To:  Big Gay
From: Mitch Berg, dispassionate observer
Re:  PR

Dear Big Gay Movement,

Joe McCarthy called.  He says “back off the kneejerk paranoia over cognitive dissonance“.

That is all.

…maybe the woman in this story can claim she’s transgender. Or gay.

That seems to be the way to get the law to work for you these days.

To:  Big Gay
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Silence Is Golden

Hi,

Save your stereotypes; I’ve done more to combat real physical hatred against real gay people than most of you will.  Long story.  Takeaway:  I’ve got no beef with gay people.

So don’t be phoning it in as a “hate crime” when I say I’ll support this in the public schools when you support open displays of crosses on Good Friday and Easter.

Deal?

That is all.

People of faith Christians who own businesses in the wedding industry are trying to find a way to keep new social demands from forcing them to violate their faith in their vocational life via legislation, the courts, and adaptation.

But it would seem they missed a golden opportunity.

The next time a gay couple comes into their bakery obviously fishing for a “public accomodations” test case, they should phone it in to the FBI as a “hate crime”.

Over the Easter Weekend/news hole, Rolling Stone magazine and their writer, Sabrina “Amoral Pig” Erdely, retracted their hatchet job University of Virginia rape story. I’ll add emphasis:

On Sunday, Ms. Erdely, in her first extensive comments since the article was cast into doubt, apologized to Rolling Stone’s readers, her colleagues and “any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article.”

She apologized to her readers, colleagues, and people who felt triggerwarned?

Well, isn’t that special.

Nothing for the people she falsely accused?  

The people she nifonged?

In an interview discussing Columbia’s findings, Jann S. Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, acknowledged the piece’s flaws but said that it represented an isolated and unusual episode and that Ms. Erdely would continue to write for the magazine. The problems with the article started with its source, Mr. Wenner said. He described her as “a really expert fabulist storyteller” who managed to manipulate the magazine’s journalism process. When asked to clarify, he said that he was not trying to blame Jackie, “but obviously there is something here that is untruthful, and something sits at her doorstep.”

So Amoral Pig Erdely ran a story without even the faintest whiff of what used to be considered journalistic due diligence, buuuuuuuuut of course she’ll continue to “write” for Rolling Stone.  

It’s been my theory for most of a decade now that the “Society of Professional Journalists'” “Code of Ethics” is nothing but a framework by which media outlets can justify absolutely anything they do, even if only by pleading “we subscribe to the SPJ Code of Ethics”.

It’s very close to becoming a new Berg’s Law.

Who in the flaming hootie-hoo are the other 32%?

The educational establishment is calling in its markers with the mainstream media, and beating the drums against charter schools in particular, and school choice in general.

Of course, it’s the same set of out of context factoids they trot out every 2-3 years.

Finances:  Some charter schools have a hard time making a financial go of it.  Of course they do; they can’t run to the taxpayer and crank up the local education mill levy (“for the children!”) whenever they spend their way into a hole, the way the district schools can.

Grades:  Some charter schools, especially schools in urban areas catering to black, Latino, Asian, immigrant and Native American kids. lag the public districts in terms of achievement.  We’ve been through this; back in 2009, after Nick Coleman joined into a previous round of catcalling charters, I ran through the stats.  Some charters – including many urban charters full of minority and immigrant kids – spanked the public districts.  Others lagged.

Paternalism:  The great unstated fact that none of charters’ opponents ever addresses; 80% of urban charter kids are minorities and immigrants.  Every black, Latino, Asian, Native or Somali kid that leaves the public school system is leaving the the reservation that the DFL is counting on to train its future voter base.

But charters in the city – especially the ones catering to older kids – have two handicaps, as I showed in 2009:

• Burnout:  They take a disproportionate number of kids who’ve been terribly failed by the district schools, and have had their love of learning – something pretty much every child is born with – beaten out of them pretty decisively.  It takes a good charter some time to help a kid back to the point where he or she gives a crap again.  With some, it never works.  With others, it does – but rarely overnight.
• Cooked Testing Books:  After age 16, the big district schools can shunt their less-enthusiastic students, or the ones with difficulties (criminal records, kids of their own, and on and on) off into the “Alternative Learning Centers”, or ALCs.  There, they’re off the books; their test scores aren’t held against the district.  Charters have no such option; every kid’s score counts.

If someone in the educational-industrial complex ever wanted to get the fact about charter schools versus public schools, they could do two things:

1. Cut The Umbilical Cord:  Let public schools exist on their per-student allotments and whatever money they could raise themselves.  I know.  It’ll never happen.  If it did, over half of public schools would shut down in a year.
2. Longitudinal Testing:  Every single current comparison of public and charter school achievement relies on straight-up comparisons on how students are doing right now.  They are the average score of every student in the charter school, versus the average of every kid in the public school that hasn’t been shunted into a diversion program.  But if they did a longitudinal study comparing how individual students did over time – specifically, comparing how students who left public schools with low achievement fared over the rest of their educational career, versus control groups of similar kids who stayed in the public systems – that would be more accurate (and, given the graduation rates for Twin Cities public schools, more damning.

But we’ve been through all this before.

The real question today is, what’s behind this latest round of out-of-context piss-balloon-throwing from the educational-industrial complex?  Why are they attacking charter schools this time?    Why is Big Education’s propaganda machine going to work to slag the hundred labors of love that make up the Minnesota charter school sector?

Why?  Oh, why?

Oh, right.   Minorities getting all uppity.   And as they leave the public districts, that’s a lot of jobs, and funding, for the political class that are harder to justify.

It must be stopped.

And that’s why the left’s useful idiots are attacking charters this year.   And next year.

Four legal arguments against “Net Neutrality“.

The FCC’s new internet rules cite a Soros-funded front group dozens and dozens of times:

New internet regulations finally released by the Federal Communications Commission make 46 references to a group funded by billionaire George Soros and co-founded by a neo-Marxist…The term “Free Press” is mentioned 62 times in the regulations. Some are redundant mentions referring to the same Free Press activists’ comments in favor of more oversight. In total, the FCC cited Free Press’ pro-net neutrality arguments 46 times.

The FCC received more than 4 million public comments as it was weighing the net neutrality initiative, but Free Press and other activist groups have received the most attention by pressuring the FCC and the White House on behalf of their cause.

The Obama Administraiton is the most transparently corrupt administration in history.

Opponents of urban charter schools – inevitably white, upper-middle-class, MPR-listening, Subaru-driving people with degrees from Macalester – have developed a habit of sniffing that urban charters are “a return to segregation”, because many charters, especially in the city, are aimed at ethnic groups.

What these lilywhite guardians of “diversity”-for-its-own-sake miss is that these charters – the Twin Cities have schools aimed at black, H’mong, latino and Native American kids, and used to have one serving Muslim students – may be “segregated”, but it’s entirely voluntary; the decision of the parents and families involved.

And why would they do that?

Because they’re racists?

Perhaps.  More likely, I suspect, it’s cultural (the Native American and H’mong schools), and linguistic (the Latino schools).

And I suspect that for more than a few parents, it’s more like this:  while they like the idea of “diversity” – exposing their children to different people, cultures, races and the like – they also know they’ve got one shot with their kids.  America’s racial problems aren’t going to be fixed in 12 years.  If they’re fixed in thirteen years, that’s great – but too late for your first-grader.

And in the meantime, lurking in the background at the worst “diverse” schools, are scenes like this (and save your breath, Volvo-driving ninnies; this sort of tension is endemic at urban schools; my kids went there for years, and while it rarely got that bad, it hovered over the school experience in ways ugly and comical for their entire time in school).  And while I suspect that, like me, a lot of parents would love for their kids to participate in America’s ethnic “conversation”, they also figure that there’s plenty of time for that when they’re adults, and they’d like to spend that first 12 years focusing on them getting an education without all the pointless, mindless tension.

The Clintons’ foundation, in addition to being tied to enough corruption to warrant comparisons between Hillary and Richard Nixon, is floating in influence-renting money from Middle Eastern nations that treat women like Marge Schott treated the domestic help, only with “death” instead of “venial little insults” involved.

But remember:  Koch!

The Mozilla Firefox browser seems to be slipping into second-tier status, after nearly 2 decades as one of the go to web browsers.

Is it lagging technology?

Or is it user anger over the politically correct ouster of former CEO, Brandon Eich?

Personal experience in the IT business says the former is certainly a factor – but there’s evidence that the witchhunt is accelerating things.

To:  The Entire Gay Movement:
From:  Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re:  The Mote

Dear Every Gay In The World,

I’m Mitch Berg.  I’m a conservative – but I can’t say as I’ve ever hated gays.  Indeed, I’ve probably done more to fight the overt, physical hatred of gays than most of you have.  And the simple fact is, after over a decade as a single parent, I have barely had time or energy to put into my own sexuality, much less bother with anyone else’s.

Now, I’ve had my beefs with you all – the whole “if you oppose gay marriage, you are teh bigot!” campaign was a crime against logic.

And while I don’t believe anyone would “choose” to be gay, there’s actually nearly no evidence that it’s genetic, either.  Most of what I’ve read makes me think it’s an adaptation.

And y’know what?  I don’t care; God loves you all, and it’s not for me not to, even if I were so inclined, which I’m not.

I don’t care much for “identity” movements, since they tend to politicize things that ought not be politicized.  But I get it; decades of repression, yadda yadda.  I’ll call it square.

But I’ll just say your whole “want to be accepted” thing would sit a lot easier with real humans if Dan Savage hadn’t appointed himself your spokesbeing.  Emphasis added by yours truly:

A few days ago, Savage told the Family Research Council’s Josh Duggar of “19 Kids and Counting” to “go f**k yourself” after Duggar posted a picture with Rick Santorum. Savage then made a child molestation joke against Pope John Paul II, and now he’s going after the GOP. After Ben Carson said that he believes being gay “is absolutely a choice” in an interview with CNN March 4, Dan Savage tweeted out: “Being gay is a choice? Prove it: Choose it yourself. Suck my dick.”

Dan Savage; anti-bullying crusader.

Please pass the word to Mr. Savage (and I ask this not because I think y’all have a secret underground network, but just on the off-chance that someone out there knows that big arrogant trained chimp) that he would seem to find cognitive dissonance more threatening than does the most inbred redneck.

And that’s a bad thing.

That is all.

Where would we be today if the federal government had enacted a “Cell Phone Neutrality” act in 1987?  A policy saying that nobody could pay a premium for a snazzy, newfangled, small cell phone until everyone had a big, clunky, expensive one?

How about a “Car Safety Neutrality” act in 1971, saying that no one could pay a premium for a car with airbags until everyone had a car with airbags?

What if we passed us a law saying that nobody could pay a few bucks extra for good healthcare until everyone had crappy healthcare… Oh, wait.

The United States government: giving the most successful piece of infrastructure of the 21st-century regulation that didn’t work in the 1930s.

Note to liberals/”progressives”:  when companies release “premium” products, other companies notice that less-“premium” people want them too – and they find ways to make those “premium” products more affordable.  And everyone wins.

Which is why poor people have cell phones, consumer electronics and cars of higher quality than the rich had 30 years ago – but their healthcare, education and mass transit keep getting worse.

…that if we voted for Mitt Romney, we’d have a government beholden to plutocrats, that trampled on the people and the law itself to get its wishes, while marinating in luxurious unaccoutability.

And they were right.  Even parts of the Left are smart enough to see it, albeit possibly too late.

Note To John Kline, Erik Paulsen, Tom Emmer and (if you’re smart) Colin Peterson:  Oppose this.  Seriously.

It gets old, always, always, always repeating “if a conservative said this, the media would collectively crap a cinder block”.

But it’s always true.

But former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg said something that would put him squarely in David Duke territory; emphasis added for the dense and dazed:

“It’s controversial, but first thing is all of your — 95 percent of your murders and murderers, and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America,” Bloomberg is heard saying in the newly released audio.

And his prescription?  Well, it’s meant to sound a little more benevolent than something a Klansman would say, but spiritually it’s the same exact thing:

“That’s where the real crime is,” he added. “You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed. First thing you can do to help that group is to keep them alive.”

“Keep them alive” – by disarming the victims.

Forget dog whistles; this piece is full of racist foghorns.

And it puts an exclamation point on the most important premise related to the gun control issue today; it is today, as it was in 1968, and 1866 and 1842, an instrument of keeping ethnic minorities disarmed, helpless and in “their place”.

Rarely as they as obliging as to say it in as many words, as Bloomberg is recorded saying (and the media is doing its best to scrub all mention of the tape’s existence); even Heather Martens is smarter than that (thus far).

Do the world a favor; make sure a black DFL voter hears this.

It’s been a rough year or so for Heather Martens.

It seems like just yesterday that she was not only serving as the chairperson (and almost solitary member) of “ProtectMN”, an astroturf checkbook advocacy antigun group, but de facto Minnesota State Representative for House District 66A, doing both her own job and that of Representative Alice Hausman (notwithstanding being a paid lobbyist, which is supposedly against House rules).  But it was in fact two years ago.

Last year, the worm turned for Heather Martens.  Flush with Michael Bloomberg’s money, the regional anti-gun movement hired a slew of PR professionals to carry the victim-disarmament movement’s legislative water.

And nobody has ever accused Martens of being a PR professional.  Inept? Sure.  Incapable of making a substantial true statement on the gun issue?  Utterly.

And so during the 2014 session, Martens was largely sidelined.

Oh, she still had her ace in the hole; for the past decade and change, no editor anywhere in the Twin Cities media would consider a story about firearms complete without a (false, laughable) quote from Martens.  She was to gun issues what Larry Jacobs is to every other political topic.

But then, a few weeks, back, the unthinkable happened; the Strib published a story on a gun policy issue that passed on quoting Martens.

Does this mean the Twin Cities media has finally realized what every other sentient person in the universe on both sides of the gun issue has known for over a decade – that Heather Martens is to competence and knowledge on Second Amendment issues what Mark Dayton is to hip hop?

Let’s not get carried away, here.

But let nobody think that Ms. Martens is going to fade too gently into obscurity, no matter how objectively richly deserved.  She sent out an email blast to her “supporters” this past week, including a little bird.  Bits of emphasis are scattered throughout by me:

Dear Mr. D’Artagnan,

The gun extremists have pulled out all the stops. They’ve introduced a bill to repeal all permitting and background check requirements to buy and carry firearms. The gun extremists tried to repeal our life-saving Minnesota law before, and we stopped them — but we couldn’t have done it without you.

Can you help us stop this dangerous bill?

Two questions, here:

• What bill are they talking about?
• If, as Martens claims, “we stopped them”, then why do they need everyone’s help to stop it again?

Join us on Monday, Feb. 23 at 10:30 in Saint Paul to stand up for your values — for the right of every child, from every neighborhood, to live free of the fear of gun violence. Click here to RSVP. A program from 11-1 with testimonials and a legislative issue training will be followed by visits to legislators for those who sign up.

If you can’t be there in person, please make a donation today to help cover the costs of the event.

Thank you for all you do,

Heather Martens

I’m tempted to show up.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals exclaim that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s lack of a college degree proves he lacks knowledge.

I knew a guy who was frighteningly well educated. He could tell you why it rained, when it was going to rain, what made it rain . . . he just didn’t have enough sense to come in Out of the rain.

Knowledge is not wisdom.

Knowledge is learned in college; wisdom is won in the world.

I wish our current President had more worldly wisdom and not so much college knowledge.

I sincerely hope our next President does.

Joe Doakes

Anyone still talking about where they went to college more than five years after they graduated, unless there in an academic field, probably has nothing to be proud of in their post-college life.

Anyone who barbers about where someone went to college, unless that person is operating on the child or building their bridge, is probably an idiot.

Representative Mary Franson, GOP from Alexandria, is making the first move toward repealing the forced unionization of childcare and homecare providers:

… Rep. Mary Franson (R-Alexandria), a former childcare provider, introduced legislation – known as the “Hands Off Child Care Act” – that would repeal the childcare unionization law of 2013.

“The vast majority of childcare providers do not want be forced into a union,” said Franson. “Given the high costs of childcare in Minnesota, this legislation will help alleviate costs that unionization would bring providers, moms, and dads.”

It’s worth noting that Minnesota already had some of the highest childcare costs in the United States – considerably higher than our other costs and standards of living, before the DFL, working at the behest of the SEIU and AFSCME, jammed down the unionize Asian of providers in the 2013 session.

“But wait!”, You might say, “the DFL controls the Senate, and Mark Dayton is still the governor!”

And you to be right. Mark Dayton doesn’t take a dump without his union benefactors’ okay.

But this bill will get votes on the record, assuming it gets out of committee. And that’s with the GOP majority in the house needs to do; get lots of damning votes to associate with lots of DFLers on these bread-and-butter issues.

I’ve made these two points before, somewhere in the blog’s past 13 or so years – maybe several times.  But I think there’s a fresh-ish point here, so bear with me.

Background: Two of the luckiest breaks of my life were:

1. In 1980, at the beginning of my senior year of high school, a couple of slickie boys who’d been working in major market radio bought out my first radio station, KEYJ.  They changed the format, ramped up the “slick”, and fired most of the locals (including me).  The lesson?  Loyalty to one’s employer is a sucker bet.
2. Later, I went to college at an obscure little school in the middle of North Dakota.  My mom worked as a secretary in the nursing department, so I got a huuuuuge tuition break, and I graduated debt-free.  But in those days, nobody but nobody came to Jamestown College to recruit graduates (other than the Air Force, and all they were interested in was nursing majors).  You were on your own.  The lesson:  You’re only as marketable as you make yourself; relying on your “credentials” is a sucker’s bet, too.

Stemming From Misinformation:  We’ve talked a lot about the Higher Ed Bubble in this space over the years; decades of government and government-backed student lending has built up an immense system of higher education institutions that crank out a huge surplus of people with degrees that “aren’t needed” in our society, or for whom at least the markets are very tight; because of the “borrow now, pay later” policies that the government and Big Education have been pushing, these students are not only coming into the workforce with degrees that “didn’t train them” for a career that was viable, much less one that could pay off all that debt.

Now, I’m not sure if there was ever a time when an anthropology or music or history or theatre or Norwegian major could graduate from college and look forward to getting snapped up purely for the skills they learned in college; engineers and nurses and computer programmers, yes, but not English majors (outside the Education track, anyway – and that’s getting dicier too).  I’m not sure if it was the crowd I hung out with, or the place I went to school, or the time I went there, but I don’t recall any non-teaching-track writing or art  or English or theater performance majors getting out of school and expecting a job as an writer or artist or actor; they – we – either…:

• Hunkered down for a rather straitened near-term life against the hope of finding a niche that paid the bills (and I do have friends who’ve done this)
• Adapted, and used the marketable meta-skills they’d picked up in college and/or their early work careers to find a career in another field, possibly completely unrelated) (that’d be me), or…
• Toiled away at their chosen major field with no expectation of making a living at it.

That was then; kids graduating with tens of thousands of dollars in debt in those fields is now.

False Optimism:  The answers, we’re told, are to either focus kids toward:

• Vocational and technical fields – everything from tool and die manufacturing to personal care.
• “STEM” – science, technology, engineering and math.

For the former?  I couldn’t agree more.  There is a big chunk of American academia that takes students “settling” for a vo-ed or technical career as a defeat.  It’s just not true – or shouldn’t be.

As to STEM as a panacaea?  It’s a bit of a racket; business is pushing STEM even as wages are stagnant and industry imports “labor” from overseas as fast as they can find it.  Industry is pushing people into STEM to drive down the cost of labor, and it’s working.

Still, there are quite a few jobs in the field, and a kid who’s so inclined can get a decent start in life that way, if they’re so inclined.

What’s Missing Here:  But let’s go back to the two big lessons I learned up front in this post.

Loyalty to one’s employer – in the sense that people who spent 35 years working at the same job and retired with a company or union pension used to feel it – is a thing of the past.  So why do people think that spending ones career tied to a field of study one (usually) chose in ones teens and twenties should have a longer shelf life?

Because one’s working life is more likely than ever to involve adapting, changing, re-learning and starting over than to involve doing the same thing for forty-odd years.

And that’s the part that modern education – high school, liberal arts, STEM or technical – always, always seems to get wrong.  The supreme skill in life is not building a circuit or writing a term paper or analyzing historical political campaigns; it’s knowing how to adapt to the many changes life throws at you, no matter what you major in.

Can that be taught?  Sure.  Not everyone can learn it, no more than I will ever be adept at calculus.

But it’s certainly more useful than 95% of what people are taught these days.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Got this fundraising e-mail today. I think there’s a flaw in the proposal but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

***

Dear Friend

Our country is in trouble and we need your help in a big way. The rich are cheating this country of a Billion Dollars of tax revenue EVERY MINUTE.

Right now, federal tax law supported by Republicans is costing the government at least 50 cents – and in some cases as much as 72 cents – out of every dollar earned. By closing the payroll tax loophole, Democrats in Congress could fully fund every vital program to invest in infrastructure, eliminate racial inequality and prepare our children for the future.

All it would take is one simple fix in the payroll tax laws, setting the amount of withholding equal to total wages earned. And it would affect only a small number of Americans – fewer of them every day – but the Evil Republicans backed by the Koch Brothers are blocking this common sense reform.

Tell Republicans to Give Congress Back its Money! Tell Republicans to Close the Payroll Tax Loophole!

And please help us spread this urgent message by contributing $100, $50 or even $25 today. Your contribution could make the difference between saving the country and letting the terrorists win.

***

Joe Doakes

it’s so hard to tell truth from parody these days…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Star Tribune finally deigns to report that Department of Public Safety altered the Application to Carry a Pistol form, to include more than a dozen illegal questions. Heather Martens is fine with that.
Heather Martens . . . said some of the questions on the form reveal information that may not turn up in a background check. Further, she said, where 80 percent of the state’s gun deaths are by suicide, even the simplest questions may get honest answers. “I could say that some of those questions are very important questions, and there’s no downside to asking them,” she said. “I wish they asked everybody who is buying a gun, ‘Are you planning on killing somebody with this?’ and a certain number of people are going to say yes. That’s just the way it is

First, it’s not 80%, it’s less than 70%. Still tragic, but let’s be honest about the numbers.

Second, the percentage doesn’t matter; the questions weren’t asked on an Application to Commit Suicide. Suicides don’t get permits.
Third, as Rep. Tony Cornish pointed out, the questions are irrelevant because only information law enforcement needs is exactly what turns up in a background check.

Fourth, notice the smooth slide away from the subject at hand – Permit to Carry – over to her pet peeve – Permit to Purchase. Too bad the reporter doesn’t have a clue about gun rights, so she doesn’t notice she’s being lied to by misdirection.

Joe Doakes

Dear reporters here in Minnesota; why do you keep going to Heather Martens for information on firearms issues?

If you had a source in any other area who always give you false information, and always made your reporting wrong, would you keep going back to them?

There really isn’t any excuse for this, anymore.

Now, for years, I called myself “Minnesota’s Best Feminist” – largely because it pissed lesser feminists off so much.

I’ve laid off the bit for a few years, now – not because it wasn’t true (like most fathers these days, I don’t want my daughter to be held back for any reason but her own merit or hard work, or lack thereof (and she has plenty of both).  I am what some academics would call a “Gender-Equity Feminist” – someone who believes in removing obstacles to female equality in law, which is the starting point of real equality in our society.  That’s as opposed to “Gender Identity Feminists”, who see feminism as something analogous to nationalism, an identity to be upheld against a hostile opposition.  I’m not one of those.

Most of American “feminism” in academia and “womens’ studies” programs and the media today is the latter – which is a sort of dumb irony; members of the most spoiled, cossetted community in America, academics and social thinkers, from most most spoiled and overweened generation of people in American history (Generation X and the Millennials, who are rapidly approaching the Baby Boom for sheer irritation factor), prattling about the hardships they face.

The WaPo recently ran a list of new years resolutions by a group of “feminists”.

Most of them are written in the curious, circular argot of the post-1990s humanities graduate student, clogged with circular, post-structural, deconstructionist language that is only intermittently interchangeable with standard English.

By the way, the drawings of the various thinkers involved were done by the author of the WaPo piece, Ruth Tam.

So as my service to you, I’m going to translate the statements into plain(ish) English.

	Janet Mock, 31 | ‘Redefining Realness’ author and MSNBC’s ‘So Popular’ host | @JanetMock	“All you white, urban, upper-middle-class women have seized “feminism”. I’m here to subdivide the turf! Stand back!”
	Lux Alptraum, 32 | BinderCon co-founder | @luxalptraum	“When I talk about “putting programs and policies in place to level the playing field”, you know what I mean is yet another social-service bureaucracy staffed with lots of people like me – because those Women’s Studies degrees aren’t exactly raking in the bucks, if you catch my drift”.
	Leigh Stein, 30 | BinderCon co-founder | @rhymeswithbee	“While everyone that has any sort of public profile online gets harassed one way or another, I want to make harassing women a special, extra level of wrong. Sort of like ‘hate crime'”
	Ai-jen Poo, 40 | National Domestic Workers Alliance director, Caring Across Generations co-director, created #dwdignity, #caringamerica, #womentogether | @aijenpoo	“Hey, don’t let Lux Alptraum reel in all the swag! The political process…er, ‘feminism’, needs to provide jobs for my constituency, too!”
	Elizabeth Nyamayaro, 40 | Senior Advisor to Executive Director of UN Women, heads HeForShe campaign | @e_nyamayaro	“It sure sounds like I’m asking for men to just siddown and shaddup, doesn’t it? There’s a reason for that…”
	Jessica Pierce, 29 | Black Youth Project 100 National Co-Chair | @JFierce	“Not only should one never waste a crisis, one must find a way to turn a crisis into power”
	Charlene Carruthers, 29 | Black Youth Project 100 National Coordinator | @CharleneCac	[Actually, Ms. Carruthers wasn’t especially satire-worthy; while I likely disagree, she says nothing especially outrageous]
	Lindy West, 32 | Writer, performer, I Believe You | It’s Not Your Fault founder and editor | @thelindywest	“Free Speech, Schmee Schmeech. Women, while boundlessly strong, are fragile vessels that must be protected from the scrum of the marketplace of ideas, above and beyond current civil and criminal law. That’s right – you must both respect womens’ power and yet show us a level of deference that’d make the Victorians shake their heads with disgust. Also, why did Ruth Tam dislocate my mouth?”
	Mikki Kendall, 38 | HoodFeminism.com co-editor, created #solidarityisforwhitewomen, #fasttailedgirls, #NotJustHello | @karnythia	“Poor black men are the disproportionate victims of police brutality. That’s a lot of victimological mindshare we feminists are leaving on the table. Let’s get moving on that!”
	Feminista Jones, 35 | Social Worker, writer, activist, created #YouOKSis and #NMOS14 | @FeministaJones	“More marches now!”
	Mia McKenzie, 38 | Award-Winning Writer, Black Girl Dangerous founder | @blackgirldanger	“You know when I say ‘I want to see queer and trans people of color with radical social and political analyses dominate independent media by creating and growing our own platforms, so we can centralize and control our own narratives’ that I actually mean ‘I want to develop yet another left-wing noise machine that allows ‘us’ to lie with impunity, just like the Alliance for a Better Minnesota and Media Matters do’, right?”
	Alexandra Brodsky, 24 | Know Your IX founding co-director; Feministing.com editor; The Feminist Utopia Project co-editor, Yale Law School student | @azbrodsky	“Dealing with sexual violence via concepts of ‘male guilt until proven innocence’, ‘trial without representation’ and ‘mob justice’ have done so much for higher education; it’s time to bring them from the campus to the larger society!”
	Patrisse Cullors, 31 | Dignity and Power Now executive director, co-created #BlackLivesMatter | @osope	“I have something to say – but first, I’m gonna cut Ruth Tam for this drawing she did of me”
	Alicia Garza, 33 | National Domestic Workers Alliance Special Projects Director, co-created #BlackLivesMatter | @aliciagarza, @blklivesmatter	“When I say stuff like ‘black women are the portals to the future’, I’m not being racist. Seriously.”
	Opal Tometi, 30 | Black Alliance for Just Immigration Executive Director, Co-Founder www.blacklivesmatter.com, co-created #BlackLivesMatter, #reunitehaitianfams, blackimmigration.net, reunitehaitianfamilies.com | @opalayo	“When I went to the doctor, I told her ‘forget about the virus – treat the sneezing!'”
	Brianna Spacekat Wu, 35 | Giant Spacekat head of development | @spacekatgal	“Just as Americans did at Omaha Beach and Selma, we need to mobilize our entire society against the plague of doughy, cheetoh-dust-flecked thirty-something game programmers sending hate male to female game programmers; that is the real plague!”

You hear that sound, gender-equity feminism? That’s a boat revving up, pulling a full load of Fonzie behind it.

According to Big Gun Control, the reason that the two policemen in New York City – a city that is historically among the most hostile to the law-abiding gun owner, a place that is doing its passive-aggressive best to scupper the spirit of Heller and McDonald, while more or less living up to their letter, a place that still is mired in the stone-age in terms of the attitudes of the political class toward the law-abiding gun owner…

…is that it’s too easy to get guns in New York.

Since the victims were Asian and Latino, I guess they couldn’t blame race…

To the more deranged parts of the American left, everything is evidence for their narrative.

For example – whether temperatures rise or fall, it’s all evidence of man-made global warming.

And a couple of New York police get killed by an apparently deranged man angered, according to his social media postings, by the Brown and Garner killings?

Why naturally – it’s the guns’ fault.

No, really – there’s a crisis not to be wasted here, for the Left.  To Big Left, this is yet another chance to warm over gun control.

As if more laws would have saved those two cops.