The big news in right-wing alt media lately has been the travails of the Daily Wire – heretofore the most successful conservative alt media source in the business.   In many ways, DW was what picked up Limbaugh’s mantel after his untimely passing. 

But the Wire has had its problems lately:  some chalk it up to MAGA’s decreasing  tolerance for Israel, which Shapiro’s DW supports.  

I think the problem is a lot simpler than that.  I think it boils down to two things:  it’s spread its focus too far, and much of what it does focus on just isn’t that good.  

Unfocused:  the nation needs a solid conservative news and opinion source.  Limbaugh was that.  Fox News used to be.   Limbaugh’s gone, Fox News is in a mushy middle zone, and the likes of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are lapping up the horseshoe right – there’s a definite market for the DW, or something like it.  

But along with that very worthy mission, DW took on trying to enter the culture war.  Which is, again, and again very noble and much-needed venture.  

But their entries, although no doubt catastrophically expensive, have been pretty much trash.   They’ve released a non-documentary movies – all of them properties the various studios passed on, and so were available on the relative cheap.   “Run Hide Fight” was the first – a concept (high school girl takes on school shooters) that I loved, but it came off like a high school theater class production of “Die Hard”.  “A” for concept, “C-” for execution.  And it was a lot better than some of the other efforts – “Ladyballers” would have been a fun ten minute Youtube short, sort of like one of the Babylon Bee’s videos.  But they tried to make it a feature length film, which was about 110 minutes too long and, I suspect, 110 minutes too costly.  Can’t say I’ve had the interest to sit through their other offerings.  

Their documentaries are better, more or less – “What is a Woman” was a good concept (and only 20 minutes too long).  The follow-up, “Am I Racist”, started out strong and swerved into cringe, finishing “Meh”, for all the same reason.  Which we’ll come back to. 

The two documentaries did well enough at the box office.  Well enough to pay for the turkeys – or the gargantuan “Pendragon Cycle” that seems to have been in production for years? 

Not to mention some of the dubious dives into merchandizing?   “Jeremy’s Razors” would have to not just shave your face, but make you taller and richer to be worth $30 more than a pack of Harry’s Razors.   Harrys’ made a stupid woke ad; for $30 for razors, I can overlook it.  

All of that – and running a news service as well – had to have been a huge money suck.  

The cash cow should have been their basic content – the podcasts and radio shows that bring in the listeners and viewers.

And that’s the bad news.  

No Beat:   I’m a Ben Shapiro fan.   No bones about it.  If you’re not, that’s fine – there are plenty of forums for you out there.  He’s brilliant.  On a scale of 1-100, his podcasts are a 90 with a standard deviation of about 2 always good, frequently brilliant.  

But the rest of DW’s flagship personalities?

Matt Walsh may be the least interesting person in media today.  He’s a professional troll – sometimes brilliant (“What is a Woman”), frequently more like an entitled ninth-grader.  His podcast is a 50, with a standard deviation of 20 – occasionally brilliant, frequently cringey.   Part of the problem for me – admittedly someone whose style is “radio” – is one of the tics in his delivery;  he will frequently (like, once or more in every podcast) make a point, then re-iterate it, then re-re-iterate it, and re-re-re-iterate it…I’ve heard seven or eight repeats of a point or conclusion, done with out irony.    A nervous tic, or a mark of sloppy thinking?  Who cares?  It’s annoying as hell.  And unlike the Medved-like information vacuum that is Shapiro, he’s frequently crushingly ignorant.  Last year, talking about Trumps’ record on abortion, he went through one of his muttering, sometimes barely audible lists of examples to the contrary, and got to “Reagan.  Ronald Reagan.  What did he ever do for us?”, ignorant of the fact that Reagan ever controlled the house, barely he’d the Senate for six out of eight  years, and had to spend his political capital on the top of his agenda, eliminating the USSR and fixing the economy.   I’d love to ask Walsh which he’d prefer to have tried (futilely) to trade.   His one strength?  He’s a troll with a level of commitment that Shapiro called “sociopathic”; it was tongue in cheek, but it lands.  It’s a personal thing, but a little trolling goes a long way for me.  “What is a Woman” was pretty brilliant – 50 plus two standard deviations.   “Am I Racist” had moments – shaming Robin DeAngelo to cough up a purse full of pocket change for a black guy was a classic – but I descending hard and fast into the kind of cringe that has me tuning out on “Fawlty Towers” these days.  

Michael Knowles is better – I’d call him a 70 with a standard deviation of 5.   He’s an agreeable sort, with some intellectual heft on matters of the Catholic Church, campaign politics, the Catholic Church, history, the Catholic Church, logic, the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church.   An avowed former atheist, he brings that “the douchiest New Yorkers are the ones that grew up in Buffalo” vibe to his discussions about the nature of faith.   And enough of the cigar talk, ffs.  

The res to the lineup?  Can’t say I can be provoked to care all that much, although watching Reagan Conrad’s rise to her “Token Gen Z Podcast” slot gave me “Top Forty Radio in the ’90s” vibes.  I suspect there’s a lot of money going out there.  

I hope DW can pull it out.   Or that Salem is smart enough to pick up the scraps if it doesn’t.  

Remember 1998? 

Minnesota was doing so well that we could play a practical joke on ourselves.   

We were one of the most successful states in the union.  The combination of “good government” Democrats – naive, misguided but not actively malevolent – and a Republican Party that in retrospect still hadn’t caught up with the Reagan Revolution gave us a government that on the one hand did too much, but on the other hand kind of left things alone enough for them to work.  

Things were so good that we could elect a professional wrestler as governor.  

And things stayed good, or at least acceptable, until…

…well, sometime after 2010.  I can’t quite place it – sometime between Mark Dayton’s election and 2020 – that that ended.   Maybe it was the fourth tier of taxes, or the takeover of Minneapolis and then the DFL by the DSA, or Walz’s idiotic response to the pandemic.  

But in that time, Minnesota has gone from one of the good states to somewhere between “laggard” and “death spiral”.  

I’m not mongering doom – I think the state can be saved.  But the slice of time where that’s possible is flying on by.  

With that in mind?  It’s convention weekend.   

The DFL

The DFL’s convention is happening in Rochester.   And the only real question is, “will it matter”?  Klobuchar is going to win the nomination and, barring an epic October Surprise on fraud or corruption from the Feds, she’ll likely become governor.   More on that when we come to the GOP side.  

The Senate race – which is no longer a race – is more interesting.  Angie Craig yesterday announced she’s headed straight to the primary, after learning 75% of the delegates were pledged to Peggy Flanagan.   

In 2010, knowing the delegates were insane, Ken Martin stepped in and poured on the money to overthrow Margaret Anderson-Kellihers endorsement at the primary, with Mark Dayton.  Eight years  later, after the convention gave the nod to the Karen twins, Erin Murphy and Erin Maye Quade, as well as actual Communists Matthew Pelikan for attorney general, Martin brought in the money and the public union clout to jam down Walz and Flanagan as well as the relatively moderate Ellison in the primary. 

Peggy Flanagan is likely the weakest statewide candidate the DFL has endorsed in my memory.   She could be beaten – more on that below – and I suspect smart DFLs know that Craig would be a much easier sell outside 494/694.   

If it we were talking about Ken Martin and a DFL before, say, 2020?  No question about it, the statewide DFL leadership would yet again nullify the convention and jam down a more electable candidate.  

But the DFL has changed since 2018 – they took their defeats in 2018 and 2021 (on the police funding question in Minneapolis) as a signal get really serious about taking over the DFL.  And you can say two things about Richard Carlbom; no way, no how does he look like a young Hermann Gôring, and he’s no Ken Martin.   

I wouldn’t put it past the DFL, though. I know if I were a GOP Senate candidate, I’d much rather face Flanagan.  

The MNGOP

The Governors race appears to be a tossup between Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth and Kendall Qualls, although Mike Lindell has been doing well in Central Minnesota and has some strong delegate support as well.   I suspect Demuth will win the endorsement, and I’m going to guess it goes to a. primary.  I like both Demuth and Qualls (Lindell’s got a great story, but in the general he’ll make the GOP long for the good old days of Kurt Bills), and I think Demuth has the lead with delegates so far, but let’s be honest – the real key to this election lies with the Feds, and if they drop a huge string of indictments against key DFLers in October.  And the media will be doing its best to mute even that.  

And it’s a shame, because getting a Republican – any Republican – into the executive branch to check and balance the DFL’s depredations may be the only sustainable hope the state has to pull out of the tailspin it’s in.  

So fingers crossed for the Feds.  

For the Senate race?  

This is the first time I’ve harbored any genuine hope in a Minnesota senate race since the mugging they call the 2008 election – mostly because Peggy Flanagan is such a very weak candidate. 

The three contenders are Adam Schwarze, Michelle Tafoya and Royce White.  

I follow the Buckley Commandment – vote for the most conservative candidate who can win. 

White has his proponents – mostly among the “burn it all down” crowd pushed by “Action4Liberty”.   A4L has cracked the code on weaponizing ignorance of politics and, along with “Minnesota Gun Rights”, profits from defeat. I don’t see him getting the nomination, “rocks and cows” support notwithstanding.   He will , I suspect, have enough oomph to be a kingmaker or to deny any endorsement at all.  

It’s going to be be between Adam Schwarze and Michelle Tafoya.   Schwarze likely has the lead among the delegates, although Tafoya has been working the room pretty hard for someone who is generally considered to be headed for the primary.  

Schwarze has all the things that delegates and activists love – a former SEAL, impeccable conservative credentials, and a vow to abide by the endorsement.  He’s also got next to no name recognition outside party activists, and will have to buy some by November.   

Tafoya has some cons – a stance on abortion that is simultaneously too accomodationist for many GOP activists and identical to Donald Trump’s position (12 weeks), and a “path to citizenship” stance on immigration that is a poor sell at the convention but likely not a problem in Maple Grove.  She’s also got name recognition, is raising serious money, and has at least some polling showing her close to the margin of error against Flanagan.  

I’d pay money to see either of them debating Flanagan or Craig.  

So – who is the most conservative candidate who can beat Flanagn or Craig?

I was in a discussion a few weeks ago about what the future holds for the Twin Cities. Someone – a Minneapolis booster and fan of the current administration in Minneapolis and Minnesota – said the cities’ current decline is a sign that the metro is in “the throes of a new city being born”. 

Well, maybe. Good times aren’t guaranteed to last, and any city can turn things around. And they can turn in either direction – fifty years ago Detroit was a thriving city with some worrying symptoms, and Nashville was a backwater with some music companies. The elevator goes down *and* up. 

But a whoooole lot of people, particularly boosters of the status quo in Minneapolis and Saint Paul over the past ten years, think that’s the *normal*. 

It occurs to me – when we talk about what the Twin Cities and Minnesota used to be, people under 40 have no idea what we’re talking about. Minnesota was an economic, cultural and technological powerhouse. It was a destination. It was certainly a destination when I moved here in 1985. 

Let’s recount what’s changed since I’ve lived here.

In 1984, Minnesota was a legit competitor to Silicon Valley. The top two supercomputer companies – the highest tech of the time – were here, spinoffs from a Cold War defense industry that was a national destination and made MN a tech leader. It wasn’t just defense.

In the ’90s, Minnesota had the densest concentration of medical R&D in the world. Hundreds of companies in biotech, medical devices, bio-engineering and every other corner of medical technology sprang up here; it was called “Medical Alley” for a long time.

This concentration of money, technology, infrastructure and talent made the state a business hub. “Sure,” you say, “MN still has a lot of Fortune 1000s!” Sure. Headquarters. But 3M used to have plants all over the place, bringing manufacturing jobs and middle class incomes to places like the East Side of Saint Paul. Honeywell, Ford, 3M, IBM, Ecolab, Medtronic, Whirlpool and countless other companies used to BUILD things here. And it wasn’t just business – although we’ll come back to that.

Minnesota was a cultural center, too. Everyone remembers Prince; many remember Flyte Tyme; some of us recall when the Twin Cities were a hotbed of all kinds of music. And not just music; in the ’80s, MN was the greatest concentration of theater outside New York. 

And we punched WAY above our weight in other performing arts – everything from dance to standup comedy. And there was a film industry – one that actually employed a lot of people, full time, doing Hollywood production for MN prices. That’s all gone now.

It wasn’t all local. Some of it was external: the Cold War ended, so the big defense companies (Sperry, Burroughs, CDC, Honeywell) downsized (freeing up a tidal wave of capital that financed the prosperity of the ’90s). Technology changed, so Cray, ETA and 3M followed suit. NAFTA moved some of the manufacturing elsewhere. 

But state tax policy was exporting jobs long before Clinton cashed the “peace dividend”, much less NAFTA. 

3M started shifting R&D and headquarters to TX in the ’80s; the film industry succumbed to a DFL tax grab in the ’90s, and disappeared overnight. 

And it’s not just big businesses. The startup I’ve been working on (www.storyaliz.com) moved, along with 2/3 of its staff (of, uh, three people) to the Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati. Between taxes, regulations, the “family leave” policy and the stagnancy of the small business climate, there’s just no upside to trying to do a tech startup in Minnesota. 

And as to the rest of MN’s cultural scene?

There’s a reason places develop thriving artistic cultures, and it’s got little to do with artists. Look at every flourishing of ANY art, anywhere, throughout history; they all coincide with places and times where there was enough surplus wealth to support that talent.

Broadway didn’t create a wealthy NYC; it was the opposite. 

Minneapolis in the 70s-80s was like that – a place with lots of people with extra time and money to support talented people doing cool stuff, and who were inclined to participate in great things.

In 1986, when I was producing the Don Vogel show, I booked a writer from Fodors Travel Guides – which were where you went for information about places you wanted to travel, before there was an internet, and were pretty well-respected at the time – for the show. He’d just written an article calling the Twin Cities “the Athens of the 20th Century”. 

Hyperbolic, perhaps – but not all wrong, either. Nobody’s said anything of the sort in almost 30 years. We’re just another Midwestern city now.

So when people like the one I was talking with say “we’re watching the birth of a new city”?

Sure. It happens. 

But cities and cultures don’t happen because of wishes. They are responses to economics, policy and demographics. 

So ask yourself this: do our current policies foster creation of things – cardiac catheters, R&B records, naval cannon, scotch tape, comedy, brilliant ideas and products of all kinds – or just consuming goods and services? 

Because that determines the city and state you get. 

I think there’s a very strong case that Minnesota has become a consumer, not creator, culture. 

That’s a problem.

But I have a hunch if the GOP ticket has a major chance of turning things around in Minnesota, it might just start here:

I have no idea if any of this is true – but if I were writing this as a movie, then the Republicans in the legislature, knowing full well that the law enforcement apparatus in the state reports to Keith Ellison and that one might as well report fraud to the state’s cattle herds as the Attorney General, bypassed state authorities completely and went to the Feds.   

And as the extent to which the DFL-dominated executive branch is riven with crime becomes known and more and more DFL officials are frog-walked to Leavenworth, even the densest “soccer mom” in Eden Prairie stats to realize the depravity they’ve been abetting and repents at the polls this fall. 

A guy can dream.  

Joe Doakes, erstwhile of Como Park, emails:Hind Rocket at Powerline reports on the Cuban Drone crisis, saying, “Cuba is a great example of how long an incompetent, tyrannical and utterly discredited regime can hold on to power as long as it has a monopoly on guns.”

Sure.

And given Cuban mechanics’ facility at keeping old cars going, I’d think sending the plans for Sten guns to Cuba might work, too…

I’d love to know what Peggy Flanagan is, er, “thinking”:

“Avenge” what?

The DFL has controlled the executive branch for 15 years, and most of state government the past eight.  Flanagan has been in power for eight years.  

Avenge…what?  Her regime’s actions?

I presume she’s talking about “avenging” Metro Surge – the federal operation that negated Minneapolis’s “sanctuary” status and went after the sex traffickers and drug wholesaling that made Minneapolis and other “sanctuaries” home.   And while you can disagree with some of ICE’s methods – and I do – the bulk of the disruption to the city was caused by the masses of leftists with Main Character Syndrome, organize by professional progs to spend their days roaming the city with their @#$#^ whistles and vuvuzelas making the city sound like a roaming Chuck E. Cheese. 

Avenge yourself.  

Please, MNGOP.  You could win this one. 

 

Joe Doakes, ex of Como Park, emails:

President Trump is threatening to pull US troops out of Italy because they weren’t there when we needed them to help us in Iran. It’s the right act for the wrong reason.”Tribute” is a payment from the conquered countries to the Imperial conqueror, an act of submission. Mongol Horde, Chinese Dynasty, Aztecs, Romans … they all did it.

If the United States was any kind of Imperial power, money would be flowing from the rest of the world to us; but instead money flows from us to them in the form of military aid and welfare.  Instead of them paying tribute to us, we are paying tribute to them.

Either we are the Conqueror or we are the Conquered. I prefer the former and we ought to start acting like it. Pull the US out of our subservient role in UN, WHO, NATO, and NAFTA. End foreign welfare payments. 

Notify England, Spain, Germany and Italy that we are no longer leasing our bases while giving them rights to deny our use, but instead they are gifting that land to us in exchange for our continued troop deployments there. 

Then we can talk about Greenland.

Joe Doakes

 

If we were an empire – like the British, Roman, Napoleonic or Alexandrian ones – the armies of our various cliens (let’s call ’em “vassals”) would be parts of our military. The Romans had a word for it – “auxiliaries”.

After a few months of listening to some of my Libertarian and “Alliance 4 Freedom” friends yakking about how the Trump administration and the GOP are the real gun control party – driven by a couple of dumb remarks by Kristi Noem, Jeannine Pirro and Trump himself – Joe Doakes points out something that I’ve written about over at HotAir. 

Trump, for all his northeastern ambivalence about guns and the 2nd Amendment, has done more to reinforce the right to keep and bear arms as a right (let’s not focus on “bump stocks” for right now) than any president…

….I was about to say “of my lifetime”, but the correct ending to the sentence is “…that any president has ever needed to”.  

It’s of particular interest to me – partly because of the orgy of gun grabbing that the MN Senate just passed (it’s going to die in the House, and it’s pretty much intended to rile up the Karens for mid-terms), and partly because I am a litigant against the city of Saint Paul’s peek-a-boo “assault weapons ban”.  

Anyway – Trump’s prior squishiness about binary triggers notwithstanding, I never thought I’d see a Department of Justice react to a pinheaded local and state gun control bills quite like this:

It’s a great change. 

Let’s hope it survives 2028. 

It’s safe to say I’m not a Peggy Flanagan fan.  She was the ultimate diversity hire – an ultra progressive (by 2018 standards) “minority” woman (we’ll come back to that) to help drag “moderate” Tim Walz over the DFL’s finish line.  She’s been the most visible Lieutenant Governor I can recall in Minnesota history – during Walz’s first term, I think Flanagan was listed as a co-equal, and appeared in the background of all the Governor’s social media (which ended when Flanagan started making noises about running against Walz’s third term attempt befere…well, you know).  

I think the fact that the DFL is going all-in on torpedoing Angie Craig to support P-Flan is the best thing to happen to the GOP in years, in spite of itself; it gives the GOP the best chance it’s had to win a statewide race since the 2010.  

But there’s one criticism she’s gotten, and has resurfaced, that I’m going to sit out:

In my freshman and sophomore years of high school, if I hadn’t had German, Civics, History and music, I’d have likely had a worse GPA.  I was bored stiff.  English class was always 50% literature, which I loved, and half grammar, which bored me stiff.  I knew how to talk and write, for crying out loud.  

In 10th grade I had Geometry.  My six-weekly grades were C, D, F, F, F and F.   So I musta not gotten Geometry – right?

Then I got a “B” on the final, which salvaged a “D” for the year.  

Anyway – I went on to 11th and 12th grades, and had probably a 3.7 – I cared about the classes I was taking, I’d started working at the radio station and so finally had an identity outside of “greasy-haired cello-playing athletically-inept nerd”, and things just started clicking.  

All by way of saying a number one acquires between ages 14-18 doesn’t define an adult. 

A lifetime of being a “public service” leech does.  So I’ll stick with that.  

Joe Doakes, late of Como Park, emails:

Headline: CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Gives Firsthand Account of WHCD Shooting: ‘I Was a Few Feet Away from Him as He Was Shooting,’ Says He Wondered, ‘Is He Trying to Shoot Me?’

I’m sure that was pretty much everybody’s first reaction:  “Shots fired near the President.  Holy cow, they must be trying to kill Wolf Blitzer.”

Joe Doakes

After eighty years on camera, or however long Wolf Blitzer’s been doing it, it’s probably hard not to think one is the main character.

As if telling the least stable people in our society that the President and his supporters are part of a crowd that our grandparents spent the best years of their lives killing eighty years ago, the incentives for leftists to commit violence against their enemies just keep piling up. 

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

A brewery owner in Minocqua, Wisconsin promised free beer on the day President Trump dies but alas, another failed assassination attempt. No free beer today.

Now every Democrat in the nation and half the RINOs in Congress are hoping:

Wel, that is the point of incentive structures, after all.

SCENE:   Mitch BERG is fixing some broken chain link fence.   Avery LIBRELLE pedals down the alley on a recumbent bike, catching him by surprise.  

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG: Ugh…er, hey, Av…

LIBRELLE:  Shut up.  Billionaires are evil. 

BERG:  Huh.  So why’s that…

LIBRELLE:  They pay no taxes! It’s wrong for a billionaire to pay less taxes than a teaching assistant!

BERG:  Their employees and subsidiary businesses pay immense taxes – and they personally defray taxes by using deductions and business losses – same as your progressive plutocrats.  

LIBRELLE: That’s just wrong.  

BERG: OK.  Put a pin in that.  Did you see where Ilhan Omar’s personal fortune dropped from $30 million down to well under $100K?

LIBRELLE:  Yeah?  So?  It was an accounting error.  

BERG:  Right.  The error being that the accountant didn’t consider…what, now?

LIBRELLE:  Deductions and…

BERG:  Go on?

LIBRELLE:  (Mouth flaps like a trout on the dock)

BERG:  Same as the billionaires, right?

LIBRELLE:  Pouncer!

BERG:  Nah.  But if we find out that her and Hubby Number Four used that “mistaken” valuation to get credit, I’ll be pouncing….

(But LIBRELLE has already pedaled away)

And SCENE

At Columbine, it took four hours for the SWAT team to enter the building.   There’d been reports of bombs – half-true – and protocol was to make sure the bomb squad had had its say before sending the SWAT team in.  By the time SWAT got into the school’s library, the victims and shooters had been dead for hours.  

Police training changed after that, as Federal law enforcement studies showed that the most successful deterrence to spree killers was to try to kill them.   It threw off the careful planning that almost all of them put into their attacks. 

Nevertheless, the police at Parkland dawdled for long enough for the murderer to have enough time not only to kill 17, but to leave the premises.  Uvalde was even worse – cops not only stalled for an hour, but threatened to arrest parents to wanted to take matters into their own hands while it still mattered; it took a team of Border Patrol to end the standoff.  

And now comes news that the Brooklyn Park police knew what was going in the Hortman residence for half an hour before they went in – by which time Vance Boelter was halfway to North Minneapolis on the bizarre chase that led to his eventual arrest.  

Some are hollering “cowardice”.  As my first carry permit instructor Joel Rosenberg said about civilian self-defense shooting, “a life or death decision you make in a split second in the dark is going to get analyzed to a fine sheen by lawyers sitting in a warm, well-lit, secure room for as long as they need”., and I suspect that’s true for police as well; room-clearing against someone who’s expecting you is frightfully dangerous, body armor ain’t perfect and even when it does stop a bullet it leaves you pretty banged up.   I’ll wait for a more thorough investigation (and I may be waiting a while) before I judge anyone’s character.  

But for those crying “cowardice” – this seems like a fine time to point out that people in our society consider our own lives  to be of incalculable worth, needing to be preserved no matter what and defended…

…by cops, who are expected to put their lives on the line for what a cop makes – an average of about $68K in the US today.  

So – what is it that makes your life of infinite value, but a cop’s worth risking for $68,000?

That’s the central thesis of Geoff Snyder’s classic “A Nation of Cowards” – a seminal article on the moral imperative to see to one’s own defense first before blithely expecting society to do it for you.  

It is, of course, a personal choice – but like most personal choices, there’s a moral component to it as well. 

This past weekend the Strib went after the Minnesota Political Class’s elephant in the room:  what’s the problem with Minneapolis?

I’m not going to do a bunch of pull quoting – I’m not going to pay, and the piece was pretty much meh.  

But I’ve found another problem;  when you try to discuss the collapse of Minneapolis with people under, say, 45, it quickly becomes clear – they have no idea what Minneapolis, the Twin Cities and the state declined from.   

When I moved here in 1985, Minnesota was an economic, cultural and technological powerhouse. It was a destination – which was a big part of the reason I moved here.  

Let’s recount what we’ve lost

In 1984, Minnesota was a legit competitor to Silicon Valley. The top two supercomputer companies – the highest tech of the time – were here, spinoffs from a Cold War defense industry that was a national destination and made MN a tech leader.

It wasn’t just defense. In the ’90s, Minnesota had the densest concentration of medical R&D in the world. Hundreds of companies in biotech, medical devices, bio-engineering and every other corner of medical technology sprang up here; it was called “Medical Alley” for a long time. This concentration of money, technology, infrastructure and talent made the state a business hub. “Wait”, you say, “MN still has a lot of Fortune 1000s!” Sure. Headquarters. But 3M used to have plants all over the place, bringing manufacturing jobs and middle class incomes to places like the *East Side of Saint Paul*. Honeywell, Ford, 3M, Ecolab, Medtronic, Whirlpool and countless other companies used to BUILD things here. And it wasn’t just business – although we’ll come back to that.

Minnesota was a cultural center, too. Everyone remembers Prince; many remember Flyte Time – Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and some of the biggest hits of the era; some of us recall when the Twin Cities were a hotbed of *all* kinds of music, pop and punk and what later become grunge.

And it wasn’t just  music; in the ’80s, MN was the greatest concentration of theater outside NYC, and we punched WAY above our weight in other performing arts – everything from dance to standup comedy.

And there was a film industry – one that actually employed a lot of people, full time, doing Hollywood production for MN prices.

That’s all gone now.

Some of it was external: the Cold War ended, so the big defense companies (Sperry, Burroughs, CDC, Honeywell) downsized. Technology changed, so Cray, ETA and 3M followed suit. NAFTA moved some of the manufacturing elsewhere.

But tax policy was exporting jobs long before NAFTA. 3M started shifting R&D and headquarters to TX in the ’80s; the film industry succumbed to a DFL tax grab in the ’90s, and disappeared overnight. And as to the rest of MN’s cultural scene?

There’s a reason places develop thriving artistic cultures, and it’s got little to do with artists. Look at every flourishing of ANY art, anywhere, throughout history; they all coincide with places and times where there was enough surplus wealth to support that talent.

Broadway didn’t create a wealthy NYC; it was the opposite.

Minneapolis in the 70s-80s was like that – a place with lots of people with extra time and money to support talented people doing cool stuff, and who were inclined to participate in great things. In 1986, Fodors Travel Guides called the Twin Cities “the Athens of the 20th Century”. Hyperbolic, perhaps – but not all wrong, either. Nobody’s said anything of the sort in almost 30 years. We’re just another Midwestern city now.

People like the Strib columnist, and people who take the Strib seriously, are saying we’re “witnessing the birth of a new city – different from the old one, but just as good in its own way.   

Maybe. Sure.

But cities and cultures don’t happen because of wishes. They are responses to economics, policy and demographics. So ask yourself this: Do this state’s current policies foster creation of things – cardiac catheters, R&B records, naval cannon, software, scotch tape, and the ultimate vote of confidence for the future, families?

Or is it just a bunch of people in buildings, just consuming goods and services?   And I’m not just talking welfare stacks – the “walkable city” is nothing but a vision for how people consume goods and services – a genial fantasy that never includes offices, warehouses, repair shops, utilities – or schools, playgrounds or kids.  

Because that determines the city and state you get. MN has become a consumer, not creator, culture.

That’s a problem.

The other day, I went to downtown Saint Paul and actually parked and patronized a downtown business for the first time in probably over a year and a half.  I was meeting someone at a downtown cafe to talk some business.  

I met them at 4PM, on a Robert Street where a desultory car or two swished past as I wrangled with one of Saint Paul’s byzantine meters.  

I hit the button, entered my space number, and waited while it buzzed and whirred…

…and said “Invalid Space: Rush Hour No Parking Zone”.  

I looked up and down the street.  I saw a northbound car a block away.  

That was it.  

Downtown Saint Paul hasn’t had a rush hour that “rushed” since Norm Coleman was mayor.  

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

The American government should put the interest of American citizens first, before all other countries. If not America First, then who?

I agree with Thomas Jefferson’s vision of American foreign policy: 

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

 A century ago, Europe got itself into trouble and America bailed them out.  We went back two decades later and did it again.  We’ve been babysitting them ever since. 

True, the NATO treaty does not require Europe to assist us in our Iranian endeavor. But they should.  The missiles launched by Iran could have reached Paris or Bonn but not New York. The oil bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz was headed for them, not us. 

What brings the issue to a head is not their unwillingness to help, but their inability.  The British navy has a dozen operational vessels.  French, Spanish, and Italian air forces claim 400 combat aircraft each, but how many are operational and how many have the legs to reach the Middle East?  How many German tanks?

NATO was formed with eyes East toward Russia but The Fulda Gap is no longer the threat. President Trump is correct that the United States should reconsider its membership in NATO. And then let’s talk about the United Nations.

Joe Doakes

 

Even as NATO’s civilian populations swelled, their militaries shrank to – I’m not kidding – 1/6 of their 1992 size. They shifted their missions to “peacekeeping”, and treated their militaries accordingly – becoming global mall cops.

Hey, Eurotrash.  Meet Americans.  

We’re pretty famous for not letting each other get captured by barbarians:

Aw, shucks.  But no, our greatest military success of all time was liberating this weasel’s homeland and the rest of Europe, in a war we didn’t start but that the French could have ended in 1939 before it really got going.  

Anyway, yeah – that’s us. Once we lost 18 men trying to get back a single chopper pilot – and he was already dead .

So – we lost two MC130s, each costing $114M, plus three Kiowa “Little Bird” choppers that couldn’t be loaded out in time.   To save one guy.   

To a European Air Force, that’d be a crippling loss to their fleet. 

To the US, it means we’re down to 57 MC130s.  

Now – if you’re a Euro fighter pilot, what does this tell you?

Although I wouldn’t worry too hard. If you’re a European pilot operating outside of Continental Europe, you’re gonna have to have American support to have gotten there in the first place. So you’ll probably get rescued too. By Americans.

This is, as Barack Obama might have called it, a “composite conversation”. It happened – in bits and pieces, with different people. 

No Kings Protester (“NKP”): No kings!

Me: Couldn’t agree more. And what luck – we don’t have one!

NKP: You know what we mean. Donald Trump is acting like a King!

Me: I mean, if you disagreed with ICE’s tactics, I might agree – but that doesn’t make Trump a king any more than it made Bill Clinton one when the FBI killed Randy Weaver’s family or killed almost 100 people, disproportionally children, in Waco…

NKP: I don’t know anything about that, and I don’t care. 

Me: OK ,that’s fine. But you DO know that the “No Kings” organization demonstrated against the removal of Victor Maduro, who has murdered tens of thousands of people…

NKP: I don’t know anything about that. 

Me: And in favor of the dictators of Cuba, who’ve murdered tens of thousands of Cubans and many more around the world. 

NKP: Don’t know, don’t care. 

Me: Huh. And today the organization is supporting keeping the Mullahs in power – and they may have murdered more of their own people in a single day than the Nazis ever managed. 

NKP: Not sure how that’s relevant. 

Me: Well, “No Kings” keeps supporting actual dictators. 

NKP: I don’t know about any of them. 

Me: And billionaries, too?

NKP: Yep!

Me: So you’re aware that “No Kings” is funded by a network of plutocrats, including not only the usual Soros family trash, but Neville Singham, the billionaire who moved to Shanhai and is dedicated to spreading Communism – which has murdered as many as 100 million people?

NKP: So you say. I can’t confirm any of that. 

Me: You certainly COULD if you wanted…

NKP: I oppose kings in the US. That’s ALL I care about. 

Me: Huh. Like when Trump created a snitch line, an Orwellian thoughtcrime database, fired people who stood up for their medical autonomy, and pushed censorship of dissent and drove legislation to gut the Fourth Amendment for law-abiding citizens…

NKP: Yeah! That’s some real fascist snizzle, there. 

Me: Every last one of those was either Tim Walz or Joe Biden. 

NKP: <blinks>

Me: So it appears to me, a mere casual observer, that while you may oppose kings, you seems to be fine with dictators. 

NKP: JANUARY 6! 

Me: How so?

NKP: FASCIST! FASCIST!

Me: Wait’ll next week when we talk about the leftist and socialist roots of “fascism”

(But NKP has left the conversation).

Al

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Trump is threatening to send 10,000 troops to Iran, boots on the ground,  which moderate Republicans fear would be crossing a “red line” and would cost Republicans the midterm elections.

The fear is that if we lose seats in the midterm elections, then we won’t have power so we won’t be able to get Presidential appointments confirmed or judges confirmed or the Save Act passed or DHS funded.

Which would be different from now, how, exactly?

Maybe the problem is not lack of Congressional power but lack of willingness to use what power we have. That problem won’t get solved by backing down from Iran. 

Joe Doakes

 

Yep. I think we’re past the point where timidity is the prescription for the midterms.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

I’ve been a Comcast customer since 1998 when I moved to The Cities. They recently jacked my rate to $103 per month.  I called but there is no customer loyalty reward program so fine, I’ll switch to T-Mobile.

That was a bust. It seems T-Mobile internet uses the same technology as my ordinary T-Mobile cell phone data plan, but somehow prioritizes ordinary cell phone data packets higher than internet data packets.  In busy times, the internet lag was worse than dial-up.  And that’s if the connection didn’t drop. 

Makes me wonder about other options. What do SITD readers use for internet connection? How fast and how reliable is it?  Anybody still using the telephone wires?  Anybody using Elon’s satellites?

Joe Doakes

 

I’m a little curious myself.   I’ve been on Comcast since ’99, and given that I do so much work from home the speed and, yes, reliability is hard to argue with.  

Starlink is JUST the wrong side of a viable option for me ATM.  But only just.  

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is talking with Bill GUNKEL, former Republican who is now chairmain of the Inver Grove Heights chapter of “Former Republicans for Ron Paul…er, Dennis Massie”.  

GUNKEL:   Illegal immigrant voting is impossible.   

BERG:  Of course it is.  

GUNKEL: Glad we agree!

BERG:  Of course.   When the DFL jammed down automatic vote registration on issuing drivers licenses, and then passed drivers licenses for illegal aliens. and pointedly shot down GOP attempts to have those IDs labeled “Not to be used for voting”, in a system that allows any voter to “vouch” up to eight other voters in with a – wait for it – drivers license, that was all just to spike the rhetorical ball in the end zone during the “trifecta”.  

GUNKEL:  There’ve only been five examples of illegal voting found in the past 400 years…

BERG:   Er…OK, so let’s say some illegal does vote in Minnesota.  We can’t identify illegals at the polls, and we don’t have provisional ballots, so once a ballot is cast, there’s nothing we can do about it in the unlikely event we do catch them.  Which, if you assume the oh-so-extreme hypothetical that Secretary of State Simon and Attorney General Ellison are in on the fraud, there’s absolutely no impetus for them to do.   Aren’t these “small numbers” small numbers because the system is designed not to catch illegal immigrants voting?

GUNKEL: (pregnant pause)

BERG:   Not to mention the thousands of cases of fraudulent registrations found in 2012, which I’m sure were there just for the fun it. 

GUNKEL:   Illegal immigrant voting is impossible.   

BERG:  Of course it is.  

The most reliable weapon in the arsenal of anyone at war with the United States is Americans – specifically Americans of the left and, lately, the “horseshoe right”, who’ve pretty much taken Jane Fonda’s mantel and run with it.  

The Mullahs knows this – it almost worked for them in re Gaza.  

And I’m pretty sure they’re counting on it working again – and that it’s behind the missile “attack” on Diego Garcia over the weekend.  

Launching two missiles at a target like that is like having your six year old nephew throw the first punch in a brawl.  It’d take a pretty serious “saturation” attack and/or a lot of luck to get anything onto that airfield that’d explode.  

And whoever fired the missiles had to know that.   The target wasn’t the B2s or B52s.  It was X, MSNow and Tucker Carlson.  

Oh yeah – and nations, especially nations that Mossad penetrated decades ago, don’t likely just arf up a missile that doubles the known range overnight, do they?

Not really, no.  

The target wasn’t bombers. It was an influence bomb.

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, writes:

When the people of a nation have been disarmed and oppressed, it is fanciful to expect them to rise up against the well-armed government which is oppressing them.  The Founding Fathers knew that and thus enshrined in the Constitution the right to keep and bear arms, not solely for defense against robbers or home invaders but also against a tyrannical government.

In World War 2, the United States air-dropped Liberator pistols to enable disarmed people in The French Resistance to kill Nazis. That wasn’t enough to win the war – troops in the air, on the seas and on the ground were still needed – but it was a gesture of faith in ordinary people’s ability to seize control of their own future.

I think we should do it again, in Cuba and Iran, with leaflets saying. “It’s your country. Take it back.”

What can it hurt?

Joe Doakes

 

The Liberator was a single-shot .45 pistol with a rate of fire of about one round a minute; it had a plug bolt, and no extractor – the user would run a stick down the bore to extract the case after firing. It was literally useful for nothing but knifepoint range assassinations. It came with, essentially, a Bazooka Joe comic (kids, ask your parents) showing illiterate tribesmen how to use it.

Records of its use are sketchy, but doesn’t love the concept?

I’m going to advocate for a revival of the “Sten” gun – a submachine gun designed and built in record time in the UK right after Dunkirk, when speed and simplicity were king;  made out of stampings so crude the Soviets looked and said “uh, that’s some crude stampings, there) with only the bolt and barrel being machined, and using the trove of 9mm ammunition captured in North Africa until domestic manufacturing started, It equipped most of the Commonwealth armies (at least among troops that didn’t rate a Thompson) and was airdropped into occupied Europe in prodigious numbers.  Iy was also so simple that plans airdropped into Poland, France, Norway and Yugoslavia allowed them to be manufactured in quantity in occupied Europe.   

Crude?  Absolutely.  Some Brits claimed theirs jammed every time they were fired.  The one I shot had the back receiver cap fall off with the last round I fired. 

But it cost $15 in 1944 dollars to build, with maybe five man-hours of time, including machining.   

Apropos not much.  Honest.  

What can I say, it’s been a busy year.   Details upcoming (and by “upcoming” I don’t necessarily mean “soon”.   

I pulled the plug on my attempted redesign.  It was just gruesome.    I thought I could make it work, but…well, you see what happened. 

I’m going to try to restore things to more or less the way they were from (ahem) 2006-ish to last year.   And yes, try to write more while we’re at it.   

Stay tuned.

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Forty years ago, I volunteered to serve as Election Judge for the 1984 Presidential election. Paper ballots. Hand counted. Two judges verified each ballot.   We had one volunteer election monitor watching us count for a while but he got bored and left early. Yes, it took a while – I remember the sun coming up as we were finishing – but nobody in the room had the slightest doubt the count was accurate and fair.

I remember watching lawyers scrutinize “hanging chads” on television for the 2000 election that even the New York Times finally admitted was accurate and fair.

I remember watching poll workers hang cardboard over the windows so nobody could watch the count in 2020. I still don’t believe that result was accurate or fair.

The key difference is transparency.  Why can’t we supplement eyeballs with technology?  

Hang a camera over every counting table, broadcasting to the internet in real time. The whole world can watch. Why not? What is there to hide?

Joe Doakes

 

Because that would risk delivering the undesired result.