Being. a good parent (or parent-state) means making sure kids can’t get tobacco, or tobacco subvsitutes like vape, even if the vape is a way of quitting smoking (as it was for at least one young person close to me)…
…but making absolutely certain they can chemically and surgically neuter themselves without adult consent…:
The states are the “laboratories of democracy”, and ours is run by Dr. Frankenstein.
So what exactly does Mayor Carter do?
Fix roads? No.
Put criminals in jail? Please.
Play the social media game?
Well, now we’re onto something:
I bet he has a completely lit Instagram account…
The latest Moms Want Action tweet. Like everything MWA says, it’s counterfactual…
…but let’s stick with appearances and play a game of “Where’s Waldo”, where “Waldo” = “a black person”.
\
See her back there? Peering over the shoulder of the woman with ELCA Hair, not that that narrows it down any?
White, upper-middle-class female, utterly entitled, and keeping a few minorities around as visual accessories.
There is no more perfect metaphor for the gun control movement.
The culture war is fought and lost or won in a million little nooks and crannies in our society.
The collective perception of historical ephemera that tumble-dries together to form “the public consciousness” is one of those collections of crannies.
And somewhere in that perception floats the collective dog’s breakfast of ideas and ideals that form the cultural idea of what is and was good, and what isn’t and wasn’t.
You ask most Americans “who was the worst president in American history”, you will get many answers. Conservatives and progressives may differ – Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush likely trend toward the top for both, respectively. There are some consensus picks; Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan and a few others.
But among the eternal parade of cultural skirmishes that could stand some winning, the left’s rewriting of history re Woodrow Wilson needs to be turned around and pointed back toward history’s lower colon, where it belongs.
A national consensus on hating Wilson is long overdue. It is the patriotic duty of every decent American. While conservatives have particular reasons to detest Wilson, and all his works, and all his empty promises, there is more than enough in his record for moderates, liberals, progressives, libertarians, and socialists to join us in this great and unifying cause.
The roll call of the worst presidents in American history includes some consensus top choices. James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce both contributed mightily to the nation’s slide into the Civil War, and Andrew Johnson did enduring harm to Reconstruction in the war’s aftermath. But all three of those men were repudiated by the end of their single term in office. They left no heirs who would acknowledge their influence, no fleet of academic hagiographers who could see themselves reflected in those presidencies.
Wilson, by contrast, served two full and consequential terms. He was the only Democrat re-elected to the job during the century between 1832 and 1936. He was lionized by liberals and progressives in academia and the media for most of the century after he left office in 1921. In my youth, and perhaps yours, Wilson was presented in history books as a tragic hero whom the unthinking American people didn’t deserve. He was often placed highly on academics’ rankings of the presidents. Princeton University named its school of international relations for him. Even in rescinding that honor in June 2020, the university’s press release declared: “Though scholars disagree about how to assess Wilson’s tenure as president of the United States, many rank him among the nation’s greatest leaders and credit him with visionary ideas that shaped the world for the better.”
Nah. Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash. He was a bad man who made the country and the world worse. His name should be an obscenity, his image an effigy. Hating him is a wholesome obligation of citizenship.
Let us count the ways:
Read the whole thing if you can.
Whatever other missions I have in life,extinguishing any lingering ignorance about the loathsomeness of Woodrow Wilson is going on the list.
“Hell is other people”, said the French existentialist philosopher.
Close, but no cigar.
Hell is, however, most things “public”.
Like the behavior in public waiting rooms on public transit lines by certain members of the public.
Metro Transit is shutting down the indoor waiting area at the Hennepin Avenue transit station due to what I’m going to start referring to as Southside Cardio: Drug Abuse, Prostitution and Street Crime”. :
“Over the last couple of years, these places have become more and more of a problem for us,” [MTC spokesman Drew] Kerr said. “There aren’t a lot of locations like this that are open right now for the public to just be and to stay warm. And that’s not what they’re intended for.”
Metro Transit officials said in an announcement Tuesday the closure of the Uptown station is also due to property damage and litter. The space will be reopened later in the year when contracted security officers are in place at the station and five other locations. Those stations include the Vertical Circulation Building/Central Station in downtown St. Paul, the Blue Line Lake Street/Midtown and Franklin Avenue stations, the Chicago-Lake Transit Center and the Brooklyn Center Transit Center.
The building near the Central Station in St. Paul already closed in December after a double homicide…”The amount of open drug use is the largest thing right now. Homelessness, as well. And we’re not social workers,” Timlin said.
Across the transit system, crime rose by 54 percent between 2021 and 2022. Metro Transit officials said last year, about a quarter of the calls for service were at the six stations where they’re bringing in security.
The crime will move to the neighborhoods, of course.
It’s been my pleasure and privilege to participate in the “Speaking Proudly” speech tournament since 2019.
The tournament is for high school girls – grades 9-12, in public. private, charter or home school – to speak about democracy in America.
If you know a high school age girl who’s interested, applications are due by the end of the month:
This is a genuinely great event. The ability to speak convincingly in public is one of the great markers for success in life. Please pass it along.
This is how they describe the free lunch bill:
A “tax cut”.
I suppose public education is a “tax cut” because parents aren’t doing teaching at home, too?
This is a new Australian Army recruiting video.
Who are they training to fight?
Taliban?
ISIS?
The Chinese?
After three years of absurdly restrictive Covid regulations met by some strenuous civil and less than civil resistance, they are not just training to fight Australians – who are officially disarmed – but they are putting that out that as a feature for recruiting new soldiers.
Who puts this kind of campaign together?
More troublingly – who do you think this sort of campaign appeals to?
From. My. Cold. Dead. Hand.
That wave of right-wing terror they’ve been warning us about for the past fifteen years is apparently nigh, and coming for Jacob Frey:
The progressive mayor of Minneapolis is fearing for his life since receiving an uptick in death threats…
Well, yeah. After giving free reign to leftists, including all but inviting “Anti”-Fa to attack Trump rallygoers, of course all those right-wing MAGA hat-clad goons are going to threaten a puling left mayor…
…from left-wing extremists, nearly three years after the unrest over the police-involved death of George Floyd…
.
Wait, what?
The wave of terror is coming from the left?
Why, yes – we’ve commented on this before.
It was probably 15 years ago that I wound up running into a young Assistant US Attorney at a social event.
We got to talking – as I am wont to do with, well, people.
What quickly became evident in talking with him – early 30s, graduate of an Ivy League law school after having been a legacy Ivy League undergrad – was the sheer contempt he had for the people outside the federal “criminal justice” system he met.
Example: we got to talking about gun control. He was a Hillary guy. And he went to a demo the ATF put on for federal “criminal justice” employees, where they learned some basic firearm safety, and got to test-fire some of the guns the Feds used. And with that, he did in fact consider himself to be one of the class that should have the right to keep and bear arms (not that he would). The rest of the plebs, naturally,, should be disarmed forthwith.
Now bear in mind this AUSA wasn’t working on organized crime. Or even “crime” as most of us would understand it. His bailiwick was various abstruse import regulations. Not cocaine or fentanyl, mind you; things like wood, food and alcohol, livestock, furniture.
So that’s right – he oozed with sneering contempt for otherwise honest people who ran afoul of abstruse import regulations.
And he didn’t seem to be all that unusual among federal “criminal justice” employees.
Of course, I ran head-on into the contempt another tranche of government employees – the public school system – feels for the peasantry, first-hand, around that same time.
My own struggles with the Saint Paul school system were at a time when the big dumb consultant idea was “zero tolerance” for even the faintest most ethereal hint of “violence”.
Dumb as that could be – and outmoded as it has apparently become, given the evaporation of safety in Saint Paul schools – it was a fart in the breeze compared to the contempt shoveled at parents since the dawn of “woke” education.
I figured – correctly – that Saint Paul and Minneapolis would be pretty hopeless.
But – Little Falls (via Gary at LIberty & Proosperity Blog)
“My name is Cassie Fredregill, a local resident of Little Falls. As my 10-year-old daughter came home from school one day, she told me that there was going to be a class on sexting. As any concerned parent, I reached out to her teacher to confirm what my daughter told me and asked what this class was going to be about.” The thought of a 10-year-old getting taught about sexting is utterly repulsive…
…Cassie wondered why she hadn’t received paperwork that permitted her to opt her daughter out of the class.
In response?
The school district barred her from parent teacher conferences.
She was not happy (jump to 5:25):
Point being, a distressing number of schools are starting to see parents as the enemy – and themselves as a class of aristocrats who shouldn’t have to be troubled by them.
I’ll have Ms. Fredregill on my show on Saturday.
SCENE: It’s1989, in the home of TONI and MELVIN Carter (JR.). Melvin is a police officer; Toni an aspiring politician. They sit on a couch in the living room, watching the news. Their 10 year old son Melvin the III walks into the room.
MELVIN III: Mom? Dad?
MELVIN JR: Yes, son?
MELVIN III: What’s for dinner?
TONI: We have no food.
MELVIN III: What now?
MELVIN JR. We bought an acquarium.
MELVIN III: Uh – cool?
TONI: Absolutely cool. You know how we love fish.
MELVIN JR: We also got the driveway cobblestoned.
MELVIN III: But our driveway was perfectly fine…
TONI: I’ve always wanted a cobblestoned driveway.
MELVIN III: But…why?
MELVIN III: It’ll set off the look of the1932 Cord Roadster I bought at the car show.
MELVIN III: The what what what?
TONI: It’s a classic car.
MELVIN III: I didn’t know we were “classic car” people.
MELVIN JR. We’re not. Just seemed like a good idea.
TONI: Provided we got a cobblestone driveway.
MELVIN III: But…dinner?
MELVIN JR: My boss is just going to have to pay me more.
MELVIN III: Huh
SCENE dissolves, flashing forward 34 years. Melvin III is now the mayor of Saint Paul, Minnesota.
MITCH BERG: So we’ve got money for student savings accounts, universal basic income, reparations, and trying to build a new Rondo neighborhood on a land bridge over I94….
…but we’re waiting on the Legislature – and apparently the minority party in the legislature, at that – to pay for something that is one of government’s unambiguously legitimate jobs?
One of mine is that one day, I get a chance to respond to a grievance pimp like Cori Bush tyhe way Alex Epstein does here (around 1:30 into the video):
Til I do, I guess I’ll just keep practicing. And eating my vegetables.
Democrats, especially the MN DFL, pine for European style “social democracy” – or at least the kind they’ve incorporated into their romantic interpretation of 1970s-style Swedish and Danish socialism.
Their teenage-girl-level keening is selective – they are quiet about the fact that Denmark, for example, has no minimum wage.
But for the most part, DFLers are figuratively pining for the fjords most of the time.
Will that change soon?
Minnesota just signed a law legalizing kidnapping kids and playing Mr. Potato Head with their body parts and endocrine system, while allowing unlicensed, unqualified paraprofessionals to conceal what’s going on from parents.
Or as they refer to it, “guaranteeing gender-affirming care”.
This, they do just as Europe wakes up from its fifty year trip through the looking glass:
The United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, and France have all taken steps recently to pull back on transgender medical treatments for seemingly gender-dysphoric children.
Sweden has been one of the most progressive nations on transgender health care for decades. Back in 1972, Sweden became the first country to allow transgender people to change their legal gender.
Last year though, Swedish hospitals halted the use of puberty blockers in five of the country’s six clinics for minors with gender dysphoria. The last clinic only uses puberty blockers in clinical trials. The country now emphasizes psychotherapy for minors with gender dysphoria instead.
In particular, the always freaky-deaky Swedes have slapped themselves upside the head and spun a proverbial bootlegger turn:
The Karolinska Hospital in Sweden recently issued a new policy statement regarding treatment of gender-dysphoric minors. This policy, affecting Karolinska’s pediatric gender services at Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital (ALB), has ended the practice of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-dysphoric patients under the age of 18.
This is a watershed moment, with one of world’s most renowned hospitals calling the “Dutch Protocol” experimental and discontinuing its routine use outside of research settings. According to the ”Dutch Protocol,” which has gained popularity in recent years, gender-dysphoric minors are treated with puberty blockers at age 12 (and in some interpretations, upon reaching Tanner stage 2 of puberty, which in girls can occur at age 8), and cross-sex hormones at the age of 16. This approach, also known as medical “affirmation,” has been endorsed by the WPATH ”Standards of Care 7” guideline.
Never thought I’d see sanity creeping across the Atlantic to the west, but then the whole world is pretty much upside down these days.
Tens of millions of dollars of daycare assistance, bundle up in cash and sent overseas. Same with hundreds of millions of dollars of food assistance.
And now…
The city of Minneapolis is a huge graft machine. Same with the state, under DFL control.
Silly peasants. There’s no such thing as “Woke!”:
[Ipsos] latest poll confirms that no one really knows what “woke” means, particularly when respondents aren’t provided with any accurate definitions. “Republican presidential hopefuls are vowing to wage a war on ‘woke,’” USA Today’s write-up of its survey began, “but a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds a majority of Americans are inclined to see the word as a positive attribute, not a negative one.”
Or if it does exist, it’s an unalloyed good thing!
Hear that, Republicans? Everyone loves “woke”! Well, at least 56 percent of those surveyed endorse the word when they’re told it describes someone who is “informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” By contrast, just 39 percent of respondents express a negative view of the word insofar as it describes someone who is “overly politically correct” and is inclined to “police others’ words.” Having deemed the Right’s obsession with “wokeness” a quixotic endeavor, USA Today bellyflops into a solipsistic reflection on how the public’s perceptions “raise questions” about the Right’s self-defeating myopia.
Of course, this is an example of two institutions that should be distrusted and veriied – media:
This is a prime example of journalism that works backward from a conclusion in pursuit of evidence to support it.
and the polling industry:
A quick perusal of the polling on the issue exposes the flaw in USA Today/Ipsos’s methods.
When respondents are not primed with erroneous definitions and are instead asked only if they would vote for a self-described “woke” candidate, as CBS/YouGov did last October, they found that 58 percent of likely voters would be less likely to pull the lever for that candidate. That same month, a Harvard-Harris poll found that 64 percent of respondents, including a majority of Democrats, blame “the increase in crime” on “woke politicians” as opposed to “other factors.” That’s, at the very least, odd if most Americans don’t understand the word or believe it only describes a heightened social consciousness.
…that should be distrusted but verified, and then almost to a mathematical certainty distrusted some more.
For those who need a primer:
Wokeness in practice is not something so quaint as speech-policing and “political correctness.” It encapsulates an alternative theory of social organization that often enters into conflict with the Constitution. It prescribes not just otherworldly speech codes but programs of reeducation for those who decline to subscribe to them. It necessitates the redistribution of economic and social goods in the pursuit of “restorative justice” for wrongs committed by generations long passed. It redefines cosmic constants like the laws of mathematics, operating on the bigoted assumption that those laws are incomprehensible to those who were born into certain identities. “Woke” does not describe a persnickety busybody who cannot abide your verbal miscues. It describes a revolutionary.
But, like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that isnt, the “Republican War on Women” that never was, the “Threat to Abortion” that never existed in Minnesota, the “De Santis Book Ban” that isn’t and the “Blogger Registration” law that never will be, the new attempt to gaslight the right on the existence of “woke” (and critical race theory), the intended audience isn’t people who can reason or think critically.
It’s aimed at Democrat voters.
So maybe not all HR people are remedial:
I’d love to see if that is still true at companies that officially embrace “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI), or if the actual hiring managers at companies that adopt such frippery also find potential employees like that to be a complete pain in the ass, too…
SCENE: MItch BERG is waiting for some delicious brisket at his favorite BBQ joint. As he orders, he notes Avery LIBRELLE walking in the door. He ponders bolting out the kitchen, but it’s too late.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Uh, hey…
LIBRELLE: Shut up. Ron DeSantis is imposing a fascist censorship regime in Florida! He wants to imprison any bloggers that criticize him!
BERG: It’s a bill with one sponsor – its author, who is most likely its only supporter in the legislature. It won’t get a hearing, much less pass either chamber, much much much less get signed into law. If you hear about it after this coming week, it’ll be from people on the left who are desperately trying to keep it alive to promote the “DeSantis is literally Hitler and even worse than Trump!” canard.
I mean, there’s a grain of sense to it – there are plenty of “bloggers” and other social media tweeps who don’t reveal who’s paying them to write.
LIBRELLE: Blah blah, blah. Hey – I wanna order!
GIRL BEHIND COUNTER: Certainly, Ma’a…er, S… (Looks at BERG, in a cold sweat)
BERG: No idea.
LIBRELLE: Do you serve cricket meal loaf”
GIRL BEHIND COUNTER: Uh, no.
LIBRELLE: What the…
BERG: (to Girl behind counter) I’ll take my order to go, thanks. .
And SCENE
It’s an aphorism I’ve kept in my mind through a *lot* of life’s ugly travails and misfortunes this past 20-odd years, along with “This, Too, Shall Pass”. Together, the two lines are wonderful, complementary views of coping with life’s vicissitudes; trouble ain’t forever – but sometimes, the only way past a problem is to finesse, claw or bludgeon your way all the way to the other side of it.
Through divorce, dips in the employment situation, post-divorce shenanigans, teenage problems, pandemics, riots and all of life’s other ups and downs, both aphorisms have been priceless.
The original line was from Tom Sizemore, as Sergeant Horvath in “Saving Private Ryan”.
Sizemore didn’t write the line.
But if anyone else – John Krasinski or RuPaul or Mark Wahlberg or even Tom Hanks or Morgan Freeman, even a young Clint Eastwood – had delivered the line any other way, it wouldn’t have had the same impact.
But something about the way Sizemore delivered that line made it memorable enough to keep it front and center all these years.
And for that, I remember Tom Sizemore.
It’s not “pro-choice”.
It’s “pro abortion”.
Someone broke out the windows and tagged the walls of the crisis pregnancy center.
But wait. There’s more.
The next day, as the “protest” got going, the staff was repairing the damage. WIth a difference that passive-aggressive MInnesota leftists aren’t used to:
The tweep went on to ask – why the intimidation?
Seems pretty simple to me: Because their people had already committed violence against the building.
Ask any domestic abuse counselor: Violence against things usually escalates into violence against people.
He and the staff are only as safe as the least stable “protester” lets them be.
This is what “Restorative Justice” looks like:
The crime – the victim’s ex-boyfriend bought a gun for two juveniles to kill her new boyfriend and, if she got in the way, her as well – was egregious enough that even the fairly useless Mike Freeman was trying to charge the juveniles as adults.
The “boys” will now be out after a couple years in the Red Wing juvenile facility.
I’m offering the parents (and/or their advocates) an hour on the NARN to tell us how “restorative” they find Mary Moriarty’s idea of “justice”.
Today is the 19th anniversary of the Northern Alliance Radio Network.
I’ll probably save the whole “waxing philosophical about it” thing for (God willing) next year – and for those of you who like that sort of thing, I have a hunch it’ll be a doozy.
But like this blog, that two hours a week has been a steady, constant thing over the course of a couple of mind-warpingly turbulent decades, personally and for the nation.
Back in October of 2003, asking Chad the Elder, John Hinderaker, Brian “Saint Paul” Ward, Ed Morrissey, Scott Johnson, Atomizer, King Banaian and JB Doubtless (and eventually Michael Brodkorb) if they wanted to do a radio show was a little like making a burger with four patties; you realize it’s probably going nowhere, and the world will not change if it fails completely, but that’s no reason not to try.
And the fact that it worked – of which more below – is further evidence of what may be the biggest axiom of my life: the things that start as jokes, whimsical experiments or drunken pranks on myself, tend to be the things that are the most rewarding. I’m going to have to do a post on that phenomenon sometime in the next year.
Of course, for that little flight of fancy to become what it did has taken the connivance of a lot of people. Three generations of general managers (John Hunt, who originally OKed the idea along with Ron Stone and current GM Nik Anderson), and four of operations managers (Patrick Campion, the first person I talked, along with his successors, Nick Novak, Lee Michaels and John “Consigliere” Berg, no relation) had to agree to put us on the air, schedule staff to keep us on, and take the risk of having a bunch of noobs on their air.
How many generations of producers did it take to make us sound passable? The late, unforgotten, great Joe “The Jackal” Hanson, Tommy “The HBomb” Huynh, Matt Reynolds, Irina Malanina, The Consigliere, Terminator N, Megan Fatale, G-Money, and a whole bunch of Brad and King’s producers I can’t even begin to remember…
…and of course Brad Carlson ,King Banaian and Jack “The New Guy” Tomczak.
Not to mention the audience.
Not sure who or what I’d be today without the result of the – not sure what to call it, joke or prank or unhinged scheme – that got hatched 20 years ago this coming fall. But I do know I doubt I could navigate the insanity of today’s world without it – not to mention the blog that started it.
Anyway – thanks!
Governor Walz is “turning power over” to Lt Governor Flanagan for a few hours while he has a colonoscopy.
I don’t not expect DFL goons to roam the streets looking for wreckers while she’s in power. Fingers crossed, everyone. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
However, if all goes well, hopefully we’ll get word as to whether the endoscopist found the code for the model that predicted 20-70,000 dead Minnesotans by July 2020.
SITD Bonus: Rejected names for the post:
But again – I’m trying to be a better person than that.
To: All you Normies
From: The Elites
Re: Die, For All We Care
Proles/knaves/fyrds,
Your life, property and family, mere peasant, are not of enough value that we, your elites, should allow you a $500 handgun to protect them.
However, ours – we elites – are of such value that dropping double the income of a typical American household is perfectly fine:
Luxury real estate agent Branden Williams said protection dogs have become so popular among his mega-wealthy clients in L.A. that he’s now in the market for one himself, especially after a neighbor was robbed at gunpoint in Beverly Hills. Williams has tasked the same broker his mom used to buy her protection dog, a German shepherd imported from Germany, with finding him a suitable animal this year.
“I will say they’re not cheap; the ones I’m looking at are between $60,000 and $100,000,” he said. “It’s a whole other level of training; we’re not talking about doggy day care here.”
Just so you know the hierarchy of the universe.
(BTW – kudos to Lisa Bender, who at least got the spirit of things right, advocating gun control while getting private security on the taxpayer’s dime. Well done, Ms. Bender) .
Regards,
Your Betters
Here’s today’s music list:
A regular reader sent me this:
Social services get funding based on how much need exists – which means it’s in their interests to make sure people know to get their needs out, front and center.
No stone left unturned.
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