Is there someone out there, anywhere, who read this:
…and thought “Hmmm – government is clearly not working for my family, and the “Inflation Reduction Act is clearly a turd that will raise prices…
…but he ended it with the word “Period”.
Hmmm.
He must be onto something”?
The IRS actively targeted the Tea Party and other conservative groups.
The FBI actively trafficked the “Russia Collusion” hoax.
Big Media publicly changed its mission from “passing facts along to people” to “denormalizing Trump”.
Pardon me if I’ve got questions about the Mar-A-Lago raid.
Roughly a fifth of American adults don’t want to have children:
Our estimate of the number of childfree people is much higher than past national studies, which placed the percentage between 2% and 9%. This likely happened because our measurement focuses on a person’s desire to have children, not their ability. This is important because a person can be childfree whether they are biologically capable of having children or not…Our findings depart from research conducted in the 1970s, which found that childfree adults tended to arrive at their decision later in life after postponing parenthood for many years. Earlier decisions may reflect changing norms toward parenthood and an increasing recognition and acceptance of a childfree lifestyle.
Before you ask? The study does in fact distinguish between people who haven’t decided yet, and those who can’t have children for medical reasons.
The bad news: this means 20% of Americans aren’t going to be bringing anyone into the world to take care of them – literally, financially, politically any other way – when they get to the stage of their life when they need help. Someone else’s kids will be taking care of all that – from paying Medicare taxes to literally changing their diapers.
The good news: They are disproportionally, although not completely or overwhelmingly – in Blue America.
A friend of the blog – and fellow Saint Paul resident – emails:
Our Councilperson, Mitra Jalali, recently tweeted about how wonderful it would be to permanently close Snelling to make it pedestrian/transitway only. Someone sane asked the question about where traffic would be re-routed. Someone who apparently has been blind to what the construction of the light rail on University has done to local businesses responded that “traffic will tend to disappear because non-locals won’t pass through and locals will walk more places.” Well, actually that person is partially correct and partially paying attention- traffic disappears because everyone will find a new place to be. But, where the person is oblivious is locals won’t walk more places because those places will disappear as they did on University Avenue.
Anyway, Little Africa Fest happened this weekend and a portion of Snelling was actually closed off to cars and was pedestrian only. I like the local African restaurants, so I checked it out, hoping to get some good food. It was 6pm in the evening. The event started around 11am, I believe, and was supposed to go on until 10pm. There was quite a lot of activity happening at Hamline Park and it was very crowded there. That is good. Those businesses deserve attention and it was a community festival with the local businesses setting up booths. But, as anticipated, nothing happening on the closed part of Snelling Avenue. No real apparent reason to close off Snelling Avenue. In fact, if we permanently closed off Snelling Avenue, this is how it would look 24 hours a day. No one walking, no real activity happening.
The close the streets people say that closing some streets to cars, or “building streets for people” would actually make neighborhoods safer. I must say I didn’t hear any sirens going on during the festival- but perhaps that might have been due to the heavy visible police presence in the neighborhood for the festival…
On the one hand, a street that is genuinely closed probably makes a bad getaway route.
On the other hand, if there is no business, and thus no potential victims on the hoof – that’s a little like destroying the village to save it, isn’t it?
It’s been a while since we inaugurated a new Berg’s Law.
But it’s high time.
Berg’s 24th Law Of Rhetorical Predictability: Democrat politicians can, and routinely do, say anything they want, regardless of honesty or even factuality, confident that their audience, while theoretically “educated”, has no capacity for critical thought”.
We’ve seen this writ large…
…well, no. We’ve seen this writ small, venial and a little bit pathetic this past week or so, as Governor Walz has gone out of his way to take credit for a “Middle Class Tax Cut”…
…that he fought:
The only reason Governor Flanagan and Mr. Walz have “never raised a tax” is because of that single-vote, and later 3-5 vote, MNGOP majority in the Senate.
But Flanagan and Walz made the claim in the Farmfest debate, and it’s on their TV ads that have been inundating local TV this past few weeks.
Why?
Because they know local media will never check them on it, and DFL voters can’t think critically anyway.
They could say “2+2=Abortion”. and every ELCA-haired crone at every coffee shop in Crocus Hill and Kenwood will nod their head and chant it back in response.
It’s why it’s called a “Law”.
I have no idea why it Michael Beschloss a blue check.
But let’s place a little bit, if not with him then with ourselves:
It’s entirely possible he’s right. Abortion, and abortion alone, could Blunch watch polls today say will be a red wave.
But if it doesn’t?
What is the opposite happens? What if The “Rod wave” actually happens?
Will that be a referendum on the Supreme Court?
I’m going to post this for the morning after the election, just to make sure I ask Beschloss, if that’s what happens.
It finally happened; I’m at an age when I get to spend time correcting younger people about the misconceptions some older people are giving them about “my” time.
Maybe it’s just me – but I’ve been noting a little surge of questions – and revisionist answers – about the 1980s, lately.
I’ll stick with the question:
I’ll take a run at that.
No, Mr. McGeoch and anyone else with the question – they were even better than most people today credit them for.
Do yourself a favor and watch the movie the movie “Miracle”; the opening montage *brilliantly* shows how depressing US life was in the ’70s.
Here it is.
If you are of a certain age, you can almost feel the depression of that era – the malaise that plagued us for that miserable decade – creeping over you.
We know how the movie – and the game whose story it related – ended; a two hour movie about a one hour game boiling down to one of the most memorable minutes in the history of television:
The decade took a little longer, and was a lot more suspenseful.
It wasn’t just that we bounced back from the economic malaise of the ’70s, and the ’82 recession (as bad as 2008) in a way that seems *miraculous* today. Although to a guy getting out into the world at the time, that was pretty good timing.
No – it was much bigger.
In the ’70s, Communism – the bloodiest dictatorships in history – was at its peak. And while the success of Ronald Reagan’s goal of extincting the USSR has a thousand fathers today, in 1980 literally nobody thought they were going away.
People today think of the Cold War as a cultural punch line – but it was no joke, kids.
I grew up in missile country, during the height of the cold war, between two SAC bases. I grew up very aware the world could get incinerated in minutes if some colonel in Moscow or Colorado Springs had a bad day.
I was *never* going to have kids in a world like that. This was something I knew when I graduated from college. Why bring someone into the world, just to have them die with you, and the rest of civilization? What was the point?
And over the course of that decade, the USSR – the most murderous regime in history – went from being the “other” superpower to…gone.
The threat hanging over all of us and everything we did…
..vanished.
In 1980, the entire American intelligentsia said the Communist world was here to stay. Anyone who says that they didn’t think so is lying.
And yet:
Even his own staff thought it was too reckless. The Democrats? Forget about it.
And even though I was living in the middle of it at the time, I didn’t quite believe it. Even as the Berlin Wall fell…:
…I couldn’t quite believe it.
I’ve cited Miracle; I’m going to drop the other pop culture bomb. Things still hadn’t sunk in for me when I was working at at Top 40 station. This song came out:
It’s “Right Here, Right Now” by Jesus Jones. They’re a trite, flash in the pan British post-new-wave band. But it was the only song (other than the Scorptions Wind of Change) about that bit of history. I can’t think of a whole lot of pop culture artifacts about “watching the world wake up from history”.
It’s a trite bit of new wave pop – and I get a catch in my threat when I listen to it, to this day.
Because it came out about the time that the USAF, which had kept nuclear bombers on alert 24/7 for literally 40 years…stopped. Hundreds of missiles got retired.
And it was like someone lifted a steamer trunk full of bowling balls off my chest. I have no idea how to relate that to someone who wasn’t there.
Bob Dylan didn’t have this to sing about
You know it feels good to be alive
Other than perhaps to hope one gets the significance that my oldest was born a year later – into a world that was safe enough to think about it. And for all the jabbering about “revolution” that the generation before mine had inflicted on the world, this? This was revolutionary.
All because of what happened in the ’80s.
I saw the decade in, when it seemed the world could change with the blink of an eye.
And it didn’t end there. With the end of the Cold War, a tidal wave of defense effort turned to civilian uses. All that American ingenuity that had spent the ’70s and ’80s helping tanks hit their targets while driving at 40mph, detecting Soviet submarines hundreds of miles away, went into civilian goods. The GPS in your smart phone started out in smart bombs. Your car’s airbag’s origin story was in the fire detector in M1 Abrams tanks. This blog comes to you via ancient Department of Defense project eventually called the Internet.
It was the “peace dividend”. Bill Clinton (with the invaluable assistance of the last actually conservative GOP Congress forcing him to the right) got to cash it. The economy went on the longest boom in history.
It would not have happened without the events of the 1980s.
That’s the fun, nostalgic part. I spent my late teens and early 20s watching the world wake up from history.
But as another song put it, nothing good ever lasts: Mr. McGeoch’s entire generation grew up knowing little about the era but what they’ve been told by the people who write the memes, who shoot the TikTok videos, write the cultural punch lines – while at the same time benefitting from its results as no previous generation in human history. Two generations have grown up thinking that the world that started in 1989 was the natural order – or, simultaneously better and worse, not having to think about it all that hard.
It’s not. Mankind’s natural state is for the strong to dominate the weak; for those with the will to power to control those without. The moral arc of history is long, but almost always – but for this past 200-odd years – bends toward tyranny and barbarism.
And it can all go away like *that*.
“I saw the world change in the blink of an eye” when I was 26.
I’m seeing it change back in a long, slow, masochistic drip drip drip.
Like the seventies – only much more serious, this time. Perhaps because I’m old enough and well-read enough to know the consequences. Perhaps because the people driving us toward what appears to be an even deeper, grayer nadir are not comic book villains in tanks, but people in our own country, with PhDs and blue checkmarks.
It’s game-time…
…against ourselves.
Hope that answers the question.
An apparent teenager was shot and killed on the Nicollet Avenue LRT platform on Tuesday afternoon, in broad daylight, during a Twins game.
#DowntownIsBack #Vibrant!
Minneapolis’s progressives sprang into action against the real problem…
…which is apparently “people who point out that Minneapolis has a problem”.
If only people would stop talking about crime, it wouldn’t be a problem, would it?
Now, last month I was reliably informed that an “activist” Supreme Court had banned abortion.
So this just can not be: a referendum to repeal Kansas’s constitutional protection of abortion failed, and failed hard, yesterday.
Why, it’s almost as if all the Dobbs decision does it require pro-choicers to do what us Second Amendment activists have been doing for fifty years; go out and convince voters, and elect legislators, create a cultural push in favor of, uh, killing babies throughout all nine months of gestation and beyond.
Which, to some extent, is what happened in Kansas. Sort of:
The result is bad news, but supporters of the abortion license are giddily overreading it. The instant line is that the result shows that a backlash to Dobbs will be powerful this November. And it’s true that the referendum appears to have driven turnout in the state. This suggests to me a few potential advantages for pro-abortion Democrats this fall. They can do very well in places where a pro-life referendum is on the ballot, especially one that can be presented as effectively banning abortion without exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape; and maybe also in some places where legislators are on the verge of enacting such bans (or can be presented as being on the verge of it).
Will they be as successful in turning out their vote in the many places where those conditions are not present? Tuesday night’s result in Kansas will yield Democratic confidence about the answer to that question. It could turn out to be overconfidence.
And even in Kansas, I think pro-lifers ought to come back in a few years with another ballot initiative, this one establishing a gestational limit on abortion: at fifteen weeks, for example. There is no reason pro-lifers should take this deeply disappointing vote as the last word anywhere.
I said “sort of”:
There are two takeaways from this:
… for another year of school, their teachers are getting ready as well:
“Interrupting whiteness“
Now, here’s a little dirty little secret of mine; I can and do ignore people who create new adjectives by adding “–ness” to the ends of nouns, willy-nilly.
When I first started hearing “progressive“ activists jabbering about “whiteness“ a few years back, I got to confess, I ignored it. The idea that there is some essential, internal racial trait that unifies a term that covers Armenians and Norwegians, or Italians and Irish, is the kind of laughable absurdity you get from… Well, racists who are trying to pound facts into shape to fit is theory.
It’s always hard to pick which leftist pathology to ignore, and which to take seriously.
Of course, looking at the “crowd“ in this photo, I’m not sure I would take them “seriously“ if they weren’t all intimately involved in teaching the children of whatever parents weren’t smart enough to get them out of the Minneapolis Public schools…
All those Democrat twitter account with Ukrainian flags will be Ukrainian flag-free by September 15.
Woman in the Phillips neighborhood of south MInneapolis describes the break-ins and arason that followed her criticism of a neighborhood “homeless camp”:
“This would not happen in Kenwood. This would not happen in Lowry Hill, in Linden Hills. This would not happen by the lake. We’re on our 18th camp in a six-by-six neighborhood,” that homeowner told us when explaining the last two years.
She is fearful for her safety after what happened at her home. It’s why we are not showing the woman’s face or using her name.
After being out of town, she came home to a horrible scene two weekends ago. Every room in the house where she’s lived for 20 years was ransacked.
“Everything destroyed and torn apart. Doors kicked in. Everything I owned [was] trashed. Stolen. Bags of stuff stolen and taken out of the house,” she said.
She believes it was retaliation for speaking out about homeless encampments in the neighborhood.
The woman may be anonymous. but she knows how things work in a modern, “woke” city:
The woman was candid about what’s gone on.
“So, when the city talks about equity in every breath, every breath they say ‘in the eyes of equity.’ I’ll just say it’s bullshit, because if it was in the eyes of equity, they would be containing crime here in the Phillips community,” the woman said.
Liz Collen at Alphanews has the whole story:
When people can’t count on government to keep them safe, they’ll figure out a way to do it themselves. And that’ll get very ugly, very fast.
Watching the ongoing slow dripping failure of the Southwest Light Rail line, it’s temping to remember a time when American could actually accomplish big public infrastructure projects.
Forget for a moment the breezy authoritarianism that went behind such projects as “Urban Renewal” and driving interstates through neighborhoods with less clout than their neighbors – that’s part and parcel of government “getting things done” whether your goal is to drive from Cleveland to Detroit or to stop the spread of a disease with a 99+% survival rate.
But there was a time when this country did get big projects done; the canal system, the coastal forts, the transcontinental railroad, the Panama Canal, the Tennessee Valley Authroity (again, forget the low-grade totalitarianism), the Interstate Highway System.
Those days seem to be over. America just doesn’t finish big infrastructure jobs anymore.
It’s a long read – but this piece notes the dismal record of American public infrastructure work since the beginning and failure of California’s “High Speed Rail” (HSR):
Despite its failure, the HSR project inaugurated the U.S.’s megaproject era. Once a rare type of project, by 2018 megaprojects comprised 33 percent of the value of all U.S. construction project starts. An alarming number of these have spiraled out of control for many of the same reasons that killed the California bullet train. The decade that followed the financial crisis was a kind of inflection point in the industry; this was when construction projects became noticeably worse and when the long-term implications could no longer be ignored. One of the most cited studies of the U.S.’s declining ability to build reviewed 180 transit megaprojects across the country, revealing that today, U.S. projects take longer to complete and cost nearly 50 percent more on average than those in Europe and Canada.
Having joined Kiewit in 2010, I witnessed these changes first-hand. I have since moved on, but have remained in the broader industry, including working on what are called “strategic pursuits”—the process by which companies compete for megaprojects. This experience has provided insight into the mechanics of how these projects are awarded and why they so frequently fail.
You can fill in “Southwest LIght Rail” (and some Twin Cities-y locations) at virtually any point in the piece, and it still makes sense.
The Star Tribune is complaining about “misinformation” today. You may hit a paywall (I did), and i”m not giving them any money.
Sort of unrelated aside: today is the fifteenth anniversary of the collapse of the 35W River Bridge, in downtown Minneapolis.
An event which prompted the most obscene tidal wave of concentrated disinformation I can recall – mostly, former Strib “Senior Columnist”, the late Nick Coleman, who beclowned his newspaper in print and on national TV by blaming Governor Pawlenty, and tax-accountability groups like David Strom’s “Taxpayers League”, for the collapse before the last of the bodies were cold. It was the most craven display of “journalistic” abuse on the local level, ever.
In the intervening years, the Strib’s fortunes have fared about as well as the late bridge. The Strib managed to do some good reporting on the story – but along with the photos and the survivor interviews, it’s hard to separate that story from Nick Coleman on MSNBC, bellowing bug-eyed at the camera about Tim Pawlenty’s responsibilty…
…for an engineering mistake made in 1967.
The bridge is back. The Strib is still here, technically. And “misinformation” has become an industry that’d boggle Nick Coleman’s mind from the great beyond.
The MInneapolis City Council – with crime, inflation and housing issues all solved, youbetcha – sees a shiny new progressive toy:
Two Minneapolis City Council members have joined forces with pro-choice organizations in an effort to push the city to pay for abortions
I mean, they’re not paying a lot of police salaries these days, so…
August 1, 2025: “Residents of Manila garbage dump: “Californians go home! You’re ruining everything!”
Brad Finstad is running for the US Houise in CD1.
Allen Shen is running for the Minnesota House in HD40B
And here’s today’s song.
Former Trump hand Michael Anton, writing for Compact, offers a bracing view of the various pathologies of Trump haters, whose numbers are legion, at least among the chattering classes. I am going to pull a few quotes; this article is a festival of pull quotes, truly a “read the whole thing” special. But a few of Anton’s observations deserve particular consideration, to wit:
Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime.
All along the Potomac, you can sense it: oh boy, here comes the hoi polloi. The whole point of the current January 6 show trial is to demonstrate, beyond question, that your concerns do not matter. Stay outta the 202, y’all. The enmity Anton describes began before Trump — before the MAGA hat became the visible headgear from hell, the tricorner hats of the Tea Party were not a source of great amusement to our betters, but rather an unwelcome interruption to the exciting new world on offer. The concerns of those citizens mattered not at all then and little has changed.
The Tea Party did not last; it was leaderless by design and easily coopted and dispersed by the professional Republicans who serve as junior partners in the Beltway ecosystem. So nothing changed. What did change? This time the hoi polloi had a herald, who happened to be a publicity hound from Queens.
Why did Trump get the gig? Why wasn’t the herald someone more housebroken, like Marco Rubio or “Jeb!” or John “Daddy Was a Postman” Kasich? Amazingly, it was because a carnival barker like Trump was more credible than the other worthies in the field were. Back to Anton:
The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.
What Tea Party/MAGA types want isn’t hegemony over their betters. Rather, they want to be left alone, without the ministrations of those who have plans for how they ought to live their lives. Can’t have that, of course. And if you are old enough to have had friendships of over 30 years, you understand and have likely experienced the following:
People I have known for 30 years, many of whom still claim the label “conservative,” will no longer speak to me—because I supported Trump, yes, but also because I disagree on trade, war, and the border. They call not just my positions, but me personally, unadulterated evil. I am not an isolated case. There are, as they say, “many such cases.”
Kevin Williamson and the NR gang, pick up the white courtesy phone. Then Anton gets to the nub:
How are we supposed to have “democracy” when the policies and candidates my side wants and votes for are anathema and can’t be allowed? How are we supposed to live together with the constant demonization from one side against the other blaring 24/7 from the ruling class’s every propaganda organ? Why would we want to?
I am not sure we can. There’s more, a whole lot more, at the link. Consider it carefully, as we are in a dangerous moment.
Serve:
Volley: Here’s something that should be even less controversial: if you’re going into the job market with skills that nobody will pay you a living wage for, you’re not ready to “adult”.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
When I turned 62, that number really hit me hard. In my mind, 62 is
OLD. It should be retirement age. I should be sitting on a beach
looking at snowbunnies in bikinis. I should be sipping a brewski as
walleyes nibble my bait. I should be finishing the book I started to
write before Covid. I should be taking my grandkids to the shooting
range and the magic shop and the ice cream parlor but I’m not doing any
of those things.So I’m taking a break. I’ve really enjoyed writing for Shot In The
Dark, the back-and-forth in the comments, but it’s time to focus. Take
good care, everybody. I miss you already.Joe Doakes
We’ll keep your seat warm for you, Joe.
To: The Hon. Rep. Dean Phillips (MN-03)
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Burning Daylilght, Bucko
Rep. Phillips.
You recently tweeted this:
Well that’s great.
But I’ve got some questions.
For starters: you’ve had two years with control of the presidency and both chambers of Congress. Why, 2.5 years into this period of complete control, are you suddenly concerned with jobs leaving, prices rising, debt skyrocketing, the price of medicine and “climate change”?
Did you used to wait to do your school projects to 9PM the night before they were due? Did your entire conference?
Also – as I asked your colleague Rep. Craig the other day – what powers to you, a Congressperson, have to affect any of those issues via your votes?
Yesterday, we noted that Governor Flanagan and Mr. Walz were going noticeably loooooooooonbg on abortion in their socialist media presence. \
It’s enough to make you think that their internal polls are bad enough that they are shoring up their base to try to forestall a complete meltdown.
Don’t get cocky, of course.
But does this…
…look like someone whose big concern is reaching outside her base?
My theory – their internal polling, especially in CD2, is is “engine room on the Titanic is flooding” bad.
10 years ago, when economic times were fairly good (compared to 2008, anyway) and Barack Obama was on the ticket, the DFL went long on same-sex marriage, counting on it (and the big uptick it advantage) to blunt whatever remaining impact the tea party insurgency had had two years earlier.
That year, social issues (and a presidential race) led the DFL to a sweep, taken control of both chambers of the legislature for two years.
The DFL seems to be counting on the same thing happening again:
The Governor, as well as Mr. Walz, have been leading in exceptionally hard on abortion (as well as a certain amount of whistling past the graveyard on the economy).
And they are already pouring money into TV ads.
Those internal polls must be really, really bad.
All summed in one (since deleted) tweet:
I do know who needs to hear this; when someone brings a gun into a supermarket, shoot the security guard and then it doesn’t other people, and no one can lift a finger until the cops arrive, that’s not really much of an endorsement for gun control.
…to figure out how to rephrase something like “the Democrats know they can say any bull crap they want without fear of consequences, because well the typical Democrat is a college educated person, they are ill-informed and gullible” into the form of a “Berg’s Law“.
Because we need it now more than ever:
Literally nobody who matters treats and ectopic pregnancy or a miscarriage the same as an elective abortion.
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