Tag Archives: Open Letters

Open Letter To Governor Walz

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To: Governor Walz
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: State Of Non-Emergency

Your Highness,

Your ongoing, and apparently endless, emergency declaration is, put mildly, draconian – especially if you’re in the private sector, especially an entrepreneur. You’ll notice that a sizable majority of people supporting the your most extreme quarantining provisions are public, non-profit or academic employees, students, or the retired. There’s a reason for that.

Now, we’re Americans. Most of our anscestors came here to escape tyranny – some petty, some very much not.

But for most of us in the private sector, “resisting” the worst excesses of your emergency measures is beyond our control or ability. Our businesses are shut down; trying to re-open leaves many of us open to getting ratted out to state licensing and permitting authorities on the government-sponsored snitch lines, which the “Karens” among our neighbors are all too happy to keep busy, thus making earning a living a risky venture.

Our jobs, our livelihoods, our social lives – especially those of us for whom “zoom calls” are no substitute for business or pleasure – are all on hold until events meet criteria that our Governor, in a display of abusiveness that would get him tossed in jail if he did it to his wife or kids, won’t tell us.

So what do we do?

History is dotted with ways in which people, deprived of all other means of hitting back at their oppressor, hit ’em anyway.

When Norway was occupied during the Second World War, Norwegians – the ones who couldn’t escape to the UK or into the mountains to carry on the battle – would draw a number “7”, or flash seven fingers at fellow citizens. It referred to Norway’s king, Håkon the 7th. It was a small, almost meaningless gesture – but it gave the people the feeling that they were doing…something, at least, that the occupier couldn’t control.

And so, I suspect, with masks. Minnesotans, their jobs reducing hours or cutting pay or just plain gone, their businesses gasping for air, their social lives and recreation limited to whatever’s in their houses, only as safe from retaliation as their least stable, least passive-aggressive “Karen” or “Chad” of a neighbor, are resisting with the only tool they have.

Their faces.

Work With Me, Here – And you know what? It didn’t have to be this way.

Been to stores that require masks? Many people gripe about it – but most people put ’em on.

I mean, I don’t personally care – I’ve already had Covid, and can neither catch nor spread the disease; I may as well wear a red rubber clown nose. But there IS a reason surgical staff wear them, too [1]

I have a hunch if Minnesota would have done it, given the right information and a choice, if the state had…:

a) Asked people, nicely, to wash their hands, stay home when sick, and put on a mask when around crowds, and

b) Foregone the whole “act like your scolding mother” and gone a lot lighter on the whole “emergency powers” thing

c) Focused the state’s efforts on protecting the vulnerable…

…things might have worked out a lot better.

Y’know – like they did in South Dakota.

Of course, that is all predicated on the notion that the state’s response was about mitigating the effects of Covid.

That is all.

[1] And no, people who get health problems from the minuscule amount of CO2 that gets trapped in their masks are about as common as people with actual Celiac disease (I’ll let our millennial readers shuffle uncomfortably and clear their throats).

Open Question For “The Party Of Science”

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To: Governor Walz and the Minnesota DFL
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant who passed College Biology
Re: Help me underdstand this

Governor Walz

So let me get this straight. According to you;

Covid19 is a lethal epidemic.

Attending protests to seek the re-opening of the state during the middle of the pandemic threatens grandma and, since “essential workers” will bear the brunt of any outbreak, likely racist as well.

But when one is attending mass demonstrations, even ones involving violence and property damage, against a politically-acceptable cause, or attending a funeral in a packed church full of un-masked people, it’s utterly acceptable from an epidemiological standpoint.

Unless there’s tear gas involved. Because then, Covid is a deadly pandemic.

Remembering, as always, that y’all are the “party of science”, not febrile superstition, yessireebob.

That is all.

Open Letter To MPR

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A friend of the blog who fled Saint Paul just in time writes:

this msg is making the rounds of the S.MPLS progressive/arts set

Per Jon Collins at MPR News- “South Minneapolis: I know this sounds crazy. But it’s 2020. And I’m working on story now about white supremacists coming to Minneapolis to foment race war under cover of the protests. I need your help, and your friends help. Please refer anyone with real, credible info (not rumor or speculation) or sources to me at (I’m gonna redact that)

What the heck – let’s give this a shot:

 Mr. Collins,

I’m Mitch Berg.  I’m  a talk show host at WWTC-AM in Eagan, and I write the blog “Shotinthedark.info”.  

Last week you put out a call to your listener mailing lists, looking for confirmed sightings of “white supremacists”.  

I’m genuinely curious – did you find anything?

While I am a very overt conservative (I went from Bob Collins’ Christmas Card list to…well, not on it over the past few years), I also spent time covering radical groups of all stripes back when I was in the mainstream media.  

And while I realize this is very unlikely, I’d like to invite you on my show (Saturday, 1-3PM) to talk about your findings.   Because it’s everyone’s city. 

Thanks, and stay safe

Mitch Berg
Host, WWTC-AM

Given that I saw a lot of “AmeriKKKa” and “Destroy the 1%” graffiti, but not a single swastika or “14 words” reference, I’m thinking the Twin Cities either got the most inept “white supremacists” in the history of bigotry, or they were the most ingenious – fiendishly tricking a whole city full of leftists into doing the job for them.  

Attention, Mayor Orwell

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To: Jacob Frey, Mayor, Minneapolis
From: Mitch Berg, cantankerous peasant
Re: “Love”

Mayor McDreamy,

You said “love trumps hate.”

Was this the “love” you were talking about?

Do you even regard this as a problem? Or are you and your staff high-fiving each other over this kind of thing today?

Serious question.

That is all.

Not As Live As You’d Hope

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To: “Live From Here”
From: Mitch Berg, ornery peasant
Re: “Out In America” with Tom Papa

Have you ever listened to a putative “comic” bit where a “comedian” reads a (for purposes of argument) “comic” monologue of intermittently (very very intermittently) amusing observations, interrupted with a tag line that isn’t especially funny the first time, but gets repeated 3-5 times every episode, to the point where you want to spray him with spray cheese on stage?

I have.

Read more

Kudos

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To: Mayor Melvin Carter, the City Council, and Mayors and Councilors going back 30 years, except Norm Coleman
From: Mitch Berg, deplorable peasant
Re: Here

You’ve all given us years of obsessive emphasis and spending on virtue-signaling programs to appease upper-middle-class progressives – “Resilience”, bikeability, making the city less habitable for cars, as well as focusing on toxic trifles like pushing up the minimum wage (driving down employment), “sanctuary” (bringing more low-wage, low-skill labor to the city, driving down wages for poor, low-skill workers right here), light rail (destroying more jobs and businesses and increasing blight) and “density” (of housing for upper-middle-class progs), taking money and city attention from public safety.

Spending less on police; carrying on his predecessors’ policy of failing to up-charge gun offenders, basically abandoning pursuit of property crimes, keeping the city focused on punishing property owners rather than criminals, and acting as if there’s really no problem.

And while you and city council don’t run the public school system, they are part of the same political machine that does. The ongoing collapse of the public school system (except for a few islands where the relatively few children of the “high density” progressive caste go, when they don’t go to private school) is correlated with crime in the community. They knew this in New York in the sixties; kids who graduate with terrible educations (as St. Paul kids increasingly do) and limited prospects for the undereducated (as Saint Paul increasingly has) are more vulnerable to being enticed into crime, gangs, and becoming part of the blight. As the schools get worse (and they are, and nothing the School Board is doing will ever stop it), it’ll contribute more to the city’s blight. And while blight may not cause crime, you don’t have to be a sociologist to note the correlation.

As a result? Calls go unanswered, crimes go unsolved, property gets less secure, people who value secure property move elsewhere, “high density” makes housing less affordable while housing policy drives down values outside the high density areas, making owning property in the city a terrible investment, spurring more flight and more blight. Violent crime, defying a nationwide down trend, is surging.

It’s the same recipe that made San Francisco and Manhattan unlivable for people making less than mid six figures and drove out poor people to the inner ‘burbs; it’s in the process of doing the same for Seattle and Portland, while making vast swathes of Newark, Camden, Baltimore, Chicago, North Minneapolis and other cities into blighted shooting galleries.
None of it’s new.

And the voters of this city will keep voting you, your council, and the same policies into office. Just watch.

Not sure how you all pulled it off – getting a lifetime sinecure for jobs you’re currently failing at, and have been for decades, and I’m gonna bet you continue to fail at.

Kudos.

That is all.

An Opportunity

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To:  The Council for American/Islamic Relations
From:  Mitch Berg, Crabby Peasant
Re:  Well, You Know

Dear CAIR:

For starters – condolences about last week’s shooting.   It’s a horrible thing and proves that even the most placid parts of the First World can be awful, anarchic places.  This should be a lesson for a lot of privileged, white, First World “progressives”…

But I digress.

Your Minnesota chair called for Minnesotans to reject Islamophobia:

The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) held a press conference Friday morning in Minneapolis, with a number of speakers highlighting the threat of anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States and across the world.

Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of CAIR-MN, called for all Minnesotans to stand against Islamophobia.

“The only way we can move forward is when the average Minnesotan says, ‘Not in my state, not on my watch,’” he said. “That is the only way we can move forward.”

On a couple levels, I couldn’t agree more.  I’ve fought with some of my political party’s moron bigot fringe against “Islamophobia”.  And like a lot of  people like me, I’ve offered to take any Muslim citizen who wants to learn a more active form of self-defense to the range (given that the closest thing to a positive lesson one can take from last week’s atrocity is that “a good guy with a gun” works for Muslims too).

But while we’re talking about bigotry – let’s see to all the antisemitism?

Don’t be coy.  You know it exists. You may not agree it’s a bad thing…

…and right there, there’s the problem.

Any chance you could speak out against that?

Have your people call my people.

That is all.

Open Letter To All The Progs Who Still Think “All Conservatives” Were “Birthers”

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To: All Progs Who Still Think “All Conservatives” were “Birthers”
From: Mitch Berg, Angry Peasant
Re: Settling Up

Dear Progs who still still think inserting references to “Alex Jones” and “Birthers” puts an end to all arguments with conservatives and/or Trump supporters:

I’ll be charitable and call it “even”.

To be a little more charitable – Omar is hardly alone. Dim as she is, she’s got someone really, really depraved doing her thinking on this sort of thing for her.

Well, if you live in the Fifth, you better hope that’s all it is, anyway.

Open Letter To My Pro-“Choice” Friends

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To: My Various Pro-“Choice” Friends
From: Mitch Berg, Disgusted Peasant
Re: WTF

So when we had our discussions over the years about abortion, I responded to your palaver about “women owning their bodies” with an incisive “Yeah, but let’s give some moral weight to the fact that the fetus is intended to become a human.

To which you responded “Look, nobody wants an abortion” – which seemed fair enough – and the ever-threadbare “We want abortion to be safe, legal and rare“.

To which I nodded my head, not really believing you believed it.

Monday, my misgivings got strapped to the top of a rocket and shot straight into the Capitol: the Senate failed on a procedural vote to pass a law that would have protected babies that were already born alive. Not inviable; not inches from emerging from the birth canal.

Alive. Human, even according to the infanticide industry’s orthodoxy of, it seems, mere weeks ago.

One after another, Democratic senators took to the floor to smear the bill as an attack on women’s health care, a baseless criticism that they failed to substantiate. In the process, they revealed their belief that allowing unwanted infants to perish after birth constitutes a form of women’s health care.
Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) reintroduced his Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act in direct response to Virginia governor Ralph Northam’s endorsement of permitting mothers and doctors to let infants die of neglect. “The infant would be delivered,” Northam said, explaining a hypothetical case in which a woman in labor wanted an abortion. “The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
This “discussion” is what Democrats voted on Monday to preserve — a discussion not about health-care options for women but about whether or not to extend health care of any kind to newborn infants. With their votes and their speeches, 44 U.S. senators embraced Ralph Northam’s position, which, despite attempting to clarify, he has never retracted.
“I want to ask each and every one of my colleagues whether or not we’re okay with infanticide,” Sasse said at the start of floor debate on Monday. “This language is blunt. I recognize that. It is too blunt for many people in this body. But frankly, that is what we’re talking about here today. Infanticide is what [the bill] is actually about.”

I gotta say it – after the bloodbath of the midterms, I predicted the Democrats, in MInnesota and DC, would overreach.

As bad as the party of Tide Pod Eviita has been on soooo many issues, this one may be the nauseating acme.

That is all, baby-killers.

Open Letter To Senator Scott Jensen

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To: Sen. Scott Jensen
From: Mitch Berg, Impudent Peasant
Re: Know Your Friends

Sen. Jensen,

Last year, as he got set up to run for re-election as a Republican in decaying purple district, Representative Dario Anselmo made a very visible point of cuddling up to Minnesota’s various gun control groups.

He spoke at their rallies.

He offered his own testimony (his stepmother was murdered).

He sought the grabbers’ endorsement, he could practically taste it.

And after all that, the DFL and the gun grab groups up to which he’d been sucking, endorsed the DFL opponent, who won the race surfing atop of curl of Progressive Plutocrat money. And it’s not just Anselmo. Republicans who cuddle up to Big Gun Control tend to get treated like the kid in junior high who, when the bullies and mean girls ask them to eat a bug to be accepted by the “cool kids”, eat the bug – and have the photos of them eating the bug pasted up around the school.

Don’t eat the bug, Senator Jensen.

That is all.

Open Letter To All The Media Working The “Displaced Federal Worker” Angle

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To: Most Of You In Big Media
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Perspective

All,

I remember back in 2003, during the post-9/11 recession, when my field was in its “last hired, first fired” phase, and I – a single parent with two kids – got laid off from a contracting job after my old startup closed.

How it took me three months to get an interview. Five to earn *any* money. And 10.5 months to actually get a job – which led to 6-12 months catching up back bills, and years rebuilding credit. How we scrimped, stretched unemployment checks and a tax refund and about five weeks of contract work to cover six months.

And you know what I remember the most? How the media constantly did stories talking about all the trouble we unemployed and underemployed private sector workers were having, and how dire our situations were – even after *two missed paychecks*, and nobody saying “when you finally land a job (whenever that is), we’re going to give you all the “back pay” you would have had coming”.

That helped so much.

UPDATE: Wait – that never happened. Nobody gave a crap. To the media, private sector unemployment when there’s a GOP president is a feature, not a bug.

As far as those Fed workers go – I get the dislocation that happens when your income gets diverted (see above), and that lots of federal workers aren’t the stereotype of Big Bureaucracy fatcats with the six figure salaries and the golden pensions (although a lot more are than they like to let on) and that invincible sense of entitlement to your income.

But when this kerfuffle over the budget and wall ends, THEY GET BACK PAY. EVERY PENNY.

As a private sector worker who’ll be working until he’s 75 to pay the pensions of all these federal and state and local workers so they can retire at 55, can I just say “please stop with the &^%$# waterworks”?

That is all.

Open Letter To Paul Gazelka

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To:  Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka
From:  Mitch Berg, Ornery Peasant
Re:    Line In The Snow

Senator Gazelka,

This morning on the lesser talk station, the host – Drew Lee – asked you about the approach your caucus, with its one-vote majority, was going to take regarding gun control in the coming session, given incoming Speaker Hortman’s statement that gun control is going to be her first priority.

(In a state with a muirder rate among the lowest in the nation – truly the extremist tail wagging the dog).

Your repliy seemed to indicate the proper response was to work with the opposition to find “a solution”.

I’ll make it simple;  the solution is fight crime.   Take everything that burdens the law-abiding gun owner off the table.

End of sentence.

The DFL – beholden as they are to millions of dollars in Bloomberg money for their wins in the election – will fight you on it.

We – the good guys, the law-abiding gun owners – will fight you a lot harder if you screw us.

Don’t screw us.

That is all.

Open Letter To The Entire US Senate GOP Caucus

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To:  Entire US Senate GOP Caucus
From:  Mitch Berg, Cranky Peasant
Re:  A Big Lie

Senators,

Confirm Brett Kavanaugh.  Now.

The allegations against him are of a piece with nearly every leftist narrative today – utter crap.  It’s transparent BS.  Like most lefty memes – “gun violence”, the “War on Women”, the $15 minimum wage and on and on, it is largely a set of chanting points that aren’t intended to convince the intelligent.  They are intended solely to leverage the tribalist ignorance of the masses of entitled would-be elitists who make up Big Left’s voting bloc; they don’t fact check jack; they hear things on the media, and the left’s alt-media, and parrot it like the obedient little schnauzers most of them are.

Confirm Brett Kavanaugh.  Now.

Nothing reinforces a tactic like success.  If Big Left manages to scuttle Kavanaugh, you can expect every single conservative – I almost added “male” to the list, but as we saw with Sarah Palin and MIchele Bachmann, the left hates conservative women even more – will meet the same scabrous, defamatory treatment.

Every one.

Confirm Kavanaugh.  Now.

And if Big Left tries to call out the schnauzers of “The #Resistance”, then yes, let’s meet them – in court if they choose wisely, at the barricades if they don’t.

But confirm Kavanaugh.  Now.

If you fail to do this, you will get brutalized this November.

And you will have it coming.

Confirm Kavanaugh.  Now.

Open Letter To The Parkland Kids

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To: David Hogg et al
From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re: Agenda item

7 dead in one Chicago neighborhood in 12 hours.

Of course, they were mostly black and brown, so they don’t look like any of you.  And they were mostly killed by people with criminal records (and, sadly, at least of the victims likely had records, too – that’s the way of inner city crime, which accounts for over 3/4 of this nation’s homicides (with and without guns) every year.   That means more people killed in two days that have died in all school shootings in the past five years, all rolled together.

But they’re black and brown and killed in ones and twos with weapons that aren’t on the social engineers’ hit lists yet.  And they had the bad fortune to be murdered  almost exclusively in cities run by the same political class that pays for your airfare and security and sign printing and also gets you all that A-list media treatment.  Cities that already have all the gun control measures “you” are so stridently demanding (fat lotta good they did, huh?) so nobody’ll be talking about those murders, will they?

Will they?

Will you all be marching through Chicago?  Calling a bunch of gang-bangers “terrorists” and “Murderers?”

No?

That is all.

More Hogg Now!

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To:  National Rifle Association
From:  Mitch Berg, devious peasant
Re:  David “Boss” Hogg

Dear NRA,

You need to pay any price, bear any burden, to get David Hogg a TV show.  Perhaps on Fox News.

You’ll have a supermajority in favor of the post-Heller interpretation of the Second Amendment for the next two generations.

With rhetoric like this:

“The pathetic f***ers that want to keep killing our children, they could have blood from children splattered all over their faces and they wouldn’t take action because they all still see those dollar signs,” Hogg said before describing the “exhaustion” he’s experienced as a result of his month-long stint as a political activist.

“At this point its like when your old-a** parent is like, ‘I don’t know how to send an iMessage’ and you’re like, ‘Ok give me the f***ing phone’ and you take it and you get it done in one second. Sadly, that’s what we have to do with our government because our parents don’t know how to use a f***ing democracy so we have to do it.”

Prime time cable network nightly show.  Now.

Maybe have John Paul Stevens for his first guest.

Open Letter To All Those “Spontaneous” High School Demonstrators

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Dear “spontaneous” demonstration participants,

I was in high school once. And I remember how little I cared about the opinions of people my parents age.

But I was blessed to of gone to high school at a time when the teacher staff at my school included a fair number of Vietnam, Korea and World War II veterans.

And one of the unmistakable lessons we got, back in my teenage years, was that “having people pay attention to your opinion is something you earn”.

One does not “earn” this by appropriating other peoples sorrow; and it’s more than a little bit ghoulish to try

Bilge like this isn’t helping. You are wrong on every factual point, and I strongly suspect you’re not smart enough to listen long enough to figure that out.

That is all..

Dear Pawns

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To:  Parkland High School Students / Sudden Media Stars
From:  Mitch Berg, peasant
Re:  Your sudden stardom

Students,

First things first – I’m sorry for the trauma that happened to you and your school.  You might want to have a word with not just the FBI, but your school board, who was apparently aware of Nik Cruz’s growing madness.

Anyway – condolences.

Now – you’re not gonna like this, but some of you will thanks me, someday.  I’m going to do something none of the adults in your life – especially those people whew flew down from Washington and New York with the bales of airline tickets and hotel reservations, barely hours after the shooting – are going to do.

I’m going to tell you the truth.

You’re being used.

I get it.   You’ve been through a traumatic experience.  But you need to know that none of the things you’re ostensibly campaigning for would have prevented the shooting at your school.

Background checks?  Florida has a huge gap it the mental health information it reports to the feds.  Just like Minnesota.  It wouldn’t – didn’t – work.

Banning “Assault Weapons?”  It’s been tried – you were toddlers when the last ban ended.  Even its supporters said it was just a feel-good law that did nothing about crime.

Bagging on the NRA?  Yeah, that’ll save lives.

Repealing the Second Amendment?   Please.  Mass shootings and denying the right to keep and bear arms is not correlated with mass shootings.

Look, I get it; when I was your age, I thought the NRA was a CIA plot to make gun companies rich.  it was an idea put in my head by the parents and grandparents of the people chaperoning you around DC and the CNN studios.  They are using you as another way to try to turn the tide in a political battle they’ve been losing for thirty years, now.

You are being used as props.  Pawns.  Stage dressing.

Most of you will figure it out someday, with any luck.

That is all.

Open Letter To Melvin Carter

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To:  Melvin Carter, DFL Candidate for Mayor of Saint Paul
From:  Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re:  Gandered

Councilman Carter

I’m Mitch Berg.  I’m one of Saint Paul’s tiny film of conservatives, so you’ve never had the faintest hint of a reason to pay attention to me, and you likely never will.  And it – like everything about Saint Paul’s governance – shows.

But I come today not to bury you, but to show you some common ground.

Councilman Carter, you may be a politician, but otherwise you are by all accounts a law-abiding citizen.    There’s no indication you don’t follow the rules [1].

And yet here you are, getting smeared by the police union (an integral part of the Metro DFL establishment) that you are also a loyal, elected part of) for things that are not you fault, that you’re not responsible for, and that you have nothing to do with [2], *even as* the person who allegedly burgled your house – the bad guy, here – slides anonymously and without ceremony toward his eventual, inevitable catch-and-release date.

In other words, Melvin Carter, yoiu on the business end of the same collective smear Big Left dishes out to *all* law-abiding gun owners; blaming the law-abiding for the actions of the criminal;  burdening the law-abiding but ignoring the criminal.

(“But wait!  It’s not bigotry against gun owners!  It’s racism!”, someone will say.  Why choose? It’s both; the roots of gun control are intensely racist).

Welcome to the party, Councilman Carter.  Perhaps you might want to rethink your party’s assumptions about the rest of us?  [3]

Mitch Berg
The Midway

[1] Including the laws and rules about securing the guns;   the law is about safeguarding kids, not burglarproofing your collection; a trigger lock or locked gun box is ample to meet the law’s requirements.  If the law required us to make every potential danger in our houses theft-proof, we’d all live in fortresses, and we’d all *still* be criminals one way or another.

[2] Other than, of course, the culplability he shares with this city’s current government, ruling party and political class of which he’s a part, of course.

[3] Speaking conceptually, here.  I don’t own guns.  They terrify me.

Rep. Walz: Lie Down With “Protect” MN, Wake Up With ELCA Hair

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To:  Representative Walz
From:  Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re:  Pandering

Rep Walz,

The other day, you took time off from measuring the drapes in the Governor’s office to Demsplain how you plan to end atrocities like the  Las Vegas shooting:

Representative Walz:  I realize you’re talking to your DFLer base, and they’re not long on logic, much less less knowledge on this issue, but perhaps you, or one of them, could tell me:  how would “background checks” have prevented a shooting by a person with no criminal background that anyone seems to be aware of?

I’ll be inviting Rep Walz onto the Northern Alliance Radio Network this Saturday to discuss this.

But let’s focus for a moment on the statement “Let me  be clear:  I’ve got the credibility to bring gun owners to the table in St. Paul to get this done”.

Rob Doar from MNGOC had the most accurate response so far:

Pandering, you say?

Why, yes – pandering is the word:

Rep. Walz cavorting with the Dreamsicles, just before the 2016 election.

With that photo, you are as “credible” with gun owners as David Duke would be as an emissary to Black Lives Matter.

We, The People

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To:  “David Smalley”
From:  Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re:  Your article on, ahem, “Patheos”.

Mr. Smalley,

I”m not going to bother dispensing with the bulk of your “seminar caller”-stule, utterly and intensely illogical assault on “gun culture”.

But there is one line that I want to call out, by way of accelerating its demise from conversations among the smart people.  It’s this oldie-but-goodie:

So even today, with the 2nd Amendment in full effect, we don’t have the rights to be “armed as well as our government.”
Secondly, what if you were? I could hand you 50 M-16s, give you 1000 illegal bombs, steal you a couple of tanks, and smuggle in some bazookas, and even let you fully train 500 of your closest friends.
If the government wants your shit, they’re going to take it.
You still wouldn’t be a match for even a single battalion of the United States Marine Corps. Not to mention the Air Force, Army, Navy, National Guard, Secret Service, FBI, CIA, and Seals.
So stop acting like your little AR-15 is going to stop tyranny.

This makes perfect sense, Mr. “Smalley”, since as we know the military – especially the “combat arms” people – infantry, armor, artillery, combat engineers and cavalry,, as well as special forces – are drawn from families with two parents who have masters degrees in poli sci from Oberlin, work for social justice non-profits, shop at Whole Foods, drive Subarus, listen to NPR and practice vegan lifestyles.

Right?

Wrong.

The families – fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, cousins – of those soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, and generally by extension those troops themselves – are drawn from the caste of our society that owns guns, for ideological as much as practical reasons.

It’s culturally almost impossible to separate the “gun culture” and our military.  :

Your little cultural genocide tale  only exists in lefty fantasy.

That is all.