Last week, social conservatives on social media vented their disgust at a mother whose son had been shot and killed in an armed robbery attempt; the woman infamously asked how it was her son was supposed to get money for clothes, being in “the hood” and all.

The landed punditry pummeled the mother; with such an upbringing, how was the kid supposed to grow up? was a common refrain.

I’m not going to bag on a distraught mother.  She’ll have an eternity to wonder about what she did or didn’t do wrong as a mom.  I’m not going to chuckle at grief, even if it provides what seems to be a window into a worldview utterly foreign to mine.

And because there’s a much more galling example of corrosive entitlement happening on a much bigger, but less dramatic, scale.

The Detroit Way:  A dozen current and former Detroit school administrators received the equivalent of federal indictments for bribery and kickbacks totaling over a million dollars over 13 years.   The administrators allegedly worked with a crooked vendor to take kickbacks for school supplies that weren’t delivered, funneling funds through dummy companies set up to try to fool auditors.

That case will wend its merry way through the courts for many more years, no doubt.

But if I may, I’ll ask the world’s collective dogs to leave the grieving mother of the late robber alone, and take a gander at this ripe turd of entitlement (with emphasis added):

“It’s pitiful that they’re going after principals who are probably just doing what they need to do even if it might be a little bit unethical in order to provide the students in their schools with the supplies and materials that they need that district and the state should be providing us,” teacher Cathy Brackett said. “They should be going after the big thieves who have come into the district under the guise of emergency managers and consultants who have skimmed not just thousands of dollars but millions of dollars away from our students and just move on to their next gig, seemingly without repercussions.”

While Ms. Brackett is right to a point – the educational consulting racket is basically an under-the-table wealth transfer from the taxpayers to the political class, which in Detroit means Democrat hangers-on – it’s that emphasized bit that made me forget all about the robber’s mom’s outburst; people skimming taxpayer money are “probably” doing it for their kids’ benefit?  Read it for yourself.

You’ll notice that this happens only in cities where one-party rule has ossified into a permanent political overclass – which happens only in Democrat-run cities, as it happens.

Alondra Cano – “third world feminist” (whatever that means) and Minneapolis City Councilwoman – took time off from not bothering with her actual constituents’ real problems to sound off, like every other demigogue, on the Freeman press conference yesterday.

Her Facebook page seems to be set up to disallow copying, so I screenshot the whole dismal lashup:

Let’s be clear, here; I don’t find the inquisition into possible police wrongdoing comical.

I find Alonda Cano – industrial engineer par excellence, social-media bully and frothing-yet-brittle demigogue – comical.

“Political pressure?”   The City of Minneapolis has bent over backwards to accomodate Black Lives Matter.  If a Tea Party or Pro-Life group ever blocked a freeway, the Minneapolis or Saint Paul police departments would rain down attack dogs and billy clubs like the Great Deluge.

Like all wannabe liberal demigogues, she’s making up her reality as she goes along, knowing the stupid and gullible won’t care.

What had been a roar of artillery weeks earlier had quieted to a trickle of distant, infrequent thuds.  Where the men of the Russian Second Army had charged forward over snow-capped passes days earlier, on March 31st, 1916, survivors now limped back through a morass of mud and blood at Lake Naroch, in what is now modern Belarus.

It should have been a momentum-changing victory for Russia and the Entente.  Eager to recover from their rout in the summer of 1915, 373,000 Russian soldiers had attacked only 82,000 Germans holding one of the weakest portions of the Eastern Front.  887 pieces of field artillery had pounded the German line for two days – an eternity by Eastern Front standards – under a battle plan crafted by the Russian Imperial Army’s own Chief of Staff.  The Russians had optimistically believed they were about to achieve their breakthrough.

Instead, it was yet another major Russian defeat.  Only this time, it had the fingerprints of the rest of the Entente all over it.

—

Lake Naroch carried all the hallmarks of early Russian defeats – bad intelligence, terrible tactical execution, and overconfidence.  The difference was the Russians thought they had addressed these issues before the battle

The seeds of the Russian debacle at Lake Naroch had been planted months earlier in the French city of Chantilly.  Indeed, many of the Entente defeats of 1916 could trace their lineage to the Inter-Allied Conference at Chantilly in December of 1915.    (more…)

…our mainstream, institutional media has a long, glorious tradition of upholding freedom, comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable.

OK, other than that, our media couldn’t possibly have sold out freedom and appeased tyrants for 13 pieces of…
… Dammit!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A buddy had an insight why Hillary won’t be indicted, won’t even be seriously questioned, about her ever-shifting lies:
The standard has shifted. Washington’s “I cannot tell a lie” was replaced by Hitler’s The Big Lie which was replaced by Bill Clinton’s The Great Lie.
The Great Lie does not mean the person is a convincing liar. That went out the window with Slick Willie. We all knew he was lying, but the media decided that as long as his lies were told in furtherance of the Progressive Agenda, the media would let them ride. This is the mindset of reporters like Nina Burleigh, who graphically described how she would reward President Clinton for keeping abortion legal. That attitude brought us the era of The Great Lie, the lie that is, in modern parlance, “too big to fail.”
The frustration of Democrats and their wholly-owned subsidiary, the mainstream media, is the GOP hasn’t accepted the new standard. The GOP still thinks it’s fair to indict Hillary for lying about her crimes. Hillary’s lies are, of course, brazen and transparent. But the objective that the lies are protecting – electing her President – is too important for the media to call out the lies, as that might jeopardize attainment of the objective.
The stakes are too high to hold Hillary to the truth because the truth would derail the process of crowning her to lead us into the abyss.
The Great Lie has become the accepted method for every Progressive issue. Universal free medicine is too important to allow truth to interfere with the dream, so The Great Lie that Obama-care is working must be accepted without question. Climate change is too important to be clouded with truth so The Great Lie must prevail even if we have to silence scientists and distort the data to fit the theory. Gun control, Muslim terror, campus rape, the methodology is always the same.
There is an added incentive for the mainstream media to endear themselves of The Great Lie: it frees them from the shackles of ethics, truth, due diligence, etc. If the issue is sufficiently important in the Progressive Agenda, then no outdated journalistic ethos need slow down the machinery of printing garbage for the masses. It’s a much more efficient than the old methods of sourcing facts, confirming identities and access of the informants or suppliers of facts, editorial oversight to check for balance and fairness. The only people who suffer are those who care about the truth.

Joe Doakes

The idea of “journalistic ethos” is to news consumers (and journo students) what Santa Claus is for children.

The quote “democracy can only survive until the majority discovers they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury” gets attributed to a lot of people; over the years, I’ve seen De Tocqueville and Jefferson, among may others (it’s actually Alexander Tytler).

But what matters at this juncture in history is not so much who said it, or even that it was said.  What matters is that we’ve hit that point.

The “Blue Model” of government – first vote to provide goodies at public expense; then turn them into “entitlements” granted by the force of law that can’t be reasonably undone – holds sway in much of this country (including Minnesota); it’s done so for so long, entire generations think it’s the norm.  Much of the American populace can’t imagine government that isn’t in the entitlement biz; it’s the same part of the populace that seems to think that these “entitlements” are funded by gold coins borne down from heaven on the backs of unicorns (or “taxes on the 1%”, which are about the same thing).

It’s unsustainable.  And that which can not be sustained, won’t be.   The next case?  Illinois:

The Supremes have spoken: The Illinois state constitution is a suicide pact. Less than two years after invalidating an adjustment to state workers’ budget-busting healthcare benefits, the highest court in Illinois has ruled unconstitutional the City of Chicago’s last-ditch efforts to stabilize its woefully underfunded pension system. The Wall Street Journalreports:
“The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a plan to cut future retirement benefits and boost employee contributions for Chicago city workers, undercutting a pillar of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s strategy to stabilize one of the nation’s most troubled pension systems.

The justices ruled the changes would violate the rights of city workers and retirees protected under the Illinois constitution. The Emanuel administration had argued that the changes came as part of an agreement under which the city would increase its annual contributions to two of the city’s four pension funds to ensure they remain solvent.”

So to pay for the golden contracts of generations of retired city workers, the City of Chicago is going to have to raise taxes, cut spending on services (like police, fire, and education – and can you imagine an exquisitely expsensive and utterly failed system like the Chicago schools, with less money?) or, most likely, both.   This will drive out established businesses (but for corporate headquarters, of course; CEOs love the urban amenities and are willing to pay the taxes on one building; not the one where the blue and pink-collar proles work, naturally) and inhibit new ones, and worsen the plight of the city’s poor.

It’s called “the Blue Model”.

It’s also called “Detroit, Chapter 1”.

Detroit is in Chapter 4, now.  There is no Chapter 5.

Mike Freeman is set to announce whether there will be charges in the Jamar Clark shooting at 10:30 this morning.

Fox9 reports that Freeman will also show a number of videos – likely the ones that “Black Lives Matter” has been clamoring for.

My guess – and it’s only a guess?  The videos will support the officers’ side of the story, and Freeman will announce no charges.  Since Freeman isn’t running for office again, he can be the target for the community’s ire, taking some of the heat off of Mayor Hodges and Chief Harteau.   Again – it’s my speculation.

UPDATE:  No charges will be filed against the officers.

UPDATE 2:  Freeman is showing the videos.

UPDATE 3:  Nekima Pounds-Levy apparently wants to have quotas for charging and convicting officers.

UPDATE 4:  Did someone just threaten to burn the city down?

UPDATE 5:  Question from social media; “who let BLM (Pounds-Levy) into the press conference?”   Answer:  The same people who let them out onto 35W without repercussion.  The cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul have coddled BLM more than they would any other protest group.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Thieves used the cab of a semi-truck to smash down the door of a Ventura, California gun store to steal guns.  Video is on-line.

 15 guns in the hands of criminals and no background check!  Damn the NRA.

 Why won’t Congress pass common-sense legislation making semi-trucks safer?

 Joe Doakes

And storefronts!

Oh, wait – they already did.  The thieves got bigger trucks and heavier chains.

Why, it’s almost as if criminals will go above and beyond what the law tries to prevent them from doing…

Richard Fernandez – one of the best foreign-policy writers going, these days – notes what’s really important about Brussels, and most likely Paris, and, let’s be honest, the next massacre, coming soon to a major soft target near (some of) you (emphasis added):

That [Salah Abdeslam, planner of the Paris attacks] was found just a short distance from where police had been looking for him for weeks should have clued Obama in to the possibility that he had a base of sympathizers. Abdeslam’s ability to go to ground right under the noses of the Belgian authorities should have suggested that European counterterrorism was mutating into something more deadly: counterinsurgency.

Counter-terrorism is the police vs a “handful of killers”.  Counterinsurgency is the state vs a rival state.  The attack on Brussels may mean Trofimov was right: Obama’s handful of killers now had a social base of potential sympathizers legally indistinguishable from the original European inhabitants and from which they could launch attacks at the “very heart of Europe”, as Christopher Dickey described Brussels in the Daily Beast.

The war in Europe today is different only in scale – for now – from the beginnings of the Vietnam War, where a motivated minority with support from a belligerent waged guerrilla war against the South without need of a formal declaration.

And yet President Obama and his Euro-progressive ideological cousins continue to treat the ongoing terror offensive in Europe as nothing more than an outburst of lawlessness.

Remember when liberals wanted government to stay out of peoples’ bedrooms?

Either do liberals:

Gone is the language of morals, tradition, and order—the state now intervenes in our sex lives bearing the mantles of safety, exploitation, and sex discrimination.

“We are living in a new sex bureaucracy,” warn Harvard Law School professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk in an upcoming paper for the California Law Review. Contra court decisions such as Lawrencev. Texas—which decriminalized sodomy in Georgia and affirmed a constitutional right to sexual privacy—”the space of sex” is still “thoroughly regulated” in America, they write. And “the bureaucracy dedicated to that regulation of sex is growing. It operates largely apart from criminal enforcement, but its actions are inseparable from criminal overtones and implications.”

Gersen and Suk’s paper, titled “Bureaucratic Sex Creep,” is mostly focused on federal overreach with regard to colleges and student sex lives, though they say this is only one realm of such regulatory creep. In great detail, the authors trace the roots of how the feds came to be in the business of encouraging “enthusiastic” sexual communication between teenagers and how everything from forcible rape to unwelcome comments between students became the prerogative of Washington paper-pushers and campus “Title IX coordinators.” This “bureaucratic turn” may be “counterproductive to the goal of actually addressing the harms of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment,” they warn, while also depriving due process to the accused and encouraging bizarre new sexual norms overall.

Bear with me here:  one of the cultural left’s favorite artistic conceits is the story of “Lysistrata”, the greek legend involving the women freezing the menfolk out of sex until they ended all war.  It’s one of those sanctimonious legends that feminists have held near and dear forever.

And like “class war” – their other big conceit – it turns out that there might be a grain of truth to it.  The opposite of anything the left ever predicted, but a grain.

In the case of class warfare, they got it; it’s on the gun issue, and they were on the side of the patricians, and they lost (so far).

As far as Lysistrata goes?  When college feminists take a breath from complaining about the nonexistent epidemic of sexual assault, they bemoan the growing disinterest of college-age men in relationships.

That’s right; the PC war on the male is being met…with Lysistrata in reverse!

And no – while upending a lefty conceit is singularly satisfying, in the long term it’s not a good thing.  More on that tomorrow.

We have a problem here.

Where is that ACLU SWAT team?

Joe Doakes from Como Park sends from his Instagram account:

Wouldn’t the one sticker have been sufficient?

Joe Doakes

What, they ran out of Subarus?

As you may recall, I had the great pleasure of hobnobbing with Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Mike Gallagher and Dennis Prager last week.

And we were regaled with Hugh’s optimism…on many fronts.  He’s an optimistic guy.  He also just landed a drive-time network talk show contract with; I’d be pretty sunny too.

But one of Hugh’s rays of sunshine continues to be his faith in the criminal justice system; that it’ll work the way it was explained when he was a 1L at Michigan Law, or maybe 9th grade civics class.  He has that faith in the system that only people in the system have.

In this case, it’s the faith that Hillary will ever be indicted, much less tried, for deliberately breaking federal law with her email server.

It’ll never happen.

Kevin Williamson:

People like Hillary Rodham Clinton do not go to jail without first becoming governor of Illinois or mayor of Detroit, and Herself always has her sights set on a higher office than those. But even relatively lowly players in her world escape jail time. Lois Lerner turned the Internal Revenue Service into a branch of the Obama campaign, using the agency’s fearsome investigatory powers to harass tea-party groups and conservative organizations. She’s enjoying a fat pension right now rather than the federal hospitality she so richly deserves. Kamala Harris, who is trying to do much the same thing with the office of the attorney general in California, probably is headed to the Senate. The Texas prosecutors who harassed Kay Bailey Hutchison, Tom DeLay, and Rick Perry for wholly imaginary crimes are in no danger of facing real recriminations.

One of the few legitimate reasons for a goverment at all is a fair, predictable, just system of justice.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has violated a half-dozen national-security statutes, has criminally withheld information from investigators, and much more. It is a safe bet that the consequences of her doing so will be considerably less than those of failing to pay a parking ticket issued by the duly constituted authorities of Muleshoe, Texas. Something about that isn’t right.

When you lose that, in addition to all the obvious things, you lose…one of the few legitimate reasons to have a government.

Read this piece, from MPR, about the bombings in Lahore, Pakistan.

Horrific?  Yep.

What’s missing?

The fairly pivotal fact that the the Pakistani Taliban targeted the park because it was a major center for Pakistani Christians celebrating Easter.

To do so would interfere with the narrative that we’re not involved in a battle to the death with a millennarian, eliminationist death cult (and no, I’m not referring to every Muslim, or even a majority).

Show me a charity that seeks to train, and ideally arm, Christians around the world – especially in Nigeria, ISIS territory, and Pakistan – to resist genocide, and I will hold a fund-raiser.

UPDATE:  Let’s put a hotfoot on that charity providing arms and training to Christians in harm’s way.  And, if we can swing it, tanks and jets and napalm.

Stat.

(Hat tip to Kel in the comment section)

Every rifle club member in the UK is now on a terror watch list.

Security services have quietly acquired the details of every single person in the UK with access to firearms and put them on a database with known terrorists, it has emerged.

Hidden away in the middle of the government’s draft Investigatory Powers Bill, a snooper’s charter designed to legalise mass surveillance of innocent law-abiding British residents, was a startling admission dressed up as a case study

The lesson?

Never, ever compromise with the left on the Second Amendment.  You may as well compromise with a snake.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve been informed that as a White Male, I have White Privilege and therefore, my life is easy. It doesn’t seem easy. I decided to check what privileges I got from being a White Male. I’m having trouble finding any and that’s unfair. All the other White Males get to feel guilty, they all have an excuse to wave signs while they stand around on freeways, I don’t get to. I can’t see that I’ve ever gotten a benefit from my White Privilege.

I grew up in a town with no Black families at all. Every boy in school was a White boy. When teachers went looking for the kid who caused the trouble, I got no preference for being a White boy.

To be accepted to college, I had to meet a certain minimum GPA and test score. The college needed Black Males to meet its affirmative action goals so the GPA and test scores were lowered for Black Males. It happened again when I applied to graduate school. I received no preference for being a White Male.

To be hired for a government job, I had to score in the top 5% on the civil service exam to get an interview. The agency needed women to meet its affirmative action goals so they hired a woman who scraped by with a minimum passing score instead of hiring one of the top scoring applicants. I received no preference for being a White Male.

Supposedly, my White Privilege protects me from harassment by the police. When I was a teenage White Boy cruising at night in a bright red Mustang, you can bet I caught the eye of every traffic cop. Now that I’m a middle aged man commuting from work in a sedan, cops never notice me. I’m just as White and Male as ever, but I’m not driving a noticeable vehicle and I don’t drive badly or during high-crime hours. That’s not a privilege, that’s adulthood.

So where do I go to get my share of the privilege?

Joe Doakes

A question I keep trying to ask people who prattle about “privilege”; so let’s say Nekima Levy-Pounds, the boss of Black Lives Matter in Minneapolis, a law professor with tenure and an upper-middle-class income who can pretty much do anything she wants without fear of getting fired, and Billy Bob Bodine, a hot tar roofer from Shreveport Arkansas who sounds like an extra from Deliverance, walk into MPR or Minneapolis City Hall or the U of M.

Who would have the “privilege”?

To my Christian friends?  Have a happy and blessed Easter!

To my Jewish friends?  Have a great weekend!

To my agnostic friends:  how ’bout them Twins?

Anyway – all the best to all of you!

Here’s the site for Archway Defensea.

And ♫ here’s today’s music playlist.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on live from 1-3PM today!

Today on the show,

• I’ll be talking with Peter Johnson of Archway Defense about the Brussels attacks, and what they mean here in Minnesota

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

This observation is a whack upside the head (emphasis added):

Some U.S. counter-terrorism officials say much of the gap between Washington and Belgium — and some other European countries — is cultural. Europeans’ deeper commitment to personal privacy sometimes prevents or delays sharing of information such as travel data — that is taken for granted in the United States.

The idea that Europe – the contintent of sheep-like government-addled socialized drones who gave us Naziism, Socialism, Communism and Soccer – have more commitment to personal privacy than the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is a jab in the gut.

…that some prosecutors need to be pelted with rocks and garbage.

…but I, for one, think this is a brilliant idea.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In my youth, readers of science fiction books knew “Hugo Award” on the cover meant “Good Book;” but over the last 30 years or so, it’s come to mean “Politically Correct Book” in which politically correct characters express politically correct opinions only slightly related to science fiction.  Look, the reason I read escapist literature is to escape the relentless political correctness of modern life, I don’t want it in my science fiction.  Others must agree: sales of science fiction books have plummeted.

Science fiction writer Larry Correia (author of the awesome Monster Hunter, International series) made fun of the trend, saying “Boring message fiction is the leading cause of puppy-related sadness.”  He claimed conservative authors and conservative opinions were ruthlessly supressed by the SF publishing industry.  A group of writers calling themselves “Sad Puppies” urged science fiction readers to nominate stories for the Hugo award based on character, plot, action, and writing, not the sex or color of the writer or the political correctness of the story.  It turned into a massive brawl between the Establishment Gatekeepers Protecting Cronies and the Insurrectionist Outsiders Seeking Change (oddly like this year’s Presidential primaries).

Science fiction writer Dave Freeer commenting at website Mad Genius Club about this year’s Hugo award nominations:

“. . . my support for World Con and the Hugos is rather like one’s support for cousin Hugo who has turned into a hopeless drunk, in the process of losing everything because of his life choices. You remember him as a nice guy, once. Funny, compassionate, full of promise and potential, rather than the vicious drunk and petty thief he is now. For the sake of what he once was, you still try and help him, even though you know it’s probably fruitless and he’ll probably steal from you too. But eventually, you just have to walk away, because he has to want to change. And I’m not seeing that.”

Yep.  Sounds right to me, in both Hugo nominations and Presidential primaries. If Bernie and Trump get shafted at the convention by the Establishment Gatekeepers, I suspect an awful lot of Americans will give up and walk away.

Joe Doakes

And from more than just sci-fi and politics.

But more on that later today and/or next week.

Jurors comment on their verdict in the Gawker-Hulk Hogan trial, which awarded a nine-figure settlement to Hogan that, if upheld, should purge the foetid abcess that is Gawker from existence, blessedly, forever.

The Gawker tried to argue they have a First Amendment right to trash peoples’ rights to privacy – using the cunning legal theory that “we’re entitled to”.

Well, close enough:

The jurors had strong words for Gawker founder Nick Denton and the website’s former editor-in-chief, A.J. Daulerio, who was ordered in the verdict to pay Hogan $100,000 in punitive damages.

“I mean there was a quote in there that it was fair game for a celebrity that’s over five to be exposed, and we’re like, ‘What?,’ and this was a quote from A.J.,” O’Neil said. “You could tell he didn’t want to be there. He was very arrogant, very pompous in his response and he made that statement at the end.”

“I think it made everybody, it made me pause, and I was just like, ‘You did not say that,'” he said. “That means you really do think you’re above the law and it was that philosophy, we’re Gawker. We can get away with anything.”

“He treated the deposition the way he treats journalism,” Young said, while Eastman called Daulerio, “very flippant.”

Stevens said she was looking at Denton in court while the verdict was being read because she wanted to see whether he would show any signs of remorse. She didn’t believe he displayed any remorse during his testimony.

Rot in hell, Gawker.  And get your hands off the First Amendment.

A friend of the blog writes:

When I read articles like this, I think of those kids who say to their parents, “If I just get this toy, I’ll never ask for anything anything.” Of course it’s not true and no parent believes it. So, why would we ever believe the city government when they tell us that ifvthey just take some of our money, magic will happen?

Because some people – people who believe in government solves actual problems – live in a continual state of denial. My