Veni Vidi Vi. Or EMACS If You’re A Wuss.  

July 21st, 2015 by Mitch Berg

Via our old friend King Banaian – old coding languages that refuse to die.

There were some on there I didn’t know.  And I suppose it’s mildly heartening that they didn’t list Smalltalk.

Yet.

Disqualifying

July 21st, 2015 by Mitch Berg

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama wants to ban people who can’t manage their budget from possessing firearms. So we can add every Democrat politician to the list?
Joe Doakes

He might propose disarming Greece, Portugal and Italy…

… but then, soon enough, he’ll have to disarm the United States.

Wait…

Thanks A Billion

July 20th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

To:  Governor Dayton, the Minnesota DFL, and just enough Republicans to make it a community embarassment
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Thanks For Nothing, Idiots

All,

We – those of us on the real right – tried to warn you.  But you were too busy gettign yoru arm twisted by Zigi Wilf, or entertaining sentimental stories about families going to Met Stadium in -25 blizzard conditions, or wiping foam from guys in helga braids off your face, to pay attention.

So pay attention now; you were wrong, and we were right, and the deal you were browbeaten into or were too stupid to know better than to oppose “crafted” to build the new Vikings stadium is one of the worst stadium deals in the US.

However, I’m sure the Downtown Brotherhood has made their thanks known.

On behalf of the rest of us?   Oh, yeah – we don’t count, except if we don’t pay our taxes on time.

That is all.

 

Donalded

July 20th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

SCENE:  Bill GUNKEL, former Republican and now chairman of the Inver Grove Heights chapter of “Former Republicans for Ron Paul”, is driving down a Saint Paul street when he notices Mitch BERG walking his dog.  GUNKEL pulls over and rolls down his window.  

GUNKEL: Hey, Berg!

BERG: (Choking back mild annoyance, ordering the dog to sit) Hey, Bill.

GUNKEL:  Boy, Donald Trump sure showed those squishy RINOs in the GOP presidential field how it’s done!

BERG:  Huh.  How so?

GUNKEL:  He told it like it was!  He said the things that no Republican would dare to say!  He said what needed to be said on immigration!

BERG:  OK.  And that means what?

GUNKEL:  That means he really pissed off the Establishment!

BERG:  Huh.  And that, then, means what?

GUNKEL:  He might be a Republican I could vote for again!

BERG:  Because he “tells it like it is”, and “pisses off the Establishment”?

GUNKEL:  Yep! (grins like a toddler who just made a big pants)

BERG:  Yeah, let me show you something.  (Clears throat, takes deep breath)   “We need to complete the border fence, enforce existing laws on immigration, and crack down on hiring illegal workers.  And Karl Rove is wrong, and the Tea Party is right.  And I think Scarlett Johannson would dig me”.

There.  I just told it like it was on immigration, and pissed off the establishment.

GUNKEL:  (blinks, puzzled)

BERG:  I just did everything Donald Trump did.  I said a couple of things that pander to a voter bloc, but that I’ll never have to try to convince a single legislator to pass, or a single taxpayer to fund.  In other words, I just said stuff.

GUNKEL:  (blinks, puzzled)

BERG:  Talk is cheap.

GUNKEL:  (blinks, puzzled)

BERG:  The only thing I lack is a media to lavishly publicize what I’m saying, by way of trying to discredit the GOP, and especially to draw the conversation away from the likes of people like Scott Walker and Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, who are actually saying things the American people need to hear.

GUNKEL:  (Shakes it off)  You’re a RINO.

BERG:  Clearly.

(And SCENE).

 

Forfeit

July 20th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

The NY Daily News informs us that last week’s shooting in Chattanooga, claiming four Marines and a Navy petty officer, all unarmed – where a person whose motive can’t possibly be determined, but whose actions absolutely do not define his entire race the way Dylan Roof’s defined all white people – has “renewed the debate on gun free zones“.

That’s incorrect, of course.

There is no “debate” about “gun-free zones”.

There is a faction of society that clings to the notion that telling people to be nice will make everyone be nice.

And there’s a faction of society that notes, correctly, that nearly every mass-shooting in recent years – schools, post offices, the Crosswinds Mall in Nebraska, the Fort Hood massacre, the shootings at Virginia Tech, and even the Charleston shooting – either took place in a “gun free” zone, or in a state with restrictive gun laws.

That’s not a debate.

That’s the smart people being nagged by the ignorant.

Fact:  You are at much greater risk in a gun-free zone than elsewhere.

I Heard It On The NARN

July 18th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

Here’s the crowd-funding campaign for the Edina condo-owner who’s being asked to move for displaying the flag.

Way Way Down Inside, You Need NARN

July 18th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today!

Today on the show,

  • I’ll be talking with Represenative Duane Quam. 

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

Join us!

Disproportionate

July 17th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

I never quite understood the hatred for Tim Tebow.

And while I don’t much care one way or the other about gender reassignment surgery – I’m going to plead the classic libertarian “it’s their business, not mine” – I’m not really sure I understand the enraptured love of Caitlin “Chris” Jenner, either.

And I still don’t.

Although if that’s what it took to get away from the Kardashians, I’m certainly not going to second-guess him.

A Small Liberation

July 17th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has smacked down the Gestapo-like no -knock raids  on conservative dissidents:

In a ruling [yesterday] morning, the Wisconsin Supreme Court rendered official what observers have long known: Wisconsin Democrats did, in fact, launch a massive, multi-county “John Doe” investigation of the state’s conservatives, featuring extraordinarily broad subpoenas and coordinated “paramilitary” raids of private homes; the “crimes” that provided the investigation’s pretext were not crimes at all, but First Amendment-protected speech; and the legal theory underpinning the investigation was bunk, “unsupported in either reason or law,” as the court put it.

I can maintain a certain amount of intellectual attachment for most political stories – but the Wisconsin KGB makes me genuinely furious:

The raid victims have suffered severe, long-term consequences as a result of these raids. Almost to a person, they say they no longer feel secure in their own homes. They report watching what they say, terrified that overt political involvement could lead their homes to be invaded again. One victim said, “I tried to create a home where the kids always feel safe. Now they know they’re not. They know men with guns can come in their house, and there’s nothing we can do.” Another victim — whose son was home alone when police arrived, guns drawn — is haunted by this chilling thought: “He could have been in the shower. They could have broken the door down. He could have been shot. Over politics.”

The prosecutors involved need to be removed from public life.  I almost tried to type “public service”, but my fingers stopped and started smoking.   In a just world, they’d be perp-walked out of their homes in their underwear in front of the mocking and jeering of their former victims.

A free society can only remain free while the majority are pulling in the same direction – toward freedom.  Laws are, tautologically, needed for “the rule of law”.  Laws – especially excessive laws, which covers most “campaign finance” laws – are also the footholds by which the unscrupulous eat others’ freedoms.

Residual Force

July 17th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

Former mayor of the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers Andy Aplikowski is throwing his hat in the ring for a lateral transfer, declaring his candidacy for the Minnesota State Senate in SD 35.  He’s running to replace retiring Senator Branden Peterson.  

He’ll probably have an easier race in reliably read SD 35, in the far north suburbs of the Twin Cities, THAN he did winning the famously fickle MOB race..  He’ll definitely have an easier time representing that district than he did the MOB.  

Good luck, Andy. Have your people call my people..

Perturbation

July 17th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Having trouble understanding the moral code of people who see killing babies as less offensive than disturbing a corpse. 

Yeah, I got nothing either.

Gun Free Zones: Four More Dead

July 16th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

A man motivated, I’m sure we will be assured, in no way, no how by Muslim extremism, has left US Marines dead in… wait for it… Wait for it
… in a gun free zone.

Not that it matters, of course, because as we found in the Fort Hood massacre,  even major post, much less recruiting stations, are gun free anyway.

Trinity

July 16th, 2015 by First Ringer

The shelters were scattered across the cool New Mexican desert, one in each direction, 5 miles away from the target – a simple wooden 100-foot tower, looking much like an oil derrick.  Yet for most of the observers, the VIP shelter 20 miles away seemed the safer bet.

The mood was tense.  The gathered collection of scientists and soldiers tried breaking the tension with betting pools on the power of the explosion they were about to witness.  J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the program, was on the low end of most of the predictions – only 30 tons of explosive power.  More confident scientists guessed the explosion would be 1,400 or 3,000 tons.  One pessimist wagered zero.

At 5:29am on the morning of July 16th, 1945, the “Gadget”, as it had come to be known, was triggered.  The surrounding mountains were said to have been lit up as though it was the middle of the day.  The shockwave could be felt 100 miles away.  A mushroom cloud 7.5 miles high was all that was left at the center of the detonation.  The explosion had the effect of 200 kilotons or 20,000 tons of TNT.

Operation Trinity – the testing of the first atomic bomb – had been a success.

—

The Los Alamos headquarters for the Manhattan Project.  An inauspicious backdrop to the most destructive weapon in human history

The path to Trinity had been an arduous one.  Six years, 130,000 workers, $2 billion worth of expenses (the equivalent of over $25 billion today), espionage and dissent all hallmarked the journey to the design, development and eventual use of the atom bomb.  It was a journey started in August of 1939 with nothing more than a letter.    Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Only A Conundrum If You Have A Soul

July 16th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

So let me understand: it’s noble to kill babies but wicked to sell their corpses?  Nope, still not getting it.

Better still:  infanticide enthusiasts labor under the delusion that “it’s not human until it’s born”; the infantile rationalization that a “fetus” delivered two weeks early at 38 weeks is human, while another one that’s gestated for 38 weeks that hasn’t yet been delivered isn’t human at all.

But apparently the spare parts they strip out of the ripped-apart corpses are human enough to use on other humans.

So, logically, the pre-natal child isn’t human, but their parts are?

Transit Is Painless

July 16th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is mowing his lawn.  Avery LIBRELLE, fresh from a trip on the Green Line ,ambles up the sidewalk.  

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!  Societies that impose punitive taxes on cars, like Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, all have higher qualities of life than the US does!

BERG:  OK.  So?

LIBRELLE:  So we could do with fewer cars!

BERG:  Correlation does not equal causation.

LIBRELLE:  What are you talking about?

BERG:  All three of those countries have higher suicide rates than the United States.  Clearly high taxes and lack of cars make people want to kill themselves.

LIBRELLE:  Why do you hate science?

And SCENE

They Warned Us…

July 15th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

…that if we voted Republican in 2014, greedy bloodthirsty soulless profiteers would enrich themselves and their organizations by selling children’s body parts.

And they were…

…well, no.  There’s nothing ironically funny, here.  Planned Parenthood is, in fact, harvesting body parts from pre-natal children killed in late-term abortions, and selling them for, er, non-profit:

This is a bombshell – but I’m under no illusions that Big Left, and their minions in Big Media, will allow this story to get to a wider audience (and when they do, they’ll blame Republicans, somehow).

Planned Parenthood responds:

Planned Parenthood, which in addition to abortions provides healthcare and information regarding birth control and other reproductive issues, explained in its statement, “Patients sometimes want to donate tissue to scientific research that can help lead to medical breakthroughs, such as treatments and cures for serious diseases.

“At several of our health centers, we help patients who want to donate tissue for scientific research, and we do this just like every other high-quality health care provider does — with full, appropriate consent from patients and under the highest ethical and legal standards.

“There is no financial benefit for tissue donation for either the patient or for Planned Parenthood.”

Let’s forget for a moment that we’re talking about “tissue” from pre-natal children aborted at around 24 weeks’ gestation – inside the envelope where 25% of children, if delivered alive, can survive and live normal lives.

If there’s “no financial benefit”, then why aren’t the “tissues” donated?   What’s with the price list that Doctor Spumoni rattles off?

We’re supposed to think that Planned Parenthood’s activities, and “after-market parts” service, is intended to save lives.

We can do that; we can also acknowledge that some of the Nazi’s medical “research” at concentration and extermination camps was intended to save lives, too.

Of course, if you are a functioning human being, you can not “forget for a moment that we’re talking about tissue from pre-natal children aborted at 24 weeks”.

You’re Crazy To Dissent!

July 15th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

In the 1970s – during Leonid Brezhnev’s kinder, gentler version of the Soviet Union – the gulags of the Lenin and Stalin regimes were largely replaced by “psychiatric hospitals”.

Since disssent from government was considered a mental illness in the Soviet Union, naturally, dissidents needed “treatment”.

Author Dinesh D’Souza – one of the Obama administration’s most prolific and articulate dissidents – got caught up a few years ago in one of the web of speech rationing laws. These laws – commonly referred to as “campaign-finance laws” – are intended to, and eventually will, make all political speech and activity, including (I predict) this blog, potentially prosecutable.

Judges and bureaucrats referring to speech as “illegal” is nothing new; it’s the battle freedom will always have to fight.

But using the psychiatric profession to beat down dissent?  It’s baaaack; D’Souza’s judge has ordered him, for a third time, to seek psychiatric treatment:

D’Souza’s defense counsel Benjamin Brafman provided evidence to the court that the psychiatrist D’Souza was ordered to see found no indication of depression or reason for medication. In addition, the psychologist D’Souza subsequently consulted provided a written statement concluding there was no need to continue the consultation, because D’Souza was psychologically normal and well adjusted.
But Judge Berman, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, disagreed, effectively overruling the judgment of the two licensed psychological counselors the U.S. probation department had approved as part of D’Souza’s criminal sentence.
“I only insisted on psychological counseling as part of Mr. D’Souza’s sentence because I wanted to be helpful,” the judge explained. “I am requiring Mr. D’Souza to see a new psychological counselor and to continue the weekly psychological consultation not as part of his punishment or to be retributive.

Point of basic logic to Judge Berman:  if you’re “requiring” the treatment, you’re not doing it to be helpful.

Not Stirred

July 15th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

Joe Doakes feom Como Park emails:

Man visits flea market, sees Confederate materials for sale, calls 911. He was shaking and almost vomiting, he was so upset because an ancestor suffered under a foreign government. 
 
Give him a ticket. Misuse of police emergency resources is a serious matter.
And give his house back to the tribe it was stolen from.
Joe Doakes

Up next: the Irish sue the Norwegians and Danes.

Privilege

July 14th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

Earlier this week, while listening to Jack and Andrew on the lesser talk station, I caught them running through this piece about 38 examples of liberal privelege on college campuses. 

The piece is very much worth a read.

Of course, if you live in a place like the Twin Cities, you realize there’d be room for a similar piece for adults in places where Jon Stewart is considered news and where chanting “settled science!” is considered an argument-ender.

I’m going to take quick shot at it, off the top of my head:  if you’re an adult in a “progressive” city…:

  1. You’ve never had to learn to confront dissent as anything other than either a mortal threat to your worldview, or a joke to be scuttled away from, using ad homina if necessary.
  2. You’ve never had to learn to debate at a level beyond strawmen, red herrings, and chuckling “facts have a liberal bias” as if the saying were handed down by the ancients, rather than by a mediocre comic who made a living satirizing conservatives.
  3. After 12 years of indoctrination in the public schools, and often as not 4-8 years at an institution where dissent is treated as a pathology, you are utterly secure in your faith that your club is the sole source of truth.

35 more to go!

The Moral Of The Story

July 14th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

“Agreement and the acquiescence isn’t enough. You must agree, and acquiesce, for the right reason, and with sufficient fervor .”

Political Philosophy 

July 14th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

“Government should be safe, legal, and rare”

– Madagascar Red

Shell Shock

July 14th, 2015 by First Ringer

In September of 1914, at the very outset of the Great War, a dreadful rumor arose. It was said that at the Battle of the Marne, east of Paris, soldiers on the front line had been discovered standing at their posts in all the dutiful military postures – but not alive. “Every normal attitude of life was imitated by these dead men,” according to the patriotic serial The Times History of the War, published in 1916. “The illusion was so complete that often the living would speak to the dead before they realized the true state of affairs.”

It was blamed on asphyxia, the result of such powerful new high-explosive shells fired at massive intervals – 432,000 shells had been fired in 5 days at the Marne.  That such an outlandish story could gain credence was not surprising: notwithstanding the massive cannon fire of previous ages, and even automatic weaponry unveiled in the American Civil War, nothing like this thunderous new artillery firepower had been seen before.  The rumor emanating from the Marne reflected the instinctive dread aroused by such monstrous innovation.

Only the “frozen” men at the Marne were not actually dead.  Rather, what the survivors of the first days of the Great War were experiencing and witnessing was an issue that would dominate every major army for the next four years – shell shock.

—

Duck & Cover – the scale of warfare experienced by the men in the trenches was unlike anything any army had encountered before.  No army was prepared for how a largely conscripted, civilian-based military would react

“Shell shock,” the term that would come to define the phenomenon, first appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet in February 1915, only six months after the commencement of the war. In a landmark article, Capt. Charles Myers of the Royal Army Medical Corps noted “the remarkably close similarity” of symptoms in soldiers who had been exposed to exploding shells.  The first cases Myers described exhibited a range of perceptual abnormalities, such as loss of or impaired hearing, sight and sensation, along with other common physical symptoms, such as tremor, loss of balance, headache and fatigue.    Read the rest of this entry »

By. By.  By. By. By. 

July 14th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

For the love of all that is holy, people – stop saying  “on accident”.

It is “by accident”.

“On accident” makes, grammatically and etymologically, no sense.

Anyone who says “on accident” in my presence again will be maced. And not a jury in the world will convict me – provided the jury is all literate people.

Some risks are worth taking.

They Warned Me…

July 14th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

…that if I voted for Mitt Romney, it would lead to the development of an expensive, coercive surveillance state.

And they were right!

All In

July 13th, 2015 by Mitch Berg

At long last, Scott Walker is officially in the race.

I’ve departed from my traditional neutrality in presidential endorsement battles -certainly battles that take place over a year before the convention – and have been supporting  Walker for quite some time.  There are other good options in the race; I like Bobby Jindal a lot, John Kasich would be an excellent choice (who’ll never happen), and for that matter Jeb Bush, for all his faults, would be a vastly better President than any Democrat option (and more acceptable to a conservative; let’s remember that he governed generally well to the right of his brother).   And I’ve got nothing against Marco Rubio or Rand Paul – other than both of them being first-term Senators.  Either would be better Presidents than our current former one-term Senator – but why settle?

I’ve seen some criticism of Walker as being not conservative enough in some areas.  I’ve notice that some of them are areas where conservatives criticized Ronald Reagan, too. t

Walker’s not perfect – no candidate is, and the ones that try to portray themselves as ideologically perfect (I’m looking at  you, Ron Paul) are generally at the head of ideological personality cults (I’m looking at you, Ron Paul fans).

Some say Walker hasn’t had the best month, and that he’ll need to win Iowa outright to have a shot at the nomination.

And never have I been so tempted to go hang out in Iowa for a while…

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