Governor Walz’s Very Special Session is a work of crass political manipulation.
I’m not going to try to explain it – Representative Zerwas already did it better than I could:
Every session, especially since 2011, our entire government devolves down to three people in a locked room.
That’s not what we voted for…
…well, OK. It is exactly what a slim majority voted for.
Interesting article in the WaPo on San Francisco; its title suggests its current situation
“breaks America’s heart”, which is a fine play on Tony Bennett, but doesn’t really reflect the contempt most Americans outside the tech industry and politics have for the place.
The city is in the midst of collapsing, not so much from wealth, or even the “prog” boogeyman “income disparity” or even the lack of a middle class, but from the complete unaffordability by anyone who isn’t either wealthy or heavily subsidized by the wealthy.
And of course, San Franciscans -the people who voted for the government that led them here – are the last to understand why:
“This is unregulated capitalism, unbridled capitalism, capitalism run amok. There are no guardrails,” says Salesforce founder and chairman Marc Benioff, a fourth-generation San Franciscan who in a TV interview branded his city “a train wreck.”
First – and something of a tangent – Salesforce sucks.
More on-point? “Capitalism” only “runs amok” when it’s got government paving its way – with zoning, taxes and social policies designed to promote some groups over others, to bring “the right people” and promote “the right kind…” of society, life, politics. It is leading the way – but hardly alone – in proving Joel Kotkin’s point from ten years ago; cities are becoming donuts, with a core of immense wealthy surrounded by immense poverty, largely via government policy.
Unbridled capitalism gave us…Williston.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
What we did to you wasn’t “spying.”
“Spying” is when you do it to us.
Joe Doakes
It’s a fascinating piece – and a look into the painstaking training lawyers get in the art of obfuscation.
One article that’s been providing some fascinating insights into politics (as well as bits and piece of my personal life) over the past couple of years) is “20 Diversion Tactics Highly Manipulative Narcissists, Sociopaths And Psychopaths Use To Silence You” by Shahida Arabi.
And yes, I know – “Narcissism” is the pop-psych diagnosis du jour meaning “someone I really don’t like”, these days. I’ll ask you to consider my argument on its merits, rather than its resonance with a pulsing mob of pop culture droogs.
Anyway – tactic #3 is called “Nonsensical conversations from hell” – sometimes called “word salad”:
Malignant narcissists and sociopaths use word salad, circular conversations, ad hominem arguments, projection and gaslighting to disorient you and get you off track should you ever disagree with them or challenge them in any way. They do this in order to discredit, confuse and frustrate you, distract you from the main problem and make you feel guilty for being a human being with actual thoughts and feelings that might differ from their own. In their eyes, you are the problem if you happen to exist.
Now, it could be I’m partaking in the pop-culture kool-aid, but I can’t be the only one who thought “word salad” when I they read this.
Here is a way to while away the long hours at your desk.
Count the number of people who are more upset by the story than they are by the notion of aborting a fetus that has already been born.
Remember when Democrats tittered with glee at the (small) number of Republians who were obsessed over Barack Obama’s birth certificate?
They can all, every one of them, shut up now:
…according to a Rasmussen poll released today, a staggering 67 percent of Democrats believe Ocasio-Cortez’s climate change warning to be completely legit.
According to the poll, 48 percent of all likely voters agree that the United States has only twelve years left to fight climate change before the effects are irreversible. The poll did not identify Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders (who still believes the doomsday prediction to be true) while conducting the survey. According to the poll, 40 percent disagree with the prediction, and 11 percent are undecided.
The most fascinating thing about the poll, aside from the large percentage of Democrat sea sponges who believe the 12-year prediction, is how the number of voters who believe it has skyrocketed in just a few months. When Rasmussen first polled on this issue back in January, after Ocasio-Cortez first publicly made her prediction, only 23 percent of voters agreed with it. Back in January, however, only 34 percent of Democrats believed what Ocasio-Cortez says only a sea sponge would have taken seriously. This shows the incredible influence the socialist wing of the Democratic Party has on the party as a whole.
Having Tide Pod Evita as your thought leader is like having Jesse Ventura as your charm school superintendant.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
US currency is legal tender for all debts, public and private.
80% of all currency contains trace amounts of cocaine.
Possession of a trace amount of cocaine on currency in your pocket is a felony, regardless of how the cocaine got on the currency.
You are required to use our money, but you are prohibited from using our money. Catch 22. Look, people, that book was satire, not a guide to public policy. Fix the law.
Joe Doakes
To much of our administrative class, “everyone is an inadvertent felon” is a feature, not a bug.
I’ve spent most of my life – virtually my entire adult life – first raising and now working with millennials. And getting used to their various quirks – like, the way the seem to collect diagnoses and physical and mental illnesses (or at least their labels) the way they used to collect Pokemon cards. If I had a nickel for every group of millennials I’ve heard comparing being celiac and dysthemic to being “on the spectrum” and having anxiety, I could contribute enough money to get a republican elected in Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’ district.
Bemusement turns to irritation when they start yapping about “the world the previous generations left them”. The Great Recession, “climate change” and Trump, I guess, all combine to make millennials all goth-y about the world around them.
I’ve tried – without much success – to expose the idea that maybe, just maybe, the world they’re growing (Still. Interminably) is actually, if not better, at least no more malignant than the worlds their elders had:
It never really sinks in. But then it never really does, with the young.
David Harsanyi moves from memory to fact, to prove the point – millennials just don’t have it that bad, and to the extent they do, it’s largely because of lifestyle choices. From his conclusion:
Of course life has a new set of challenges for every generation, and no one expects millennials to sit around prefacing every complaint by noting, “Hey, life is better for me in so many ways.” But it’s simply untrue, despite a sense of unearned victimhood, that millennials have it harder than those who came before them. In most ways, the opposite is true.
I’d urge you not just to read athe whole thing, but to pass it on to a millennial close to you. Presuming they’re not triggered.
I just finished spending a year and a half riding the Vomit Comet (aka “the Green Line”) to work and back most days.
At its best, it was a serviceable ride.
At its most middling, it was crowded with free-loading University kids and, early on cold mornings, homeless people curled up sleeping on the chairs.
At its worst? I navigated between puddles of vomit, stepped in a pool of urine, and was to the point of intervening as a man attacked a woman.
You can almost sense the defeat in the Met Council’s latest release:
Metro Transit is ending 24/7 service on the Green Line between downtown St. Paul and downtown Minneapolis.
The change, which is scheduled to take effect in August, comes amid concerns about drug use, assaults and other misconduct on the trains.
Under the plan, the light rail trains will not run between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. weekdays.
General Manager Wes Kooistra said the trains will be replaced with buses that will stop near each Green Line station.
Kooistra said the two-hour shutdown will also give crews more time to clean train cars and repair tracks
Emphasis on “clean the cars”.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
If the defendant in this case had somehow managed to obtain a gun and shoot up City Hall, Liberals would demand universal background checks and ammunition taxes and identification-stamped bullets and God knows what all else. They’d insist those measures were necessary, to prevent this kind of shooting.
But the real cause of the shooting would be they let him out of the nuthouse. Twice! Once in 2012 and again in 2017. After he was released, he refused to take his meds. What a shock! Totally out of the blue. Who could have predicted it?
We don’t have a gun problem. We have a mental health treatment problem. Everyone who is concerned about gun violence needs to read “My Brother Ron,” by Clayton Cramer. If you can’t afford to buy your own copy, let me know and I’ll buy it for you.
Joe Doakes
I second the nomination of Cramer’s book. Cramer’s departure from blogging was a dismal day for the medium.
We noted earlier this year that Philadelphia’s tax on pop was taking down soft drink sales, and jobs and stores with it.
And it turns out that that’s true – pop sales are down by half in Philly.
But people are healthier – right?
Er…right?
While researchers found that sales of sugary beverages fell in Philadelphia after the tax, beverage sales in nearby towns and counties without the tax went up. That suggests people may have been traveling to get their soda at a reduced price.
But…but…Revenue! Right?
Jazz Shaw did the math that I thought about, but didn’t, since Jazz did it…:
So, let’s look at this assuming one million ounces of soda was sold anually before the tax went into effect. If sales had remained the same, the city would have realized $62,400.00 in revenue instead of $54,300.00. But with the volume cut in half, they managed to slash their revenue to $31,200.00. (I was told there would be no math. Apparently City Hall in Philadelphia was operating on the same assumption.) Great job, guys. You gutted your revenue stream, caused layoffs in the beverage industry and depressed sales in the city’s retail outlets, likely impacting entry level jobs.
Of course, this is “unexpected” only if you haven’t followed similar stories from coast to coast, including here in Minnesota, where the rapacious and punitive increases to the cigarette tax enriched a lot of North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin convenience stores a few years back.
According to police dispatch, a “crowd of 8-10 men with hammers and iron bars” attacked people on the Green Line (aka “Vomit Comet”) platform on the East Bank, at the U of M.
According to Alpha News:
A person who claimed on social media to have been at the station when the incident occurred said that the group of males had “hammers and bars,” and that they seemed to be “attacking anyone who looked like they had money or were white.” The witness, who said he isn’t white, said he didn’t want to “[take] on a bunch of dudes with blunt objects,” and that he “hurried an older white lady away” and they walked a few blocks to catch a bus.
There is considerable effort on the part of local progressives to discredit the story – as it comes from conservative Alpha News via those neocon tools, the Minneapolis Police Scanner and U of M Pollice Departments.
According to the Pioneer Press:
Police responding to a report of a group threatening people at a light-rail station at the University of Minnesota stopped seven juvenile males who fled from the Minneapolis platform, a university representative said Monday.
Two males who were carrying metal pipes were identified through video surveillance and witness descriptions, said Lacey Nygard, a University of Minnesota spokeswoman. Police issued them citations.
That first paragraph has had the local PC police all a-twitter: “Only two had pipes, not ten hammers”, because thugs never throw away pipes and crowbars when the police are chasing them, naturally.
As I’ve noted in the past in this blog, I am Minnesota’s best feminist.
Now, let’s be honest – I did it, back in blogging’s heyday (from about 2004 throug about 2009) mostly to troll lesser feminists; watching commenters at shriekblogs like “Mercury Rising” rage and thunder against a conservative guy declaring himself the “best feminist” made my heart well with joy.
But at the core, it’s still true. I do believe in the things first-wave feminist sought; things like my daughter and granddaughter being treated equally in the eyes of the law, and accorinding to their actual merits in society and the workplace.
And not only has that battle been largely won, but in some areas of society – the treatment of boys in schools and universities, the effects of family court and the “Violence Against Women Act”, the pendulum has swung a little too far.
But that’s “first-wave” feminism – the part that started with the right to vote, and continues with beating on Harvey Weinstein and Louis CK and Al Franken.
Then, there’s the kind of “Feminism” that seeks to turn women into an identity class and political bloc (progressive, natch). Some call it “Toxic Feminism”, but the technical term is “Second Wave Feminism”. Books could be written on the subject (indeed, they have been – scads of them, mostly garbage).
And in reading the bleatings of the “Feminist Identity” movement over the years, I got the same feeling I used to get when I was beset by angry junior high kids; the solipsistic grasp of the world, the same echo-chamber logic, the same grounding in a world that exists only in fantasy, the same bottomless entitlement.
Camille Paglia noticed the same thing:
My favorite period in feminism has always been the 1920s and 1930s, when American women energized by winning the vote gained worldwide prominence for their professional achievements. My early role models, Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, were fierce individualists and competitors who liked and admired men and who never indulged in the tiresome, snippy rote male-bashing that we constantly hear from today’s feminists. I am an equal opportunity feminist who opposes special protections for women. What I am saying throughout my work is that girls who are indoctrinated to see men not as equals but as oppressors and rapists are condemned to remain in a permanently juvenile condition for life. They have surrendered their own personal agency to a poisonous creed that claims to empower women but has ended by infantilizing them. Similarly, boys will have no motivation to mature if their potential romantic partners remain emotionally insecure, fragile, and fearful, forever looking to parental proxies (like campus grievance committees or government regulators) to make the world safe for them.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll no doubt say it again – the biggest problem with Ilhan Omar isn’t that she’s Muslim. It’s that she’s a progressive who’s serving as a role model for other immigrants to suck them into the world of intersectional, dysfunctional, identity-obsessed modern progressivism.
Those who think school massacres and “Assault weapons” are inextricably tied together haven’t read the story of the Bath, Michigan massacre, which happened 92 years ago this morning.
I wrote at some length about it a few years back.
While gun control laws are short-sighted and sclerotic (even if you presume “preventing crime” is their motive, and I do not), but evil is nimble and creative.
A friend of the blog sent me this; it’s a map showing the most-common birth country for immigrants, by state, excluding Mexico.
And with most states, you see either what would appear to be the effects of random distribution according to economic forces (the fairly even spreading of Indians, driven heavily by immigration of engineers, academics and other technicians), proximity (Philipinos in the West, Canadians in the North, Cubans in Florida), one that stumps me (Germans in New Mexico?)…
…and Somalis in Minnesota.
Why, it’s almost as if a political movement decided to import an entire class of voters and concentrate them in a swing-y state, and indoctrinate them into a multi-generational voting bloc or something.
.
Babyon Bee may be America’s most credible news source.
Jeff Koons’ Rabbit has sold for $91 million dollars.
It’s a three foot tall steel casting made from an impression of…a balloon rabbit.
It’s the sort of thing that gets the usual people huffing and puffing the usual blandishments – but not everyone is kissing up to the artist or the buyer. This from – who else – NPR’s Neda Ulaby:
ULABY: Jed Perl, another distinguished art critic, is even more grossed out than Jerry Saltz by the sale. Perl doesn’t even like the sculpture. Here’s how he describes the most expensive piece of art by a living artist.
PERL: It’s a metal molding of a plastic blow-up toy.
ULABY: Perl finds the smooth, faceless “Rabbit” emotionally empty to the point of being dead. But plenty of other people see a sense of humor in the sculpture and in its highly polished surface, a reflection of our increasingly impersonal and overhyped world.
Well, I certainly see humor in the fact that something this trite has people this completely bonkers.
Is anyone but me working on a polished-steel casting of a tulip bulb, just out of pure ironic commentary? (Liberals – ask you economically-literate parents).
Last week, amid news of several states’ abortion laws (intended to provoke SCOTUS-ready legal challenges to Roe V. Wade), one-time “actress” Alyssa Milano declared a “sex strike”.
It fared about as well as you’d expect.
And Milano – whose movie credits include “Who’s The Boss”, [NOTE TO MITCH: TRY TO CARE ABOUT ALYSSA MILANO’S “ACTING CAREER” LONG ENOUGH TO GET A LIST IN HERE BEFORE YOU PUBLISH THIS], and, uh, “Who’s The Boss”, reacted, well, about as well as you’d expect:
With states continuing to restrict abortions despite her #SexStrike protest, Alyssa Milano became so furious that she destroyed her own property, she admitted on Twitter Wednesday.
“I just threw my phone across the room. Cracked the screen. Read this. Please,” Milano tweeted, linking to CBS News story about an 11-year-old girl who couldn’t get an abortion because of Ohio’s “heartbeat bill.”… “Heartbeat bills,” which prohibit most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, have passed in four states this year, and Alabama lawmakers on Tuesday voted to effectively outlaw the procedure entirely. Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, was expected to sign the legislation.
Although none of the laws have gone into effect amid legal challenges, pro-choice advocates fear they will push the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark 1972 ruling enshrining the right to abortion.
She’s a former child star, and not used to getting her way. But then, progs are largely the same.
…but they can’t catch everything:
Remember to not put it on your face https://t.co/KfeEtTI1Hw
— Adam Trahan (@AdamTrahan) May 16, 2019
I don’t cry much – but I love, love, love this video of a progressive pro-infanticide snowflake trying to argue that she’s above the law, that there’s a different set of rules for progressives in campus…
…and then…slowly…
I so so so love a happy ending.
The gun control measures that “have 90% support” failed in conference committee yesterday, after having to be buried in the House Public Safety omnibus finance bill because the DFL didn’t have the votes to pass them as standalone bills, even in the Metrocrat-dominated House.
And I hope, hope, hope that the DFL keeps running with that “90% support line” in the Senate elections next year.
“Infinite Elgintensity” is a comically-arrogant and usually hilarious lawyer and Youtube bodybuilding videoblogger…
…who does some of the best commentary about the Social Justice militia out there, on the side.
I say that to point out that while I thought about writing something about Burger King’s self-parody-ingly “woke” Unhappy Meal campaign, once I saw IE’s video take, I gave up and decided to punt to him. Language not safe for work, btw:
(His two cents on the Gillette fiasco were worth at least a nickel as well)
And it makes me wonder – will there come a time when Millennials get tired of people not only walking on eggshells around their seemingly paper-thin collective skin, but talking and advertising down to it?)
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Last Summer, the Associated Press reported 40% of families struggled to meet at least one of their basic needs. The story was based on a press release by the Urban Institute. And what was the biggest problem for struggling families? Cost of medical care. Why? Because Obama-care destroyed health insurance. This week, CBS recycled that storywithout bothering to mention the story was six months old and based on data that’s 18 months old, and also without mentioning the latest employment numbers. I’m all for recycling, but it’s almost as if the media aren’t really interested in the truth, only in bashing a Republican administration.
Joe Doakes
And if you’ve ever been around reporters at a bar, you know they’re not carbon-neutral, shall we say.
It almost seems that Big Media is working hand in glove with Big Left to pass a narrative to low-information but high-emotion voters.
That’s just crazy talk.
Right?
The Who’s rock opera “Tommy” turns 50 this year.
Kyle Shaeffer has a retrospective:
Yes, Tommy is very 1960s. Pinball competitions and psychedelic acid trips are not exactly hallmarks of today’s world. But of course, what makes the album sotimeless is the music. From great singles such as “Pinball Wizard,” “I’m Free,” and “The Acid Queen” to the more intricate musical tapestry and recurring themes laid out in the five-minute overture, this is an album one can, and should, listen to front-to-back in one sitting.
While hailed as a triumph by most critics upon its release, Tommy did have its detractors. Some found the theme overly twisted and its ideas of physical and sexual abuse and subjecting children to acid trips just too distasteful. Even at the ripe old age of 23, when he began work on the project, Pete Townshend was not a simple man. It should be noted that to compose songs for the two most disturbing parts of the opera, “Cousin Kevin” and “Fiddle About,” Townshend asked bassist John Entwistle to do the honors. Having been sent by his parents to live with a clinically insane grandmother for two years as a child, they brought up too many dark memories better left to his autobiography.
I discovered The Who about the same time I discovered pop music – I was a moody adolescent, and Pete Townsend was a moody arrested adolescent, so it wasn’t a huge stretch. I think I was 15 when I first checked out Tommy from the library. I did in fact sit down and learn the whole thing on guitar – I probably could have played it from memory, almost, at one point.
And I thought – next year, Tommy will be closer to the end of World War I than to the present day. Or,, to put it another way, neither were all that long ago, really…
As I remind pouty millennials, the state of the world has never been better.
A lower percentage of the human race is beset by war or famine than at any time in history.
For the first time in history, obesity is a bigger problem than famine.
But sometimes, you get a cold, hard reminder that not everything is working out.