I’ve been hearing the plaintive stories of Americans, many of them seniors, stranded in Puerto Vallarta by the Cartels’ tantrum over their jefe being put down.
I’ve got a simple solution.
They should form groups, organized online, to follow the sicarios around and blow whistles at them.
You might be wondering if the drubbing they took caused the radical wing of Big Left to get a little circumspect? To see if they might want to change their approach, especially to the parts of their late coalition that forsook them last November? To even say “maybe we oughtta dial back the culture war schtick”?
Well, not many of them.
This sign has been popping up in Minneapolis:
For all the “All Are Welcome Here” signs in Minneapolis yards, it’s clear some groups mean “all… except you.” The dark money socialist group “Minneapolis for the Many” finally said the quiet part out loud: “When we say ALL, we don’t really mean ALL.”
The signs are posted by a group, “Mpls for the Many“, which apparently seeks to move Minneapolis’s city government even further to the left, and appears intended to supplant some of those “In This House” signs standing in the front yards of so many white, middle-class “progressives”.
I put “progressives” in scare quotes because, well, if you read the responses to the tweet above, it just doesn’t seem very “progressive”. It’s got that whole “scarlet letter” vibe about it.
And it’s not a rare thing at all – as David (a Minneapolis inmate) points out, many on the left seem to think the social contract is, er, subject to terms and conditions (nearly a direct quote from many of the responses to the tweet above, in fact).
Tom Knighton (at our sister publication Bearing Arms) points out that the current round of “mostly peaceful” demonstrators are putting the gloves back on – so as not to get gasoline, explosive residue or any stray flames on their hands:
Now, Molotov cocktails are bad, but the nature of them tends to mean that people know good and well that there’s no one around when they use one–or, conversely, that someone is present. Using one is a violent act, but it’s still a thing that gives the user at least some control over who all is going to be hurt by the cocktail when it’s thrown.
After that, all bets are off, which is why we don’t really treat them as a nothingburger.
But bombs are an escalation. These are intended to go off at a later time. It doesn’t say if they were meant for remote detonation or on a timer, but what we know is that these aren’t necessarily controlled and can be much more destructive.
To those who believe in such things as social contracts, it appears that part of our society is conjuring up some escape clauses in the fine print.
Today, for the first time in history, I can say “I’m looking forward to watching the first day of the new Legislative session”. As in, watching the livestream to see the fireworks or even better lack of them as the DFL takes their toys and flees.
Since Melissa Hortmans stunts…
Minnesota House Democrats swearing their allegiance to Baal, 2025 (colorized) pic.twitter.com/qIFa3mkzvy
…appear to be landing like the concept of “Vice President Walz”, and she doesn’t dare back down now, I have to figure she’s gotta find some way to double down and to avoid losing face.
And I have a hunch “losing face” is the most charitable interpretation; I have a hunch the DFL’s panic has more to do with “GOP control of committees and the power to hold public hearings when they start investigating DFL fraud” than quora.
And on the surface, it’d appear that this tweet is peak irony:
The South is booming—and remains the fastest-growing region in the country. It's currently the only place where more people are entering than exiting. Places like South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and many more are all experiencing major growth.
As you read the thread, it becomes clear that it’s really more a matter of the Democrat leadership class being oblivious to the results of their own policies.
That, and their messaging can not be intended to influence anyone but the stupid, the ill-informed and the uncritical, can it?
“Losing the popular vote for the house?” There is no “popular vote for the house”. There 134 district elections – nothing more.
And in one of those districts, neither the state DFL, nor the HD40B committee, nor the voters did their due diligence to find that their candidate was lying about living in the district.
The DFL wants to use their “mistake” to deny representation to half the state.
“Minnesotans voted for a tied house?” No – but if you want to look at it that way, half of Minnesota voted for a GOP House. And just under half of the state voted for a DFL House. And one district voted for a liar, either with the connivance or via the incompetence of the state DFL.
Why not “Share power”?
To paraphrase the great political sage Tim Walz, “when you have political capital, you use it”
The giggly fratboys of the DFL said that two years ago. Today, the line has apparently changed to “we dont’ have any capital, and if you don’t lend us some ’til payday, we’re going to throw a tantrum”.
Mohamed Jama, a potential top contender in a crowded special election to represent the safely Democratic district in northeast Minneapolis and Cedar-Riverside, likely does not meet the residency requirements according to state voter data.
You know who I’m talking about – the young humanities major at your job; the know-it-all lady witih ELCA hair in the PTA; the angry young relative who deigns to grace you with her presence at holiday dinners anyway.
This one goes out to you. Use it wisely.
Reasons American healthcare is expensive:
6. American pharmaceutical and device research and development can’t recoup costs overseas, due to rigid price controls in “single payer” healthcare systems (ironically making all “single payer” systems in effect dual payer systems).
5. Healthcare costs track gross incomes, worldwide. The inflation curve for healthcare is largely the same as the growth in a nation’s standard of living, whether it’s the US, Taiwan or Norway.
4. Americans are terrible drivers.
3. Americans are disproportionally very overweight.
2. As most Americans work during their prime earning years, older folks that used to stay with family in their 80s and 90s are now in assisted living, skilled nursing and memory care.
1. The “Affordable Care Act”, and the serial waves of government intervention that came before, stuffed a gob of unfunded mandates onto insurers.
Reasons American healthcare is expensive:
5. Healthcare costs track gross incomes, worldwide. The inflation curve for healthcare is largely the same as the growth in a nation’s standard of living, whether it’s the US, Taiwan or Norway.
4. Americans are terrible drivers.
3. Americans are disproportionally very overweight.
2. As most Americans work during their prime earning years, older folks that used to stay with family in their 80s and 90s are now in assisted living, skilled nursing and memory care.
1. The “Affordable Care Act”, and the serial waves of government intervention that came before, stuffed a gob of unfunded mandates onto insurers.
Not reasons that American healthcare is so expensive:
…is that not only can you “appropriate” an indigenous culture to your rhetorical ends, you can agglomerate indigenous cultures together into whatever custom mix you want to make whatever “point” you please.
For example, the term “Latinx”, which purports to consolidate widely disparate cultures (Puerto Rico has little in common with Central America, and less with Argentina and Chile).
Perhaps the Maori of New Zealand might want to do something to nip this in the bud before white progressive women drag their culture over the shark with them?
I mean, saving more money is good for you – might make you a conservative, eventually, actually.
And unless you save that money in a coffee can in your closet, it’ll go to a bank, which’ll circulate the money around, further helping those who are participating in the economy to grow things.
Not sure that’s quite the “own” you think it is.
Even less so than dumping Twitter to join “BlueSky”, really.
OK, so moving to Canada after threatening it over and over again may be a bit much.
But changing social media platforms (after two years of threatening)? That’s a little more doable.
Last week a friend of the blog emailed:
Blue sky app. Looks and works pretty much like X. Their world views are safe there. They speak very freely again which is good humor. Just search your favorite MN media person they are there. No invite needed.
The FotB was referring to BlueSky – which is basically “X” but an echo chamber for the left.
Y’know – Jack Dorsey’s original vision for Twitter, before being foiled by Elon Musk.
And today:
One week on Blue sky and they really have posted nothing revelant.
Lots of angry libs
I’m missing a party with both the formerly cool but recently genocidal Bob Collins and Kate Knuth?
JD Vance’s visit to the Third Precinct brought out, if not the worst of the plagues facing today’s Minnesota, at least the most comical: the WUPH.
The White Urban Progressive Homer. Generally a 20-30-something male, employed in the non-profit, public or academic sector, part of the laptop class, single, socially mobile, mostly self-focused.
And they seem to obsess relentlessly about the zipcode they live in – or at least parts of it:
Restaurants on the same intersection JD is standing (and talking about a "city in decline"): Du Nord Cocktail Room Lagniappe (creole) Arbeiter Brewing Hook & Ladder (music/shows) Zen Arcade (marijuana) Loncheria Los Amigos Wendy's Raising Cane's Mr. Momo Quruxley (Somali) https://t.co/DKei9BBvNl
Here’s a lake thats been here since before there were humans in Minnesota. Therefore everything in Minneapolis is fine. Go about your business, peasant!
You know how they say the worst, most arrogant condescending New Yorkers are the ones that were born in Albany?
A get a little of that vibe from the WUPH – people who seem to think a place’s natural beauty and social amenities impart worth on people who live there is…
Baldamar is my secret suburban restaurant where no one ever knows me, so I go there sometimes and eat by myself at the bar and pretend I am mysterious
Which, to my New York example, is about as parochial as the Lutheran church gossips in the basements of the churches in Woodbury and Forest lake that I suspect so many WUPHs originally come from in the first place.
It’s high time we updated the “DFL Dictionary” – which, as you read it, is clearly a product of a more innocent time.
When I do, one phrase I’m going to add is the “Urban Life Theme Park”.
To wit:
Urban Life Theme Park: (noun) A neighborhood, populated mostly by white middle-class “white “progressives” with Urban Progressive Privilege, mostly from the “laptop class” (non-profit, governmental, academic or petty professional) and their “fur babies” (but, signally, not the people who work at their restaurants, bars, coffee shops brunch places, pet spas and doggie daycares). Technically in the city for purposes of urban virtue-signaling (especially trying to one-up people from suburbs or rural areas), but economically and socially insulated from all but the most banal urban issues.
I’ll cop to it – I spent a good chunk of my early years in the Twin Cities with a big chip on my shoulder; the city mice were often dicks to the country mice. And though it’s been over thirty years, I’ve still got a short fuse on the subject.
So I’m asking rather than declaring; is there a way to listen to that and not hear “you hicks gotta know your place?”
SCENE: On Broadway at Central, in Northeast Minneapolis. It’s late fall; winter is clearly on the way. Stray papers blow down the street, nearly deserted in, visibly chilly. Outside the boarded up remains of what had been a breakfast place catering to “laptop-class” white progressive “new urbanites”, one of many boarded up stores on that once-lively stretch of street, a small group of people stand around a fire in a trash pail.
The group includes Tyrese and TayShawnda GROVES, a 40-something black couple; Steven SPALSKI, a 31 year old white male with his girlfriend, 30 year old Summer BLEAKER; 58-year-old Cindy HARLESS; Juan and Marcella VEGA, both 50, with their 11 year old son Arturo; and 45 year old Thai NGUYEN..
A police car creeps down the rutted road, dodging potholes, the officer avoiding the gaze of the people around the fire.
TYRESE GROVES: (to Spalski): So what did you used to do?
SPALSKI: You mean…before the joy?
(The group laughs, mirthlessly)
SPALSKI: I was a graphic designer for a startup that had just done its IPO.
BLEAKER: He was in line for a ton of stock options.
MARCELLA VEGA: What happened?
SPALSKI: (sighing with a weight greater than his years): All our customers went bankrupt.
TAYSHAWNDA GROVES: Same here. We ran a little grocery store over North. We were getting by…
TYRESE GROVES: …til the “anti-gouging price controls” hit.
NGUYEN: F***ing “anti-gouging act”
(Several of the people spit onto the dirty sidewalk).
GROVES (To Juan and Thai) You?
JUAN VEGA: I ran a little repair shop. Couldn’t get parts anymore.
NGUYEN: Thai restaurant. All our wholesalers went bust.
TAYSHAWNDA GROVES: Well, they took care of the “gouging”.
(Bitter laughs ensue)
MARCELLA VEGA: At least we had all that “joy”.
(General murmurs of disgust was the group warms their hands).
A Subaru, belching oil smoke, pulls up. Two women – 27 year old Emily FRONTENAC and 48 year old Emily MONTPETIT-EMILY, roll down a window. FRONTENAC’s hair shows little flecks of long-neglected blue dye at the end of long dirty-blond roots. MONTPETIT-EMILY, a blocky-looking woman, stares ahead grimly.
FRONTENAC: Hey – do you know the guy who’s selling the gluten-free eggs?
THAI: I might.
JUAN VEGA: Hey, just a minute ( points at the shirt MONTPETIT-EMILY is wearing, which looks a little like this…
JUAN VEGA: You’re one of the “pissed off women” who dragged Harris and Piglet over the line into the white house!
MONTPETIT-EMILY: Er…uh…
SPALSKI: You’re the ones that brought us all the “Joy”!
FRONTENAC: Uh….
JUAN VEGA: I had a good life before you “pissed off white progressive women” tanked the economy!
FRONTENAC: We saved abortion rights…
HARLESS: I can’t feed my grandkids abortion rights!
FRONTENAC: But…
TAYSHAWNDA GROVES: Hey, it’s a couple of the “pissed off women!”
JUAN VEGA: You always knew better than everyone.
SPALSKI: I had a life before you and your idiot president!
(Arturo Vega picks up a small rock and whips it at the Subary, dinging off the door)
FRONTENAC: Heyyy!
NGUYEN, HARLESS and TYRESE GROVES pick up handfuls of rocks and garbage and start pelting the car, which accelarates away as SPALSKI kicks at the back bumper.
MARCELLA VEGA: Feeling the joy yet, b***h*s?
JUAN VEGA sails a rock down the street, cracking the Subaru’s back window.
TAYSHAWNDA GROVES: I’ll show you pissed off women…
(General murmurs of asssent)
NGUYEN: So what are you all having for dinner tonight?
The comments on this tweet are the tip of the rhetorical iceberg, and bespeak a crowd who treat violations of their ‘Urban Progressive Privilege’ like getting jabbed in the yarbles with a knitting needle.
It’s high time we stopped calling Ivy Leaguers like this Columbia spokesbeing:
Reporter grills Columbia student after she demands the university help feed protestors occupying Hamilton Hall:
"It seems like you're saying, 'we want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over this building, now would you please bring us some food'." pic.twitter.com/vNczSAM4T1
By the way – at “Mitch Berg University”, students who infringe other students rights – Jewish, conservative, liberal, communist, I don’t care – by depriving them of the use of the campus they pay to attend will be blockaded into their “autonomous zones”; no water or food go in, no sewage comes out.
Only way out is through a checkpoint where they either make a videotaped apology and commit to pay restitution to the students they’ve adversely affected, or sign the acknowledgement on their expulsion paperwork.
No, that’s what Rep. Luke Frederick of Mankato says:
Another Minnesota Democrat, Rep. Luke Frederick, displaying open contempt for religious testifiers at a House committee today who asked that their religious liberty be protected against claims of gender identity discrimination. Frederick compared the testifiers to those who… pic.twitter.com/n2UY2Dmv7c
“Art” as humanity used to know it is pretty much dead, at least in any community of people who call themselves “artists” anymore.
This was from a, for lack of a better term, “art event” in Powderhorn Park over the weekend:
Ignore the stupid sled.
Look, rather, at the audience. What do you see?
Inevitably, they are smug, corn-fed, entitled, white progressive members of the laptop class and the non-profit/industrial complex – no doubt from “Urban Life” theme parks like Marcy Holmes or Merriam Park, larping it up as “art fans” in Powderhorn, the part of Minneapolis that smug progressives go to when they want to be “down with the neighborhood” (before they scamper back home to where all the barristas and short order brunch technicians have to commute to from Fridley and Brooklyn Center).
The MPD has condemned the display – which, I’m sure, is causing all sorts of nasal snorking over lattes this morning.
And why not? It’s not their stores being cleaned out (none of them as any concept of the free market more involved than a coffee shop), not their cars being jacked (does anyone actually steal electric cars?), not them waking up to bullet holes in their siding.
Here’s hoping every last one of these cretins needs a cop sometime soon.
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.
People inexperienced in the ways of Metro “progressives” might joke “I wonder if she’s going to put “Irritating people into behavioral change” into her campaign literature, yuk yuk”.
To those who know the breed, it’s not a joke. The suburban white upper-middle-class “progressive” seeks out different flavors of trite masochism and whiffle-ball self-abnegation – paying for bags, making “stolen land declarations”, putting up “In This House” signs – that have little financial and no moral cost, to signal dubious but convenient virtue to the less englightened.
Pay is up 1% among those with jobs – but 2% fewer are employed as a direct result of the policies, and that’s just scratching the surface (emphasis added):
Many economists have reached similar conclusions about minimum wage increases in the past. Still, the size of the impacts the researchers measured — by comparing Minneapolis and St. Paul to data culled from other Minnesota cities from 2017 through 2021 — were eye-popping, especially in low-wage industries.
Take Minneapolis’ retail sector, for example: The minimum wage increase led to 28% fewer retail jobs than researchers would’ve expected from a similar city during the same five-year period. By this comparison, Minneapolis also saw a 20% drop in hours worked and a 13% dip in aggregate worker earnings.
Across St. Paul’s restaurant industry, the city’s 2018 minimum wage hike was responsible for drying up nearly one-third of available jobs, the study found. In “limited-service” (fast food) restaurants, both hours and earnings fell by more than half after the increase took effect.
“Good, they’re mostly terrible jobs anyway” say the white progressives from the non-profit/government/industrial complex. They re literally spinning this as good news – or excuses for more programs.
It’s possible that Big Left isn’t pushing these minimum wages as a way to gut opportunity for entry level workers. But if it were, I’m at a loss for what they’d do differently.
No, not the popping of the Glock full-auto conversion.
It’s the wailing and gnashing of entitled, plush-bottom, White progressive Minneapolis Yoo-hoos losing their spit over being lampooned by an editorial cartoonist.
They have no frame of reference. Modern MSM editorial cartoons have all the intellectual diversity of The Colbert Show or NPR.
So the calls for “canceling” Thompson have already started.
It’ll be interesting to see if Thompson is forced to repent of his sins.
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.
It took a week for the story to get out – but somehow, it did.
A group of Mayor Carter’s staffers showed us what “One Minnesota” looks like when the new gentry cross paths with the proles:
“They just came in, they were obviously intoxicated,” recalls restaurant owner Jason Dorweiler.
He says a group of seven people came in asking for a table, while three men went to the restroom.
“They were very loud, we heard noises from inside the bathroom, outside while service was going on,” Dorweiler explains. “We kind of checked in on them. It appeared that they had urinated all over our floor, which is a bad sign, in addition to them coming in and just being annoying. They proceeded to sit down and were just being belligerent the whole time.”
