SCENE: Mitch BERG Is shopping for a new stove at the appliance store. Focusing on spec sheets, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE, who makes a beeline for BERG.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, whyyyyyhi, there, Avery. What’s…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. The paranoia of you wingnuts is hilarious. Now you’re saying “big bad gummint” is coming for your gas stoves.

BERG: Yeah – I hard NPR saying that, last week.

It’s the latest tempest in a teapot on the internet and in Washington politics – what some have dubbed StoveGate. That is the idea of banning natural gas cooking stoves. The controversy started with a remark from Richard Trumka, a commissioner on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, last month before a consumer advocacy group. He cited health studies about gas stoves.

LIBRELLE: Exactly. Nobody’s coming for your gas stove.

BERG: But they’ve been talking about wanting to ban them for years.

LIBRELLE: (Theatrical sigh). OK, Merg. Are they coming for your gas stove right now?

BERG: You people do this with everything. With CRT in schools…

LIBRELLE: Are they literally teaching your kids a law-school level sociology class, right this second?

BERG: …and bespoke gender…

LIBRELLE: Are they booking your kid for gender reassignment surgery right this second as we speak?

BERG: …or socialism…

LIBRELLE? Are they nationalizing your busienss right now?

BERG: Or gun control.

LIBRELLE: Is there a SWAT team beating down your door, not your neighbor’s door but your front door, looking for your guns right this second?

BERG: …then you call us hysterical.

LIBRELLE: Heeeyyyyy! Hysterical is anti-feminist, and implies that insanity is a feminine trait.

BERG: (Seeing a golden opportunity) Am I telling a woman she’s hysterical right this second?

LIBRELLE: Why, as a matter of fact…

(Gas oven lights off with an exaggerated roar. LIBRELLE walks away by the time the sound dies down).

BERG (to clerk). Did you catch that?

CLERK: I was wondering myself.

BERG: Guess we’ll never know.

And SCENE.

I don’t know who this guy is.

I don’t know where he teaches.

I’m sure he’s in a boatload of legal and professional trouble for beating the stuffing out of that gabbling little prick.

But I’d love to find out. And if theres a legal defense fund, he should have his people call my people.

https://twitter.com/FightHaven/status/1614985827314028545

I pity the poor schlubs at the Babylon Bee and The Onion.

How hard must it be to actually satirize the modern left?

Speaking of which – this was in the MN House:

While gender may be a, uh, “social construct”, so is insanity.

DNA, however, is not.

Last February 9, in response to the shooting of Amir Locke, schools around the Twin Cities let their students walk out of school “in protest”.

Let’s be clear – these protests are about as spontaneous and organic as a Nuremberg Rally. The “student activists” who “plan” these walkouts are puppets. Muppets, really.

But I digress.

Amid all the hysteria over school shootings, one facts that gets lost is that schools are generally, statistically, the safest place for kids to be, there days, especially in places like North Minneapoli.

As Minneapolis discovered.

One of their students, DeShaun Hill – a football player and honor student – was shot while walking home.

A court has ruled that this was negligent, and awarded Hiill’s family $500K. I’ve added emphasis:

North High principal Mauri Friestleben was put on leave by the Minneapolis School District for her decision to let students walk out of class Feb. 9 to attend a sit-in at Minneapolis City Hall to protest the police shooting of Amir Locke. Friestleben was later allowed to return to her position.

Hill family attorney William Walker maintains Friestlben’s decision ultimately led to Deshaun’s death. 

“If that principal had not released these children over the instruction of the district… D. Hill would be alive today,” Walker told KARE 11 during a phone interview Tuesday, just hours before the vote. “They (Hill’s family) are devastated… You can talk to a mother who cries every day. D Hill Jr. was loved by everybody. He was the hope for this family.”

Walker said particularly disturbing is the fact that North families and caregivers were not informed about the decision to let students leave early, saying the Hills would have picked Deshaun up at school rather than let him walk home or to a public bus.  

The alleged killer – an apparent psychopath with a 12 year long criminal record – allegedly shot Hill for bumping into him on the street.

So, to sum up:

• Keep kids in school: $0
• Release them out onto the street, unsupervised, without telling families? $500,000
• Remaining at the leading edge of the social justice fashion curve: Priceless.

I graze a bit on NPR, mostly to find material. Let’s just say it’s a “target rich environment”.

The network has a couple of shows – chock full of vaguely-black sounding accents and topics, slathered over the same progressivized-for-your-protection content they provide the other 162 hours a week, shows like “It’s Been a Minute” and “The Takeaway”, that seem to try to address, not so much the “black” audience, but NPR’s huge, relentlessly white progressive audience, apparently to make them feel, if not “more authentic”, at least a little less guilty.

But I’m here to bring the guilt back.

In recent months, I’ve heard 2-3 shows on the relentlessly woke networks – interviewing the stars of the movie “The Woman King”, an “afrocentric feminist” story about a sub-Saharan kingdom’s unit of female warriors.

The movie – and the gushy, smarmy, self-congratulatory interviews – gabble and prate on and on about female power and empowerment and inspiration and enough word salad to unstop a cement colon.

What doesn’t get mentioned? The real life “warrior women’s” main military and economic justification; procuring slaves to sell. They were a revenue-generation tool for the Dahomey monarchy.

Go ahead. Tell me where the slavery talk is. I’ll wait.

National Review’s Armond White – one of modern media’s most intellectually consistent and rigorous film critics, and incidentally a black man – was not amused:

Historical fraudulence is a problem, but the reasons behind it are what cause alarm. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood and screenwriters Dana Stevens and Maria Bello gainsay Dahomey’s role in the slave trade, trivializing the complications of that original sin. Instead, they offer another Millennial gender-flip, conceived to further sexual confusion via racial frustration and feminist anger.

This approach cannot be taken seriously because, like Black Panther and The Lion King, The Woman King is juvenile. The film’s comic-book premise treats black audiences like children. That adolescent kick over hair-pulling catfights is extended into an almost laughable, pseudo-political history lesson pitting women against men…Thus, she gives us Dahomey as Wakanda, a made-up history for uninformed viewers who feel so “unseen” that they can be robbed and conned again.

But let’s not bury the lede here.

NPR, and Hollywood.

Erasing Slavery.

It’d be so cool if NPR engaged with the proles. I’ve got so many questions.

I have no investment in comic books. I don’t want to generalize this, but I really don’t recall anyone in my social circle – or anyone I knew at all, really – reading them after about age 12.

So in the “epic battle“ between DC and Marvel, I vote “present“. If I care to vote at all.

Which I don’t.

Watching the descent of Hollywood into endless reboots of DC and Marvel properties is not the most depressing aspect of watching western culture today. But it’s not far from the bottom of the barrel, to be honest.

I’m not saying, I want the comic book industry to kill itself off.

But if I did, I’d want to see a lot of stories like this:

The “gay Superman“ gimmick a couple years ago was one thing; at least he still looked like Superman.

The anorexic superman played by “transgender man“?

Well, isn’t that just so 21st-century.

UPDATE: I’m told I’ve fallen for a joke tweet.

Then it’s a pretty brilliant joke, since the premise is exactly that plausible, in Hollywood, these days.

The U of M paid Nikole Hannah-Jones $50K to speak at the U – and complied with a demand to conceal the evidence (emphasis added by me):

Hannah-Jones participated in a Dec. 6 “moderated discussion” as part of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs Distinguished Carlson Lecture Series.

According to a contract obtained by Alpha News, the university paid Hannah-Jones’ agents $50,000 for her appearance on campus. The contract prohibited the university from recording the live event, which some school officials took issue with.

“Is the no recording item firm? I would like to remove that if possible. I am looking at one of our local news reporters for the moderator, and we’ve had great success with replaying the conversation via Minnesota Public Radio when we use their hosts. This, along with providing the recording to classrooms for instruction and discussion is important to us,” wrote Gail Fridlund, an events manager with the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

But of course, the U acquiesced.

Tom Gagnon, executive vice president of the Lavin Agency, said “that provision is firm” but offered to explain the “good” reasons for the recording prohibition.

“I don’t want folks to think she’s being a diva!” he said in a later email.

The university ultimately agreed to prohibit recording and covered the costs of Hannah-Jones’ travel and lodging expenses.

Those “good reasons” are none other than you and me – taxpayers with the capacity for critical thinking. They’ve seen what happens when the plebs see how the grift works.

If someone knows someone with a samizdat recording, let me know.

To: Hennepin County
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: You’re Screwed Blue

Dear HennCo

I can’t believe I missed this; your new co-chief public defender (FKA “County Prosecutor”) was sworn in this past week.. As befits an unserious person in an unserious city at an unserious time, she was sworn in on a comic book:

The new attorney of Hennepin County, Mary Moriarty, took her oath of office Tuesday with her hand placed on a copy of a graphic novel about the late congressman John Lewis.

Photos from the swearing-in ceremony show Moriarty with her hand on a copy of “March,” which she described as a “graphic novel trilogy about Congress Member John Lewis and his courageous fight for voting rights.”

A comic book.

I may start rooting for the criminals at this rate.

Oh, yeah – no surprises here:

“Research and data show that non-restorative models of punishment do not prevent recidivism, do not repair families, and cause harm to a community. Incarceration, sometimes a year or more after a crime is committed, disconnects the punishment from the impact of a crime on a victim,” she says on her campaign website.

“Incarceration disconnects the person who committed violence from their community and makes reintegration extremely difficult,” the website adds. “Mary’s office will seek to provide an alternative to traditional prosecution through restorative justice as an option for victims.”

She also opposes the cash bail system, which is “not helping to make our community safer.”

So strap in, HennCo. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better.

The Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco is hosting the “Third Annual Midwest Gender Identity Summit,” – discussing the “needs of transgender patients in healthcare,” 

Just kidding. It’s the “Sanford Research Center”, in Sioux Falls.

Sanford Health – the titan of rural healthcare, and one of the biggest employers in the upper midwest – is pushing the very “blue” trans agenda in the very red northern Great Plains:

Both Sanford and the Transformation Project are representative of the larger forces that are working to bring the transgender movement to the deepest-red corners of the United States — a coordinated, well-funded campaign for which South Dakota has become something of a trial run. That campaign’s influence has reached the Republican-dominated state legislature, where dozens of anti-gender-ideology bills have failed over the past decade. “No one thought South Dakota was a state where this could be stopped,” Libby Skarin, the campaign director for the ACLU of South Dakota, boasted in February. “I think the fact that we have consistently stopped these bills has been a source of hope for folks, like if they can do it in South Dakota, we can do it in our state.”

Sanford, which purports to be “the largest rural health system in the United States” — it currently employs nearly seven times more South Dakotans than any other business in the state — has played a pivotal role in orchestrating those conservative failures. In 2021, a National Review investigation detailed the medical giant’s links to the failure of House Bill 1217, which would have banned males from competing in women’s sports. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem had sparked conservative outrage by vetoing the bill earlier that year — a move that dampened her status as a rising Republican star, even after she hastened to reintroduce an analogous bill at the outset of the next legislative session.

The Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) agenda is being pushed into very red places by very blue big business – as a project to try to “convert” red parts of the country.

And in the case of Transgender ideology in South Dakota, it’s working:

Despite the overwhelmingly Republican composition of South Dakota politics, gender ideology has made inroads in almost every area of the state’s governing institutions. Last month, for example, SDSU drew conservative criticism for hosting a “kid-friendly” drag show, an event that multiple local lawmakers argued could be illegal under the state’s prohibition on “show[s] or other presentation[s]” deemed “harmful to minors.” Elsewhere, the Noem-appointed head of the state’s Department of Corrections signed a new “Management of Gender Dysphoria” policy specifying that state-prison inmates could request transfers to facilities that corresponded with their “gender identity” rather than sex — and be provided with sex-change drugs on the taxpayer dime.

But no set of institutions in South Dakota has embraced gender ideology more than the state’s Sanford-dominated business community, which sits well to the left of the state’s political center of gravity. (In November 2020, Sanford replaced its CEO of 24 years after he informed employees that he wouldn’t be wearing a mask around the office, arguing that he had recently recovered from the Covid virus and therefore posed no threat of spreading it.) The state’s Chamber of Commerce chapters, which are closely tied to Sanford, regularly lobby against social-conservative bills, including medical conscience rights, the prohibitions on sex changes for minors, birth-certificate gender changes, transgender locker room use, and bans on men in women’s sports.

This is happening as other civilized countries are having intense second thoughts about the excesses of Big Transgender.

This shows how Big Left gets incrementalism in a way conservatives are having a lot of trouble with.

A friend of the blog emails:

Explain to me how adding more bureaucrats terrified of offending a DFL constituency will prevent fraud committed by a DFL constituency protected by the bureaucracy

I don’t think the governor or his staff read this space, so I will try to explain it.

It will work, because we are moving forward together as One Minnesota. with equity and reproductive rights for Minnesotans of all genders.

I may have the details wrong, but that’s what I remember from the campaign.

Berg’s 20th Law is clear and unambiguous . To wit:

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.

Is the Law right about the recent case at the U of Cincinnati, about which so many prog brows were furrowed in recent days?

What do you think?

Outgoing speaker Pelosi poses with her cheerleaders…

…hahaha. Just kidding. She’s posing with (most of) the female members of the White Houe press corps…

…oops. Distinction without much difference.

Anyway, here’s the photo:

Now, the cynics among you – like the Tweeter I’m linking – might scoff “Whoah, check out all that diversity!”.

Pish-tush. Some of them are from Ivy League schools, and some are from Oberlin!

The MN Department of Natural Resources is apologizing for…

…well, I’ll let the story explain it:

“Yesterday we sent out the latest issue of the Trailblazer newsletter with a theme of gratitude. Today I’m sharing with you our deep regret for unintentionally omitting wópida, which is the Dakota word for ‘thank you,’ from what we had intended to be an inclusive message of thanks,” Ann Pierce, director of the DNR’s Parks and Trails Division, wrote in an email Friday.

In addition to Dakota, the newsletter does thank everyone in Ojibwe, Spanish, German, Italian, Somali, Hmong, Greek, and English…

…but not Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Russian, or any of the languages spoken much more predominantly in Minnesota than Dakota is.

But in the spirit of the season? Takk, kitti, dziękuje, spasibo and thankewverymuch for the bounty of material.

Part 243,320: By 2028, feminists who want to meet with women – as in, people born with two “X” chromosomes – will have to meet underground.

I hope you all had a happy, blessed, gratitude-heavy Thanksgiving.

I hope you did not spend the day alone in a New York apartment, sitting on your toilet, hunched over your smartphone, obsessively typing bilge out onto social media.

Like this guy seemed to:

Only to be reminded that graywashing American history is how authoritarianism thrives.

Democrats: it is literally violence to “misgender” someone, even unintentionally, even if they are of a chosen gender you’ve never heard of“.

Unless…:

…they are inconvenient to the trans political movement. Then, you can follow the sort of reasoning that would shame Archie Bunker.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.

I have so much for which I should be grateful – and I’ll be going through the list, as far as I can, tomorrow.

But I’m going to jump the (if you’ll pardon the expression) gun, and say I’m thankful I’m not that this grift.

Whoah – did I say grift? I meant, “dinner party“:

Jackson and Rao are the founders of an organization called Race2Dinner. For $5,000 the two women will attend your eight-person dinner party and bring along “Lisa Bond, our Resident White Woman.” For that price, they will berate you about your racism. They will share their own experiences with racism, which sometimes don’t sound like actual racism. But if you object or even if you agree, they will tell you that’s what white women do and you’re part of the problem. The two have a lot of observations about “what white women do.” White women are mean to each other, for instance. When they are accused of racism white women accuse black women of being “angry” or “crazy.” White women also say they’re not racist. White women like dinner parties. And they like to say they’ve donated money to the ACLU. If you suggest that black women may be mean to each other or that they may like dinner parties, you’re also a white supremacist. Because how would you know? Don’t say you have black friends because that too would be a sign of white supremacy.

Questioning whether spending $5,000 to have people call you names is also “white supremacy,” and the authors explain, “we are tired of it.” The fact that you are complaining about the price is evidence that you “see this work as charity. You doing us a favor. … White supremacy culture has you believing that you are doing us a favor by even caring about racism or antiracism. This results in your incessant demands that we educate you—on your own racism, on a system you created to harm us for your benefit. For free.

On the one hand, it sounds as hellish as the left tells us Thanksgiving with one’s family ostensibly is.

On the other hand, if I had a lot more money than bills – or friends who’d be willing to pitch in – I think it’d be fun to pony up, invite the ladies, and watch the sparks fly.

To: Every Single Progressive
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreperous Peasant
Re: Berg’s 18th Law

To some extent, I created Berg’s 18th Law to protect me, and people like me, from going out on long, brittle factual limbs.

The law is pretty clear:

Nothing the media writes/says about any emotionally charged event – a mass shooting, a police shooting, anything – should be taken seriously for 48 hours after the original incident.  It will largely be rubbish, as media outlets vie to “scoop” each other even on incorrect facts.

But after a couple of days of listening to people like you claiming that all conservative social and economic thought was a form of “stochastic terror” aimed directly at LGBTQIAetcetc people, it’s worth noting that I wrote it even more for you.

I’m going to guess most of you didn’t know that Sunday was “World Toilet Day“ (I personally celebrate the Eastern Orthodox Toilet Day, which is December 3)

Something I didn’t know about the humble toilet; to at least one part of Big Left and, to at least one part of Big Left, it’s a social justice issue:

So, if you’re having trouble keeping this straight – and if you’re sane, you should – let me break this down for you:

Separate, safe toilets for women are in essential to human dignity – except in the United States, where they are a sign of toxic bigotry.

I hope that’s clarified things for you.

Shooting at an LGBTQetcetc club in Colorado over the weekend.

While the perp was apparently “on the radar” (in a state where the progressive prosecutor ensures there are no consequences for being there), expect this atrocity to be used less for gun control and more to demonize any criticism of LGBTQetcetc activism of any kind in any place – pushing the notion of “stochastic terrorism”:

“Stochastic terrorism” is just a silly concept that dovetails with “words are violence” and opens the gate for any favored group to shut down all debate because the very existence of the debate will drive people to violence. Of course, no one, at least no sane people, believes it exists, but it is a handy cudgel with which you can belabor your opponents.

“If you say you disagree with me, it must be because you want me dead”.

That’s how society gets to Orwell’s “Duckspeak” – when it becomes impossible to commicate in any but the most innocuous terms without fear of some consequences, rational or not.

Hard to live in a civil society with that hanging over every social question.

… it apparently also is to “diversity“:

It’s raising a hackle or two:

Where, indeed?

…of 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”), it’s hard not to look at this story – “Klan literature” being handed out in a swing-y part of northeastern Minnesota long controlled by a DFL that’s not happy about losing ground in the are, four days before an election where the DFL is poised to lose, maybe big – and not presume it’s a hoax.

Ted Nugent/Oathkeepers poll shows a supermajority of Americans blame “woke” politicians for the crime wave.

Wait – did I say Ted Nugent/Oathkeepers? I meant Harvard:

The correct answer to the poll is “yes’ to both, of course.

Parents shut down a Dearborn, Michigan school board meeting over the distribution of “woke” books:

A school-board meeting in Dearborn, Mich. was shut down earlier this week by hundreds of protesters opposing the circulation of LGBTQ books across the city’s public-school system.

Viral videos recorded by a Detroit Free Press reporter circulated on Twitter showing pandemonium breaking out at the meeting Monday night. Many of the protesters carried signs in English and Arabic: “Keep Your Dirty Books in the Closet,” “Stop Grooming Our Kids,” and “Homosexuality Big Sin,” some read.

Darn those redneck fascists with their signs in English and…

…uh, what now?

Ooof. A protected class going after a couple of protected classes. That’s gotta be awkward.

Wonder what Rashida Tlaib has to say about it?

We must, we are told by the current powers that be, respect the chosen genders, no matter how outlandish, of every person, on command.

The government ha, however, has carved itself out a little bit of insanity to actually get some business done:

Trans women still have to register for the draft. Trans men are exempt.

According to the Selective Service System website, nearly “all male US citizens and male immigrants, who are 18 through 25, are required to register with Selective Service.” The website states that all biological males must register for the draft, including “U.S. citizens or immigrants who are born male and have changed their gender to female.”

What are they – biologists?