Choice

A friend of the blog writes:

Just had an online meeting with our kid’s teacher. Expectations were laid out and kid is expected to be on time and we can expect a daily schedule that has the kid doing school work live, on line from 9-3:30. (There are breaks built in as there are during in person learning). 

We are at a charter school. Compare that expectation with the public school teachers union, who wanted one hour weekly of live in person, online learning.

We need more advocacy work like what Rashad Turner is doing. here. 

These are crazy days indeed, with me being on the same side of an issue as Rashad Turner.

Open Letter To House Majority Leader Winkler

To: Rep. Ryan WInkler, House Majority Leader
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Timing

Rep. Winkler,

Yesterday you tweeted in re the shooting in Kenosha:

Rep Winkler, I say the following with all due respect.

I’m just spitballing, here, but maybe a white, suburban Harvard grad who called one of the leading jurists in the nation an “Uncle Thomas” because he departed the Democrat Party’s plantation, might want to sit out the whole “white supremacy” thing.

That is all.

Almost As If By Plan

In the late 1980s, Gallup took a poll about race relations among African-Americans. About a third said racism had an effect on their lives.

Thirty years later – during the regime of the nation’s first African-American president – that percentage had doubled.

The graph over the past 20 years or so looks like this:

Note the beginning of the slide – the middle of an election where the Democrats needed to pull out all the stops to counter the Tea Party and general dissatisfaction with the collapse of the healthcare system.

Unexpected?

Hardly. It was by design.

Graph depicts the prevalence of the terms “Race” and “Racism” in our “elite’ media’s narrative:

Why, it’s almost as if the “elite” media needed to create a crisis for the “elite” political class not to waste.

Remember – “race conflict” is merely a delivery system for “class conflict”.

The New Kulaks

Remember when “racism” meant “hating, disparaging or discriminating against someone because of their ethnicity?”

And the good guys and gals sought “equality” – the whole “judging by the contents of peoples’ hearts rather than the color of their skin” thing.

Those were quaint days indeed.

Today? Big Left isn’t seeking “equality”. The goal is “anti-Racism”.

And the “racism” they are against is, when you dig beneath the twaddle, all of Western CIvilization.

In Much The Same Was As OJ Is Looking For “The Real Killers”…

…Big Left is looking for the real racists.

But they have met the enemy, and it is them.

Jeopardy, 2021

CONTESTANT 1: “I’ll take “Riddle Me This” for $600, Alex”

TREBEK: “A couple of shades of melanin”

(CONTESTANT 2 Rings in)

TREBEK: Irving…

CONTESTANT 2: “What is ‘the difference between a community group of ‘freedom fighters’ and a ‘scary right wing militia’ to Big Media?”

TREBEK: Correct, and you have the board…

Our Orwellian Overlords

Individualism is groupthink.

Hard work is indolence.

Objectivity is emotion.

Respect is hate.

Delayed gratification is fleeting and temporal.

Apparently Orwell is “the New Normal”, at least among progs:

Not just Orwellian – socially illiterate. These are traits of Western Civilization – which sprouted in the West, which happens to have been almost entirely white until a few hundred years ago, but could hypothetically have happened anywhere the ideals of individual worth and the value of the individual’s work have caught on. For all the left’s yapping about “historical accidents” and “lotteries of history”, this was the ultimate one, in human terms.

I used to wonder what these people supposed would happen when you treat a group that isn’t fundamentally an “Identity” group  as as identity group.   

Now I’m pretty sure that’s the goal. 

Compare And Contrast

In watching yesterday’s kerfuffle about the couple in suburban Saint Louis who strapped up – to a horde of catcalls about their deeply flawed gun handling – against a bunch of “peaceful” protesters who’d just smashed their community’s gate – I can’t help but recall four scan weeks ago…

…when armed Americans were briefly all the rage, if a confused sort of rage, to our cultural betters…

…provided it’s the right people with the guns.

Statistics, Damned Statistics And Lying Statistics

Here we go again.  Liberals deploying statistics as weapons without understanding how to operate them. 
First chart: White household income is twice Blacks’.  Yes, but a “household” is a family unit.  A two-parent family household with both parents working $15 an hour jobs makes $60,000.  If the family splits up or never marries, the same parents working the same jobs are  reported as only $30,000 per household.  Whites are twice as likely to get married and stay married as Blacks so their household numbers reflect combined totals instead of single-parent totals. This is a cultural choice, not systemic racism.
First chart notes that Blacks get paid less than Whites.  Yes, because Blacks work lower skilled jobs than Whites, because of the educational “achievement gap” which has stubbornly persisted for decades despite all efforts to change it. Individual Achievement Plans, Affirmative Action, school funding, court monitors, forced bussing . . . nothing changes the fact that Black kids do less well academically than White or Asian kids.  Which might be because Black kids are simply not as smart, as IQ researchers consistently find, or because Black culture deplores “acting White” but protects disruptive Black students who are passed along to avoid trouble.  This is not systemic racism against Blacks. 
Second chart – Minnesotans in poverty – is the result of broken households and also family size.  Black women tend to have more children than White.  More people in a single-income household = closer to poverty.  This is a consequence of cultural choices (not to marry and stay married, to have more children), not systemic racism against Blacks.
Third chart: Black unemployment is 40%.  Point the finger directly at Governor Walz for that one.  He shut down “non-essential” businesses which tended to employ more Blacks.  But as stupid as the Stay Home order was, it wasn’t intentional racism, it was a panic response to the Covid pandemic. But even before the shut-down, Black unemployment was still twice that of Whites.  
That’s not because of intentional racial discrimination, it’s because Minnesota’s economy is largely white-collar which requires educated workers (see education gap, above) plus we’ve experienced a huge influx of low-skilled Black immigrants.  There are only so many taxi driver jobs available; the rest sit idle.  These are functions of economics and immigration, not systemic racism.
Final chart: Blacks are more likely to die of Covid than Whites.  Nobody knows why that’s so.  It’s an interesting fact but it cannot be the result of systemic racism – the virus hasn’t been around long enough for Whites to develop plans and methods of discriminating against Blacks based on the virus.  Maybe it’s genetic?  
We are endlessly lectured by Liberals that all cultures are equally valid, and therefore Whites have no moral grounds to impose our culture on other people.  Fine, but that also means we have no duty to ensure their cultural choices result in the same achievement outcomes as ours.  Stay in school, get a job, wait to have kids until you’re married: these are the keys to academic and economic success in America, regardless of your race.  But the keys only work if you’re willing to use them.  Otherwise, you remain locked out of prosperity and it’s nobody’s fault but your own.  
Joe Doakes

For some, blame is easier than fixing the problem. And we have an entire political party devoted to harnessing that fact.

Only A Couple Of Explanations For This

This is Senator Tim Kane, father of an “Anti”-Fa thug who punched a 17 year old girl at a Trump rally, and who came within an electoral miracle of becoming the Vice President of the United States:

Now, there are a few reasons he might say something like this:

  1. The Babylon Bee hired an impersonator, and this is satire beyond parody or reason.
  2. He’s really that stupid.
  3. He knows better, but he believes his audience actually is that stupid.

Thoughts?

Institutional Racism

A friend of the blog writes:

I don’t know who re-worded this Villager article, but it was a white woman who thought she was pretty clever on Twitter. I haven’t actually looked at the Villager article yet, but did have fun making the “clever” woman’s edits more real-

A man died while in police custody May 25. The four officers involved are now in custody awaiting trial and charged with 2nd degree murder. The death sparked protests to highlight that police brutality still exists. Others took the opportunity to loot and commit arson in two marginal neighborhoods of the Twin Cities. The neighborhoods, which have higher populations of people of color, have been the target of DFL endorsed politicians for years as DFL endorsed mayors and councilmembers pushed through light rail construction, zoning changes, house developments, soccer stadiums and bike lanes despite calls from residents that those were not the priorities for their neighborhood. 
“They’ve been wanting to get rid of our community for years, and this is the last straw,” says one black resident who only gave a first name of Tyrone.
Other local business owners of color are saying, “we survived the 2008 recession, the never ending construction, the zoning changes since we weren’t immediately remodeling, but this is the absolute end. We’re packed and already moving.”

Hope springs eternal that black, Latino and Asian voters will figure it out: the riots the DFL wanted, condoned, celebrated and in many cases DFLers (or their idiot children), participated in, in the city whose entire economy has been jiggered against them by progressive plutocrats with deep pockets, just might not deserve their continued loyalty…

Cultural Appropriation For Ye, But Not For We

This was the House Democratic leadership, doing their (nothing but) symbolic photo-op before the George Floyd funeral:

They’re wearing “Kente” cloths – apparently Ghanaian in this case, but there are similar adornments all through Africa. They have cultural significance.

And to Pelosi and her little claque, they are nothing but costumes.

Some actual Africans were not amused at the virtue-accessorizing:

But remember – don’t go eating burritos, honky.

Urban Progressive Privilege: when making the right progressive-y noises is enough, at least within your social circle.

Items For The “Cancel” Agenda

SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking out of the local Korean joint with a container of Galbi. As he’s committing to going out the door, MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats.

SILBERMAN: Mister Berg.

BERG: Er, hi, Ms. Silberman. What’s new?

SILBERMAN: Not much time for small talk. I’m doing a story about cancel culture.

BERG: You mean, about how the titans of the progressive media, the Guardian, have their roots in laissez faire policies regarding slavery and the future of the American union during the civil war?

SILBERMAN: No, no. I’m looking for examples in the world of politics.

BERG: You mean like the town in Alabama whose entire base of wealth was built on the products of slavery, but posits itself as a bastion of “progressive” thought today.

SILBERMAN: Alabama?

BERG: Yuuup.

SILBERMAN: Go ahead. I’m listening.

BERG: This town in Alabama built its entire civic wealth between 1815 and 1865 on textiles – an industry based on slave-produced cotton – and tobacco, which was…

SILBERMAN: …raised by slaves. Yes. Yes. Keep going.

BERG: And they voted for the Democrat, pro-slavery candidates for President, in 1860 and 1864.

SILBERMAN: I already hate them.

BERG: And then, when the Civil War was well underway, they undertook a pogrom against not only blacks – whom they blamed for the war, and for the economic hardships the war brought them – but against whites that supported abolition, destroying their businesses in an epic riot.

SILBERMAN: Perfect. Probably fundamentalist Christianists to boot. These people need canceling.

BERG: I’ll say.

SILBERMAN: What town in Alabama?

BERG: It was…wait, did I say Alabama?

SILBERMAN: You did.

BERG: My bad. It was New York City. Your hometown, if I recall.

SILBERMAN: (Stands, stunned).

BERG: You’ve been canceled.

SILBERMAN: (Jaw flaps, but no sound comes out)

BERG: Try the dok buk uhm. It’s divine. (BERG walks out)

And SCENE

Privatization

A friend of the blog emails:

The Walker Art Center is just one of several venues and school systems that are just now discovering the benefits of privately funded security. They can hire their own private security, do background checks, control unwanted behavior a little better.

Wonder if there will be more support for private funding of other systems that take advantage of all of us- health insurance, school, etc?

I wonder if the cognitive dissonance will ever actually dawn on any of the parties involved?

By the way – I’m gonna guess that spending all day Tuesday putting black backgrounds on every bit of social and traditional media will fix it.

Shutdown: Racist!

It is well-established law that a policy which appears to be
race-neutral, but which has a disproportionately large adverse impact on
racial minorities, is a form of racial discrimination.

Governor Walz’ Stay Home order, which ordered the closure of
non-essential businesses, has resulted in nearly half-a-million
Minnesotans losing their jobs, 25% of them racial minorities as opposed
to only 12% Whites
.

The Stay Home order is a form of disparate impact racial discrimination.

Governor Walz is a racist.

Republicans in the state House tried to end the Stay Home order.
Democrats blocked their efforts.  Twice.

Minnesota Democrats are racist.

Why isn’t anybody talking about this?

Joe Doakes

Rhetorical question, right?

Proof

A friend of the blog writes:

This retweet- I have no words…

except that if the couple he was retweeting ever read this, then they would find the racism in the US.

Berg’s Eighth Law – “American progressivism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder.”

– applies here.  

And applies, and applies, and applies some more.  

Tales

Every Democrat candidate favors paying reparations to Americans held in slavery.
Last American slave died in 1971, nearly two generations ago.
Too late to pay reparations to someone who was actually owed them.  Everyone else simply has an interesting family history to tell.
Joe Doakes

Not to mention the fact that there were not a few black slave owners – some owned quite a few.

So it’s entirely possible, given the number of generations that’ve descended since 1865, that we’d be paying “reparations” to the descendants of slave owners as well.

Because I’m going to tactfully suggest that the business of identifying which blacks are descended from slaveholders is going to be pretty dang dilatory, if you catch my drift.

Virtue-Hitchiking

Who knew – Berg’s Seventh Law covers intra-left squabbles as well.

Cultural appropriation is bad – unless, apparently, you’re appropriating it from other junctions in the intersectional map.

And Kira Davis has having nothing to do wtih it:

Since the “Broad Squad” came on the scene we have been incessantly barraged with rage rants about “people of color” and “women of color” and “brown people.” I myself have come to use these terms more than I care to, only because they are now a part of the vernacular.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t resent it.
Being a “woman of color” is not the same thing as being a Black woman, and yet the progressive Left has decided it is. A woman of Indian or Mexican heritage may possibly find herself coming up against some kind of discrimination here and there but it is not, nor will it ever be the same thing as what Black women have faced in this nation historically and to this day.
Not even close.

The likes of Tide Pod Evita and Ilhan Omar – people whose communities came here of their own free will – are trying to appropriate the unique (in this country, anyway) experience of black America for its own cheap gain.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Challenge…Met!

I’m pleased that Governor Walz is taking concrete steps to end rampant racial discrimination in state government hiring.  For far too long, the State has relied on affirmative action implemented through voluntary goals and timetables.  Now that we know proportional representation is the ultimate indicator of perfectly just society, we can set about hiring an exactly proportional workforce: 85.3% White employees, 5.2% Black, 4% Asian, 1.2% Native, and fill the rest of the jobs with people who are uncertain or have no opinion.

The funny thing is, in my vocational field, I believe I know of one black practitioner in the Twin Cities. That’s it. A black student wanting to make a decent living could pretty much write their own ticket in UX.

Orwell Was Right

Ohio Democrat tries to exempt black infants from the legislature’s fetal heartbeat bill.

Because…:

Rep. Janine Boyd proposed Amendment 0291 which would have provided an exception for black mothers to abort their babies. 
Boyd suggested protecting black children from abortion is akin to slavery.
“Black slaves were once treated like cattle and put out to stud in order to create generations of more slaves,” she said during her remarks, which were broadcast on The Ohio Channel. “Our country is not far enough beyond our history to legislate as if it is.”

So – life = slavery?

In case you were wondering if the Democrat “Stupid Caucus” has a deep enough bench waiting in line behind Jerry Nadler, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and the like, fear not.

Comforting The Comfortable, Afflicting The Afflicted

I don’t know about you – but these days, when a accusation of a “hate crime” gets massive, immediate coverage, I’ve started to assume it’s a hoax until proven otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong – hate crimes exist. But the more publicity the unproven allegations get, and the more lurid the charges against someone in a MAGA cap, the more likely it seems the whole story turns out to have all the substance and integrity or a Ryan Winkler presentation on Black History Month.

Jussie Who?:Three weeks ago, I had not heard of Jussie Smollett. I’ve never had occasion to watch Empire, and I doubt I ever will.

But when I heard the story of the “Hate Crime” that reached out and, per his story, caught him a few weeks ago, nothing, even to my rather cursory listening, seemed to add up.

Kyle Smith – not a cop, but rather a writer at National Reviewnoticed the same things, and has 27 questions for the “journalists” who presumed Smollett’s story – of “MAGA”-screaming rednecks who attacked him without really attacking him – was unassailably true.

8 . How likely do you think it is that attackers would shout, “This is MAGA country” in Chicago, a place that no one thinks is MAGA country?

There are 26 more – the sort of thing “journalists”, ostensibly being the curious sort, should have asked.

13. Don’t you think it strange that his attackers fled without much harming Smollett or robbing him?

14. Related to (13), did it not occur to you that the whole alleged attack looked a bit like the criminal equivalent of a press release, meant to send a message rather than accomplish anything?

15. If you were beaten up, would you somehow remember to pick up your Subway purchase afterward?

Goalposts Moved: Over the weekend, as Smollett’s story began to collapse, the narrative changed; Smollett’s actions weren’t themselves a publicity “hate crime” against deplorables; they were “starting a conversation”:

I don’t know about you, but I think Jussie Smollett, and especially all the #Resitance media sycophants who parroted the story because, if you hate the MAGAs, it’s just too good to fact-check, just made life a lot harder for people who actually do wind up on the wrong side of bigotry.

Other than deplorables, obviously.

Low Expectations

Democrat politicians tend to talk down to black voters, according to Fox News Fox News Fox News!

Sorry.  I mean Yale:

The team found that Democratic candidates used fewer competence-related words in speeches delivered to mostly minority audiences than they did in speeches delivered to mostly white audiences. The difference wasn’t statistically significant in speeches by Republican candidates…There was no difference in Democrats’ or Republicans’ usage of words related to warmth [the mnemonic for “acceptance or friendliness toward people different than  you” – Ed]. “It was really surprising to see that for nearly three decades, Democratic presidential candidates have been engaging in this predicted behavior.”

Now, we’ve seen these social science polls with amusing (?) partisan results for decades – most of them garbage.  It’s important to know what the methodology that led to the study was:

They designed a series of experiments in which white participants were asked to respond to a hypothetical or presumed-real interaction partner. For half of these participants, their partner was given a stereotypically white name (such as “Emily”); for the other half, their partner was given a stereotypically black name (such as “Lakisha”). Participants were asked to select from a list of words for an email to their partner. For some studies, this email was for a work-related task; for others, this email was simply to introduce themselves. Each word had been previously scored on how warm or competent it appears. The word “sad,” for example, scored low for both warmth and competence. “Melancholy,” on the other hand, scored high for competence and low on warmth.

Participant also completed a variety of measures that assessed how liberal they were.

The researchers found that liberal individuals were less likely to use words that would make them appear highly competent when the person they were addressing was presumed to be black rather than white. No significant differences were seen in the word selection of conservatives based on the presumed race of their partner. “It was kind of an unpleasant surprise to see this subtle but persistent effect,” Dupree says. “Even if it’s ultimately well-intentioned, it could be seen as patronizing.”

Unpleasant surprise.  “Unexpected”, even.