So is this a tourism ad, or a cry for help?

Odd tourism ad, doncha think? Usually you get a picture of nature, or a soaring skyline, or beatiful people enjoying dazzling nightlife. But not this time.

So what does a tourist do in Portland? Apparently you can cross a bunch of bridges. That might have some allure. I have it on good authority that Portland has a number of restaurants, but it’s difficult to tell what the bill of fare might be from this brown paper ad. It’s possible the restaurants in Portland feature word salad. “We’re a place of dualities that are never polarities.” What does that even mean? Does it mean this?

That might be the dazzling nightlife? After all, things are going well:

Every member of a police crowd-control unit in the US city of Portland has resigned after one of its officers was indicted on an assault charge.

The charge stemmed from violent anti-racism protests that rocked the city, in the state of Oregon, last year.

Prosecutors allege the officer used “excessive and unlawful use of force” against a protester in August 2020.

But Portland’s police union described the decision to prosecute the officer as “politically driven”.

The reporting here is from the BBC. Looks like they didn’t get the “mostly peaceful” memo. 

…Minneapolis’s PR firm is going be earning its pay over this next one-to-fifty years.

“Protesters” took to blocking off streets in the Uptown area over the weekend – leading to an incident where someone drove into the crowd, killing one woman.

Which led a crowd to block off Lake Street yet again. And it wasn’t an especially “peaceful” bunch of protesters.

One local news crew actually videotaping a woman wandering around, gun in hand, shooting at God only knows what or two:

Police arrest a suspects after we heard shots fired following a confrontation with a driver. pic.twitter.com/T1IOf5bkn9

— Bill Keller (@billkellerfox9) June 14, 2021

I’ll try to post the video when and if it becomes publicly available.

By the way – ain’t Uptown looking grand these days?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Happy Anniversary from your friends, the right-wing accelerationists, Nazis, Umbrella Man, the Klan, Trump supporters and other deplorable people bitterly clinging to their guns and Bibles.

Joe Doakes

The Babylon Bee has a hard time keeping up with modern Progressivism.

Twin Cities media – in this case, the “Minnesota Reformer”, aka “MN Monitor 4.0” – is apparently still hoping for the FBI to charge “Umbrella Man” with destroying or damaging 700 buildings last year.

I’m sorry. That was snarky.

I’ll try again.

They are apparently still awaiting formal confirmation that Umbrella Man led a horde of “white supremacists” who managed to damage 700 buildings, while leaving not so much as a single swastika or “14 Words” refernce – being simultaneously a bunch of brain-damaged losers and operatives with Mossad-level fieldcraft skills. .

Updates as the situation warrants.

An allegory in three acts:

Act 1

SCENE: An elementary school classroom.BULLY is sitting at the desk next to KID. A half dozen pencils lie strewn about the floor around KID’s desk.

BULLY: Throws a pencil at KID. KID looks annoyed, but shakes it off.

BULLY: (Sotto Voce) Hey, kid! (KID looks over as BULLY whips another pencil at him. KID, more annoyed, shakes it off)

BULLY: (Sotto Voce again). Hey, kid!

KID: Tries to ignore BULLY.

BULLY: (Flings pencil, hard . The pencil catches KID in the corner of the eye, and it hurts.

KID: (Jumps up). What’s your problem?

BULLY: Ms. Walburn! Ms. Walburn! The Kid is trying to pick a fight with me!

MS. WALBURN: Kid, you have detention tonight!

BULLY: Ms. Walburn, have I not been warning you about Kid’s propensity to bullying for days, now ?

KID: What the…?

And SCENE

Act Two

SCENE: In the kitchen of a single-wide trailer. WIFE Is sitting on the floor sobbing. HUSBAND is looking around, apparently making sure nobody saw what just happened.

HUSBAND: Look, you provoked me.

WIFE: (Sobs)

HUSBAND: I mean, OK, hitting was wrong, but you have to admit, the way you badger me about things is emotional abuse. And you know what they way – emotional abuse is worse than physical abuse.

WIFE: (Sobs)

HUSBAND: And you were badgering me. I mean, criminy, we both have big problems, here.

WIFE (Sobs)

HUSBAND: I mean, since emotional abuse is worse, and you do a lot of it, we’re really still not even even-up, here…

WIFE: (Sobs)

HUSBAND: I mean, you’re lucky I’m willing to call it even. It’s a gift.

WIFE (Sobs)

Act Three

SCENE: The United States, today.

BIG LEFT: “Whiteness” is a mental disorder that goes along with merely being white. Whiteness and systemic racism are inseparable.

NORMALS: That’s bulls#it.

BIG LEFT: That’s your privilege, racism, misogyny, transphobia and ethnocentrism talking.

NORMALS: That’s just word salad at best. “Inclusion language” – an arcane code designed to show you’re one of the “good ones” – at worst.

BIG LEFT: What if your employer were to find out about your retrograde thinking? They might not appreciated it.

NORMALS: So you’re going to try to cancel me, now?

BIG LEFT: Pffft. There is no such thing as “cancel culture”.

NORMALS: Sure there is. If we’re mainstream conservatives, and haven’t gone as undercover as a Mossad operative in Tehran, we can’t get jobs in Academia, public education, much of private education, Hollywood, many public employee unions, the news media, a whooole lot of BIg Tech, an increasing number of smaller companies. And if we break cover – or any “evidence” of mainstream conservatism is found, we can get hounded out of our jobs, our hobbies, our volunteer work, deplatformed, and have our personal lives upended as well.

BIG LEFT: Republicans do it too!

NORMALS: So let me get this straight – it doesn’t exist, but Republicans do it too?

BIG LEFT: Evangelical groups picketed LGBTQ bookstores! Gays were oppressed!

NORMALS: OK, so that’s a “yes”. And let’s be clear on this – you go back almost forty years, to very localized episodes, to find behavior that pretty much every significant conservative repudiates today. As opposed to people being barred or drummed out of whole swathes of academia, business and culture. No cancel culture? Please.

BIG LEFT: Nope. There is only “accountability culture”.

NORMALS: “Accountability” for what? Having, much less voicing, utterly mainstream Republican views?

BIG LEFT: For the results of your Privilege and Whiteness!

NORMALS: Privilege – an Orwellian deflection of classist and cultural privilege shared by the left’s “elites” over to race? “Whiteness” – a bit of made-up pseudo-social-science designed entirely to denigrate and invalidate people without needing to engage in any facts?

BIG LEFT: Sounds like “white fragility” talking…

NORMALS: More word salad, with a siding of making facts up as you go along.

BIG LEFT: Here’s the only “fact” you need: January 6! The worst act of terrorism in American history!

NORMALS: Leaving aside the fact that it’s far from the only partisan violence at the seat of American democracy, January 6 was something that every significant conservative repudiated. But you keep on trying to apply it to everyone you disagree with, as if it gives The Left a permanent intellectual get out of jail free card.

BIG LEFT: Bet you wouldn’t be talking so big if you had a bunch of protesters in front of your house, would you? It’d be a shame if something…broke.

NORMALS: Go ahead. Make my day.

BIG LEFT: It’s a threat! It’s a threat! Behold the wave of white supremacist terror we’ve been warning you about for the past fifteen years!

And SCENE.

Winston Smith, the man killed last week in Uptown, was apparently already “at war” with the police:

Smith’s violent resistance to arrest may have been motivated by his belief that he was engaged in a “war” on cops.

For years leading up to his death, Smith made statements across social media platforms vowing to shoot police officers if he were ever to be apprehended, encouraging his followers to bring guns and bombs to protests and outlining tactics he believed would be most effective to kill members of law enforcement. He also frequently suggested that he was meeting with like-minded people and taking tangible steps towards these aims.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvbAftCj5rA

“Get ready for war,” Smith told his followers via Instagram in mid-April.

“Motherfuckers are finna move on these ‘ops,” he continued, using a slang term that means people would attack police.

“All the shooters, suit up,” he ordered. “Lace your boots up, it’s war fucking time. Bring your gun to the protest, bring them fucking bombs and rocket launchers and all that shit.”

Even some of the local media – in this case, ,reliably left-of-center Fox9 – are taking their break from the Twin Cities media’s usual “write a hagiography first, ask questions later” procedure and noting that there just might be an elephant in this particular room.

UPDATE: It’s unclear from media or law enforcement reports whether Smith was involved in January 6, the only example of violence in American history.

Have we reached a tipping point in the culture war as re guns?

It’s not a new point – if you’ve listened to my show, you’ve heard the story.

But this past year, 40% of gun sales were to people outside the “white male who’s already got a bunch of guns” stereotype:

Not only were people who already had guns buying more, but people who had never owned one were buying them too. New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners. And the data, which has not been previously released, showed that new owners were less likely than usual to be male and white. Half were women, a fifth were Black and a fifth were Hispanic.

In all, the data found that 39 percent of American households own guns. That is up from 32 percent in 2016, according to the General Social Survey, a public opinion poll conducted by a research center at the University of Chicago. Researchers said it was too early to tell whether the uptick represents a reversal from the past 20 years, in which ownership was basically flat.

Further evidence (along with the fact that younger Americans overwhelmingly support the right to keep and bear arms) of this thesis.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/an-arms-race-in-america-gun-buying-spiked-during-the-pandemic-its-still-up/ar-AAKvZfB?fbclid=IwAR3XpPNFnN3AzvSBuOo0Lg1yYnPyr606bKqagbSsPdSkYuIWo5cFxPEFA90

The sound of gunfire, off in the distance/I’m getting used to it now.

That wasn’t off in the distance. It was the scene at 38th and Chicago yesterday, also known as George Floyd Square. Sure, it was the middle of the day, but it’s always a good time to bust a few caps, right? This news report was, ahem, deadpan:

The Minneapolis intersection where George Floyd died was disrupted by gunfire Tuesday, just hours before it was to be the site of a family-friendly street festival marking the anniversary of his death at the hands of police.

Nothing quite says family-friendly street festival like random gunfire. But fortunately, a bona fide journalist was on the scene:

Journalist Philip Crowther, who was shooting live video from 38th and Chicago, reported hearing as many as 30 gunshots about a block east of the intersection. Crowther said a storefront window appeared to have been broken by a gunshot.

“Very quickly things got back to normal,” Crowther said. “People here who spend a significant amount of time, the organizers, were running around asking, ‘Does anyone need a medic?’ It seems like there are no injuries.”

Mr. Crowther? There’s nothing normal about any of this. But hey, we appreciate the narrative!

Friday Morning: local media cover the bejeebers out of a press conference – the sort of coordinated coverage that screams “a PR flak is working this hard”:

While challenges remain, downtown Minneapolis’ progress toward a post-pandemic revival is picking up steam, according to the panelists who joined a Friday morning online forum hosted by the Minneapolis Downtown Council…“My take on all of this is that you haven’t seen anything yet. Downtown is going to come back stronger and bigger than ever,” said Fhima, who leads the kitchen at Fhima’s Minneapolis.

Still, the panelists said, downtown is currently battling the perception that it’s unsafe — a perception Fhima [1] said was fueled by the lack of foot traffic on downtown streets during the pandemic, when many office workers shifted to working from home and widespread closures of restaurants and venues kept visitors away. Just as an empty restaurant might make diners question the quality of the food, he said, an empty downtown can leave visitors unnerved

“Challenges remain”, indeed.

18 hours after that coordinated burst of manufactured sunshine blowing up the Twin Cities collective nethers:

Two people were killed and 8 wounded in a shooting in downtown Minneapolis, police said early Saturday.

“Preliminary investigation reveals that two people were standing in a crowded area and got into a verbal confrontation,” the Minneapolis Police Department said in a statement.” Both individuals pulled out guns and began shooting at each other.”

Look – I enjoy downtown. I’ve worked there, and 2-3 years ago I used to go down there for concerts fairly regularly – move the Dakota than the First Avenue these days, but whatever. And as a taxpayer, I’ve had a lot of taxpayers money “invested” in it on my behalf, so it’d be nice if the current occupants at the City Council stopped screwing things up.

Not holding my breath, of course.

[1] Have any of Dave Fhima’s restaurants ever succeeded? . I haven’t paid much attention to the restaurant scene, but going back ten years or so, any of his places turned into their own vacant slices of downtown in a year or so.

After reading this story, I’m overwhelmed with a desire to lead a movement to get conservatives to eschew smashing their own faces into rock or cement walls.

No true conservative would ever smash their face into a cement or rock wall.

Just a bunch of face smashing sheeple.

Who’s with me?

Remember when there was an unstated rule, when following news coverage of a crime in the Metro – if they didn’t mention the offender’s ethnicity or show a photo, it actually answered the question?

New addition to the rule: if the story pertains to criminal justice’s response to last year’s riots, and the offender’s ideology – “Boogaloo”, “proud boy”, whatever – isn’t mentioned, you know by omission whose “side” they were on.

Case in point.

Prove me wrong.

There was a time when news outlets in the Twin Cities would, on occasion and when it was germane to the story, reach out to people on the political right. It even got to the point, in the last aughts, when lowly lil’ ol’ me was getting occasional calls from Channel 4, MPR and WCCO Radio for a grassroots conservative perspective on stories. This hit a peak during the Tea Party years…

…and then, abruptly, stopped.

We’ll come back to that.

The “point/counterpoint” feature was, if not a staple, at least a fairly normal part of American media life not all that long ago. Before “Crossfire” – which, I’m surprised and pained to see, has been gone for over 15 years – there were others; the earliest I can remember was a weekly bit on “Sixty Minutes”, “Point/Counterpoint”, with liberal Shana Alexander and James Kilpatrick – two articulate spokespeople for two diametrically opposed viewpoints.

Of course, CNN’s Crossfire was the biggest of them all. The original cast – Pat Buchanan and Tom Leyden – was the best, and sometimes created some fantastic TV – and I say this as someone who was pretty much a Democrat back then, although I hadn’t really thought that much about it (which makes me amply qualified to be a Democrat today). The most memorable bit, in those days when “white supremacist” groups operated in the open and were at least an order of magnitude larger than they are today, was an interview with a uniformed American Nazi. And Leyden, the show’s liberal and a World War 2 veteran, opened the segment by saying “My biggest regret in life was that I didn’t kill more of you back during the war” as the normally un-out-irascible Buchanan looked on, his jaw momentarily agape.

It’s a scene you wouldn’t get today – partly because any notion of patriotism and objective good and evil is gone from the left…

…and partly because Crossfire is long gone.

Now, according to Ben Domenech at Federalist, it was killed by Jon Stewart, who during a fabled appearance in 2004 completely trashed the premise of the show:

Readers will recall this was the infamous “hurting America” clip, where Stewart crapped all over the very concept of a debate show that paired left and right as co-equals in a running debate over the direction of America.

Stewart, who’s a fan of uninformed hubristic rants generally but will put the clown nose back on the minute you call him on it, went on a jeremiad against hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala as representing the worst aspects of American politics. But looking back on the ramifications of his comments — “Crossfire” was canceled months later — what do we see? There is today essentially no program on all of cable television that pairs left and right perspectives on camera as co-equal hosts, allowed to engage in free and open debate about the topics of the day.

Domenech’s premise – that event was the beginning of the end of actual debate in the media:

So we should ask: Is that a good thing? Is the media landscape Stewart helped create better for it, where Brian Williams regularly engages in Stewart-like snark (he called Ron Johnson a Russian asset the other day for reading a Federalist article into the record) and Tucker Carlson is the biggest name as a solo act in cable news?

In a context in which so much ink is dedicated to the concept of silos and the elimination of common space between right and left — and I mean the real right and left, not David Brooks and Maureen Dowd — do we honestly want a world where there is no space where these warring sides meet to do rhetorical battle?

The answer is: of course not. It’s much, much worse. The inability to have a space where such debates play out, and the inability of existing entities to provide such a space, has led directly to a degradation of our political conversation and a lack of familiarity with even the most basic version of the other side’s perspective on the world.

Domenech may have a point – the event was certainly the beginning of the end on cable.

But the stifling of actual co-equal debate began much earlier. I recall the woman who edited the “Letters to the Editor” page at the Strib, back before the internet made everyone an LTE editor, and then before social media made us all stupid, describing on a talk show how she made sure she picked only the dumb voices on some subjects, like gun control and abortion. You know which side she favored.

But it’s become absolutely airtight. As I noted way up above, local media made a point of at least acknowledging some sort of opposing opinion. During the run-up to the Republican National Convenion in 2007, I got invited on an MPR program on the planned protests, to discuss planned counterprotests. Because there was a counterpoint, and there was another side.

A few years later, when I spent some time fact-checking NPR’s fact-check column, both here and via email – correctly – one of MPR’s news execs inadvertently cc’ed me on an email to RIchert, telling her not to bother engaging. And that was the last I’ve heard from NPR, on any level, for any reason.

And it’s not just me. Far from it – even “tame” liberal Republican voices like David Brooks are getting rarer.

It was almost like a switch flipped, along about 2011. LIke the media saw what a motivated, decentralized, idealistic conservative-libertarian throng like the Tea Party could so (and did, in 2010), and figured they needed to starve it of that most precious political commodity ,air time.

I strongly suspect that the “outing” of “JournoList” didn’t end the collusion around the progressive narrative in the media – indeed, I suspect that, like an evil, adenoidal Gandalf, it just came back, bigger and stronger and more secret still.

And the nation is much worse off for it.

Twelve years ago, during the first year or so of the Obama administraiton, I pointed out my, shall we say, skepticism over the Administration’s, and Big Left’s, claims that we were on the verge of a wave of “white supremacist terror” that was going to, in the words of more than a few pundits, “dwarf 9/11”.

White supremacist terror was certainly a real thing. In the 1920’s, aided and abetted by Woodrow Wilson, the Klan was a major power in the South, and could even muster thousands of member to rallies here in Minnesota.

And I”m old enough to actually remember active White Supremacists doing bad things; the Medina Shootout, the shooting of Alan Berg, and others.

But to paraphrase Martin Luther King, the arc of White Supremacist organizations has been long, and has curved toward Palookaville. According to actual sources that had to keep their jobs by reporting facts, groups like the Klan, the Bund and other radical white supremacist organizations mustered:

• Millions of members and active sympathizers in the 1920s
• Hundreds of thousands by the 1960s
• A few tens of thousands by the time I graduated from high school, after a decade and a half of rigorous prosecution.
• As of 2015 or so, a few thousand, powerless, isolated, ridiculed, inbred losers living in their parents basements.

The number of actual identifiable active “White supremacists” has shrunk, in terms of verifiable numbers, by an order of magnitude every generation.

Of course, with the election of Trump, the narrative turned: while there were fewer verifiable, actual members of organizations, the “rhetoric” of the new administration “created more sympathizers”…

…which was simultaneously unverifiable, un-testable, and conveniently allowed the keepers of the narrative to brand anyone to the right of Amy Klobuchar as a “potential” “white supremacist”. Like Candace Owens.

But I digress.

The narraative saw comical spectacles like the pathetic gaggle of a hundred or so endomorphic cretins gathered from across ten or more states to Charlottesville, parading with tiki torches before set upon by a much larger mob with the active connivance of a “progressive” mayor, presented as evidence of the coming Racemageddon.

Berg’s 20th Law reads “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” has heretofore concerned itself with dime-bag racial huckstery like last week’s collossal FUBAR at Adelphi University, where university staff indulged in a “Ready, Fire, Aim” moment: an anonymous social media post declared that there was a wave of lynchings of blacks headed toward…Adelphi?

In response to the anonymous post — which included no corroborating evidence — the school sent a statement to the student body.

“There have been recent incidents of students using racial slurs, hateful comments, and reported threats of violence and retaliation on social media — and sadly, this is not the first time these issues have occurred,” said Adelphi President Christine Riordan. “To those among us who have been targeted, directly and indirectly, we hate that this has happened to you, and we hate that we have not yet found a way to stop it.”

“Ignorance, racism, hate and violence hold no place in the Adelphi community, yet those things keep happening here,” continued the communication. “We know there is no place at Adelphi for inexcusable messages of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, but such racist attacks are a stark reminder of the work we need to do to combat systemic inequality and ongoing racism in our very own community.”

Adelphi University Strategic Communications Director Todd Wilson directed Campus Reform toward another statement published the following day.

The second statement admitted that public safety and local police officers “have continued to ask for direct evidence of threats from those who have received them firsthand and none have been submitted for investigation.” 

As with the entire wave – remember that word – of such hoaxes, so significant as to lead to the enshrining of Berg’s 20th Law, there shall be none.

But maybe I, and my law, have thought too narrowly.

The law focused on penny-ante hoaxes like Adelphi, or this one (one of several such in recent years, which seem to come up so frequently I have to check to make sure they’re not the same episode) or the similar one at Saint Olaf a few years back (a school which is no stranger to hate crimes, but all of them seem to be directed at the right).

But the entire “wave of terror” narrative applies. Like the scads of little hoaxes, everything about it must be observed, questioned, verified…

…and, if the pattern continues, as it usually seems to do, mocked and taunted from public life.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Andrew McCarthy writing at National Review says the Chauvin jury was correct to convict him, not based on anything reported in the media or introduced as evidence at trial or the pervasive atmosphere of intimidation, but because the conviction means Chauvin is a bad cop and that exonerates the rest of society from the charge of systemic racism. 

Sacrificing a victim to the mob is shameful.  Twisting your shameful act to pretend it’s all for the greater good is disgusting.  But I expect nothing less from a Never-Trumper. 

Joe Doakes

It’s the sort of rationalization I expect from someone who spent way too much time in the prosecution industry.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We’ve heard a lot of legal expertise tossed around lately.  Let’s see how easily our resident legal scholars handle a first-year law school exam question.:

Criminal Procedure quiz, essay portion:

A man is accused of committing a crime in Minneapolis.  The prosecuting attorney spends a year tainting the jury pool with pretrial publicity.  Defendant moves for a change of venue citing his Constitutional right to a fair trial but the judge concludes the State’s actions have been so widespread, so pervasive, so completely corrupting, that the Defendant cannot get a fair trial anywhere in the state.

The judge’s choices are:

A.  Hold the trial in Minneapolis since that’s where the alleged crime occurred, even as the mob outside the courthouse threatens to burn the city if the man isn’t convicted;

B.  Dismiss the charges on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct in violation of the Defendant’s Constitutional rights.

If the judge chooses A, he opens the door for the State to violate future defendants’ Constitutional rights in a similar manner.  If the judge chooses B, the mob burns down the city. What should the judge do?   Explain your answer in 100 words or less giving citations to relevant statutory, case-law, and rule authority.

You have one hour.  Begin.

Joe Doakes

Er..Racism and White Privilege and the Patriarchy?

Those seem to be the answers for everyone question one can’t answer these days.

The Chauvin trial wrapped up yesterday. As this is written, the jury is deliberating.

But well into last week, Saint Paul was strapping in.

Saint Paul is smoking ’em if they got ’em.

The Midway Menards hasn’t yet piled stacks of plywood in front of the store – which is the “smoke ’em if you got ’em” moment, from where I sit.

Some merchants are of the opinion that some kind of supplication to the crowd might buy them some grace.

But most of the biggest victims last year were immigrants and merchants “of color”, and there’s no reason to expect the white left-wing college kids who did most of the burning last year are going to be any different this time around.

If some legislator wants to push a bill removing “duty to retreat” and allowing self-defense of felony-level destruction of property via lethal force, I’ll pound all the pavement they need.

Or, y’know, assert the rule of law:

DeSantis: “If you riot, you are going to jail, and you are going to have to spend time in jail. If you assault law enforcement in a violent assembly, you are definitely going to go to jail. You burn down somebody’s business. …”https://t.co/58PwCjPfxL

— John Robb (@johnrobb) April 19, 2021

Assert it equally, regardless of class, race or all the rest? Absolutely – suggest otherwise (or suggest I suggest otherwise) and you are depraved and need to be shunned.

But assert it, for chrissake.

The press “reports” on Maxine Waters’ weekend trip to Brooklyn Center:

U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters Visits Brooklyn Center Protests https://t.co/J1tpPQ8kvh pic.twitter.com/6s6zBhyVWA

— WCCO | CBS News Minnesota (@WCCO) April 18, 2021

Did they cover everything?

Miss anything?

Like…the incitement to violence?

From the party (and media) that seems to think that there was no political violence in this country before (or apparently after) January 6?

UPDATE/BUMP: Oh, yeah – like Lisa Bender and Philippe Cunningham, Waters wanted special treatment while she incite her violence.

…that Reverend King…

Headed to Minneapolis to stand with the Floyd family as closing arguments are set to be made today. pic.twitter.com/kkS9KtHzq1

— Reverend Al Sharpton (@TheRevAl) April 19, 2021

…flew coach.

…for any DFLers that happen to be reading.

Yesterday, on the one hand, DFL rep Jennifer McEwen, sounding as if she were nearly in tearms, chided her GOP colleagues for attacking Maxine Waters, who spent her weekend telling Demcorats to riot if they didn’t get the verdict they wanted in the Chauvin trial…

WATCH: Democrat Senator defends Maxine Waters as "an icon" after she came to Minnesota and incited violence against law enforcement.

23 Senate Democrats voted NO on a resolution supporting the @MNNationalGuard. #mnleg pic.twitter.com/LujTln5XPH

— MN House Republicans (@mnhousegop) April 19, 2021

Right after that, the DFL moved a resolution condemning the National Guard – part-time soldiers who live among us all – for supporting the effort to keep “Anti”-Fa from burning down. more poor, immigrant and minority neighborhoods:

WATCH: Democrat Senator defends Maxine Waters as "an icon" after she came to Minnesota and incited violence against law enforcement.

23 Senate Democrats voted NO on a resolution supporting the @MNNationalGuard. #mnleg pic.twitter.com/LujTln5XPH

— MN House Republicans (@mnhousegop) April 19, 2021

Do these people speak for you?

And if you deflect to “January 6”, in the seeming belief that there was no pollitical violence in this country before that day, I will mock and taunt you for a month straight, and you will deserve it.

This was Keith Ellison, the other night in Brooklyn Center:

MN Attorney General Keith Ellison also addressed the crowd. @kare11 pic.twitter.com/ztGklOazWY

— Heidi Wigdahl (@HeidiWigdahl) April 13, 2021

So we have:

• Minnesota’s top “law enforcement officer”
• Out after the curfew his political class imposed
• Telling (the right) people to go ahead and flout the curfew

I’m going to need to find all these examples of Ellison’s perfidy and collect ’em all in one place for 2022. This stuff needs to get dragged out of the memory hole…

…for whatever good it’ll do.

Watching what’s going on now, I’ve had just about enough of two responses:

“It’s just property”

Let’s say you’ve worked hard, and spent $40,000 on a car. Since the average median income is about $40,000, that’s a year out of your life (your math may vary; If you make $100,000 a year, imagine you bought a Range Rover). You can spread that out over 4 to 7 years with a loan – but it’s still got to get paid, which means you are still going to spend a year of your life to pay for that car.

Somebody steals or destroys it. That means they have taken the work from a whole year of your life.

Without paying you.

And saying “it’s covered by insurance“ is a copout; instead of appropriating the life and labor of one person, you’re spreading it out across everyone. Insurance against accidents and the vicissitudes of life is one thing; assuming insurance is there to pay for someone’s looting or crime spree is the same as saying “this group of people is entitled to that group of people’s labor, without compensation.”

Stealing and destroying things, and saying “someone else will pay for it“, whether it’s one person or hundreds of thousands, is no different than making them work for you for free.

If someone openly talked about forcing a group of people to work for them for free, what would you do?

If someone were coming at you with the explicit purpose of forcing you to work for them for free, what would you call it?

Hint: we fought a Civil War over it at one point.

The other saying: “Complaining about destruction of property is privilege”

Your G___damn right it is. It’s a “Privilege“ you, and I, and every chump Of every race, religion, gender and orientation who pays taxes to any level of government, earn, in full expectation that government will carry out its absolute minimum legitimate role.

Which is not “building bike paths” or “running resiliency departments” or even “making life happy and equitable”.

It is “ upholding the rule of law“.

Which all sounds very square, like the John Lithgow character in “Footloose”…

…until you remember that without some minimum standard of order – for example, knowing that the home you work to pay for and the business you work to build, and the community that you work to create, aren’t going to be stolen and destroyed arbitrarily – prosperity [1] is impossible.

And without prosperity, “freedom“ is irrelevant. What difference does it make if you can vote, if you are working from sunup to sundown to stave off famine and don’t have time to keep up on the news?

It is the same level of “privilege“, by the way, that leads one to legitimately expect the justice system to which we lend some of our freedoms to work, fairly and impartially, no matter who the defendants are.

I’m done with taking either of these arguments as anything but the abominations they are. Our entire society needs to be done with them both.

Excusing looting, whatever its motivations, is an attack on everybody’s freedom. It’s time to treat it as such.

[1] and by “prosperity“, I don’t mean “Jay-Z driving around in a Bentley“. I mean “most of us aren’t out working in a field from the sunrise until sunset, to earn a famine prone subsistence living, so we have time to read books and raise our kids and think about things other than trying not to starve“. Which, throughout millions of years if human history, has been the rule, not the exception. That is mankind‘s natural state, not this relative utopia we are living in today.

The Top Ten Things you Never, Ever Hear in Real Life.

10. “Hey, hand me that piano”.

9. “Gosh, the Star Tribune does a great job of balanced coverage on divisive issues”

8. “You know what I could use right now? A plate of “Scrod” from Embers”

7. “The fact that the Vikings, T-Wolves, Wild and usually the Twins disappoint me terribly is a sign that my priorities in life are terribliy out of whack”.

6. “See how much clearer and more fluid writing is when you arbitrarily and mindlessly adhere to the ‘Oxford Comma?'”

5. “The ‘zipper merge’ has made my life better”

4. “I got a call back from Alice Hausman’s office!”s

3. “That Mike McNeil on AM950 is appointment listening for me!”

2. “I always feel healthy and safe riding the Green Line after 6PM!”

And the #1 thing you never, ever hear in real life:

Number 1: “Oh, good. Al Sharpton is in town. Our racial divide and social crisis is going to get better”.

I’ve been thinking about impunity.  It’s why:

-Black Lives Matter and Antifa can burn down cities;

-Keith Ellison can orchestrate a lynching;

-Tim Walz can imprison the whole state for an entire year;

-someone in the Biden Administration can send troops to kick down doors
in Syria;

-China can humiliate our diplomats in Alaska;

-sex fiends and pedophiles can prey on victims for years;

-illegal immigrants can swarm our border.

When people know they can get away with bad behavior, they engage in
more of it.  Swift punishment deters bad behavior.  How can we restore
the deterrent necessary to end bad behavior?

Joe Doakes

A city without any political opposition, and a political system without any major media scrutiny, all lead to people acting with impunity.

A friend of the blog emails:

Essentially this article blames the pandemic as the reason for higher Minneapolis property taxes next year.  The reason is because commercial real estate in the city has been jumping so much over the last 10 years before 2020, home owners have not seen as much increase in property taxes.  It’s all relative.  The city spend money like a drunken sailor and has been able to pass that on to the growing apartment buildings, restaurants, other commercial ventures that have popped up in the last 10 years.  That growth has halted and I predict commercial properties and values will decrease which will shift the burden to homeowners.  Get ready homeowners.

2020 has changed all that.  Part of the change is the pandemic as businesses realize they can keep workers working at home and reduce the amount of office space needed.  But it is also true that businesses will not move into a city that has no police force and allows blocks of businesses to be looted and burned.  Target is downsizing.  There wasn’t even a thought of the Canadian Pacific merger of having the headquarters in downtown Mpls where it is now.  Who thinks Minneapolis will see a Final Four or a Superbowl in the next 10 years?  The airheads running the city have created a bigger mess than just the pandemic.  I am glad to see my favorite establishment, Brit’s Pub, has re-opened but I am not tempted to go there even in daylight due to the dangerous downtown. 

Right now I am watching the discussion on the local Nextdoor.  People are noticing a big jump in their assessed home values yet their property taxes are stable and some even falling a bit.  The respite in tax increase this year is a big head fake.  The 2022 property taxes will increase mightily as these higher home values will shift a big piece of the real estate base from business to homeowners.  Maybe not if the city’s spending can be cut.  Unfortunately those cuts will likely come from the police force which is already being decimated by resignations and retirements.  The city can just recognize reality that they cannot retain and recruit enough badges.    My heart is sad for my beloved Minneapolis.  The local voters have been mislead by the local media and the chickens have come home to roost.  They will appeal to the state of MN for help.  God give backbones to the state legislature to say “NO.”  Just say “no” as Mpls voters caused this problem, they need to fix it.

Let this be a cautionary tale for other cities.  You don’t want this.

The same story can be said for all of Hennepin County. This will affect them as well.

Two observations.

First: when the MInnPost is too far to the middle for a Democrat machine…

Second: This is what a death spiral looks like.

See also: Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, Newark…

…well, you get the idea.