…to figure out how to rephrase something like “the Democrats know they can say any bull crap they want without fear of consequences, because well the typical Democrat is a college educated person, they are ill-informed and gullible” into the form of a “Berg’s Law“.
Because we need it now more than ever:
Literally nobody who matters treats and ectopic pregnancy or a miscarriage the same as an elective abortion.
We’re being asked to watch out for signs our political, market and social leadership are thinking about threatening democracy.
In this case, by media historial Michael Beschloss:
OK. I’m on it. Let’s get started:
Let’s see to these, shall we?
If you lelt them babble on long enough, they always prove you right:
By the way – newspaper editorial cartoonists take a test when they’re interviewing, measuring their knowledge of current events, history, and their understanding of the ins and outs of American society.
If they score over 50%, they get a job in the warehouse.
Under? Cartooning.
Steve Sack is gone – but stupid is eternal .
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
A judge ruled some of Minnesota’s restrictions on abortion are unconstitutional under the Minnesota state constitution, which offers broader protection of privacy rights than the federal constitution in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision.
I have not read Judge Gillespie’s 140-page opinion. Submitted for your reading pleasure.
Joe Doakes
I’m waiting for the movie.
To: Scott Jensen/Matt Birk
Please, please, please: if you happen to win the Governors race, promise to release the full, unredacted records from the state’s “Covid snitch line”
Because I want to find every single one of these backstabbing weasels.
People often would send in lists of “non-essential” businesses that remained open or weren’t strictly following masking requirements, according to files from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA).
Another complaint reported on people for purchasing non-essential items at a convenience store in White Bear Lake. “Customers are coming and saying, ‘I’m bored and needed to get out of the house.’ They buy lottery tickets, a candy bar, a soda … those items are not ‘essential.’”
I was about to write“This might not be my better self speaking“.
But I think everybody’s better self wants a chunk out of these people, too.
On the one hand, I try not to spend much money in MInneapolis. And riding the Vomit Comet, or taking my car, downtown isn’t something I do lightly anymore. Of course, I don’t like to reward First Avenue for their demented vaccine policies or having soaked up a bunch of transfers of taxpayer money to them during the pandemic.
And while some of the best memories of my life took place in that building, the staff and management don’t much care about that, or them.
On the other hand:
There’s a part of me that wants to reward them, in some small way, for packing the gear to offend the alphabet people, while in downtown Minneapolis.
Decisions, decisions.
To: Lieutenant Governor Flanagan
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: This…
Lieutant Governor Flanagan,
About this appearance, on a local, uh, livestream, I guess?
I have so many questions.
Baaaaaaaaaaahb: For starters: Does anyone really care how you dress? And by “anyone”, I don’t mean “Baaaaaaahb from FRIDley” – although we’ll come back to him, and to there. You’re a public figure. You’re going to get, uh, “Feedback”.
But you are one of the four most powerful people in MInnesota; you are arguably the most powerful Lieutenant Governor in recent Minnesota history, since the Governor only serves at the pleasure of the extreme “progressive” caucus you lead. Beyond that, yoiu’re a member of the political class, from a social echo chamber in you can do pretty much anything you want, without any consequences whatsoever (and, indeed, have done just that). You (and your family) have a lifetime sinecure, on the taxpayer’s dime. You could wear aluminum foil pants and a 2LiveCrew t-shirt, or pretty much anything but a MAGA cap, with complete impunity.
(Indeed – given that you’ve never, not once in your life, worked in the private sector, you are in the very rare position of never having had to obey any sort of conventional dress code, outside whatever rules the MN House of Representatives imposes – and if you had any problems about any rules you had to follow on that steppingstone to power, the record is silent).
So even if some (fictional?) “Baaaaaaaaaahb from FRIDley” dunks on your attire – so what?
Does it affect you, your life, your living, your power, in any way?
Because if not, it isn’t unreasonable to think you’re doing it to drum up some phony grievance, a bloody shirt of phony victimization for one of the most powerful, entitled people in Minnesota to wave about. .
Beyond that?
FRIDley?: I was struck by the contempt you clearly felt for Baaaaaaaaahb from Fridley. I was more struck by the laugn your audience shared with you about the reference.
You seem to feel a palpable contempt for people who aren’t like you and your neighbors in the leftist echo chamber, and to feed off the contempt you, plural, feel for them.
Why is that?
That is all.
There are times I miss the old website “Stuff White People Like“.- a satirical, often hilarious look at the foibles of generally upper middle class, educated, urban honkies. It became a best selling book, chronicling the gentle social satire of a much less divisive time – the George W. Bush administration.
Will come back to that.
Last week, after an hours long standoff that allegedly began, and continued, with random gun fire fired blindly through the walls into neighboring apartments, police snipers apparently killed Tekle Sundberg, aman who (let’s be solicitors) was apparently mentally ill, and (let’s be honest) had apparently been terrorizing the other residents of that apartment block for quite some time.
I’m not equipped to comment on the merits of the police action; while we have passed the statutory three day limit imposed by birds 18th law, The Twin Cities media just doesn’t do a good job of covering stories where facts and progressive narrative intersect. Like the Christine Rusczyk shooting, this is is going to be a long, ugly ride.
What I am equipped to comment on, though, is the behavior of perhaps the most loathsome group of people in society today – Woke, Overeducated, Middle-class Progressive White Activists. (Hereafter WOMPWAs).
And one of the things WOMPWAs like is standing around in groups of like-minded people, preaching to the infidels. Sometimes they are called protests, sometimes visuals – and, more accurately, group virtue signaling.
Which is what they were doing on Friday, until of Mr. Sundberg’s victims – Arabelle Foss-Scarabella, a single of mother of two who lived next-door to the late Mr. Sundberg – arrived on the scene:
“It’s not the time”, one of them progsplained a woman…
…who’d been protecting her kids from this:
There is plenty of evidence that Sundberg was deeply mentally ill.
There is even more evidence that WOMPWAS are equally mentally ill, in their own way.
Dick’s Sporting Good is sort of the Angela Merkel of big retail. They kowtow to the left, and have an unearned reputation for doing things well, but at the end of the day you can see literally every choice they ever made is wrong. They’ve tried to become a big-box REI.
They banned “modern sporting rifles” after Newtown – and again after (IIRC) Parkland (and have kept it going since then).
And, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, they signaled their progressive virtue to the world by planning to pay for employees abortions, as well as up to $4,000 in travel benefits to get to states that allow the procedure, if applicable.
Unmentioned: abortion is cheaper than childcare. Which Dick’s doesn’t help with in the least:
America First Legal (AFL) asked the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to open a civil-rights investigation into the company, alleging multiple violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on parental status…The legal group claimed that the retailer discriminated against mothers who decide not to terminate their pregnancy by not offering them an equivalent benefit. It called the project “wholly detached” from the company’s business of selling sporting goods and golf equipment, which in turn may “needlessly destroy shareholder value.”
“Subsidizing travel for an abortion, while denying an equivalent benefit to a mother welcoming a new baby, is perverse and unlawful. Using racial balancing and quotas in hiring and promotion, as the company claims that it does, has been illegal for decades. DICK’S management is an avatar for the rot and danger of corporate wokeness,” AFL Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight Reed D. Rubinstein said in a statement.
My problem: There are so many “woke” companies to boycott – but I have been avoiding all of them for other reasons for a long, long time. I wiped Dick’s off my shopping list in 2013, and it never got back.
What’s a guy to do?
BLM harpy crashes a block party in the neighborhood that’s actually been complaining loudly enough to get the Governor’s attention.
Gets told – in the middle of “woke”, “progressive” downtown Minneapolis’s condo-land – to take it elsewhere.
The push back against the stormtroopers of the extreme left is starting slowlyi – and from some unlkely (and let’s be honest, safe to them) places rooted in left-wing privilege.
But it’s starting.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I’ve been working on a movie script for an action adventure film. I made sure to be Woke and Diverse to avoid rejection for those reasons.
***
The top 100 richest people on the planet are mostly old straight White men who hate women, minorities, LGBTQ+ and want them to die, with a couple of Asian and Middle Easterners for diversity but no Blacks because Slavery). They meet at a mountain resort in Idaho hosted by an oil tycoon and guarded by the militia. He tells the group that evolution sorts winners from losers and they are the winners who deserve to rule the planet. He proposes to divide the Earth into kingdoms responsible for local administrative affairs operating under a global empire to resolve differences and fairly allocate resources.
Someone points out the public won’t stand for it. No, but they won’t have a choice. The 100 Kingdoms won’t need as many servants as we have population so we’ll reduce the population to a manageable and sustainable level. It’ll be easy since we control the media and the military. Scare the public into giving up their rights by releasing a virus. Imprison dissenters (those who aren’t killed resisting arrest). Shut off natural gas to freeze them; ban them from media so they can’t communicate; shut off gasoline so they can’t travel; shut off diesel so they can’t get food farm to market; defund the police and stage a few false-flag incidents; let anger, panic, starvation and disease do the rest.
What if the people revolt? Order your troops to fire on them. Won’t the generals oppose us? Replace them with boot-lickers (promise to make a general into a Baron under your Kingship and he’ll willingly kill his entire family to serve you). Replace warriors with woke and trans time-servers so they’re no threat to our private security, which will be made up of former warriors serving to protect their families from the mobs we created.
How will we pay for it all? Just print money, flood the economy, inflation will impoverish citizens which will make them frightened and easier to manipulate.
How do you know this will work? We’ve been running beta tests for a couple of years, now. Covid lockdowns. Stimulus checks. Defunding the police. Crushing Canadian truckers and Danish farmers. Sri Lanka. We should be able to destroy the present world order and replace it with The 100 Kingdoms in about five years. Who’s on board?
Somehow, The Good Guys find out about the plan and Our Hero is assigned to stop them. I won’t tell you the rest because I don’t want to spoil the surprise.
***
I shopped the script around to several movie studios but they keep telling me there’s no market for documentaries.
Maybe if I change the setting, make it Sci Fi taking place on a planet far, far away and a long time ago, with space ships and laser beams?
Joe Doakes
It’s just crazy enough to work.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:l
Best possible news for our nation: Lesko Brandon kicks out 60,000 unvaxx military members. All those trained professional warriors just became part of The Resistance. It’s not only us Wolverines anymore. Excellent.
Meanwhile, the military is reducing standards again, desperate to find bodies to replace the trained professional warriors they just let go.
Civilian gun sales continue unabated, the better to face off against Lesko Brandon’s Wokesters in Uniform. The next Insurrection should be a real doozy.
Joe Doakes
I’m going to break with Joe on this one for a bit. I’m going to suggest that if we ever have a real insurrection, the military will be the least of the problems, as they are overwhelmingly not drawn from the “blue“ elites.
As Robert Kaplan noted in his excellent (albeit a generation old) imperial Grunts, an 18-year-old from East Texas is 32 times as likely to serve in the military as one from New York City (and that New Yorker is much more likely a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx, or a blue-collar Irish kid from Staten Island, as opposed to a WASP trust fund baby from Manhattan).
Call me naive, but that’s where I put my faith.
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v. Wade and giving the job of dealing with abortion back to the Legislative branches of the state and federal governments, some Progressives have been shocked, shocked they tell you, to learn that Congress could have done exactly that, long ago. Twice, the Democrats had the presidency and majorities in Congress – and still they failed to do what that noted conservative powerhouse Ruth Bader Ginsberg told them they needed to do – codify abortion in statute.
In the first half of Bill Clinton’s first term, he had a unified Congress and a slim majority. They could have passed some form of abortion legislation.
But that would’ve involved compromise – at the time, giving on parental notification and waiting periods. And the extremists (of the day – seeing today’s pro-infanticide howler monkeys, “parental notification” and waiting periods almost seem quaint – would have none of that:
As CQ explained:
[FOCA] would have the effect of overturning existing state laws that require 24-hour waiting periods and would nullify some parental notice and consent laws for minors. Many House members and senators want to allow precisely those types of restrictions on abortion. But abortion rights groups and their allies in Congress are adamantly opposed to such limits.
FOCA’s legislative text made plain that no state could restrict abortion “at any time” in pregnancy so long as the procedure was needed to protect the “health” of the mother. The term “health” was left undefined, and an open amendment process could have narrowed its meaning, so that the bill would protect only those with serious physical — as opposed to psychological — health issues.
And again, in the first half of Barack Obama’s first term, there was a similar layout; the Democrats had the Presidency, the Congress, and a pro-Roe majority on the SCOTUS.
And again, the move came up against the extremists:
There were many Democrats back then, including Joe Biden, who opposed taxpayer funding but supported Roe, just as Joe Manchin does today. There were at least 20 pro-choice House Democrats who voted for an amendment limiting taxpayer funding, and at least three House Republicans who supported Roe (Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, Mary Bono Mack of California, and Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey).
If Pelosi had the muscle to get Obamacare through the House, why didn’t she try to ram through a bill protecting Roe? Three factors were at play. First, there were six sitting Supreme Court justices who supported Roe. Second, it had taken significant political capital to pass Obamacare, and a vote on FOCA would have been politically painful. Third, the same sorts of divisions that had killed FOCA in 1993 were still at play in Congress in 2009 — there was likely majority support for some right to abortion, just not for one as broad as FOCA’s.
So it may not have been easy – but given even the most minimal compromise, they could have headed off Dobbs.
But they didn’t. Apparently having a perennial bloody shirt to wave, and having an angry mob at their disposal, suits them.
So – when Justice Alito’s draft opinion on Dobbs leaked (I’m sure the FBI will be getting to that any day now), the Left and Media (ptr) furtively warned that gay marriage might be next.
Like Roe, Obergefell – the SCOTUS case that legalized same sex marriage nationwide – was an incursion into the Congress and the States’ enumerated powers. And, like Roe, it was another area where Democrats in Congress would need to:
And in theory, codifying same sex marriage should be much easier than abortion would have been:
Gay marriage is not the controversial issue that it was a few decades ago. The religious Right is not the force it once was — the Republican electorate, like the rest of the country, is increasingly secular and un-churched. As a result, its views on theologically informed issues such as marriage are more liberal: As of 2021, 55 percent of Republicans support same sex marriage. Among Americans writ large, support sat at 70 percent — a ten-point increase from 2015. In other words, it wouldn’t be politically toxic for Democrats to hold a vote on codifying same-sex marriage. If anything, as the progressive author Sasha Issenberg argued, a legislative push to codify Obergefell “might actually be politically wise for Democrats”: “The massive and still growing popularity of the gay-rights movement’s signal political achievement lets Democrats flip the script and make the culture wars work for them,” Issenberg wrote. “Reigniting the debate over same-sex marriage could give Democrats the perfect wedge issue.”
Pushing for same sex marriage right now could be as perfect a wedge for Democrats today as it was in Minnesota in 2012, when they used it to help crush the MNGOP in that very ugly year, taking down an otherwise popular Voter ID amendment initiative with it.
So – why don’t they?
Part of it, as Nate Hochman notes in the NR piece above, is that the Democrats may just be incompetent; they didn’t anticipate the weakness of Roe anymore than they did the collapse of Aghanistan.
Part of it? Keeping their voter base in a smugly-ill-informed panic suits them.
A few weeks back, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I knew the same thing everyone in the country who passed ninth grade civics, even if taught by a moonlighting football coach, knew; The decision didn’t “ban abortion“; it merely forces abortion proponents to do what gun rights supporters have had to do for the past 55 years; convince voters.
They, like us Second Amendment people, would have to go through the long, arduous, and provided ones cause is right, ultimately rewarding process of convincing people one voter, one legislator, one bill or issue at a time.
In some cases, I told people; “You keep throwing around polls saying 90% of the American people support abortion on demand. It should be a cakewalk“.
Of course, it might also mean having to make occasional compromises to convince those people.
Maybe this is the problem:
If this poll is accurate, the choice mob is going to have to make some concessions to get to that massive support they claim.
And as we saw in 1993/1994 and in 2009/2010, if there’s one thing abortion supporters hate, it’s any compromise at all, and even the flimsiest margin of the issue.
There are really two sides to the coin I’m looking at, hair: on the one hand, there’s nothing quite as pathetic as a group of people realizing that the information they’ve been given is deeply faulty.
On the other side of the coin, there’s nothing quite as dangerous as a bunch of people who have spent 50 years believing they’ve been entitled to get their way on every particular of an issue, not getting their way on any particular of the issue.
Democrats, nationwide and in Minnesota, are fixated on “Red Flag Laws”. In the wake of Uvalde, it’s become the flavor the the month for the grabbers, yet again – part of the endless cycle that the gun control movement has become.
Now, it’s hypothetically possible to create a Red Flag Law that could work. But it won’t, and can’t, be the Red Flag bill that the DFL keeps dragging out in the Minnesota legislature, which:
All that is bad enough.
But once you get to that, you come to the inevitable realization that if our mental health system can’t effectively intervene in a tragedy like this horrific s**t-show earlier this month, what do you think they can do about cases that present much more subtly, or with much more backstory ?
Here’s the saddest thing you’ll read today. An anthropology professor at UCLA is retiring early, another casualty of the mob.
The principal driver of the doublethink in my department and so many others at UCLA is fear of the woke faction.
Signs of this fear are omnipresent. Discussing whether to stop requiring the GRE (a standardized test, like the SAT) from applicants to our Ph.D. program, one colleague told a meeting of the biological anthropology subfield that he regarded the GRE as the most informative part of an applicant’s dossier, but that we had no choice but to vote to stop requiring it. Why? Because otherwise we would be regarded as racists. (I was the only person to vote against dropping the GRE requirement).
…
Why am I pessimistic? For a few reasons.
First, the younger faculty tend to be far more woke than their elders. Second, administrators and student protesters perform elaborately choreographed routines that inevitably end with the former enacting policies that they wanted to enact anyway, for which the latter’s public temper tantrums serve as a pretext. Third, now that standardized tests have been dropped from undergraduate application requirements, a growing number of students will be simultaneously unable to handle university level coursework, and predisposed to denounce their professors for heresy, having been chosen for admission on the basis on their leftist activism as high school students. Meanwhile, California’s K-12 schools are increasingly substituting mind-damaging political indoctrination for education.
…
The rise of alternative institutions, like the University of Austin and Ralston College, are very hopeful signs even though the work is slow-going. But until those new schools are built, I can’t bear to spend one more moment in a place that’s morally and intellectually bankrupt.
That’s it: I’m getting out.
Vast swaths of the culture have fallen behind the Woke Curtain. None more so than academia. Not surprising, since it was the incubator for this plague. I believe that eventually the woke madness will burn itself out because it is not a natural human state. But, untold damage will be done before that happens. Communism is a fair example. It is not natural for people to live effectively as prisoners in a police state and it couldn’t last, but it took a generation or two for the Iron Curtain to fall.
The young people whose heads are being filled with this swill are a lost cause. They won’t be reasoned with. They’ll continue to slither into society and infect the HR departments and faculty lounges and press rooms board rooms where they end up. We’ll have to wait till they fade from the scene, and that, sadly, will be a long time.
Deep thoughts from Chris Cillizza, circa 2015:
Joe Biden’s unique trait as a politician is — and always has been — his honesty. Sometimes that honesty gets him into varying degrees of trouble. Sometimes it makes it seem as though he’s the closest thing to a real person you could possibly hope for in politics.
This didn’t age too well, now did it? I can’t prove Cillizza’s childhood nickname wasn’t Corn Pop, or that he wasn’t at some point a classmate of Biden’s at the Naval Academy, but it’s a useful reminder that our betters have been carrying water for Ol’ Joe for a very long time now. There was more:
The Joe Biden on display with Colbert is the person who has inspired remarkable loyalty — over decades — from a tightknit group of staffers who would form the core of his presidential brain trust if he decided to run in 2016. It’s the guy who, for a time in 1987, was one of the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination. It’s who Barack Obama saw when he decided to pick Biden as his vice president in 2008.
1987. Do you remember why Biden fell from grace all those years ago? I suppose you could ask Neil Kinnock, whose speech Biden plagiarized. You could ask Barack Obama:
One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”
After the last 18 months, no one seriously doubts The Leader of the Free World’s ability in that realm.
David Mamet, the playwright and screenwriter, is among my favorite writers. (My other favorite to pull off that particular daily double is Tom Stoppard.)
In 2008, Mamet wrote a piece at the Village Voice entitled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’.” In it, he described the beginning of his journey away from conventional liberal beliefs.
And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
Today, of course, to view America as a pretty darn good place to live, and boy howdy aren’t we lucky that we do, is to the Left heresy.
In 2011, Mamet wrote a book entitled The Secret Knowledge in which he shared in his inimitable way where his intellectual journey had taken him in the intervening three years. The book was a collection of essays and in them Mamet summed up his effort to reconcile what, as Leftists do, had been assumed to be default and correct political views with what he observed.
This is the essence of Leftist thought. It is a devolution from reason to “belief”, in an effort to stave off a feeling of powerlessness. And if government is Good, it is a logical elaboration that more government power is Better. But the opposite is apparent both to anyone who has ever had to deal with Government, and, I think, to any dispassionate observer.
It is in sympathy with the first and in the hope of enlarging the second group that I have written this book.
This year Mamet published Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. Like The Secret Knowledge. It too is a collection of essays, many of which had appeared in the National Review. Many were written during the times when Covid policies ravaged what the disease had left untouched. Mamet recalls observing “a family of four, on mountain bikes, at five thousand feet, climbing an empty road in northern Nevada, all wearing masks.”
Here are a couple examples of his insights.
But the question occurs to me again: Why are Jews liberals? And I have come to a new answer. I used to think we voted for Democrats out of a millennial biblical occupation with justice, compassion and generosity. I no longer think so.
J.S. Mill wrote that give a man a choice of two tasks, one that will bring him renumeration if he works at it and the other that will pay him regardless of his effort, he will choose the second, take the free money, and employ his energy seeking additional benefits. We see Mill’s observation at work in welfare, unemployment, and other government subsidies. No amount of oversight will keep a recipient from taking the stipend and then finding a way to improve his lot off the books
Similarly, we Jews have two political choices: conservatism, counseling individual initiative; and liberalism, promoting statism, which is to say passivity and government support. But we Jews do not need help or direction in embracing self-reliance; it’s been all we’ve had for two thousand years. It’s our party trick. We’ve always been on our own.
Liberalism was attractive because it offered Jews something we did not have and for which we’ve always longed: the promise of inclusion, which is to say anonymity.
And this sister thought,
Observe that every conservative who employs the preface “This may not be politically correct but” is not only acknowledging but aiding the forces of thought control. These forces do not need to be acknowledged, and whether or not they are opposed, they must not be strengthened.
Napoleon said that if we want to know our opponent’s fears, we need merely observe that with which he seeks to terrify us. Leftists are terrified of exclusion from the mob and see, everywhere, the exclusion’s cost. Imprisonment, vituperation, bankruptcy of conservative opponents, the severity of their punishments fit not to the degree of their deviation (to the Left there are no degrees) but to their persistence, having been threatened and warned, in any deviation.
He recognizes the ugly face of Leftism because he lived it. There could be no better prophet. (For a typical reaction to Mamet’s apostasy, see here. Someone needs to change their sheets.)
And so, like King Lear, the liberal Left “decided” to grant “some” of the power they supposedly had to more “worthy” recipients – that is, those from whom it had been supposedly stolen.
But, again as with Lear, we see that the generous assignment of some of one’s power inevitably inspires its recipients to usurp the rest. Hitler ran a bluff on France in 1940, and the Bolsheviks could’ve been stopped in the suburbs of Moscow by a squad of police (see Minneapolis). King Lear thought himself generous and was beggared by those to whom he bequeathed his power.
Now our country is being eviscerated by the Marxist Left. Each battle they win emboldens them to escalate their activities: shaming becomes blacklisting; picketing becomes destruction; demonstrations become riots. Just as with taxes, all they want is all we got, and who could stop them? Enter Donald Trump.
He looked at the Left and informed us that he knew them of old: they were the same thugs, thieves, cheats and whores with whom he’d been doing business all his life. He was formed by the construction industry.
The Left wet the bed.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Modern Monetary Theory says the government can borrow and spend as much as it likes without consequences. If we can afford a gas tax holiday, why not an income tax holiday, a social security tax holiday, a liquor tax holiday?
Or is MMT a lie and the gas tax holiday simply at attempt at buying votes with taxpayer money?
Joe Doakes
It is, of course, a purely academic exercise, like so much of the policy big left has been foisting on this country for the past hundred years and change.
Berg’s Seventh Law – “When a progressive issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds” – has been getting a workout lately.
But this next bit – an LATimes response to last week’s Bruen decision at the Supreme Court – may be heading to the Berg’s Seventh Law Hall of Fame. [1]
I’ll let the Times own words do the talking:
Is “California” “ready”? Well, the state’s government clearly isn’t:
California Democrats are scrambling to craft and enact new legislation this week that would somehow salvage the requirement — assuming local law enforcement continues to enforce it — that residents get a permit before carrying a concealed weapon. Current law forces gun owners to show “good cause” for needing such a permit, and that is now unconstitutional.
And they can’t talk about the issue without a certain amount of gaslighting:
Nathan W. Jones leads the Bay Area chapter of the Black Gun Owners Assn. But until a few years ago, he wasn’t even into guns…on Thursday, while many were apoplectic over the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the rights of gun owners to carry a loaded weapon in public — throwing gun control laws in California and New York into limbo at a time when shootings are increasing — Jones was thoughtful.
On the one hand, he wants it to be easy for law-abiding citizens to be able to defend themselves “if and when the time arises.” But on the other hand, he’s a 50-year-old realist who knows that fear and hatred of Black people run deep in the United States, especially when we’re armed.
And this is based on…?
“There’s no overt racism when we go to the gun range, but we know how people are looking at us,” Jones said of the dozens of Black members who meet up to go shooting. “We know the things that people think.”
So, gaslighting it is. “We know what you’re really thinking?” Every signficant pro-2nd-Amendment group, at the national and federal levels, have welcomed the surge in black gun owners – whatever their reasons for joining the tribe.
The writer, Erika D. Smith, is certainly impressively ignorant on the substance of the issue:
And the other, truly weird thing is that race is now actually being used as an argument in support of loosening gun laws
Justice Clarence Thomas, in his opinion for the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen case, waxed philosophical about how the right to bear arms was crucial for the self-protection of Black people in the South during Reconstruction.
And how in 1868, Congress “reaffirmed that freedmen were entitled to the ‘full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty [and] personal security … including the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.’”
Meanwhile, a coalition of progressive organizations, including the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, the Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services, filed an amicus brief in the case, urging the Supreme Court to rule exactly as it did.
Their argument? That gun control laws in New York, like California, disproportionately harm Black and Latino people who carry guns for self-defense. They complained of clients who have been “stopped, questioned, and frisked,” and deprived of their livelihoods because they “exercised a constitutional right.”
“We represent hundreds of indigent people whom New York criminally charges for exercising their right to keep and bear arms,” they wrote. “For our clients, New York’s licensing requirement renders the Second Amendment a legal fiction.”
Smith – and the white LA progressives who edit and publish the LATimes who greenlit Smith’s piece – seem almost amazed to notice the one real thing that the gaslighting just can not deflect from:
But the governor and lawmakers could fail in their efforts, and the Supreme Court’s ruling could stand. And then, California could be forced to confront a reality that has long made many self-proclaimed liberals uncomfortable: Black people — potentially a lot of us — legally carrying guns in public.
Dig beneath the ongoing, lazy slander of all white America, and the McCarthyistic “white supremacists under every rock” rhetoric that’s become background noise in most “progressive’ writing; that’s the real fear. The only thing a white progressive fears, and needs to control, more than a black person is an armed black person.
And when they become armed, and realize that the honky at the range isn’t the problem…
[1] Note to Self: Create a Berg’s Seventh Law Hall of Fame.
“ACK-shu-ally, we’re not fifty states. We’re one country“.
Show of hands if you’ve heard at least one progressive, lodged far on the left side of civic education’s Dunning-Kruger curve, say something like that.
Among the many failures – or acts of sabotage – of modern American education, perhaps among the biggest, most dangerous shortcomings is the complete collapse of civics education.
Modern students seem to learn nothing aboujt:
With that in mind? Perhaps the Dobbs decision, and the court’s new-found originalism, are a big step in the right direction for a nation more divided in many ways than before the Civil War.
Because the alternative to a renewed federalism is a national divorce at best, and civil war at worst.
To: Democrats
From: Mitch Berg, whose common “irascible peasant” self-appelation has never seemed more on-target.
Re: You
Dear all Democrats,
Every once in a while, in front of a friendly audience, you slip and let the truth out.
In front of the NPR simps in 2016, for example, you said in as many words it was time for the media to put its finger – or arm, or butt – on the scale to tip the public against Donald Trump.
And now, from the (if you’ll pardon the expression) Colbert sixty minutes hate:
You can put most of what this woman says into the mouth of a spousal abuser – which really is a great metaphor for the modern Democrat party.
That is all.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is at REI, getting a handlebar cell phone carrier for hjs bike. He rounds the corner from the coffee cups, and runs into Avery LIBRELLE, who is shopping for…something? BERG tries to backpedal quietly away, but it’s too late.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Oh, shhhhhhhhure as I stand here today, it’s Avery…
LIBRELLE: Shut up. The Supreme Court just violated the separation of church and state, by allowing an educator to pray at school functions.
BERG: Well, you got a few of the facts right.
LIBRELLE: What would you think if a Muslim were to throw down a prayer mat on the fifty yard line and delay the kickoff while he prayed to Mecca?
BERG: Coach Kennedy didn’t interrupt the game with an ostentatious prayer in the middle of the field. It was a personal observance, after the game, involving him and only him. Other than the fact that it took place on the field around people, it couldn’t have been less public.
LIBRELLE: It caused an uproar.
BERG: It caused a small group of progressives to go to the school board and, after years of such observances, change the district policy to ban “demonstrative religious activity, readily observable to (if not intended to be observed by) students and the attending public.”
LIBRELLE: So what would you think if a Muslim did something like that?
BERG: Have you actually been in the Midway Target? The Roseville Walmart? Seeing Muslims throwing down their mats at prayer time in an out of the way part of the store is nothing new at all. I care about it no more than a Christian praying whereever they want.
LIBRELLE: Yeah, but what if a non-Christian kid sees the demonstration, by one of their school’s authority figures? That’s going to put pressure on them. (Nods smugly)
BERG: So let me get this straight: a Christian school staffer, praying, privately but in public view, is…
LIBRELLE: Oppressive, fascist and probably white supremacist and racist.
BERG: Mkay. In the meantime, a non-binary or LGBTQ teacher telling kids the details of their personal and identity’s sexual orientation, including how their various orientations practice intimacy, to kids of all beliefs, including Christian and even Muslim kids, telling them there are infinite genders and no real notion of masculine and feminine, when they’re still at an age where the parents haven’t had “the talk” with them themselves yet?
LIBRELLE: Essential social education, to make up for the sloth and incompetence of parents.
BERG: Aaaah…
(They are interrupted by an employee)
EMPLOYEE: (to BERG): Can I help yo, sir?
BERG: (waves box with holder). Good to go.
EMPLOYEE: (to LIBRELLE) And you, si…uh, maa… (looks at BERG, startingi to panic a big. BERG shrugs)
LIBRELLE: I need a new seat for my electric recumbent bike.
BERG: So you, the big environmentalist, have switched to a coal-powered bike?
LIBRELLE looks up, alarmed, stammering, giving BERG time to make his break.
And SCENE.
I don’t wanna interrupt a guy when he’s on a roll, but has anyone told Billy Joe Armstrong – the guy who last had a hit about 20 years ago, calling George W. Bush voters “American Idiots” – that the UK has more restrictive abortion laws than the US?
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails about yesterday‘s New York Supreme Court ruling:
The New York State Supreme Court struck down a New York City ordinance allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections. What a bunch of haters.
The Boston Tea Party was based on “no taxation without representation.” The Declaration of Independence affirms that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. The Constitution lays out the formula to determine consent, through voting. The consistent underlying principle is that the people who will be affected by the rules imposed by the government ought to have a say in who makes up that government. And illegal aliens hiding in the city are affected by the rules adopted by the City Council as much as anybody else, so they ought to have a say in who sits on the City Council as much as anybody else.
And why should it end there? Citizens of foreign nations are affected by laws made in the United States Congress: foreign aid payments to their nations; wars waged in their countries; immigration encouraged or not. Why doesn’t every citizen of every nation get to vote for our Congress?
Why should they have to vote at all? That’s a heavy burden for someone who doesn’t read or speak the language, can’t complete the Request for Absentee ballot, can’t afford postage to send it back on time. Why not let US-based voter advocates cast ballots for them? They could bring ballots by the suitcase full, helpfully completed on behalf of all the citizens of the world.
And why bother with paper ballots for all those people? Think of the expense and wasted time, running them through the machines again and again until the right guy wins. Why not simply program the machine to give the desired result and be done with it?
It’s a slippery slope the court has chosen, this notion that only certain people should be allowed to vote. Probably a bunch of MAGA Trumpers on the court. Or worse, Open Borders Libertarians.
Joe Doakes
Don’t be giving Steve Simon any ideas.
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