On the one hand, it’s amusing to see that suddenly “cultural appropriation” – in this case, a bunch of rhythmically-challenged Argentine leftist “Karens”
Argentinian leftists express their anger towards Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Javier Milei
Until the mid 1940s, Argentina was a wealthy first-world country, with a per capita GDP competitive with the US.
Then, the “Argentine leftists” sold Argentine voters on “Rizz” and “Brat Vibes” with the Perons and a series of socialists, which gutted the economy and led to a series of coups and counter-coups, which also gutted the economy, which led to a war to restore pride that led to humiliating defeat that further gutted not only the economy but national pride, which led to further see-sawing back and forth, finally leading to a complete economic collapse 20 years ago, which has largely been met by further waves of center-to-far-left governments spending money they don’t have (or borrow from the IMF) to keep programs afloat at the expense of, well, everything.
So now the growups, led by Milei, are in charge, and they are showing the world the actual potential of the Argentine economy and people.
So perhaps after his past 70-80 years, it’s best that Argentine leftists stick with club-footed cultural appropriation and dancing with all the rhythmic authority of Swedish disco dancers. They cause less damage (artistic damage notwithstanding).
While this is good – and expected – news, I feel a little cheated.
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, is rolling back its diversity, equity and inclusion policies, joining a list of major corporations that have been under pressure by conservative activists. The company confirmed on Monday to The Associated Press th… https://t.co/j3oiq5I7VR
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.
— Frederick Melo, Reporter/Axolotl (@FrederickMelo) August 23, 2024
And Minneapolis:
Building permits have also dropped quite a bit in Minneapolis according to the data. There were 3,000+ total units from 2020-2022, 1,528 in 2023, and 321 so far this year. pic.twitter.com/1PZmKSxlEq
Somehow, though, they’ll be ready to take the entire load (and all those mandated EVs) by 2040?
Reminds me of this classic discourse on solving difficult problems:
I’m going to guess the “miracle”, in this case, will be that everyone involved in setting the policy will be out of government and cashing fat non-profit or lobbying checks by the time energy becomes unaffordable to proles.
Well, at the very least he loved it, back when he was teaching kids “social studies”:
Wow: The Free Beacon dug up this old news article in which Tim Walz defines "communism" as a system in which "everyone is the same and everyone shares." He praised the CCP for providing "food and housing" rations. A real-life communism respecter.https://t.co/OKgcHmGDwUpic.twitter.com/oQUuQN6nG9
There appears to be precious little evidence that he changed anything but his surface decorations (during 12 years as a “moderate” while campaigning in the rural 1st CD).
I always liked the idea of Argentina’s libertarian-conservative President, Javier Milei.
But after seeing this interview, I am actively wondering a bunch of things:
Does the US need to bottom out, as Argentina’s been doing for most of my life – before being ready to, as he says, “put on our long pants?” and embrace the freedom that used to be this nation’s reason to exist?
And where can we get one of him to run for governor in 2026?
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:
THIS SATURDAY: Revolutionary Communists to march to the Wells Fargo Center, demanding that big banks be nationalized under workers' control. Calling on all workers not to vote for either the Democrats or Republicans, come November. Starting 1pm at Minneapolis City Hall. pic.twitter.com/bqt6jPJmFZ
[Since] 2019 — the last pre-COVID year — Minnesota’s real GDP growth has ranked 36th out of the fifty states, coming in at 4.0%, less than half the national rate of 8.1%.
The gross GDP growth comparison is bad. The per capita numbers, even worse:
Minnesota’s recent performance is relatively poor. As Figure 2 shows, between 2019 and 2023, Minnesota’s real, per capita GDP growth ranked 39th out of the fifty states. Again, with growth of 3.1%, Minnesota’s real, per capita GDP growth was less than half that of the United States, 6.6%.
The Walz regime will respond, no doubt, as it always does; with a selfie of “Lieutenant” Governor Flanagan feeding Governor Klink a pronto pup.
Capital, productive citizens and the college kids who are the productive citizens of the future are fleeing. Businesses have been moving their non-white-collar operations out of MInnesota for decades.
You may not win along with it, but that’s your fault for denying reality.
Speaking of denying reality: we warned MInneapolis about the inevitable end results of rent control, high taxes and onerous regulations (aka “everything the Met Council does re housing and transit policy”).
And yet every $%#$%$@# time their chickens come home to roost, they act surprised and angry:
Roughly 7000 apartments in Minneapolis sit empty because landlords refuse to lower their rents to prices our communities can afford.
Thank you @noemptyhomes_mn for hosting a vacancy tour! Landlords letting homes intentionally sit empty during a housing crisis is unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/tlSmWqCF0Q
A significant chunk of the far-left clacque that runs politics in the metro are Marxists, either overtly or under the hood.
And an amazing number of them subscribe to the “Labor Theory of Value” – the idea that labor, as opposed to the other three factors (Capitol, Management and Land) is the dispositive factor of production.
I have been challenging adherents for years – test the theory by taking a group of fast food workers, plopping them on a vacant lot, and seeing if a Hardee’s springs up around them.
It’s an absurd test – exactly the one the theory deserves.
The annual “natural change” in Minnesota’s population (births minus deaths) is not enough to compensate for the number of people moving out of the state. In the little over three years from the last census (April 1, 2020) to July 1, 2023, Minnesota saw a natural increase in residents of about 40,400. These gains were wiped out by the net domestic outmigration (people leaving Minnesota for other states) of 46,000. If not for the net “international migration” of 34,600, Minnesota’s overall population would have fallen over this period.
Young people are leaving the state – which is a huge change from when I first moved here, when the Twin Cities were a destination to a lot of recent grads stepping out into adult live.
But hey, maybe protecting criminals while jamming people into ticky-tack multi unit boxes will fix the problem:
This small apartment building just got built between two single family homes a few blocks from me, it should be legal to do this in every neighborhood. pic.twitter.com/iWwm6XBBpq
The Minneapolis City Council’s vote on minimum wages for independent contractor drivers has driven Lyft out of Minneapolis, and Uber out of both cities.
A friend of the blog emails with an initial reaction very close to my own:
That being said, Uber and Lyft were never affordable here in the Twin Cities like they are elsewhere. That is likely because the market here doesn’t support it like it might in cities with higher density populations.
This article mentions that “Seattle and New York City have passed similar policies in recent years that increase wages for ride-hailing drivers, and Uber and Lyft still operate in those cities.”
Yes, well, the cost to use those services was lower to start with because they actually could make money there. So, they are likely still making money even if passengers are paying more to ride. I would bet those services were barely making it here as it was. It’s not hard to drive most places, it’s not even particularly expensive. The downtowns of MSP are mostly dead anyway, so who is using Lyft and Uber at this stage anymore? As far as I can tell, the council’s stupid ordinance just gave them the excuse to pull out.
That was pretty much what I thought; it was yet another case of a prog city council demanding the world violate the laws of economics to give them what they want.
But wait. There’s more.
It’s the current DFL – so one must always check to see if there’s an ulterior motive involving transferring wealth from taxpayers to the DFL’s non-profit/government complex.
It was still morning in America.Notice, of course, thst it was 34 years ago. Reagan had barely left office. The Berlin Wall had yet to fall, but it was teetering.
But this is a good time to remind d you to be the backlash you want to see.
Imagine this: withdrawing your UBI check that was seamlessly deposited in your public banking account after picking up your kids from awesome public school and then taking green transit back home to your social housing flat
At first blush, I thought it was parody, and not especially good.
I moved from there to Assumption B – a chuckleheaded sophomore political science major from Austin, or Seattle, or maybe the University of Saint Thomas. It can be hard to tell parody from reality with them, sometimes.
That’s what I thought. Or, let’s be honest, that’s what I hoped. Parody, or young lefty dolt.
But no. Mr. Lee is a California state assemblyman, detailing the world he and most of Big Left hold out as their idea.
No mention of that social credit score you gotta pass to get into your “public bank account”. No mention of who’s going to be teaching at those “awesome public schools” or building, maintaining and operating that “green transit”, or even why either would exist if people get Universal Basic Income. No mention of how in a world without the generation of value and wealth, the “UBI” will pretty much inevitably devolve into ration tickets, to buy…what? Who’s doing the producing, the farming? Robotic cricket mills creating insect paste is about the only logical option.
Modern Monetary Theory says the government can borrow and spend as much as it likes without consequences. If we can afford a gas tax holiday, why not an income tax holiday, a social security tax holiday, a liquor tax holiday?
Or is MMT a lie and the gas tax holiday simply at attempt at buying votes with taxpayer money?
Joe Doakes
It is, of course, a purely academic exercise, like so much of the policy big left has been foisting on this country for the past hundred years and change.
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.
I’m not sure that the Biden administration, like the Obama administration before it, is undertaking multigenerational effort to destroy this nations “red” heartland.
But if they were, I wonder what they would be doing differently?
Neil Young’s Unknown Legend, one of my all time favorite songs, came up on my playlist.
It’s been, geez, two or three weeks now. I’m not sure if I’m not supposed to listen to Neil or not.
(Name Redacted)
One of the greatest aphorisms about music Dash art, really – Asia “ love the art, ignore the artist”. And I figure, once the song goes out into the world, it belongs to us (subject to copyright and intellectual property), not them.
But it is getting to the point where it’s hard to tell what you are, and are not, supposed to support if you want your dollar to stop working for the enemy.
For example, a certain brand of razor blades (which shall remain unnamed for purposes of this post) was a revelation to me when I first discovered it; I actually enjoyed shaving for the first time in my adult life.
Now, I happen to like this particular brand of razors every bit as much as I like Michael Knowles (who is an excellent writer, but kind of ok as a talkradio host) – so I was relieved to see that this particular brand of razor still sponsors other conservative talk radio, and I wasn’t going to have to go out into a razor market dominated by “woke “brands like Gillette to try and find a new brand of blades.
With Denmark and Sweden tripling down on the free market and abandoning draconian Covid regulations, the longing eyes of the world’s “Social Democrat” noodlers have turned to New Zealand’s. Jacinda Ardern.
She ran a very hawkish “Lockdown” regime in 2020, drawing the admiration of a lot of Mascists – as if they could replicate the lockdown of a country with a population 20% smaller than Minnesota’s, with land area 25% larger, isolated from all other land by a thousand miles, able to cut itself off from the world by closing a couple ports and a few gates at the Wellington airport.
Has it worked? Time’ll tell.
But she’s got more government gigantism in mind:
If you’re a smoker who wants to indulge your habit while gazing over the mountains of the South Pacific, you’d do well to move fast.
New Zealand announced plans to become the first nation in the world to ban tobacco https://t.co/xCO8QyzR3X
Roger Daltrey, lead singer of The Who for the past 57 years or so, tees off on the “Woke” generation:
“The woke generation — it’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves,” the rocker said in a recent interview with DJ Zane Lowe on Apple Music.
“I mean, anyone who’s lived a life — and you see what they’re doing — you just know that it’s a route to nowhere, especially when you’ve lived through the periods of a life that we’ve had the privilege to,” Daltrey added. “I mean, we’ve had the golden era. There’s no doubt about that.”
The English rock legend went on to point out the differences between “the woke generation” and generations of the past, noting, “we came out of a war,” and have actually “seen the communist system fail” firsthand.
“But we came out of a war, we came out of a leveled society, completely flattened bomb sites and everything,” Daltrey said. “And we’ve been through socialist governments. We’ve seen the communist system fail in the Soviet Union. I’ve been in those communist countries while they were communist.”
“I’ve seen how ‘wonderful’ — really? — it was,” the rocker added, sarcastically.
People today forget, or never knew, that after UK went full-bore Labour at the end of World War 2, it subsequently took them nine years to end war-time food rationing. And while the food situation gradually improved, once “rebuilding” ended, the rest of the economy went in the tank.
Also – not bad for a guy that’s gonna be eighty in the next few years.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this scene last week:
I first started paying serious attention to politics in about 1980. Like a lot of high school kids, then and now, I was somewhere out on what would be called “the left”; I wrote a platform for North Dakota Boys State (a statewide mock government program put on by the decidedly conservative American Legion) that called for systematic redistribution of wealth, abolishing nuclear energy and nuclear disarmament, and a whole bunch of stuff that would be pretty mainstream among the Bernie Bros today.
Three years later, due to the good graces of my English professor, Dr. Jim Blake, I had re-evaluated most of my assumptions. I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984, and never really looked back.
And I had no reason to. None of us did. Although the history books, all being written from the perspective of the Left, will never admit it, the two decades from 1980 to 2000 were, objectively, the last American Golden Age. I’ll squeak out an optimistic coda and add “so far”, but I’ll be honest – I haven’t been feeling it, but I’m a firm believer in acting like you want to feel, and so there is is. “So far”.
I’ll come back to that.
There’s no denying it was one of the high points of American history. We led an economic surge that brought more wealth to more people than any in history. We, as a nation, led a political surge that led to the collapse of one of the most evil regimes in history (although not the other one – so far).
Maybe it’s just the perspective of one guy’s lifetime – but I suspect you’d have to look long and hard to find a place and time when it was generally better to be a human.
Not just in material terms, but in terms of the tension between freedom and order, one of the hardest things about running a self-governing society, being in relative balance – and, more importantly, the general commitment to the system and process that kept all those moving parts in balance.
And it’s been downhill from there.
The arc from Morning in America in 1980 to last week’s skirmish at the Capitol – which, loathe as I am to come even close to Democrat chanting points, was a form of coup, not against President-Elect Biden, but against the states’ constitutional power to select electors – peaked…somewhere in the late ’90s – when one of the glories of the American system, gridlocked government, combined with a Peace Dividend brought about by the end of the Cold War (thanks, President Reagan), led to an outburst of technological, entrepreneurial and market power that brought so much wealth, and security, and general well-being, to so many people that it may have been as close to a uptopia, in some ways, as humanity can get. Because of the gridlock in government.
Somewhere between 1998 and 2005, things started to turn back south again. It’d be easy to point to the polarization of American politics, starting with the various Clinton scandals, through the fiasco of the 2000 election, the near-decade of squabbling over the War on Terror and the 2008 government-caused financial meltdown, as the cause – but it went in parallel with a lot of other changes in our nation’s political, moral and social lives that have led to their…
…I was going to say “culmination” last week at the Capitol. But of course, that’s not true. Last week’s sorry episode was, like last summer’s riots, and the social back and forth that gave us Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Trump himself, and the movements that supported them all in a way that was increasingly “un-American” (I’m still claiming a meaning for that term), and if you think that was the peak, or trough, or any sort of ending to the story, you just haven’t paid attention to 20,000 years of human nature.
So let’s not call it a culmination. Let’s call it a checkpoint, on a path that may be going up, or down, but control over which We The People need to take before the phrase “We The People” is forever relegated to the museum.
How have we gotten from the peak of Western Civilization to…this, in my adult lifetime?
