About a year and a half ago, I wrote one of my favorite pieces in the history of this blog – Unpacking the Invisible NPR Tote Bag, which spelled out the ideal of “Urban Progressive Privilege.

I described the phenomenon if “Urban Progressive Privilege” by tracing a line from the document from which the term “White Privilege” sprang – “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by one Peggy McIntosh:

Urban Progressive Privilege is like an invisible weightless NPR tote bag of special permissions, immunities, secret handshakes, Whole Foods gift cards, a virtual echo chamber accompanying everyone who has that privilege, filtering out almost all cognitive dissonance about political, social or moral questions, and a virtual “cone of silence” immunizing them from liability for anything they say or do that contradicts the group’s stated principles.  As we in Human studies work to reveal Urban Progressive Privilege and ask urban progressives to become aware of their power, so one who writes about havingUrban Progressive Privilege must ask, “having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”

It was, to a degree, satire – and, like a lot of satire, it was simultaneously journalism.    Privilege does exist in our society – but social, economic, educational and geographic class at the end of the day count for (I’ll be charitable) every bit as much as race.   Can anyone say that Clarence Thomas is held in lower regard (by people other than Ryan Winkler, anyway) than John Roberts?

I wrote the piece originally because the ideal that “whiteness” – whatever that means, as if a “race” that simultaneously includes Norwegians and Armenians, Slavs and Spaniards, has any actual ethnic meaning – conveys so much privilege by itself that a white house painter in Spooner Wisconsin has social, cultural, financial and legal advantage over Oprah Winfrey or Sarah Jeong is so comically absurd.

So absurd, I thought, that it had to have been written by someone who was so detached by class privilege that they hadn’t the foggiest idea what life was like outside of their class bubble.

Lo and behold, I was right.

William Ray digs into Peggy McIntosh’s knapsack in this brightly illuminating piece in Quillette.

When I say “I was right” – well, I was being modest:

Peggy McIntosh was born Elisabeth Vance Means in 1934. She grew up in Summit, New Jersey where the median income is quadruple the American national average—that is to say that half the incomes there are more than four times the national average, some of them substantially so. McIntosh’s father was Winthrop J. Means, the head of Bell Laboratories electronic switching department during the late 1950s. At that time, Bell Labs were the world leaders in the nascent digital computing revolution. Means personally held—and sold patents on—many very lucrative technologies, including early magnetic Gyro-compass equipment (U.S. Patent #US2615961A) which now helps to guide nuclear missiles and commercial jets, and which keeps satellites in place so you can navigate with your phone and communicate with your Uber driver. Means is also recorded as the inventor of a patent held by Nokia Bell in 1959 known as the Information Storage Arrangement. This device is the direct progenitor of ROM computer memory, and is cited in the latter’s patent filed in 1965 for IBM. So, long before Peggy McIntosh wrote her paper, her family was already having an outsized effect on Western culture.

Elizabeth Vance Means then attended Radcliffe, a renowned finishing school for the daughters of America’s patrician elites, and continued her private education at the University of London (ranked in the top 50 by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings), before completing her English Doctorate at Harvard. Her engagement to Dr. Kenneth McIntosh was announced in the New York Times‘s social register on the same page as the wedding of Chicago’s Mayor Daley. McIntosh’s father, Dr. Rustin McIntosh, was Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics at Columbia University. His mother was President Emeritus of Barnard College, an institution in the opulent Morningside Heights district of Manhattan, famous since 1889 for providing the daughters of the wealthiest Americans with liberal arts degrees…[husband] Kenneth McIntosh was himself a graduate of the Phillips Exeter Academy, which boasted alumni including Daniel Webster, the sons of Presidents Lincoln and Grant, and a number of Rockefeller scions. He later completed his elite education at Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School. By the time of his marriage to Elizabeth, Kenneth McIntosh was a senior resident at the prestigious Brigham Hospital in Boston, founded by millionaire Peter Bent.

In other words, Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America’s aristocratic elite, and has remained ensconced there ever since.

So Peggy McIntosh is the scion – scienne?  Scionette? – of a family that is in the top fraction of the top 1% of people in this country in terms of social, educational (or at least “Educational Affiliation”), financial and cultural stature.

And this leads up to a summation that could soon become a Berg’s 7th Law corollary:

Her ‘experiential’ list enumerating the ways in which she benefits from being born with white skin simply confuses racial privilege with the financial advantages she has always been fortunate enough to enjoy.

And – I’d add, from my position as an observer – it provided cover for the vastly more toxic “Urban Progressive Privilege”.   Ray says nearly as much:

All of which means that pretty much anything you read about ‘white privilege’ is traceable to an ‘experiential’ essay written by a woman who benefitted from massive wealth, a panoply of aristocratic connections, and absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever. This alone calls into question the seriousness and scholarly validity of the derivative works, since they are all the fruit of a poisonous tree. But McIntosh’s hypothesis was eagerly embraced nonetheless, because it served a particular purpose—it helped to mainstream a bitter zero-sum politics of guilt and identity. This dark epistemology has quietly percolated through the universities and the wider culture for two decades now. It has had the effect of draining attention from a massive and growing wealth gap and it has pitted the poor against one another in public spectacles of acrimony and even violence.

“Progressivism” has ended up on the “wrong” side of the class war it has always espoused: they are the patricians, and have been for over a century now.

Idenitymongering – and the firehose of “privilege” allegations that are one of its weapons – is one way of dividing the unruly plebes against each other, as Ray points out:

A school board in British Columbia even thought it would be a good idea to greet its poor and working class white middle school students with this poster reminding them of the guilty burden they bear on account of their skin:

No, it’s not a flyer for a community theater production of “1984”. Yet.

I grew up a very poor white kid. By which I mean, single-mother-on-welfare-in-Alberta poor. As a child, I remember feeling utterly hopeless about ever making any sort of life for myself. If I were at school in British Columbia today, I would now have to deal with seeing this admonition every morning as well. One wonders why Teresa Downs doesn’t simply step down from her $200,000 a year job and pass it to a person of colour since she acquired it unfairly. Is her public declaration of culpability supposed to be compensation enough? Presumably, like Peggy McIntosh, she has convinced herself that human well-being will be better served by shaming the children of people whose average annual income is around $23,000.

I suggest you read the whole thing; as much as I pullquoted, there is so much more.

Moms Want Action sent out a photomeme to their troops yesterday:

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One wonders what bill they defeated in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

But not as much as one wonders what “guns in schools” bill they “defeated” in Minnesota.

Hint:  There was none.

When the gun grabber movement fabricates not only “facts”, but victories, it reminds me of something.

But…what?

Oh, yeah – this:

The gun grabber movement has never once made a single statement that is simultaneously substantial, original and true.

A friend of the blog writes:

It used to be people would go out for a night of fun and one person would have to be the designated driver. A majority didn’t even think to use cabs and public transit would often not run regularly enough at bar close.

Now that we have Uber and Lyft, I have heard many, many stories of people using those services when going out. I know some people who no longer drive under the influence because of the affordability of Uber.

So, of course, when people get real options that are reliable and affordable, those in the government who think their jobs are as social engineers have a problem.

Of interest locally, I found this link through a Tweet that declared Minneapolis/St Paul should consider this next. Why?

They can try to limit all they want, but there will still be people in cars and ride sharing will still happen. For example, the other day, I was approached by a man on the street who was trying to start his own ride share business, offering lower rates than Uber by about $2. I also have the number of a taxi driver who moonlights as a personal driver for those of us with his business card. He pretty much places himself on call for us.

So, yes, there will be options, which makes it even more aggravating that city governments get involved in private business that actually works for the people.

In a system built on rent-seeking, people will seek rent.

And for the government permission racket to survive, it’s gotta deliver the rent.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Visa and Mastercard won’t service conservative businesses.  They are intentionally discriminating on the basis of political viewpoint.

It’s completely legal, of course, under freedom of association.  It’s the same reason I don’t shop at Dick’s Sporting Goods, the America-hating social justice suck-ups who won’t sell Black Rifles, and the reason I won’t spend money in any store that bans guns on the premises to provide a sanctuary for criminals.  I disagree with their political viewpoint so I won’t support it.

Customers have a right to discriminate against merchants based on their political viewpoint.  Should merchants have a right to discriminate against customers based on their political viewpoint?  Tough question.

I’m on the side of the wedding cake decorator who doesn’t want do gay cakes.  I’m against Visa who doesn’t want to facilitate gun sales.  I could use some help from SITD readers.  How do we balance the rights?

Joe Doakes

I’ll throw this out to my audience, who are inevitably much smarter than I am.

My two cents:  it takes two to balance.  The other side wants nothing to do with “balance”.    I think we are inevitably sliding into two different economies (at best) or complete dissolution as a nation ,one way or the other.

Thoughts?

This week, I started going over the political and social aspects of various personality disorders, viewed through the lense of Shahida Arabi’s excellent piece,  “20 Diversion Tactics Highly Manipulative Narcissists, Sociopaths And Psychopaths Use To Silence You”.

Yesterday it was “Gaslighting” – the narcissistic abuser’s way of trying to convince you not to trust your own lying perceptions, mind and memories.

Today, it’s the trait that helped put this blog on the map: Projection:

Berg’s Seventh Law Is In DSM-V.  Sort Of:   Arabi’s second point is “Projection”; she describes it:

One sure sign of toxicity is when a person is chronically unwilling to see his or her own shortcomings and uses everything in their power to avoid being held accountable for them. This is known as projection. Projection is a defense mechanism used to displace responsibility of one’s negative behavior and traits by attributing them to someone else. It ultimately acts as a digression that avoids ownership and accountability.

Sound familiar?

It’s another term for Berg’s Seventh Law;  “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”.

While we all engage in projection to some extent, according to Narcissistic Personality clinical expert Dr. Martinez-Lewi, the projections of a narcissist are often psychologically abusive.

Like, for example, fretting about an “oncoming wave of right-wing violence” (perhaps by tiki-torch-carrying cartoon figures) while ignoring or cheering on gas-mask-clad “Anti”-fa thugs destroying property and beating up peaceful event-goers.

So yeah – of course it sounds familiar:

Rather than acknowledge their own flaws, imperfections and wrongdoings, malignant narcissists and sociopaths opt to dump their own traits on their unsuspecting suspects in a way that is painful and excessively cruel. Instead of admitting that self-improvement may be in order, they would prefer that their victims take responsibility for their behavior and feel ashamed of themselves. This is a way for a narcissist to project any toxic shame they have about themselves onto another.

And yes, it has resonance in the world of Trump (or Bush, or Reagan) Derangement syndrome:

Narcissistic abusers love to play the “blameshifting game.” Objectives of the game: they win, you lose, and you or the world at large is blamed for everything that’s wrong with them. This way, you get to babysit their fragile ego while you’re thrust into a sea of self-doubt. Fun, right?

Fun – and the status quo in our society.  Especially here in MInnesota.

Solution? Don’t “project” your own sense of compassion or empathy onto a toxic person and don’t own any of the toxic person’s projections either. As manipulation expert and author Dr. George Simon (2010) notes in his book In Sheep’s Clothing, projecting our own conscience and value system onto others has the potential consequence of being met with further exploitation.

TL:dr version: don’t take their crap.

Tomorrow – “Word Sadal”

… on Donald Trump for saying the things about the late Senator John McCain…

… That they were saying about him 10 years ago.

Armed citizen rescues a couple and a child from a would-be carjacker:

LITTLEFIELD, Texas – Littlefield Police said a man with a gun and a concealed carry permit was able to stop a violent carjacking Thursday afternoon.

Police arrested Ruben Garcia Lopez, 25, for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, assault, terroristic threat and resisting arrest.

Littlefield Police were called to the 900 block of West 4th Street Thursday afternoon.

A police statement said, “A male subject was armed with a knife [and] was assaulting a female and trying to take her car.” Police said Lopez also assaulted the woman’s boyfriend. Her kids were in the car.

Police quoted Lopez as saying, “This was his (expletive) car”.

“Even though she was being assaulted; the woman was trying to get her kids out of the car,” police said.

“A neighbor arrived at his home, saw the attack in progress, and armed himself with his handgun. He has a concealed handgun permit,” police said. “He came to the aid of the victims and pointed his weapon at the attacker.”

Lopez then moved away from the car and went across the street.

When police arrived, “… the attacker dropped the knife and attacked the officer.”

More, faster.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Another natural disaster, another lesson in why politicians shouldn’t attempt to meddle in economics. Some hypothetical examples to consider:
A hurricane is coming. You have failed to stock up. The store has bottled water. You want bottled water. How much should you pay for it?

Suppose the store says, “Sorry, that water is not for sale at any price, we’re saving it for after the hurricane because we know resupply will be impossible. We won’t sell to hoarders.” Should the store be allowed to refuse to sell to you?

Suppose you say to the store clerk, “I know it’s not for sale, but I’ll give you $100 per bottle for it.” Is it still price gouging if the store isn’t charging a higher price but instead is accepting bribes on the side?

Suppose the store says, “We just sold our entire inventory at the usual price, that guy over there bought it all. Talk to him about buying some of his private supply.” How much should a private citizen be allowed to charge for the supplies he thoughtfully laid in before the disaster came?

Suppose nobody is willing to sell you water for the .99 per bottle you formerly paid for it. Does that justify you taking their bottles, by force?

The entire basis for the science of economics is the study of scarcity and the best way for society to respond to it. Okay, politicians, here you go: scarcity is coming. How should we respond? What have 5,000 years of human history taught us?
Apparently, in Hawaii, the answer is: “absolutely nothing.”

Joe Doakes

If “progs” understood economics, they wouldn’t be progressives.

Yesterday, I introduced you to an article.  “20 Diversion Tactics Highly Manipulative Narcissists, Sociopaths And Psychopaths Use To Silence You” by Shahida Arabi.

It’s a fairly brilliant piece on coping with people with the variety of personality disorders that are slowly being recognized – sociopathy, narcissism (the two favorite pop-culture “diagnoses” of Donald Trump, among the Trump deranged – which is one reason I’m almost reticent about writing this piece; it’s become “hip” to call people you disagree with sociopaths and narcissists, lately).

But the more I read it – and the more I see the way our nation’s political conversation is going – the more I think it’s a coping mechanism for … well, the rest of us, in dealing with our nation’s socio-political and media ruling classes.

Because my case is this:  The behavior isn’t all that different.

Gaslighting:   Arabi describes “Gaslighting” as follows:

Gaslighting is a manipulative tactic that can be described in different variations of three words: “That didn’t happen,” “You imagined it,” and “Are you crazy?” Gaslighting is perhaps one of the most insidious manipulative tactics out there because it works to distort and erode your sense of reality; it eats away at your ability to trust yourself and inevitably disables you from feeling justified in calling out abuse and mistreatment.

Is a comprehensive rewrite of history – “our entire history is racist”, “Reagan didn’t really have anything to do with bringing down the USSR” – gaslighting?

Does systematically impugning the motives and morality of those who differ from the narrative – “The NRA is a terrorist organisation”, “‘Whitenesss’ is an existential problem” – qualify?

Absolutely:

When a narcissist, sociopath or psychopath gaslights you, you may be prone to gaslighting yourself as a way to reconcile the cognitive dissonance that might arise. Two conflicting beliefs battle it out: is this person right or can I trust what I experienced? A manipulative person will convince you that the former is an inevitable truth while the latter is a sign of dysfunction on your end.

“All of society’s problems trace back to systematic racism/white supremacy/male privilege” – no matter what the actual parties’ actual beliefs, stories, background and motiovations?  That certainly qualifies.

How does one resist?

In order to resist gaslighting, it’s important to ground yourself in your own reality – sometimes writing things down as they happened, telling a friend or reiterating your experience to a support network can help to counteract the gaslighting effect. The power of having a validating community is that it can redirect you from the distorted reality of a malignant person and back to your own inner guidance.

This is true.  And it’s something the gaslighters know, too – because they do their darnedest to shut down that “validating community”; it’s why Big Left is doing its best to remove conservative news and opinion from social media, to push the return of regulations like “The Fairness Doctrine”, to jam down “Net Neutrality” and the like; because like any abusive partner, they know that that support network stands between them and complete brainwashing.

Next installment:  Projection.

The “Legacy fund” transfers a whole bunch Minnesota taxpayer dollars to wildlife conservation – arguably accetable, maybe – and “the arts”.

And when I say “the arts”, I don’t mean art.  I mean the kind of s**t that Minnesota’s arts bureaucrats find acceptable.

Like this “Protect” Minnesota production. 

Yes, you should treat it as a theft.

Statistics can be just as misleading as any other variety of rhetoric;   

One of my “favorite’ examples, lately, is the purported incidence of sexual assault among young women in college.

Looking into the “stats” provided, one reaches a few logical roadblocks:

The Japanese brutal occupation of Nanjing, China is commonly known as the “Rape of Nanjing.” It is called this in part because so many local women were raped. The numbers are fought over by historians, but the best estimate is that 20,000 of the approximately 100,000 women who were in Nanjing at the time were raped by Japanese soldiers, or about one in five. This means that if the one in four number is correct, then colleges are more dangerous for women than being in Nanjing during the Japanese occupation. Now, I would venture to guess that if I tried to stuff you daughter into a time machine and send her back to Nanjing on December 13, 1937 you would probably fight me to the death to prevent it. But parents don’t act anything like this vis a vis going to college, ergo no one believes this figure. So why does everyone keep using it like it is accurate?

Because like most such inflamed rhetoric, especially (but not exclusively) from the left, it’s not about informing. It’s about bludgeoning, bum-rushing and bullying the gullible into giving them what they want.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Astonishingly, Hawaii does not have enough hurricane shelters for all its inhabitants. Reminds me of New Orleans. And Puerto Rico. And pretty much every other burg run by Democrats who have plenty of money for illegal immigrants, street mimes, diversity coordinators and homeless bums but not enough money to patch the streets or shelter citizens from disaster. I wonder if their Resilience Officer spent all his time organizing garbage collection, as St. Paul’s has? I’m sure that will be a big help when a tornado rips through the heart of town, or a blizzard knocks down the power lines.

Joe Doakes

Given our last brush with “Protect” Minnesota, it seems they consider genuine resilience to be a bug, not a feature.

The Entente had made no shortage of promises as their soldiers had fought across the globe.

The Russians had been promised Constantinople.  The Italians had been promised chunks of the Austo-Hungarian Empire.  The Japanese had been promised Germany’s Pacific territories.  The Arabs had been promised independence.  And the British and French had made promises between themselves to divide up the rest of their opponent’s colonial lands.  That many of the promises contradicted themselves was hardly a matter – sorting out the various treaties was a concern for victors, not the vanquished.  And the war appeared far from won.

The letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lionel Walter Rothschild on November 2nd, 1917, could easily appear as simply another promise the Entente could cast off following the war.  The letter was short – only a page long – and exceptionally vague given the contents.  “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” Balfour stated in his letter one of Britain’s most prominent Jewish leaders, “and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”

In three brief paragraphs, Britain set the road-map for an entirely different Middle East – and the conflicts that would define the next century.

The Balfour Declaration – the short document altered the structure of the Middle East

The concept of a Jewish homeland – a political goal of the Jewish movement of Zionism – had been debated for decades, if not nearly a century.  For many of the Jewish leaders in Europe, the question was not if the Jews should settle into a nation state of their own, but where.    (more…)

What best sums up rural/urban American relations?

To me, it’s the Thomas Franks book What’s the Matter with Kansas?.    The de facto subtitle was “why do Rural Americans vote against (I’m gonna add a little emphasis here) their best interests?”

Can you think of a more arrogant bit of preening than telling someone you don’t know and whose live you haven’t – can’t! – live, what their “best interests” are?

It lives on today, of course; Democrat candidate Jeff Erdmann wrote about his time working with the Angie Craig campaign:

[Erdmann] was phone banking and asked a supervisor what message he should tailor to the rural part of the district, since the script seemed aimed at city dwellers. “Just tell them the trailer-court story, they’re not big thinkers out there,” he said he was told, referring to Craig’s childhood in a trailer home.

But when rural Americans are asked why they don’t “vote for their best interests” for “progressives”, for some reason the obvious response – “you mean “best interests” like out of control crime, society organizing itself into demographic donuts of immense wealth surrounded by misery, exquisitely expensive but utterly wretched public education, intrusive bureaucracies and regulation, and a one-party system run by a political class that holds in sneering contempt everything I believe in?  Those “best interests?”

Somehow that response never makes it in the paper.

Which brings us to Dave Mindeman.

Mindeman – DFL activist and the proprietor of the “MNpACT” blog who is, if memory serves, not a rural farmer or businessman, but a retired pharmacist from the south metro, has a piece in the MinnPost (anyone remember the MinnPost?  I still get them mixed up with the Minnesota Monitor), entitled “Democrats are the real champions of rural Minnesota”.

And it’s tempting to say that he shoots his entire premise in the foot right out of the gate:

Democrats are always on the defensive when it comes to rural or outstate Minnesota. And I fail to see why that should be.

There is this misperception that Democrats only represent urban Minnesota. And granted, since the bulk of the population are city dwellers, it is only natural to devise programs that fit that large chunk of Minnesota residents. A lot of Democrats represent that urban population and need to pay attention to it.

And that they do, pushing policies statewide that cuddle up to the DFL’s MInneapolis and Saint Paul shot-callers.   So while Mindeman is correct in saying…:

But Democrats who have represented more rural areas have nothing to feel bad about.

…that’s because those rural Democrats have either adapted to their surroundings (see:  the Iron Rangers’ pro-life, pro-2nd Amendment stance) or, as with most DFLers outside 494/694 and the Arrowhead, or been retired from politics at the ballot box.

But once you get past the thesis, where’s the free-range beef?

I would venture to say that Democrats have done more for rural Minnesota than the Minnesota Republicans have ever accomplished. Look at the record on the issues close to greater Minnesota.

Broadband. Each legislative session, Democrats propose larger funding for this rural business essential. Gov. Mark Dayton, and Democrats in the Minnesota House and Senate have all been on board with much higher investment than the Republicans. And when the majority party throws those smaller bones at rural Minnesota, they think gratitude is in order. It’s not.

This, of course, has nothing to do with “investing in rural Minnesota”, and everything to do with turning rural broadband into a public utility (to create more sinecures for the DFL political class – and, as with every other public utility, what could possibly go wrong, there?), or serve as a political cudgel…

…that the DFL desperately needs to draw attention from the simple fact that it’s Minnesota’s confiscatory business tax and regulation system, not slow internet, that’s the problem for rural business.

LGA. For several years, legislative Republicans have used Local Government Aid as a “wasteful” spending punching bag — even though smaller Minnesota towns and cities request it every session.

But it’s not the smaller towns that the DFL is fighting for.  As we showed during the 2010 campaign, while LGA was originally designed to help smaller, poorer towns afford things like water and sewage plants and new schools, it’s morphed into a systematic transfer of tax dollars from the parts of the state that work (largely the Republican controlled parts) to the parts that don’t (Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth soak up an awful lot of that money, notwithstanding all the caterwauling about helping rural Minnesota).

Transportation. This is a real sore point to contend with. Republicans make a mockery of responsible transportation management.  [What about the elephant in the room – Ed]  Rural roads need fixing, but rather than increase revenue streams to meet the need, they gimmick their way through a patchwork of band-aids that have no long-term resolution.[What about the elephant in the room – Ed] And to justify all this, they demonize light rail and urban transit as taking away all the available funding – knowing full well that metro transportation has created its own funding stream with the metro sales tax, which frees up more of the gas tax for rural infrastructure.

That’s a bit of flimflam;  transit eats up all sorts of other revenue, including 40% of Minnesota’s exorbitant motor vehicle sales taxes.

But a guy’s gotta ask:  the Democrats (and a Republican, Arne Carlson, who was to the left of many DFLers then, if not now, especially fiscally) controlled most of the power in this state for decades, and (at an institutional level) still do.    Are they saying the roads suddenly went to crap in 2010?

Health care. Here is the real irony of it all. Rural Minnesota is the real beneficiary of the ACA health care provisions. Rural Minnesota has fewer insurance carriers, fewer hospitals and clinics, and less local access.

AND OBAMACARE AND MNSURE MADE IT INCALCULABLY WORSE!

People across vast swathes of Minnesota went from having several plans to choose from to, in many cases, one.   The horror stories – people having to leave their hometown clinic an drive 40-100 miles to get to an in-network facility – are so prevalent outstate, it’s a wonder any DFLer can leave the metro without getting pelted with rocks and garbage.

What the DFL, Obamacare and MNSure did for rural healthcare was a crime.  If only we had an institution, with printing presses

Child care. This is a problem that has kept getting worse in recent years. Rural residents struggle to find competent and local child care that allows them to continue to work without drowning in expenses. Some rural Minnesotans drive 50 plus miles just to drop off their kids at a place they can trust and still get to work. Instead of addressing this issue, Republicans prefer to fight unions and find fraudulent providers that they can make examples of, while doing nothing for the actual problem.

Wait – back up.

Fighting the unions?

He’s reverring, of course, to the DFL’s years-long effort to turn day care providers into unionized de facto state employees (contributing dues to DFL supporting unions, natch), while in the meantime ratcheting up regulatory requirements to a level that – are driving providers, especially rural ones, from the business at a catastrophic pace.  I’ve interviewed Rep. Mary Franson – the only sitting rep that has actually worked in the daycare industry – and it’s pretty clear – the DFL seems daycare providers as more a potential revenue source than, y’know, childcare providers.

Once again, Democrats have been discussing this issue for some time, but while in the minority, any solution gets bottled up by the majority in committee.

Which is the handy excuse of every party that has no power.

Best we keep it that way.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The old Leftist slogan “Question Authority” has become “Question Other Authority.”   You should question all authority except Liberal Authority; them, you should believe without question.

As more young people buy into the new idea, this shift has exciting implications for the fields of climate science, law enforcement and politics.

Also academic freedom .

Also freedom.

Psychology and psychiatry are, as they say, evolving; the innards of the human mind are less penetrable, so far, than the far side of the moon or the deepest parts of the ocean.

One of the nonspecific, vexing maladies that’s been identified – or “identified”, at any rate – lately are the various “personality disorder” mental illnesses.  Starting about a decade or so ago, the industry started recognizing the existance of these conditions:  Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), as well as Histrionic, Antisocial, Paranoid, Avoidant, Dependent and other flavors of Personality Disorders.

Like much of what’s on the borders of the field, it’s all very ill-defined – and even less “treatable” in any miraculous sense.

But it’s helped a lot of people put a tag – sometimes rightly, sometimes as a stretch, like most amateur and, for the matter, professional mental health diagnostic art – on a lot of behavior that has made a lot of peoples’ lives very, very difficult.  Including, truth be told (and then moved on from) in my own life.

And when you start reading more about this chain of disorders, things get depressing really fast.  There’s no treatment – because getting the “patient” to recognize they have a problem is nearly impossible; a sociopath or narcissist will elude any culpability for his or her actions like Jackie Chan slipping a sloppy kick.

The only thing that remains is to try to learn to deal with the person with the disorder – or to accept the imperative of living without them.

It’s brutally difficult for everyone involved – and not a little bit heartbreaking.

One of the better pieces I’ve read about dealing with these various conditions is a piece, “20 Diversion Tactics Highly Manipulative Narcissists, Sociopaths And Psychopaths Use To Silence You” by Shahida Arabi.    In the world of internet popular psychology, it’s as good a summary of symptoms and coping tactics as I’ve ever seen.   It’s been a lot of help to a lot of people close to me over the past year or so.

But this article – series of articles, really – aren’t about coping with  abuse from mentally-ill people.

It’s about coping with abuse from half the population.

The Mind Politic And Its Illness:  I read Arabi’s piece several times by way of helping a few people who are close to me, before it occurred to me:  “This applies just as much to the way our dominant political and media culture treats the Great American Middle as it does to people with personality disorders”.

Starting tomorrow, I”ll be going through the entire article.

I’ve worked for two companies based in Jacksonville over the years.

At one of them, I stayed frequently at the riverfront Hyatt, along the Saint Johns river, a picturesque estuarial bend that separates downtown Jax from San Marco.

I routinely walked up the promenade to Jacksonville Landing when I had an evening to spare and an expense-account dinner to scare up.

And while it wasn’t really much of an issue for me while traveling, I thought I’d made a mental note that it was a “Gun Free Zone”.

And I was right.   Just like Pulse Nightclub and Parkland High School, the law-abiding citizen is completely disarmed at Jax Landing, where yesterday’s spree shooting took place.

It’s getting too predictable.

It’s come to this:  America’s satire sites do the news better than the legacy media.

Sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church is the flavor of the month.

Sexual abuse of children in public schools is SQUIRREL!

Other sources confirm this problem is big—“far more common” than you want to believe. Further, just like the Catholic problem, public schools “continue to conceal the actions of dangerous educators in ways that allow them to stay in the classroom.”

Further, one study says that between 1 and 5 percent of teachers sexually harass or abuse students. Given that there are 3.2 million school teachers, those numbers represent between 32,000 and 160,000 predators in the schools.

Despite this startling problem being laid before the U.S. Department of Education in a 2004 study entitled, “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of the Literature,” it was related to me that there are no updated stats or studies. Despite the overwhelming indications, there have been no national or even statewide studies of student experiences of educator sexual misconduct. Fifteen years have gone by since this study!

The difference, of course, is that Big Left detests all that Catholicism stands (or at least stood) for, while teachers are Big Left’s shock troops.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The reason we don’t try crazy people for crimes is society has decided it’s not fair to punish people who lack the capacity to understand that what they were doing was wrong.

The reason we don’t try children for crimes is they lack the wisdom and maturity to control their behavior to follow the rules of civilized society.

These concepts work for simple crimes like stealing an apple off the vendor’s cart, or punching someone on the schoolyard, or shooting somebody while fooling around with Dad’s pistol.  They’re acts of impulse, of stupidity, but not malice.

Raping two girls while holding their boyfriends at gunpoint doesn’t fit those parameters, so the perp shouldn’t get the break.  He should be given a fair trial followed by a first-class hanging.

I think there’s a point where “juvenile” justice shouldn’t apply.

Some pathologies, a kid grows out of.  Not sure “Raping while holding witnesses at gunpoint” is really one of ’em.

Join me from 1-3PM today on the NARN, live at the State Fair!

Today on the show:

• Pete Stauber and Jim Hagedorn, two of the biggest opportunities the GOP has nationwide for seat pickups!
• Doug Wardlow, GOP attorney general candidate.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

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Join us!

The most powerful word in the free market is “no”.

With the simple word “no”, each individual consumer votes every day on the products and services they do or, vastly more often, don’t want to spend their scarce, precious resources on.

Were it not for the word “no”, cell phones would still weigh 2 pounds and cost $10 a minute; cars would still have two wheel drum brakes; VHS tapes would still rule the home-video market.

The lack of the term “no” – or, at least, it’s complete on importance to central planners, who are all about their various pet “yeses”,- is one of the great flies, if not the fatal weakness, and socialism.

Without the word “no”, there would be no free market. Also, no improvement in goods, services or, really, the entire human condition.

With that in mind – people are saying “no” in record numbers to government subsidized mass transit.

The Federal Transit Administration released June 2018 data revealing that the transit industry has now experienced four straight years of ridership losses. June 30 was the end of the fiscal year for most transit agencies, and ridership has fallen in every fiscal year since 2014.

Nationwide, the total decline since 2014 was 7 percent, but declines in many urban areas were much larger:

• 29 percent in Memphis;

• 27 percent in Charlotte;

• 26 percent in Miami;

• 25 percent in Albuquerque;

• 24 percent in Cleveland;

• 22 percent in St. Louis;

• 21 percent in Milwaukee, Sacramento, and Virginia Beach; and

• 20 percent in Los Angeles.

The article Dash by the excellent Randall O’Toole – notes that the feds are blaming a lot of factors for this tree fall Dash ride healing services for the middle class, and the simple fact that most poor people own cars, and most people can reach more better paying jobs in 10 minutes by car than an hour by transit.

But they all boiled down to one thing – people everywhere, nationwide, of all economic groups (except for a tiny fringe of “car free” middle class trend follower is) are saying “no” to being jammed into trains to go with the government has deemed they need to be.

I’m on the brink of declaring…not so much a new “Berg’s Law”, but a corollary to Berg’s Seventh Law.

Something to the effect of “the more the Left’s hangers-on jabber about “Right Wing violence”, the more left wing violence will be going on.”

Oh, the media will continue to parrot the narrative, even as they occasionally, perhaps unwittingly, undercut it with some basic facts, still, the deep-down depravity of the left’s inner  id is always out there.

threats of murder

NBC Ignores

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A colleague is worried that confirming Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court will make it too Catholic, too Harvard, too Elite.  The justices won’t understand what the people want, won’t deliver rulings to their expectations, the public won’t accept them.  We need a more diverse court, one more in touch with common people, to better understand their concerns.

I dunno – we have a Wise Latina, a Lesbian, a Black, a Jew, a Protestant and some Catholics.  We have men and women, old and young.  We have legal scholars who delve deep into the history of the nation to divine the intent of the Founders, and people who march in lock-step with the prevailing Liberal orthodoxy of the day.  I think we’re doing okay, diversity-wise.  Trump should get to put whoever he wants on the court.  Elections have consequences, remember?

I’d be a lot more sympathetic if I believed the concern would be as strong were a white male Catholic Harvard-educated Liberal to be nominated.  Somehow, I suspect the argument would be exactly reversed: we need the best and brightest on the court, wise philosopher-kings to tell us what the law ought to be, not a bunch of grubby middlemen haggling for their special interest groups.

SCOTUS nomination fights expose the id of both parties.

I like our id better than their id, to be honest.

But then, that’s one of the reasons I foresook liberalism in the first place.

#MeToo becomes #SheToo.

Women being basically hiuman, it was pretty much inevitable.