Attorney General Elllison has Covid:

I was going to fill in those “mild symptoms” here, but I can’t seem to get rid of the Twitter response, so I’ll multitask. 

Get well soon, Your Highness. 

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails

If your wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, would you go with her to chemotherapy treatments?

Why not? Everybody loves a vacation day, right?

Democrats criticizing Gov. DeSantis for being “inexplicably absent” from the office apparently haven’t heard of “. . . in sickness and in health . . . .” That’s a shame. Lesko Brandon never tires of lying about his wife being killed by a drunk driver because he thinks it makes him a sympathetic figure. Ron DeSantis does not exploit his wife suffering every woman’s worst fear, he just quietly does the right thing by her.

The nation could use more people who stand by their mates, who keep their promises, who put family above publicity.

Joe Doakes

DeSantis is a moral, upstanding person.

That’s why the left hates him so terribly.

Think about the evolution of military equipment over the past 100 years.

In 1920, the infantryman carried a bolt-action rifle. The tanker drove a rattle-trap armored against rifle fire that could clank along at 3-4 miles an hour. Many of the navy’s ships were powered by coal, and the big cannon was the sine qua non of naval warfare. Pilots flew in planes made of wood and doped canvas – basically box kites with motors, armed with machine guns and glorified grenades.

Thirty years later, the infantry carried cyclic-fire weapons, tanks could shake off light artillery (usually) the Navy’s sunday punch was powered by oil, and planes were the piston-engine equivalent of todays’ Formula 1 cars and the first jets were duking it out in the skies, armed with cannon and the first crude guided missiles.

Thirty years after that, tanks could hit the speed limit, see in the dark and shake off big, powerful artillery. The pride of the Navy was nuclear-powered. The first “stealth” aircraft were just starting to take shape at the Skunk works, and the front-line planes were armed with radar and infrared missiles that could reach out, in some cases, 100 miles.

And forty years hence? Drones are in the field, ships are stealthy, aircraft can shoot down aircraft that have no idea they’re there.

But through each of those eras, there’s been one thing in common – the M2 (HB)

Which was, as it happens, adopted by the US Army (in this case ,the long-disbanded Coast Artillery branc) for the first time 100 years ago this year. I’m gonna throw it out today, since I have no idea what the actual date of adoption was.

Here’s a quick history and tear-down guide…:

…from a channel that’s probably the most essential source of firearms trivia on the Internet.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Senator Elizabeth Warren supports court-packing. That’s really embarrassing for a Harvard law professor. Even a night-school wonder like me, knows better.

The problem with the Supreme Court is not that it’s too small. The court is too large now, to get things done expeditiously and correctly: too many egos to sooth, too many agendas to accommodate, too many compromises requiring hair-splitting decisions.

The problem is not that the court is full of justices eager to overturn precedent. If a case was wrongly decided, it should be overturned in the interest of justice.

The problem is not that the court veers away from widely held public opinion. Pandering to public opinion is Congress’ job. And it’s mostly on volatile social issues where the Court has caused the worst problems.

The problem is Marbury v. Madison, a case decided fewer than 20 years after the Constitution was adopted. That’s the case in which the Supreme Court gave itself the power to throw out legislation the Court felt was incompatible with the Constitution. The court’s power-grab flatly contradicts the entire premise of a “enumerated powers” Constitution. That decision set up the Court to make historically and horrifically bad law: Dred Scott (struck down the Missouri Compromise which allowed slavery to spread to more states), Plessy v. Fergussn (upheld racial segregation); Korematsu (upheld concentration camps for American citizens); Roe v. Wade (upheld abortion on demand); Obergefell v. Hodges (struck down gay marriage laws nationwide).

Adding more justices to a run-away court won’t rein it in from ruling on social issues. A constitutional amendment is required. And if that doesn’t curb their enthusiasm, perhaps removal from office? A Harvard law professor should understand that.

Joe Doakes

There is limited evidence that Warren understands anything but getting and holding power.

In the early days of the pandemic, an MIT scientist did what Americans have always done best; turned their ingenuity to solve a problem, fast, well and cheap.

She developed a fast, inexpensive Covid test – in an amasingly short time:

Within a few weeks, Bosch and her colleagues had a test that would detect coronavirus in 15 minutes and produce a red line on a little chemical strip. The factory where they were planning to make tests for dengue fever could quickly retool to produce at least 100,000 COVID-19 tests per week, she said, priced at less than $10 apiece, or cheaper at a higher scale

And then the FDA got involved:

In the months that followed, Bosch responded to repeated requests from FDA reviewers for data and studies. When the agency finally put out guidance that summer about the performance over-the-counter home tests needed to meet, officials required that such tests be nearly as sensitive as the lab tests used to definitively determine whether a patient has COVID-19.

That standard proved difficult to meet. Rapid tests are usually sensitive enough to detect viral antigens when someone has enough of them to be able to spread the disease. Such tests are not as good at picking up cases in either earlier or later stages of infection, when viral loads are lower.

Bosch’s tests missed the FDA’s high bar. It wasn’t until the spring of 2021 that much larger companies were able to design similar tests — relatively inexpensive, over-the-counter rapid tests — that the agency found acceptable.

“You could have antigen tests saving lives since the beginning of the pandemic,” said Bosch, sitting in her lab at MIT. “That’s the sad story.”

Sometimes it feels a little simplistic, chanting “government is what holds us back“, like some knee-jerk reductionist libertarian yahoo.

But it’s not really wrong.

…and the universe delivered.

Russia’s hockey team goes on the ice wearing Soviet throwback uniforms.

And were promptly beaten by…

…Finland.

By the way – in what way is wearing Soviet retro-wear any different from swastikas and Totenköpfe?

BTW, Finnish for “Do you believe in miracles?” is “Ustokko ihmeisiin?”.

Neil Shah is running for the MNGOP nomination to run for Governor.

Kim Crockett is running for nomination to run for Secretary of State.

Here’s the Legislative Evaluation Assembly.

And here’s today’s playlist:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If China moves on Taiwan and Russia moves on Ukraine, we should move on Cuba. Think of the money to be made selling beachfront property to condo developers like . . . Donald Trump.

Hey, as long as The Big Guy gets his 10%, what’s the problem?

Joe Doakes

hey, there’s an invasion that would make American leftists sit up and pay attention.

I remember the way my kids would be all giddy, giggly and happy, running down the stairs to check out the presents on Christmas morning.

It’s the closest thing I can think of to how “progressives” sound when a natural disaster hits a red state.

Also – remember “weather isn’t climate!” – but only until it happens in a state where the Senators don’t hitch themselves to Climate Change as a policy driver.

With that in mind – prayers for the people who wound up on the wrong end of a bunch of tornados in Kentucky over the weekend.

…the Babylon Bee has become America’s newspaper record in recent years

This was the graph The Democratic Congressional campaign committee (DC cc ( released last week, purporting to credit President Branden with a drop, of sorts, in gas prices:

These are the actual prices since the beginning of his regime.

The blue graph above covers, literally, the last little square of the second graph.

It is, I think, further evidence of my theory that the Democrats realize they don’t actually need to push actual facts, since their audience just doesn’t think that critically.

I live in the Midway.

When people think of the Midway, they think urban blight – and they’re not wrong. .

South of Thomas, anyway. So far.

I’ve lived here a long, long time. I’ve been on the rollercoaster – the worst of the “Murderapolis” years (where Saint Paul was also beset with violent crime as well, although as usual to nowhere near the level of Minneapolis.

I’ve got no intention of going anywhere anytime soon.

And most of us live here without much incident.

And throughout the cities, most of us do. Some places it’s harder than others; I know people in North Minneapolis who’ve learned to tune out gunfire that’s not too close, sort of like infantrymen who ignore artillery shells that are passing overhead. Other places it’s harder for reasons that go beyond ambient crime; people stuck in the “George Floyd Autonomous Zone” or whatever they call it these days, or Powderhorn Park last year, where external forces change the neighborhood, against the neighbors will or not.

But for the most part, we live here, more or less like we did five or ten or 25 years ago. Maybe a little less retain, maybe a little more careful at stoplights – but life goes on, the changes slow enough, riots notwithstanding, not to raise any particular alarms.

But things are worse than they were five years ago; the numbers don’t lie. VIolent crime has skyrocketed. In Minneapolis, they were at 82 homicides so far this year. That was the total in 2016…

…for the entire state of Minnesota.

So life goes on – but all is not well, and all is not what it was five years ago, when Minneapolis had very low crime by urban standards, and carjacking was something you read about in Chicago. .We carry on – but we’re aware that property crime is a third above the national average; violent crime, double the national rate.

IShiny Happy People: bring it up because Ive been beset by a small plague of Shiny Happy People lately. Overwhelmingly young women in their late ’20s/early ’30s, visibly and vocally members of “progressive” Christian congregations, resisdents of third tier suburbs, who declare “Don’t believe all the apocalyptic hype; I’ve been to Minneapolis (or Saint Paul), a bunch, and it’s still pretty awesome”.

The message comes with an. implied “Tut tut, all you big angry white men; if lil’. ol’ me can take in a show, I don’t know what you’re jabbering about”.

I’ll meet ’em halfway. I’ve stopped bothering responding to hysterics from Orono and Landfall and their Mad Max fantasies.

But a quick note to the Shiny Happy People, the “progressive” evangelical tourists who drive in, proclaim, and drive back home.

On any given day in Minneapolis last year:

• There were five armed robberies – six times the Minnesota average per capita.
• There were 8-9 assaults. That’s almost triple the national rate, per capita. Note that this doesn’t include the rampant reports of gunfire that don’t produce a victim – each of those is an assault, although usually with. not complainant but a victim, either at North Memorial or out on the street.
• There was a murder, on average, every 4.5 days. The rate is closer to every four days, so far this year.
• There are ten burglaries
• There are thirty reports of theft – everything from reported shoplifting to porch piracy.
• There were ten car thefts.

That averages out to roughly 66 crimes per day- about 14 of them violent.

Spread that across a population of 400,000 people and your odds of being directly victimized by a crime of any kind is about 1/66 (and lower than that if you leave out the burglaries, which won’t apply to the Shiny Happy tourists).

Your odds of being involved in a violent crime on any given day in Minneapolis are about one in 2,666.

So you’re right; if you go to visit a congregation, or a restaurant or a coffee shop in the city, the odds that you’ll get back to Circle Pines unscathed are very, very high. Even in North Minneapolis, the odds favor you.

But for those of us who are here – many by choice, many not – the odds get worse every year. And the crimes that affect quality of life – the ones that make you focus on. personal security, make you leave a car length in front of you at traffic lights, make you run out to an Amazon drop location rather than get deliveries to your door, make you get your catalytic converters branded to help maybe prevent yet another petty but grossly expensive theft, or that make you wonder in the pit of the night “was that fireworks, or was that gunfire?”

Mind your tact, Shiny Happies. We don’t go home to Anoka when we’re done.

As many of you noticed, the blog was offline yesterday. And it’s been running slow for a few months before they.

The two were, as it happens, unrelated; there was a move to a new server that caused a few problems, and a denial of service attack bogged the blog down yesterday.

Hopefully we’ve got them both fixed.

Thanks to the good folks at Hosting Matters, who have hosted this blog for the past 15 years, and who are still the best in the business.

Not being able to reasonably expect your business not to get burned? That’s going to put a damper on a community’s sense of possibility.

Being afraid their children aren’t safe coming home from school?

“We have had students who have been walking home or walking to the bus stop and they have been robbed, and told to empty their pockets, hand over their cellphones,” Friestleben said. “I really would like to know what the public safety plan is. I don’t see it.”

This is not just a north Minneapolis thing. Washburn High School principal Dr. Emily Lilja Palmer also shared the post, and said that carjacking and robberies are up on the south side. She also added that the city is in crisis, and it’s hurting students. She said there are discussions currently happening about how to keep kids safe as they leave from winter activities in the dark.

But remember – the parents are the “domestic terrorists”.

If the City of Minneapolis doesn’t figure out what city government is for, Kyle Rittenhouse will seem like an episode of the Brady Bunch.

“Feminist” organization “Times Up” – established with the help of progressive plutocrats with deep pockets in the wake of the “#MeToo” movement – has collapsed, very publicly, very messily:

The vast majority of Time’s Up’s remaining staffers were laid off Friday in what they described as a debacle that began with leaders revealing they gave the news to the Washington Post first and ended with board member Ashley Judd breaking down in tears.

The embattled organization, limping since its CEO and entire board resigned this summer, announced Friday that it would lay off the vast majority of its remaining staff. Leadership informed staff of the decision in a virtual meeting that started 15 minutes before the Post article made the pink slips national news.

Turns out that while Big Left doesn’t care about morality, there are certain levels of hypocrisy that even the left can’t stomach – sometimes, anyway:

The attorney and women’s advocate Roberta Kaplan resigned Monday as chair of the prominent #MeToo group Time’s Up over the over fallout from her work advising Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration when the first allegations of sexual harassment were made against him last year.

Kaplan cited her work counseling the administration last winter and her more recent legal work representing Melissa DeRosa, a top aide to Cuomo who resigned Sunday, nearly a week after a report by the state attorney general concluded that the governor had sexually harassed 11 women.

“Justice” means what they say it means. No more, no less, no different.

It’s a Dennis Prager line, and it’s utterly correct.

John Miltimore goes over the “why”, on two issues Democrats claim to hold dear in their platforms – affordable housing and hunger.

And shows that in the 18 states that Democrats control, housing is less affordable, that people are hungrier, and it is in fact their fault, since there is in effect no Republican opposition for them to, er, overcome.

Prefer your left-shredding in convenient video form, from that noted tool of conservative intellectual thuggery…

…, the New York Times?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Had a rough weekend. Low grade fever, chills, sensitive skin, slept for hours. Finally got a lab test on Tuesday: positive for Covid. No Thanksgiving for me. You guys can split my share of the pie.

I’m fortunate to have a mild case. Four days of down time, about like we had in The Olden Days when somebody got the Flu, before Covid took over the entire world. Worked half a day yesterday and I’m “at work” today, sitting at my home computer pushing electrons around. Thank you, Lord, that I have an easy, indoor, sit-down job. This is why modern Americans survive at such high rates compared to other nations or historical times . . . I have paid leave, warm housing, plenty to eat. Prosperity does indeed save lives. If only the damned Liberals would quit trying to destroy it.

Joe Doakes

Get well soon, Joe.

And what you said about the left hosing everything up.

I’m encouraged by the fact that young people of all political stripes are more pro-Second Amendment than the rest of society.

This is one of ’em.

More, faster.

More, faster. 

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We don’t have a national firearms registry.  That would be illegal.

We just keep the sales records of every firearms dealer who went out of business.  Ever.

So that’s okay, then.

Joe Doakes

It most certainly is not – but that’s what happens when you start putting loopholes in civil rights.

Who might have warned you about this?

No idea. Seriously.

I’ve had a few commenters point out that the site has gotten rather slow.

The site was recently moved to a different server at my hosting service. That likely means your IP path to this site has changed; if your browser has the old IP address cached, that might cause a problem.

Trying from a different browser, or an incognito browser, or perhaps flushing your cookies, might help.

If it doesn’t, I’ll talk with my hosting company and see if it’s something on their end.

“Anti”-Fa / BLM “proteszters”, led by a man who is putatively George Floyd’s nephew, mostly-peacefully break into the home of the judge in the judge in the Kim Potter case, live stream the whole thing:

Among the many problems, here?

• If no legal consequences befall these “people”, confidence in the “justice” system will get smacked.
• And consequences happen here, but not for regular citizens – and they generally do not – then that’s another self-inflicted hit.
• And when people stop trusting institutions to create the order (combined with justice) that makes regular life possible, they do it themselves. And that’s usually a very bad thing.

Worst part of all? If Mike Freeman does something about this (which seems unlikely to this cynic; what, arrest George Floyd’s nephew?), that’ll be the good news – since whoever replaces him (Ryan Winkler?) will be even worse.

Get on the list to come to the SD39 debate on 11/16 – SD39Republicans@gmail.com

Or go to precinctstrategy.com and click Minnesota.

…I worry that today’s Democrats will re-assess their addiction to gaining and consolidating power and stop overreaching, to say nothing of gaslighting all of society…

…actual Democrat reality steps in.

To midterms!

“So, why are Minneapolis and Saint Paul simultaneously gentrified to the hilt, plagued with blight, and devoid of “affordable housing” in 2041?”

Do you suppose anyone will make the connection?

I mean, the odds of people getting smarter between now and then don’t look great…

Virginia is so racist, it just elected its first black woman as Lieutenant Governor.

Jamaican-born Winsome Sears, a former Marine and assemblywoman…

…is the new black face of white supremacy, I guess: