Dems: Public broadcasting is NOT state media! 1% of their funding comes from government!
Normies: Then defunding won’t hurt anythi…
Dems: NOOO! You’ll KILL ELMO! Why do you hate Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers?
Dems: Trans women are women!
Normies: Except in athletic competition, where their innate masculine physical traits are a huge advantage, not to mention in prison where they tend to rape bio-women…
Dems: Genocide!
…that the DFL made Minnesota a sanctuary state for Munchausen Mommies like this soulless crone.
(WARNING: You may vomit):
And when a Munchhausen Mom like this walks through a custody order to bring the kid that they’re “transing” to MN, the state will put her wishes above that of the other state’s court order.
Food for ugly, nightmarish thought.
DFL: Let’s fully fund education!
Normies: Could you define that term? Because we already pay an awful lot of money, and the results keep getting worse…
DFL: You hate children! Why do you hate children?
1980: Journalists and teachers were among my role models and beacons of sanity. And the guys in KISS were symptoms of the decline of civilization.
2023: One of the guys from KISS is a beacon of sanity:
And our “journalists” are signs of the decline of civilization:
I didn’t see that coming…
…more than about 30 years ago.
(Note to Soledad O’Brien: Your comparison would make sense if Paul Stanley’s parents had seen him at age six, standing in front of a mirror holding a tennis racket for a guitar, and hustled him into makeup and a leather pants suit).
Dems: Blue America *carries* Red America. Without us, Red America would starve.
Normies: OK. Let’s talk national divorce, since you don’t need…
Dems: Why are you talking treason!?!? NEVER!
To: Rep. Samantha Vang
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Gaslighting
Rep. Vang,
You wrote the “Social Credit” bill (you call it ‘Stop Hate’, but my title is more accurate) that I talked about on my show over the weekend.
You got a storm of criticism – almost all of it justified.
This was your response:
Well,no. That’s not what it does.
Y’see, the market for hate crime far, far outstrips the supply, notwithstanding the DFL’s “Reichstag Firing”. For example:
The mosque fires were set, not just by one guy, the the one criminal in Minneapolis dumb enough to actually commit a crime that Minneapolis’s city government still gives a sh*t about.
No – Rep. Vang’s bill will essentially collect statemens about “microagressions” reported by protected classes.
Bumper sticker they don’t like?
Something overheard in a cafe?
A Trump sign?
Nobody knows. The bill allows no scrutiny, no Data Practices requests, no accountability or transparency of any kind.
It is, in every respect, a “social credit” bill.
Which is a key part of the Communist system, Rep. Vang, that your parents and her people fled.
That is all.
DFL: Walz runs the most transparent administration in history.
Normies: His administration us utterly opaque, hides information, and communicates only in giggly selfies.
DFL: Our HR office will be in touch.
DFL: The surplus is immense, and a monument to DFL wisdom.
Normies: It’s mostly one-time money. You turned it into permanent spending. It’ll be a deficit next session.
DFL: We ALWAYS said it was one-time money!
DFL: the police are in occupying force of oppressors, and must be defunded!
Normies: we oppose defunding the police.
DFL: hey, we never said anything about defunding the police!
DFL: we will make Minnesota a safe place for children to get gender affirming care
Normies: we oppose allowing children who can’t rent a car or consent to getting a tattoo to opt for life changing gender altering surgery.
DFL: hey, who said anything about altering gender!
DFL: it’s good for children younger than 13 to attend a highly sexualized drag shows.
Normies: we oppose children attending highly sexualized drag shows
DFL: don’t you DARE call us groomers!
DFL: it’s time to ban magazines larger than seven rounds, as well as “assault weapons”
Normies: so, do you want to confiscate firearms?
DFL: how dare you say anybody’s coming for your guns! You’re paranoid!
Earlier in this exceptionally loosely linked series, I lamented that the conditions that set up the great American resurgence of the early 1980s aren’t, largely, there in our society today.
I’ll return to the example of France. The French nation and people have a culture that goes back, in one form or another, to pre-Roman times, through Vercingetorix, Charles Martel, Joan of Arc, Napoleon, a phalanx of seminal authors and artists, and centuries of stories, mythical and historical, that helped define what “French” actually meant, to the world but especially to France.
The demographic bleeding-out of World War I caused a crisis in faith in that myth – a malaise, to borrow a term that’s come up in this series before, and most certainly will again. With nearly 10% of the population dead, wounded or missing. and much of the country’s heartland devastated, it’d be fair to say France had Les Bleus
Unlike France in 1940, America hasn’t been demoralized by a great military, demographic and spiritual catastrophe in its recent past (and remember – the end of World War 1 and the invasion of France were about as far apart as 9/11 and today). In the past 40 years, America vanquished its greatest foe to date without a (non-proxy) shot being fired, followed by the greatest expansion in wealth in history. America should be stoked.
But we’re kind of the opposite today.
Every rational, sane, intellectually honest American knows our history – like the history of every nation – is full of imperfections, things that modern mores reject. That’s true of every country ever – at least, the ones that evolve positively. And for the most part, with a few extremely notable exceptions, Western Civilization has done that for the past few hundred years. The notion of “progress” in the human condition was meaningless before Western Civilization as we know it today started evolving.
And so Western culture – especially American culture – developed its own myths and legends. It was the land of opportunity, and of equality.
No, not equal opportunity for everyone at every time – but that, too, has progressed. And generations of immigrants choosing American, and disproportionally succeeding at it, are evidence that the myths have not only some basis in truth, but are in fact not merely myths of facts of American life.
But the powers that be in our culture have been working to undercut those parts of our national mythology.
Equality? In 1987, a Gallup poll showed that about a third of black Americans thought racism was a driving force in American life. In 2015, that figure had doubled. Does anyone seriously think that America got twice as racist between 1990 and the third year of Barack Obama’s third time?
Even more toxically in the long run? The notion that we are a nation of equal opportunity is being pecked away at by a league of leftist intellectual lilliputians.
I was listening to NPR a few weeks ago (so you don’t have to), a show called Marketplace, a show that tries to talk about economics.
They were interviewing Alyssa Quart, a woman whose career seems to revolve around convincing Americans that there is no opportunity. She was flogging a book, Bootstrapped: A Self-Made Myth And The Dystopian Social Safety Net It Created.
And it’s exactly as cynical as you might think:
“Boots were really important in the 19th century,” Quart said in an interview with “Marketplace” host Reema Khrais. “If you’re wealthy, you had someone who could help you put them on. If you’re a working man, you were struggling to pull them up every day. So pulling yourself over your bootstraps became this symbol of getting ahead in this country all on your own steam.”
In her latest book, “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream,” Quart looks at how this symbol helped create what she calls the “dystopian social safety net.”
“If we have a country where the social welfare state is much more fragile than, say, other advanced industrialized countries,” said Quart, “you have people then relying on this ragtag network of nonprofits, volunteers, crowdfunding.”
Quart’s message is being spread on fertile ground, at least among Gen-Zs, who’ve grown up with the message that “Boomers” got all the money and left them the scraps (which, by the way, I also felt as an angry and under-employed GenXer just out of college).
Thing is, Quart made a good point – unintentionally, and in a way that indicts the modern Left’s sabotage of American culture. She endlessly belabors the lack of government insitutions to “support” the poor, which is the usual leftist twaddle. Because…
…of course the idea of dragging one’s self up, completely solo, “by one’s bootstraps” is rare to unheard of. Of course America had institutions that fostered that.
Family.
Church.
Communities – and by that, we’re talking social communities, not governments.
Which are the things Big Left has been aggressively demolishing.
So yeah – coming up by one’s bootstraps is hard. Never easier than in any other culture in history…
…but Big Left is going to change that.
Not gonna prevaricate: This kid had me pretty depressed (in a “howling with laughter” kind of way) last week:
This young lady was the perfect antidote:
Let the Great Sort continue!
Yesterday, we talked about the Five Christians You Meet in the Movies.
And it started me thinking.
Last year, I started but didn’t quite follow through on a statistical study of race and gender characteristics in TV advertisements, as well as the tone or general sense of stereotype associated with the “Characters”. Spoiler alert: white males are subject to a certain…stereotyping, outside of ads for home improvement, sometimes. The numbers were jarringly uniform; there seems to be an unspoken (maybe) pact to portray white males as dim buffoons at best, cads at worst.
And while I don’t watch a ton of TV, I see enough to know the parallels are there.
There are five kinds of men – of all races – visible on television, either programming or advertisement, today:
The Impotent Buffoon: The most notable example of this “male” is the “boyfriend” on most TV/streamingt shows aimed at Millennials and younger. Mewling, incompetent, the inevitable inferior in the relationship whether he knows it or not. The first crisis in the plot inevitably shows him to be about as useful as a set of debate notes in front of Lieutenant Governor Flanagan. This is also the “husband” in most TV ads, these days; schlubby, married to a woman who’s waaaaay out of his league (and, in many cases, with kids who are made to appear much, much smarter than him). In a recent development, that incompetent male isn’t always white anymore (the guy in the “WeBuyAnyCar.com” ad jumps to mind).
The Douchebag: These are the people that all the “Jocks” in every John Hughes teensploitation movie grew up to be. The recent simulacrum of this type was the “partner” FBI agent in the (often excellent) Christina Applegate/Linda Cardellini streamer Dead to Me; a youngish man with all the physical symbols of being upper-middle class; he went to a pseudy-Ivy on, of course, a lacrosse scholarship, and exudes the casual arrogance that the modern TV viewer has been trained to expect to shortly see torn straight down by his senior partner – a (grabs checklist of modern “virtue” tropes) Latina single mother who worked her way up from a street, uh, FBI agent. (Sub-flavor: The gay douchebag, who usually ends up being the good guy).
Old Money: The definitive versions? The senior partners in the arbitrage firm in Trading Places.
The Melodrama Villain: Usually middle aged or older, usually coded as American aristocrats. If a show needs an “evil” Macguffin, it’s usually one of these guys. Even in car ads, for crying out loud, the “baddie” usuallyl resembles the “Goldstein” character in the Macintosh “1984” ad.
The Bankable A-Lister: Bankable A-listers are always exempt from all these tropes. Competent, intelligent, hot…perfect. The sort of thing that we’re supposed to be moving away from when the character is female.
Now, on level this is all good critical fun.
On the other hand – remember the complaints of African-Americans to Stepin Fetchit and Amos and Andy, or Natives to a century of movie stereotypes of Indians, or Latinos to decades of “lazy Mexican” tropes, who asked “why should our young people grow up with this vision of themselves all round them in popular culture?”
They were right.
If you’re a young man today, growing up as a generation of young men that’ve had their boyish “male” traits sanded off or drugged into submission by a feminized school system – and whose very testosterone levels are being eroded by diet or environment or God only knows what? When you look at pop culture around you, what do you see?
The loudest voices in our culture telling you “your type” is impotent, ineffective, useless, and if you draw a winning ticket in life’s lottery, anything from insufferable to evil?
Perhaps the proper term isn’t “stochastic terror”.
Maybe gaslighting?
Grooming for failure and misery?
Intergenerational abuse?
The more I think about it, I’m talking myself back to “stochastic terror”.
I’ve been inadvertently mis-scheduling posts lately. It’s been a busy week.
But my work ethic doesn’t like having just one post for a day.
So – how about Chicago: Mobs (plural) of teens not at all stochastically terrorize THE FREAKING LOOP:
Or, to put it in the mob’s own words and pictures:
One couple who got mobbed and rescued by a good samaritan as the Chicago PD drove languidly past:
The “young man”, the boyfriend in the piece above, was black, btw.
Fearless prediction: it’s coming to Minneapolis. This summer. Just you watch.
I’ve listened to a lot of vapid, trite radio in my life.
Janeane Garofalo’s attempt at a talk show. Most any “audio essay” by David Sedaris. Just about every local show on AM950, from Nick Coleman and Wendy Wilde and Two Putt Tommy and Steve Timmer through Bart McNeil or whatever his name is. Lots of dreadful stuff.
But I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything quite this stomach-pumpingly vacuous as this two year old episode of “Radiolab”, an NPR podcast [1] which combines an oppressive amount of cutesy sound editing with a programming lineup that captures all of the lows of “This American Life” with none of TAL’s occasional highs.
it’s a rebroadcast [2] from a couple of years ago, when the Covid pandemic had come and gone for most of America, but was still leaving the world a Camusian hellscape for the organically-fed fashionably angsty member of the Laptop Class that work for and listen to National Public Radio.
And in it, the plush-bottom yoohoos in the studio seem to be straining to make the case that 2020 and 2021 is a candidate to be horrible years in history, as compared to…
…536AD. When something, a bunch of volcanoes or comet dust or something blotted out much of the sunlight for years, causing a chain reaction of crop failures, famines, plagues (as hungry rats invaded granaries) and wars that led to the death of perhaps 20% of the people on the planet at the time.
But Covid’s pretty bad, too!
Here’s the neat (if nauseous) trick: Listen to it, and you can almost feel like you’re sitting in a “breakfast place” on Eat Street listening to a bunch of non-profiteers bitching about how lack of rent control is genocide.
NPR should really be funding itself.
(more…)Wednesday, I wrote about the dreary history of demoralized, rootless societies. I focused on France of 1940 – for whom the end of World War I was as recent as 9/11 is today.
France had an excuse, of course; out of 8 million Frenchmen that served in World War I, 3 million became casuaties; applied to America in World War II in proportional scale, that would have amounted to 4.5 million dead, wounded and missing. A million dead out of a 1914 population of 8 million, proportional to today’s United States, would amount to 11 million dead. Plus 20 more million maimed or disappeared.
That’d be a tough hurdle to get over.
America doesn’t have that excuse today – but we’ve been through similar emotional straits. The loss of about 58,000 in Vietnam, combined with a decade of social struggle and economic turmoil as America adjusted not-always-gracefully to being not the only functional economy in the world left us with a case of the national blues that was in full depressing fury when I was in junior high and high school.
Back then, America’s moral fundamentals were strong enough that when something came along to blast us out of the moral, intellectual and economic blahs, it was a little like the first bit of screen door weather in the spring:
And yes, even this, much as the interpretation mortifies both the singer and his more dogmatic critics…
…and it’s not just my opinion.
Of course, in 1980 America’s moral fundamentals were still strong. When Herb Brooks and Ronald Reagan and even Springsteen’s wild pitch hit, Americans were still patriotic – even our left of center 39th president believed in what America stood for, even though he was lost at the controls. America still oozed testosterone, metaphorically and literally.
If you believe that there’s a move among transnational “elites” to destroy western civilization and it’s crown jewel, it’s not a stretch to think they’ve been more careful this time around about gutting the fundamentals that could lead to a recovery of our national mojo.
It’s a WSJ survey from a few weeks back, that found among other things that:
The only value that went up? Money, up from 31% to 43% over the past 25 years:
“Aside from money, all age groups, including seniors, attached far less importance to these priorities and values than when pollsters asked about them in 1998 and 2019. But younger Americans in particular place low importance on these values, many of which were central to the lives of their parents,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
In the 2023 poll, just 19% of the respondents overall said they attend religious services once a week or more. Some 31% of younger respondents said that religion was very important to them, compared with 55% among seniors, the Journal reported.
Who knew – after decades of undercutting the traditions of family and virtue and idolizing an utterly materialistic view of the universe, family and virtue are undercut and people are crassly materialistic, even to the point of societal leaders calling material entitlements like housing “rights”?
Whether by accident or conspiratorial design, American society at large today is not fertile ground for another Morning, another Miracle.
And it gets worse. More Monday.
Let’s talk about drag shows. Not the current hot-button politics of the whole genre today. Just the “art form” itself.
I don’t care for them.
No, not because it involves men cross-dressing. Guys wearing dresses and wigs to play a role? Mitch, please. All the female parts in Shakespeare’s day were played by cross-dressing men. Monty Python and Kids in the Hall were cross-dressing decades ago, and at least on the surface they did it for the same exact reason as drag shows do; Entertainment.
Which is the crux of why I don’t care for drag; it’s entertainment – and it’s just not entertaining.
To me, anyway.
Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve had friends who say “give it a chance!”. And I did. And I just…don’t…care.
Part of the problem is it appropriates [1] “burlesque”. And burlesque, as a genre, bores me stiff – especially the modern version of it. It’s not that I “can’t relate” – one of the points of art is to learn to relate to things that aren’t part of your life, or to get better insights on things that are *or* aren’t parts of your life. Art should challenge you, and I actively seek out art that is different from my personal status quo. I’ve learned a lot, and grown as a person, for the effort.
Just not from burlesque. Or drag, for that matter.
As far as drag shows showing school children a window to that culture? Fair enough. We have a lot of cultures; some involve snake-handling, debutantes, monster truck rallies, soccer, “Real Housewives”, ultimate fighting, eating ghost peppers off the vine, and drag racing. I personally can tolerate, even respect several of those cultures without feeling any need to learn more about them than I do, but this isn’t about me; in the interest of raising well-rounded children, shouldn’t we also let them participate in in-church 24 hour prayer vigils, three-gun shooting competitions and Turning Point USA rallies? Give them a view into lots and lots of cultures? Have your people call my people.
I mean, as far as culture goes, in for a penny, in for a dollar.
Of course, the current fracas isn’t about exposing kids to different cultures; it’s about undercutting the dominant culture.
Of course, drag has existed for well over 100 years; it’s a political subject to day, because none of its current hot-point status is about “exposing children to culture” for its own sake.
Just for purposes of argument, let’s forget for a moment that drag, like the burlesque of which it is a minstrel-show version, is inherently sexual in nature; all of the tropes of burlesque were ways to play peek-a-boo with the sexual mores of the Victorian era, and Drag is an “ironic” homage to that era, around the claim that men with “alternative lifestyles” today have to be as sly and coded about their preferences as the straight world did 150 years ago. Which, given the near supremacy of “alternative lifestyles” in today’s dominant culture is itself just a tad preposterous [2]. Saying it’s not a primarily sexual art form is like saying burlesque is nice and chaste; it’s preposterous, and would get you laughed out of any room not controlled by lunatics manifesting a social agenda.
Don’t be a moron.
But I set out to write about a genre, not a political fracas, and it’s to there I’ll return; you wanna dress up and sing? Go to it! No need to save me a seat.
(more…)So, businesses are opening in a building that got re-opened after…uh, some unfortunate events, apparently:
“The 2020 fires”?
A bad streak of accidents?
Spontaneous combustion?
Flaming rocks from the sky?
In a city full of media that bellows “off what?” when the DFL says “jump”, KARE11 has lapped the field at going “woke”.
The DFL noise machine has been treating this speech by Rep. Walter Hudson – longtime friend of this blog, and by far my favorite outside NARN guest host – like a return of the Nuremberg Laws.
It’s in response to the Transgender Sanctuary (AKA “Kidnapping Protection”) legalization.
Walter’s right. And it’s time for people who support, not just American freedom, not just Western Civilizaiton, but objective reality, to take a place in the fight.
In “1984”, the tipping point in Riley breaking Winston Smith was getting him to say “2+2=5” like he really meant it.
This isn’t new.
From abusive marriages to Communist countries the first step is convincing you reality isn’t real. Women are “vulva owners”. Truth is false. Freedom is slavery.
It’s reality versus fantasy time.
I’ll do my due diligence and make my usual reference to my self-coined but completely accurate dictum:
Berg’s Eighteenth Law of Media Latency
Nothing the media writes/says about any emotionally charged event – a mass shooting, a police shooting, anything – should be taken seriously for 48 hours after the original incident. It will largely be rubbish, as media outlets vie to “scoop” each other even on incorrect facts.
I will continue to observe this law.
But to speculate just a bit? I’m going to go out on a short sturdy limb and guess mass shooting at the Covenant School disappears down the memory hole.
The shooter, y’see, is a former student who, while being almost universally “deadnamed” in the media by her original, female identity, seemed to be pretty actively presenting her…er, him…er, xheirself as (what biologists used to call) male:
That’s two spree killings in one. year carried out by gender-dysmorphic people. The avalanche of mental illness spurred on by the lockdowns and America’s general spiritual and emotional decline is paying dividends for those who benefit from both.
Darn that NRA.
And I’m sure various cultural cues, like this and this…
…were utterly unrelated.
By the way – like most spree killers, the murderer chose the target because there was less chance of resistance. The school was a “gun free zone”, and had other vulnerabilities that beckoned:
[Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake] answered, “Yes,” [that Covenant was the only school targeted] but noted there was another location the suspect considered striking as well. However, he said the suspect did “a threat assessment” of the other location and decided there was “too much security.”
Draw your conclusions. I certainly am .
Unlike the Uvalde shooting, initial reports indicated the police response was fast, violent and decisive – something that the Feds long ago determined was a key factor for dealing with spree killers, and that this blog has noted time and again and again and again and again and again is of paramount importance in containing and ending these shootings.
…and apply it to minor children.
That’s pretty much what the DFL is doing.
The University of Helsinki gives climate activist Greta Thunberg an honorary PhD in Theology .
The Babylon Bee should sue for trademark infringement.
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