Whatever Strong Is

 ... these things aren't it.

I'm not sure what to make of the confluence of these stories, but they all make me think of Cardi B being called a "strong, black woman" as she behaves like a degenerate cow. 

It's not strength and it's not art, it's two women trading on their flesh.

There's Portland.

The situation in Portland did not improve after the election. Activists kept marching nightly. They swarmed the house of a newly elected city commissioner because he'd voted against the latest measure to defund the police. They vandalized 27 businesses along a six-block strip in Northeast Portland. They established an "autonomous zone" called Red House, ostensibly in support of a black and Native American family facing eviction. And on New Year's Eve, they used Molotov cocktails and other high-powered incendiary devices to cause tens of thousands of dollars in damage in downtown...

Wheeler brokered a supposed peace with the occupiers at Red House. But on January 6, the Portland Tribune reported that the zone was covered in trash and human filth; that the area, a short walk from where I'd lived until recently, had become unlivable. "There are men walking around with guns, pistols, long arms, shotguns, rifles (who approach you) if you get close to their camp," someone who lived within the zone told the paper. "This is definitely not our neighborhood anymore."

It's not a political movement, it's a tantrum. 

Further, money is not things. That link is a long post in response to the modern economic theory undergirding the stimulus and MMT crowd. Here are two tidbits.

(Summarizing a fallacy from the stimulus crowd): Spend and goods will come. Don't worry about who makes it and why...

(From the stimulus essay): Work incentives don’t matter. For decades, welfare measures in the US have been carefully tailored to ensure that they did not broaden people’s choices other than wage labor.

Well, if so much employment is on an active margin, people choosing employment or not, what other than incentives gets people to choose work? Work is not fun, especially jobs that the disadvantaged can aspire to.

It all makes me think of this uplifting image.

This is infantile. If you are perfect, then so is everyone else and there's no one need for improvement or effort.

Portland is what you get when you discover that Cardi B and stimulus bills don't deliver anything you really wanted. It's childish, deluded fools banging their spoons on their high chairs in the form of a wrecked city. It's the natural consequence of detaching having from earning.

Aaaaand back to Kipling.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."