I keep hearing these words  used interchangeably, typically by liberals.
That is wrong; they are not the same words. They do not mean the same thing.

Equality is when everyone gets the same. Equity is when everyone gets
what they deserve.

You studied hard, went to class, turned in assignments on time. I never
cracked a book, skipped class, failed to turn in assignments.

Equality means we both get A’s.  Equity means you pass and I fail.

Doesn’t matter that you came from a culture which values education and I
came from a culture which does not. Culture has nothing to do with
equity or equality of results. That’s just an excuse for lack of
individual effort.

Now, it’s gone even farther.  Now equity means reparations. Someone
whose hair and nose looked like yours had a rough life 150 years ago? 
Sorry about that, let me adjust your grade . . . here’s your A.

Annoys me.

Joe Doakes

All that, and it’s unsustainable.

Problem is, society may well find that out by the literal and figurative collapse of everything that “equality” built that can’t, in all equity, continue.

On August 31, 1939, groups of SS officers staged “attacks” on several German border outposts. Near a radio station near the village of Gleiwitz (modern day Gliwice, in Polish Silesia), a group of operators “captured” the station and broadcast militant Polish propaganda, and then dumped a group of recently-executed prisoners, dressed in Polish uniforms, around the station and other border outposts.

The bodies, and the attacks, were “false flag” photo ops designed to let the Germans claim to the world press that the invasion of Poland – which occurred hours later, and which started the European phase of the largest, bloodiest conflagration in human history – was provoked by Poland. It was patent balderdash, but within Nazi German is was pretty much gospel.

“Poland provoked us!”

It’s a situation familiar to anyone who’s dealt with domestic abuse; the abuser never believes it’s their fault.

So “Big Left” wanted violence. They welcomed it. They begged for it in as many words, over and over:

Until it started hitting them in the polls.

Then? They were “Trump’s riots”.

There have been so many ginned-up moral panics over the past four years that they simply dissipate into the ether. Reminder: The National Guard hysteria — “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun,” for example, warned Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times — happened right before the “fascists are snatching our mailboxes!” hysteria.

“As right-wing groups increasingly move to confront protesters in U.S. cities, demonstrators are assessing how to keep themselves safe,” says the same New York Times today. By the time this is all over, rioters will be remembered as the true victims.

Democrats thought they could somehow take advantage of radical protests to help them win 2020. It has backfired. Once distaste for the violence began showing up in polling, and once Republicans could circumvent media coverage during their convention and focus on David Dorn and other victims of leftist violence, the Democratic Party and their allies switched the narrative.

Today, the dangerously unserious House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff blames Trump and, who else, the Russians for “willfully fanning the flames of this violence.” Joy Reid, recently given a primetime show on one of the country’s major news networks, claimed that the riots were false flag operations perpetrated by “armed white nationalists” deployed as a nationwide strategy to help reelect Trump.

I’m pretty sure Schiff, Walz, Frey, and the rest of the gallery of “elites” don’t believe this.

I do believe they are counting on their voters not being smart enough to tell the difference.

Here in the Metro, I’m not sure they’re wrong.

It’s your fault, dirty <strike>polack</strike> deplorable.

Hopkins School Board Vice-Chair Chris LaTondresse – did he tell you he’s an “Obama administration alum” yet?

The Defund the Police movement hitches it’s wagons into the western suburbs.

In the apparently halcyon days of April 2018, students and school officials of the Hopkins School District gathered together in what was called “National Walkout Day” in memory of the horrific tragedy of the Columbine school shootings 19 years earlier.  Students spoke of issues of gun control and school safety.  And while none of the student speakers were even alive when Columbine occurred, a common theme of seeking safety at school echoed in the various speeches.

A time-traveler from that April day in 2018 would have a hard time reconciling the Hopkins School District of just two and-a-half years later as the School Board voted to keep guns out of their schools – guns in the form of local police protection:

The Hopkins school board on Tuesday night embraced a student-led call to remove police from Hopkins High School — with the action to come at year’s end.

The 6-1 vote brings a suburban voice to a national movement that has sought to end the use of school resource officers, or SROs.

The move to defund Hopkins School Resource Officers comes after several months of intense online lobbying by a group calling themselves “CopsOutHHH” and a poll of Hopkins students in favor of the movement – a poll in which only 183 of the District’s 1,600 students voted.  By the end of the year, Hopkins will sever it’s relationship with the Minnetonka Police Department (the Hopkins School District includes parts of Edina and Minnetonka) in a move that supporter and Board Vice Chair Chris LaTondresse bizarrely described as not actually “defunding” the police since the contract was due to expire anyway.

LaTondresse, a DFL endorsed candidate for Hennepin County Commissioner who touts his consulting work for USAID as making him an “Obama administration alum” in the same way that I apparently was a member of Congress because I visited Washington D.C. once, claims the move will allows for more mental health funding.  Considering the SRO budget is $113,142 out of a budget of $91,502,418, the idea that shifting 0.01% of the School Board’s resources away from security and towards mental health will address either issue is laughable at best and incredibly dangerous at worse.

It’s also a conclusion that files in the face of peer-tested research.  Carleton University conducted a two-year study of SRO programs and in their report, published by Routledge in 2019, they concluded that for every dollar invested in the program, a minimum of $11.13 of social and economic value was created.  While attention would likely focus on the role the SRO could or did play in the estimated 525 school shootings over the past decade (a number in partial dispute as it groups any gun-related incidents on a school campus together), left unreported are the number of incidents prevented by early SRO intervention.  The group Averted School Violence has begun to attempt to collect and analyze such data, a task made somewhat difficult by the very nature of the endeavor – incidents that don’t escalate into violence rarely make the news.

LaTondresse and the Hopkins School Board also want to cite that SROs make students of color fundamentally uncomfortable.  While data can’t contend with feelings, even a Brookings Institute report from 2018 which was less than fully supportive of SROs as agents of school safety didn’t see any correlation between SROs and race.  Brookings believed context for arrest records and racial backgrounds were lacking and thus a poor metric to judge whether or not SROs were more likely to discriminate or otherwise negatively impact minority students.

But no amount of data – or even common sense – was present on Tuesday night as the Hopkins School Board voted to eliminate basic security without even so much as a concept of what would replace their School Resource Officers.  Instead, a small but vocal minority has continued to push a partisan agenda that endangers students for the goal of striking symbolic blow against the police.

A friend of the blog writes:

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

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

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

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

Just curious about the vigilance committees the NAACP formed in Minneapolis, after the riots. 

624.61 ARMED ASSOCIATION.

It shall not be lawful for any body of persons, other than the National Guard, troops of the United States and, with the consent of the governor, sons and daughters of veterans and cadets of educational institutions where military science is taught, to associate themselves together as a military company with arms, but members of social and benevolent organizations are not prohibited from wearing swords. Any violation of this section shall be a misdemeanor.

Should I expect to read about charges being filed, soon?

Joe Doakes

I’ve also noticed a certain…difference in tone in covering groups of “people of color” and immigrants (including a number that I consider friends) arming up to defend their property, and white people doing exactly the same thing with exactly the same motivation.

I listen to NPR so you don’t have to.

And there are some reasons it’s worth it. I mean, that’s where you get Live From Here with Chris Thile.

Well, for now, anyway.

Otherwise, there’s…

…well, a lot of racial virtue-signaling. I suspect the most lilywhite of America’s organizations is fearing a lot of backlash when the Bolsheviks come for the Mensheviks.

Speaking of which, it’s always a bit of a chuckle when the “progressives” that are NPR’s staff, social circle and pool of sources try to explain things like economics to the pool of “progressives” that are NPR’s audience.

Case in point – a piece from yesterday’s All Things Considered, an interview with one Eula Biss, about her new book about Capitalism.

Biss – a “non-fiction writing” major who has lived within the academic echo chamber her entire career, is the author of “Having and Being Had” – a primer on…

…wait for it…

…Capitalism.

Or, rather, a coddled, over-schooled/undereducated resident of the academic echo chamber’s perversion of the cartoon term “capitalism”, itself a hijacked representation of “the free market”…

…not that either term isn’t completely lost on Professor Biss.

Let’s start with this passage, which the NPR crowd will no doubt take for an emanation of wisdom, but merely proves that Biss’s son and babysitter are smarter than she is:

PFEIFFER: At one point, you’re talking about your son paying for a Pokemon card, although someone else thought he overpaid for the Pokemon card. What was it like for you to watch your son try to figure out what something was worth and why and maybe not figuring it out correctly?

BISS: Oh, it was amazing. In watching him learn how to play Pokemon the way it was being played in first and second grade at his school, I felt like I was seeing an economy be invented. But it was also somewhat excruciating to me because I saw the ways in which other children and his babysitter and I were training the values of capitalism into him. So, yes, at one point, he gave away a valuable Pokemon card because he just didn’t like it very much.

And then I heard his babysitter saying to him, were you a smart negotiator? And I thought, oh, no. What are we doing? This kid is only 6, and we’re already training him not to be generous and to get as much out of an exchange as he can possibly get out of it even if he doesn’t care about the thing he’s giving away.

PFEIFFER: Oh, that’s so interesting. I mean, diamonds are objectively very expensive and valuable, but if I don’t care about them and I just want to give them away, is that fine, or is that flawed financial thinking?

BISS: Under the logic of capitalism, it’s insane, right? But by some other logic, it makes perfect sense, especially since diamonds aren’t incredibly useful. You can’t eat them, and you can’t live inside them.

The interview – and one suspects the book – is a cavalcade of white progressive guilt, the sort of consequence-free wailing that afflicts our current layer of pseudointellectual societal overburden:

BISS: One of the things that I didn’t want to have happen to me as I entered this new life and lifestyle [i.e. – bought a house in a tony neighborhood near Northwestern Universitiy] was I didn’t want to begin to think that I had what I had because I’d worked hard, which is one of the patterns of thought very common to upper middle class. I don’t believe that I got what I got because I worked hard. I believe that I got what I got because the system favors me in a number of different ways – one, because I’m white, but also because I started out middle-class.

Notice she doesn’t mention “…because I’m part of an academic-industrial complex to which being a recipient of Urban Progressive Privilege gives me a priority ticket”.

Ms. Biss: If you’re that concerned about the things your “work” didn’t “earn” you, give up your teaching gig at Northwestern and become one of the people you describe later in the interview:

I think one of the possibilities that I could perceive, especially once the pandemic arrived, was the possibility of – what if we compensated the people we speak of as essential workers? So what if everyone who is essential to the daily workings of our lives was paid well and had health insurance and had basic security? That’s entirely possible. It’s even possible within capitalism, but that involves us making a series of changes in policy and, to some extent, in what we collectively value.

It’s entirely possible – say, within the context of a real epidemic, a modern-day Plague with a two-digit mortality rate, something that legitimately shuts down society for the duration of a disease serious enough to impinge even Nancy Pelosi or Lori Lightfoot’s lifestyles – for the skills and presence of “supply chain” workers, from the farm to the Walmart, to become very, very valuable. Vastly moreso than, say, writing professors at Northwestern.

But I don’t think that’s the “policy change” she’s referring to.

The bad news: these are the people teaching the “next generation of leaders”

The not-so-bad news: nobody she teaches will amount to anything outside the academic-industrial complex.

A family watches their grandmother die, through a window – if they’re lucky.

More often, they are barred from the hospital where their loved one spends their last hours.

Thousands – possibly as many as 30,000 – cancer patients die because their needed care has been, and is being, deferred due to absurd coronavirus restrictions. Nobody has even estimated the toll for other diseases.

A father is barred from his pregnant wife’s ultrasound. This isn’t just missing a cute gender-reveal or a heart-warming first-encounter; the wife has had several miscarriages; a lot of mental health is riding on this test. No dice, Dad. Wait in your car until summoned. Put a mask on, while you’re at it.

Nancy Pelosi gets a blow out.

You have just discovered the meaning of socialism.

The Strib: “Minneapolis City Councilwoman Lisa Bender is doing a high stakes juggling act“.

That’s right.

She’s juggling, on the one hand, the rage of citizens, whose city, and their investment in it, is disintegrating around them, against the demands of the extremist progressive establishment that provides her funding, her power base and her electoral future.

That sounds difficult.

So who do you suppose she’ll side with in this “jugging act?”

You get one guess.

Been hearing yammering about the nation divided against itself, being
torn apart by culture war, end of life as we know it, civil war, yada yada.

Okay, sure, it happened once before.  But there was a fairly clear
geographical division – North against South.  What the division now? 
Suburb against Core?  City against Country?

In a war with clear issues, clear battle lines, colored uniforms and an
honor code to waging war, America lost 620,000 men (plus an unknown
number of non-combatants killed by accident or for lack of food and
medicine as society was disrupted).  That’d be more than 6 million
Americans today.

Without clear issues, battle lines, uniforms or codes of conduct, this
next conflict will be more like Kosovo or Somalia or Syria: everybody
against everybody.  The death toll won’t be anywhere near as low as 6
million.

Maybe society should be moving to establish better lines, set up a
buffer zone, before the actual shooting starts?  BLM in Minneapolis and
St. Paul proper, other Liberals inside the 694/494 loop, Conservatives
outside the ring.  Cross the Line of Death at your peril.  It couldn’t hurt.

Joe Doakes

Berg’s 21st Law is in full effect.

We’ll be talking about this subject with Walter Hudson on the show Saturday.

Why, it’s almost as if Biden knows something:

No, Mr. Vice President, I firmly believe that if you lose that part of this country will consider it a casus belli.

That’s what your party has wrought.

Are there still “independent” voters out there?

I don’t think I’ve called myself “independent” since my 20s. Most people I know are pretty strongly aligned, although “my social circle” is a self-selecting set.

But they apparently exist.

Let’s stipulate in advance – any poll taken before Labor Day is pretty useless. Any poll taken before mid-October is suspect. And as we saw in 2016, all polls are potentially delusional.

That being said – the Dems can’t be liking what this poll tells us:

When asked who they would vote for if the election were being held today, 47% of independents said that they would vote for Trump and 37% said they would vote for Biden, the poll showed. Another 5% said that they weren’t sure who they would vote for and 11% said that they would vote third-party or vote for someone other than Trump or Biden.

I’m gonna guess that, and not Mayor McDreamy and Governor Klink growing spines, is what brought the Guard out to Nicollet Mall last week.

I know, I know – there is no voter fraud.

All those phony registrations that election integrity groups uncovered between 2009 today? Just random demographic fuzz.

Nine people registred in a single small-town laundromat? What are you – paranoid?

Secretary of State Simon defying three court orders to turn over dox related to irregularities? Nah, nothing to see here.

It’s downright unpatriotic to question the election system.

Perish the thought:

A top Democratic operative says voter fraud, especially with mail-in ballots, is no myth. And he knows this because he’s been doing it, on a grand scale, for decades.

Mail-in ballots have become the latest flashpoint in the 2020 elections. While President Trump and the GOP warn of widespread manipulation of the absentee vote that will swell with COVID polling restrictions, many Democrats and their media allies have dismissed such concerns as unfounded.

But the political insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears prosecution, said fraud is more the rule than the exception. His dirty work has taken him through the weeds of municipal and federal elections in Paterson, Atlantic City, Camden, Newark, Hoboken and Hudson County and his fingerprints can be found in local legislative, mayoral and congressional races across the Garden State. Some of the biggest names and highest office holders in New Jersey have benefited from his tricks, according to campaign records The Post reviewed.

I know – anonymous source, NYPost, yadda yadda.

But at some point, even the undecided have to decide there’s “smoke”, here…

The Guthrie Theater had to cancel its entire Spring and Summer run of
performances because of the deadliest virus known to mankind.  They need
help to keep the doors open.  Their state grants and corporate sponsors
aren’t enough.

Won’t you considering digging deep to support the Arts?

Um…

Well…

No.

Joe Doakes

Hard pass.

Same with you, NPR.