A friend of the blog emails:

Mitch, I received this communication today as I am a Hennepin County Leader.  I wonder if some event prompted County Administrators to review the county’s motor vehicle safety policy.  Said policy is attached along with the document linked at the bottom of the paragraph (the document emphasizes what to do in an accident that occurs while driving a county vehicle).

What possible event could have happened that prompted this timely reminder to all county employees? It makes me wonder if some county employee when confronted about misuse of county vehicles or one who had a recent accident with a county vehicle might be claiming…”What, I didn’t know there was a policy against…” I thought you might find it interesting timing as I did.

You have my permission to share.

I’m sure there’s no connection…

The house DFL caucus is starting to “take a crime seriously”.

Or at least that’s what the headlines are intended to say: “In response, we are already drafting bills based on the input of all stakeholders”

All?

Well, not all the stakeholders. Not the party that currently holds the minority in the Minnesota house.

There’s a reason for that, of course; this has nothing to do with fighting crime, and everything to do with fighting the perception that the majority party in the Minnesota house is nothing but a pack of feckless felon coddlers.

In other words, a public relations stunt to pray on a news media that serves as little but a bunch of feckless DFL coddlers.

A good Lyft driver with a gun ends a car jacking in west Philadelphia:

Two suspects in an armed carjacking are in the hospital after police say they attempted to take a vehicle from a Lyft who was armed with a gun he was licensed to carry on Monday afternoon in West Philadelphia.

Now, let me be absolutely clear on this; I don’t have any guns, and the thought of shooting someone in self defense is mortifying to me.

But I’m going to bet at least a few carjackers in Philadelphia are mulling changes to career plans.

If you get your car jacked in Hennepin County?

The carjackers themselves will likely do less time than your vehicle.

Minneapolis is, as of yesterday, at 93 homicides for 2021 so far.

The record, during the Murderapolis years, was either 95 or 97, depending on your source.

Context? Sure.

In 2016 there were 82 unjustified homicides…

…in the entire state of Minnesota. 30 of them were in Minneapolis.

Whenever the DFL used to win elections by lopsided margins, they’d drunkenly chant “We own this city!”

Yep, chuckleheads. You sure do.

2020: San Francisco mayor London Breed pushes policies softer on crime, vagrancy and social decay than even her predecessors. She literally raised not a finger – at best – against the decriminalization of shoplifting less than $900 worth of merchandise, leading to the gutting of much San Francisco retail and roaming gangs of smash and grab flash mobs of looters.

2021: London Breed turns into “Dirty Harriett“.

Mark my words: Law Enforcement in San Francisco, under pfogressive leadership, will be about as subtle and libertarian as Ted Nugent leading a band of saracens…

…although I suspect it’ll have little effect on crime.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails about a story I’ve been wanting to touch on all week:

You know those “Good Guy with a gun” stories that Liberals scoff at as Sexist White Supremacists Compensating for Something?

This Edina woman isn’t scoffing.

If only there were some way society could assume responsibility for protecting the public from violent criminals, some group of armed public servants sworn to uphold the law so that private citizens don’t have to.

Joe Doakes

Of course, the “good guy with a gun“ angle got buried so deeply, it’s a good thing the fact didn’t need oxygen.

You’ll never get our opinion class to admit it, but it was the good guy with the gun that saved the situation.

Carjacking comes to Lynden Hills – the leafy, upper-upper-middle class part of Minneapolis that adjoins Edina.

Via KARE11:

Catch the bit starting at 1:23?

…but we have to address whatever the greater problems are…that have brought about such system unrest. So my biggest hope is that enough of a light gets shined on this that we all start working toward some real substantive change.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and presume, given the language and the “white guilt”-addled neighborhood, that she’s not talking about ending “catch and release” and “bail reform” for habitual violent offenders?

Stockholm Syndrome is the psychological phemenon of people becoming attached to their hostage-takers.

Minneapolis Syndrome is one step beyond – where you blame yourself for the fact that they attacked you in the first place.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails

You’re a cop. You’ve stopped a driver and have him standing on the side of the road because he’s got warrants for his arrest. He dives back into the car, presumably going for his gun. What do you do?

a. grab him from behind and wrestle with him. No, because he might still grab his gun and shoot you.
b. grab your expandable baton and smack him. No, because he’s diving into the car and there’s no room to swing the baton.
c. grab your pepper spray and Mace him. No, because inside the car, it’ll blind you, too.
d. grab your Taser and shock him. Maybe, depends on who else has hands on him that will also get shocked. What other options do you have?
e. grab your . . . .

. . . too late. He shot you. You’re dead and so’s your partner.

Intellectually, she intended to grab her Taser but instinctively, she grabbed her pistol. It’s a learned response. It’s what cops practice the most. Gun instructors say “train as you will fight” because that’s how your body will react in the half-second available. And cops train with guns because that’s ‘the gravest extreme,’ when the training matters most.

Officer Potter did not commit murder. This was a horrible accident but entirely foreseeable because the decision-action table is too long, too many variables to run through, and nobody can ‘train as you fight’ for all of them.

Joe Doakes

A roof on qualified immunity quite a bit – Justifiably so – but at its core, it is intended to protect people like police from excessive liability for exactly this sort of situation.

Unlike civilians, who are legally strongly discouraged from doing anything but running away from altercations, the police are expected to go toward the sound of trouble.

The pendulum likely need to swing back. I’m pretty sure this is a terrible case to enact that swing.

Jussie Smolett was convicted of lying about being hate-crimed, three years ago, by a roaming band of Trump supporters. In downtown Chicago.

Most of the lefty commentators who proclaimed the case a damning indictment of American society were – “unexpectedly” – silent over the weekend.

And they may have been the smart ones.

Ja’Han Jones – a writer of sorts for MSNBC who is described as a “futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics”, meaning pretty much someone who partied with the right people in college – warned conservatives about what we “should realize before they relish the Jussie Smollett verdict“.

Nonetheless, the strange, seemingly ever-changing details in the case have provided nearly three years’ worth of material for comedians and online commentators. Some of it has been quite funny, in fact. 

Of course, there’s not a lot of there in the piece, which concludes:

Even more comical, in my view, was the predictable conservative outrage over Smollett’s allegations. Conservatives took to social media in 2019 to express outrage over the dropped charges. How dare someone make such a heinous claim about followers of their dear leader, they screeched. Violent, masked white guys who shout Trump slogans and use chemical agents to attack victims? 

Many on the right shamed those of us who knew such a claim was totally plausible — and then the Jan. 6 insurrection happened.  

And that’s it!

Of course, Berg’s Seventh Law applies. I’m sure there were conservatives that, after a decade and a half of watching hoax after hoax, and retraction after retraction of narrative-based claims of hate crimes, indulged in a bit of schadenfreud at a verdict that, had it not been on a case tried in crazy-blue Chicago, was utterly predicable to anyone with two brain cells to rub together to get some sparks.

But Jones is projecting, of course; it was everyone on the left – not just hoi polloi in comment sections, but an unbroken phalanx of blue-checks – who were dancing and cavorting about the usual chanting points; gut-shot to white cis-hetero privilege that this “hate crime” represented, the spotlight it still showed on the hatred that, they’d tell us, still roils beneath the surface of every honky.

Berg’s Twentieth Law – assume widely-publicized “hate crimes” are hoaxes until proven otherwise, which I obeyed in every particular even before I watched Smollett’s “alibi” crumble like a donut fresh out of a microwave – gave way to Berg’s Seventh Law; when the left accuses you fellow conservatives of moral turpitude, it’s almost invariably projecting.

Smollett’s verdict brings me no joy; we have a society that actively enables this sort of narcissistic showmanship, and uses it to further tribalize a society that doesn’t need any more.

My question isn’t whether Sheriff Hutchinson drove impaired last weekend – though it seems likelyl.

It’s not why – cops are prone to drinking, and it’s been a rough couple years.

It’s not whether he drove in a county vehicle.

It’s not whether he got favorable treatment from the State Patrol – which didn’t post the details of his crash for nearly half a day (2.5 hours is the norm), or took a urine test rather than a more accurate. blood test when Hutchinson got to the hospital. Cops generally look out for cops. Of course the Patrol went easy on the Sheriff.

No. My question is this:

The Sheriff was said to have been partying at a resort full of sheriffs, at the State Sheriff’s Association meeting, at the Arrowwood Resort near Alexandria – a room full of people whose departments spend a lot of time, and earn a big part of their budgets, arresting, prosecuting and fining drunk drivers – very frequently, people with blood alcohol levels between .08 and .1, which in most people is barely perceptible intoxication, a lowering of the limit that was almost entirely done to allow more arrests and prosecutions of people pulled over for other offenses – tail-lights, expired tabs – after a beer or two. They run departments whose deputies have prosecuted DUI cases that have gotten many menaces off the road, it’s true – and also put a “DUI” on the recrods of nearly 10% of Minnesotans – a blotch that goes on to infringe their civil rights, their employment prospects, and their status in the community.

And yet, nobody in that resort full of sheriffs thought to tell Hutchinson “er, maybe you oughtta stay and have a couple cups of coffee, or bunk up at a Best Western for the night”, or anything of the sort.

No – off he went.

And, one presumes, off most of them went, as well, presumably after a bump or two themselves.

Nobody in that room full of people that have helped arrest and convict 10% of the entire state of DUI thought to pull Hutchinson aside?

Remember:

Yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors…And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that [concern] comes from a place of privilege because for those of us for whom the system is working,

Minneapolis City Council PResident Lisa Bender, June, 2020

It appears Minneapolis has solved that particular “privilege”:

This sort of thing is unacceptable in North Minneapolis, in Frogtown, out on the Lower East Side or deep in the heart of Phillips.

But this isni’t in any of those places. This is in leafy, green, upper-middle-class, DFL-voting Nokomis. The heart of Mayor Frey’s power base. Just down the road, figuratively, from Lisa Bender’s privately-secured house.

The victim is speaking out:

Public Safety is a privilege – one that Lisa Bender enjoys with all the subtlety of Keith Moon at an open bar, at taxpayer’s expense, to the tune of well into six and heading toward seven figures, if last years spend rate has kept up.

This is the choice facing the entire state next year; more of this, or drawing a line on the cement and say “they shall not pass”.

And make no mistake, that is the whole choice; Mayor Frey is stuck with a city council that was bruised but not chastened by the electoral results last month. Governor Walz is a beard for the “Progressive” wing of the DFL (read: the DFL), the extremists who call all the shots in the DFL these days, without whom he will be an empty plus-size suit out of a job in 2023. That wing thinks the disorder is a good thing. If they didn’t, it wouldn’t be running rampant in Minneapolis.

This is the choice.

PS: This is the situation in Minneapolis, with Mike Freeman – “liberal”, but not “progressive” – runs the Henco Attorney’s office, perfunctorily shoveling cases before “progressive” judges who’ll kick everyone back out on the street before their cell beds get warm.

Imagine what life’s gonna be like when Ryan Winkler is the Henco Prosecutor!

Home invaders in Minneapolis beat a woman and her daughter, film the whole thing.

But remember – the real problem is mean tweets.

That’s not true.

The real problem is, when peoples taxes don’t buy law and order, they will get it for themselves. And that’s usually not done via the anarcho-capitalist fantasy of spontaneous self-organization of groups of sovereign individuals.

The Uptown McDonalds.

In the eighties and early nineties, if was a great place to go to watch dissociatives dissociating.

For most of the past 20 years? On a Saturday night, it’s the place to go if you wanted to watch college girls in cocktall dresses throwing up on the sidewalk on 30 degree nights.

Today? It’s a great place to go to feel like you’re in Beirut in the ’80s.

Rebecca Brannon – one of very few actual journalists working these days – was there around bar closing on Saturday night/Sunday morning.

This is what she recorded:

But the 20 second video doesn’t show the half of it. I talked with Brannon on the show over the weekend. What got her attention was…

…guys, including the guy with the long-ish gun (looks like a Hi-Point carbine to mme) standing around in the parking lot, openly displaying their guns.

Brannon started taping when the guy with the long-ish gun fired a shot in the air. He shot into the air again when he drove off in the stolen car.

A civil society can not sustain this sort of thing. If the authorities don’t stop it, either the economic crash that follows the collapse of order will, or the people themselves will. Hard to tell which is worse.

cc: Shiny Happies.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’d bet a brand-new nickel the guy who drove his pickup into the
Christmas Parade was not protesting the Rittenhouse verdict by mowing
down White people.  I doubt he follows civic events closely enough to
realize the parade was happening.  He drove down that street running
over people like an entitled ass who isn’t required to follow any of the
rules of civilized behavior because . . . he’s not.  As a Black man in
America, he’s a member of The New Nobility, a class above the law, not
subject to it.

Junior Level, of course.  This particular nogoodnik isn’t a jet setter
flying to the climate change summit.  He won’t be invited to any
birthday parties on Martha’s Vineyard or Hollywood awards events.  But
he’s minor nobility just the same.  Imagine if 200 years ago, Lord
Brooks had driven his carriage through a group of peasants dancing in
the lane, killing several of them.  The commoners would have been
outraged but the Powers That Be would express their hope his horse
hadn’t chipped a hoof while trampling those filthy vermin. That’s why
certain Black men believe they can loot stores, jack cars, rob people,
drive like crazy, shoot from car windows and beat their women.  It’s
learned behavior.  They’ve learned it’s okay for them to do.  You see it
on the highways around the Twin Cities every day.

But now, suddenly, after a string of wrist-slaps for years of crimes,
Brooks is charged with five counts of intentional murder. How completely
unfair.  That’s like giving a puppy a treat every time he poops on the
floor until one day he poops on the rug and you bash his head in.  How
was he to know?

If you’re looking for a greater social commentary in this incident,
that’s the lesson.  Stop treating criminals like nobility.

Joe Doakes

If you remove consequences from doing something, people will do it. Whether it’s shoplifting or having babies out of wedlock or putting money in investment bubbles.

Madame Vice President [1] on the Rittenhouse verdict:

So – the woman for whom giggling about putting black men in jail for simple weed possession was pillow talk with Willie Brown, and who came out in favor of prosecutors hiding exculpatory evidence in death penalty cases, has been…

…sorry. Couldn’t finish that with a straight face.

[1] Keep checking back on this.

We’ll allow for a moment that ‘Medium.com”, when the subject is race, criminal/social “justice” or the economy, is like Tumblr for people with unsupportably high self-esteem .

With that being said, this happened this morning:

Now, for whatever reason it’s not loading for me at the moment, or I’d be llinking to it. I’ll try to catch it later today.

But if we’re judging by the headline?

As I noted last week, people are projecting their views of the rest of American on this trial -and while I pointed out that all “sides” were doing it, let’s be honest; it’s the left that’s making it into a cottage industry.

Two observations:

Pick Your Poison: If you thought Januarhy 6 was an epic assault on America, but don’t see the attempt to bully and intimidate jurors – the backbone of our justice system, as imperfect is it and they are – as something every bit as serious, you are an idiot.

Allow me to say it to your face.

Literally, if need be.

Rules for Radicals: And of course, chaos benefits the extremes – of both sides. Especially the extreme that has a plan and the political and social “infrastructure” to capitalize on and exploit the chaos .

In 1933, the German Communists supported President Von Hindsenburg giving Chancellor HItler – the leader of the Reichstag’s (Parliament’s) largest party, the Nazis – near compete control under an emergency powers decree. The Communists – with their direct action arm, Rote Fahne, which later became “Anti”-Fa – figured they had the political will and street power to capitalize on the chaos they saw ensuing .

They bet wrong.

Big Left, today, isn’t betting wrong. While “Red” America is proud of its traditions, and owns a hell of a lot of guns,there is no organization on the right that is waiting in any significant numbers, with a plan and people with their own willl to power, least of all a will to power that leads back to a Constitutional Republic.

The riot on January 6, stupid and illegal as it was, was never in any real position to alter the Constitutionally-mandated process.

Bullying the justice system? That most certainly is.

…to the crime wave currently sweeping the Twin Cities, it’ll likely be when parts of the state with functional two-party systems start catching slopover.

Which may be happening:

Big Left and Big Media will spin this as racist, naturally – to them, suburbs = racism (says they, from their cozy strongholds in Crocus Hill, Kenwood and Edina).

And when enough exurban soccer moms get robbed at gunpoint, it won’t matter.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking through the Cub Foods on Larpenteur, gauging the level of shortage going on, when Avery LIBRELLE almost literally bumps into him.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Aw, ssshhhhhure enough, it’s Avery. How are you…

LIBRELLE: People going places where people don’t know who they are, and might be angered by their presence, should stay home. It’s just provocation!”

BERG: Are you talking about the Rittenhouse Trial, or the Ahmad Arberry trial?

LIBRELLE: Clearly, the…

(Stops)

LIBRELLE: Um…the…er…

BERG: (Slowly steps away as the wheels grind slowly to a halt.

And SCENE

Self-defense is bad, unless you’re a rioter. Brawling is good.

No, really.

This story came out last week.

On one hand, a round of applause for the locals who grabbed the guy.

The good news: People are getting sick of criminals.

The bad news: Perhaps they’re also getting sick of a system that coddles criminals, and are ready to start doing order (if not justice, in the sense we’ve come to expect) themselves.

But there’s more.

As of when this post was written (Saturday morning), Minnesota had 84 homicides – two more than for all of 2020.

Let’s put that in context. In 2016, there were 82 unjustified homicides.

In the entire state of Minnesota. Minneapolis had 30-.

Thjis is what civic collapse looks like.

The Kyle Rittenhouse case – involved in jury instrucitons today, and going to final attorney summations today – is plenty complicated, but about some fairly simple questions:

• Did Rittenhouse instigate or participate in instigating two different deadly-force incidents in which he used lethal force on four people, with two dead, one seriously injured, and one missed (who has disappeared from public view)?
• Was his fear of death or great bodily harm reasonable?
• Was the threat to his life immediate?
• Was his response reasonable – enough to end the attack on him?
• DId he make a reasonable effort under the circumstances to disengage?

Proving or disproving those five points for two incidents and four shootings has taken eight days of testimony and over a year of pre-trial wrangling – all very complicated – but the questions themselves are fairly simple.

But as far as the media and the large culture are concerned, this trial isn’t really about the facts of the case.

This case is about America’s tribes – the “four Americas” that George Packer talked about last summer – projecting their views of each other onto each other via a teenager who jumped into the deep end of the pool head-first.

“Smart” America, the Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton crowd, see in Rittenhouse the bitter gun-clinging Jeezuz freak they picture that other tribe of Americans being; they earnestly exclaim “Nobody needs a gun like that” (ignoring the fact that four people tried to kill him). They think Rittenhoue is an intellectual symbol of all they detest about that other America. This includes most, but not all, media coverage; Big Media has cast its lot with “Just America”, and it shows in much of the coverage.

“Real” America seems. him as a lone sentinel of freedom, fighting back against the (politically favored, socially immunized) mob that is ravaging our centers of thought and commerce (and Kenosha). A kid from bedrock America, good and true, a bone to be chewed by a “blue” culture and media (ptr) who are siding with the rioters

“Free” America sees this as another show trial, like Bernard Goetz, a symbol of a state run amok that is actively crushing liberty.

“Just” America, naturally, sees Rittenhouse, the person and the case, as a symptom of “white supremacy” and the base, violent nature of the army of straw cis-men they face.

Indeed, with few exceptions, the higher the social status of the person commenting on Rittenhouse, the less their commentary actually has to do with the shootings in Kenosha or the facts at trial.

Everyone and everything in our society today is a metaphor, it seems.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Conservatives have been warning Liberals for years that if cops won’t arrest thieves and carjackers, citizens will take the law into their own hands.

This is what that looks like, at first.

Except if this guy gets convicted, everyone else will learn a lesson from it. It’ll end differently next time. The next guy won’t call the cops. He’ll finish the job, leave the body in the street, and drive his van home.

Because that’s what happens if cops won’t arrest thieves and carjackers, but Will arrest citizens who had no alternative to taking the law into their own hands.

And the next step after that? If honest citizens are forced to conclude the cops are as much a problem as the crooks? Who gets shot then?

Joe Doakes

Even the mob knew enough to keep hands off of cops.

But it is not a big stretch for civilians to figure out “never talk“.

Two bad guys run into a good guy with a gun, while attempting a workplace shooting.

Only the good guy walks away.

Well, that and a bunch of innocent bystanders. Can’t forget them.

The number one story in the world this past three days: Alec Baldwin accidentally shot a cinematographer on a movie set in New Mexico.

It’s easy to feel Schadenfreud for someone who’s wallowed in so much of it himself:

I try to remain above that…

…but I’m only human.

Still.

Back in college, I worked as a stage hand (as well as acting in a few shows). The lady who ran the theater department had a long history working in show business of all kinds; she had been the first female theatrical producer in Los Angeles, had worked as a make up person on the original “Planet of the Apes“ (and had one of the masks in her office to show for it) and on and on.

We had two productions back then that involved some sort of weapons work; in one, one of the actors (and a classmate) “shot“ someone. The “prop gun“ in this case was a starter pistol, borrowed from the track and field team. The chamber was only big enough to hold starter gun caps. The barrel was not a barrel; there was no hole down the middle for a bullet.  The only way to kill someone with that pistol would’ve been to beat them over the head with it – and even then, it would have been a long, slow process. Professor Lavin drilled us – the whole crew, not just the actor doing the shooting, since anyone onsince anyone on the crew might have to handle the starter pistol – on the safety rules like everybody’s life depended on it.

The absolute ironclad rule was “don’t point the gun at a person, even during the scene when you are “shooting” someone.  The scene was “blocked out” (actors arranged about the stage) so that it would look like the gun was being aimed at the victim – but was in fact, pointing to a spot offstage with no cast, crew or audience. [1]

That was a piker, by the way, compared with all the things I had to learn to do a sword fight, when I played Henry II in “Lion in Winter“.

This was all emphatically nonunion.  Professor Lavin relayed all sorts of stories about how universal this knowledge was among Hollywood crews.

So while I am minding Berg’s 18th Law on waiting for the facts, I find it less than completely convincing that *someone* on that set – the armorers, the prop people, the day labor on a set in rural New Mexico, and even Baldwin himself, who has engaged in gunplay in at least one movie in his career (chasing the spy through the “Sherwood Forest” of missile tubes in Hunt for Red October, a Union shoot if there ever was one) hadn’t been through the four basic rules of gun handling at the very least.

I can imagine why someone would put a live around into a “prop gun“; it looks more realistic when it fires.

Why someone would do it when they were apparently checking the blocking on the scene (I have to imagine the fact that the director and the cinematographer were standing directly in the line of fire meant they were setting up a camera shot) when the prop master/armor was yelling “cold gun“ (which tells me someone knew something about proper procedure on that said) is completely beyond me.

So I’ll keep following Berg’s 18th Law.

 [1] That’s one of my dirty little secrets among conservatives; growing up in a anti-gun household, I learned all of my gun safety from a Democrat theater professor :-).  I literally learned three of the four essential rules of gun safety – they are always loaded, never point them at something you’re not willing to destroy, and never put your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot – doing theater.