Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I get calls from people wanting to know how to fix problems with real estate title documents, almost always sound like 20-something women, who treat commas as question marks with a rising voice inflection.  It’s painful to listen long enough that I can give the obvious answer.

 “Hi.  My name is Kelli?  From Big Title Company?  I just have a quick question and I’m hoping you can help me.”

 “Okay.”

 “We have this customer?  And she got married?  And changed her name?  But she used her old name on the documents and the County won’t accept them for recording because the name doesn’t match.”

“Okay.”

 “So how do we fix that?”

 “Throw them away and start over.  Do it right this time.”

 Maybe the hesitancy is a generational thing, afraid to make a statement that someone might pounce on as offensive?  I don’t notice it with male callers or older women. 

 Joe Doakes

I don’t know.

But I do know the Millennial generation is on track to replace the Baby Boomers as the most overanalyzed, overhyped generation in history.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’m old enough that having amateur debaters attempt to play their tricks on me has become tiresome.  In a recent on-line exchange, my opponent said “I can see you have a lot of anger on this issue.  You need help.”  Nice try, but no cigar.  I know that trick and it no longer works on me.

 Accusing me of being angry is a rhetorical device intended to disqualify my opinion by implying that I’m not rational, I’m hysterical.  It’s also intended to thereby divert attention from the hollowness of my opponent’s intellectual position and therefore acts as an admission that her position IS hollow since, if my opponent had a worthwhile argument to make, she’d have made it; the fact she didn’t make one is compelling evidence she had none to make.

 My response was along the lines of: “Don’t snivel.  It’s not seemly to sit there bawling when you’ve been bested.  Stiff upper lip!  Oh, you weren’t crying?  Of course not, no more than I was angry, so let’s both can drop the posturing.  Talk sense if you have it; if not, shut up.”

 Didn’t want that person as a “friend” anyway.

 Joe Doakes

“People who believe as you do are often compensating for something, ifyaknowhatImean.”

“Yes,  We’re compensating for the fact that there are a lot of stupid, evil people in the world.  Oh, as to the blue reference, you “know what I mean” in only the most abstract possible sense, ifyaknowwhatImean.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It’s painful to watch the Republican Presidential nominee join in clamoring for a secret, non-appealable Enemies List of un-persons who have been stripped of civil rights by some unaccountable bureaucrat in the federal administration: four years ago, no right to raise money for voter education; last year, no right to private communication by email or cell phone; today, no right to travel by air; tomorrow, no right to self-defense.  Secret blacklists are the McCarthyism that my teachers warned me about.  

I’m going to add emphasis to this next bit:

 How can people not see that empowering the government to decide Who has rights is empowering it to decide Nobody has rights?  Sure, it’s great while your guy is the President, but what if the unthinkable happens and my guy wins?  Will you still be happy when you’re on the receiving end?  Are Americans really that eager to roll back the clock to 1775, to be subjects instead of citizens, to live by sufferance instead of right?

 What’s heartbreaking is the ONLY civil rights organization standing up for Due Process of Law is the NRA.

 Joe Doakes

Not only are about half of Americans unclear on the difference between “Citizen” and “Subject”, but a good chunk of them actively yearn to be subjects.

Provided nobody tells them who to marry or whether they can get an abortion…

…are you seeing a pattern yet?

I’m not sure what disturbs me more; that so many on the left are so depraved at heart…

…or that so many feel they’re entitled to be that way.

Williamson’s Victor Davis Hanson’s ¹ piece – on the bureaucracy full of smug, entitled, thirtysomething bureaucrats who have such disporportionate control over this country today – is worth a read from beginning to end.

But this quote was the payoff:

Most men in Dayton or Huntsville do not lounge around in the morning in their pajamas, with or without built-in footpads, drinking hot chocolate and scanning health-insurance policies. That our elites either think they do, or think the few that matter do, explains why a nation $20 trillion in debt envisions the battle over transgender restrooms as if it were Pearl Harbor.

But read it all anyway.

¹ Yeah, it’s been that kind of morning.

Pet owners demanding “Paw-Ternity” leave.

Money quote:

 I couldn’t help but think that, just as Jameson was getting used to me, he feared I, too, was abandoning him. The guilt continues today: While my co-workers with kids walk out the door at 6 p.m., no one seems to care that I also have a child at home waiting for dinner.

You don’t have a “child” at home waiting for dinner.  You have a pet.  An animal whose instincts amply suit it to survived without “mom” juuuuuust fine.

Y’know where you teach your (two-legged) children not to mock people who look, think, act or believe differently than them?    Let’s all make an exception for people who think pets are “children”.

(And if the free market can afford to pay for “paw-ternity” leave, I’m all for it.  But you just know this is going to become yet another government mandate, don’t you?)

A friend of this blog writes:

So there was a letter to the Villager editor, which I thought made quite a bit of sense regarding paid family leave. Then, I happened to see a discussion on Twitter about that letter. The responses on Twitter seem to be what is wrong with the entitlement generation/class. (I suspect the discussion is by mostly millennials.) 

The most striking comment from the person who assumes that she pays twice as much in student loan debt as the money the editorial writer set aside to raise a family. This from a person who, per her Twitter account, is a lawyer and who apparently owns a house not just in St Paul, but also in Mexico.

But, all of the comments assume we have no choice in how we spend our money. The entitled confuse needs with wants, lack control in their own lives. It is where they decide the rest of us need to be in the cycle of debt in which they find themselves.

Misery loves company.

“Democratic” socialist misery requires it.

…but Mark Zuckerberg and his Zuckerminions can’t ban me from my blog for posting this:

Or…can they?

Stay tuned.

I’m not a big Donald Trump fan.

No.  Really .  Not.  A.  Fan.

But I’m reminded of Churchill’s statement about Stalin; he didn’t care for him, but if Satan were Hitler’s enemy, Churchill would at least do lunch with him.

And so the Saint Paul City Council might be responsible for me doing  lunch with The Donald, after they put their own special carve-out in the First Amendment:

The St. Paul City Council will vote Wednesday on a resolution that condemns presidential candidate Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and declares Trump unwelcome within the city limits….[Councilman Dai Thao] acknowledged on Thursday he had not yet touched base with fellow council members on the resolution. “We think it will pass,” he said. “St. Paul has always been welcoming to immigrants.”

But not, apparently, dissent in any form.

Dear Mr. Trump:  While I won’t be voting for you at caucuses, I beg of you; please, please, please come to Saint Paul (aka “Chicago on the Mississippi”).  Call these morons on their bluff.

It’d be the show of the century.

It’s another big win for urban liberal privilege.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The student was disrupting the class.

The teacher couldn’t get her to stop being disruptive.  The teacher called the Principal.

The Principal couldn’t get her to stop being disruptive.  The Principal called for a Deputy Sheriff.

The Deputy couldn’t get her to stop being disruptive.  The Principal gave the Deputy permission to arrest the student to take her out of class.

The Deputy couldn’t get the student to stand up to leave so he dragged her out of her chair and out of the classroom.

Another student filmed the arrest.

The teacher and the Principal support the Deputy’s actions.

The student is Black, protests erupted.

The Sheriff fired the Deputy.

The lesson learned: Black students don’t have to obey school rules.

How will this lesson affect minority graduation rates, unemployment, college admissions and lifetime earnings?

Joe Doakes

Joe’s asking a rhetorical question.

We can see it in Valeria Silva’s Saint Paul Public Schools.

And when Silva’s gone?  We’ll see it in her successor’s SPPS, as well.

Just watch.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Mel Brooks poked fun at racists in Blazing Saddles with the line:  “We’ll take the Blacks and the Asians . . . but we don’t want the Irish!” Well, maybe not the Asians, either.

Joe Doakes

Affirmative action penalizes Asians in higher education.

And yet, outside Vietnamese and Koreans, most of them vote Democrat.

Eventually, America’s ethnic minorities will figure it out.  Hopefully while there’s still time to fix things.

Earlier this week, while listening to Jack and Andrew on the lesser talk station, I caught them running through this piece about 38 examples of liberal privelege on college campuses. 

The piece is very much worth a read.

Of course, if you live in a place like the Twin Cities, you realize there’d be room for a similar piece for adults in places where Jon Stewart is considered news and where chanting “settled science!” is considered an argument-ender.

I’m going to take quick shot at it, off the top of my head:  if you’re an adult in a “progressive” city…:

1. You’ve never had to learn to confront dissent as anything other than either a mortal threat to your worldview, or a joke to be scuttled away from, using ad homina if necessary.
2. You’ve never had to learn to debate at a level beyond strawmen, red herrings, and chuckling “facts have a liberal bias” as if the saying were handed down by the ancients, rather than by a mediocre comic who made a living satirizing conservatives.
3. After 12 years of indoctrination in the public schools, and often as not 4-8 years at an institution where dissent is treated as a pathology, you are utterly secure in your faith that your club is the sole source of truth.

35 more to go!

A year or so after he finally departed the Minnesota Vikings, the City Pages has finally pulled its collective head out of Chris Kluwe’s ass long enough to do some reporting about the taxpayer-funded improvments to Zygi Wilf’s real estate portfolio the Vikings and their stadium.

And while Corey Zurowski’s piece is not quite on par with the reporting the Pages did during Steve Perry’s heyday, it’s not bad.

Oh, yeah – as anyone who was reading conservative blogs before 2010 knows, the stadium is a lousy deal for taxpayers:

Minnesota and Minneapolis taxpayers are on the construction cuff for a combined $498 million — the state $393 million and the city $150 million. [But don’t 393 and 150 add up to 543? – Ed] In both cases, the public funds are being floated by taking on debt, not cash.

[pullquote]At four percent and change, that means $26 million in interest alone in the first year.[/pullquote] Plus maintenance and the inevitable “improvements” that’ll be needed.  Read the whole article for the whole story about the principal, interest and taxes.

And King Banaian reminds us that on top of all that (and the minimal economic benefit it’ll bring, and even that mostly in the form of money that would’ve been spent elsewhere being spent downtown), the e-pulltabs that were set up to float the state’s share in this bit of larceny are taking money away from other Minnesota non-profits, including many that aren’t run by billionaires from out of state:

The number of bingo halls using paper, not electronics, is down to six in Minnesota after the closing of St. Cloud’s Bingo Emporium….State Senator John Pederson of St. Cloud says the tax on pull tabs was raised to 36-percent last year to help fund the Vikings stadium, which put paper-bingo halls in a “very, very difficult situation.”

Oh, well.  You’ve gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet, right?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I overheard a young woman in the building talking on the phone in the break-room.  She’s stressed out today.  She thought she was current on her debt consolidation loan but the bank claims she’s been a month behind for ages.  Out of every $60 payment she makes, $40 goes to interest and $15 to late fees which means the principal has hardly been touched.  She and her live-in boyfriend have no more available credit and can’t get caught up because neither of them have an extra $60 that isn’t already promised to someone else.

I remember those days, when my family was young and struggling, when $60 was not a modest dinner at Red Lobster but an insurmountable obstacle.  Seems like a lifetime ago.  I suppose everybody must go through it – no other way to learn sacrifice, delayed gratification, habits of thrift.

Unless you’re a politician.  Then you just spend whatever you like on whatever you want.  Must be nice.

Joe Doakes

Rachel Dolezal has “identified” as black since she was 5.

I’ve “identified” as a Chicago Bears middle linebacker, an F-15 pilot, as James Honeyman-Scott (albeit not dead) and as a very wealthy guy since I was 6, 12, 16 and 35, respectively.

Let’s show those cis-athletes, cis-pilots, cis-rock starts and cis-plutocrats who’s boss, shall we?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A friend has a Facebook page. He linked to this

Immediately, a Black woman responded: “People will stop talking white privilege when society doesn’t provide significant benefits to one group for arbitrary reasons. Until then, we have a problem…unless you’re a white male and you’re the one getting all the privileges at the expense of others.”

From her Facebook page, she went to Howard, then DePaul for a JD/MBA and lives in a giant house in Maryland.

I’m thinking of writing a comment to my friend, saying “Geez, dude, why did you join the military to pay for college? Why didn’t you swing by the Office of Giving Free Stuff To White Men for your college degree? Could have picked up the keys to your Lexus and home in the suburbs while you were at it (the house used to come with a free Mexican to handle the yard work but that program was cut under Bush, the bastard).”

I won’t, because on the off chance that she’s a civil rights lawyer affirmatively actioned into the Justice Department to sue White males for Eric Holder, I don’t want to get my friend in trouble.

Can’t have a dialogue with a person like that. Her “dialogue” assumes facts not in evidence and she’s not interested in hearing them.

Racial tension is worse than any time since the Civil War and yet Blacks have never had it better.

Hmmm, I see there’s a civil rights complaint against Harvard

for discriminating against Asians in favor of Blacks. It seems Harvard has been providing significant benefits to one group at the expense of others, for arbitrary reasons. Can we start that dialogue about privilege now?

Joe Doakes

A leader in the local “Black Lives Matter” movement is fond of invoking “white privilege” when she’s stumped in an argument. Which gives us the fax fascinating juxtaposition of a woman with a tenured academic job for life hectoring people in the private job market about “privilege”.

News Flash from our “Elite” Media:  people who grow up realizing, via their own precocious cognition or through family tradition, pressure or persuasion, that attending an “elite” school gives one a disproportionate shot at “elite” jobs, have a vastly disproportionate shot at getting “elite jobs”:

Lauren A. Rivera, an associate professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, has been looking at investment banks, consulting firms and law firms for the last decade for her upcoming book “Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs.”

Rivera spent nine months as an ethnographer in one of these top firms, observing every aspect of the hiring process. She points out the firms may be missing out on top talent.

Well, duh.

In fact, the 99.99% of America that didn’t attend an Ivy League school knows that. The main benefit of going to an Ivy isn’t so much the education – Matt Yglesias went to Harvard, and with that I rest my case.

No – the main benefit is access to the most important benefit; the alumni directory.

“If you want the best and the brightest regardless of social background, if you’re not systematically looking at over half the best and brightest because they don’t qualify in terms of social background, that is not necessarily an equitable or open process,” she says.

Now, I bring this up not because it’s a revelation – please – but because it’s a product of National Public Radio’s “Marketplace” program.

Which is a bit of irony – since getting a job at any level of National Public Radio (or any other big Public Radio system) is entirely about having the right alma mater, the right connections, and at times the right politics.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A former colleague was laid off last year, he’s been struggling. He writes:

***

Applied for a job with [unit of government name redacted]. Sorry, they needed a person of color to achieve diversity in the workforce.

Applied for a job with [downtown law firm name redacted]. Sorry, they needed a gay person.

Applied for a job with [corporate headquarters name redacted]. Sorry, they needed a woman.

Just once, I’d like to be judged on the content of my character.

I have a dream . . . .

***

Silly middle-aged White Male; dreams are for kids.

Joe Doakes

That’s so 1963…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Divorce case recently appealed to the Minnesota Court of Appeals, sent back for more fact-finding on this question: were the parties even married? The Court of Appeals’ reasoning infuriates me.

When you fled to Thailand in 1975 to escape the Communists after the Americans abandoned Southeast Asia, and you got “married” to this guy that you met in a refugee camp, did you file a marriage certificate with the Thailand government? No? Well, then, the fact you’ve lived together for 40 years, had six kids together, filed married tax returns and owned real estate in Minnesota is interesting trivia but really, lady, if you can’t be bothered to fill out the proper forms, we have no sympathy for you at all. Shacking up with a guy – even with the tribal elders’ blessing – doesn’t give you the privilege to use the Minnesota divorce court. You can’t get divorced if you were never legally married.

Dude. It’s a refugee camp. There IS no government. And if there were, you’d be a fool to bring attention to yourself. No self-respecting government would issue a marriage certificate without a birth certificate, proof of residency, passport stamps showing legal entry, resident alien visa and payment of appropriate fees to every bureaucrat . . . none of which is possible in a war zone. You couldn’t get “legally” married even if you wanted to. It’s a REFUGEE camp.

Oh, and your husband claims you were already married to another guy when he married you. Well, yes, the guy who stayed behind to cover our escape. No, I don’t have a death certificate but I strongly suspect he was captured by the Pathet Lao so what do you think happened to him? No, I didn’t serve him with a Divorce Summons; there was nobody crazy enough to go back to serve it so I could get divorced while I was struggling to survive IN THE REFUGEE CAMP.

It’s as if these judges lived all their lives in safe, comfortable First World suburbs where the biggest disruption in life is weak Wi-Fi signal; they literally cannot conceive of a place where there are no forms to complete, no pens to complete them, no office to file them in.

Madness.

Joe Doakes

What happened to official Minnesota’s vaunted “cultural sensitivity?”

After four years under firmer Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Chicago has run up an absolute mountain of debt, and is among the ranks of cities that could easily go bankrupt in the near future.

So naturally, inveterate democrat Chicago voters appear likely to go the Greek route, and kick the physical can down the road even further, appearing to favor someone even further to the left:

Three weeks remain before the April 7 runoff between Emanuel and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a Cook County commissioner and fellow Democrat whose candidacy is the vehicle for grievances against the mayor and his efforts to steer the city away from insolvency. Chicago has $20 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, a school system deep in deficit and a credit rating dropping toward junk. It’s in danger of being overwhelmed by debt unless it embraces onerous solutions that probably would include retirement benefit cuts and tax increases.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen such financial uncertainty and so many moving parts all going on at once, and no one wanting to blink first by saying what he’s going to do about it,” said Donald Haider, a former Chicago finance director who ran for mayor in 1987.

Of course, they have to walk a very fine line; essentially, both have to campaign on who’s willing to be the most brazen about waiting for a federal bailout, without actually saying it.

I got a brief shot at listening to the Jack Tomczak show this morning, on the lesser talk station.

They were talking about Minnesota’s “budget surplus”.

And they played an audio clip of Gov. Dayton, which pretty completely summed up the disconnect the DFL has on this issue.

In the audio clip, the governor referred to the surplus as “our collective good fortune”.

And this highlights a yawning golf of cognitive dissonance between DFLers (and others they’ve fooled) and the rest of Minnesota.

To a DFLer, budget surpluses are borne down from heaven in velvet-lined ivory chests on the wings of unicorns.

To the rest of us? The government’s “surplus” is our deficit. Every penny of that surplus came from what could’ve been a more productive use. Small business’ payroll; a manufacturers capital budget; your household budget and mine.

It’s not a “collective good fortune”; it’s a burden. It’s money taken out of the productive economy to run government, in excess of what government demanded in the first place; if the DFL has its way, it will be turned into permanent spending, to be wrenched from your wallets, your budgets, your bottom lines in perpetuity.

Surpluses are a bad thing. Deficits – provided they lead to spending cuts, rather than tax hikes – are a good thing.

Except for the permanent government class, of course.

Two quick points as background:

• It stinks to have a job offer rescinded.  I’ve had it happen once; a contracting agency made me an offer to work a contract at Northern States Power, back when that still existed.  In the two weeks that followed, NSP re-aligned its priorities.  The agency rescinded my offer; there was no job to put me in.  It was worse than a pain in the ass in my case; I had given notice at the job I had (which I hated), and I had a mortgage and three kids to feed.
• I’m always amused to hear that businesses “recruit on college campuses” – partly because I went to a college that nobody ever recruited at (at the time) unless you were a nursing or computer science major.  I always figured “wouldn’t that be nice?”, but never thought that much of it.

Federal spending (as a percentage of US GDP) drops close to the historical average…

The federal budget is shrinking as a percentage of gross domestic product, falling just below 20 percent in the third quarter of 2014. That’s down four points from its peak of 24 percent in 2011, according to market analysis firm Strategas’ survey of recent Treasury Department data.

 

“That’s a pretty large drop in government spending,” said Daniel Clifton, head of policy research for Strategas.

 

The drop puts current federal spending close to the norm for the last half-century. While the budget has grown in absolute numbers — the omnibus spending bill passed earlier this month totaled more than $1 trillion — federal spending has averaged just over 19 percent of GDP since 1963.

 

The decline is due to a combination of factors, the main one being the restraints that were put on federal spending in 2011 as a result of the debt ceiling standoff in Congress

…for the past half-century.  Which, to be fair, is about when the Fed started its orgy of spending like a crack whore with a stolen gold card in peacetime.

Who’d have thought we’d be talking about the Johnson years as a positive baseline?

At any rate, it’s an incremental step in the right direction – thanks, in its entirety, to the Tea Party.

Walmart stores in 21 states are taking money away from salaries normally paid to higher skilled workers – including those who work their way up from minimum-wage – to pay for minimum wage hikes:

The new laws have prompted Wal-Mart to adjust the minimum premium paid to its higher-skilled employees and combine its lowest three pay grades, Reuters reported Wednesday

Sapping initiative to pay for feel good social canoodling?

All is proceeding according to plan.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Discussed Mall of America protest with a co-worker. What’s the point. To raise awareness. Of what? That police are killing Black people. Why do I care? You don’t care? Not really, I’m a law-abiding White citizen so I’m in no danger; besides, how does disrupting my Christmas shopping make me care about your pet peeve? It’s not a pet peeve, it’s an important civil rights issue that every American should care about. Oh, so now it’s not raising awareness, now it’s preaching: I can’t simply be aware of your issue, you intend to force me to agree by holding my grandkids’ Christmas presents hostage. That’s not persuasion, that’s coercion, and I resent it.

Taking people like my co-worker at their word that the protesters are acting in good faith, it occurs to me the MoM protestors are using the Underpants Gnomes Theory of Effecting Social Change.

1. Enrage people who are trying to finish their Christmas shopping by protesting at the Mall
2. ?
3. Enraged Christmas Shoppers help protestors achieve the Social Change the protestors desire.

The protestors haven’t quite figured out Step 2 yet, but they’re certain Step 3 will result. So they blithely launch into Step 1 assuming it’ll all work out in the end. It won’t: enraged Christmas shoppers will actively hate the protesters and all they stand for, will call the cops to have them arrested, and will scoff at hand-wringing newspaper editorials in the Strib and when jail time is imposed, will nod and say “Damned right.”

Kind of like the Westboro Baptist Church chanting “God Hates Fags” at military funerals, to protest the legality of homosexuality in America. Step 1 has been achieved, we all know there’s a controversy. And we all know what you want as Step 3 – outlaw buggery. But you haven’t worked out the details of Step 2 so you haven’t convinced the rest of us to act in your favor. Instead, we form parties of flag-waving motorcycle riders to drown you out. And people who might otherwise have been inclined to discuss the subject reasonably, look at the motorcyclists and say “Damned right.”

Of course, if the protesters are not acting in good faith; if the protesters are professional agitators or paid union hacks or general thugs, the above analysis does not apply.

Joe Doakes

We live in a place who’s dominant political cultural values “sending messages” over “convincing people”.