Today’s Joke. Tomorrow’s Reality
December 6th, 2022 by Mitch BergPart 243,320: By 2028, feminists who want to meet with women – as in, people born with two “X” chromosomes – will have to meet underground.
Heavy-Handed Metaphor Alert
December 6th, 2022 by Mitch BergA bar and restaurant explicitly aimed at revitalizing Downtown, and at “bringing Minneapolis together”,as a “place of healing for people” as one of its owners said, and overturning the image of downtown Minneapolis as a crime-ridden area enmeshed in a death spiral, has…
…oh, do I even need to finish the sentence?
I mean, let a thousand lights shine and all. It takes more gumption to try to open a restaurant downtown than I, for one, have.
But some of this stuff just seems to be the cosmic equivalent of taping a “kick me” sign on your back. The “Baghdad Bob” vibe alone was just tempting Murphy’s Law…
In March, a bartender at Ties Lounge & Rooftop told Alpha News that downtown Minneapolis is “very, very safe,” even though the city had released data at the time showing increased thefts, gunshot victims, and assaults in the area compared to the previous year.
…even if crime, and downtown’s eroding status as a destination, didn’t do it first.
Convenience
December 5th, 2022 by Mitch BergSCENE: Mitch BERG is walking around Uptown Minneapolis trying to decide which pop-up brunch joint to go to. Absorbed in thought, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE has approached
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Oh,Go…olldarnit, Avery, how have you…
LIBRELLE: Shut up. Why aren’t Republicans condemning Donald Trump’s latest attack on Demoracy?
BERG: Republicans and conservatives are, in droves.
LIBRELLE: But when are they going to condemn it?
BERG: Uh…they re?
LIBRELLE: But when are they going to condemn it?
BERG: While you ponder that, here’s another question: when are Democrats going to condemn their party’s constant erosions of the Constitution and the rule of law? Their efforts to erode Federalism, abolish the electoral college, add states to tack on Democrat Senators, weaponizing the IRS, FBI and DOJ, squat on the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 10th and 14th Amendments, circumvent the FIrst Amendment via “public/private partnership” between Big Tech and the Democrat Party, weaponize “Emergency Orders”, pack the SCOTUS?
LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?
BERG: (Backs slowly away)
LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?
BERG: (Leaves building)
LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?
LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?
LIBRELLE. But when are you going to condemn it?
(And SCENE)
“Dark Money Is Baaaaad”
December 5th, 2022 by Mitch Berg“But our money is for a good purpose, so…”
Obviously Toxic Masculity
December 5th, 2022 by Mitch BergMinneapolis father chases car thieves who stole his car, with his four kids inside:
Derek Gotchie, the father of children, was close by and jumped into the stolen vehicle the suspect arrived in and chased his stolen car until he rear-ended the car near Plymouth Ave. N and Penn Ave N., according to the Minneapolis Police Department.
The suspect then exited the vehicle and fled on foot.
Let me be the first to day – hooray for toxic masculinity!
I Heard It In The NARN
December 3rd, 2022 by Mitch BergToday’s music playlist:
New Feudalists Vs. The Free Market
December 2nd, 2022 by Mitch BergRemember Compact Fluorescent Bulbs?
Government and the expert class all but brought them to your house and forced you to change out incandescent bulbs at gunpoint. Government tried to jam them down with by force of law, notwithstanding their cost (to purchase, and to dispose of), and their many other drawbacks.
And then, just about the time the jamdown was complete, the free market came up with the LED bulb: cheaper, better light, easier to dispose of (and they last longer, so there’s less need to dispose of them) and they use even less energy.
Point, free market!
That same expert class is saying we need to switch to electric vehicles to “save the planet”.
Steven Hayward at Breitbart spells out how there’s no rational way to look at this as anything but returning the world to feudalism.
We’re already getting there, under “unusual” (for the moment) circumstances.
Of course, yet again, the free market may well have a better answer – more sustainable (especially if society kicks its unscientific superstition about nuclear power), more affordable, and capable of keeping the world, not just the top 10% of it, mobile. More on this in the future.
Watch to see how the would-be ruling class tries to gundeck hydrogen power.
Read the rest of this entry »Downtown’s Back, Baybee!
December 2nd, 2022 by Mitch BergIf proclamations made with muted, Minnesotan gusto were correlated with economic results, Jacob Frey’s exhortations would have downtown Minneapolis humming along like Dallas.
Alas, they do not. Some of downtown’s signature office towers are ailing financially:
The 30-story LaSalle Plaza in downtown Minneapolis is scheduled to go to auction next week after the previous owner, the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois, avoided foreclosure by transferring the building to its lender, Northwest Mutual.
Nearby Fifth Street Towers is facing the same fate and may also go back to its lender this month, according to Axios’ sources who were not authorized to discuss the matter.
And it’s not just your garden-variety class-AAAAA office space. It’s the big daddy of all the downtown office buildings (emphasis added):
Real estate analytics firm Trepp is keeping tabs on IDS Center — the city’s most iconic office tower — due to a 77% occupancy rate and the loss of Nordstrom Rack from Crystal Court, said senior managing director Manus Clancy
Rumors of downtown’s non-demise appear to be premature.
“If You Can’t Stand It, Stand It No Longer”
December 1st, 2022 by Mitch BergI know a few people with contacts in the Chinese diasporic and dissident communities. They’ve been telling me for the past few years – even before the pandemic – to watch out for what’s going on in China.
To Americans inured to rioting in Minneapolis and Portland, the news of riots in Shanghai, not long after rioting in formerly-free Hong King, might elicit an ignorant shrug.
So it may not be immediately apparent how striking it is to see scenes like this in China: a man, yelling “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” (at 3:08), is dragged away by police and militia…
…and then dragged back by the passersby.
Chinese subjects, forcefully re-capturing someone arrested by the cops.
That’s a little like the famous Tienanmen Square guy putting down his groceries, pulling a Molotov Cocktail out of the bag, and setting the tank on fire.
Lest you feel too happy, it gets much worse.
Around 7:15, the story follows a fire call at a large apartment in Xinjiang. Firemen have a hard time reaching the building at all, due to Covid lockdown restrictions. Since the building is locked down, the fire escapes are locked shut – and the death toll was horrific (as the cell phone conversation captured around 7:30 shows).
Around 8:35: residents unblock a neighborhood that had been sealed off for over three months, and send the police running.
I know – don’t give Tim Walz any ideas, right?
But the people were not amused.
Various whispers from the dissident community – which you can credit or not, as the attribution is pretty much all underground – is that a whooole lot of Chinese students and emigres are the children of party members who are trying to get their families ensconced somewhere safe before things blow up. Whether that’s wishful thinking or prescience, time will tell.
On the one hand, totalitarian dictators are generally very good at seeing to their own survival (until they’re not).
On the other? In 1980, the record shows Ronald Reagan was just about the only person who could see the USSR collapsing. In historical scale, it all happened so quickly after that – almost too quickly for the left to claim they’d predicted it all along.
Is China the same?
More on this in the future.
Two Americas
December 1st, 2022 by Mitch BergAs the late Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards said, there are two Americas.
Both of them might look at this video, of Chinese cops searching peoples cell phones for signs of anti-regime badthink.
One America thinks “get a warrant, bitch”.
The other America gets a tingle down its leg and thinks “imagine what we could do for vaccine, mask and distancing compliance!”
That second America is the one that’s nattering at the first America about “democracy”.
A Tale Of Two Stories From The Baggage Claim Level At MSP
November 30th, 2022 by Mitch BergFifteen years ago, when Republican Senator Larry Craig was alleged to have sought sexual favors from an undercover cop in a rest room on the baggage claim level at Minneapolis/Saint Paul International Airport, there was no delay in getting the story out to the public.
Today – a few weeks after Sam Brinton, a much-noted Biden Administration official and gender-fluid person was arrested mere feet away for allegedly stealing a woman’s suitcase off the luggage carousel (after not checking a bag of, er, their own for the flight at all), we get…:
Look – if you want to shave your head, put on neon lipstick and a dress and excessively high heels, you go and live your best life. Go with God. Stay tf out of my business, I’ll stay out of yours.
The beef here is, as usual, the Strib had to be shamed into covering news unflattering to Democrats by a newspaper outside the Twin Cities. The New York Post took a shift (the London Daily Mail has spent so much time scooping the Strib on Ilhan Omar, it’s affecting the trade balance).
The Strib covered the story three days after conservative Alpha News.
The court filings themselves would be the sort of thing late night comics might have had a field day with…
…back in the day when late night comics weren’t bigger Democrat PR flaks than the Strib.
Bogarted
November 30th, 2022 by Mitch BergThe DFL ran the table in the last election.
If they want something passed, they will likely pass it (exceptions exist, and we’ll be talking about them).
Marijuana legalization should be a slam dunk. There’s no need for the party to mobilize its base to get out and pimp for bread and circuses…uh, I mean weed.
And yet they’re doing this:
Seems odd, doesn’t it? Coming up with weed merch for a measure that was a campaign “promise”?
Fearless prediction: the DFL will draw up a weed bill – or amend it onto an omnibus that won’t pass with certain amendments, including weed, included. The DFL will blame the GOP, and use it in two years to get the strung-along weed-voter dupes to trudge to the polls again in 2024.
Let Them Eat Lima Beans
November 30th, 2022 by Mitch BergI can’t be the only one to have read/seen this NPR piece on controlling the cost of the Thanksgiving meal and thought it read like early-seventies Pravda, can I?
The article concocts “replacements” for the main components of the traditional Thanksgiving dinner:
Turkey is by far the most expensive thing on the table. Turkey prices have risen about 50% in the last two years, largely because of production slowdowns and an outbreak of avian flu [and, of course, trillions of dollars poured into the economy – a fact NPR goes to great lengths to avoid talking about. Ed]. On average, a 16-pound bird will run you $28.96 and stuffing (prices are up about 70%) will run you $3.88.
NPR Global Economics Correspondent Stacey Vanek Smith decided she would stick with meat for the main dish (many vegetarian options are cheaper), even though that’s not easy. Meat prices have risen significantly across the board: Beef, chicken, fish and even Spam are all pricey. So Stacey opted for pork. Specifically: bacon.
Stacey’s local grocery store was selling family packs of bacon for just $4 apiece. And, of course, a little bacon goes a long way.
Instead of stuffing, Stacey sliced some tomatoes — a relative bargain that she hoped could be put to use with leftovers to create a new holiday tradition: The Thanksgiving BLT.
The worse news: it’s not the their worst idea.
They took a photo – and I swear, this is not a Babylon Bee spoof:
This article alone could be a Casus Belli for a second civil war.
If At First You Don’t Gut The Fifth Amendment, Try, Try Again
November 30th, 2022 by Mitch BergThe city of Minneapolis wants to try again with installing speeder cameras on city streets.
These cameras will snap pictures of speeding cars, with the license plates, and mail the vehicles owner a citation.
A friend of the blog emails
If they actually go through with this, and it passes the legal challenge, it sounds like there will be some overlook or discretion on who gets a ticket.
No chance for abuse here.
It’s good to be king.
Well, kings, queens, qyngs and kweengs and whatever else they get called in woke culture…
Make Orwell Fiction Again
November 29th, 2022 by Mitch BergBadthink is the new…badthink.
Or to put this in terms any Second Amendment activist can relate to, “Don’t be paranoid. Nobody’s coming for the language itself”.
Pathologizing freedom of conscience by speciously linking it to objective evil?
Demonizing dissent?
Oh, yeah – and just flat out lying…
…to gull the gullible – a population the Democrats count on growing to supermajority levels.
Ritual
November 29th, 2022 by Mitch BergYesterday, I…:
- Changed the oil in my snowblower.
- Put in the first fresh gas of the season.
- Got my boots, choppers, coat and wool cap out and ready to go.
- Got a pot of Korean beef stew ready to go in the pressure cooker.
If we wind up getting half an inch of snow, you have me to thank.
When The World Is Absurd…
November 29th, 2022 by Mitch Berg…satire is impossible.
But some still try:
Night Of The Long Tweets
November 28th, 2022 by Mitch BergOne of the key goals of any authoritarian or totalitarian system is to dehumanize its opponents. Because without an opponent to mobilize against, people start looking seriously at the shortcomings the system’s autocrats bring to their lives.
And a good enemy isn’t really very human at all.
Whether it’s a drill sergeant during bayonet practice, or a Stormtrooper yakking about üntermensch, or a kommissar denoucing a kulak or a “wrecker”, the key in getting regular people in any authoritarian or totalitarian system to feel that rage with “the enemy” is to reinforce how really subhuman they actually are.
“President” Biden took the moral arc of American civilization a little further toward tyranny and barbarism over the summer, when he referred to half of Americans as fascists.
Former President Obama got curiously specific in referring to Republicans as “The Revolutionary Guard”.
But it was far from just national figures. Locally, reverse-McCarthyites were finding “fascists” behind hedges as well:
And of course, shut down all dissent:
I’m less surprised than most that it came to this, this quickly, in the run-up to the mid-terms:
And, suspecting as I do that the “red wave” we didn’t get this month may still be lurking out there somewhere, Big Left isn’t letting off the gas.
Perish The Thought
November 28th, 2022 by Mitch BergDemocrats: “crazy paranoid wing nuts! Nobody’s coming for your guns! It’s all just propaganda to enrich the NRA and the gun industry!“
Also Democrats:
“OK, we’re coming for 70 to 80% of your guns. But you’re still paranoid!“
The Low Bar
November 25th, 2022 by Mitch BergI hope you all had a happy, blessed, gratitude-heavy Thanksgiving.
I hope you did not spend the day alone in a New York apartment, sitting on your toilet, hunched over your smartphone, obsessively typing bilge out onto social media.
Like this guy seemed to:
Only to be reminded that graywashing American history is how authoritarianism thrives.
Violence!
November 25th, 2022 by Mitch BergDemocrats: it is literally violence to “misgender” someone, even unintentionally, even if they are of a chosen gender you’ve never heard of“.
Unless…:
…they are inconvenient to the trans political movement. Then, you can follow the sort of reasoning that would shame Archie Bunker.
The Horror
November 25th, 2022 by Mitch BergI just got the best idea for a horror story.
Check this out: a computer application slowly, insidiously saps the compassion, perspectivel, moral equilibrium and finally, intelligence from millions of unwitting people.
Who would we get to write a story like that?
Oh…
Crap. It’s too late.
It’s a shame, too. Given Hollywood’s constricted sense of imagination these days, it’d likely become a franchise spawning sequels and reboots for decades).
Gratitude
November 24th, 2022 by Mitch BergIt’s Thanksgiving.
I’ve written before about what Thanksgiving means to me, personally – on this blog’s first Thanksgiving (checks notes) twenty years ago. It’s still true in every respect.
I was on the road, driving somewhere the other day when the notion of listing the things for which I’m grateful popped up. I started trying to list them all – and the list only really came to an end when the car stopped, far too soon, at my destination.
So what the heck – I’m just going to start a stream of consciousness list of things for which I’m grateful on this, our country’s festival of thanksgiving.
I’m thankful for my family, and my family in law. Looking back over the past twenty years since I’ve been writing about all of us, there are so many ways things could have turned out differently, and much worse – but yet here we all are, and things are all right.
And I’m thankful for the family I grew up in – my sister and my brother, of course, and my father, who is blessedly still with us. And for my mother, who we’re spending our first Thanksgiving without, this year. And as I noted back last spring, I’m profoundly grateful for one of the greatest gifts my mother and father gave us all – boring, non-remarkable childhoods, free of the sort of pointless, mindless drama that has always afflicted less fortunate families, and that a certain segment of society has taken to celebrating these days.
The more families I get to know, the luckier I know we all were, and are.
So for Bun, Zam, Syd, Watermelon, and of course Barb, Jim and Dad, I’m happily thankful.
Oh yeah – and Pickle, the cat. Best cat ever.
‘m thankful for the career I have. I blundered into it 24. years ago, more out of boredom with my short career writing instruction manuals – and yet after all this time, I still look forward to going into the office every day, literally or virtually.
I’m grateful in particular for the job I have with the company I’m at. Not naming names – but it’s a place I genuinely enjoy being, with people I genuinely enjoy working with. There aren’t many places where a UX designer with a BA in English could land on two engineering patents. For that story alone, I’m exceedingly thankful.
I’m grateful for the path I took to get there – all its myriad chicanes and hairpin turns. Starting in radio at 15, burning out on it when I was 21, getting back at 22, out again at 25, nightclub DJing, technical writing, and the various twists and turns that got me here.
At the very least, there are a lot of stories to bore my kids stiff with.
On the other hand, every once in a while I can offer someone a perspective they don’t have. And that is a great feeling.
Oh, yeah – I’m immensely grateful that my first run at “Mentoring” in my career field has been successful; my first mentee – actually the child of a long-time friend of the blog – got their first job in the field after an amazingly and satisfyingly short time (by my standards, not theirs) learning the trade. That was such a blast.
I’ve become keenly aware in recent years that there are people who’ve been very important at one time or another, that I will likely never see again. The time for chance serendipity random encounters gets shorter every year. So one thing I didn’t expect, but for which I’m intensely grateful – my show and blog and, to an extent, social media have led me back into contact with a lot of people I likely wouldn’t have via the normal course of random encounters – high school and college classmates who tune in, and occasionally shout out on my show’s various social media feeds. In three particular cases – my college friend Ray Zentz, and my high school and colleg4e classmates Eric DeMar and Pennie Werth – they passed away, very unexpectedly, and (gulp) way too young. And in this past couple of course, I’ve been blessed to have had at least some contact with each of them, while I still could.
And for my many friends who are still with us, and who I do get to see and hang out with? Yes, I’m even more thankful for each and every one of you!
It’s easy enough to say “I’m thankful to be healthy”, and it’s true. But in the four years since my crash weight loss (most of which is still gone), I’ve become humbly aware that most guys who spend as many years sedentary and overweight as I did, aren’t nearly as lucky as I am, to be as relatively healthy, after all that, as I am. I’m very aware I’m as lucky as can be. “I’m healthy” is, in this case, delivered with a bit of “whew – close call” as a happy nod. And for that, I’m thankful.
Back to a bit of nostalgia – I’m thankful for my entire high school class. I can’t say I’m friends with everyone in the Jamestown High School Class of 1981 – but this past couple of reunions have blessed me with a deeper appreciation of quite a few people who, between cliques and crowds and circumstances I barely knew in the day, with whom I’ve spent more time over a few drinks at reunions than we ever did in high school, and intensely glad for the opportunity.
I’m glad I got the education I did. It’s become the fashion these days among a certain crowd of conservatives to dunk on the modern college education – and from what I see among 20-and-30-somethings today, there’s something to it – but my BA in English has served me far better than I’d ever thought it could when I graduated from college. It taught me how to think, reason, look for the question behind the question, for the additional questions that every answer launches.
And of course, “education” is more than just curriculum and schooling. I’m thankful the many unintentional lessons I learned from some of the amazing people I met, and the collateral effects of the things I learned, in class and out.
I’m grateful that this version of the RIchard Thompson Band released this version of this day-appropriate song:
Perhaps a bit less ethereally? I’m so happy to have a band again. Oh, it’s just a classic rock cover band – it’s not the flaming-hot passionate “mission in life” vibe the twenty-some me wore back in the 1980s, when I took my swing at being a rock star, or at least a songwriter, producer and whatever else came my way. But I get to play guitar in front of rooms full of people who seem to enjoy it. And even if it’s a slow night at an out of the way bar, my Fitbit says I burn 6-7000 calories and rack up a zillion steps, so even then it’s a win-win.
Anyway – for that, I’m thankful.
Given the sturm und drang of this state and nation’s political scene, I’m deliriously grateful for the voice this blog, and the NARN, have given me over the years. On the one hand, social media have given everyone a voice, of sorts – and what people have done with that voice is another entire subject. But being able to do this on my own terms (within FCC and Salem Communications rules, natch) for all this time? To the extent I’m still sane, that’s probably why.
Of course, I’m grateful for the friends I’ve made during all these years of writing – Professor Reynolds, Gary Gross, Joshua Sharf, Sheila O’Malley, and the group of local bloggers that, about this time 19 years ago, started coalescing into that radio show: Scott Johnson, John Hinderaker, Brian Ward, Chad the Elder, Atomizer, Michael Brodkorb, and of course Ed Morrissey, King Banaian, Brad Carlson and Jack Tomczak. And of course, for the many friends I made in the “Minnesota Organization of Bloggers” days – including the three whose contributions still bless this blog, Mr. D, Jeff Kouba and First Ringer.
Why, yes – even Paddyboy! I’m thankful that Pad – someone I’ve considered a friend for over three decades, and to whom I owe an odd little debt of gratitude from back before the word “blog” meant anything but something that happened about an hour after you ate a gas station burrito – drops by, pique and all. I owe you a drink or two. Have your people call my people.
And I’m thankful for this little ephemeral bit of internet I’ve been wrangling this past 20.75 years.
As I noted elsewhere around the time of the 20th anniversary, writing this every weekday morning has been sort of a Zen-like lesson – come rain or shine, feast or famine, writer’s block or fit of logorrhea, the exercise of sitting down and writing, five mornings a week, has been a way of centering myself for this past two decades. For better or worse – I have to think it’s better – one of the great takeaways from doing this has been, I think, one of the great lessons of life; keep plugging away, and things eventually explain themselves.
Of course, I’m profoundly and humbly thankful that people still choose to read it, after all this time. Thank you all!
I could keep at this for hours more. And perhaps one day I should. But cooking calls.
And so to borrow a line from that first Thanksgiving post on this blog, way back when:
But I forgot one. I’m thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I’m doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing – or better – next year.
Thanks to all of you. I hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving and a blessed holiday season.
Of Gratitude And Goals
November 23rd, 2022 by Mitch BergTomorrow is Thanksgiving.
I have so much for which I should be grateful – and I’ll be going through the list, as far as I can, tomorrow.
But I’m going to jump the (if you’ll pardon the expression) gun, and say I’m thankful I’m not that this grift.
Whoah – did I say grift? I meant, “dinner party“:
Jackson and Rao are the founders of an organization called Race2Dinner. For $5,000 the two women will attend your eight-person dinner party and bring along “Lisa Bond, our Resident White Woman.” For that price, they will berate you about your racism. They will share their own experiences with racism, which sometimes don’t sound like actual racism. But if you object or even if you agree, they will tell you that’s what white women do and you’re part of the problem. The two have a lot of observations about “what white women do.” White women are mean to each other, for instance. When they are accused of racism white women accuse black women of being “angry” or “crazy.” White women also say they’re not racist. White women like dinner parties. And they like to say they’ve donated money to the ACLU. If you suggest that black women may be mean to each other or that they may like dinner parties, you’re also a white supremacist. Because how would you know? Don’t say you have black friends because that too would be a sign of white supremacy.
Questioning whether spending $5,000 to have people call you names is also “white supremacy,” and the authors explain, “we are tired of it.” The fact that you are complaining about the price is evidence that you “see this work as charity. You doing us a favor. … White supremacy culture has you believing that you are doing us a favor by even caring about racism or antiracism. This results in your incessant demands that we educate you—on your own racism, on a system you created to harm us for your benefit. For free.
On the one hand, it sounds as hellish as the left tells us Thanksgiving with one’s family ostensibly is.
On the other hand, if I had a lot more money than bills – or friends who’d be willing to pitch in – I think it’d be fun to pony up, invite the ladies, and watch the sparks fly.
Open Letter To All Progressives
November 23rd, 2022 by Mitch BergTo: Every Single Progressive
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreperous Peasant
Re: Berg’s 18th Law
To some extent, I created Berg’s 18th Law to protect me, and people like me, from going out on long, brittle factual limbs.
The law is pretty clear:
Nothing the media writes/says about any emotionally charged event – a mass shooting, a police shooting, anything – should be taken seriously for 48 hours after the original incident. It will largely be rubbish, as media outlets vie to “scoop” each other even on incorrect facts.
But after a couple of days of listening to people like you claiming that all conservative social and economic thought was a form of “stochastic terror” aimed directly at LGBTQIAetcetc people, it’s worth noting that I wrote it even more for you.
