of the Mayor?

Like Melvin Carter, who had two guns stolen from his house, but never bothered to report them?  And then went on to become the next mayor of Saint Paul, in part with Mayor Coleman’s endorsement?

Then…don’t make him.

Franken might be able to shake this off if he could depend on conflicting memories. But he can’t. Because of that photo. The sex-abuse scandal is becoming, to cultural history, what Watergate was to political history. It is gigantic. It is era-defining. And among the dozens of famous people implicated in it, the Franken photo is the most damning and irrefutable evidence yet to emerge. It’s a tableau of our time. It is the photo of our moment. It’s the kind of smoking gun you couldn’t use in a Law & Order episode because it would be too blatant. It will never disappear from the national consciousness. Powered by Consider the breathtaking way each detail reinforces the horror of the others: A Hollywood celebrity who will soon be a Democratic senator is molesting a woman. While she’s asleep. And in military gear, because she’s traveling to support our troops. In a war zone. And Franken is smiling. While shamelessly posing for the photographer. How can we ever cease to be amazed and appalled by this photo? It is to the sex war what the picture of the summary execution of that Viet Cong prisoner was to the Vietnam War.

And for the future?

Democrats who just this week were saying they would no longer tolerate Bill Clinton–type behavior can prove it.

 

We are getting plenty of Clinton-era behavior.  But that’s not the same thing.

Saturation coverage of spree killings yields more spree killings:

Though we seem to be plunging ever deeper into a dark night, researchers now have a far clearer view of a key factor in the violence. A long-standing theory has matured into a body of evidence that can no longer be dismissed: The level of attention paid to mass shootings is central to why they keep happening.

The idea that some crimes might be self-spreading, like a disease, was proposed as early as 1890, when the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde labeled murders copying Jack the Ripper “suggesto-imitative assaults.” For mass shootings, the effect was well known among researchers by the early 2000s, when a wealth of information allowed forensic psychiatrist Paul E. Mullen to conclude, “These massacres are acts of mimesis, and their perpetrators are imitators.”

After Columbine, researchers discovered that spree killers (as distinct from terrorists) were seeking immortality.

Who grants immortality in our society?

How many 35 year olds today, outside of entertainment and professional sports, are more famous than Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It doesn’t matter how hard they worked, or how much they know.  The authors of the report are not morally qualified to express an opinion: they are the wrong caste. 

Can’t wait until the sewer line stops up and they can’t find anybody to unplug it because none of the plumbers have politically correct qualifications.

Joe Doakes

When all signaling is virtue-signaling, then the signal-to-noise ratio is infinitesimal.

Join me from 1-3PM today on the NARN!

Today on the show:

• What do do about Al Feranken – and his supporters.
• Greg Joseph, on the appeals court case against Bloomington’s North Korean trash collection system.

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!

What was it, yesterday?  When I said the whole “Always believe the accuser” thing was going to go by the boards how that Al Franken (aka “The John Oliver of 2005) is in whatever “crosshairs” the media spares for liberal icons?

I’d like to say it was a parody – something too clumsy yet fiendish for The Onion.  It’s not, of course.

And I’d like to say it’s just another Metrocrat crank – but as MSNBC showed us yesterday, it’s not.

So the takeaway is “Slut-Shaming is bad” – unless you’re defending a Democrat.

Anyway – Franken apologized yesterday, in a very well-crafted statement.  But when I read this bit here…:

“But I want to say something else, too. Over the last few months, all of us—including and especially men who respect women—have been forced to take a good, hard look at our own actions and think (perhaps, shamefully, for the first time) about how those actions have affected women.

Did he just name all men as co-defendants?

That’d be quite the trick.

Joe Doakes emails from Como Park:

I had an appointment at Health Partners yesterday.  First question the receptionist asked: “Have you traveled outside the country in the last two weeks?”

Why does it matter if I went anywhere?  I live in Minnesota, home to the largest tuberculosis outbreak in the nation, centered in the Hmong population, and the largest measles outbreak in the nation, centered in the Somali population.  There’s nothing to stop somebody from Madagascar, home to the largest outbreak of antibiotic resistant plague in the world, from coming here and bringing the disease along.

I don’t need to travel outside the country to encounter deadly infectious disease.  I have free delivery, all over town.  And if I don’t like it, the Governor said I can leave.

Joe Doakes

Ayep.

News broke earlier this week that mere Minnesotans without Super Bowl tickets will be barred from the Met Council’s train lines on Super Bowl Sunday:

Metro Transit is the best way to reach downtown Minneapolis with expanded schedules on key routes for local commuters and additional schedules for Super Bowl related events. That includes unlimited fan passes ($40 for unlimited rides on all buses, light rail and North Star from January 26-Feb 4), Gameday Passes ($30 – only those holding a Gameday Pass and an official Super Bowl ticket will be able to ride the light rail on game day) and All-Day Passes ($1-5, varies by time of day and day of the week.)

Right after this, the unions representing Metro Transit staffers voted to strike…curing Super Bowl week.

So – after building a train line ostensibly to get working people to and from work (and not to serve as a monument to the perspicacity of the sitting Met Council, nosirreebob), they’re basically turning the whole shebang over to the high rollers who can get tickets (but presumably can’t afford the much preferable car rentals, cabs, Ubers, or everything else that’s preferable to riding the train if you have any options, which is pretty much everything above “camel caravan”) – just in time for another part of the racket to seize control of the toy for its’ own shakedown.

Clearly they all learned well from Zygi Wilf.