Do pseudo-religious cults reflect the times in which they develop? Or does popular culture make the various cults the symbols of the times?

I’m sure there’s an online sociologist or philosopher, somewhere, who has thought this before – feel free to point them out – but what the heck.  It’s my blog, I’ll derive if I want to.

Think about the major cults that’ve made news over the past five or six decades:

The Manson Family formed in the Sixties – communal pseudo-hippies, living on LSD, intertwined with California popular culture – and in some ways marked the end of the Sixties.

The Peoples Temple – like an EST seminar run amok?  All about the seventies. 

Heavens Gate?  Even though it ended with a mass suicide in ’97, it flourished (after a fashion) in the eighties, for reasons that seemed to match the decade. 

The Branch Davidians?   Synonymous with the ’90s – in a decade of groups that fought the law and the law won, they were the big kahuna of them all. 

The 2000s?   My theory breaks down a little here, unless you count militant Wahhabi Islam which, conveniently for my theory, dominated American culture more than any cult in history. 

And with the war over and lost, we can go back to normal…

…well, not “normal”.  

It’s all setup for my theory that this particular cult may be perfectly set to define the 2020s, or vice versa, so far.

Joe Doakes formerly of Como Park emails:

The President issues Executive Orders which apply to the whole nation.  Opponents shop around for a sympathetic judge to block the orders.A federal judge for the District of Massachusetts blocked the federal employee buy-out offer at the request of employee unions.

A federal judge for the Western District of Washington blocked the Executive Order against birthright citizenship.

One federal judge for the District of Columbia has blocked the DOGE team from scrutinizing Treasury Department payments, and a different one in that district has blocked release of the names of FBI agents assigned to the J6 investigation. 

And that’s just in the last two weeks.  The Trump administration faced 22 nation-wide injunctions in his first term.

How can we have a nation of fair and impartial equal justice under the law, if judges in random jurisdictions can overturn the law of the whole land at whim? 

Justice Thomas criticized the practice of nation-wide injunctions in Trump v. Hawaii, saying, “. . . if their popularity continues, this Court must address their legality.”  Seems to me that time has come.

Joe Doakes

That time has definitely come.

After almost five years, the City of Minneapolis “plans” to “do” “something” with the former Speedway in “George Floyd Square”.

I’m adding emphaiss to the quote below for a reason:

The City of Minneapolis has received four applications to redevelop The People’s Way, which was formerly a Speedway gas station at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue.

The gas station turned into a gathering place in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. For the past four years, the community has used the site for twice-daily meetings, annual events honoring George Floyd, gardening and other activities, according to the city’s Request for Qualifications presentation.

So who are these four groups?

City Councilmember Andrea Jenkins represents the area and she told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS not much is known about what the private groups would do with the property, but said it is a positive step toward progress and growth at George Floyd Square.

I’m gonna guess we know one thing about them: They’re dues-paying members of Minneapolis’s DFL/DSA non-profit/industrial complex.

And if you look at Rise & Remember, Minnesota Agape Movement, P3 Foundation and Urban League Twin Cities, you’ll realize not only that nobody ever went broke betting against the City of Minnepolis transferring money to its political class, but that whatever “happens” at George Floyd Square is going to be both exquisitely expensive and a magnet for blight.

Rise and Remember – run, among other people, by George Floyd’s aunt.

Minnesota Agape Movement – headquartered in George Floyd Square. Their “team” page is blank.

P3 Foundation – if I’ve got the right one, they appear to be national nonprofit that is into all sorts of things.

The Urban League needs no introduction.

Anyway – it’s going to wind up being a “community space” that turns into a graffity-coated monument to blight.  But the non-profits will get their payoff.  So tomayto/tomahto, I guess.

So – AlphaNews and Liz Collin released Minneapolis has Fallen a little over a year ago.

One of the signal scenes in the movie happened when Assistant Chief Blackwell testified that the “Maximal Restraint Technique” – which a series of current and former MPD officers testified was part of MPD traininig, and which Chauvin’s mother pointed out in her son’s MPD training manual – was not part of MPD training.

Blackwell is suing Collin and Alpha over this claim. 

To wit:

I’m more against police brutality than most conservatives – but to a non-lawyer, it seems like the evidence pointing toward a new trial is approaching critical mass.

Berg’s Seventh Law has been getting a workout this week.

For starters – as I pointed out all through the run-up to the election – the Democrats and DFL jabbered relentlessly about voting to “save democracy”, while promising to gut free speech, freedom of conscience, the right to self-defense, privacy and separation of powers.

And perhaps it’s good news for 2026 that they seem to have learned nothing:

In the meantime, notwithstanding the 16 years of babbling about “impending waves of right-wing violence”, it is inevitably the left that leans into it:

I’ve been a Trump skeptic all along.  But if I’d known that Trump’s win eight years ago were going to bring out Big Left’s true inner nature this hard, I might have opened my mind up a little earlier. 

One of the more satisfying stories of this past year was watching the accelerating decay of the mainstream media’s influence over society.

And this was one of my favorite examples:

Watching the orwellian “Joy” campaign get pelted with rhetorical rocks and garbage by the commoners was one of the greatest, er, joys I’ve had, at least politically, in recent years.

I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Anderson Cooper’s New Years Eve broadcasts from Times Square since Kathy Griffin was still an A-lister – or, maybe, starting her descent toward the Z-list.

But perhaps the biggest story of this past year, along with and tied to Trump’s re-election, is the change in the culture over the past few months.

Suddenly, it’s…well, not “safe”, per se, to attack our narratives’ sacred cattle. But people are starting to play around with the idea.

Which brings us to Whitney Cummings – a comedian about whom I’ve never felt any compulsion to comment at all [1].

Can anyone imagine a comic, other than Dave Chapelle or Ricky Gervains, riffing on mainstream TV like this, even a year ago?

The good news is, it feels like the cultural pendulum is swinging.

The other news, neither good nor bad but definitely worth paying attention to:  these swings need to be solidified.  Talk about Trump ushering in permanent change is only not premature if we make it stick. 

[1] That’s not entirely true. Cummings briefly had a TV series, “Whitney“. I saw about ten minutes of it, and it was pretty dreadful, but somehow it eked out two seasons.

Anyway – Ed Morrissey walked into the studio and said “I just heard, Whitney’s dead”. I responded. “Thank God. It’s about time”.

Ed looked at me, a little horrified.  “The TV show?”, I asked?

“No.  Whitney Houston.”

Vivek Ramaswamy ruffled a whole lot of feathers over this past weekend with his comments about the culture of South Asian immigrants.

Stipulated in advance – there is a lot of abuse of H1B visas, to provide a relatively cheap and, by modern standards, just a little indentured labor force. That may need some fixing.

But when you start comparing second-generation Indian immigrants?

He’s not really wrong.

You should open and read the entire tweet – but I’m going to pull this quote:

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers…[Families should emphasize] movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

That drew some, er, sporty responses from what media calls “MAGA”. No doubt you’ve heard ’em.

But if you leave aside the abuse of H1B visas, and the pretty spotty record of outsourcing engineering and software development to India (whose engineering culture is often well-credentialed but stiff, hierarchical and frequently more focused on legalistic i-dotting and t-crossing than results), he’s not wrong.

This guy – one of the less-useless voices in academia – puts it well (and again, you’d do well to read the entire tweet):

But again, I’ll pull the quote:

An entertaining aspect of the past few days’ race war is that the elite Asian/Indian immigrant critique of middle-class white American scholastic culture (“You guys are lazy af, and focus totally on playing football and getting laid”) is IDENTICAL to the middle-class white American critique of Black and Mexican scholastic culture.

As a political scientist, there’s an important point here: bigotry doesn’t just go in one direction. For most people, the more forward-caste person – the bastard ahead of them in society – will always be a ruthless, stiff, amoral, dead inside, thieving, SOB who is a trash lover. But, the more poor and rural person? A dumb, inbred, animalistic, backward, criminal, low-IQ, ridge-runner.

And it should hardly bother “MAGA” too much to notice that Ramaswamy agrees with them – modern American academic culture in general would have to stand on tiptoes to get to “mediocrity”, and that pathology is even leaking into the once-sacrosanct “STEM” fields.

But it’s not just academic culture.

Immigrants, as Reilly notes, have always had to kick it up a notch to get to “even” in America.  Indians – like Chinese, Koreans, VIetnamese, Philipinos, and before them Italilans, Jews, Germans and all the others, all the way back – have done it exceptionally well. 

The concentration of Indians in technology (and, this past few years, politics) should be taken as a challenge – to our education system, sure, but to our family culture as well.  

SCENE: The rotunda at the Minnesota State Capitol.   A press conference is underway.  Standing at the podium, in front of a “Satanic” display, are three members of the Twin Cities Church of Satan:

• Joshua Micah GUMPKE – a tall, morbidly obese 30-something man with thick, unkempt back hair,  and a black neckbeard.  His arms are covered with “sleeves” of occult-looking tattoos.  He wears a black occult-themed T-shirt, stained with cheeto dust, fresh and otherwise. 
• Eva BACHMANN-DUMPF – a morbidly obese twenty-something woman with long straight blond hair.  She is wearing a different black occult-themed t-shirt, and sports a small pentagram tattooed under her left ear. 
• Edmund POCKERT – A short, wiry man with a fringe of white hair snaking around the back of his head to meet his white beard.  He wears a visibly worn suit. 

A smattering of reporters are gathered.

POCKERT:   I’m Edmund Pockert, the legal counsel for the Twin Cities Church of Satan. 

GUMPKE AND BACHMANN-DUMPF: (awkwardly, loudly) Hail Satan!

POCKERT:  Mr. J-Talon666 and Ms. QueenOfTheDark will now answer questions.

CHANNEL 11:   Mr. and Ms. What? 

POCKERT:  Those are the names our representatives go by. 

CHANNEL 9:  So what’s going on with this display?

GUMPKE:  This display is ack-shu-ally our way of striking a blow for religious pluralism.

BACHMANN-DUMPF:  We love to notice the hypocrisy of Christians who melt down when other people exercise religious freedom. 

MPR NEWS:  When you say “melt down”…?

BACHMANN-DUMPF:  Christians always have a cow and melt down when we assert our rights. 

POCKERT:  Always. 

ALPHA NEWS:  So, how do you respond to allegations that the “church of Satan” is less about religious freedom and more about getting a juvenile rise out of mainstream Christians.

BACHMANN-DUMPF:  Well, it is their own fault.  They always have a cow and melt down and freak out go into emotional tailspin and get loud and crazy and deranged and lose their shi…

GUMPKE:  They are very predictable. 

CENTER OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT:   So a local blogger and talk host left this satirical response to your display:

(GUMPKE and BACHMANN-DUMPF stand, gobsmacked and confused, for a moment. )

GUMPKE:   (finally breaking the silence) Well, this is typical.   A Christian freaking out…

CHANNEL 4:  This doesn’t appear to be – what was your term – “freaking out”.

ALPHA NEWS:  Yeah, more like “satire” or “parody”, speaking to the notion that “Satanism” exist just to try to mock and ridicule regular Christians.

BACHMANN-DUMPF:  Is this even legal?  Can they do that?

POCKERT:  (nods silently)

GUMPKE:   It’s our view that this just contributes to the climate of hate against Satanists…

PIONEER PRESS:  But it’s just mockery – not a whole lot different than this display, itself

POCKERT:  OK, this converence is over.

(The three shuffle away from the podium).

And SCENE

“Life is full of ironies – if you’re stupid”
 — PJ O’Rourke

Remember 2010-2012?   When Democrats snarled that there was no way, no how that there were “death panels” buried in Obamacare?

And those of us with some experience in the healthcare industry responded “of course, there are, and have been ever since government poked its nose into controlling the healthcare system”?

The “people” jumping for joy over the murder of Brian Thompson for running a company that administers the metaphorical institutional “death panel”, exacty as foretold, are the same class of gerbils who said that was no way, no how anything Obamacare was about. Ever!

1. Create a problem:

2. Keep on letting it stew. Let the “steam” build:

3. Go “I’m shocked, shocked that there’s a crime problem!

4. “Ride to the rescue” with a meaningless band-aid that doesn’t come close to addressing the cultural crisis you, yourselves, fomented:

Of course I’m not the first or only one to notice this:

Apparently “chaos” and “crime” aren’t polling well enough to overcome the loss of the ‘Trifecta’.

Am I the only one that heard about Taylor Lorenz’s “Joy” at the murder of Brian Thompson…

…and thought “that certainly puts a new spin on the Harris campaign’s theme?”

• Freedom is slavery?
• 2+2=5?
• Murder is joy?

One “joy” I try to deny myself is excessive schadenfreud. Pinky swear.

But I’ll confess, I feel quite a bit of it seeing Lorenz’s sociopathic level of self-unawareness splashed about the place:

Less schadenfreud, Mitch.  Less schadenfreud. 

The woke mob is doing its best to try to simpify the Daniel Penny / Jordan Neely case into a matter of “if we’d only given him what he needed, he’d be alive and impersonating Michael Jackson today”.  

For all its squawking about humanism, modern progressivism tries to boil humanity down into a series of material equation; if you give a “black or brown body” (as opposed to a human) food and a roof over their head and 12 years of an approved curriculum, they’ll turn out just fine. 

It’s a seductive reductionism at best, and kind of cynically inhuman at worst. 

But it’s not purely a product of our cultural left. 

Among the many offshoots of the Penny/Neely case is the emergence of Neely’s father – who by all documentary accounts was a pretty horrible excuse for a father, even by “father of mentally ill drug addicted street person” standards.  He’s come out of the cold to file a lawsuit against Penny.  It’s the New York way. 

Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire commented about it on his podcast last week, as the suit was filed. 

Walsh pointed out the fact that the senior Neely was, by all the available evidence, a bad, mostly absent father who appears to be looking to cash in on the misfortune of a son he didn’t seem to have made a whole lot of time for when he was alive. 

So far, so good.

But then he followed up with [paraphrasing closely, here] “kids who have good parents don’t grow up to be mentally ill crackheads harassing people on the subway”.

What “give people enough handouts or they’ll fail” is to the left, “living the prescribed life” is to the right; as if getting married at 23 and having a traditional household guarantees your kids will turn out just fine.

Don’t get me wrong – it certainly helps raise people whose heads are screwed on straight.  A traditional two-opposite-gender-parent family that prays together, stays together, eats dinner, celebrates holidays together (regardless of everyone’s politics) and keeps life in persepective ,  all other things being equal, is going have a way better than even chance of raising kids that turn into normal, healthy, productive, well-adjusted adults.  And that certainly wasn’t Neely’s chidhood.

But if you think it’s a guarantee?

Allow me to introduce you to mental illness, the world’s most merciless bitch. 

The serious, debilitating ones – crippling depression, schizophrenia, extreme bipolar disorder and the dog’s breakfast of others – don’t care about how you were raised. 

And for all the focus mental illness gets today, modern science still knows more about the dark side of the moon than about how the brain mis-wires itself.

You can be like this guy – from a well-off family, who grew up with all of life’s meaningful advantages, only for bipolar disorder to swerve him from an elite music program to a life of radical and sometimes violent personality swings, homelessness, occasional jail, living with his parents, gigging around a small town for extra money, and (after a brief flash of recovery when “they got his meds right”) an untimely death.

Or this guy, who grew up in a fairly normal if quite well-off family with both the means and the sincere motivation to raise a good kid – who slipped psychologically waaaaay off the rails and spent decades self-medicating, chemically and emotionally, to an extreme that harmed everyone within his personal blast radius, who eventually (and seemingly inevitably) succumbed, survived by parents who seemed broken hearted but to have seen and felt it coming for what must to any parent must have seemed an eternity. As I said five years ago:

And when I became a parent, his story – the whole family’s story, really – terrified me; it was possible, no matter how you loved your children, for the unreasoning, cackling spectre of mental illness and its sidekick, addiction, to take that kid from you no matter what you did and how hard you clung to the hope you could do something about it.

And I’m sorry to say I’m reminded of him in a story a family I know is living right now – a child who grew up in a pretty traditional, normal family, into a pretty normal traditional life. Married at 22, two beautiful and talented kids…

…who had a drinking problem.  Which they gave up some time ago.  Which seemed to allow a whole platoon of demons to come out to play.  This person has since spent the past couple of years chasing around the country seemingly at random, has “come out” as the opposite gender, and is clearly in dire need of a qualified, competent, and perhaps supernaturally wise intervention (from which the “opposite gender” thing will almost certainly shield them).

Is it because this person had bad parents?

No.  It’s not.  Quite the opposite.

Bad parenting and the disintegration of the traditional family have incubated a lot of pathologies in this society.  But not all of them.

So when Matt Walsh says Neely’s father was a disgrace – of course there’s no argument. 

But when the big lesson he takes away is “this doesn’t happen to children of good parents?”

It’s not just simplistic and reductionist.  It’s smug and ignorant. 

They warned us that if we voted Republican, extremists would roam the streets murdering their enemies, as their fellow extremist droogs rejoiced.

And they were right.

The meme has traveled about that UHG denies claims at double the national average. That may be true, and that may be utterly without context, and neither I nor the gerbils posting the memes know one way or the other.

Of course, most of the people rejoicing (not exaggerating) Thompson’s murder do it by way of saying it’s high time we adopt “single payer” government healthcare.

Of course, if they think a UHG denial causes problems, wait’ll they get a load of the “cost cutting” measures single-payer systems are moving into.

Not sure its directly related to the Trump election – but if there is a cultural realignment going on below our society’s electoral surface, this new ad from Apple is a sign of it.

For the past couple of decades, the only acceptable way to present fathers – of any race, of late – is as incompetent boobs who are married to improbably gorgeous and capable women.

And what this said about America is…not good.  Advertisers get paid to read the zeitgeist correctly.  And for most of this past several decades, that zeitgeist, as apparent to advertisers of products directed at women, was “Men are to social and personal life what waxy yellow buildup is to your kitchen floor”.  The notable differences were in products aimed at men – mostly beer and home improvement stores, which treated men as, well, potential customers.

A few years ago, I ran a home-made study of TV ads, measuring the percentage of ad characters by their role in the ad:

• Protagonists/customers/”everyperson” characters
• Buffoons/Comic Relief
• Antagonists
• “Experts”

Not sure I even need to tell you what the gender and ethnic breakdown was. 

The problems is, of course, that these are the messages by which our society socializes children.   Is it any wonder GenZ boys are checking out of social engagement?

And that they voted disproportionally for Trump?

Hoping this is a sign that the ad industry is seeing that cultural swing too.

As I noted the other day when an NPR reporter tried to go all “Boss Lady” on President-elect Trump, the President had a snappy comeback:

According to Victor Davis Hanson, Mexican president Sheinbaum walked the idea of compromise back a notch:

But given long-standing, de facto Mexican policy to rely on and profit from an open U.S. border, it was not long afterwards that Sheinbaum claimed she had not been so accommodating.

Or, as she now put it of the Trump conversation, “I give you the certainty that we would never—and we would be incapable of it—propose that we would close the border.” And of course, she is right: Mexico never would wish for a secure U.S. border, although it is wrong that she is incapable of guaranteeing one should she choose to do so.

What, then, is going on?

Hanson goes on to explain what, indeed, is going on. Turns out the open border is in fact a key element of Mexican foreign and domestic policy:

While in office, former President Obrador often said strange things. Two of the most pugnacious were his high-five boast that some 40 million of his own citizens had fled Mexico to cross the border: “Just imagine. There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States—40 million who were born here in Mexico, who are the children of people who were born in Mexico.” (Obrador never explained why his own citizens would willingly flee their own country to a nation habitually caricatured in the Mexican press as racist and exploitive.)

Obrador also periodically delighted in interfering in US elections by urging Mexican expatriates in the U.S. to vote against all Republicans, presumably because they seemed at times to threaten to kill the Mexican golden goose of illegal immigration.

Indeed, in 2023, Obrador urged American Hispanics to never vote for Ron DeSantis’s presidential primary campaign—an irony given Mexico’s chronic complaint of Yanqui interference in Latin American politics.

Obrador believed, as many presidents before him no doubt concurred, that the 40 million expatriates and Mexican-American children, if they were distant from Mexico long enough, would romanticize the country, and so, like most immigrants, become a powerful lobbying force on Mexico’s behalf.

…

And it is also increasingly likely that Mexican-Americans will be more prone to vote for border security than open borders—again further proof that their self-interest as patriotic Americans trumps Mexico’s cynical attempts to use them as political pawns. If those trends continue, the American Left and the Mexican government may well lobby for a secure border, in fear they are only augmenting a growing MAGA constituency.

But it’s possible this past year has seen not just a sea change among Anglo voters, but among those millions of migrants:

But, given the huge numbers of human trafficking, the chaos, the drugs, the violence, and the financial costs of supporting millions, an open border is increasingly seen by Americans as not to their advantage—as we saw in the recent Trump victory. That reality, not the rhetoric of Mexican presidents, will govern all future negotiations—a truth that President Sheinbaum should digest before she sounds off about a border that she knows her country has done so much to deliberately destroy—and to America’s detriment.

If Trump and the GOP don’t follow through on this momentum, they all deserve to get washed out of office.

NPR’s token Aztlani, Maria Hinojosa, yelling “SLAY, QUEEN GIRLBOSS!” as Mexico’s socialist female president briefly flexed on Trump’s border plans:

How it’s going:

Yep. The whole world witnessed it:

Back in college, I did a little acting.  

The highlight?  I played Henry II i “The Lion in Winter”.   And I had a blast. 

One part of the role involved using makeup to turn 20 year old Mitch into 55 year old Hank Deuce.  And since this was a small college theater, at a school that didn’t even offer a drama degre,  there weren’t a whole lot of extra people playing “Makeup Girl”.  

More than that, the professor, the late Patricia Lavin, was a formidable woman – she’d been the first female theatrical producer in LA back in the fifties and sixties, and had a long list of theatrical and film credits (she had done makeup work on the original “Planet of the Apes”, for one example) – who made sure that we learned how to do the nuts and bolts of theater. 

Including makeup. 

Which meant I, the very adolescent-macho Mitch, had to learn how to do his own makeup. 

And looking at the photos of 20 year old Mitch playing 55 year old Hank II, I actually looked a fair bit like I do today (albeit with a lot more hair). 

I thought about that when I saw this “comedian” talking about the Rep. McBride crisis:

So that’s what a woman is! Someone who can do makeup!

By that definition…

…well, do I even need to finish the sentence?

…is that not only can you “appropriate” an indigenous culture to your rhetorical ends,  you can agglomerate indigenous cultures together into whatever custom mix you want to make whatever “point” you please.

For example, the term “Latinx”, which purports to consolidate widely disparate cultures (Puerto Rico has little in common with Central America, and less with Argentina and Chile).

Another example:  Er…

…this:

Perhaps the Maori of New Zealand might want to do something to nip this in the bud before white progressive women drag their culture over the shark with them?

SCENE:  In a conference room at the headquarters of Minnesotans United for All Progressive Causes, a blindingly Scandinavian-looking suite of offices in a pre-war building in Saint Paul.  On one wall, a window looks out on a stunning vista the Mississippi River.  Through the other, rows of cubicles staffed by interns making fund-raising calls, as a couple of college-age boys tear down Kamala Harris posters and throw them in the trash.

In the conference room are:

• Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK, community engagement manager.  She’s wearing a blue bracelet.
• Inge “Lucky” CARROLL, head meme-buffer.  She sports a new, blue Celtic Thorn tattoo on her wrist.
• Gretel STROMBERG, executive director.  She also has a blue bracelet. 
• Ken MARTIN, Chair of the MN DFL
• Martina ROBBINS, Liaison director for Planned Parenthood of Minnesota.  She’s wearing blue bracelets on each wrist. 
• Chad MANBUNFRONDSON, Democrat National Committee field staffer based in Minneapolis, and current romantic partner of Gretel Stromberg.
• MyLissa SILBERMANN, Reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, and no way no how an active participant in regional progressive politics.   Her hair is newly-died blue. 

All look visibly cried-out. 

STROMBERG:   OK.  So, that could have gone better.  But (she says, visibly trying to convince herself), it’s a new day.  Onward and upward.  What do we say?

EVERYONE (grumbling).  We’re not going back.

BIRKENSTOCK (slightly more chipper): Tuuuuurn the page!

(The exhortation is met with grumbles). 

STROMBERG:  OK.   We’re going to get on top of the new plan.  Inge?

CARROLL: Yes.  We’re going to get women to adopt the “Four Bs – it’s a South Korean trend where women swear off dating, sex, marriage and having kids with men”.

BIRKENSTOCK:   I already broke up with my boyfriend.  

STROMBERG:  I actually ditched my partner .

MANBUNFRONDSON:  You what?

STROMBERG: Oh, yeah.  I’m  not going back…

MANBUNFRONDSON:  But…but… (tearing up a bit) Not even if I wear the Schoolgirl outfit?

MARTIN:  (a little perplexed). Hang on, Gretel. Isn’t Chad always an ally?  I mean, he wears an unironic man-bun and ran White Dudes for Harris of Minnesota…

STROMBERG:  The cause is the cause. 

(The women all nod.  Martin looks around, fall silent. MANBUNFRONDSON leaves the room, in tears)

SILBERMANN:  So that means…

CARROLL:  No dating.  No sex.  No marriage.  And noooooo babies.  None.   Complete cut-off. 

STROMBERG:  Sounds like genius.

(Everyone applauds – even Martin, gingerly – except for ROBBINS)

ROBBINS:  Wait.  No sex?

CARROLL:  Yep.  Even for your husband. Sorry. 

ROBBINS:  Oh, that train left the station five years ago.  No, here’s the problem (pulls out iPad, shows it around the table):

ROBBINS: This ingenious plan of yours will leave us broke. Busted. Bupkes.

(Silence around the table, as the murmer of the fundraising and MANBUNFRONDSON’s sobbing filters through the glass wall)

BIRKENSTOCK:  Well, the legislature will appropriate money to make up for it! 

CARROLL: Yeah!  We got the trifecta!  

STROMBERG:  ONE MINNESOTA!

MARTIN:  Uhhhh, kind of a good-news, bad-news situation, here…

SCENE pulls away to the middle of the fundraising floor, to the sound of the womens’ blood-curdling screams. 

And SCENE.

…that Democrats are illiterate about history that’s less than a quarter of a century old.

But they keep doing it:

Forget for a moment that this episode occurred on the orders of Bill Clinton’s disastrous Attorney General, to placate Fidel Castro (who is no way no how Justin Trudeau’s father). 

It’s also crap; employer ID verification backed with police enforcement will do the vast majority of the deporting, as people head back south of the border to avoid trouble.

Just like they did after 2017.

(This could, one day, be a Minnesota Highway Patrolman grabbing a kid whose custodial mom wants to trans him, from his father…)

In 2015, I spent some time in Detroit on a business trip.

And even then, before Covid, downtown Detroit felt…vibrant.  Fun.  There was stuff going on in the evening.   There were places to go, things to do, people around and about. 

Companies were paying people good money to buy or rent downtown and walk to work. 

Things felt pretty decent…

…in about a square mile downtown. [1]

Go outside that square mile or two and it became…well, Detroit.

But I come not to praise Detroit, but to bury WUPHs – White Urban Progressive Homers, people who tie their identities so close to their cities that it squeezes out all humor, and all thought itself.

It’s not smack. It’s actual journalism, when referring to the ravages of two generations of non-stop corrupt Democrat governance on a city.

Like Detroit.

Or, if things keep going as they are, Minneapolis.

[1] I have no idea how Covid might have affected that state of affairs, but I’m not optimistic.

Say what you will about abortion – but as we get close to the elections, let’s remember the “debate” that the DFL jammed down in the ’23 session.

I actually wrote this post during the last session – one of those “let’s make sure it doesn’t go down the memory hole” things. 

And while the DFL sure seems proud of what they did, they get quiet about it when talking with audiences outside Minnesota, now that the Piglet is running for Veep.

Last week, I ruffled some of the usual feathers by posting a link to this video by Ryan McBeth.

McBeth is a former anti-tank grunt who now does open-source intelligence and systems work. His Youtube and Substack channels are interesting; he doesn’t get everything right (he is still claiming Mossad figured out how to remotely blow up lithium batteries, although his reasoning for getting to that conclusion isn’t wrong), and he certainly runs in official-ish circles, but he shows his math.

I pointed this out, not to “run cover” for officialdom (wtf?) but out of awareness that all “sides” of every issue on social media are farming engagements to draw clicks, eyeballs, and of course the mother of all motivations, “monetization”. 

The real lesson?  Waiting for government to help you out after an emergency is a sucker bet.  Government may mean well but be incompetent; it may do its best but be overstretched; it might be actively undercutting you; it might be all three and then some.  But one way or another, example after example in the real world shows us you, the regular schnook, are likely to have to see to your own well-being after a disaster.  

Seeing to that well-being is either a waste of time, or absolutely vital – and you won’t know which until it’s too late.

This note comes from a friend of a friend:

“I’m in Asheville, NC right now and we were devastated by the hurricane. Day 5 of no power, water, internet, or even cell service. We are cut off from the world. Here’s what has mattered so far and what hasn’t in my particular situation:

Life saver #1 = Starlink internet. All our phones say SOS. Can’t text for help. Don’t know what’s going on. I plugged in my satellite internet and have been helping the whole neighborhood call loved ones. Everyone is offering me anything from their supplies because it’s so valuable.

Life saver #2 = Solar panels and 3000w battery pack. I can run satellite internet, electric kettle to purify water, charge headlamps, electronics, instant pot for cooking, ice maker for the cooler, everything I need. I’ll won’t run out of the sun like I would propane or gas if this extends a lot longer.

Life saver #3 = Gas cans and extra gas. These are sold out everywhere and are harder to get than gas itself. When power goes out so do gas station pumps. When you have portable gas you can run a generator, evacuate, drive to where the supplies are, check on family members, etc. People are stranded and sleeping at gas stations for days in their car waiting for power to come back on so they can get home.

Life saver #4 = Knowledge on how to survive without a huge stash. Some preppers spend too much on stocking up and not enough on education. None of us knew the hurricane was going to be this bad. Some people lost their entire house including supplies. Those who know multiple ways to collect water, purify it, start a fire, find food, are the ones still alive that haven’t been rescued yet. I could go for another month if I had to with nothing but my backpack and tools.

Life saver #5 = Hand sanitizer. Sanitation is rough here and the hospitals are out of power, food, and water. People are starting to smell and after you touch something you do not want to get sick and go to the hospital because it’s bad there too. The water you do find may not be safe for hand washing without purification. I wash my hands with soap and water and then do hand sanitizer after to stay healthy.

Other things I’ve relied on:

Cash. No power means no debit cards can be used

Disposable cutlery and plates

A 4×4 truck that can drive where others can’t or help tow people to safety

Solar/battery radio

Dogs for company and to alert if someone is outside

Hasn’t mattered as much as I thought:

#1 = Guns! I haven’t even thought about needing my gun and realized I put too much on this. Strangers have come together in our area and are taking care of each other like you wouldn’t believe. Each person has a surplus of something and is missing something else. We all share while still respecting boundaries and only sharing what we choose. Again, this can depend on the area but here if you are acting paranoid/standoffish of others and open carrying a gun, the nice innocent people are going to avoid you and you will be isolated without community or resources. I’m still glad to have a gun but I wish I spent more time on other skills too instead of putting so much emphasis on shooting. (And to anyone who says, “it only takes one time and you will be glad for your aim”, you’re missing the point I’m trying to make here.)

#2 = Food. This is easy to find for me but it may be due to the part of the country I’m in. I can also fish, forage, and don’t cook much because I don’t want to waste water on dishes. I had shelf stable food prepped and lll probably end up only using 25% of it in a month. As people’s freezers start to thaw we’ve had big cookouts so it doesn’t go to waste and I’ve been full most nights.

Again, this list could be based on location, type of natural disaster, weather, etc But it’s interesting to me because I’m actually living it instead of preparing and wanted to share.”

 

As the correspondent notes in the last graf, it “could” be based on location.  And it most certainly is based on the relative health of the social fabric in the area. 

“White Dudes for Harris” – the collection of online man-buns, barristos and Soho cliches from earlier in the summer – didn’t do it.

Picking Tim Walz – a thinly-closeted authoritarian with penchant for dressing up in Elmer Fudd costumes and eating Pronto Pups on camera – didn’t do it.

But this? This ad should solve Kamala Harris’s woes with men:

It’s like someone thinks the modern advertising and entertainment industries’ collective caricatures of “men” that you see in every ad or TV show that doesn’t involve an “A”-lister – either neutered, incompetent, buffoonish clichés or “men” who are “Masculine” in the same way trans men are “really women”.

This should really do it this time!

More on Harris/Walz’s male problems here.