To: All of Congress From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant with kids, grandkids Re: Your (pl) Cowardice
Political Weasel Class (Democrat and GOP)
So I’ll start with the low-hanging rotten fruit: Eric Swalwell continues to pay dividends on China’s investment:
#BREAKING There you have it. If Donald Trump is president say GOODBYE to your social security and plan to work into your 70s. This is their plan. https://t.co/1czuTDb1ek
We’re headed toward a $50 Trillion debt. Already our debt service costs more than defense, and will soon start to suck money way from it. No matter – soon it will outstrip Social Security and Medicare.
No system can survive this. This is Venezuela-level irresonsibility.
And none of you Democrats, and precious few Republicans, are taking this seriously.
Swalwell is a cartoon – but no better than most of you, when you get right down to it.
Someone’s gotta be the first to tackle this thing, because it’s definitely going to tackle us.
Clever anti-genocide activist and wag “counterprotests” at the Harvard pro-Final-Solution “encampment” in perhaps the most delicious way possible; interrupting “protesters” beauty sleep, not only with the national anthem…
Harvard’s Pro-Palestinian Camp Tried To Sleep Last Night, but One Patriot Wouldn’t Let Them https://t.co/OfFXlq0HXC
Princeton students are going on a hunger strike in solidarity with Palestinians and to pressure the University to give in to their demands. They have people on hand checking their vitals and donating to them. So stunning and brave.pic.twitter.com/628bQEEEQs
A famously blunt man, he would have likely looked at kids like this best/brightest and said “You’ve got a kind face. The kind of face I’d like to throw shit at”.
Let’s just say it resonates.
By the way – is it just me, or is “Best and Brightest” joining “Vibrant!” as a new sarcastic antonym?
NYU Professor calls for COVID amnesty on Bill Maher:
“I wanted a harsher lockdown policy. In retrospect: I was wrong… But here's the bottom line: We were doing our best. Let’s give a little grace and forgiveness.”pic.twitter.com/sxEY9nnhki
And on behalf of all the small businesses strangled by your mistake, all the parents who watched their kids slowly go crazy and stupid, and felt their personal, social and business relationships fraying and breaking?
Someone walks up to you with a baseball bat. They say they want to kill you.
Your response is “no, I don’t want to get beaten to death with a baseball bat”.
Looks like you have a standoff. A controversy. A conundrum.
Someone else steps in and asks “How about we compromise? Will you settle for a traumatic brain injury?”
It’s the middle way, after all. The guy with the bat might even say “sure, I just wanna hit you, hard!“
You might respond “No – in fact, I don’t want anyone hurting me in any way. At all”
And the buttinski responds “Why won’t yiou compromise?”
Who’s right?
You?
The guy with the bat?
Or the person striving to find the middle ground between the two of you?
If your response is “I’m putting my foot down; nobody is hitting me with a bat for any reason at all“, and the other to ask “why do you hate the guy with the bat?“, does that change anybody’s mind?
Point being, sometimes the middle path, the compromise, is not the most moral path forward.
In seven years, Minneapolis transportation planners want 60% of trips in the city taken on public transit, or made by biking, walking or rolling.
The effort to achieve that ambitious goal, which is laid out in the city’s Transportation Action Plan, began this month as the city partnered with marketing agency Vision Flourish to kick off the mode-shift campaign called “As You Go Minneapolis.”
“We want to shift people’s behavior and thinking about how to move about the city,” said Amy Barnstorff, a transportation planner in the city’s Public Works Department.
No word on how they plan to enforce compliance with this diktat.
I want to laugh when I see some of the lefties – especially the transit-oriented leftybloggers – yapping about running their lives on transit. I notice that not a single one of them seems to have kids; children are the big clinker in the “transit-oriented lifestyle”. If you have to get kids to an after-school event, it’s a major expedition; if you have to take one to urgent care, it’s either miserable (hauling sick kids on the bus is a rotten feeling, although I never had to do it) or expensive (cabs in the Twin Cities are nothing to write home about).
Just to run down the hunch, I checked out the transit planner featured in the article.
And sure enough, she punched all the expected tickets; her and her significant other apparently have a dog, but no children.
I’ve yet to meet anyone who can walk that particular walk without having a car for a backup.
These people see downtown Target locking down everything and see it as corporate greed.
I hear about it and think of failed policies that create a mass of poverty stricken people who have fallen morally into the way of a Les Miserables story, where stealing is justified. It of course is justified by the very same people upset by the Target locking down basic supplies. It’s a cycle, which will continue to infinity until the cycle is somehow broken.
We have an entire generation of over-schooled, under-educated people who think of the world in terms of corporate black hats and social justice white hats.
I stay pretty relentlessly civil, especially when discussing politics. There’s enough pointless anger out there.
But I’m going to say this, and I don’t care what you think about it: If you are part of the lefty social media mob that thinks “Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer”, you are a flat-earther.
Complicated stuff follows. Stay with me, progressives.
You think someone’s trying to kill you. You shoot them – maybe fatally, maybe not. You’re arrested. The DA presses charges – assault, homicide, whatever.
To even be allowed to *argue* self-defense for assault or homicide, you have to show a judge evidence, to a legal standard, that:
you reasonably feared being killed
That threat was immediate – it was literally them or you, right then and there.
you were not the aggressor [1]
you used ONLY the force needed to end that lethal threat.
in many states (including MN, but not WI), that you *reasonably* tried to get away [2].
That’s *before* the trial. If your evidence on any of those 4-5 criteria doesn’t stack up, you’ll be a defendant in a murder trial, not a self-defense trial.
Once you’ve gotten past that? On to trial!
And there, if the prosecution disproves any of those 4-5 factors beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury? You’re going to prison – for assault if nobody died, and murder if they did.
That’s a pretty high burden of proof for a “Murderer” to skate past. (Don’t think so? That’s just ignorant.
“But the judge was biased”
No, he wasn’t.
Rittenhouse may not have been a hero [3]. And if you think the whole episode is stupid and unfortunate, I don’t disagree – although in a moral society, the burden should fall on those who set out to damage and destroy others property.
Either way calling Rittenhouse a “murderer” is ignorant at best. And there’s an implied clause after “at best” [4]…
…but again, I try to stay civil.
I try. But I’m only human. It can’t last forever.
[1] And no, doing something you have every legal right to do does not make you an aggressor. Rittenhouse had a right to be where he was, and to carry a rifle. Don’t like it? Take it up with the Wisconsin Assembly.
[2] Where “reasonable” is defined by statute or, much more usually, in a stack of case law references that you have to be a lawyer to understand.
[3]But after seeing the mayhem that the entitled children of the politicalclass got away with scot-free in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Kenosha, it’s not hard to understand why some people think he is a hero.
[4] And that implied clause may or may not but definitely does include the thought that a whole lot of the “Rittenhouse is teh murdererer” crowd think rioting and rioters are justified, which is a pretty problematic view.
We are living in a meritocracy that is utterly lacking in merit. And our betters know it. If the current leadership in Washington were confident in their abilities and in their support, you would not see FBI raids on political opponents and political show trials on national television.
You are under no obligation to like the Bad Orange Man. Likely a plurality of the regular writers of this feature are, if not actively anti-Trump, certainly Trump-skeptical. We all know him and, in a better world, he’d be back on television pretending to fire C-list celebrities.
We don’t live in that world. We have a hopelessly corrupt federal government and, at least in Minnesota, a kleptocratic political machine built for the amusement of the parlor pinks who support them. These are the same people who especially enjoy voting for Ilhan Omar, because doing so is brave and transgressive. Ask the local gentry and they will say it’s elementary.
If you’ve read The Great Gatsby, you’ll recognize the type — there are plenty of Tom and Daisy Buchanans in the world. They like what they like and they don’t like arrivistes from the outer boroughs. And they don’t care about the damage they leave in their wake, because they are, in the main, immune from the consequences. We send people like Betty McCollum and Vin Weber to Washington to dance for the Buchanans and, if their performances pass muster, they get to stick around long enough to make bank. And when the spirit moves, the politicos send us back a percentage the money they extract from all of us. And for the most part, those of us who follow politics pretend the labels our dancers wear really matter.
This construct has lasted a long time, at least 90 years and arguably all the way back to Grover Cleveland. All of it is getting shaky now, though. And in Joe Biden, we have the decrepit embodiment of the rot that has been building since the one-time Garanimals customers started learning their Gramsci alongside the trust-fund swells.
It can’t continue. And our betters know it. They are showing force, but they are not confident. They may be able to gaslight their way past November, but the reckoning draws near.
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.
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.
A state district judge has thrown out a lawsuit by a group of parents Who were seeking an order requiring the governor to issue a state wide mask mandate and to reinstate the state of emergency.
“While this court is gravely concerned about the public health consequences of the failure of school districts to implement the guidance of the CDC and the Minnesota Department of Health regarding the use of masks for children, teachers, and staff in K-12 public schools,” the judge wrote in his ruling, “the judiciary cannot order a co-equal branch of government to exercise its discretionary, political judgment to implement a specific educational policy.”
In other words…
… (Mitch takes a deep breath)…
…the parents wanted a member of the judicial branch to compel the head of the executive branch do seize all of the authority of the legislative branch.
Sure, we have a public health crisis. We have an even bigger crisis in civics education in this state.
Professor “joins the lowercase ‘movement'” (sic) to reject the “symbols of hierarcy”.
Let’s forget for a moment that she’s keeping the “Doctor” in front of her name – as noxious a symbol of hierarchy as there is.
dr. linda manyguns joins the lowercase movement to reject the symbols of hierarchy wherever they are found and will not use capital letters except to acknowledge the Indigenous struggle for recognition. read her full statement: https://t.co/4CIjB5bRNppic.twitter.com/tPHDxfb3yq
Writing in pure lower case is the sort of stylistic affectation afforded almost exclusively to “artists”, from the wonderful e.e.cummings to a raft of “quirky” and almost invariably tiresome cartoonists, “writers” and other “artists” – almost all of whom get whatever legitimacy they claim from being part of the academy or some genus of counterculture or another…
…all of which is another term for classprivilege.
Wonder if I can find a “lowercase movement” meeting somewhere?
Also – it’d be interesting to run a poll of indigenous Americans to see if professors affecting lower case helps them, and how much…
Title: Analyzing the Propensity of Modern Feminists, Progressives and the Media to Overstate Accrued Virtue.
Aim of the Experiment: The aim of the experiment is to test whether there is any activity approved of by “Big Left” that a woman can do, that will not be turned into a example of supreme personal moral virtue.
Hypothesis: It is predicted that, provided the activity is one promoted by “Big Left”, that there is no activity a woman can carry out that will not be referred to as “Brave”, “Courageous”, “Fierce” or other such superlatives.
Background Theory: It is believed that the rhetorical “Bar” for an action to be considered an act of personal moral courage, when the action is:
Congruent with the values of modern political and social “progressives”, and
Performed by a woman
…has dropped to the point of nearly being indistinguishable from any normal activity.
Methodology: The research team:
Observed an extensive list of actions
We specifically looked for examples of morally unremarkable, mundane, even counterproductive activities not being referred to in morally superlative terms
Conclusion: There is literally nothing a woman can do (provided it’s congruent with the values of Big Left) too unremarkable, mundane or even destructive that won’t be called ‘Brave’.
After reading this story, I’m overwhelmed with a desire to lead a movement to get conservatives to eschew smashing their own faces into rock or cement walls.
No true conservative would ever smash their face into a cement or rock wall.
-Black Lives Matter and Antifa can burn down cities;
-Keith Ellison can orchestrate a lynching;
-Tim Walz can imprison the whole state for an entire year;
-someone in the Biden Administration can send troops to kick down doors in Syria;
-China can humiliate our diplomats in Alaska;
-sex fiends and pedophiles can prey on victims for years;
-illegal immigrants can swarm our border.
When people know they can get away with bad behavior, they engage in more of it. Swift punishment deters bad behavior. How can we restore the deterrent necessary to end bad behavior?
Joe Doakes
A city without any political opposition, and a political system without any major media scrutiny, all lead to people acting with impunity.
