Kind Of A Drag

Let’s talk about drag shows.   Not the current hot-button politics of the whole genre today.  Just the “art form” itself.  

I don’t care for them.

No, not because it involves men cross-dressing. Guys wearing dresses and wigs to play a role? Mitch, please. All the female parts in Shakespeare’s day were played by cross-dressing men. Monty Python and Kids in the Hall were cross-dressing decades ago, and at least on the surface they did it for the same exact reason as drag shows do; Entertainment.

Which is the crux of why I don’t care for drag; it’s entertainment – and it’s just not entertaining.

To me, anyway.

Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve had friends who say “give it a chance!”. And I did. And I just…don’t…care.

Part of the problem is it appropriates [1] “burlesque”. And burlesque, as a genre, bores me stiff – especially the modern version of it. It’s not that I “can’t relate” – one of the points of art is to learn to relate to things that aren’t part of your life, or to get better insights on things that are *or* aren’t parts of your life. Art should challenge you, and I actively seek out art that is different from my personal status quo. I’ve learned a lot, and grown as a person, for the effort.

Just not from burlesque. Or drag, for that matter.

As far as drag shows showing school children a window to that culture? Fair enough. We have a lot of cultures; some involve snake-handling, debutantes, monster truck rallies, soccer, “Real Housewives”, ultimate fighting, eating ghost peppers off the vine, and drag racing. I personally can tolerate, even respect several of those cultures without feeling any need to learn more about them than I do, but this isn’t about me; in the interest of raising well-rounded children, shouldn’t we also let them participate in in-church 24 hour prayer vigils, three-gun shooting competitions and Turning Point USA rallies? Give them a view into lots and lots of cultures? Have your people call my people.

I mean, as far as culture goes, in for a penny, in for a dollar.

Of course, the current fracas isn’t about exposing kids to different cultures; it’s about undercutting the dominant culture.

Of course, drag has existed for well over 100 years; it’s a political subject to day, because none of its current hot-point status is about “exposing children to culture” for its own sake.

Just for purposes of argument, let’s forget for a moment that drag, like the burlesque of which it is a minstrel-show version, is inherently sexual in nature; all of the tropes of burlesque were ways to play peek-a-boo with the sexual mores of the Victorian era, and Drag is an “ironic” homage to that era, around the claim that men with “alternative lifestyles” today have to be as sly and coded about their preferences as the straight world did 150 years ago. Which, given the near supremacy of “alternative lifestyles” in today’s dominant culture is itself just a tad preposterous [2]. Saying it’s not a primarily sexual art form is like saying burlesque is nice and chaste; it’s preposterous, and would get you laughed out of any room not controlled by lunatics manifesting a social agenda.

Don’t be a moron.

But I set out to write about a genre, not a political fracas, and it’s to there I’ll return; you wanna dress up and sing? Go to it! No need to save me a seat.

Continue reading

Dog Whistle

We talked last week about Peggy Flanagan’s absurd take on parenting.

Here it is again:

She followed up with this photo.

Check out that righteous Bowie knife.

There are only three interpretations for this symbology:

  • It was designed by someone who is unfamiliar with American iconography. If this is the case, wearing the shirt was pretty dang ignorant.
  • It’s an incredibly crude and juvenline jape about gender transition surgery: I’m throwing up in my mouth a little.
  • The Lieutenant Governor is talking tough: Y’know – saying she’s going to stab people who transgress to some indistinct degree or another against trans people. Y’know – like Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs”, only with actual intent.

Not sure which it is. I’m open to suggestions.

Speaking of which – I have four friends that one could classify as transgender. Two of them are from the “Armed Trans Don’t Get Shot” faction of the Second Amendment movement, whom I could see donning one of these:

Of course it’s a photoshop. Theatrical posturing about stabbing bigots is OK; taking a gun to them, probably not.

Which is a shame, since the gun might actually work.

Speaking of which, here’s the MN Gun Owners Caucus’s version:

It goes without saying that if a Republican threw a knife or gun reference into a t-shirt on a social issue, it’d be front page news, with thought-free “think” pieces clogging op-ed pages nationwide.

So I won’t say it.

Let’s Do Some Thunberging

Steven Miller on Twitter:

Speaking of “cyberbullying”: so when a teenager smiles awkwardly at guy tacitly harassing him at a rally in DC, it’s racism – but when a teenager rants at the UN like a junior Mussolini, before taking a “green” trip to the next stop on her agenda and thence home on $10M sailing yacht? Voice of a generation!

Just Another Kid Concerned About The Environment

Greta Thunberg seems to be for Swedish environmentalists what Alexandria “Tide Pod Evita” Ocasio Cortez is for American progressives; overconfident, undereducated, and very, very overpromoted.

I’ll give her this much, though; unlike the folks flying in private jets and ocean motor yachts to climate conferences, the girl – who has “led” a number of climate-related school strikes in Sweden – is putting her travel plans where her mouth is. More or less.

Greta Thunberg is to sail across the Atlantic in a high-speed racing yacht next month to attend UN climate summits in the US and Chile as part of a sabbatical year the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist will spend in the US.“Good news! I’ll be joining the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, COP25 in Santiago … I’ve been offered a ride on the 60ft racing boat Malizia II. We’ll be sailing across the Atlantic Ocean from the UK to NYC in mid August,” Greta tweeted. The journey will take two weeks.

So at least she’s sailing, rather than taking some plutoprog’s Gulfstream.

Although it’s not exactly the kind of boat my great-grandparents sailed from Norway and Sweden on. It’s the kind of rustic adventure Robin Leach in his heyday might have said was “a bit much”.

So – travel is apparently either for those who are wealthy enough to qualify as exceptions to global warming, or only for people who can take a month out of their lives to cross the ocean on a yacht that costs millions to build and tens of thousands a week to charter.

Sounds about right.

The Wrong Profile

The unqualified David Hogg couldn’t get into a junior college in Florida on his merits, but Harvard grabbed him because he’s got the right Social Justice profile. 

Kyle Kashuv – who survived the same shooting – got into Harvard on his merits.  

Or so he thought.  

Kashuv explains in this twitter thread:

Because it’s not enough merely to be a victim (forget about pretty brilliant). It’s about being the right kind of victim. Otherwise, you’re expendable – and, if you’re too obstreporous, must be destroyed.

Absolute Moral Authority

I wonder if these kids will get lionized and treated as the authorities that David Hogg has?

Survivors of a Colorado school shooting walked out of a vigil for their slain classmate Wednesday night in protest of politicians and other groups using it as a platform for gun control, a local report said.
The students from STEM High School, where two gunmen killed a student and wounded eight others Tuesday, began yelling from the stands that they “wanted to be heard” after two politicians and pro-gun control advocates addressed the crowd, according to the local NBC affiliate, KUSA.
They then stormed out of the vigil after Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet and Democratic Congressman Jason Crow addressed the crowd, the Denver Post reported.
The kids chanted “Mental health” and hurled expletives at the media, according to the report.

And I don’t know about you, but suddenly I”m feeling kind of proud:

“What has happened at STEM is awful. But it’s not a statistic. We can’t be used as a reason for gun control. We are people, not a statement,” one student said, according to video by KUSA.
Speaking of the lone fatality, 18-year-old Kendrick Castillo, another student added, “We wanted Kendrick to be mourned. We wanted all of you to join us in that mourning, but that was not allowed here. We all walked out. We were not kicked out.”

This nation needs fewer tragedies.

But if we had more of this kind of moral courage, we’d have a great start.

Human Shield

Remember this drawing?  It ran during the last Arab-Israeli conflict, to illustrate the moral difference between the tactics used by the two sides.

That kid who’s on all the news shows, David Hogg, the one demanding gun control?  The Left insists nobody is allowed to disagree with his silly proposals because as a shooting survivor, he has absolute moral authority.  And he’s just a kid, so arguing with him is “punching down.”  Ya big bully. 

I strongly suspect he’s an example of the Palestinian side of the drawing.  He’s the child shielding the people behind him.  They are the true evil.  Their tactics reveal it.

Joe Doakes

He’s sort of the Cindy Sheehan of the 2010s.

Harvard’s Everlasting Shame

Some think the admissions scandal currently in the news is a mortal blow to the importance of the Ivy League.
After listening to last night’s moronic “Westminster Town Hall” on MPR, featuring David Hogg – well, until I burned the radio out of my dashboard with a blowtorch – I’m pretty sure it’s the fact that Harvard invited him to attend.
Hogg’s address claimed the 2nd Amendment exists to protect “white supremacy”, and even linked it to “climate change” – further proof that Big Gun Control is entirely about logrolling the low-information, emotion-driven voter. He calls, naturally, for sweeping gun controls – and while polls show millennials are actually more libertarian on firearms than their elders, well, I’m pretty sure that’s why Big Left is funding Hogg and his fellow pocket fascists so heavily.
But let’s cut the crap, here.
————–
If you agree with Hogg, and want to exploit hysteria to ban a class of firearms that are mechanically indistinguishable from about 2/3 of the firearms in circulation, and are actually used *less* frequently in crimes, per capita, than any other – or, what the heck, ban all guns, as Hogg pretty much demands – there’s really only one route.
You’ve got to repeal the 2nd Amendment.
That means getting a 2/3 majority of the House and Senate on board. Even the current US House with its thin Democrat majority and growing neo-socialist caucus isn’t getting anywhere close. The Senate won’t, and never will – for reasons we’ll see in the next paragraph.
But you’re not done yet!
At the same time, you’ve got to get the legislatures of 37 states to call for the repeal. So far, I’m counting California, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware and Rhode Island, and maaaaaaaybe Illinois, Vermont, and even less likely Washington and Oregon. In the unlikely event they get every single one, that’s 11. The other 26 *will never happen*. And the battle over the issue would likely set in motion city-vs-outstate battles in NY, IL, WA, PA and OR that will make today’s red/blue divide look like a Mr. Rogers marathon, and perhaps even provide the final impetus for California to finally break up into 2-6 smaller states, 1-3 of which would likely vote “Molon Labe” (Kids, ask your friends’ gun-owning parents).
Think we’ve got tribalism today? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
So no. You’re not going to ban guns, or even broad classes of guns. Not legally.
————————
Of course, your other option is to just forget about that pesky Constitution, and go do it anyway. Which *will* – no “maybe” about it – lead to a civil war, one that’ll make the last one look like the Women’s March.
“Hahah, Merg, that’s Treason!”, some will say (indeed, have said). Perhaps, but not in the way they think.
Some greet that notion with a cavalier brushoff. “We’ve got the nukes!” says Rep. Swalwell. Huh. Let that rattle around your head for a bit.
Others – as long as I can remember – respond “What, you think you’re going to fight a tank with a rifle?” Which betrays a serious misunderstanding, I think, of who the military actually are, and where they come from. Hint: largely, not the political class who are pushing this sort of resolution.
———————
Take a deep breath and get real. Gun crime is down over the past 20 years by rates that, had they happened to cancer deaths or high school dropouts or DUIs would be considered modern day miracles.
Schools are 1/4 as dangerous as they were 25 years ago.
The US is NOT the most violent place in the world.
Stop being logrolled by emotional ninnies and the not-very-closeted authoritarians behind them, and get serious.

Politifact: Smear By Association

Politifact long ago gave up any claim to being non-partisan, at least among people who pay attention.   Fact-checking Politi”fact” is itself a target-rich environment for fact-checkers and “progressive” dogma-untanglers.

This year, they were kind of sly about it – the “winner” was “the “online smear machine” that attempted to “take down Parkland students.”

They’re referring mostly to Alex Jones’ reprehensible claims that the Parkland massacre was a setup and that the kids are “crisis actors”, and the small but vocal social media crowd that echoed the claim.

Of course, this brings up a logical problem, and a condundrum

First the logical problem, as David Harsanyi points out in Federalist:  –

Although I know of numerous Twitter accounts that have accused gun-rights advocates of being “terrorists,” many of them featuring blue checkmarks, I can’t recall a single conservative in Congress, anyone in the National Rifle Association, or any other mainstream right-wing group accusing the Parkland kids of being “crisis actors.” I do recall a single article on RedState questioning David Hogg’s actions the day of the mass shooting, which was quickly corrected and apologized for.

Yet PolitiFact spends much of its time detailing the Parkland kids’ cause by highlighting their political opponents who have nothing to do with the smear, implicitly linking them to the “Lie of the Year.” The piece is framed in a way that intimates that anyone contesting the Parkland kids’ political cause is now in league with the online mob – and Russian bots!

By the way, even if we allow that kids who experience this tragedy should dictate the contours of a policy debate, it is worth noting that there are “Parkland kids” who hold diverging opinions regarding the Second Amendment and arming teachers. They are largely ignored by the media.

It’s not the kids’ fault that they find themselves the focus of ugliness on social media. It’s the fault of those who attack them and the adults who exploit them for political causes. Young people should be given some leeway in their activism, even if they say ridiculous things—and David Hogg and other leaders of the March for Our Lives movement often say things that aren’t even in the proximity of the truth. There is no need for ad hominemattacks. But the “Parkland kids” were also given a massive stage on which to offer their uncontested emotionalism to drive the debate. Kids or not, Americans have every right to challenge their contentions.

And Politifact using Jones as the figurehead of this criticism is a strawman that tries to paint all criticism of Hogg and company as the same breed of crazy.   And yet Hogg and the rest of the kids that’ve been propped up with liberal plutocrat money deserve criticism; they are little petty tyrants in the making, and they are serial liars to boot.

Now the conundrum; without Politifact to tell people who Alex Jones was and what he was claiming, would anyone outside the alt-“right” fever swamp have ever heard of him?

The “online smear machine” is an amorphous and ugly entity that isn’t confined to any ideology and spares virtually no one in the public eye. But any way you look at it, imbuing it with an importance it doesn’t deserve isn’t doing public discourse any favors. Even if it makes conservatives look bad.

And finally – given that almost nobody in this country hears about Alex Jones except when the media expresses its high dudgeon over him, are his antics really “the biggest lie” of the year?  Or even the biggest lie about the Parkland massacre?

It’s debatable, in fact, that it was even the most significant lie disseminated about the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High. The sheriff of Broward County, after all, was featured at the widely covered CNN anti-gun rally where he misled the nation about the failures, cowardice, and incompetence that allowed the shooting to occur. And the sheriff of Broward County isn’t some random Twitter troll.

Yet.

Further evidence that the mainstream media needs to be distrusted but verified – and then, especially on hot-button topics like this, almost invariably distrusted some more.

Rhetorical Questions?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Remember Dan Rather, who insisted the letters showing President Bush lied about his military service were “fake but accurate?”

Remember the Cindy Sheehan, the Code Pink lady who protested at President Bush’s ranch because her son died in the war in Iraq?

Remember David Hogg, the kid who hid in the closet during the school shooting and became a national spokesman for gun control?

They were hot topics, media sensations, invited on all the news shows.  Their every utterance was treated as having absolute moral authority and cited by Democrat politicians as proof of the urgency to enact Liberal policies.  But none of those people are in the news anymore.  It’s as if they never existed.  They were used as props and discarded the moment they were no longer useful.

And now we have Christine Blasey Ford, who accuses Judge Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were teenagers.  That’s enough to temporarily resurrect Anita Hill, the woman who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings.  She won’t be in the limelight long.  She’s old news, too.

What is wrong with those people, that they’re willing to be exploited and later abandoned, merely to get a few seconds of attention?  Have they no pride?

What is wrong with those people who are willing to exploit and later abandon innocents who merely want a few seconds of attention?  Have they no shame?

Joe Doakes

Because it’ll be different with them…

Illiterates Lead

A couple of gun-grabber groups scheduled a protest over the weekend.

The plan was to picket the Minnesota “NRA Office”. 

On the one hand, I say “protest away”.  Especially the groups involved in Saturdays plans – the David Hogg-affiliated student group, and “Survivors Lead”, a new-ish gun grabber group made up of people who found “Protect” MN too sober and rational.

But whatever side of the issue you’re on, whatever your sympathies, there was one…er, flaw with the protest plan:

Oh, not to say that one of the event’s “organizers” didn’t try to defend the plan:

And let’s be honest – when you’re in the echo chamber, all that echoing sounds pretty cool:

Thing is, what the “students” and their adult advisors wranglers had done was go out to the NRA website, and apparently find “Locations”.

And saw that Suite 200 at Spruce Tree Square was listed.

Without bothering to read the link that the office was actually the Minnesota Peace Officers Standards and Training office – specifically, an office that administers a federal program allowing retired law enforcement officers – the ones that most of your gun grabbers think should be the only ones with guns – to get carry permits.  The instructors for the permits are certified by…well, the NRA.

So – is it a wonder they can’t research the law, history, statistics or current events, when they can’t even click a link to find out what’s in an office?

Dereliction

Glenn Reynolds on the institutional deflection after Parkland:

Despite receiving a warning directly from the Russian government, the FBI failed to stop the Tsarnaev brothers from staging the Boston Marathon bombing. Despite having plenty of resources, the Charlottesville police failed to stop a car attack that left a woman dead. The FBI interviewed Omar Mateen, the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter, and considered criminally investigating him. They didn’t — possibly because his father was an FBI informant.

The FBI also missed numerous “red flags” before the San Bernardino shooting. And despite having lots of warning, the FBI, the Broward County schools and the Broward Sheriff’s Department under Sheriff Scott Israel all failed to stop Nikolas Cruz from shooting up a high school.

And yet these repeated failures — among others — keep getting swept under the rug as we look for “solutions” to the problem of violence. No doubt Israel and the others whose incompetence made it possible for Cruz to kill his classmates were relieved to see our national discourse veer into questions of whether Laura Ingraham should lose sponsors for mocking David Hogg’s college-admissions failures, instead of their own failures to do their jobs.

Deflecting to “gun control” certainly takes heat off of the likes of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and the carnage on his watch, and that of his Democrat predecessor Bill “Rifle Up Your Butt” Daley.

Mayors of failed cities do a lot of deflecting, don’t they?

Open Letter To The Parkland Kids

To: David Hogg et al
From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re: Agenda item

7 dead in one Chicago neighborhood in 12 hours.

Of course, they were mostly black and brown, so they don’t look like any of you.  And they were mostly killed by people with criminal records (and, sadly, at least of the victims likely had records, too – that’s the way of inner city crime, which accounts for over 3/4 of this nation’s homicides (with and without guns) every year.   That means more people killed in two days that have died in all school shootings in the past five years, all rolled together.

But they’re black and brown and killed in ones and twos with weapons that aren’t on the social engineers’ hit lists yet.  And they had the bad fortune to be murdered  almost exclusively in cities run by the same political class that pays for your airfare and security and sign printing and also gets you all that A-list media treatment.  Cities that already have all the gun control measures “you” are so stridently demanding (fat lotta good they did, huh?) so nobody’ll be talking about those murders, will they?

Will they?

Will you all be marching through Chicago?  Calling a bunch of gang-bangers “terrorists” and “Murderers?”

No?

That is all.

Mama Said NARN You Out

Join me from 1-3PM today on the NARN!

Today on the show:

  • Let’s Make David Hogg a TV Star.
  • US Senate candidate Jim Newberger

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!

More Hogg Now!

To:  National Rifle Association
From:  Mitch Berg, devious peasant
Re:  David “Boss” Hogg

Dear NRA,

You need to pay any price, bear any burden, to get David Hogg a TV show.  Perhaps on Fox News.

You’ll have a supermajority in favor of the post-Heller interpretation of the Second Amendment for the next two generations.

With rhetoric like this:

“The pathetic f***ers that want to keep killing our children, they could have blood from children splattered all over their faces and they wouldn’t take action because they all still see those dollar signs,” Hogg said before describing the “exhaustion” he’s experienced as a result of his month-long stint as a political activist.

“At this point its like when your old-a** parent is like, ‘I don’t know how to send an iMessage’ and you’re like, ‘Ok give me the f***ing phone’ and you take it and you get it done in one second. Sadly, that’s what we have to do with our government because our parents don’t know how to use a f***ing democracy so we have to do it.”

Prime time cable network nightly show.  Now.

Maybe have John Paul Stevens for his first guest.