While this is good – and expected – news, I feel a little cheated.
Companies are ditching DEI because it’s bad for the bottom line; they can practice equality without flogging “equity”.
But notice how it’s framed: “under pressure from conservative activists”.
I mean, if you’re going to “blame” companies’ rediscovering economic and social sanity on people like me, and least call it “pouncing”, for fox’s sake.
So, the housing permit numbers for the Twin Cities are in.
And if putting people in houses is your goal, they are…uh, not good:
Saint Paul:
And Minneapolis:
Was it rent control? Bidenomics?
Why choose?
I have a hard time describing the contempt this bit here makes me feel:
She left the windows open (presumably at the Governor’s mansion, safely dug in down on “old money” Summit Avenue, miles from the actual rioting) and “smelled the tires burning”, because it was a “touchstone to what was happening”.
I smelled it a little closer up.
It was less a “touchstone” than it was my neighborhood – the one I’ve invested a few decades in – getting looted and burned by DFL voters.
Like all communists, Gwen Walz sees everything in theoretical terms. She’s one of the ones who is literally in the dacha, now. She can afford to.
The rest of us? Not so much.
When Governor Klink and the DFL legislative majority were making the case to squander the “surplus” [1], they put “cutting poverty by 30%” as one of their goals.
So – how is poverty in Minnesota doing?
Well – we don’t know.
Official poverty stats conveniently trail real time by a couple of years.
Official poverty rates trail real time by a couple of years. In 2022, the official poverty rate in MN was 9.6% – up from 9.3% in 2021, and an even 9% in 2020.
So at some point – 2023? 2024? 2025? – the poverty rate needs to drop to 6.4% – a rate the state hasn’t seen in recent memory.
I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and guess the rate isn’t dropping to a historic low next year.
Any action on that bet?
[1] Which, let’s not forget, wasn’t really a surplus
To: Jason Chavez, Minneapolis DSA/DFL councilbeing
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Punching
Councilbeing Chavez,
You tweeted this on Wednesday:
Let’s talk about the term “uprising”.
It usually connotes a group of subjugated, beaten-down people, “rising up” against their oppressors.
Good examples of uprisings that fit some variant of that definition:
Each of these uprisings have a few things in common: the people doing the uprising were being actively oppressed by those up against whom they rose; the targets of their attacks were the actual oppressors; tax authorities, the SS, the monarchy.
In May of 2020, people who considered themselves oppressed (we’ll accept that for sake of argument) “rose up” and destroyed…
…hundreds of businesses, extremely disproportionately owned by immigrants, people of color, people in the neighborhood. Oh, the Third Precinct got destroyed – after a couple of days of generalized looting and arson, seemingly almost as an afterthought, to give the “uprising” some window-dressing sense of political virtue other than “looting and burning cafes owned by first-generation Americans”.
I may be just an obstreporous peasant, but I think “downrising” might be a better term.
That is all.
History doesn’t repeat – but it rhymes.
The world’s major powers are rattling their sabers as they spar in secondary theaters.
The economies are in the hands of people who love to tinker with the levers and buttons of the Big State.
And young intellectually over-stimulated but underendowed bobbleheads are romping and playing:
Everything old is new again.
I saw “The Fall of Minneapolis” again last week.
Now, when I first mentioned seeing it a few months back, a few smart people whose opinions I never discount asked “is there anything new that the courts didn’t settle?”
That brings up a couple of questions.
In our society, we usually think that if a court – an impartial jury of our peers, a couple of adversarial attorneys patiently digging out the facts, a fair and impartial judge facilitating it all via “due proces” – decides something, that’s that. The truth has been found.
There’s problems with that.
The was this guy, James Fleming, a Facebook friend, shooter and criminal defense attorney. He used to snap at people who referred to “due process” by itself as a reason to trust something. Paraphrasing: due process isn’t a guarantee of fairness, much less justice. It means the proceedings all check the same checkboxes and standards. The fairness and justice is all in the details.
So – how can that go wrong?
Years ago, I was *very* tangentially involved in the case of a man who’d been accused of a fairly grisly rape and murder in 1982. He had been kind of a lowlife, a petty criminal and drug addict, the kind of guy you’ve seen on a thousand episodes of “Cops” insisting to the officer “I have NO IDEA whose gun and cocaine that is!” He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.
The courts settled the matter.
A decade and change later, a group of people did enough digging and agitating on his behalf to get the attention of “The Innocence Project”, a group of pro-bono lawyers that works on what they believe to be unjust convictions.
The lawyers found that the original conviction had been secured via:
– A jailhouse snitch with a history of perjury whose testimony nonetheless was allowed
– A District Attorney hiding exculpatory evidence.
– An incompetent public defender.
The exculpatory evidence included forensic evidence that, with modern DNA testing, could have shed some light on who the attacker was. But it vanished as completely as whispering “due process” in the wind.
After years of legal wrangling, the lawyers found the evidence – and with more modern DNA testing, determined that the man, who’d been convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt” after “due process”, couldn’t have possibly been the murderer. In 2003 he was released, after 21 years on Death Row.
And he’s not alone. In the past 50 years, *185* inmates have been released from Death Row. Not granted new trials. Not commuted to lesser sentences. *Released* from Death Row to the world – because their “convictions beyond a reasonble doubt” were in error, due to perjury, official misconduct, incompetence, and even some honest but terrible mistakes.
So – do I think the answer to “is it true?” is “the courts have spoken?”
Let’s just say I believe in (grudging, conditional) trust but verification. Throw in a heaping dollop of skepticism about the integrity of public officials and systems.
More later this wee4
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.
…of Berg’s Twentieth Law of Social Justice Warmongering (“All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise”), it’s hard not to look at this story – “Klan literature” being handed out in a swing-y part of northeastern Minnesota long controlled by a DFL that’s not happy about losing ground in the are, four days before an election where the DFL is poised to lose, maybe big – and not presume it’s a hoax.
Governors,
Seeing the hair pulling response of upper middle class leftist to actually have to pay the freight for their own policies on the border is, to put it frankly, utterly glorious:
Put another way:
Might I humbly suggest you send a couple of buses to:
The footage will be off the hook.
That is all.
A friend of the blog emails:
These amendments wouldn’t have changed my vote, but I wonder if it would have even passed if rent control as defined through the council’s amendments had been on the ballot?
Not likely, which is how it should have been in the first place – not passed.
I ask, as if in a vacuum, will this teach voters a lesson, change how they vote? The answer to that question is also not likely.
Indeed, I’d wager a shiny new quarter that this will be used by the hard left to push for even more “progressive” city councilbeings.
If it seemed to you that the Administration and Dems jammed down the “Inflation Reduction Act” – an agglomeration of “Build Back Battered“ and “Green New Deal“ policies – really really hard?
You were probably right. It’s because people are losing interest in “climate change“:
mericans are less concerned now about how climate change might impact them personally — and about how their personal choices affect the climate — than they were three years ago, a new poll shows, even as a wide majority still believe climate change is happening…Overall, 35% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the impact of climate change on them personally, down from 44% in August 2019. Another third say they are somewhat concerned. Only about half say their actions have an effect on climate change, compared with two-thirds in 2019.
The story is, in fact, more climatemongery, and goes on to try to re-bury the lede – but between the lines, the message is there; other priorities are taking over for people in the real world, outside the upper-middle-class progressive bubble.
And if people ever make the connection between the output of the “green/sustainable/equitable“ mafia policies, and the depression in their standard of living, that’s going to be a big problem for the greens.
Poor people don’t solve problems.
Serve:
Volley: Here’s something that should be even less controversial: if you’re going into the job market with skills that nobody will pay you a living wage for, you’re not ready to “adult”.
Green, “sustainable” energy policies that make middle class live unsustainable.
Transitioning from houses to apartments, from cars to mass transit.
Moving from meat to vegetables, with maybe some insect thrown in as a treat.
Hyperinflation, which serves mainly to make common savings and investment worthless, but does wonders for the wealth of the plutocrats, “futurists” and pols – who will give up no cars, houses, yachts ,warmth or food.
Seems like the “new world order” looks a lot like the old, pre-1776 world order, doesn’t it?
Victor Davis Hanson – perhaps more optimistic than I feel at the moment – in a piece you should read. Pull quote:
So a reset reckoning is coming—in reaction to the “new orders” championed by Biden and the Davos set.
In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic “No!” to the orthodox left-wing agenda that has resulted in unsustainable inflation, unaffordable energy, war, and humiliation abroad, spiraling crime, racial hostility—and arrogant defiance from those who deliberately enacted these disastrous policies.
What will replace it is a return to what until recently had worked.
I hope he’s right. The boundless stupidity of the “send me more stimmies” set – whose votes count just as much as those of smart people – serves as the counterexhibit.
…if modern Social Justice chic would or could exhibit the faintest hint of conscience…
…it seems it can.
Although it took an (ostensibly) Catholic university to do it, so…
The media yesterday expressed wonder that Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey had created a group of his “political critics“ serves a task force to “work“ on the cities crime problem.
A reader emails describe that group as:
…a veritable who’s who of those with their snout in the trough.
With LA carpetbagger Nekima Levy at the helm nothing but good can come from Mayor Frey’s Community Safety Workgroup
This gets, I think, to the truth that our media won’t, can’t, or aren’t supposed to talk about; this exercise is entirely a matter of greasing all the palms that need to be greased.
…that a city run by Kim Norton, which has been becoming blue-er and blue-er over time, would play passive-aggressive bureaucratic pattycake games with the citizenry…
…right?
A group of parents, with a Twin Cities law firm, are asking for records related to the district’s adoption of Critical Race Theory.
And how did that go over?
“On Nov. 12, an attorney representing the district said that it would cost ‘Equality in Education’ $901,121.15 to obtain the records and they must prepay before the district completes their request,” the report reads.
The battle lines for next November could not be clearer.
I just started nioting the “Land Acknowledgment” – the laborious-yet-offhand “acknowledgment” that an event was being held on land once occupied by Natives – in the last couple of years, mostly among the sorts of Twin Cities “social justice” non-profits that exude self-righteousness like some people exude bad breath.
It’s struck me as mawkish and purposeless, the sort of consequence-free moral preening that, well, defines the modern “social justice” mob, while putting none of their own skin in the game. It is to history what the term “Latinx” is to sociology and linguistics; a way to make a complex subject palatable to socially fussy white progressive social justice lemmings.
I finally have an arsenal of responses, from this article, which has almost too many great points to try to pullquote.
I said “almost”:
It is difficult to exaggerate the superficiality of these statements. What do members of the acknowledged group hold sacred? What makes them unique and identifies them to one another? Who are they, where did they come from, and where are they going? The evasion of these fundamental questions is typical. The speaker demonstrates no knowledge of the people whose names he reads carefully off the sheet of paper. Nor does he make any but the most general connection between the event and those people, other than an ancient one, not too different from the speaker’s relationship with the local geology or flora.
Things get more substantial, but no less acerbic. I recommend it.
The left is reacting to the Rittenhouse verdict with the calm, dispassionate, intellectual rigor one expects of “smart America“:
But remember – mostly peaceful.
Madame Vice President [1] on the Rittenhouse verdict:
So – the woman for whom giggling about putting black men in jail for simple weed possession was pillow talk with Willie Brown, and who came out in favor of prosecutors hiding exculpatory evidence in death penalty cases, has been…
…sorry. Couldn’t finish that with a straight face.
[1] Keep checking back on this.
…that Duke Ellington HIgh School in Georgetown, DC is going to regard this as a, er, tactical error; they’ve canceled a fundraiser involving one of their alums, Dave…
…er, let me try that again…
DAVE FREAKING CHAPPELLE
The students said they were uncomfortable supporting Chappelle because many of their classmates identify as LGBTQ+. In his new Netflix special, The Closer, the comedian compares being transgender to wearing blackface, says “gender is a fact” and says that he’s a member of “team TERF,” meaning “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.”
I’m hoping I’m around in 30 years to see what comedians say about this era.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is eating a skewer of souvlaki at a local greek joint when Avery LIBRELLE walks in. BERG tries to hide behind a menu, but LIBRELLE sees him, walks over.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Oh, hey, Avery…
LIBRELLE: You people are so paranoid!
BERG: OK, I”ll bite. How, this time?
LIBRELLE: They’re not teaching Critical Race Theory in schools.
BERG: Do tell.
LIBRELLE: Critical race theory is taught in law schools and sociology programs.
BERG: Y’know, this reminds me of the conversation I have with anti-gunners, condescendingly cooing “nobody’s coming for your guns.
LIBRELLE: More paranoia. Nobody’s coming for your guns
BERG: Right. So I point out that politicians say that that’s exactly what they’re going to do – Joe Biden said it himself on is campaign website…
LIBRELLE: That’s just talk, not policy…
BERG: Right. That’s the inevitable next line. So I point to gun control legislation jammed down in New York, Colorado and Virginia in the past few years, and they say…(motions toward LIBRELLE)
LIBRELLE: They’re not coming for your guns right this moment.
BERG: Right. According to you all, I can’t be concerned about gun control until there’s a BATFE agent beating down my door with a photocopied warrant.
But let’s get back on subject. CRT…
LIBRELLE: Isn’t being taught.
BERG: The VIrginia Department of Education says it is.
LIBRELLE: But you can’t prove that it’s being taught in classrooms!
BERG: Teachers are most definitely teaching students that America is inseparably and irredeemably rooted in racism, that “whiteness” and racism are inseparable, that the police were originally an extension of Slave Patrols, and that the Second Amendment was framed to defend slavery and nothing more. All of which are part and parcel of CRT.
LIBRELLE: Again, CRT is taught in law schools and post-secondary education.
BERG: So none of those things are taught in schools.
LIBRELLE: Of course they are.
BERG: And they are all inseparable from CRT.
LIBRELLE: No. Its not CRT.
BERG: What is it, then?
LIBRELLE: It’s a theory about race, that criticizes.
BERG: But not CRT?
LIBRELLE: Of course not.
BERG: (looks down at menu). Look at how the price of pita has gone up…
LIBRELLE: (Looks down) Huh?
But BERG has slipped away.
And SCENE
I wasn’t living here in 1980. I’m not sure how Minneapolis’s Loony Left reacted to the “Solidarity“ protests in Poland – where the Polish “Solidarity“ trade union led a year of demonstrations against Poland’s communist government. The demonstrations – which newly elected President Ronald Reagan supported morally, symbolically and materially – were the beginning of the end of the communist bloc, and the Soviet Union with it.
I have vague memories, arriving in the Twin Cities years later, of sensing that an awful lot of Minnesota leftists had bet on the wrong side in that particular episode. I mean, two decades later some of them still did, in my comment section.
Now, 40 years later, as a similarly benighted country protests for similar reasons, a Democrat government is lending the Cuban demonstrators a bit of rhetorical support from a senile president, along with an executive branch that is, as we noted yesterday, laying down the law hard in favor of the regime.
And the Minnesota left?
They are showing themselves to be as morally depraved and intellectually bovine as ever:
Facing an economic crisis, food and medicine shortages and rising prices, the Cuban people are demanding that the communist regime give up power.
“We have to see the larger context of the pandemic, COVID-19. The economy has also collapsed, Cuba depends on tourism,” said Nimtz. The Minnesota Cuba Committee is also calling for an end to the U.S. trade embargo.
“What we are doing here is to demand, demand that the Biden administration end the embargo, lift the embargo, and do as he promised,” said Nimtz.
Minnesota Progressives; reliable communist useful idiots for 60 years.
The Center for the American Experiment has had to reschedule a “Critical Race Theory“ event in Duluth.
Due to threats.
Three times:
For the fourth time in a month, a Duluth venue was pressured into canceling the Raise Our Standards event put on by Center of the American Experiment. Within minutes of the announcement yesterday that the Cast Iron Bar and Grill would host the event, the owner received threatening phone calls pressuring them to cancel. American Experiment will now hold the event in the Lafayette Park Community Center in Duluth.
Hundreds of Minnesotans attended the first 16 stops on the Raise Our Standards tour focused on the state’s draft social studies standards and Critical Race Theory. The original Duluth appearance was postponed on June 17 after the Northland Country Club and Holiday Inn both backed out of hosting the event. The AAD Shrine Meeting & Event Center also canceled with American Experiment after signing a contract to host the event next Tuesday.
You see, that’s why Big Left is making such a huge deal about “January 6“; it allows them to deflect away from the way they behave every day, everywhere.
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance/I’m getting used to it now.
That wasn’t off in the distance. It was the scene at 38th and Chicago yesterday, also known as George Floyd Square. Sure, it was the middle of the day, but it’s always a good time to bust a few caps, right? This news report was, ahem, deadpan:
The Minneapolis intersection where George Floyd died was disrupted by gunfire Tuesday, just hours before it was to be the site of a family-friendly street festival marking the anniversary of his death at the hands of police.
Nothing quite says family-friendly street festival like random gunfire. But fortunately, a bona fide journalist was on the scene:
Journalist Philip Crowther, who was shooting live video from 38th and Chicago, reported hearing as many as 30 gunshots about a block east of the intersection. Crowther said a storefront window appeared to have been broken by a gunshot.
“Very quickly things got back to normal,” Crowther said. “People here who spend a significant amount of time, the organizers, were running around asking, ‘Does anyone need a medic?’ It seems like there are no injuries.”
Mr. Crowther? There’s nothing normal about any of this. But hey, we appreciate the narrative!