Secrets of the City

Lileks is a fun read too. Bonus: Olde-tymey Christmas songs.

I’ve been riding bike to my in-laws’ in Rogers for four years now, and every year, the new subdivisions I see along the way seem to grow larger and multiply. Reverse white flight from inner-ring suburbs and outside the metro might be happening, but that’s not stopping the haphazard development of McMansion subdivisions haphazardly plopped on the land north and west of this line.

I’d be interested in some hard numbers about actual people in that story about the attractiveness of city housing. I hope it’s true. But I can’t imagine that the core of what makes of the suburbs — people with kids — are flocking to the city.

Jason, I can count several friends with two-plus families inside the confines of the Minneapolis/St. Paul borders, or just a block or two outside (the very southern edge of St. Anthony, not that you can really tell). I should be able to add another one to that list any minute now.

My statement was confusing. I meant “families of three or more.” They all have houses, careers, and kids — but that can mean anything from a marrried couple with three kids to a single mom with twins.

Besides, it’s not like kids need a yard anymore. These days, everything they do is institutionalized, commercialized, and/or virtualized, anyway — and the school system is not a problem for any English speaker with some smarts.

It’s strange that people who study this kind of thing feel that they need to include race as a factor in this trend. Why not just “affluent families” rather than “affluent white families”? We all understand that the vast majority of affluent families are white.

I’d guess that many affluent families of color have fled to the suburbs and that many are now moving back to the cities for the same reasons as white families. Is that not so? Have affluent families of color stayed in the cities when others have left?

And don’t cite the Huxtable family as an example. He had his office in the house, so moving wasn’t really an option.

Champs, I’m not questioning whether there are families in the city… I’m questioning whether there’s a suburban influx of new people into the city. Are families really moving back into the city?

By the way, congratulations to Leab for winning the first ever MNSpeak Fantasy Football League. (I came in second!) Check back next year, for the second “first-ever” MNSpeak fantasy football league.

Yes…Derusha would like some empirical evidence on this so that he can better sell his wife on the idea of moving inward from the MG.

I think I remember saying much the same thing the article about City Living was saying a few months ago- much to your skepticism jderusha.

I see you remain skeptical and that’s cool.

But I think you have to admit that the idea that people are fleeing the inner city in droves is outdated at best and simply not the case, at least not anymore.

Phear the Maple Grove!

Good point, Raindog. I certainly think (guess/assume) people are not fleeing the city, and that’s a good thing. My only question is where’s the evidence that people are flocking towards the city?

Tell one of those “Good Question” or “Reality Check” dudes at ‘CCO to look into those influx numbers.

Those guys are big stars. I’m not allowed to talk with them or even make eye contact.

I saw one of them on the street once. There was a page walking before him, throwing rose petals on the ground.

“A bag of frozen squirrel”?! WTF.

I think the article is the evidence.

Obviously it is not enough for you.

I wonder if it was Simek’s Squirrel or No Name Squirrel.

My Uncle Cecil in Indiana (he’s orginally from Kentucky) reportedly makes a great squirrel stew. I haven’t tried it (to the best of my knowldge), but that’s what I’ve always heard.

Newsflash: Kwanzaa is not a ‘real’ holiday, but rather, was ‘invented’ by a radical black separatist.

Yet every year the MSM dutifully ‘covers’ it.

Gag.

And don’t cite the Huxtable family as an example. He had his office in the house, so moving wasn’t really an option.

Mr. Huxtable was a doctor. It just seemed like he was home all the time. Mrs. Huxtable was a lawyer. She, too, did not “office” at home.

… which reminds me: why is it that when we reminisce about former Vikings, Ahmad Rashad’s name is rarely mentioned?

Define “real holiday”.

Kwanzaa is not a ‘real’ holiday, but rather, was ‘invented’ by a radical black separatist.

Thanksgiving wasn’t a real holiday, either, until a progressive Republican established it in the mid-19th century, and ultra-liberal Democrat later moved it to its present date in the 1930’s in order to give merchants an extra week of selling time before Christmas.

For that matter, Christmas wasn’t established as a US national holiday, either, until 1870, after enjoying a revival begun by an English novelist. Don’t forget that Christmas was actually outlawed by the Puritans in the 17th century after their arrival at Plymouth Plantation.

Newsflash: Bud is a racist. Ignore him.

No so Newsflash: Sparber can not argue the facts so he resorts to the old liberal standby:

Naughty name calling.

All right, Kwanzaa is an invented holiday. Have you looked up the history of Christmas? Jesus was born in the fall, and this holiday was arbitrarily placed on its current date to supersede a pagan holiday, Yule, that fell during that time. It simply took took a variety of pagan practices and superimposed Christian meanings atop them. It is ever bit as invented as Kwanzaa, but it just a bit older.

There’s your facts. Here’s another one — because you feel the need to denigrate an African-American holiday, for no reason other than the fact that, like every other holiday, it was manufactured, you are a racist. I wouldn’t say so, but for the added fact that you obsessive slag African-Americans on this site.

And now that the facts are in the open, I’ll go back to ignoring you, unless you want to talk about Saturday Night Live.

Geez why would blacks be radical or separatists?

Could it be that little thing called SLAVERY?

Or perhaps the fact that they were NOT ALLOWED TO VOTE?

Why can’t they just get along with what we good WHITE CHRISTIANS want and shut the hell up?!?!?

Happy Kwanzahannuchrismafestivus, you bitches!

msparber:

More African-Americans spent this season reflecting on the birth of Christ than some phony non-Christian holiday invented a few decades ago by an FBI stooge. Kwanzaa is a holiday for white liberals, not blacks.

It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI pawn, Ron Karenga, aka Dr. Maulana Karenga. Karenga was a founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers and a dupe of the FBI.

In what was probably a foolish gamble, during the madness of the ’60s the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the organization, the better. Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.

Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the ’60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. They did not seek armed revolution. Those were the precepts of Karenga’s United Slaves. United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names.

Whether Karenga was a willing dupe, or just a dupe, remains unclear. Curiously, in a 1995 interview with Ethnic NewsWatch, Karenga matter-of-factly explained that the forces out to get O.J. Simpson for the “framed” murder of two whites included “the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Interpol, the Chicago Police Department” and so on. Karenga should know about FBI infiltration. (He further noted that the evidence against O.J. “was not strong enough to prohibit or eliminate unreasonable doubt”  an interesting standard of proof.)

In the category of the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much, back in the ’70s, Karenga was quick to criticize rumors that black radicals were government-supported. When Nigerian newspapers claimed that some American black radicals were CIA operatives, Karenga publicly denounced the idea, saying, “Africans must stop generalizing about the loyalties and motives of Afro-Americans, including the widespread suspicion of black Americans being CIA agents.”

Now we know that the FBI fueled the bloody rivalry between the Panthers and United Slaves. In one barbarous outburst, Karenga’s United Slaves shot to death Black Panthers Al “Bunchy” Carter and Deputy Minister John Huggins on the UCLA campus. Karenga himself served time, a useful stepping-stone for his current position as a black studies professor at California State University at Long Beach.

Kwanzaa itself is a lunatic blend of schmaltzy ’60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. Indeed, the seven “principles” of Kwanzaa praise collectivism in every possible arena of life  economics, work, personality, even litter removal. (”Kuumba: Everyone should strive to improve the community and make it more beautiful.”) It takes a village to raise a police snitch.

When Karenga was asked to distinguish Kawaida, the philosophy underlying Kwanzaa, from “classical Marxism,” he essentially explained that under Kawaida, we also hate whites. While taking the “best of early Chinese and Cuban socialism”  which one assumes would exclude the forced abortions, imprisonment for homosexuals and forced labor  Kawaida practitioners believe one’s racial identity “determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding.” There’s an inclusive philosophy for you.

Coincidentally, the seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another charming invention of the Least-Great Generation. In 1974, Patricia Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snake head stood for one of the SLA’s revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani  the same seven “principles” of Kwanzaa.

Kwanzaa was the result of a ’60s psychosis grafted onto the black community. Leftists have become so mesmerized by multicultural nonsense that they have forgotten the real history of Kwanzaa and Karenga’s United Slaves  the violence, the Marxism, the insanity. Most absurdly, for leftists anyway, is that they have forgotten the FBI’s tacit encouragement of this murderous black nationalist cult founded by the father of Kwanzaa.

Now the “holiday” concocted by an FBI dupe is honored in a presidential proclamation and public schools across the nation. The only principle Kwanzaa promotes is an unbounded capacity to respect any faith but Christianity.

A movement that started approximately 2,000 years before Kwanzaa leaps well beyond collectivism and litter removal to proclaim that we are all equal before God. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). It was practitioners of that faith who were at the forefront of the abolitionist and civil rights movements. But that’s all been washed down the memory hole, along with the true origins of Kwanzaa.

Hey, don’t point fingers at me — I don’t celebrate Kwanzaa. But to complain that it is manufactured is nonsense. Almost all of our holidays are recent inventions; the rest are just older inventions.

Me, I’m a Juneteenth kind of guy.