Q: “Did you see that episode of “The Office” where…
A: “See it? I don’t even own a TV! All TV is crap!”
Q: “Huh. Oh, I see Chris Cornell died…”
A: “Who? Some singer? I don’t listen to any pop music after 1970. I don’t even own a record, cassette, 8 track, CD or MP3 player!”
Q: “All right. So did you see that talk about…:”
A: “Talk? The English language is so debased. I only communicate in Kings’ Anglo-Saxon…”
(And SCENE)
Joe Doakes from Como Pak emails:
If you wonder why we don’t have moon bases yet, Laura Montgomery explains it in a May 8th column (scroll down).
Joe Doakes
I’m assuming this is why we don’t have the flying cars we were supposed to have by 2000.
Go here for details about the 99th Infantry Battalion – the “Viking Battalion” – and their events at Camp Ripley this summer.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air!
Today on the show:
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
So you say “Mitch, I get the idea about your post the other day about Urban Progressive Privilege – but how can I sum it up perfectly?”
Simple. Imatgine a car with one of those “Coexist” bumper stickers on one side, and a “Resist” bumper sticker on the other.
(Adapted from a social media post by a friend of mine…)
Autocorrect mixed blessing. Especially with voice-to-text – which has caused me a problem or two on this blog over the past couple years.
But I’m reminded…
…there’s an upside
Did Trump do anything wrong? We don’t know – that’s what trials (and the whole “innocent until proven guilty”) thing is all about.
But the firestorm of agitation that Big Left and the Media are whipping up, in the absence of any hard evidence, has nothing to do with right, wrong or justice, says Kurt Schlichter:
The blizzard of lies and distraction blowing through Washington is not just any routine stuffstorm, but a calculated attempt to bring down a president – our president, not the establishment’s president. And more than that, it’s an attempt to ensure that we never again have the ability to disrupt the bipartisan D.C. cabal’s permanent supremacy by inserting a chief executive who refuses to kiss their collective Reid.
This is a coup against us. It’s a coordinated campaign by liberals and their allies in the bureaucracy and media to once and for all ensure their perpetual rule over us. We need to fight it, here and now, so we don’t have to fight it down at the bottom of this slippery slope.
There are times I wonder if this nation shouldn’t just call it quits and split into 2-5 other nations, and let the coasts rot in their own splendid filth.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I astonishes me how much law enforcement has improved during the Trump Administration. He should get more credit for it.
No, really: remember last Summer when thousands of people demonstrated against police, insisting that Black Lives Matter? They shut down Snelling for the State Fair, shut down freeways, marched all over, all the time, all for the same purpose — to protest unfair treatment of Blacks by law enforcement.
There hasn’t been one such march since Trump took office; therefore, Trump solved the problem and he ought to get credit for it.
Either that, or there never was a problem, the whole thing was a billionaire-financed fake movement intended solely to whip up minority support for the Democrat candidate for President. Now that she’s lost, there’d be no need to spend money on agitators and consequently no marches. Who could believe such a cynical thing? That can’t possibly be the reason. No, it must be all Trump’s doing. He saved the nation from a heinous and ongoing civil rights injustice. Good for him.
Joe Doakes
As we noted earlier this week, the Obama Administration’s big “victory” was fairly destroying race relations in this country.
…that “If liberals didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all”.
But as I wrote this piece the other day, I realized that stories like this have nothing to do with double-standards, and everything to do with the fact that Urban Progressive Privilege only has one standard; be like us in every way, or you are beyond the pale.
To: The MNGOP Legislative Caucuses
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant
Re: You Never, Ever Learn, Do You?
Deaar MNGOP Legislative Caucuses – House and Senate
Today, after months of wrangling, word dribbled out that the Stand Your Ground and Constitutional Carry bills were not going to get a floor vote. While the bill wouldn’t pass into law, we wouldn’t need to re-argue it next session – which would be a huge benefit, especially given (cough cough) it’s an election year.
It was a kick in the teeth for Second Amendment voters.
Which is a bit of a problem. Can you think of a group in this state that has done more, with less outstate support, than the shooters? That did more to get your majority?
Thanks for nothing.
I get it – politics are complicated. Compromises happen. It’s just that as for me and a lot of people like me, you made the wrong one.
So – not another dime. Not another phone call. Not another minute of time until you get your collective head right.
That is all.
Democrats: Read Dershowitz. Then shush and get a grip.
Every town – Michael Bloomberg’s checkbook advocacy gun grab Group – is not quite ready for prime time in the leadership department.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
There’s a reason the United States considers cyber warfare to be a weapon of mass destruction, same as nuclear weapons: because of the massive damage it can cause to modern civilization.
Mitch wrote recently about a grid-down scenario from EMP attack. How about grid-down event caused by ramsomware? How secure are the computers that serve the national electrical grid?
If the Twin Cities were without power to scan groceries, to accept debit cards, to pump gas, to run air conditioners and elevators, to listen to the news or surf the web or communicate on cell phones . . . how long would it be before hooligans started breaking windows and homeowners started loading shotguns to protect their families?
You do have a shotgun, don’t you? And several weeks of food and water? A medical kit. Propane or charcoal for the grill.
Joe Doakes
My plan is to become a warlord.
“White Privilege” has been all over the news this last couple of years.
It’s been there because the Big Left has ordained that it should be. My theory; in a nation full of “privilege” – class, racial, academic, social and, let’s be honest, the privilege of being born here rather than Russia or Nigeria or Burma – Big Left needed to focus on racial, “white” privilege to whip up black votes for Hillary Clinton, a geriatric white plutocrat. As a result, all discussion of other “privilege” is off the table.
Terms, Terms, Everywhere Are Terms: White privilege exists, of course. It goes hand in hand with the idea of “we-ism” – the idea that everyone on earth is more comfortable around, and accomodating of, people more like them than less.
Beyond that? In my more sardonic and less cautious days, I defined it as being a descendant of a society from a harsh, lethally inhospitable place that had zero words for “hakuna matata” but more words for “stab him!” than Eskimos have for “snow”; a dour, patriarchal warrior culture that killed everyone that had designs on enslaving them. As a result, my culture has no commonly-held concept of being enslaved. We operate from the standpoint of people who’ve been free (or at least subjects of generally benign monarchs) as far back as our cultural memory goes. On behalf of all my cultural cousins, I am sorry for those of you who are descended from matriarchal hunter gatherer societies that couldn’t effectively resist the slave merchants, but I can’t change history any more than you can. Just the present – a present I and my cultural cousins have been trying to change for 240-odd years, now.
More soberly, and after interviewing a representative of Black Lives Matter on my show, I arrived at the idea that “white privilege” is the ability to walk into a room and not have everyone wondering if you’re “one of the good ones”. It was a little after that that I first encountered the academic paper in which the term “white privilege” was coined, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh. It supplied fifty definitions of white (also male) privilege.
Every one of which, by the way ,translates to “freedom”, “justice” and “being accorded the dignity of being treated as an autonomous individual rather than a member of a group” – all of which are supposed to be values near and dear to our Republic and Western Civilization itself, and all of them things we should be working tirelessly to spread to everyone.
And when some mindless Social Justice Warrior jabbers about “smashing white/male privilege”, the proper response is “so – you want to smash freedom, justice and individual dignity? See you at the barricades”.
Discussion of all other privileges – academic, social, class – were drowned out. As they were intended to be.
But with the complete subsumation of the left by identity politics, it’s time to return the favor Peggy McIntosh did us; it’s time to define Urban Progressive Privilege.
Unpacking The Invisible NPR Tote Bag: I’m going to borrow McIntosh’s format – which I suspect was actually tacitly borrowed from Jeff Foxworthy – of the simple list of attributes of Urban Progressive Privilege.
To wit:
Urban Progressive Privilege; Unpacking the Invisible NPR Tote Bag
Mitch Berg
“You were taught to see Urban Progressive Privilege as a bit of talk show rhetoric – not in terms of a very vislble system conferring dominance on my group via a meritless meritocracy”.
As an urban progressive, you have been taught about “privilege” by others who have that privilege. Being able to caterwaul about privilege is a prerogative of the privileged.
Like the concept of “white privilege” (which, conventional wisdom tells us, that “whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege”), the first rule of Urban Progressive Privilege is “I don’t believe there is such a thing”; it’s the water in which the Urban Progressive swims. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have Urban Progressive Privilege. I have come to seeUrban Progressive Privilege as an invisible and group package of unearned assets that I can count on using daily, but about which it’s hard to be anything but oblivious.
Urban Progressive Privilege is like an invisible weightless NPR tote bag of special permissions, immunities, secret handshakes, Whole Foods gift cards, a virtual echo chamber accompanying everyone who has that privilege, filtering out almost all cognitive dissonance about political, social or moral questions, and a virtual “cone of silence” immunizing them from liability for anything they say or do that contradicts the group’s stated principles. As we in Human studies work to reveal Urban Progressive Privilege and ask urban progressives to become aware of their power, so one who writes about havingUrban Progressive Privilege must ask, “having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”
So – when assessing Urban Progressive Privilege, can you say any of the following?:
I’m looking for more examples. Keep ’em generic – not related to any specific issue. .
It’s 2009.
Barack Obama is president – elected in part by a biblical wave of support from black voters and novelty in the general election, and identity-mongering in the primaries.
You’re a Democrat strategist, planning ahead to the next two elections. You need to keep women – Hillary Clinton voters – engaged enough to vote for Obama again in four years. Child’s play; engineered a fake “war on women” and assign the media to run it. Which they will. They always do what you tell them. It doesn’t always work – NPR was trying to make “Occupy” a thing for a solid year after the last rat-infested rape camp was carted to the landfill – but often enough, it gets the ignorant riled up enough to move the dial.
But look ahead four more years. Obama will be termed out. The Democrat bench is painfully shallow; the buffoon Biden, Fauxcahontas, the photogenic failure Martin O’Malley, and a few other governors that (you can’t possibly know or believe, yet) will be turned out of office next year…and the donkey in the room, the inevitable Hillary Clinton.
Who you gonna call?
Of course Hillary’s the front-runner. She’s been painstakingly grooming herself and building a machine since 1998; but for the tsunami of identity that carried the freshman Senator Obama into office, she’d likely have already been president already.
But – but, you think she’s going to be like 200 years old in 2016.
So how do you get a tsunami of African-Americans to turn out in the same kind of numbers for a geriatric honky?
Create a race relations crisis, and send the order down the chain of command to the mainstream media to create a national issue of it. Then, exploit it with a presidential campaign that was about virtually nothing but identity politics.
Well, as re the crisis, it’s mission accomplished:
Unfortunately (for Hillary), the relentless identity-mongering backfired, turning blue-collar honkies into an identity group in its own right.
And so today we have Hillary still out of office, a lingering race relations crisis that’s killing hundreds of people a year in our inner cities…
…and a media awaiting orders for the next national politically-based squirrel chase.
Here was the MN House vote on the Genital Mutilation bill yesterday.
The bill would – how can I put just the right point on this – hold parents responsible for the genital mutilation of their children, with felony charges against parents who facilitated any of the wide array of culturally-based, barbaric genital mutilation practices.
There were four “no” votes – all DFLers, naturally:
Ilhan Omar and John Lesch – after getting headlines for criticizing author Mary Franson for ostensibly seeking headlines – voted yes.
…can a company have a legal monopoly on a product people are willing to pay huge money, risk fail, and kill to cover their black market turf over…
Most of Europe’s political leaders – almost without exception, among the big ones – have no children. The list is almost airtight: Frances’ Emmanuel Macron; Germany’s Angela Merkel, the UK’s Theresa May,Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon, Italiy’s Paolo Gentiloni, the Netherlands’Mark Rutte, Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel – none have kids. Sweden’s Stefan Löfven has no bio-kids; the EU’s uber-bureaucrat Jean-Claude Juncker is also “child-free”.
And this is significant:
One of the benefits of parenthood is the daily confrontation with free will—a human nature. Parents may have their child’s life, career, and happiness planned out, but a child has other ideas -constantly. Love, patience, teaching, negotiating, scolding—nurture—can help direct the child, but the overwhelming otherness of the child is undeniable. They are not blank slates upon whom the parent exercises his will.
Political leaders without this experience of parenthood may be susceptible to the idea that people are blank-slates, interchangeable units of human capital. As a parent and a teacher, I have seen many brilliant and well-meaning parents and colleagues crash their will and intellect against the rock of a child’s independent nature. Now, scale such a hubristic paternalism to a nation. Or a continent.
Contemporary childless leaders, however ascendant they feel today, may be the last gasp of secularism. The future is won by those who show up, and only the religiously orthodox are having children.
The number of utopians – good and evil (and as opposed to totalitarian gansters, who may talk of utopia but never practice it), from the far left, far right, and the far libertarian fringe – who have eschewed parenthood is also a little daunting.
I know my own approach to politics was a lot more…entitled? Absolutist? Based on assumptions that raising kids showed me were unsupportable? All of those and more, before I had kids.
So now we have the leadership of one of the world’s most powerful blocs of natoins, all governing from the perspective of people who’ve never had to deal with kids?
I think it’s also significant that the leaders of the former Communist countries in Europe – Poland, Hungary (fiive kids!), the Czechs, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria – people who’ve had to deal with genuine cognitive dissonance and the imperfection of institutions in their lifetimes – tend to have kids.
Last year, we were assured, BREXIT would spell doom for Britain, and the conservatives who led it.
It just had to happen; BREXIT was an epic rejection of the political technocrat elite by the rabble and peasants – and the technocrats (and those who suck up to them) warned us that that could lead to nothing but calamity.
It haan’t – and the opinion polls on the upcoming parliamentary votes seem to be bearing this out:
For the first time in this election, YouGov reveals the voting intention picture in each British government office region. The fieldwork, conducted from April 24 to May 5, shows:
- The Conservative vote share is up, sometimes dramatically so, since the last general election in every region of the UK.
- Labour are down on their 2015 vote haul in every region of the UK except the South West and South East where they were already performing poorly.
- The Liberal Democrat vote share is up in most regions, but only by small margins.
- UKIP’s vote share is down seven to ten points in all regions except Scotland and London, where they were already performing poorly.
The Tories have co-opted a lot of UKIP’s messaging. And Labour seems to be eading toward its worst showing since the end of WWI.
Last week, the “hate crime” at Saint Olaf – a typewritten racist message left under a black students windshield wiper – turned out to be a hoax.
As, in fact, have the vast majority of “Hate Crime” incidents in the past six months; for all the caterwauling about the wave of hate certain to accompany Donald Trump’s election, nearly every episode has turned out to be lefty false-flags.
I Don’t Make The Rules:: It’s gotten to the point where it’s time to codify this as law. Berg’s Law – in this case,
Berg’s Twentieth Law of Social Justice Warmongering: All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise.
No, Actually, I Do Make The Rules: Saturday, the City Pages ran a story involving some anti-semitic, anti-muslim imagery around Uptown and Lake of the Isles:
The street sidles Lake of the Isles one block to the west in the Kenwood neighborhood of Minneapolis.
On Thursday, a resident was enjoying the agreeable spring morning when she came upon a disconcerting sight. Affixed to light poles on the northwest side of the lake along a paved trail were anti-Semitic and Islamophobic stickers.
“Fuck Jews” read one. The other had a hand giving the middle finger and the word “Islam” below it.
She summarily took down the stickers and contacted Councilwoman Lisa Goodman, telling her, “I was so shocked. I don’t think I have ever seen anything like that in Minneapolis.”
As of late Thursday afternoon, neither the Minneapolis Police Department nor the Park Police had received report of the incident.
At the bottom of the Islamophobic sticker listed a website: tightrope.cc.
“It’s not illegal to be white… yet!” reads tightrope’s main page.
The site is a one-stop shop for all goodies intolerant, from the “Racist Joke Book” to “White Lives Matter” stickers to KKK hats.
This episode doesn’t pass the sniff test.
Whi;e, “Tightrope.cc” could just as easily be legitimate as a false flag ( the proprietors die in a fire, either way), putting a link on a poster is easy.
But the posters around Uptown and Lake of the Isles? My BS detector practically jumped out of its mounting bracket.
First – cutesy photoshops with mid-level production values that look like they were done by art school fops, profaning religious imagery? That’s a Minneapolis lefty thing (If I didn’t know better – and I actually don’t – I’d say that middle finger up above looks like Ken “Avidor” Weiner’s work – but I’m told he’s at least semi-retired from whatever it was he did).
And Uptown and Lake of the Isles? Please.
Most people who do this sort of thing stay on home turf. There’s a reason the snowflake at Saint Olaf dropped a racist note at ˆSaint Olafˆ- because it’s home turf. The perp knows that if he’d have dropped anti-black racism in North Minneapolis and been caught, they’d be finding pieces of him in dog stools for weeks.
My guess – and it is a guess, but if I were a gambling man I’d bet money on it – is that this was done by a couple of twenty-something social justice snowflakes looking to false-flag the right – all the right.
Am I right?
Who knows? I’ve been wrong – once or twice.
But’s called “Berg’s 20th Law” for a reason.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I had forgotten how carefully Liberals at the New York Times scrutinized President Obama’s nominees to the federal bench, to avoid politicizing the judiciary. I’m sure they did, right? Because if not, if they’re only worried about it when The Other Side does it, then it’s not a matter of high moral principle, it’s a matter of hypocritical partisanship, and that doesn’t bother me at all.
Joe Doakes
I believe Joe’s got it figured out.
I saw this story a few years ago, and put it aside until today – the fortieth anniversary of the dedication of the more unusual Catholic churches in the world, Kosciol Arka Pana in Novy Huta, Poland.
Which is interesting in and of itself; Nowy Huta is a district in Krakow that was built as a “Socialist Realist” experiment, an entire community built from the ground up to reflect the ideals of Stalin-era communism.
Including absolute, suffocating atheism.
Poles are, of course, obstreperously Catholic – so the battle between Socialist Atheism and Faith seesawed across the city. In 1960, a wooden cross was erected with aa permit, prompting police response; violent demonstrations ensued. The future pope, then-bishop Karol Wojtyla, who began holding annual outdoor Christmas Eve Masses in Nowy Huta in 1959 – and saw to it that ever time the cops removed the cross, another one replaced it.
It took seven years to secure a permit – and, literally, nothing else. In a society where all resources were officially allocated by the government – picture a government where everyone is Alondra Cano – they did it all with volunteer labor and scrounged material.
With no outside help it was down to the locals to mix cement with spades, and find the two million stones needed for the church’s facade. The first corner stone was laid in 1969 by Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, who would later assume fame as Pope John Paul II, but the discovery of a WWII ammunition dump delayed work, as some 5,000 mines and shells had to be carefully removed. Finally, on May 15th 1977, the church was consecrated. Built to resemble Noah’s Ark, with a 70 metre mast-shaped crucifix rising from the middle, the church houses an array of curious treasures, including a stone from the tomb of St. Peter in the Vatican, a tabernacle containing a fragment of rutile brought back from the moon by the crew of Apollo 11, and a controversial statue of Christ that shows him not on a cross, but about to fly to the heavens. If you think that’s odd, check out the statue dedicated to Our Lady the Armoured – a half metre sculpture made from ten kilograms of shrapnel removed from Polish soldiers wounded at the Battle of Monte Cassino. In the early 1980s, the church became a focal point during anti-communist protests, not least for the shelter it afforded the locals from the militia. Protesting during the period of Martial Law was dangerous business, as proven by the monument dedicated to Bogdan Włosik opposite the church. Włosik was shot in the chest by security services, and later died of his injuries. His death outraged the people, and his funeral was attended by 20,000 mourners. The monument commemorating the site of his death was erected in 1992 and is a tribute to all those who died during this period. As recently as September 2012, Kraków City Council awarded Arka Pana the ‘Cracoviae Merenti’ silver medallion for its significance to the city’s history.
Apropos not much, other than historical interest.
Last week, we noted that the Strib had rejected an op-ed by Sarah Cade – a center-left African-American woman who happens to be a competition shooter, a friend of mine, and the owner of one of the most rightous ARs I’ve seen.
By way of trying to outflank the Strib’s abusive monopoly on political opinion publishing, I posted her entire op-ed on this blog last week in its entirety.
Yesterday came news that, with the advance of a “Stand your Ground” bill to hearings in the House Rules Committee this week, the Strib ran a series of fact-free opinion pieces against the legislation – but not a single piece in support. Against the fact-free – and largely Bloomberg-financed – dreck, not a single word of learned response was allowed to see the light of day in this state’s misbegotten “newspaper of record”.
I”m just a little blog. I’m David’s left toenail, going up against Goliath.
Well, you and me – we are David’s left toenail.
I’m going to urge you do a couple of things:
It’s not much. But it’s the best that we can do.
And every once in a while, David gets in a lucky shot.
More on the “Stand your Ground” hearings later this week.
P.S. to the Strib: it’s been a while since I publicly said I sincerely hope the free market drives that little DFL PR shop you call a “newspaper” out of business for good.
The more things chance, the less they change.
Berg’s Eighth Law (“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”) gets overshadowed by the Seventh and, lately, the Eighteenth Laws.
But it is no less universal – as that noted conservative tool, the City Pages, noted last week. As we noted two weeks ago, new MNGOP chair Jennifer Carnahan stomped down hard on a fairly racist Facebook meme posted by the 7th CD. Even the City Pages approved:
For her part, Carnahan did everything right, wasting no time publicly apologizing and demanding the resignation of the person responsible.
But Berg’s Eighth Law reared its head:
But as news of the Ellison post spread, hate mail started piling up in Carnahan’s Facebook Messenger. People didn’t seem to care that she wasn’t the person who created the post. They called her a racist. They demanded she step down. They were all from people who hate racism, presumably, though some were plenty racist themselves.
They certainly were:
They apparently missed the relatively dispositive fact that Carnahan didn’t, y’know, actually write or post the “Goat-Humper” meme herself.
If you’re black, Asian, Latino, gay or female, Big Left hates you.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Aristotle explained the difference between dialectic and rhetoric. Higher learning has been a White Male tradition for thousands of years. White males in monasteries preserved the knowledge until White males at universities could share it with other White males. For anybody else to go to college is cultural appropriationand it’s got to stop.
I notice, by the way, that the author skips right over the historical context for the pasta he thinks his culture would claim. That belongs to the Chinese. He’ll have to go back to eating clams on sea weed or something more authentic.
Joe Doakes
If you’re reading English and are not descended from, well, the English, it’s time to go back to your own ancestral tongues.
I’m a quarter Scots, so I’ll grandfather in. Og jeg snakker lille Norsk, so jeg er OK..
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