Portland cop (who happens to be black) – the leftist protest mob, especially those organizing them, are the actual racists:
You’re be hard-pressed to show that the “protesters” rioting in Minneapolis weren’t the same pack of over-schooled, under-educated, entitled upper-middle-class honkies.
More later today.
Correlation doesn’t equal causation.
Every kid with a decent junior high science teacher knew that by, well, the end of junior high.
But Millennials didn’t have good science teachers. Seriously – how did medical schools find students, much less graduate doctors, over this past 15 years?
But I digress.
It also seems to be what passes for “Journalism” lately.
To wit – according to the WaPo, a spike in violent urban crime over the past three months “followed” the greatest wave in history of people…
…“led to” a spike in violent crime.
Not dumb enough for you?
“We find that states where individuals are more likely to search for racial epithets experienced larger increases in June firearm sales,” they wrote, “even after adjusting for the personal security concerns that likely generated the March spikes in gun sales.” This is a new development: Running the same analysis on previous spikes in gun-buying yielded no correlation between racial animus and purchasing behavior.
No, it’s not the Babylon Bee. But it’s pretty damn close.
Question for the “reporters” involved: why are we so sure it’s not the other way around – that the crime wave didn’t cause the surge?
The death rate for media credibility is way ahead of the one for Covid.
Remember the Indians who tore down the Columbus statue on the capitol grounds, as Capitol Police stood by and did nothing?
Governor Walz promised there would be “consequences.” Haven’t noticed any news articles about charges being filed. Did they get a time out? Double secret probation?
What exactly are the consequences for destroying government property? I’m feeling oppressed by the health department. Can I go burn it down?
Joe Doakes
If the “Penalty” for destroying statuary is nervous foot-shuffling and occasional statements with no followup, I’m totally going after that Floyd Olson statue.
Like a lot of Twin Cities residents, I’m eyeing next spring – sometime after the scheduled March opening of the Derek Chauvin trial – nervously, remembering that the LA riots (at least the ones everyone remembers) began not with the pummeling of Rodney King, but with the acquittal of the four officers involved.
And here’s a fearless prediction (one I’ve already made): Chauvin will be acquitted of Second Degree Unintentional Murder – not because of any legal cop-fu, but because while I’m not a lawyer, I don’t think you need to be a lawyer to see why it’s going to be very hard to show that Chauvin was – check the emphasis, taken from the statute for 2nd Degree Unintentional Murder…:
(1) causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense other than criminal sexual conduct in the first or second degree with force or violence or a drive-by shooting; or
Is a cop responding to a call “the commission of a felony?” I can see Alondra Cano believing that – but Ellison? Someone who’s ostensibly been to law school?
Unless there’s some bodacious lawyer-fu in store, or the Attorney General’s office plans on tampering with the entire witness pool, I’m just not seeing it.
But does the concept of qualified immunity mean there could be yet a third adverse verdict for George Floyd’s supporters and the Twin CIties’ far left’s many professional and amateur hooligans?
Was it “clearly established” on May 25 that kneeling on a prone, handcuffed arrestee’s neck for nearly nine minutes violated his Fourth Amendment rights? The issue is surprisingly unsettled in the 8th Circuit, which includes Minnesota.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit blocked civil rights claims in two recent cases with broadly similar facts: handcuffed detainees who died after being restrained face down by several officers. Unlike those detainees, Floyd was not actively resisting at the time of his death, except to repeatedly complain that he could not breathe.
While that distinction could make a difference in the constitutional analysis, we can’t be sure. Even if the 8th Circuit concluded that Chauvin’s actions were unconstitutional, it could still decide the law on that point was not clear enough at the time of Floyd’s arrest, meaning Chauvin would receive qualified immunity.
The 8th Circuit could even reach the latter conclusion without resolving the constitutional question, as courts have commonly done since 2009, when the Supreme Court began allowing that shortcut. To defeat qualified immunity in this case, says UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz, a leading critic of the doctrine, Floyd’s family “would have to find cases in which earlier defendants were found to have violated the law in precisely the same way.”
The whole piece is worth a read – and the whole concept of seriously reforming qualified immunity is something conservatives need to take an enlightened lead on.
Because it’s for damn sure the other side won’t.
A friend of the blog emails in re the Taco Bell at Snelling and Edmund in the Midway:
Hmmm, are we positive that the city council didn’t pay people to riot in St Paul? Now I just read that the Taco Bell on Snelling can’t reopen until a conditional use permit for drive thru is issued because they need that in order to rebuild. (Even though they already have a drive thru currently).
I know the city has been itching to get rid of the shopping center and the Taco Bell both. Seems too easy…
As we noted last week, the whole “renovation by Molotov Cocktail” thing this past month does seem to have been all too convenient…
The feds turn down Governor Klink’s disaster funding request:
The federal government has denied Gov. Tim Walz’s request for aid to help rebuild and repair Twin Cities structures that were damaged in the unrest following George Floyd’s death.
Walz asked President Donald Trump to declare a “major disaster” for the state of Minnesota in his request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on July 2. More than 1,500 buildings were damaged by fires, looting and vandalism in the days of unrest that followed Floyd’s May 25 death in Minneapolis police custody, racking up more than $500 million in damages, according to Walz.
“The Governor is disappointed that the federal government declined his request for financial support,” [Walz spokesperson Teddy] Tschann said in a statement. “As we navigate one of the most difficult periods in our state’s history, we look for support from our federal government to help us through.”
The “disaster” was, of course, caused by sixty years of DFL governance that is swerving exponentially to the left, decades of mismanagement, a toxic culture run by white liberals more concerned with virtue-trumpeting than competence and justice, and of course by a city that simultaneously rolls out the red carpet for young, largely white, largely upper-middle-class radicals (the direct action arm of the DFL) which the city was packed full of when Mayor Frey made his ill-fated decision to evacuate law enforcement from East Lake Street.
Why should the American taxpayer – especially those who work hard to support competent government, almost invariably in red states – pay for the DFL’s decades of depraved indifference to their own incompetence?
You break it, you buy it.
A few weeks ago, I joked – well, “joked” – that you could that most of the destructive rioters were upper middle class white kids, closely linked to the Twin Cities’ political class.
How could I tell this?
Because Allianz Field, home of “Minnesota United” soccer club, and a mere block from stores that were burned or looted wall to wall, didn’t have so much as a single graffito on it.
We’ll come back to Allianz Field in a moment.
The strip mall that adjoins Allianz, the “Midway Center”, essentially the Midway’s “main street”, was damaged extensively in the riots – but not comprehensively.
That hasn’t stopped the mall’s owner from terminating all the leases in the complex.
Jenny Hui got choked up earlier this week when talking about the family business being shut down.
She’s 28-years old and essentially grew up inside Golden Gate Cafe.
Her parents opened the restaurant in St. Paul’s Midway Shopping Center shortly after they emigrated from China decades ago.
“They worked super hard all these years to build everything we have now,” Hui said. “It’s devastating to see it go out like this.”
But the aftermath of civil unrest last month left parts of the Midway Shopping Center significantly damaged, and the landlord has informed tenants that he intends to terminate their leases.
The Pioneer Press obtained a copy of a letter dated June 25 in which the landlord cited a clause in the lease agreement that allows him to terminate in the case of extensive damage. He noted that all personal property must be removed from the premises by July 1
Now, stop me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t “MN United” looking to clear that shopping center out of the way to make way for its own development plans – plans that cater only dubiously to the neighborhood?
Major League Soccer’s Minnesota United principal owner Bill McGuire is involved in the property, though owner Rick Birdoff with RK Midway wrote the letter to tenants. Neither responded to requests for comment.
The Midway Shopping Center sits in the shadows of the newly constructed Allianz Field soccer stadium, home to Minnesota United.
Convenient, huh?
To: President Trump
From: Mitch Berg, Irasicble Peasant and Scott Walker supporter
Re: Disaster Request
Mr. President,
This past week, Governor-For-Life Walz asked you to declare Minneapolis and Saint Paul “disaster areas”.
Make no mistake – they are.
But they are a disaster entirely due to generations of DFL policy, decades of mismanagement, and a week of seemingly assessing the situation during the various riots and seemingly selecting the stupidest, most self-destructive response.
So – just as insurance companies won’t cover damage to your house if you take a sledgehammer to your walls and countertops, there is no way the taxpayers of the United States – or Greater Minnesota – should be on the hook for the Minnesota DFL’s stupidity.
As they point out whenever they win an election, they “…own these towns”. Paying federal tax money to ameliorate the stupidity of Walz, Frey, and generations of DFL politicians before them is throwing good money after bad.
But I’m nothing if not a uniter. So I have a suggestion.
Tell Minneapolis to start rebuilding with whatever’s left of the $500,000 Mayor Frey charged your campaign for the nonexistent “security” at your rally at the Target Center last year. You know – the one where mobs of leftist droogs (including at least one City Council member) attacked your supporters out in the streets (usually five or six of thugs, and their soi-boifriends, ganging up on an old guy, or a woman, usually from behind), all but cheered on by the Mayor. There is no way any of that “security” money got spent. Tell the DFL to use that.
Please don’t let Real America down on this. Please, please tell the Governor-for-life and Mayor Frey to go f*** themselves. Preferably in as many words, preferably on national TV. Until there are consequences for their, and their party’s, crimes against their positions and the people they govern, nothing will ever improve.
That is all.
The Senate GOP – the only real bit of power the opposition has in Minnesota – is finally going to ask the question that it seems nearly nobody in our media will.
Why didi the DFL politiclal “chain of command”, from Mayors Carter and McDreamy up through Governor Klink, allow two of the Twin Cities poor, blighted but slowly recovering neighborhoods to get torched, looted and bludgeoned almost beyond recognition?
Republicans specifically want to know the details of what led Minneapolis police to abandon the Third Precinct police station. Additionally, they want to know why the National Guard was not a visible presence on the ground in Minneapolis until the weekend, four days after the violence started.
At the press conference, Gazelka did not directly answer a question about whether there will be subpoenas issued for the hearings, but a top aide clarified that the Senate Judiciary Committee does have subpoena power, and they will be involved in these hearings.
Democratic senators will be part of these hearings as well. It sets up for what is likely to be a spectacle at the Capitol, with Republican Senators, most of whom are from greater Minnesota, grilling top state and even city officials over the basic question of what happened.
The DFL’s evasion controls are set to “emergency”:
Susan Kent, the DFL Senate leader, responded to Republican plan to hold hearings, saying that Republicans should be just as focused on criminal justice reform as they are on the destruction of property. She noted that these hearing come after a recent special session, where no police reform proposals were agreed upon, during which the Senate held a single, informational hearing for criminal justice reform.
“It is deeply discouraging and troubling to see Senate Republicans prioritize hearings that completely fail to address racial disparities within our criminal justice system,” she said, adding: Minnesotans statewide are asking us to do our jobs and take meaningful action. The one informational hearing they held on weak proposals doesn’t cut it. It is now abundantly clear they were never really interested in passing critical legislation.”
And I’ll agree with the suburban doyenne Sen. Kent, at least halfway; we should examine the “racial disparity”.
Why is it always the black neighborhoods that the hordes of white “anarchists” and “anti”-fa and other members of the DFL’s direct action force flock to to burn and loot?
We don’t like the statue of Columbus on the Capitol Grounds.
We tried to get it removed through official channels.
We lost.
We announced we were going to tear it down ourselves.
We heard the Governor tell us not to, that the police would stop us.
We didn’t care.
We weren’t stopped.
We weren’t arrested.
We weren’t charged.
We weren’t even scolded.
We are heroes, taking back the lands our ancestors sold a century ago.
We’re coming for your house, next.
Joe Doakes
Some animals are more equal than others.
The stupidity of the mob that is seizing headlines and rewriting/erasing history is on daily display.
But now, they’ve gone far, far beyond too far:
It’s a statue of legendary confederate general, slave trader and blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Wait – he was never a confederate general, never owned a slave, and was born nearly 100 years after the Civil War.Indeed, Vaughan was something of a center-lefty during his way too short life.
So of course the mob is vandalizing his statue.
I’m rooting for the guy in this video who, attacked by small mob of “Anti”-Fa sympathizers in Albuquerque, including one who tried to beat him over the head with a skateboard, came up shooting:
Another video shows the man certainly tried to retreat:
So let’s go over the elements of a self-defense case (as best I know them, not being a lawyer or especially familiar with New Mexico law):
There was an immediate threat of death or great bodily harm – He was hit on the head with a skateboard, and the thugs – or as NPR refers to them, “protesters” – were shouting “Kill Him”. I call that a reasonable threat.
Reasonable Effort to Retreat – Looks like the man made more than a reasonable effort.
Used only the force needed to end the threat – And how. That pack of bullies turned into a bunch of sheep faster than Tim Walz discovering a new regulation.
Can’t be the aggressor – Might be the problem. According to the NPR story:
As protesters surrounding the statue chanted “Tear it down!” and one of them swung a pickax at the statue’s base in an effort to bring it down, a confrontation erupted between the demonstrators and a group of armed men.
“We are receiving reports about vigilante groups possibly instigating this violence,” Police Chief Michael Geier was quoted in a department tweet as saying. “If this is true will be holding them accountable to the fullest extent of the law, including federal hate group designation and prosecution.”
The inevitable “white supremacist” allegations are flying around. Of course, even people with unfashionable, even reprehensible, views have the right to self-defense. Berg’s 18th Law is in effect here.
Still and all, maybe some of these morons will realize that the next woman six or seven of them gang up on might be able to do the same. And society might just get a little more polite.
I’ll be following developments in this case.
22 year old Dylan Robinson was arrested earlier this week in Breckenridge, Colorado, on suspicion of torching the Third Precinct.
Well, with a name like “Dylan”, he’s certainly not immigrant or black.
But what about “White Supremacist”? Is he one of the crowd that the Governor and both Mayors blamed for all the violence and destructrion, as well as all that leftist graffiti all over town?
Nope. While you can’t judge a book by its cover, I’ll bet a shiny new quarter he’s either with, or likes to pretend he’s with, “Anti”-Fa.
I bet another shiny new quarter that the Henco Attorney’s case gets quietly gundecked, and Robinson ends up skating, since – another quarter here – he’ll be connected with some Democrat poobah or another.
Any takers?
SCENE: Mitch BERG is looking for almond flour at a Cub Foods, when Cat SCAT, designated “fact checker” at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, and the office manager at a small phrenology practice, glomphs up from behind.
SCAT: Hah hah, Merg! People are removing racist statues from the Capitol grounds! That’s gotta make all you fat angry old white men wet your pants with rage!
BERG: (Beholding the red-faced, utterly Caucusoid and, shall we say “zaftig” SCAT, and silently contemplating and then thinking better of commenting). Yeah, it’s the mob showing the rest of the world that they don’t have to play by the rules.
SCAT: It’s no different than the fall of the Berlin Wall!
BERG: The…Berlin…Wall?
SCAT: Haha! Yes! Take that!
BERG: OK, let’s compare and contrast.
Columbus: Problematic but incidental figure, who wasn’t even the first European to come to North America – that was the Norwegians, five hundred years earlier – and who has had no affect other than symbolism on anyone in centuries, the un-personing of whom from history should be a cause for a critical discussion.
With me so far?
SCAT: Yeah! Evil white man!
BERG: Riiight. OK – the Berlin Wall: Not just a symbol of the contemporary division of Germany and the current subjugation of tens of millions of people to the bloodiest regime in history, but an actual current militarized barrier along which seventeen people had been murdered in the decade, and three in the year, before it was destroyed. The demolition of which was subject discussed thoroughly but quickly in the immediate aftermath of people on both sides of the wall deciding to jettison the Communism that had reigned in the East (the government that many of the statue-yankers are shilling for, interestingly enough), and, other than the massive “vandalism” of the wall after the Bornholmerstraße incident and the collapse of the DDR (which was one of the great images of my lifetime, but remarkably ineffective, leaving as it did a, well, wall through the middle of Berlin), was dealt via due process leading to its orderly and deliberate demolition, with remarkable worldwide unanimity, mourned by nobody that didn’t have hands still dripping with fresh blood.
Other than that? Same/same!
SCAT: So what about the alt-right taking over those six blocks in Seattle, and turning it into a slave plantation?
BERG: It’s “Anti”-Fa, and they turned it into an “Occupy” camp, only mixing in extortion with the rape and filth, and you’re changing the subject as well as lying about the substance of both subjects…
(But SCAT has already wandered away)
And SCENE
Looking at the SF article on armed citizens again –
“As the car fills with the acrid scent of burning chemicals, Ellison tells his friend in the driver’s seat to pull over. Before they come to a stop, Ellison, 30, flings open the door and jumps out with a pistol in one hand and a small fire extinguisher in the other. He walks briskly down the street, scanning the block for the origin of the fumes.”
Even assuming he has a permit to carry, that’s “brandishing,” and it’s a crime. What are you doing waving a gun around, one-handed? What’s your target? Where’s the imminent danger? Why is that damned thing out of the holster???
His father’s the attorney general. That’s his legal justification, peasant.
“At one checkpoint, a young man nervously looked down the street as a car approached, his finger on the trigger of a semiautomatic rifle half-raised in front of him.”
Get Your Booger Hook Off The Bang Switch!! What the hell is wrong with you? Have you no firearms safety training at all?The author is PRAISING these idiots for running around the streets with loaded guns and no idea how to use them safely.
Every time a new group gets frightened enough to run out to buy guns – women, gays, trans – I make the same offer: I will teach you how to use it, safely, for free. Time to step up my game. Whole lotta people desperately need help before somebody gets hurt from sheer stupidity.
Joe Doakes
There are a whole lot of people who’ve come over to the 2nd Amendment side this past few months. There are a lot of opportunities for us to show them how it’s done.
Although I’m not sure Jeremiah Ellison is going to be one of the ones who learns much.
This was the House Democratic leadership, doing their (nothing but) symbolic photo-op before the George Floyd funeral:
They’re wearing “Kente” cloths – apparently Ghanaian in this case, but there are similar adornments all through Africa. They have cultural significance.
And to Pelosi and her little claque, they are nothing but costumes.
Some actual Africans were not amused at the virtue-accessorizing:
But remember – don’t go eating burritos, honky.
Urban Progressive Privilege: when making the right progressive-y noises is enough, at least within your social circle.
The Daily Caller published transcripts from the Chicago City Council’s “meltdown” during the riots.
And it’s not pretty. It’s the sound of modern “progressive” urban government getting its ass smacked by reality.
A couple of the excerpts are of particular interest (emphasis added by me):
“A war zone.”
Lopez said his district had turned into a “war zone” as gang members were taking neighborhood security into their own hands. “It’s just like a war zone right now … The gang members are now getting involved, walking around with AK-47s, threatening to shoot, I hate to say it, black people,” Lopez said, whose district, the 15th Ward, has a large Hispanic population. Lopez previously said in a May 31 tweet that members of the Latin Saints gang were “engaging and chasing looters” in his ward.
Huh.
So – gang bangers in a city with rigid, comprehensive gun control, have “AK47s”?
Weird.
“There aren’t enough cops.”
“Right now and I’m sure I echo what everybody else has said, there aren’t enough cops. We’re getting overwhelmed in this thing,” Burke said on the call. The mayor agreed. “It’s hard to fathom that we have 13,404 [officers], the highest headcount that we’ve had in probably a decade, and given the volume of looting, it feels like we’re a tiny police force,” Lightfoot said.
“Private citizens, they’re going to become vigilantes, they’re going to protect themselves, because the police aren’t reachable, there’s not enough men or women to respond when the call is made but the call doesn’t get answered,” Burke added.
Wait – you mean if government doesn’t do one if its few legitimate jobs – preserving order – then people will do it themselves?
To: Governor Walz and the Minnesota DFL
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant who passed College Biology
Re: Help me underdstand this
Governor Walz
So let me get this straight. According to you;
Covid19 is a lethal epidemic.
Attending protests to seek the re-opening of the state during the middle of the pandemic threatens grandma and, since “essential workers” will bear the brunt of any outbreak, likely racist as well.
But when one is attending mass demonstrations, even ones involving violence and property damage, against a politically-acceptable cause, or attending a funeral in a packed church full of un-masked people, it’s utterly acceptable from an epidemiological standpoint.
Unless there’s tear gas involved. Because then, Covid is a deadly pandemic.
Remembering, as always, that y’all are the “party of science”, not febrile superstition, yessireebob.
That is all.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking along University Avenue, looking unsuccessfully for “white supremacist” graffiti. Distracted, he misses Avery LIBRELLE, who is roaming the streets with a cell phone, reporting people who aren’t socially-distanced enough to the governor’s snitch line. They nearly run into each other.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Uh, hey, Avery…
LIBRELLE: It’s time for cities to de-fund the police!
BERG: Huh. Seems…illl-advised.
LIBRELLE: It’s high time we did it! It’s the only way to cure systemic racism.
BERG: Right. And deaths from house fires will stop when cities abolish fire departments.
LIBRELLE: We’ll come back to that.
BERG: Huh. Hey, what could go wrong?
LIBRELLE: Camden, New Jersey did it! In 2012! And guess what, Merg? Crime fell!
BERG: Yep. It “fell” because in 2012, it was literally the most dangerous city in the US, of any size. A city of about 77,000 people in 2010 – about the size of Fargo or Duluth – it had 69 homicides. You do the math…
LIBRELLE: Hey…
BERG: Sorry, my bad. I’ll do the math. That’s a homicide rate well over 100 per 100,000 – triple that of Detroit.
LIBRELLE: And guess what, Merg? Crime has fallen!
BERG: Along with the entire rest of the US. And it’s “fallen” to 31 per 100,000. Which is, if it were a city over 200,000, would make it the fifth most dangerous city in the US, after Saint Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It’d be tied with Kansas City.
And they do all that magic with a “re-organized” police force double the size of the old one .
LIBRELLE: (Has become distracted) Hey – is that a white supremacist I see over there? With an assault rifle?
BERG: It’s a city road crew worker with a jackhammer.
LIBRELLE: I”d better see what Vox.com says about it…
BERG: Er…about crime?
(But LiIBRELLE has wandered away already)
And SCENE
Watching Mayor Trudeau crying with all the convincing grace of a rented mourner over the casket of George Floyd, at the not-remotely-socially-distanced funeral (violating the Mayor’s own directives, after a week during which he abandoned a fifth of the city to looters, reigned over press conferences that looked like outtakes from “Reno 911”, got caught like a deer in the headlights when asked what his “plan” was, got bailed out by the marginally-less-incompetent State administration, blamed the destruction (accompanied as it was by thick layers of left-sympathetic graffiti) on nearly nonexistent “White Supremacists” (who managed to somehow leave a thick layer of leftist graffiti and leave an amazing number of clearly labeled “black owned” stores more or less unscathed), I have to wonder…
,..is there some level of unintentional comedy below which the voters of the City of Minneapolis won’t go?
A friend of the blog emails:
The Walker Art Center is just one of several venues and school systems that are just now discovering the benefits of privately funded security. They can hire their own private security, do background checks, control unwanted behavior a little better.
Wonder if there will be more support for private funding of other systems that take advantage of all of us- health insurance, school, etc?
I wonder if the cognitive dissonance will ever actually dawn on any of the parties involved?
By the way – I’m gonna guess that spending all day Tuesday putting black backgrounds on every bit of social and traditional media will fix it.
Children of Tim Walz and Ilhan Omar made their sympathies known bright and early last week.
Isra Hirsi, daughter of Rep. Omar, tweeted out calls for ‘supplies’ for rioters. Called on it by Andy Ngo, she reverted to virtue-signaling:
Now, I can possibly cut Hope Walz a little slack. Make no mistake, she annoyed the crap out of me during the election; she spent a lot of time on Twitter dunking on her father’s opponents; when called out, she responded to the effect of “what, you’re attacking a high school kid for supporting her father?” So she’s definitely angling for a career as a professional feminist, and maybe Amy Klobuchar’s PR flak.
But she’s gotten some flak for this tweet:
And she’s not wrong. She was, in fact, relating facts; the National Guard doesn’t come sliding down a fire poll and jump into their Hummers and race to the scene when the governor gets on the radio – as some thought they did.
I’ll cut Walz – the younger, anyway – a little slack.
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter’s dad was a cop. I wonder what he thinks, seeing what his son has let the city come to.
Businesses at the intersection of Como, Front, and Dale Street, a mile or so from Mitch’s house. Sign says: “RIP George Floyd, BLM, minority-owned.”
Hoping to be eaten last is not a winning business strategy. But it’s all that’s left in St Paul.
Joe Doakes
That’s what occurred to me last Thursday, watching “black-owned”, “minority-owned” or, in some absurd cases, “community owned” businesses frantically post themselves to throw their white neighbors under the bus (not always successfully – Mexican restaurants in Minneapolis looked particularly hard-hit).
It has become obvious there were two groups reacting to George Floyd’s death. His family/friends/supporters who wanted wanted answers from government and were exercising their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances; and the Antifa, looking to cause trouble.
Antifa has been very careful – there have been no homes destroyed, nobody killed, no personal danger. They are destroying businesses to protest capitalism’s exploitation of low income and minority people.
Except . . . most businesses carry insurance and most of those policies cover “civil unrest” which means Antifa is really striking at insurance companies. Fine, they’re capitalist organizations, they deserve it.
Except insurance companies spread their risk over multiple lines – home, auto, business – so if the company takes a hit in the business line, they can cover it by raising rates in the home and auto lines. Which means Antifa is really attacking every home owner and car owner in Minnesota. Fine, they’re rich capitalist pigs, they deserve it, too.
Except . . . remember all those programs to help low income and minorities into homes? The escalator to wealth? The first step on the ladder? Those homes were all purchased with loans that require the homeowner to maintain insurance. For wealthy homeowners, no problem, pay the higher rates. But for marginal homeowners, it’s an issue. And it’s a bigger issue in the time of Covid, when minority and low income people have been laid off in higher numbers. Which means Antifa is really attacking low income and minority homeowners.
I know, it takes effort to understand your actions have effects which are SEEN and also effects which are UNSEEN. it takes effort to see the ripple effect of Black homelessness downstream from burning some schmuck’s bar. It takes effort to redirect your actions into productive, positive, beneficial work instead of mindless destruction.
But failure to think the problem all the way through, means you end up harming the people you intended to help. That includes your supporters, like Governor Walz’ daughter Hope and Attorney General Ellison.
Joe Doakes
We’ll need to revisit this in ten years, when the DFL power structure wonders where the &^%^% their tax base went.
Police and Emergency Medical Services (EMS) deal with a lot of people in crisis – including various medical crises, exacerbated or caused by drugs, alcohol, mental illness, or physical pathologies.
Combining the stress of a contact with police, the medical episode and other contributing factors can cause all sorts of problems, some of them potentially fatal:
A standard method of dealing with Excited Delirium and Positional Asphyxia, while detaining and maintaining physical control over someone, is to turn them on their side. It’s easy enough, relatively, to maintain physical control – but their chest can expand, their diaphragm can expand and contract the lungs which, with someone in crisis, helps bring down the blood acids that lead to Acidosis, lowering the risk of cardiac arrest.
Or at least, that was what the Minneapolis Police Department was taught by Hennepin EMS, the paramedic service for Hennepin County, which helped train Minneapolis cops in basic first aid and other medical techniques used to stabilize people in crisis, even when they needed to be detained an controlled.
And for cases where more intervention is needed, some paramedics use a drug called ketamine. it’s a sedative, used in operating rooms for starting general anaesthesia – but it works just fine for sedating someone in a crisis, letting them breathe and recover while de-stressing, physically as well as mentally. Hennepin EMS was the first paramedic agency in the country to use Ketamin to sedate people in medical emergencied, along with about a third of all EMS agencies in the US. It’s a “very safe drug that works quicker [in his experience] than anything else”, says my source.
But – says my source – the article, the inevitable raft of subsequent lawsuits and regulatory investigations resulted, in my source’s words, in some EMS medics “…being spooked. As an agency, we were less likely to administer optimal treatments.”
It’s also a component in some “date rape” drugs – which we’ll come back to.
Hennepin EMS trained Minneapolis cops – and used Ketamine to de-escalate medical crises.
That is, until just about two years ago.
That’s when a story came out in the Star Tribune, by Andy Mannix, entitled “At urging of Minneapolis police, Hennepin EMS workers subdued dozens with a powerful sedative“.
A source formerly located in Hennepin EMS, speaking on condition of anonymity, tells me the Mannix article got pretty much every substantive fact about the use of Ketamine wrong (“He spelled Hennepin right”, my source quipped).
But the damage was…well, not done. It began. Minneapolis broke its training arrangement with Hennepin EMS, and stopped the use of ketamine.
Breathing: Fast forward to Memorial Day, 2020, and the infamous encounter outside Cup Foods in South Minneaoplis.
The New York Times put together what my source calls an excellent video on the killing – including some camera angles and audio I hadn’t encountered before. My source says the Times did an “outstanding job”.
It’s distressing, but worth a watch.
And as you do, notice – Floyd was clearly having a medical emergency. He was a big guy, so having his wrists cuffed already restricted his breathing. His claustrophobia was self-stated – but as a 6’5 guy (Floyd was 6’6) the thought of being wedged into one of those passive-aggressively cramped little police cruisers makes me a little panicky all by itself. Stress on top of medical crisis – strikes one and two.
And then officers Chauvin and Moua arrived, pulled Lloyd out of the back of the car, and commenced kneeling on his neck and back – seriously impairing his breathing.
Some wannabe social media doctors have missed the point, borrowing lessons from Heimlich Maneuver training and claiming that since Floyd could say “I can’t breathe”, he could breathe.
But, my source relates, it wouldn’t matter, if the killer symptom – acidosis, which Floyd was unable to ventilate – was leading to a cardiac arrest.
One of the officers figured it out, asking Officer Chauvin if they might roll Floyd onto his side – which Chauvin rejected, keeping Floyd under his knee until EMS arrived.
By which point Floyd was well past mere “crisis” – unresponsive, apparently acidotic, sliding toward the cardiac arrest that was reported by the EMS when they reached 36th and Park – mere blocks from Cup Foods.
Did a sloppy news story and a subsequent frenzy of litigation and regulation take a vital tool out of paramedics’ toolkits? One that might have prevented George Floyd’s death, and the orgy of misery that it led to?
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