The Strib notes that the DFL is going on exactly the orgy of “progressive” legislating I (and everyone with a brain and a useful education) knew they would.
But I come not to talk policy.
I come to take optics.
Look at the photo:
After years of gridlock, we’re making progress on issues well supported by Minnesotans. We won the election, promising to act. We came into session, ready to lead. We are moving a powerful agenda for people. We didn’t come to play. #JoyFightWinhttps://t.co/7bNWQM9FTP
Is this the most badly posed “joy” photo you’ve ever seen?
What’s Lt. Governor Flanagan doing, not in costume?
Am I the only one who thinks these dailiy photo ops, with staged crowds of grinning rent-a-constituents, are starting to look just a liiiiitle North Korean?
Why does the governor look like his endoscopist told him he’s going to have to do the two-day cleanout process for his next colonoscopy?
Democrats have introduced a bill in the Minnesota Legislature that would ban the sale of bottled water in the state.
Introduced earlier this month by Rep. Sydney Jordan, a Democrat from Minneapolis, the bill would prohibit manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers from “selling or offering for sale bottled water in Minnesota.”
The bill defines bottled water as “water contained in a formed or molded container” that is “comprised primarily of plastic resin, sealed, and holds less than two liters when full.”
I was reliably informed that stories of teachers subverting parents will to “transition” or otherwise influence (but don’t you dare say “groom”) children were “paranoisa”, misinformation and right wing hate speech:
A family in New York has filed a lawsuit against the Brookhaven-Comsewogue School District, Terryville Road Elementary School, and 5th-grade teacher Debra Rosenquist because they allege that Rosenquist attempted to secretly transition the gender of their 10-year-old daughter without notifying the parents.
The student – who is identified as A.V. in the complaint – became confused as to her gender during the 2021-2022 school year because Rosenquist insisted on using a male name and male pronouns to refer to the student.
Weird. I’m reliably – and very angriliy – informed this can not be:
In October 2021, the teacher began to call A.V. by the name “Leo” and use he/him pronouns for the child. No one in the district informed the parents (referred to as L.N. and E.V. in the complaint) of these changes.
Several months later, in January 2022, the school’s principal informed the parents that the child had met with the school psychologist (without the parents’ knowledge) and had drawn a girl with the words “I wanna kill myself” and “I feel sad a lot.” The psychologist determined this was because A.V. was confused about her gender identity.
This was the first time A.V.’s parents had heard anything about the confusion regarding A.V.’s gender identity or new name and pronouns forced on the child by the teacher.
Here’s the entire complaint against the Suffolk County schools, over the episode…
In this case, it was over a vote re…it doesn’t matter that much, except it’s something moderately routine, except for the “activists” involved.
Anyway (with emphasis added by me):
After the failed vote, protestors began to shout and scream at councilmembers and approach the dais. The meeting had to go into recess and the protestors were removed before it continued.
During the shouting, an aide for Councilmember Michael Rainville says specific threats were made against Rainville’s family. Councilmember Emily Koski joined Rainville in filing a police report against the protestors.
“You can’t have democracy if you don’t allow the democratic process to happen and if you have someone that is fearful for their lives or that of their families because of a vote that they took, that is wrong,” said Mayor Jacob Frey.
Anyone but me remembering when Mayor McDreamy all but told the police to stand down in the face of threats to Trump supporters when they rallied at the Target Center?
Democracy didn’t matter so much then, I guess…
…but that’s a matter for another rant.
The answer comes from Economics 101 – a class no Minneapolis City Council person passed before the class (like the City Council) was taken over by the people from the Grievance Stuidies department; when you reward, or fail to provide negative consequences for, negative behavior that someone sees as benefitting them, you will get more of that behavior.
The Twin Cities “activist” class blocked freeways – and those who objected got the negative consequences.
They attacked Trump supporters at rallies – and were practically feted by the city.
Then, after they ran riot after the death of George Floyd, and the Mayor and Governor decided to follow Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s dubious example and give the mob “space to destroy” Baltimore, they threw the mob a bone; not just an entire (majority black, Latino and immigrant) neighborhood, but an entire police precinct, thinking the mob was some toddler that needed to work out his aggressions, and was shocked, shocked that they just kept going?
In confrontation after confrontation, the city o Minneapolis, and the Walz Administration, has shown those who were willing to resort to violence that not only would there be no consequences, but it would positively help them get their way.
You sowed the poo-storm. You are reaping the poo-storm.
Well, you’re starting to. You’re discovering that, in a Minneapolis (and Minnesota) run by the Grievance Studies department, expecting to be safe is a privilege.
I was at Pheasant Fest last week and the American Petroleum Institute had a booth. Not sure why, but I believe it’s because so many pipelines cross pheasant country.
Well I told the guys I want a tee shirt that says ” I like fossil fuels!”.
He told me, “That’s great! My idea was “The oil industry saved the whales!”
1950: The “Expert” class pushes “Urban Renewal” – the freeway system was part of it. Neighborhoods destroyed, downtowns gutted, replaced with inorganic bauhaus canyons – because Big Government and the Expert class said it was for our own good.
But it sure transferred money into the hands of the political class!
Controversy over across the pond, as Sir Bob Geldof “misgenders” Sam Smith, the (checks notes) “nonbinary” singer most famous for invoking Satan at the Grammies last month, on a British morning TV show.
Although there’s plenty of anger to go around, as the press asks why the hosts of the TV show didn’t step in to stop the tragedy:
But…has the organization learned the right lessons?
(Emphasis added):
When asked about his priorities, Lansing invoked what he has called the network’s “North Star” since his arrival in the fall of 2019: a push to ensure the network has a bigger and broader audience base, rooted in younger and more diverse listeners, readers and consumers. The emphasis, he says, must be on drawing in “the future audience to make NPR sustainable for the next 50 years.”
“Younger”? Well, over the past decade, the network has sure jammed down more than its share of breezy mediocrities (“It’s Been a Minute”, “The Moth Radio Hour”) – not sure if yesterday’s news is a verdict on that.
As to “more diverse” – they’ve tripled down on antagonizing half their audience. Even their “game shows” carry the message; the once excellent “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me“, which used to include the late PJ O’Rourke as a regular panelist, has become as lively and politically unpredictable as “Late Night with Steven Colbert“.
But you remember above, when I said I didn’t take joy in others misfortunes?
Well, I’m going to ask forgiveness for this, since I’m going to make an exception. Emphasis added:
The layoffs are in keeping with an increasingly grim landscape for media companies over recent months. Vox Media cut jobs by 7%; Gannett and Spotify by 6%. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, eliminated its Sunday magazine and a handful of other jobs. After becoming part of Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN cut hundreds of jobs and killed off its brand-new streaming service, CNN+.
I suspect you, like all DFLers, know your voters don’t know any better, and wouldn’t think about it critically if they could, which they can’t, but perhaps you’re not the one to be yapping about your colleagues’ propriety.
American progressivism’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.
Presidential candidate Nikki Haley was accused of using “her Brown skin to launder White supremacist talking points” during a racially charged interview on MSNBC Sunday night.
“I see [Haley] and I feel sad,” Daily Beast contributor Wajahat Ali told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, “because she uses her Brown skin as a weapon against poor Black folks and poor Brown-Black folks.”
“[S]he uses her Brown skin to launder White supremacist talking points,” Ali added.
There is no harder job in America than to be a female, black, Latino, Asian, gay or Muslim conservative.
It was one of a short series of events that blasted the US out of its post-Vietnam, Watergate-era funk, and played a role, at least psychologically, in ushering in one of the greatest eras in American history.
To paraphrase Sydney Greenstreet in that other great American moment, Casablanca, “It’ll take a miracle to bring the USA back, and Big Left has outlawed miracles”.
(PS, article actually concludes scenario is "unlikely" and "global warming seems unfavorable to the parasite" — but only towards end) pic.twitter.com/Pf3LwgcDkF
So let me make sure I’m clear on this; if our government is violating the Constitution you’re wrapping yourself in, how long are we supposed to go along with it?
“Our country is governed by the Constitution”
One might hope. But when the government turns the executive branch institutions – the FBI, IRS, BATFE, CDC – against the peoples freedom? When the government trashes the separation of powers and undercuts federalism, and proposes violating the contract under which small states agreed to share some of their sovereignty with big states by eliminating the Electoral College and making the Senate reflect popular rather than state votes…
…how long before dismissing those usurpations with an ofay “Well, the Constitution” isn’t by itself an answer?
“Secession is unconstitutional“
So?
So was the American Revolution.
Saying “secession is illegal” is like trying to end a moral argument with “…because the Bible said so”. It’s vapid and cowardly. Is it illegal even if the Constitution has been rendered moot? Because saying that is like saying the preservation of government is the point, not the system the Constitution establishes and the eternal rights it enshrines.
One of the symptoms of a strong, thriving downtown, is when multiple outlets of a popular store chain, selling a common addictive product to locals and passersby, close en masse.
Not long after the FBI put Catholic worshipers on its politically, motivated watchlist, this happened:
An 18-inch pipe bomb was found behind St. Dominic's Catholic Church in Holmesburg, Philadelphia. Since the rumored & subsequent overturning of Roe v. Wade last year, Catholic churches have been increasingly targeted across the U.S. https://t.co/XPEk5rNZRo
Not jumping to conclusions, here – because I don’t think there’s any need to jump. As we continue to wait for the “epic wave of right wing violence“ that Obama promised us, the epic wave of left-wing violence continues.
What is it about you morons who got you starts writing about grown men chasing balls around fields, that makes you all such dim bulbs about politics? Eddie Schultz, Mike McFeely, Jim Souhan, Bob Costas…
Anyway – go ahead. Declare “Economic Civil War“.
See how California does having to import all of its water from the rest of the country.
See how New York City and DC do, paying import prices for food.
Years ago, when I was looking for alternative ways of schooling my kids, I ran across the Sudbury Schools . The Sudbury model makes kids responsible for their own education. Radically so – nobody tells them what to learn and when. Literally – there is nothing saying “Kids have to be able to read or do math at a specified level by the time they’re X years old”. Teachers are there to help the kids learn what they ask to learn.
Nobody tells kids “Today it’s reading time”. The kids learn to read when they learn to read. Some learn by asking teachers to show them how; some, by asking other kids; others just translate the alphabet.
But while nobody tells Sudbury kids when or how to learn to read, they all do – by the time they’re eight, all of them read at or well beyond “grade level”.
One Sudbury advocate pointed out – i’m paraphrasing, here – that by age five, children learn a whole language, often more than one, along with a world of other material, all by absorbing it from people and the world around them, in their own ways.
Indeed, you have to work hard to prevent children from learning.
And at age six (or earlier, now), that’s exactly what the system does for most kids; forces them to abandon their own style of learning, and learn by sitting in straight lines and listening to someone tell them what and how to learn.
They point out that if kids learned how to speak their native language/s the way they are taught to read or do math or science, we’d have a generation of kids with “Speaking Disabilities”, complete with a class of clinicians earnestly treating it.
Anyway – learning to read.
Dad was an English teacher, and Mom read to me a lot as a kid. I learned my alphabet, and learned how letters and sounds corresponded, and one day when I was four, I clearly remember driving down I94 to pick up Dad at grad school at North Dakota state in Fargo, and seeing the word “FAR-go” on the sign on the freeway, and saying it out loud to the amazement of my mom and grandparents (but not, I suspect, my infant sister).
Come to learn there are three schools of thought for teaching kids how to read.
Whole Word: If you’re a certain age, you might remember the “Sally Dick and Jane” books? They taught kids to recognize words by repeating them over and over, and associating them with sounds they recognized. It was probably what I did in the car that day on the way to Fargo – associated some sounds and letters with a word I’d been hearing a lot, since it’s where Dad had spent the summer.
Phonetic: Learning to sound words out. OK, I’d done a bit of that in reading the sign. F sounds like “Eff”, “A” can be “ah”, and I sorta wung it. Better example: in third grade, my teacher pointed at a map to an island in the Pacific and asked who could tell her what she was pointing at. I raised miy hand, since even then I believed in faking it ’til I made it – and then started sounding out the unfamiliar and frankly weird word. “Huh Ah Wah…Yiy?” “Yes! Hawaiii”, she cheered, as I sat there, amazed, feeling like I’d broken a secret code by accident.
Whole language: teaching kids to guess until they get it right.
I’m being a little flippant with that last, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.
We’ve known for decades that people have different learning styles. Some learn by doing, some by watching others do, some by doing while being supervised, some by reading and analyzing, and so forth. It’s utterly uncontroversial.
But somehow, when it comes to children, educational theorists throw that out the window. I’ve written before about the dismal failiure of the “Park your ass in a seat for six hours a day and move when you’re told to” model of education in teaching boys.
Now, it turns out we have an epidemic of children who can’t read – and it appears to be linked to an educational fad related to the third bullet point, “Whole Language Reading” – and the wholesale logrolling of teachers by “experts” and a thriving, well-oiled consultant class.
I listen to NPR so you don’t have do – but there are some pearls among the swine. And one of them is this piece, from one of NPR’s “investigative reporting” podcasts. about the history, effects, and star power of “Whole Language” learning, and the way a whole lot of NPR-listening, laptop-class parents discovered the whole scam when they were stuck at home watching their teachers flail away on Zoom.
It’s – trust me on this – worth a listen:
To sum up: For decades, teachers essentially ignored the fact that kids learn reading the same way humans learn everything – via combination of methods unique to most every individual – and imposed a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching reading based on one scholar and “expert’s” very striated study of child cognition. The consultants latched onto the experts, and sold the schools on their, for lack of a better word, product.
And today, a staggering percentage of kids can’t read – far, far worse than when “Why Can’t Johnny Read” first came out and started the furor over failed education…
…68 years ago.
Remember this, by the way, as the DFL moves to destroy home schooling.
Rep. Winkler is no longer alone at the top of the list of casual racists in government:
The Left is so outraged by a proposal to build a statue of Clarence Thomas at the Georgia Capitol, that one unhinged lawmaker compared him to an “Uncle Tom” who “sold his soul to the slave masters.”
Watch for yourself: the hatred and radicalism of the far-Left on full display. pic.twitter.com/dt1F7bYzoJ
I got this link in an email from a woke acquaintance this morning who believes that if she can find my mental health records she can use the pending Red Flag laws to take away my guns.
Now for sale: Data on your mental healthFor years, data brokers have collected and resold Americans’ personal information. But the pandemic-fueled rise …
she suggested that while it might be problematic for Keith Ellison’s office to purchase and act upon this list directly it would be an ideal synergy for a NGO run by someone like Nancy Nord Bence;
to buy the list,
winnow through all available social media targeting the non-woke,
and “possible” gun owners,
then presenting the courts with Red Flag requests for their political enemies.
She sees this possibility as a promising growth oriented cottage industry.
Count on it.
They want to make owning a firearm too personally, socially and legally dangerous…
“Return of the Rifleman” is the title of a big write-up in the NRA magazine on the subject of the Army’s new rifle.
You didn’t know? Neither did I. Turns out the Army has been looking for a new rifle and cartridge since WW II when the M1 with its 30.06 bullets in stripper clips was determined to be too slow and too heavy. “Lighter weight” and “capable of fully automatic fire to saturate close range targets” got us the M16 but now the Army is looking for an upgrade again.
6.8 x 51 mm cartridge at 80,000 psi chamber pressure gave better ballistics than the .223, 308, 30-06 or even the 6.5 Creedmore. Slightly smaller diameter than the 7.62 x 51 NATO round but same length cartridge requires an AR-10 sized platform. Steel jacketed cartridges weigh slightly less than brass and are cheaper to make but cartridge size is the same. No reduction in total size or weight, no gain in rounds carried, so the deciding factor was effective range: 800 yards.
I have trouble believing new recruits will be able to hit anything shooting that far. Current Army rifle qualification course shot with an M16 is a series of 40 pop-up targets from 25 to 300 yards. That’s a far cry from the 800 yards the new gun was designed for. Also, the whole point of switching to the 5.56×54 M16 rifle and 9mm pistol ammo was standardization with our NATO allies. Is that out the window now?
My question: does this signal a change in strategy? What war are they anticipating? Where will combat troops be expecting clear fields of fire half-a-mile long to make use of a new cartridge? Not in Europe, not interchangeable with our allies. Not in the jungle, that’s for close range weapons. Not in the desert, that’s what the Barrett is for. Where does the Army anticipate it will be fighting?
Russia?
China?
America?
Makes me think conspiracy theory thoughts about the military industrial complex wanting a change merely so it can sell new hardware and ammo; and the administration wanting to ban sales of AR15 ammunition to civilians to preserve manufacturing capacity for the Army to supply its new guns; and whether the newest woke recruits wearing red high heels and rainbow arm bands will be able to use the new gun/ammo to full effect.
I’m a big believer in Chesterton’s Fence. Color me skeptical about this change.
Joe Doakes, formerly in Como Park
Not that I disagree with Joe – it’s hard to be too cynical about any branch of today’s American government – but there are rationales for the caliber change.
This particular Youtube account – by a former admittedly mediocre infantryman, who does some really good open-source intelligence stuff – explains some tactical rationales from a grunt’s-eye view.
As to the caliber thing? I do feel a little awkward as an American. In the sixties, we jammed 7.62.51 down on NATO, over the objection of the Brits, whose 7x43mm round had immense potential to be the sort of “intermediate” cartridge that modern “Assault Rifles” needed; America believed in long-range marksmanship, which required the full power cartridge…
…until Vietnam, when it turned out long range marksmanship was largely irrelevant, and the US jammed down the 5.56x45mm.
So we learned – after the 2020 eection, naturally – that if the whole population had heard about the Hunter Biden laptop story, enough Biden voters would have switched to Trump to have created a bit of a landslide.
So, whew, good thing the media and big tech hushed up the story, right?
Of course, the Minnesota media did cover Mark Dayton’s myriad physical and mental health issues – in January, 2010, about nine months before anyone in Minnesota cared about the election, which Dayton won over Tom Emmer, largely due to the presence of potemkin Republican, Tom Horner, but significantly because the media refused to report anything non-regal about Dayton other than long before anyone cared or long after it mattered anymore.
Ilhan Omar’s family and financial issues? Mitch, please.
And now, we learn that the media – this is shocking, I know – sat on the details of John Fetterman’s stroke until Pennsylvania was safe from the scourge of (checks notes) Mehmet Oz.
Mr. Fetterman declined to be interviewed for this story. But aides and confidantes describe his introduction to the Senate as a difficult period, filled with unfamiliar duties that are taxing for someone still in recovery: meetings with constituents, attending caucus and committee meetings, appearing in public at White House events and at the State of the Union address, as well as making appearances in Pennsylvania.
The most evident disability is a neurological condition that impairs his hearing. Mr. Fetterman suffers from auditory processing issues, forcing him to rely primarily on a tablet to transcribe what is being said to him. The hearing issues are inconsistent; they often get worse when he is in a stressful or unfamiliar situation. When it’s bad, Mr. Fetterman has described it as trying to make out the muffled voice of the teacher in the “Peanuts” cartoon, whose words could never be deciphered.
Nick Coleman used to claim the conservative bloggers that so bedeviled him were “trying to shut down the Strib”.
It wasn’t entirely true – back then.
Today? That’s the kindest possible interpretation.
Now for sale: Data on your mental healthFor years, data brokers have collected and resold Americans’ personal information. But the pandemic-fueled rise …
