Stopped at Kwik Trip for a bathroom break on my way up North for the weekend. Store music was Me and Bobby McGee, by Janis Joplin. I looked around at the employees and the customers, and realized the song was older than anybody in the store.

Except me.

Joe Doakes

Worse than that – a few years back, when my kids were at home, one of them was watching a music video. It was some Australian boy band doing a cover of “What I Like About You”, the 1979 hit by The Romantics.

And it occurred to me – a band at that time (2016) covering “What I Like About You” would have been the same as a band in 1979 covering a song from 1942.

Or, today, 1937.

A new article in New Yorker chronicles the “Cultural Revolution” – the Chinese Communist Party’s revolving round of purges that wracked China in the decade before Mao’s death in 1976.

Tell me – what does this scene look like?

Red Guards—a pseudo-military designation adopted by secondary-school and university students who saw themselves as the Chairman’s sentinels—soon appeared all over China, charging people with manifestly ridiculous crimes and physically assaulting them before jeering crowds. Much murderous insanity erupted after 1966, but the Cultural Revolution’s most iconic images remain those of the struggle sessions: victims with bowed heads in dunce caps, the outlandish accusations against them scrawled on heavy signboards hanging from their necks. Such pictures, and others, in “Forbidden Memory” (Potomac), by the Tibetan activist and poet Tsering Woeser, show that even Tibet, the far-flung region that China had occupied since 1950, did not escape the turmoil. Woeser describes the devastation wrought on Tibet’s Buddhist traditions by a campaign to humiliate the elderly and to obliterate what were known as the Four Olds—“old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes.” The photographs in Woeser’s book were taken by her father, a soldier in the Chinese military, and found by her after he died. There are vandalized monasteries and bonfires of books and manuscripts—a rare pictorial record of a tragedy in which ideological delirium turned ordinary people into monsters who devoured their own. (Notably, almost all the persecutors in the photographs are Tibetan, not Han Chinese.) In one revealing photo, Tibet’s most famous female lama, once hailed as a true patriot for spurning the Dalai Lama, cowers before a young Tibetan woman who has her fists raised.

Does it remind you of…:

• A “Struggle Session” at in the humanities department of an exquisitely expensive private university – like Hamline or Saint Thomas?
• A Pacific Consulting Group workshop on cis-privilege
• An “Anti”-Fa coffee shop after hours?

Hah, silliy peasants. It reminds the New Yorker of…

Trumpism!

Why did a rich and powerful society suddenly start destroying itself?

The Trumpian assault on the West’s “olds” has long been in the making, and it is, at least partly, a consequence of political decay and intellectual ossification—akin to what Mao diagnosed in his own party. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, a consensus about the virtues of deregulation, financialization, privatization, and international trade bound Democrats to Republicans (and Tories to New Labour in Britain). Political parties steadily lost their old and distinctive identities as representatives of particular classes and groups; they were no longer political antagonists working to leverage their basic principles—social welfare for the liberal left, stability and continuity for the conservative right—into policies. Instead, they became bureaucratic machines, working primarily to advance the interests of a few politicians and their sponsors.

In 2010, Tony Judt warned, not long before his death, that the traditional way of doing politics in the West—through “mass movements, communities organized around an ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political parties”—had become dangerously extinct. There were, Judt wrote, “no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself.” Trump emerged six years later, channelling an iconoclastic fury at this inbred ruling class and its cherished monuments.

I suppose in the interest of intellectual self-review, I need to ask – is it gaslighting? Or is it just the sort of stupendous self-unawareness that seems to be a condition for joining today’s “elites”?

Point toward the “lack of self-awareness” thesis – they don’t seem to realize this sort of cultural slander is how we got Donald Trump in the first place.

(Hat tip to regular commenter Max Overlord)

…can happen two ways.

We accept our differences and find our common ground.

Or we silence dissenters and pretend we’re one big happy family.

At the moment, the American body politic has chosen its option. And it ain’t pretty.

…we’d need a leader to stand at a dais and demand that a leader “Tear Down This Wall” in this country in my lifetime.

But here we are.

Guess we know what “Build Back Better” really means, now.

And when the media says Biden is a “return to normal” – almost in sync, almost like there’s still some back-channel communication going on – I do not recall Trump walling off the White House.

President Biden admits the nation is powerless to change the trajectory of the virus.

He did not specifically concede President Trump was right all along, did everything he could, and nobody could have done anything better.  But giving up the fight two days after taking office means President Biden has no plan to defeat the virus because a virus cannot be defeated, it can only be endured.

It would have been nice if he had said that before the election but hey, better late than never, right?

Joe Doakes

It’s worse than that. Throughout the campaign, he croaked “I have a plan” for Covid.

He knew is was BS.

The people who wrote, and continue to write, everything he says, and control his “administration”, knew it too.

They could all count on one increasingly irreducible fact – a majority of Democrat voters are emotion-driven muppets with the critical thinking skills of barn-raised turkeys.

As seniors try to navigate buggy, inept MN-IT (but I repeat myself) websites, or pile in to try for a single-digit percent chance of a shot (maybe, or again, maybe not), teachers union members get a special vaccine event…

…even though they’re still ambivalent about going back to work at all.

Just saying – when David Brooks is right, he’s very, very right. Teachers unions are just as intelledtually vacuous and immune to real science as the most blinkered pandemic conspiracy theorist:

in-person learning can be done safely with the right precautions. This was unclear last March and April, but now study after study has shown that schools can be safe. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just attested to this fact. The evidence seems clear.

Private and some public schools are already operating safely all around the country, with little evidence that attendance is spreading the virus.

[But] teachers unions don’t seem to have adjusted to the facts. In Washington, Chicago and elsewhere, unions have managed to shut down in-class instruction. The Chicago public schools union is on the verge of an illegal strike, even though 130 private schools and 2,000 early learning centers have been open safely since the fall….The Chicago district installed air purifiers in classrooms, conducted ventilation tests, increased rapid testing and held more than 60 meetings with union leaders, but so far the union has been able to keep public schools from reope

Of course, it’s not about science – because the Teachers Union is no more about science than it is about, well, teaching:

A study by Michael T. Hartney and Leslie Finger found that political partisanship and teacher union strength explain how school boards approached reopening. Another survey, conducted last year by Chalkbeat and The Associated Press, found that roughly half of white students had access to in-person learning, compared with a quarter of Black and Hispanic kids.

Readers, many of us got involved in the Black Lives Matter marches last summer. I guess I would ask you, do Black lives matter to you only when they serve your political purpose? If not, shouldn’t we all be marching to get Black and brown children back safely into schools right now?

There were many haunting moments in MacGillis’s ProPublica piece [cited elsewhere in Brooks op-ed]. One comes when he asks the National Education Association president, Becky Pringle, about her claim that reopening schools could lead to the death of 50,000 children. MacGillis points out to her that, in fact, the number of American children known to have died of Covid-19 up to that point is around 100.

The unions are not reflecting reality. Instead of addressing legitimate fears with facts and evidence, they are using their political muscle to inflame those fears. The most vulnerable people in our country are the victims.

The whole thing is worth a read.

A friend of the blog emails:

How come we can call the new Covid strain from Brazil “The Brazil Strain” but we can’t call the Chinese strain “The Chinese Strain”?

Presumably because Brazilians are “white Hispanics” [1]

[1] “Hispanic”, meaning from the Iberian Peninsula, which is where Portugal is. And yes, the vast majority of Brazilians are not of Iberian descent. The joke is as absurd as the intersectional double-standard.

National Guard troops brought to DC, used as props for the Inauguration, abandoned when no longer useful but not sent home. Democrats act crassly, media fails to notice.

Republicans act classy, media fails to notice.

I wonder how many of those troops were Georgia military who voted 100% for Joe Biden – according to the official count.  I wonder how many of them will vote Democrat next time around?

Joe Doakes

I’m just hoping it matters, myself.

Death by Powerpoint, Gov. Klink style.

And – not only back, but better than ever, by popular demand – it’s the weekly playlist!

Decades ago, in an effort to keep housing “affordable”, the city of New York imposed rent control. No existing rental unit could increase its price, absent jumping throught a Byzantine series of bureaucratic hoops.

The “market” responded to the bureaucratic muddling – at first, creatively. The rent control stayed with the the renter. When the renter died or moved, the rental rate could move with the market. But the “ownership” of the rental could be passed down through any semblance of the original renters families – so children, nephews and nieces, stepchildren, further-order descendants, and utterly phony descendants – a fraud that was almost never investigated. Also, renters (and their descendants) could, and did, sublet, and even subdivide, apartments, renting the spaces out at much better than market rates and making a tidy profit on the deal. People are pretty creative when it comes to skirting rules, and New York City government is equally thud-witted and uncreative at creating the rules people skirt. It became almost

The second-order consequences were less salutary. While rents were frozen, utilities and property taxes were not – so landlords got squeezed hard. Landlords with sufficient means sold their properties to “co-ops”, or went condo, or found the few available loopholes – and there were very few, since the powers that be (and are) in New York treated landlords as a populist enemy to be demonized for political gain. The less affluent landlords fell behind on taxes. Squeezed by the city to pay up, repairs sufferend. Eventually these landlords stopped repairing their properties in less desirable areas, which quickly became even less desirable; vast swathes of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Harlem fell into deep blight, with block after block of apartments abandoned…

…in a city with an “affordable housing crisis” where even in the 1980s, it was impossible to find a place to live for under $2,000 a month in 1985 dollars (which is $4,500 to 5,000 today).

Of course, all that blight begat crime. By the late ’70s, much of New York was a shooting gallery, wit over 2,000 dead per year.

Of course, there is a lot of money in New York, and a lot of people want to be there, so the real estate didn’t sit idle for too long – begetting the third-order consequences: developers moved in, took over the blighted, abandoned real estate, and built it back up. Of course, given New York’s regulatory “zeal” and astronomical taxes, it wasn’t just any developers. It was the ones with enough money to do the building, to navigate the bureaucracy (read “Money”) and pay the taxes (read – “keep the money coming”). The up-front costs were high – and the rest was even higher.

So after decades of “rent control”, one can not live in a decent place on Manhattan with an income of less than $500,000 a year.

I write this to highlight the path that the Minneapolis City Council – known among those in the know as “the dumbest city council between Chicago and Los Angeles” – is drooling to drive Minneapolis down.

Neo-populist progressive economicallly-illiterate stupidity – a barrel that, in Minneapolis, has no bottom.

Henco attorney Mike Freeman isn’t happy about the “Minnesota Freedom Fund” repeatedly bailing out violent offenders who can be linked, however tenuously, to political protest.

Which is fine, as far as it goes.

But have you noticed, in the wake of all the collective slander about “white supremacists” being “the real culprits” behind last spring’s riots, that not a single media report or government objection notes that the “Minnesota Freedom Fund” is financed by progressive plutocrats and aristocrats,

And why would they be bailing out “white supremacists?”

I keep asking Twin Cities media figured “reporting” on the story, to the extent anyone ever does.

There’s never an answer.

#Unexpected.

The one, potential silver lining to the Democrat sweep at the federal level is the inevitability of “Progressive” overreach. With luck and a GOP that isn’t completely indolent, that could turn into a 2022 midterms that make 1994 look like Lena Dunham in a Swedish Women’s Beach Volleyball tournament.

And that overreach is happening. From the “Moderate” “Uniter” Joe Biden, no less.

To quote that great moral authority Dan Rather, “Courage”.

Republican legislators are trying to change the Governor’s emergency powers. I applaud that effort.

An “emergency” is an unforeseen combination of events requiring immediate action. A tornado, a blizzard, a flood, even a disease outbreak, can all be emergencies.

But for how long? At what point is “immediate” action no longer required, and “deliberate” action should replace it? At what point should the Governor return power to the people’s elected representatives to make decisions?

Presently, the law says his power continues until a majority of both houses revokes it. That’s backwards. It should end unless a majority of both houses extends it.

Joe Doakes

The provision, if it was given much thought at all, was (I suspect) written with the assumption that all future goverors would operate from a basis of integrity and concern, mutually held with a statesmanlike legislature, for the balancing of order and liberty.

Events have shown that to be a poor assumption.

Events have also shown us that the Second Amendment movement got it right in 2015 when they pushed through limitations on the Governor’s emergency powers in re confiscating guns and curbing gun rights under a “state of emergency”.

We need to do that with the rest of state law.

Assuming the opposition can ever prevail.

Governor Walz released…

…well, he called it his “education plan”, earlier this week.

Those of us who work in business – which significantly, has never included anyone in our executive branch – can identify what this…thing, is.

It’s a two page list of platitudes. One and a half when you leave out the header.

None of it has specifics. None of it is testable to see if it’s working or isn’t, in any way. And while we are assured that there’s more “plan” coming, mark my words – there’ll be no more substance in the thousands of pages of institutional gobbledigook that are surely to come.

But let’s translate the terms from their current Educational/Bureaucratic dialect – the form of English with the lowest signal to noise ratio of all our many argots – into actual English:

• “‘Caring and Qualified’ Teachers” – Get ready to get logrolled with a few years of sob stories about how underpaid teachers, especially in the Metro, are.
• “Expand opportunities and mental health staff” – Full employment for soft-science and non-profiteers in the school system.
• “Statewide Mentor Program to help retain teachers” –
• “Expand full service community school model statewide” – We need to expand the system’s efficiency at transferring taxpayer dollars, not just to Education Minnesota, but to the non-profit/industrial complex that’s attached to it like a remora fish – and all you schools in greater Minnesota need to step up and do your bit.
• “Establish an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Center” – Because why should we pay Pacific Consulting Group millions to screw up our schools when we’ve got PCG-trained career bureaucrats who can do it for us. Although we’ll still be transferring plenty of wealth to PCG.
• “Expand rigorous coursework options” – You bought an education system! Now, for just a few billion more, you can have one that actually teaches stuff to kids! Maybe!
• “Prioritize school funding to the students that need it most” and “Guarantee that compensatory aid funding supports students traditionally left behind” – jigger the various knobs and levers to move more money to the Metro.
• “One time investment to ensure pandemic enrollment loss does not negatively affect students.” – parents and students are bailing on the public schools in record numbers. We need a bailout.
• “Strengthen community and school partnerships” – No “community” non-profit left behind.

Hope that helps.

Where did all the ammo go?

People hoping to get out the range without having to take out a second mortgage to afford to replace their stock are asking (as I might have, before all my guns fell into Superior).

The conspiracies are…colorful:

• Companies are stockpiling their product to drive up demand
• Ammo plants have shutdown completely
• Ammo companies are in cahoots to stop selling to civilians and are now selling only to the Feds and law enforcement.
• OJ bought all of it in his search for the real killers. 

The reality? More mundane:

Spread the word.

Senate File 26 passed the Republican-controlled Minnesota Senate unanimously and is headed for a vote in the Democrat-controlled House.  The bill makes it easier for people to obtain marriage licenses during the Walz Dictatorship.

Weren’t Republicans going to fight to end the dictatorship, rather than enabling it to continue? 

What was so urgent about this bill that Republicans had to go along with it, rather than hold it up to force concessions?

I get that they’re all amateurs, citizen-legislators, but isn’t there anybody up there who knows how to play this game? 

Joe Doakes

I’ve wondered the same, from time to time.

But political parties are run by those who show up.

Every conservative that’s stayed home out of anger over Trump being nominated, or Trump losing the 2016 caucuses, or failture to retroactively condemn or canonize Tim Pawlenty or Michele Bachmann, or Jennifer Carnahan-Hagedorn’s performance as chair?

The party reflects those who show up. In some places – the 7th CD – that’s a good thing. In some – CD4 – it’s deeply problematic.

But it”s those who show up that pick the people who get elected that fight the fight.

I’ve been out for the past couple years – call it burnout.

I”ll be back.

As we noted last week, “Stand your Ground” and ‘Constitutional Carry” bills have been introduced in the Legislature.

And they have a shot, potentially – there are enough red-district DFLers with legitimate fears of being retired in 2022 to maybe soften the DFL’s stance, and Governor Klink might need to weigh his fealty to the Progressives against gun control’s dismal record outside 494 and 694. A veto will be held against him, and every outstate DFLer, in 2022. Smart DFLers (like Bakk and Tomassoni) remember 2002, when every single outstate DFLer who opposed “Shall Issue” was defeated in the ’02 mid-terms.

Remember – it took seven years to get Shall Issue reform passed, culminating in the ’02 pro-gun election sweep.

Gun rights are a long game.

This, against a backdrop of 40% of gun buyers in 2020 being new purchasers, and 40% of them being women and, at least anecdotally, a substantial number of them being formerly ambivalent about firearms.

The left gets this. And so we get articles like this in the Strib – all but portraying Constitutional Carry as a tool of the Klan.

My suspicion? Big Left realizes they are losing the gun battle, and has to gaslight the minority who still opposes them into becoming more die-hard, to avoid losing more ground outside the Blue coasts and Chicago.

President Biden, we’re told, is a devout Catholic, which is a good thing…

…as opposed to Amy Coney Barrett, for whom it was a bad thing.

Also – “Ascendant liberal Christianity is an eternal hope on Big Left. Sort of like Blue Texas. There’s anways been a “blue” church: mainline Presbyterians, white Methodists and Episcopoals, ELCA Lutherans, and an awful lot of mainstream Catholics, who have made their peace with abortion in exchange for programs just as easily as “Feminists” made theirs with Bill Clinton.

The “blue” church is “ascendant” because one of its own is in power. These also happen to be the denominations that are in demogrpaphic free-fall.

But there is no narrative but the narrative.

The party that defended Ted Kennedy’s sluffing his way through legacy admissions to Ivy League undergrad and law school, to say nothing of allowing a woman to slowly die in his car as he staggered around Chappiquiddick looking for sobriety and an alibi with all the conviction of OJ looking for the real killers…

…is tittering over Lauren Bobert’s education, and a “criminal record” matching those of an awful lot of teens and 20-somethings.

Berg’s Eighth Law is universal. There is nothing a Prog needs to destroy more than one of “their” people – women, minorities, the underclass – leaving the plantation.

Kind of a good news, bad news situation here. But maybe not in the way you think.

A teachers union president in Washington State refers to reopening schools as a “white supremacist” initiative.

The good – or “good” – news: this is an example of the type of rhetorical, social and policy overreach one can expect when “progressives” – in this case invariably white, middle-class, and visibly “progressive” – find themselves in power. This statement – literally, “wanting your kids back in schools, and wanting some sense of stability and normalcy for their mental health, at a time when teenage suicide is exploding all over the country, is racist” is the very definition of “2+2=5” – mental health is mental illness, concern for kids is a pathology, truth is lies. (And the ability to say it without having ones own peers pelt one with rocks and garbage is Urban Progressive Privilege).

ut another way, evil – no scare quotes. Inverting moral truth and moral falsehood is as textbook a definition of venial evil as exists.

That’s the “good” news.

The bad news? About half the country, as this is written, doesn’t know any better, or just doesn’t want to think about it that hard.

Migrants waiting in Mexico to get into the United States are thrilled that Joe Biden is now President.  

Two more migrant caravans are on the way.

Their optimism is based on news reports that President Biden will issue executive orders affecting immigration.

Maybe if I brush up my Rosetta Stone Spanish, I can get some yard work done cheap.

Joe Doakes

Unless, of course, they wind up subject to the $15 an hour minimum wage – which means most of them will never find legal work, and will wind up on the dole.

According to plan.

Joe, you might have to hire a neighborhood kid. If American neighborhood kids still do yard work…

I was debating whether to call this episode….

…”Peak ‘Urban Progressive Privilege” – 100+ overschooled/badly educated, middle-on-up class, likely 20/30-something junior members of “the elite” media who have experienced so little struggle and dissonance in their lives that they consider publishing a Ben Shapiro column a mortal threat, and feel entitled enough to whine about it in public.

Is it “peak”?

If I say so, there will be another, worse example tomorrow.

This next two years, at the minimum, are going to be for Urban Progressive Privilege what 1977 was to white polyester suits and mens necklaces.

“Know what’d be better for halting Covid than wearing a mask? Wearing two masks. Let’s all do it.

But wait – you know what’d be better than wearing two masks? Three masks! Let’s get on board…

Hang on – you know what’d be better than wearing three masks? Four masks! That’s like four times the protection! So…

Jst a doggone minute – you know what’d be better than wearing four masks? Five masks! Bam!

Whoa, dudes, dudettes and non-binariliy-duded – you know what’d be better than wearing five masks? Si masks! Let’s smoke this brisket…

But…ay caramba – you know what’d be better than wearing six masks? Seven masks! Holy cow, we got the virus on the run now…

But hold your horses, hombres – you know what’d be better than wearing seven masks? Eight masks! Can you smell the victory…

Wow – wow wow wow – you know what’d be better than wearing eight masks? Nine masks! This must be what Jonas Salk felt like…

Oh, maaaaaan – you know where I’m going, right? 10 masks! Let’s get on board…

D’oh – I’m such a silly. Why stop at 10 when 11 masks are sitting right in front…no, wait, 12! 12 masks!…

… more horrifyingly Orwellian than the title of this proposed cabinet post…

… is the actual proposal itself.

They’re building bridges over their roads for the reindeer to cross safely.

In fact, let’s go one step farther.  Let’s dig tunnels under the roads for raccoons to cross safely.  And paint different colored stripes for bicycles to cross safely.  And lower speed limits so jaywalkers can cross safely.

You know what?  Why are we messing around with half-measures?  If we’re going to do it, just do it right.

Ban vehicles and tear up the roads completely, so everyone and everything can cross safely.  Because what’s more important – moving people and goods efficiently, or signaling our virtue?

Do it . . . for the reindeer.

Joe Doakes

To be fair, not only are “we” doing it…

…but the “we” in this case is the Utah Highway and Natural Resources departments – arguably less likely to be swayed by bizarre priorities than Texas.

Say what you will – it’s a fascinating watch.