When I read the headline on this piece (“We Should Ban Cars From Big Cities. Seriously.”), the first thing that crossed my mind was “Oh, this could be a fiendishly brilliant parody of gun-grabber “arguments”.

Then I saw the masthead; BuzzFeed.  Which means nothing clever, fiendish or otherwise.

A gun lobbyist would typically step in right about now to ask whether those who demand gun control after mass shootings also want to ban cars after events like this week. To which I say: Hell yes. Cars don’t belong on the streets of big cities, and we should do everything in our power to get rid of them.

You can’t stop crazy. But you can reduce the number of people allowed to drive their 4,000 pound machines into city parks, along city beaches, past playgrounds, and alongside the sidewalks of the most pedestrian-packed places in the nation. If we banned cars from every city in the US tomorrow, we would stop vehicular terrorism overnight — and save thousands of lives.

The “writer” – Jessie Singer – fancies himself a transportation expert.  Clearly he’s not an expert in logistics; that Ethiopian coffee doesn’t arrive at his New York cafe on the backs of unicorns.  They arrive in commercial trucks.  And they likely will for a long, long time.

The trucks in New York and Nice, France were…what now?  A rental from a Home Depot or a Lowe’s ($19.95 an hour) in NYC; a regular delivery truck in Nice.

With experts like this, it’s hard to believe the left needs ignorant people.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Former professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point writes about the failure of leadership at the academy.

But enough hammering on the Army.  Let’s talk about the Navy, with two collisions this year, what’s happening to its leadership?

Makes one wonder: do we need a professional officer corps?  Would senior non-coms be enough to teach new recruits the basics, leaving strategy and tactics to a small group of experts?  Do we need military officers worrying about diversity and career opportunities for women – aren’t there enough people in academia, the media and politics doing that already?

Joe Doakes

It’s not an academic question.

A longtime friend of this blog writes:

Every election, I hear people complaining that voting is on a Tuesday, that it should be on a weekend, that it should be a holiday. Of course, the people complaining also seem like the people who do find a way to get to the polls. And I always laugh at such a blatant example of how out of touch people like that really are.

For one, who is it that they believe can’t make it to the polls? I am guessing they envision people with minimum wage jobs who are afraid to speak up and actually take time to vote as is allowed by law, providing they are actually at work during voting hours.

But, how many of these minimum wage workers are also working on weekends, on holidays. Why is it that people think voting turn out would be any different? And we do have absentee voting as well as early voting now. Again, who is it that is not voting that would magically appear if voting day was a holiday or on a Saturday? Maybe the people who are not voting already understand that most of what happens in government screws them, insults them and says it’s for their own good. Why bother voting for that?

And on that note, happy voting day. I do know who I am voting for. But, I’m curious where to rank Nosemarie, Clu, and Puff this year for St Paul mayor?

I’ll be putting Clu at the top of my ballot.    Nose and Puff have both left is in the past 18 months, so they are no probably registered as DFL voters.

One of the few bits of “good” news from the Sutherland Springs mcaassacre is that it was ended by a Good Guy with a Gun.

Details are coming out now – Stephen Willeford responded to the shooting with his AR15, fired a shot that apparently found a gap in Kelley’s body army, and seized the initiative:

Willeford is being hailed as a hero. His actions may well have stopped further bloodshed. Willeford is not a member of the church where the shooting took place, but he his daughter called him and told him there was a man in body armor shooting up the church

Willeford grabbed a rifle and answered the call. He found Kelley (above) outside of the church and shot him. The surprise caused Kelley to drop his rifle, and the shooter then ran to his own SUV and fled the scene.
Johnnie Langendorff was also responding. Langendorff picked up Willeford and the two gave chase. They followed Kelley in a high speed chase and eventually caused Kelley to lose control and run off the road. There, police say Kelley shot himself in the head.

This is, of course, exactly what law enforcement now knows about spree killers; resist them with lethal force, and they usually run, give up, kill themselves, or – as in this case – all three.

Just as we said.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Canada doesn’t want refugees who pass through the United States.

Haters.  Next thing, they’ll have their military putting up concentration camps on the border.

Joe Doakes

You never know.

First things first:  Berg’s 18th Law is still in full effect;  it’s been mere hours since a man murdered 27 people at Sutherland Springs Baptist Church, near San Antonio; anything you read in the media will be crap.

One thing we do know?  Churches in Texas are “gun free zones”.  Nobody in that church was legally authorized to carry a firearm to defend themselves or their fellow parishioners.

Like nearly all mass shootings, it took place in a “gun free zone”.

Just like David Lillehaug and Nancy Nord Bence like it.

You post your property “no guns allowed?”  I’m not going there.  I’m not spending money, I’m not worshipping, I’m not saying “boo”.  I will consider them a threat to my safety.

No exceptions.

But Wait:  What’s this that the mainstream media is pretty roundly ignoring about the attack?  The shooter was himself shot by…

…an armed citizen:

Stephen Willeford managed to shoot Devin Kelley before jumping in another man’s truck and chasing him down, the Daily Mail reported.

Texas Department of Public Safety chief Freeman Martin said Willeford “grabbed his rifle and engaged the suspect” after Kelley left the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, where he opened fire with an assault rifle and killed 26 people.

And just as law enforcement teaches about mass shootings these days – if you show a mass shooter any resistance, they usually break off the attack, and either give up or kill themselves.

Kelley did both:

The man who killed at least 26 people in a Baptist church in a rural Texas town on Sunday died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt told CBS News in an interview on Monday morning.

Tackitt said gunfire was exchanged between the gunman and two armed citizens during a vehicle chase after the shootings.

The church was a gun-free zone – naturally.   But the rest of Texas was not.

UPDATE 2:  The USAF apparently neglected to report Kelley’s domestic conviction to the NICS – allowing him to buy the guns he used.

MInneapolis’ DFL is eating itself:

While this blog has endorsed Nekima Levy-Pounds, a Ray Dehn victory would serve about the same purpose.

Saint Paul reaches an “agreement” on Cuban North Korean Sopranos-style trash collection.

After 14 months of negotiations, seven contract proposals and 10 drafts, St. Paul officials say they have reached an agreement for coordinated collection with the city’s 15 private waste haulers. The city council will vote on the contract next Wednesday and set rates the following week.

“This contract allows us to provide residents with efficient and equitable service at reasonable and uniform rates,”

The “Reasonable and uniform rate” is, naturally, about $5 a month higher than I’ve been paying for the past five years.

Which will, of course, help pay the salary of at least another DFL-union-dues-paying city employee.

Mayor Chris Coleman said in a written statement. “It also ensures that all current haulers will maintain their market share, which was one of my top priorities. It is the right direction for garbage collection in Saint Paul.”

Bobby Stewart, head of operations with Highland Sanitation, said while he and other haulers had been opposed to coordinated collection, “it is a plan that we can live with and shouldn’t endanger our ability to survive as a business.”

City officials say the proposal incorporates most — though not all — of their 17 goals, from implementing predictable rates and services to reducing the number of trucks on city streets.

Crime is rising.  The city’s tax and employment bases are shrinking.  The achievement gap is among the worst in the nation; the public schools are collapsing.

But hey, we’ve got “coordinated” trash collection.

Saint Paul city government; stupid and worthless.

Larry Frost is running for Bloomington City Council.  Found out more here.

Here’s the details on my band’s upcoming gigs:

• “Elephant in the Room” on Saturday, November 11 at the Sundance in Maple Grove
• “The Supreme Soviet of Love” at O’Gara’s in Saint Paul.

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

Today on the show:

• Larry Frost, Bloomington City Council candidate
• My endorsement for Minneapolis Mayor
• The Twin Cities Left:  you ain’t seen nothing yet. .

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!

Latina singer, in the habit of telling whitey to move to the back of the hall and “brown” people to come to the front at her concerts, finds some that…well, don’t:

As she has done before, last month, Lido Pimienta, a Colombian-Canadian singer, asked audience members of color to move to the front and white members to move to the back. Unlike other times she has made that request, some white members refused to act in accordance with her request, including a white female volunteer who was reportedly there to photograph the show.

By the way – according to the media, it’s not “people sick of stifling political correctness acting out on it”.

On, no.

Inevitably, it’s…

Although Billboard could offer no details regarding the alleged racism, festival officials claimed the photographer and several white members of the audience reacted with “aggressive” and “overt racism” after Pimineta requested “brown girls to the front.”

According to the National Post, Allie O’Manique, who shares management with Pimienta, said the female photographer would not budge from her position near the stage, prompting anger from some crowd members. O’Manique, whose version of events was confirmed by Festival spokesman Trevor Murphy, said that Pimienta “just kept saying, ‘Move to the back’ … finally after saying it about 10 times — and the woman refused to move — [Pimienta] said, ‘You’re cutting into my set time, and you’re disrespecting these women, and I don’t have time for this.”

So responding to racism is “racist”, now?

Hunch:  You’re going to see a lot more of this.

(And call me a “language-ist”, but using “disrespect” as a verb gets you pelted with rhetorical rocks and garbage in my world).

Donna Brazile blows up Hillary Clinton.

Too much stuff to pullquote.  How much of it is sour grapes?  How much is stage-setting for the next part of Brazile’s career (my guess – lots).

Read the whole thing.  .Discuss.

It’s almost too obvious to be a Berg’s Law; when facts don’t favor the Dems’ argument (and they rarely do), and they know their audience isn’t informed or curious enough to check them on it (and they never are), and the media won’t trip them up (and they never do), then lying is just fine.

But it‘s a near thing.  It really is. According to those noted conservative tools at the WaPo.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Rules of telephone courtesy for people who want my help:

Do not leave me a voice mail, throw the handset back on the cradle and dash out of your office. When I call you back 30 seconds later, I don’t want to hear that you’ve just stepped out.  You’ve wasted my time responding to a call that you’re not available to take.  Wait a decent interval – five minutes or so – in case I reply immediately.  Yes, that means thinking ahead a bit: do not leave voice mails while you’re holding your pants to avoid wetting them; go to the can now and call me when you’re done.

Do not call me on the cell phone with your window down, the radio up, right before the tunnel, or when you’re on gravel roads at your lake place where the signal is iffy.  Inaudible and dropped calls waste my time.

Do not call me to discuss a file without having the file number in front of you.  When I have to wait on hold while you paw through the mess on your desk looking for basic information, it wastes my time.  And no, I won’t answer “just a general question” because I’ve been down that road before so I know the facts you recite are never what the facts turn out to be, but you’ll still blame me when general advice doesn’t solve your specific problem.

Do not leave a long message rambling on until you panic that your time is running out, then rattle off your number so fast I can’t make out the words.

When I call you back, do not answer the phone using the speaker phone setting.  Yes, it’s easier for you to shout while you lean back in the chair instead of hanging onto the handset and talking into the mouthpiece, but it’s harder for me to make out your words with the cacophony of paper rustling and chair squeaking and echo distortion.

I’m sure there are more of them, but those are the ones that have come up this morning.  So far.

Joe Doakes

Don’t talk with your mouth full.   Ever.

From social media yesterday:

Hey – anyone remember hearing about the Vegas shooter?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Do these numbers matter?  If not, why bother keeping track of them?

Treasury Department says that for the month of September (one month only) Social Security and other payroll taxes took in $96 billion, but Social Security and Medicare cost $158 billion, about three times as much as we spent on the entire Defense budget.  Are we buying so many beans that we can’t afford bullets?

For fiscal year 2017, we ended up being short $666 billion.  That’s not the total amount of debt owed, nor the total amount of future spending promised, it’s the amount we overdrew the checkbook at the end of the fiscal year.  We borrowed money to make the books balance.  Our loan balance is now $20,000,000,000,000.00.  It goes up a million dollars a minute.

Let’s be serious: it’s simply not mathematically possible to pay America’s debts in any reasonable amount of time while maintaining any reasonable level of taxation and therefore we can safely conclude they will never be paid.  One of two things will happen:  we’ll default and cause a world economic crisis; or we’ll convert to electronic money not backed by any tangible asset so the computers can continue to transfer electrons as if they were money and nobody will care that the entire thing is a polite fiction.

Maybe in the future we’ll run things as they did on Star Trek – money simply appears, just like your lunch shows up in the replicator machine or the red-shirted guy beams up from the planet.  Magic.

Joe Doakes

Our federal government makes me feel like a redshirt all.  The.  Time.

It’s been 77 years since Germany invaded Norway.

History writ large records that the Norwegian capitol, Oslo, fell in hours.

It takes a deeper reading to know that Norway – with a lot of help from troops from Britain, the UK, and the Polish army in exile – gave the Germans not a few bloody noses, small and large, covert and open.

And one of the greatest chapters in Norway’s formal resistance, the Norwegian 6th Division’s battle to recapture the port of Narvik, in the far north, spearheaded by a unit called the ” Ålta Battalion”.

A militia unit based in the town of Ålta, in the far, far north of Norway,  Rural men who’d had to report for duty by reindeer sled and ski, they were first called up in the winter of 1939 to guard the Norwegian/Finnish border during the Winter War.   Witnessing the brutality of the war in Finland from across the border, the men from Ålta went home with a pretty sure sense of what was coming.

They were called up again just a few months later, when Germany invaded.  They were transferred from Alta – a town of 20,000, near the northern tip of Norway –  to Narvik – a small port city high above the arctic circle.   So backward was this part of Norway, just 77 years ago that they reported for service by reindeer sled and boat, not much different than 130 years earlier.   They were carried via steam ferry to Narvik – another small port town, rendered strategic by the fact that Swedish iron ore, vital to the German war effort, was carried there by rail, and then shipped to Germany; the little city was one of the most strategic spots in Europe, for a few weeks in April, 1940; it’s only a matter of dumb timing that Churchill didn’t invade Norway before HItler did; his plan to seize Narvik to interdict Germany’s iron supply was already in motion when Germany invaded.

Geographic and economic strategy didn’t matter that much to the guys in the Alta Battalion

And there – outnumbered, outgunned (they had only rifles and a few machine guns and mortars, and no air support to speak of), they did the unthinkable; they moved through the snow into the hills above Narvik, and they pushed the Germans back.  The Alta Battalion, along with the Norwegian Sixth Division (along with the destruction of a GErman fleet in Narvik Fjord by the British Royal Navy), had the Germans on the ropes; General Dietl, the Germans’ commander, estimated that his troops could have held on another day, maybe two, had the attack continued; they’d have had to surrender, or pack it in for Sweden.

But that didn’t happen; France fell, and the French, British and Polish troops pulled out and went back to the UK to face an expected invasion.  The Alta battalion turned in its guns and went home (many of them to carry on the fight in the resistance, in Sweden, or in the Free Norwegian forces overseas.

Ingvald Heitmann, the last surviving member of the Alta Battalion.

I bring this up to note, purely in passing, that Ingvald Heitmann, age 100 and the last surviving member of the Alta Battalion passed away last week at the age of 100. (The article is in Norwegian, but I think I got it right).

Everyone else’s greatest generation is passing from the scene, too.

Joe Doakes from Como  Park emails:

If a conventional war breaks out, there won’t be enough targets in North Korea to go around.  The admirals know that but they sent a third carrier group anyway; therefore, the targets we are threatening are not in North Korea.

This move must be intended to send a signal to some other nearby nation.  Let’s think – who needs a reminder that war in Korea could boil over with disastrous consequences?  Who needs an incentive to step on a bug?

Joe Doakes

Most everyone?

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…

Read the rest of this entry »

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.