Archive for November, 2019

Another Walmart. Another Shooting.

Tuesday, November 19th, 2019

And another good guy with a gun saves the day:

From KSWO ABC Channel 7 in Oklahoma: “Multiple witnesses have said the gunman shot two people in a vehicle and a civilian with a gun confronted him, causing the gunman to turn the gun on himself. We are working to confirm that story with Duncan police.

That’s why this “mass shooting” got no media coverage, naturally. It disturbs the narrative.

When The NARN Talks, People Listen. Eventually. Maybe.

Tuesday, November 19th, 2019

Back in 2007 or so, James Lileks stopped by the NARN broadcast at Back to the Fifties – the classic-car show at the State Fairgrounds that used to be such a vibrant focus of life in the Midway before the same people that brought us Tony Soprano-style trash collection badgered the cruising hot rods out of existence.

Because “vibrancy”, to the new Urbanites, must exclude those who actually vibrate.

Anyway – while on the air, Lileks pointed to a 1967 Mustang Fastback, and proclaimed that “the electric car will never succeed until Detroit builds one that looks like that“.

Was Detroit tuned in that day?

I’ll just assume they were; Ford’s new battery car is going to be an electric version of the car that, along with the Model T and the F150, may be the marque’s most iconic vehicle – the Mustang:

Originally Ford was working on what it openly described as “a compliance car,” one built simply to meet incoming emissions rules in the US and Europe. But in 2017 it threw out those plans, putting together an internal skunk works called Team Edison with a brief to reimagine the project. Its goal was to design a BEV that could only be a Ford, and there’s little that’s more iconically Ford than the galloping pony.

Five models are on the way:

Between late 2020 and spring 2021, Ford will bring out a mix of rear- and all-wheel drive Mach-Es with either standard- or extended-range battery packs. The cheapest of these is the Select; $43,895 buys you a rear-driving one of these with the smaller pack, but you’ll have to wait until early 2021 to get one of those. That also applies to the $52,400 California Route 1, a RWD version with lower-drag 18-inch wheels and the long-range battery pack. All prices are before the IRS tax credit is taken into account; this will be $7,500 until Ford joins Tesla and General Motors in having sold 200,000 plug-ins, at which point it will begin to sunset. Ford expects this to happen at some point in 2021.

Maybe there’s hope? 

When Politicians Try Planning

Tuesday, November 19th, 2019

The Midway Monitor is delivered free to my doorstep. Big article about the Hamline Midway Coalition trying to figure out what went wrong with parking at the new soccer stadium.  Apparently, there’s not enough parking!  People are parking without permits in the neighborhoods, illegally parking vehicles in no parking zones, clogging up side streets, traffic tie-ups, running out in front of trains and buses.  What the hell, who knew that people would drive to soccer games? 
When Cupcake  wanted to open a 37-seat restaurant a decade ago, the City required 10 off-street parking spaces, a 4-to-1 ratio; but they approve a 20,00 seat soccer stadium with only 150 parking spaces.  That’s not 4-to-1, people, where are all the spectators going to park? 
Of course, it’s hard to be too sympathetic.  A year ago, the City approved the parking plan and neighborhood groups were upset about it.  Instead of 150 parking spaces on two parking lots that would be used a few days per year, they wanted more buildings and even less parking because . . . wait for it . . . fans would Ride The Damned Train.  And besides, they have 400 spaces to park your bicycle, in case you’re coming from, say, Afton and need a place to park the old 10-speed.  What could go wrong? 
Joe Doakes

Given all the wonderful publicity about the Vomit Comet lately, it’s a wonder people didn’t ride the train more frequently. 

I live about a mile from the stadium, and on game days the streets in my neighborhood are clogged and the sidewalks teeming with would-be spectators.  

Great job, City!

Open Letter To FedEx’s Fred Smith

Monday, November 18th, 2019

To: Fred Smith, CEO, FedEx
From: Mitch Berg, Crabby Peasant
Re: Debating Big Left

Mr. Smith,

I applaud your challenge to the NYTimes’ publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, to a debate between him, his business editor, your tax executive and yourself over your enterprises’ relative tax burdens and financial contributions.

I also note that progs – whether in government or the media – never deign to debate.

In case you didn’t know that, I mean.

If so, carry on.

That is all.

Your Best Interests, Peasant

Monday, November 18th, 2019

Just remember – when “progressives” whinge about red areas and GOP voters not “voting for their best interests”, that they are the people who brought you stories like this:

Baltimore has just hit 300 homicides for the fifth consecutive year, reported The Baltimore Sun.
On a per-capita basis, Baltimore is one of the most dangerous cities in America…The murder crisis in Baltimore could hit a record this year. There are 47 days left, and as of Saturday morning, 301 homicides have been logged into The Baltimore Sun murder map — as shown below: 

As Maryland ramps up its persecution of the law-abiding gun owner, the murder spree is actually accelerating:

All of this as the murder rate outside Democrat-controlled cities shrinks

So tell us about those “best interests” again?

Re-Education Needed

Monday, November 18th, 2019

Target claims it is a corporate leader for social responsibility, even going so far as to have transgender bathrooms, but they pay their workers a pittance.

Evil selfish bastards. Fight for 15!

In 2010, Target found on the hard way that there is no “progressive enough” when dealing with the Big Left’s mob; that a decade and a half of prostrating themselves to the howling mob didn’t protect them when the howling mob needed a kick toy.

Will they need to be educated again?

Great Job, Minneapolis

Friday, November 15th, 2019

Whatever you do, stay the course:

Keep giving the DFL more chances to try to run a city.   

Maybe a few hundred more second chances and they’ll get it…

…nah.  Can’t keep a straight face. 

Snapped

Friday, November 15th, 2019

Why are progressives so anti-gun?

Perhaps because, subconsciously, they know Berg’s Seventh Law is for real.

Gun-controller shoots her kids, self:

Ashley Auzenne, 39, fatally shot Parrish, 11, Eleanor, 9, and Lincoln, 7 — and then herself — in their Deer Park home, local police said in a statement. Authorities found their bodies when they got a request for a welfare check and responded to the New Orleans Street home around 8:45 a.m. Tuesday.

Police also found a gun inside the home.

The Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the deaths a murder-suicide on Thursday, with Ashley Auzenne as the suspect, authorities said….Last November, Auzenne framed her Facebook profile picture with an “#End Gun Violence” banner.

And the reason? She got her way in her divorce – custody, apparently – but didn’t get everything she wanted:

She was concerned she’d not be able to move with the kids to her hometown, and would need to find a job and pay him rent if she stayed in their current home, he said.

And as we’ve noticed in the past, Auzenne was not the first prog to lose it and start killing helpless people with one of those guns they claimed to abjure (for everyone else)

Beneath all too many anti-gunners is a narcissist with a violence problem.

OK, Millie

Thursday, November 14th, 2019
A friend of the blog emails:   
 
“I’ve often found great enjoyment watching millennials fight with baby boomers in St Paul over “save the earth” issues. They seem to think they are vastly different from each other. I have yet to notice the difference.
“So, I found the Disney heir’s recent comments even more hilarious.

Disney also slammed baby boomers’ attitudes toward millennials, who are less financially stable than previous generations and are dealing with the ever-growing threat of climate change.
“And the more often you object to Millenials’ understandable resentment toward a generation that has selfishly poisoned their water, blown past every climate warning so they could drive their stupid hummers, and looked away or worse for sexual, racial and economic injustice, the more you prove their point that you just don’t understand anything of value to them,” she wrote. “Look, these kids are facing down a rising tide (literally) of changes that threatens everything you and I taught them to hold dear.”
“How about you guys sit the f— down and let the kids drive,” she added.
She concluded: “Get over the idea that all things pass, you are old and you need to let history do what history does: move on.”

“Nice try, Ms Disney, but I honestly don’t think millennials are more virtuous than the Boomer generation before them who thought we were all going to die. In fact, these millenials are still driving, still moving to the suburbs to raise kids, still choosing a lifestyle they can’t afford- all while telling someone else that they can’t. Why, it’s as if the two generations are the same. No wonder they are fighting. The more helpful approach might be to actually understand we can’t move on from history, we can just hope not to repeat the worst parts of the world’s history- something both liberal boomers and millennials seem hell-bent on doing.”

I’m spooling up for a stemwinder on the whole idea of turning generations into identity groups.

Other Than Bring One Of The World’s Great Countries Back From The Brink Of Suicide, I Mean…

Thursday, November 14th, 2019

The Smartest Woman Ever and her daughter, Chelsea “The Ryan Winkler Of New York” Clinton, wrote a book about great women.  

And of course – you could see this coming – they left out “arguably” the greatest woman of the 20th Century. 

Just going to take a moment to remind you that Berg’s Eighth Law is not called “Berg’s Eighth Tactful Hint”:

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

Come for the Berg’s Eighth Law.  Stay for the thrashing around seeking relevance.  Margaret Thatcher made a positive difference.   Hillary Clinton made only a negative one – being an awful and tone-deaf enough candidate to get even Donald Trump elected president.  

Coincidence?

Wednesday, November 13th, 2019

In the old Soviet Union, people used to joke that they could tell when there was a shortage of butter, winter boots or heating oil was on the horizon, when  Pravda would start running stories about how bad butter was for your health, how good it was to get your feel wet, and the benefits of a cooler house. 

Completely unrelated:  I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that about the time Big Media and Big Left (PTR) start telling us that “maybe freedom of speech is too complicated for peasants today“…

…that we start getting “news” like this

I Get The Sentiment

Tuesday, November 12th, 2019

I really, really do. 

What conservative, when seeing the precious, twee pretense of “arty” progressives’ political statements, hasn’t been tempted to cut loose with a can of spray paint, a sawzall or an air horn, just as a statement of artistic criticism?

The grotesque caricature masquerading as commentary?

The sanctimonious preening masquerading as high-concept art?

Or anything Ken Weiner ever drew? 

The struggle is real. 

Which is why I’m of two, or actually three, minds about this story – the (cue cliche alarm) Florida man who slashed the “Trump Baby” balloon.  

“I don’t know how many of ya’ll Republicans out there got any balls about yourself, but they got that Baby Trump balloon down here on campus right now and I’m going down here to make a scene, so ya’ll watch the news. If you got any balls, come join me,” Hutchinson [said in a Facebook video]. “This is pathetic. I’m fixing to get rowdy, so ya’ll pay attention. I’m shaking, I’m so mad right now, but I’m fixing to go, I’m fixing to pop this balloon, without a doubt. Stay tuned. Should be interesting.”
“Baby Trump” has been seen around the world where Trump has been, such as London, Buenos Aires and Los Angeles. Over $6,500 was raised through a GoFundMe to bring it to Tuscaloosa.…First-degree criminal mischief is a Class C felony in Alabama that is punishable between 1 to 10 years in prison and up to $15,000 in fines.

There’s a legal defense fund for the guy, and it’s racked up a ton of money. He’ll need it.

On the one hand – it’s fun to think about confronting those precious fops physically.

On the other hand? A conservative should be showing some respect for others’ freedom of speech, not to mention their property rights. A person’s right to swing their fist ends where the other person’s nose begins. Fun as it is to think of the snowflakes who haul that excrescence around wetting their pants at the thought of someone disagreeing with them, meeting them with violence makes you no better than “Anti”-Fa. One meets bad, stupid speech with more, better speech – so if someone wants to build a “Baby Snowflake” balloon, I’m all on board.

On the third hand? Hey, look – it’s a red state, and the authorities are arresting and prosecuting someone whose politics they most likely agree with, but who is breaking the law and inflicting violence on other. Someone tell Jacob Frey that that’s how it’s done.

Although telling Jacob Frey how it’s done will probably get prosecuted as a hate crime.

“Best Interests”

Tuesday, November 12th, 2019

Progs wonder why the bitter clingers don’t vote in “their best interests” – i.e., for Progs.

Because this is what “best interests” look like under “progressivism”.

Pitchforks

Tuesday, November 12th, 2019

The FBI is politicized.

The Federal law enforcement system is largely an extortion racket.

The IRS is weaponized against conservative groups.

Academia from Kindergarten through Post-Doctoral levels is an indoctrination scam.

The media – on whom we once counted to keep government accountable – is a PR firm for one political party.

Sometimes it seems like our self-appointed idiot “elites” have this thing sewn up.

And I don’t think they know what a bad thing that’s going to be for them:

So what are we to do? When faith is gone, both of the spiritual and the political variety, what remains? People seek peace and prosperity, and will happily live with an untold number of illusions so long as they have those two things. Perhaps we’ve been doing that for a while. But what happens when those are gone? History shows us that when the ruling class and elites refuse to do what they should and instead do what they can, creating a government rigged in their favor, destroying the rule of law, and papering over corruption and injustice, the peasants pick up pitchforks and torches and they come for those who have behaved so abominably. Perhaps our elites should read more of that history.

I’m not sure the “elites” are quite that clueless; it is why they’re trying to grab the guns.   And, eventually, the pitchforks.  

Veterans Day

Monday, November 11th, 2019

Today is Veterans Day in America. It’s the day we who didn’t serve in the military honor those who did.

And it’a also two days after the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – a symbolic event, to be sure, but one whose symbolism should not be diluted by modern revisionism.

And there’s a connection: while Communism is not a sustainable model of governance (like its passive-aggressive cousin “Democratic Socialism”). there is no guarantee that when it falls it won’t be replaced by something even worse.

And among the reason that Soviet communism fell when it did was the fact that two generations of American (and NATO) soldiers ensured that “inducing a conflict to keep the peoples’ minds off their misery” wasn’t a valid end-game.

The world changed thirty years ago last Saturday because American will, and American steel, and American troops, ensured that that change took place in its proper lane.

Nobody (and that means you, Democrats) predicted the wall, and the blood-lusting tyrants who built it, would go away.

Well, almost nobody.

But while Reagan’s (and Thatcher’s, and Pope John Paul II’s, and Lech Wałęsa) were the hammer that pounded the Soviet system on the head, that hammer jammed them against the anvil that was the American soldier (and the German, British, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, French, Danish and Norwegian troops they joined).

And fall, it did.

And so I thank all you veterans out there.

And as a special treat for all of you – “Bornholmer Strasse”, a German TV dramedy about the point where the dam broke thirty years ago Saturday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2QZKZ1NLA4&t=1215s

It’s in German – worse yet, Berlin German – but even if you don’t speak the language (and I, modestly fluent in “High” German, stretch to keep up with Berlinisch – the actions are pretty self-explanatory.

Hollywood Polishes The Cannonball

Monday, November 11th, 2019

Some stories shouldn’t need Hollywood to go all, well, Hollywood on them to make them riveting utterly compelling.

But they do it anyway. And it’s almost always a massive drag.

It’s not a new phenomenon; The Battle of the Bulge was utterly atrocious, seemingly feeling the need to dumb World War 2 down to a cowboys ‘n indians movie – for an audience that had in huge numbers actually been there. Even as a kid, the Hollywoodisms (“They’re sending tanks! Send the artillery and infantry to the rear!”) annoyed me to no end.

The effect wasn’t always catastrophic: the Great Escape didn’t completely bastardize the subject, the greatest POW camp break in history – although adding Americans to the cast was an audience-grabbing anachronism (all Americans had been sent to different camps shortly before the escape’s famous tunnels were started).

But Hollywood’s wall of shame exerts a powerful vortex.

Stories that don’t need the Hollywood treatment get it anyway. 12 Strong – the dramatization of the events of the fall of 2001, where 85 Green Berets – count ’em, 85 – led an insurgency that drove the Taliban from the battlefield. What “improvement” does a story like that need? Well, it got little from the movie – which was watchable, but traded CGI for story all too often.

And the Tuskeegee Airmen’s story needs not even a whiff of gussying up; is there a bigger underdog war movie of all time? (There could be – if Hollywood ever produces Brothers in Arms, the story of an all-black tank battalion that became one of Patton’s best, written by none other than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). But gussying up it got, with Red Tails, a George Lucas labor of love that substituted P51 Mustangs for X-wings, Germans for Stormtroopers, and white bigots for Emperor Palpatine.

Now, when I saw that there was a remake of Midway in the works, I thought “at last, someone can improve on the turgid but accurate-ish 1976 historical epic. Then I saw the most dreaded six words in movies: “From the maker of Independence Day” (a movie, it needs to be said, that I detest with a cordial passion) and gave up all hope. Roland Emmerich would seem to have turned the all-in total-stakes back-against-the-wall fight by the battered American fleet against an undefeated Japanese Navy that outnumbered it by a prohibitive margin and had aims on closing the trap around Hawaii into a video game – and made an even worse movie than the 1976 version.

Worse still? If there’s a story in American history that’s begging to just be told, it’s Harriet Tubman. Her story is both pretty universally known and completely misunderstood; a gun-toting freedom fighter who defied the entire institution of slavery while running runaways to the North (or, more often, Canada) and returned to run a huge, effective spy ring during the Civil War? One hardly needs a screenplay.

But a screenplay we get – and it’s abominanble:

Set in 1849 Maryland, full of danger, rescues, superstition, frivolous gunplay, and pop-politics, Harriet demonstrates the current exploitation of African-American history, through historical revision, simply to sell tickets while aggravating political identity, tribal separation, and perpetual grievance — the same way that politicians manipulate voters.
Ever since Harvey Weinstein confirmed Hollywood’s Obama Effect, film culture has sought various ways of appeasing racial anxiety through movies about black victimization and white guilt. It’s the new diversity, as one of Harriet’s progressives summarizes: “Civil war is our only hope.”
…The difference in approach tells everything about the modern state of Hollywood race consciousness. Dismissing Demme and Morrison’s perception of slavery’s aftermath (its internalized stress and ongoing need for explanation, relief, and catharsis), Harriet looks at Tubman on a first-name basis, as if to standardize her travails into a Slavery Land thrill ride: She suffers spells after a head wound that causes hallucinations (or prophecies) that may indicate either madness or saintliness; she sacrifices her love life to crusading zeal (the film’s only complex moment occurs when her lover laments, “I’d a died for you. If you’d a let me”); and she frequently sings out her discontent in several message-driven musical interludes: “Sorry I have to leave” and “Lord, why you let me live?”

Even NPR took a pass on it.

Why, it’s almost as if Hollywood doesn’t trust moviegoers to make the right conclusions.

Getting It All Wrong

Friday, November 8th, 2019

The notion of biological men “idenitfiying as women” (and vice versa) is old news.

Male athletes “identifying as women” and clobbering the people who are, in the various sports/events, the weaker/slower/less agile sex is becoming both a little commonplace and a cultural punchline.

So what’s going to bring some sense to this “social debate”?

When guys “identifying as women” – maybe as “women of color” – start going for minority-reserved government contracts, that’s when. 

Bob Fletcher Will Never Do Lunch At The Lex Again

Friday, November 8th, 2019

This blog has taken considerable issue with Ramsey County’s once-and-again sheriff, Bob Fletcher, on many issues.

But it’s hard to see this statement as much of anything but the inconvenient truth – at least as far as Mayor Carter is concerned:

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS this year’s sharp rise in gun-related deaths and injuries are mostly tied to an ongoing feud between two rival St. Paul street gangs.

“There is no doubt that the biggest part of this is connected to a longtime feud between two of the city’s more violent gangs,” said Fletcher.  “We have to recognize what the problem is and the problem is we have a small gang war.”

Fletcher said more than a dozen of the record-setting shootings and killings can be linked to a murder as far back as 2008, and there are no indications the retaliatory shootings are going to end anytime soon.

In a city where the mayor is trying to re-christen street gangs as “street groups”, and bends over backward to not call the plague what it is but to fob it (per the “Don’t Waste a Crisis” commandment in the DFL’s playbook) off on the law-abiding gun owner and/or non-“street group” member, it’s hard to see this sort of statement on the part of an elected sheriff as the first salvo of a mayoral bid.  

#MeThree

Thursday, November 7th, 2019

This is from a few years ago – but the sentiment is growing, at least among our self-appointed idiot elite. It’s from Roxane Gay, a feminist professor who, for some reason, got a writeup in the NYTimes:

Men can start putting in some of the work women have long done in offering testimony. They can come forward and say “me too” while sharing how they have hurt women in ways great and small.

OK, here goes.

My Testimony: I have hurt women in one small – almost infinitesimal – way; I mock and taunt the likes of Roxane Gay for being the Robespierrian ninnies they truly are. I do the mocking and taunting because bellowing “you people are nothing but pseudointellectual brownshirts, peddling a form of groupthink that can only lead inexorably to totalitarianism” gets tiring.

I mock and taunt them because the world they want – where the “wrong” people are guilty until proven innocent, and innocence can never be proven because guilt is a matter of identity more than action – is worth fighting against. And fighting with mocking and taunting is better than doing it with guns and bombs and tanks, although I doubt the likes of Professor Gay’s followers know how or why.

This mocking and taunting no doubt infuriates Professor Gay – and I no doubt hurt her and her like among the weaker sex (“progressive” “feminist” “woke” “men” and their various female accomplices) in saying so. But much as they all may wish to bully me into acquiescence, I just won’t do it.

Which, no doubt, hurts them even more.

I’m sorry I’m not sorry.

Lower Middle Class Ethnically – Nonspecific Privilege

Thursday, November 7th, 2019

A friend of the blog rights:

Re: St Paul trash referendum- I’m laughing at all of the Vote Yes Progressive Mac Groveland/Merriam Park people A- who are suddenly perplexed by the strong No vote on the East side and B- who called No voters on the East side “selfish wealthy homeowners” when it was brought to their attention that East siders said the vote No was a cheaper option for them (because trash collection cost would be shouldered by all property tax payers)
This is outrageously funny to me given how these same people support increasing taxes on “the wealthy” to pay for medical bills, cost of college, any other whim of the leisure class. It’s now selfish when it is opposite their viewpoint. But, I guess now we do have a clearer understanding of who they think are wealthy- Not them who are paying $2000 per month rent or buying half a million dollar houses. Nope. It’s the working class fool who lives in a house worth about $150,000, $200,000 at most. So selfish of them to be paying so little for housing, just making it living paycheck to paycheck. They could be racking up more debt and then perhaps they would feel more indebted to the ruling class, you know, if they had absolutely nothing.

Mac-Groveland, Crocus Hill, and pretty much all the Parks (Highland, Merriam, Saint Anthony, Desnoyer, Irvine) griping about anyone else’s “privilege” is one of those things that’s becoming an inside joke in “progressive” cities.

To everyone but…well, I listed ’em off.

“So Why Are Dems And The Media (PTR) Jabbering So Much About Impeachment?”

Thursday, November 7th, 2019

Partly because their candidates re either insane or senile. 

And party because it beats trying to explain what they’ve actually done.  

Why Blue America Is Doomed

Wednesday, November 6th, 2019

Math is racist. Achievement is supremacy.

Winston.

Seattle Public Schools adopt program that turns math into yet another grievance studies program:

In October, Seattle public schools unveiled a “framework” to inject “math ethnic studies” into all K-12 math classes, teaching “how math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color.”
Students will be asked to “identify the inherent inequities of the standardized testing system used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color” and “explain how math dictates economic oppression.”
“Why/how does data-driven processes prevent liberation?” it asks. “How important is it to be Right? What is Right? Says Who?”

It almost reads like the Babylon Bee – which is something I realize I’m saying a lot about the modern American left:

The curriculum was pushed by the school district’s ethnic studies program manager, Tracy Castro-Gill, who on Oct. 19 tweeted a picture with her “Marxist ringleader” and said the “next step is matching “INDOCTRINATED” t-shirts!”
“I am an educator of color in Seattle whose job is anti-racist work within the school district. Seattle is very white — nearly 70%. It’s also one of the most liberal cities in the US, and these liberal, white Seattleites hate being called racist, but the thing is – a lot of them are,” she wrote.
Though she was hired by the superintendent and the school board, Castro-Gill said criticisms of the math proposal from one board member’s Asian wife were racist. She also asked people to “help me push” the board and superintendent to oppose “rewhiting.”

I used to joke that pretty much every “radical atheist” was a Catholic or Evangelical with Daddy issues.

And yet again, the joke is reality:

Castro-Gill wrote on her blog that her mother is white and her father is Hispanic, but that she has a strained relationship.
“I’m fairly radical atheist and consider myself a far left anarchist who fights for racial justice,” she wrote. “My parents are both Trump supporting Republicans.”
She is also at odds with her child’s father after their child declared herself “nonbinary” after reading literature about transgenderism.

Fearless prediction – which I started writing as a joke, but as with all such things, Berg’s 21st Law is in effect here – Ms. Castro-Gill will be hired as a consultant by the Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Edina or Bloomington Public Schools in the near future.

Similarities

Wednesday, November 6th, 2019

Four years ago, Democrats got a little crusty when you pointed out that, underneath the targets of their respective rhetoric, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump had a lot in common.

Both preached an implausible platform that grabbed a lot of people who wanted (and want) a politician to “Fix things”, sure. Beyond that, both of them were America-firsters, although Sanders only manifested that through wanting to keep American jobs in the US (via economically ruinous means, natch).

And now – well, the same goes for Warren:

Warren’s catchphrase, “I’ve got a plan for that,” has as much cultural resonance with her base as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” does with his, and it’s remarkably similar to Trump’s “I alone can fix it.” It tickles the intellectual erogenous zones of a certain type of progressive wildly overrepresented in the upper echelons of the meritocracy. It screams: “We have all the answers!” and “We know what to do!”
Technocratic liberalism isn’t just an ideological worldview dating back to Walter Lippmann’s 1914 Drift and Mastery, it’s a cultural orientation. If you can’t see it, it’s probably because you’re part of it. Fish don’t know they’re wet, after all.

The media loves to point out the craziness and impossibility of many of Trump’s promises. He said fixing health care would be “so easy.” He vowed to eliminate the deficit in eight years. (It’s up nearly 50 percent since he took office). He was going to ban Muslims and make Mexico pay for the wall. Whether his supporters believed him or not, they liked what these promises said about his priorities. “Don’t take him literally,” we were advised, just “take him seriously.”

Demogogs gonna demigog.  

Every Once In A While…

Wednesday, November 6th, 2019

…a prog lets the truth slip out.

“Beto” O’Rourke, fake Latino beneficiary of a fake “Beto-mania” and former Presidential candidate – screwed up and told the truth behind Big Left’s approach to guns; they want them. All of them.

Eventually.

Beto slipped up and, in a fit of trying to re-attain relevance, let the end-game out.

Big mistake for him. And his fellow Progs know it:

During a discussion on ABC’s “the View,” the regular cohost weighed in on the former Texas Democratic Congressman’s recent exit from the 2020 presidential primary. Meghan McCain first mentioned O’Rourke’s position on gun buybacks, arguing that it may have played a role in his decline in popularity…
“He got a ton of Obama staff, and I’ll also say his stance on gun buybacks, Mayor Pete said it was ‘a shiny object that distracts from achievable gun reform,’” McCain continued. “Chris Coons said it wasn’t a wise policy move and ‘that clip will be played for years at 2nd Amendment rallies with organizations to try to scare people to say Democrats are coming for your guns.’ He made a speech about religious institutions get their tax status removed from them because they didn’t support same-sex marriage. He did a lot of, like, battleground culture war, and he ran as the most left, most ‘woke’ candidate and look where he ended up.”
“They should not tell everything they’re going to do,” Behar jumped in then, suggesting that candidates shouldn’t warn Americans the gun confiscation was coming. “If you are going to take people’s guns away, wait until you get elected and then take them away. Don’t tell them ahead of time.”
McCain pushed back, adding, “By the way, that’s what people like me think you’re going to do, so I appreciate his honesty.”

They’re all thinking it – the ones who are honest, anyway.

Never forget it.

Who Has Two Thumbs…

Tuesday, November 5th, 2019

…and tried to warn you that this exact thing was inevitable?

(Points thumbs at self).

This guy.

The Vomit Comet (aka Green Line) is a rolling assault and robbery laboratory.

The FOX 9 Investigators revealed that aggravated assaults on the light rail system, those involving a weapon or causing serious injury, numbered 59 through July 31 of this year. That is more than the 52 aggravated assaults in all of 2018, and 41 aggravated assaults in 2017.
Robberies and thefts are also on the rise with 384 incidents through October 28 of this year. That’s more than the 330 incidents in all of 2018 and 374 incidents in 2017.
“Sadly, Metro Transit’s own data reveals a transit system in crisis with a record number of assaults, robberies, and other criminal activity taking place on trains and at light rail stations,” said [Republican representative Paul] Torkelson.

In 18 months of riding the Vomet Comet to work pretty much daily, I think I saw transit cops a dozen times – and two of those were responding to assaults that’d already happened; essentially, they were crime janitors. 

And that’s just crime on the trains; it doesn’t cover the spike in crime along the Green Line.  I’ll be working on getting those numbers together for the five years since the Vomit Comet started bringing fare-skipping thugs to the Midway.  It’s not gonna be pretty. ]

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