Growing up working in radio, I learned an interesting bit of applied psychology from my various program directors: people tend to become emotionally attached to music they hear from puberty until their brain stops growing, around age 25.

It’s not so much that music attaches itself to important events in your life, as the music and the events happen at a time when your brain is filling in a lot of important space with events that matter to you – and, given its evocative intensity, the music that’s going on at the time.

If I ever got to be a phenomenally wealthy mad scientist, ,one of my experiments would be to pay a family to raise their children around nothing but some absurd, archaic genre of music – say, John Philip Sousa marches – through their twenties, and measure to see how many events, first dances and first crushes and first kisses, they associated with marching music.

Anyway, about this time in 1985, my brain was getting stuffed with the consequences of my following up on my drunken promise to move to the Twin Cities that I’d made about a week earlier at a college homecoming dance. And for the next two weeks as I tried to fill in the many blanks of my half-baked “plan”, my still-growing brain drank in the music that was going on around me, on the radio, on my boom box, and (when I got to the Cities) on MTV, which I finally got to watch.

And to this day, I hear one of those songs, it brings it all back. I hear one of the songs burned into my cortext from that era on an overhead or the radio or at a bar, and I still smell the must of autumn building, of the harvest coming in as I worked my roofing and siding job, the feel of the wind as I drove my barely-roadworthy car to MInneapolis, the “exhilaration” of my first rush hour on my way to an interview.

The smell of fear, the feel of the tingle of hope, and the shiver of taking a huge leap.

I’ve had a theory that the period from 1977 to about 1986 was one of the best periods of all time for popular music.

It might be because it was a fact. Or it might be because it’s associated with that most searingly immediate period in life, adolescence through leaping out into the world.

Why choose?

At the risk of indulging in nostalgia, I’m going to indulge in some of the rewards of nostalgia.

Mike Casey is running for the GOP nomination in CD4.

Jim Schulz, former MN Attorney General candidate, is with the Minnesota Private Business Council.

And here’s today’s music list:

As we noted the other day, Target is closing nine stores in four, blue, cities.

The news brought out a flood of expert social media opinion from people who have never worked in the productive private sector. “Target is just using teh crime to cover up teh realz reazons they’re closing” was the big line around mid-week.

Including this, from our long time acquaintance, Molly Priesmeyer.

You may remember Molly – and “award winning journalist“ who is never let the fact she doesn’t know anything about a subject stop her from writing about it.

She turns her keen-eyed expertise to the world of business:

Let’s be frank – many things can be true simultaneously.

Business ain’t easy. Balancing supply, demand and asking price isn’t for the faint of heart, and that’s before you get into taxes, regulations, and externalities like regular “shrinkage”.

WIth all that, though, Target’s been in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and even NYC for literally decades, through good times and bad, ups and downs in markets, the works.

And the closures aren’t spread across the entire market.

As far as Target’s security? Not sure if they’re better than the FBI – but let’s say they perfected teh art of store security. That means they catch thieves, grifters, swindlers and other ne’er do wells.

And then…

Well, Target may do a lot of things, but rthey don’t run any county attorney’s offfices. Or any city councils, especially the ones making laws like shoplifting less than $900 doesn’t even warrant a charge, much less a sentence.

Target’s big, but not that big.

Perhaps “award winning journalist” Priesjeyer has some insight on the facts that aren’t apparent from, well, the facts. I’m all ears.

Governor Klink apparently came to love the way he got to govern while he had “emergency powers” [1]:

Of course, none of it is “done”.

It’s mandated. It’s on paper.

Businesses have scarcely started paying for “Paid Leave”, or absorbing the impact of the unfunded mandate.

“Affordable Housing” is exquisitely unaffordable.

Public transportation? They’re throwing around plans for trains. That’s about it.

It’s the sort of performative posturing that we’d call “virtue signaling” if it were talking about social hot buttons.

Since it’s about spending and building, we’ll need a new term.

Bureauvirtue signalling?

[1] Or at least the twerp who handles his social media.

,,,that Minnesota can’t win championships?

Governor Klink, and Co-Governor Flanagan have been yapping nonstop about their “free lunch and breakfast for kids“ program.

So I was amazed to see this:

If kids are getting 10 of the weeks 21 meals at school, how are they going hungry?

Or is the school feeding program financed by the feds through the back door?

Over the past couple of days, it seems every vapid progressive mouthpiece has adopted the term “boy math”.

In context, I guess it means “math I disagree with, but can’t say why, so I’m going to insult it”.

Case in point:

Progressive girl math is dumping trillions of dollars into an economy, and expecting prices not to rise, and then saying increasing the minimum wage and raising taxes is the answer.

Alternate definition of “boy math”, apparently. math done with reason and accountability?

Citing the rise in meth-related crimes and low revenue, Target is closing nine stores in Nebraska, Kentucky and Montana.

Just kidding. They’re in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and New York City:

Target is closing nine stores in major cities across four states, claiming theft and organized retail crime have made the environment unsafe for staff and customers – and unsustainable for business.

The big box chain is part of a wave of retailers – both large and small – that say they’re struggling to contain store crimes that have hurt their bottom lines. Many have closed stores or made changes to merchandise and layouts.

Of course, the hecklers are out in force; “crime can’t possibly be that bad…”.

It’s not clear that crime is growing significantly more serious. But as economic fears grow amid inflation and rising borrowing costs, shoplifting often comes with the territory, industry watchers say.

Somehow I suspect that’s not the reason these small businesses in Oakland were bucking the narrative:

Target was not the only retailer to raise concerns about retail crime today. Approximately two hundred Oakland business owners closed up shop for a couple hours Tuesday morning and held a demonstration to bring attention to crime plaguing the area.

Target was not the only retailer to raise concerns about retail crime today. Approximately two hundred Oakland business owners closed up shop for a couple hours Tuesday morning and held a demonstration to bring attention to crime plaguing the area.

If there were just some sort of connecting thread…

Representative Kelly Moller, partaking in what’s become a pattern among DFLers, wrote this about the DFL’s apprroach to “Public Safety”:

Let’s translate this to English.

“We made losing one’s transfer paperwork an imprisonable crime, and made it legal for stalkers in areas with DFL-friendly cops or prosecutors to SWAT their victims with impunity, while doing nothing about the fact that people who commit armed robbery with illegal “assault weapons” are getting probation. In short, we signaled our “progressive” virtue. Nothing more”.

Translating DFL to human. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.

SCENE: A coffee shop in Roseville, MInnesota. Avery LIBRELLE, Cat SCAT and Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK are drinking kombucha and checking their phones. Mitch BERG walks in.

SCAT: Merg!

BERG (not happy to run into the three of them) Oh, hey…

BIRKENSTOCK: Shut up. There’s an anti-semitic Nazi running for school board in Roseville!

BERG: Huh. Do tell.

LIBRELLE: Look here ZOMG!

BERG: Did you actually just say “Zee Oh Em Gee?”

BIRKENSTOCK: Shut up. Read this.

BIRKENSTOCK: We need to spread the word!

SCAT: We need to light up social media and GET THE WORD OUT!

BERG: Uh…

LIBRELLE: WE NEED TO MAKE SURE THE WHOLE WORLD KNOWS THERE”S AN ANTI-SEMITE RUNNING FOR SCHOOL BOARD!

BERG: Look, I may be more nauseated by this guy than any of you, but let’s be honest – the guy was going to get five votes in the election. He was the farthest fringe of the fringe of the fringe.

LIBRELLE: I’m going to talk about him on my cable access show?

BIRKENSTOCK: :Your what?

SCAT: Definitely going on. my podcast.

BIRKENSTOCK: I’m putting him on blast on instagram and TikTok

BERG: Right. So, I’m just wondering if this blitz of revulsion will give him order of magnitude more public profile than he’d have had as a fringe nutcase?

SCAT: We’re being mansplained

BERG: Yeah, that’s it.

BIRKENSTOCK: You must be a sympathizer!

BERG: Er, my grandparents generation spent the best years of their lives killing people like him.

BIRKENSTOCK: When?

BERG: Er…during World War 2.

BIRKENSTOCK: During what?

BERG: Exactly.

LIBRELLE: We have to get the word out! Now!

BERG: Yeah. That’s a great idea.

BERG Slowly backs out of the shop.

And SCENE

Guy who robbed people at the MOA with an illegally-obtained AR15 last year gets…

…three months probation.

Remember this the next time some DFLer yaps about “Gun Safety”. Someone who loses their transfer paperwork for the “universal background check” will get more time than this creep.

One of the reasons given is the lack of space in Minnesota prisons.

Which the Legislature will not fix by building or adding onto an existing prison, because restorative justice.

Which means violent criminals are getting off with three years probation for…

…well, you see where this is going, right?

Ever wonder why people on the left are so fond, over the past decade, of referring to people who disagree with them as “Fascists”?

Well, of course, it’s because of all the Republican governors who use their power to bulldoze constitutional checks and balances – in the case of this conservative governor, deciding she doesn’t really need the legislature to create or repeal laws, and waterboarding the definition of “public health crisis” into compliance to do it?

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence.

Or maybe it’s this “new right” prime minister, telling the world we need to destroy free speech to save it:

Because we’re “at war”.

Conservative love to turn social disagreements into “wars” to justify their overreach. It of course peaked when the conservative MAGA president gave a speech during which he “othered” half of the nation, in a speech redolent with martial natinalistic imagery…

… that fairly shouted “the time is nigh to do something about it”, part of a campaign of “othering” dissent that started in 2009.

Or maybe it’s the fact that a majority of Republicans favor curbing free speech “for the greater good”

On the issue of free expression, at least, Republicans are not the authoritarian party. That distinction belongs to the Democrats, the party launched by Thomas Jefferson — the Founding Father who famously said that if he were forced to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Wait.- wut?

Why, it’s almost as if Berg’s Seventh Law is inviolable and absolute or something.

Why is Target having trouble?

“They’ve had trouble keeping their shelves stocked for years, now”.

But their stock boomed, especially during the pandemic (thanks, all you governors that strangled the competition).

No – there’s just something about May 2023.

What. Could. It. Be?

Here’s the link to the Minneapolis GOP City Committee fundraiser, which Elephant in the Room will be at next Saturday.

SCENE: Mitcn BERG walks into Wendy’s for one of their Caesar Salads – a low-carb treat if there ever was one.

BERG sees Avery LIBRELLE, standing at the counter, talking with an exasperated but polite looking COUNTER PERSON. BERG tiptoes up behind LIBRELLE.

BERG: Hey, Avery.

LIBRELLE: Uh…Merg…

BERG: The DFL is basically a racket that slaps a veneer of participatory democracy on top of a process where Ken Martin uses abstruse party rules to enforce the whims of the plutocrats who prop the party up.

LIBRELLE: That’s absurd. Only a wingnut would say such a thing.

BERG: A wingnut like the deputy chair of the Minneapolis City DFL?:

LIBRELLE: (Stares blankly off into space)

BERG: Caesar and a diet Coke.

COUNTER PERSON: And what does he…er, she…er…

BERG: No idea. (Drops a tenner)

And SCENE

It’s hard to choose.

Option 1

Is it that Randi Weingarten and everyone who supports her are lying about the “Teacher getting fired for reading Ann Frank“?

(She was reading a version of Ann Frank that’d been tweaked to make it read more like soft-core queer porn. Not the original).

Or is it…

Option 2

Someone actually wrote a queer porn version of Ann Frank.

Because gays didn’t have so much skin in the game during the Holocaust that they didn’t need to appropriate an utterly non-LGBT story.

Truly hard to choose, to be honest.

Chicagoans demand the government get serious about the borders.

Of Chicago. To keep illegal immigrants out of Chicago:

I’ve said for a while now that the way to save this nation, short of outright secession and breakup, is to re-embrace federalism.

This wasn’t exactly the scenario I had in mind, but maybe it’s a start.

The US Senate just changed its dress code, to allow Senator Fetterman to wear his trademark slovenly hoodies:

Now, other than the traditional case of “showing respect for the seriousness of the job you’ve [oh, Lord, we’re talking about Fetterman, aren’t we?] entrusted with”, I don’t care all that much about dress codes. But that respect is kind of important – and slowing the collapse of that respect, for the Senate and all institutions, is a pretty important mission these days.

But that’s another post.

At any rate – when the Democrat caucus says “Jiump”, Tina Smith is there to say “off what, and how high?”

If Senator Fetterman starts urinating on the plinths around the Capitol [1], Smith will be there to dismiss social norms on bladder control as “patriarchy”.

So much that feels like parody but, sadly, is not, in this tweet from Senator Fateh:

• Omar Fateh, of the party that insists “we’re not socialists, we’re Democratic Socialists, at a meeting of Socialists.
• At Macalester.
• And…that crowd.

When I said the left hates Lauren Boebert because she could beat all their men at armwrestling, you can see what I mean, now. Right?

To: Minnetonkoids Concerned about Crime
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: The Bed You Made

Concerned CItizens of Minnetonka

I get it. Nobody likes to be told “I told you so”. And scolding people for dumb decisions puts them on the defensive. Nobody likes having the consequences of their agency questioned and mocked.

So I’ll try not to, and simply say that there’s a learning moment going on, if you are ready to do the learning:

Some of you might just be figuring it out:

The local TV stations sent cameras to the meeting to capture the emotional reaction of white suburban Minnetonka residents to a crime that’s happened to black Minneapolis residents hundreds of times this year. As our recent report showed, black Minnesotans in 2021 were 9.5 times more likely than white Minnesotans to be victims of serious crime (murder, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, and rape).

The DFL-led legislature did create a new crime category for carjacking this year but stopped short of assigning any penalty to the crime, leaving that to the Sentencing Guidelines Commission, appointed by DFL Gov. Tim Walz. Thankfully, American Experiment supporters flooded the commission with emails demanding carjacking receive a felony-level sentence. Without that effort, the crime of carjacking would have been treated like the existing robbery offense.

 While I sympathize for the Minnetonka citizens who took to the microphone last night to express their outrage at the situation and call for strong accountability, it needs to be said: they voted overwhelmingly for the people who caused this lawlessness and continue to allow it on a daily basis.

Of course, if you don’t see the connection between your votes and what’s happening in your city, then you are, in fact, choosing decline, blight, decay and disorder. They follow. The relationship is causal.

That is all.

Berg’s 8th Law is pretty clear on situations like this. Especially about situations like this:

American progressivism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder.

Two women in politics were involved in “sexual indiscretions” last week.

Naturally, the difference in the media and commentariat’s reaction to Lauren Boebert’s (whose indiscretions were really more social) and Susanna Gibson (a Democrat legislative candidate) couldn’t reinforce Berg’s 8th Law more:

Gibson started an OnlyFans page, for which she is being praised as “Courageous” and “Empowered” – two more words the feminist left has completely neutered.

In the meantime, Lauren Boebert got into a drunken make-out at a play (while being staked out by media with night vision cameras, and can I just say there’s nothing weird at all about that, nosireebob).

And the answer is giggle, Victorian misogyny:

And Katie Hill has built a prosperous career out of being a Democrat woman with a sex scandal.

Now, two things can be true; Boebert is a sitting Congresswoman who won re-election by under 1,000 votes. There’s literally no sense in giving anyone a reason not to vote for you under those circumstances.

Because two things can be true: it really wasn’t behavior becoming an elected Rep…:

…and a little hilarious that the Democrats are deflecting away from Genderqueer in elementary school libraries, R-rated drag shows at schools, guys in assless chaps simulating fellation at Pride parades and Hunter Biden shorting blow off of hookers buttocks (“Grow up! Adults have sex“) with Boebert’s pratfall.

Not just Senator Smith – but Senator Smith being interviewed by Samantha Bee?

I can feel the state’s cumulative cosmic GPA wilting like a peony in a surprise fall blizzard.

Note to the GOP: If Samantha Bee is the best the DFL can get, maybe there’s opportunity.

Jessica Johnson is running for Stillwater School Board.

Our intellectual future is in the best of hands.

Book cover for Erich Maria Remarque’s classic western suspense novel:

And let’s not ignore this classic, complete with forward by Senator Blutarski:

Pinky swear, I found the first one on Amazon once upon a time.

The second one needs no pinky swear.

The FBI has a long history of underreporting defensive gun use by civilians.

Foir example, in the early 1990s, when criminologist Gary Kleck was estimating civilians used firearms for legal, justified, defensive purposes between 500,000 and 2,000,000 times a year – roughly 99% involving no shots fired. At the same time, the FBI’s estimate was closer to 80,000.

Chalk it up to reporting, or bureaucratic “conservatism”, or a statistical model that demanded a fairly high standard of confirmation for unreported episodes (like this one). Heck, even ascribe bad motives, like “trying to convince people that armed resistance to crime is counterproductive and futile” – although this was long before federal law enforcement (outside the BATFE) was widely presumed to be in the bag for the Democrats.

But some things never change:

The shooting that killed three people and injured another at a Greenwood, Indiana, mall on July 17, 2022 drew broad national attention because of how it ended – when 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken, carrying a licensed handgun, fatally shot the attacker.

While Dicken was praised for his courage and skill – squeezing off his first shot 15 seconds after the attack began, from a distance of 40 yards – much of the immediate news coverage drew from FBI-approved statistics to assert that armed citizens almost never stop such attackers: “Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander” (Associated Press); “Rampage in Indiana a rare instance of armed civilian ending mass shooting” (Washington Post); and “After Indiana mall shooting, one hero but no lasting solution to gun violence” (New York Times).

The FBI reports that armed citizens only stopped 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents it identified for the period 2014-2022. The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include those it deems related to other criminal activity, such as a robbery or fighting over drug turf.

But as with all information from government and media “experts”, the standards is “distrust and verify – and, almost invariably, distrust some more”.

Because the facts are a lot more interesting:

Evidence compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center shows that the sources the media relied on undercounted the number of instances in which armed citizens have thwarted such attacks by an order of more than ten, saving untold numbers of lives. Of course, law-abiding citizens stopping these attacks are not rare. What is rare is national news coverage of those incidents. Although those many news stories about the Greenwood shooting also suggested that the defensive use of guns might endanger others, there is no evidence that these acts have harmed innocent victims.

The errors in the FBI’s stats are legion, and egregious. For example – remember this case? I sure do.

The FBI? Enh:

For example, the Bureau’s report about the Dec. 29, 2019 attack on the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, that left two men dead does not list this as an incident of “civic engagement.” Instead, the FBI lists this attack as being stopped by a security guard. A parishioner, who had volunteered to provide security during worship, fatally shot the perpetrator. That man, Jack Wilson, told Dr. John Lott that he was not a security professional. He said that 19 to 20 members of the congregation were armed that day, and they didn’t even keep track of who was carrying a concealed weapon.

It’s not just a few case:

Seriously. The undercount is egregious.

If the CPRC is correct – and it always is – citizens respond effecivelty to, not 4%, but rather to almost 36% of active shooter situatons.

The whole thing is very much worth a read.

And as always, repeat after me. Disturst and verify.

And, usually, distrust with greater vim and vigor.