It seems to have become a bit of a ritual on the left to proclaim one’s guilt for…well, all the sins the Church of Intersectionalism recognizes. The louder the better. It’s a tradition that dates back to the Cultural Revolution; to denounce oneself before being denounced (not that that was necessarily protection).
Indeed, it seems to have become literally a religious observance.
Or, alternately, a form of mental illness.
A judge has ruled that Saint Paul’s Tony-Soprano-style trash collection system violates the city charter:
Ramsey County District Judge Leonardo Castro ordered that the system be suspended June 30 until voters can decide whether it should continue.
“It’s huge,” said attorney Greg Joseph, who represents three residents who sued the city. “It’s the right thing. We’re very, very happy.”
Last year, the City Council rejected a petition from residents to put the issue up for a vote, prompting some to file suit earlier this year asking for judicial intervention.
Between the lines, Judge Castro ruled exactly as many of us had been saying since the beginning; that the system was a violation of the city’s charter:
The city’s charter allows residents to petition to have ordinances put up for a vote. Critics of the city’s organized trash system gathered 6,469 signatures asking that residents be allowed to vote on the ordinance governing collection, the judge said.
“… A city’s charter is, in effect, its local constitution,” Castro wrote. “… Here, there is no evidence in the record that the petition presented in October 2018 was deficient in anyway. [City leaders] concede that the petition was sufficient. Consequently, it was an improper exercise of power for the Council to refuse to place the Referendum on the November 2019 ballot.”
More and more, Saint Paul’s government seems to look up to Chicago as its role model.
In the meantime – half of the haulers that were pummeled into the system have left, with many of the smaller haulers being swallowed up by larger, out of town jobbers:
A mix of small companies and big corporations were among the 15 haulers that signed a contract with the city in November 2017. Seven remain, including three based outside Minnesota.
The number of haulers will soon drop again. Last month, Waste Management announced it had bought Florida-based Advanced Disposal Services.
The retreat of haulers is happening despite the city’s pledge to preserve small businesses in the transition to organized trash collection.
“The city chose to pursue a consortium option to ensure all garbage haulers — of any size — could maintain their current market share in providing services to St. Paul residents,” Lisa Hiebert, a spokeswoman for St. Paul Department of Public Works, said in a statement. “This approach was reflective of the feedback we heard from the community, and what was represented in the final council resolution.”
“Unexpectedly”, of course.
Unless you’ve paid any attention to other such “partnerships”.
Why not stop on out to the Eagles in Stillwater on Friday or Saturday from 8PM til Midnight?
They seem to like us in Stillwater – back in April, we slew at the Stillwater Lanes and Lounge (it’s a much better venue than the name suggests), and this is like our fifth weekend playing the Eagles.
Come on out and join the Herd!
Big Leftymedia is concerned that former ISIS fighters who defected from France to the Caliphate aren’t getting due process:
[Human Rights Watch spokesman Belkis] WILLE: The trials of ISIS suspects in Iraq are fundamentally unfair. We say this based on sitting through many of these trials over the last two years. And what we see is that defendants do not get any of their basic due process rights granted to them under international law, as well as under Iraqi law. There is absolutely no presumption of innocence when they walk into the courtroom. And many times, defendants are alleging that they have been tortured.
[NPR Middle East correspondent Jane] ARRAF: France doesn’t have a death penalty. In a statement, the Foreign Ministry said it would relay its opposition to sentencing the men to death. But it also said it respected Iraqi jurisdiction. The men were handed over by Kurdish Syrian forces to Iraq because the alleged crimes were committed in Iraq and Syria.
Due process is a human right, and it’s be disingenuous of someone who supports Western Civilization to say otherwise.
I’m just wondering where the concern was when ISIS was on the ascendant?
The Children’s Theater Company is suing a sexual predator…
…wait. No. Let me read that again. I’ll add emphasis:
The Children’s Theatre Company has begun proceedings to collect close to $300,000 from a former student who was sexually assaulted by a staff member.
Huh. Yep. I read it wrong. The Children’s Theater Company has filed suit against someone one of their staffers sexually abused.
And they seem to be juuuuuust fine with it:
Actor and theater artist Laura Stearns is one of 17 people who filed civil suits against the Children’s Theatre Company for abuse they suffered as children while students in the theater company’s school. Stearns’ case was the first to go before a jury.
She claimed the company was negligent in hiring Jason McLean, the actor and teacher who raped her at his home in 1983.
A Hennepin County jury found the theater company “generally negligent” during the time period leading up to her assault, but not specifically negligent for hiring McLean. The jury decided that McLean, not the theater, should pay Stearns $3.68 million in damages.
But McLean fled to Mexico two years ago, taking his cash with him. It’s unlikely Stearns will see any money.
Last Friday, the theater company filed an application for “taxation of costs.” That’s what happens when the winner of a lawsuit asks the loser to pay for costs associated with the lawsuit, not including legal fees. The application listed $295,000 in expenses, including more than $214,000 for an expert witness.
The Children’s Theatre declined requests for an interview for this story. But in a written statement, management stressed it was not asking Stearns to pay the total sum, but simply presenting a comprehensive list of costs and leaving to the court the question of how much Stearns should pay.
Stearns’ attorney, Molly Burke, pointed out that filing for taxation of costs is optional; the Children’s Theatre didn’t have to do it.
No word whether the proudly “progressive” CTC has aroused the ire of #MeToo yet.
When you’re a civil liberty supporter, it’s easy to get discouraged. And with most libertarian issues, sometimes it seems as if the train has left the station for good.
But to borrow a cliche, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees, especially when the Big Media and Big Left (ptr) are bombarding you with weed elms.
Gun rights are winning – not just the legislative, judicial and demographic battles, but the biggest battle of all, the social battle.
Even with polls like this, claiming 90% of the people support gun control?
Yep.
Even with states like California and New Jersey doubling and tripling down on gun control?
Not only is it “even with” them; their radical gun control is a symptom of and reaction to the near complete victory in the courts, legislatures, Congress, the marketplace of ideas, and society as a whole.
Even outside the traditional “white male conservative” groups?
Especially outside those groups.
The conclusion of the piece, by Kareem Shaya:
On one hand you have an idea that has been growing for almost 30 years across almost all demographic groups; is more popular with young people than ever; spread permissive carry laws from just nine states in 1986 to 42 states and DC today; grew the installed base of its dearest shibboleth by a factor of 30 since the 1990s; and by its nature grows exponentially after reaching critical mass, because it spreads via the same natural laws that drive social networks, compound interest, and nuclear fission (see Kevin Simler’s incredible “Going Critical” for more on how that works).
Definitely check out “Going Critical”.
On the other hand you have an idea that went from grand national ambitions to eking out compromises in a small minority of states, and which gets less popular the more people learn about it. (That’s also compound interest, but with a negative sign in front of it.)
That’s one thing that is missing from the “debate” most people see, the one in the media – the sense of history.
Shaya’s piece points out that 35 years ago, complete bans on handguns and national registration of hunting rifles was the mainstream, pushed by groups like “The National Coalition to Ban Handguns” and “Handgun Control Incorporated”.
Today – barring polls taken after emotionally wrenching events like mass shootings – gun rights tends to outpoll gun control, and the grabber groups have had to continuously scale back not only their ambition, but their marketing: “Handgun Control Inc.” became “The Brady Organization”, among others.
Read the whole thing. Pass it along.
Just remember – in the era of Trump, white supremacy is exploding in popularity and busting out like never before!
I’m a User Experience Architect.
If for some reason I decided to take two years to become an abstract sculptor – well, Mazel Tov for me, but barring some pretty significant Contract-Fu on my part, I’m not going to get paid to be a User Experience Architect. Or sculptor, to be honest, but that’s skirting the point.
If you’re not doing the thing that you’re supposedly getting paid for, unless your potential services are so valuable that the client is willing to pay to keep that potential on tap, you might need another source of income.
National Public Radio seems to have taken up the “cause” of female athletes – Olympians, mind you – whose athletic sponsorships are jeopardized by taking time off from their sports to have kids. NPR’s Michel Martin talked with runner Alysia Montano about the way she was thrown out on the street after becoming pregnant:
And so in that off-year, I’d hoped that we would conceive and be able to have our daughter and return to the sport. And I did conceive. I did have my daughter. And my daughter was two months old. And I got a phone call that said, I want to talk about your contracts in regard to your performance this year – which means – you mean the year that I’ve been with child? And then I was – my payment was reduced.
Wait.
Back up.
Her payment – for running – was reduced, not eliminated, during a year in which her running was eliminated?
OK, surely she suffered grievously in other ways:
MARTIN: And what about your health benefits? I mean, that was another thing that emerged in the reporting on this is that there are athletes whose health insurance was terminated. And I can’t think a very thing – many things more frightening than either being pregnant or having a child or having a newborn with no health insurance – summarily terminated. So what about you? Did you at least have health insurance to cover the delivery or the postpartum period?
MONTANO: Yes. So the way that it works is a tier system. The luck that I did have with my daughter was I fell within the tier system because I made the Olympic team in 2012, and the protection was there for me. Now, if I didn’t make the Olympic team in 2012 and I became pregnant, I would lose my health insurance.
So let me get this straight – Nike is paying you to…run. Something that, all due respect, is the nich-iest of niche sports – a sport that literally nobody ever in history has gone into thinking of making a living at. And when you’re running, albeit not an Olympic level for a year, due to a personal (albeit blessed) choice that biology has pretty much limited to you, you still got paid.
Could there be a more first world problem?
Well, I suppose when you’re talking about “elite” athletes…:
My point and my stance is this should not be because I am an Olympian. This needs to be something that is in place for women athletes regardless.
“Regardless” of what? Level? Sport?
If I’m a company selling – let me stress this – sneakers, and I’m paying someone to…run, am I bound to support them unto death, regardless?
And am I the only one frantically and vainly combing their memory right now looking for a male athlete with an endorsement contract that included years of…well, not using the product?
Apparently when I call this a First World Problem, I’m only off by magnitude:
MARTIN: There are other women in this fight with you. We saw Alysia Montano and Kara Goucher share similar stories. What does it mean to have them alongside you?
Montano later notes the real problem:
She says she wants to make sure Nike writes this protection into the contracts of new and current female athletes because, she says, track and field athletes tend to sign contracts before they are the age in which women typically start thinking about having families, and by the time they do, they are locked into contracts without protections for maternity leave.
So it’s a matter of business education, as opposed to rampant sexism.
On this Memorial Day, I commend to you this piece by Rep. Tom Cotton on the history of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
And as always, let’s work to build – or, really, keep – a society worthy of all that’s been sacrificed.
Governor Walz’s Very Special Session is a work of crass political manipulation.
I’m not going to try to explain it – Representative Zerwas already did it better than I could:
Every session, especially since 2011, our entire government devolves down to three people in a locked room.
That’s not what we voted for…
…well, OK. It is exactly what a slim majority voted for.
Interesting article in the WaPo on San Francisco; its title suggests its current situation
“breaks America’s heart”, which is a fine play on Tony Bennett, but doesn’t really reflect the contempt most Americans outside the tech industry and politics have for the place.
The city is in the midst of collapsing, not so much from wealth, or even the “prog” boogeyman “income disparity” or even the lack of a middle class, but from the complete unaffordability by anyone who isn’t either wealthy or heavily subsidized by the wealthy.
And of course, San Franciscans -the people who voted for the government that led them here – are the last to understand why:
“This is unregulated capitalism, unbridled capitalism, capitalism run amok. There are no guardrails,” says Salesforce founder and chairman Marc Benioff, a fourth-generation San Franciscan who in a TV interview branded his city “a train wreck.”
First – and something of a tangent – Salesforce sucks.
More on-point? “Capitalism” only “runs amok” when it’s got government paving its way – with zoning, taxes and social policies designed to promote some groups over others, to bring “the right people” and promote “the right kind…” of society, life, politics. It is leading the way – but hardly alone – in proving Joel Kotkin’s point from ten years ago; cities are becoming donuts, with a core of immense wealthy surrounded by immense poverty, largely via government policy.
Unbridled capitalism gave us…Williston.
What we did to you wasn’t “spying.”
“Spying” is when you do it to us.
Joe Doakes
It’s a fascinating piece – and a look into the painstaking training lawyers get in the art of obfuscation.
One article that’s been providing some fascinating insights into politics (as well as bits and piece of my personal life) over the past couple of years) is “20 Diversion Tactics Highly Manipulative Narcissists, Sociopaths And Psychopaths Use To Silence You” by Shahida Arabi.
And yes, I know – “Narcissism” is the pop-psych diagnosis du jour meaning “someone I really don’t like”, these days. I’ll ask you to consider my argument on its merits, rather than its resonance with a pulsing mob of pop culture droogs.
Anyway – tactic #3 is called “Nonsensical conversations from hell” – sometimes called “word salad”:
Malignant narcissists and sociopaths use word salad, circular conversations, ad hominem arguments, projection and gaslighting to disorient you and get you off track should you ever disagree with them or challenge them in any way. They do this in order to discredit, confuse and frustrate you, distract you from the main problem and make you feel guilty for being a human being with actual thoughts and feelings that might differ from their own. In their eyes, you are the problem if you happen to exist.
Now, it could be I’m partaking in the pop-culture kool-aid, but I can’t be the only one who thought “word salad” when I they read this.
Here is a way to while away the long hours at your desk.
Count the number of people who are more upset by the story than they are by the notion of aborting a fetus that has already been born.
Remember when Democrats tittered with glee at the (small) number of Republians who were obsessed over Barack Obama’s birth certificate?
They can all, every one of them, shut up now:
…according to a Rasmussen poll released today, a staggering 67 percent of Democrats believe Ocasio-Cortez’s climate change warning to be completely legit.
According to the poll, 48 percent of all likely voters agree that the United States has only twelve years left to fight climate change before the effects are irreversible. The poll did not identify Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders (who still believes the doomsday prediction to be true) while conducting the survey. According to the poll, 40 percent disagree with the prediction, and 11 percent are undecided.
The most fascinating thing about the poll, aside from the large percentage of Democrat sea sponges who believe the 12-year prediction, is how the number of voters who believe it has skyrocketed in just a few months. When Rasmussen first polled on this issue back in January, after Ocasio-Cortez first publicly made her prediction, only 23 percent of voters agreed with it. Back in January, however, only 34 percent of Democrats believed what Ocasio-Cortez says only a sea sponge would have taken seriously. This shows the incredible influence the socialist wing of the Democratic Party has on the party as a whole.
Having Tide Pod Evita as your thought leader is like having Jesse Ventura as your charm school superintendant.
US currency is legal tender for all debts, public and private.
80% of all currency contains trace amounts of cocaine.
Possession of a trace amount of cocaine on currency in your pocket is a felony, regardless of how the cocaine got on the currency.
You are required to use our money, but you are prohibited from using our money. Catch 22. Look, people, that book was satire, not a guide to public policy. Fix the law.
Joe Doakes
To much of our administrative class, “everyone is an inadvertent felon” is a feature, not a bug.
I’ve spent most of my life – virtually my entire adult life – first raising and now working with millennials. And getting used to their various quirks – like, the way the seem to collect diagnoses and physical and mental illnesses (or at least their labels) the way they used to collect Pokemon cards. If I had a nickel for every group of millennials I’ve heard comparing being celiac and dysthemic to being “on the spectrum” and having anxiety, I could contribute enough money to get a republican elected in Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’ district.
Bemusement turns to irritation when they start yapping about “the world the previous generations left them”. The Great Recession, “climate change” and Trump, I guess, all combine to make millennials all goth-y about the world around them.
I’ve tried – without much success – to expose the idea that maybe, just maybe, the world they’re growing (Still. Interminably) is actually, if not better, at least no more malignant than the worlds their elders had:
It never really sinks in. But then it never really does, with the young.
David Harsanyi moves from memory to fact, to prove the point – millennials just don’t have it that bad, and to the extent they do, it’s largely because of lifestyle choices. From his conclusion:
Of course life has a new set of challenges for every generation, and no one expects millennials to sit around prefacing every complaint by noting, “Hey, life is better for me in so many ways.” But it’s simply untrue, despite a sense of unearned victimhood, that millennials have it harder than those who came before them. In most ways, the opposite is true.
I’d urge you not just to read athe whole thing, but to pass it on to a millennial close to you. Presuming they’re not triggered.
I just finished spending a year and a half riding the Vomit Comet (aka “the Green Line”) to work and back most days.
At its best, it was a serviceable ride.
At its most middling, it was crowded with free-loading University kids and, early on cold mornings, homeless people curled up sleeping on the chairs.
At its worst? I navigated between puddles of vomit, stepped in a pool of urine, and was to the point of intervening as a man attacked a woman.
You can almost sense the defeat in the Met Council’s latest release:
Metro Transit is ending 24/7 service on the Green Line between downtown St. Paul and downtown Minneapolis.
The change, which is scheduled to take effect in August, comes amid concerns about drug use, assaults and other misconduct on the trains.
Under the plan, the light rail trains will not run between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. weekdays.
General Manager Wes Kooistra said the trains will be replaced with buses that will stop near each Green Line station.
Kooistra said the two-hour shutdown will also give crews more time to clean train cars and repair tracks
Emphasis on “clean the cars”.
If the defendant in this case had somehow managed to obtain a gun and shoot up City Hall, Liberals would demand universal background checks and ammunition taxes and identification-stamped bullets and God knows what all else. They’d insist those measures were necessary, to prevent this kind of shooting.
But the real cause of the shooting would be they let him out of the nuthouse. Twice! Once in 2012 and again in 2017. After he was released, he refused to take his meds. What a shock! Totally out of the blue. Who could have predicted it?
We don’t have a gun problem. We have a mental health treatment problem. Everyone who is concerned about gun violence needs to read “My Brother Ron,” by Clayton Cramer. If you can’t afford to buy your own copy, let me know and I’ll buy it for you.
Joe Doakes
I second the nomination of Cramer’s book. Cramer’s departure from blogging was a dismal day for the medium.
We noted earlier this year that Philadelphia’s tax on pop was taking down soft drink sales, and jobs and stores with it.
And it turns out that that’s true – pop sales are down by half in Philly.
But people are healthier – right?
Er…right?
While researchers found that sales of sugary beverages fell in Philadelphia after the tax, beverage sales in nearby towns and counties without the tax went up. That suggests people may have been traveling to get their soda at a reduced price.
But…but…Revenue! Right?
Jazz Shaw did the math that I thought about, but didn’t, since Jazz did it…:
So, let’s look at this assuming one million ounces of soda was sold anually before the tax went into effect. If sales had remained the same, the city would have realized $62,400.00 in revenue instead of $54,300.00. But with the volume cut in half, they managed to slash their revenue to $31,200.00. (I was told there would be no math. Apparently City Hall in Philadelphia was operating on the same assumption.) Great job, guys. You gutted your revenue stream, caused layoffs in the beverage industry and depressed sales in the city’s retail outlets, likely impacting entry level jobs.
Of course, this is “unexpected” only if you haven’t followed similar stories from coast to coast, including here in Minnesota, where the rapacious and punitive increases to the cigarette tax enriched a lot of North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin convenience stores a few years back.
According to police dispatch, a “crowd of 8-10 men with hammers and iron bars” attacked people on the Green Line (aka “Vomit Comet”) platform on the East Bank, at the U of M.
According to Alpha News:
A person who claimed on social media to have been at the station when the incident occurred said that the group of males had “hammers and bars,” and that they seemed to be “attacking anyone who looked like they had money or were white.” The witness, who said he isn’t white, said he didn’t want to “[take] on a bunch of dudes with blunt objects,” and that he “hurried an older white lady away” and they walked a few blocks to catch a bus.
There is considerable effort on the part of local progressives to discredit the story – as it comes from conservative Alpha News via those neocon tools, the Minneapolis Police Scanner and U of M Pollice Departments.
According to the Pioneer Press:
Police responding to a report of a group threatening people at a light-rail station at the University of Minnesota stopped seven juvenile males who fled from the Minneapolis platform, a university representative said Monday.
Two males who were carrying metal pipes were identified through video surveillance and witness descriptions, said Lacey Nygard, a University of Minnesota spokeswoman. Police issued them citations.
That first paragraph has had the local PC police all a-twitter: “Only two had pipes, not ten hammers”, because thugs never throw away pipes and crowbars when the police are chasing them, naturally.
As I’ve noted in the past in this blog, I am Minnesota’s best feminist.
Now, let’s be honest – I did it, back in blogging’s heyday (from about 2004 throug about 2009) mostly to troll lesser feminists; watching commenters at shriekblogs like “Mercury Rising” rage and thunder against a conservative guy declaring himself the “best feminist” made my heart well with joy.
But at the core, it’s still true. I do believe in the things first-wave feminist sought; things like my daughter and granddaughter being treated equally in the eyes of the law, and accorinding to their actual merits in society and the workplace.
And not only has that battle been largely won, but in some areas of society – the treatment of boys in schools and universities, the effects of family court and the “Violence Against Women Act”, the pendulum has swung a little too far.
But that’s “first-wave” feminism – the part that started with the right to vote, and continues with beating on Harvey Weinstein and Louis CK and Al Franken.
Then, there’s the kind of “Feminism” that seeks to turn women into an identity class and political bloc (progressive, natch). Some call it “Toxic Feminism”, but the technical term is “Second Wave Feminism”. Books could be written on the subject (indeed, they have been – scads of them, mostly garbage).
And in reading the bleatings of the “Feminist Identity” movement over the years, I got the same feeling I used to get when I was beset by angry junior high kids; the solipsistic grasp of the world, the same echo-chamber logic, the same grounding in a world that exists only in fantasy, the same bottomless entitlement.
Camille Paglia noticed the same thing:
My favorite period in feminism has always been the 1920s and 1930s, when American women energized by winning the vote gained worldwide prominence for their professional achievements. My early role models, Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, were fierce individualists and competitors who liked and admired men and who never indulged in the tiresome, snippy rote male-bashing that we constantly hear from today’s feminists. I am an equal opportunity feminist who opposes special protections for women. What I am saying throughout my work is that girls who are indoctrinated to see men not as equals but as oppressors and rapists are condemned to remain in a permanently juvenile condition for life. They have surrendered their own personal agency to a poisonous creed that claims to empower women but has ended by infantilizing them. Similarly, boys will have no motivation to mature if their potential romantic partners remain emotionally insecure, fragile, and fearful, forever looking to parental proxies (like campus grievance committees or government regulators) to make the world safe for them.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll no doubt say it again – the biggest problem with Ilhan Omar isn’t that she’s Muslim. It’s that she’s a progressive who’s serving as a role model for other immigrants to suck them into the world of intersectional, dysfunctional, identity-obsessed modern progressivism.
Those who think school massacres and “Assault weapons” are inextricably tied together haven’t read the story of the Bath, Michigan massacre, which happened 92 years ago this morning.
I wrote at some length about it a few years back.
While gun control laws are short-sighted and sclerotic (even if you presume “preventing crime” is their motive, and I do not), but evil is nimble and creative.
A friend of the blog sent me this; it’s a map showing the most-common birth country for immigrants, by state, excluding Mexico.
And with most states, you see either what would appear to be the effects of random distribution according to economic forces (the fairly even spreading of Indians, driven heavily by immigration of engineers, academics and other technicians), proximity (Philipinos in the West, Canadians in the North, Cubans in Florida), one that stumps me (Germans in New Mexico?)…
…and Somalis in Minnesota.
Why, it’s almost as if a political movement decided to import an entire class of voters and concentrate them in a swing-y state, and indoctrinate them into a multi-generational voting bloc or something.
.
Babyon Bee may be America’s most credible news source.
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