Stipulated in advance – we don’t know yet how the Rittenhouse case in Racine is going to end up.

Acknowledging up front that Berg’s 18th Law is in effect, it would appear that Rittenhouse’s first shooting might just be problematic, and that the second two appeared to be textbook legitimate self-defense.

Of course, earlier we noted the provenance of the two “victims”. The first person shot was a rather unsavory person whose behavior hash’t really been the subject of any public scrutiny:

The second person killed (and the ones wounded with him), either:

So – while it’s entirely possible the kid committed murder, it’d seem the idea that he’s a “white supremacist” might be just a tad bit of a stretch – and while all lives are precious to God, the path from the pedo and the thumper to “black” seems a little insurmountable.

With all of that exhaustively noted, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say this tweet from Ayanna Pressley needs to not fall down the memory hole:

Heh.

UPDATE: Lin Wood and Rittenhouse’s defense team is on the ground swinging.

More later.

Last week, the Administration posted this photo – of Vice President Pence, looking across the DMZ at the Norks.

You know the old saying, “Never, Ever Read the Commennts?” It’s even more true on Twitter. “Progressives” romped and cavorted with the image. One -well, probably a lot more than one – snaked “I’m sure this made all the infantry on both sides of the DMZ crap their pants”.

G’huck g’huck.

“Progrssives” never get tyranny. They never do.

The photo is not aimed at the soldiers on the DMZ.

It’s aimed at the people in the “Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea” (DPRK) that will, inevitably, see it one day.

And think “Someone over the wall is taking our plight seriouslyl”.

Remember – this is the same crowd that giggled like eighth-graders telling “Fart” jokes when Reagan gave his Brandenburg Gate speech, which kept the Jimmy Kimmels and Conan O’Briens of the day chuckling for a news cycle or two. “Mr. Gorbachev declined to come out with a pickaxe”, indeed.

But the speech wasn’t aimed at Michael Gorbachev. It was aimed at his subjects – who took it to heart. And in four years, the Berlin Wal did, indeed, fall – an effectual relationship the left only acknowledged backhandedly, the way they usually do, by trying to take credit for it themselves.

This may be the greatest lower-third super (aka “Chyron”, aaka the graphic at the bottom of the shot)) in the history of propaganda:

When life gives you rotten fruit, ferment it down until you can make a flaming sambuca:

This is the job I want.  Quoting from the court’s opinion:

“Howard Norsetter, a United States citizen who has maintained permanent residence in Australia since 1984, began working as a scout for Minnesota Twins LLC, in 1990 . . . Norsetter’s scouting duties included evaluating athletes and making recommendations on whether the team should sign them. He developed relationships with players, parents, coaches, and agents, and he established contacts worldwide. He scouted in Australia and also regularly traveled to different countries to evaluate athletes, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, South Africa, and all over Europe . . . Norsetter also served as the team’s minor-league international supervisor.”

Living in Aussie-land, jetting around the world watching baseball games . . . I wonder what that pays?  Have the Twins EVER signed a player from Down Under?  Is it possible he’s been scouting for 30 years and NEVER found a prospect, but still got paid for it? 

I want that job.

Joe Doakes

Almost like a public union job.

With a garbage hauler.

In New Jersey.

Ryan Winkler, Minnesota’s House Majority Leader – let that thought rattle around in your head a bit – replies to Senate Majority Leader Gazelka yesterday:

“Trump’s America is deadly!”

But the Tim Walz and Peggy Flanagan’s Minnesota is the part that is rioting, burning, looting, shedding businesses and jobs, boarding up, moving to the burbs or Wisconsin or the Greater or Lesser Dakota, buggering off, hitting the dusty trail for freer and safer horizons.

Alondra Cano’s Minnesota is the part that can’t run itself even in good times without massive transfers of wealth from the parts of the state that work (for now), the Republican parts.

Lisa Bender’s Minnesota is the part that considers “law and order” a form of unsustainable “privilege” for all you plebs, but pays a lot of your money so that it has that privilege for itself.

Ryan Winkler’s Minnesota is the part where a Harvard graduate and machine politician from a lilywhite “progressive” suburb full of NIMBYs can call one of the most distinguished jurists of our time an “Uncle Tom”, and then turn around and yap about “white supremacy” when his opponent compliments the men and women who are taking time off from their real lives to clean up yet another DFL mess.

If Ryan Winkler didn’t exist, the GOP would have to invent him.

In a metro area of 2.6 million, with probably close to 2 million cars, I have merged onto the freeway behind the same car – a Malibu with a distinctive sticker and a Purple Heart license plate – twice in one week.

So maybe 2020 isn’t so bad after all.

I get it.

If you’re a businessperson, a law-abiding citizen, a resident of a place like Minneapolis or Saint Paul or Kenosha, you might be getting a little tired of being siultaneousy treated like a villain, a sucker and a pop-sociology punching bag.

And seeing the entitled, upper-middle-cass, over-schooled, undereducated “progressive” thugs and the depredations they wreak, you might just be as mad as hell and not in a mood to take it anymore.

You might even take the Second Amendment of the Constitution seirously, with its implied empowerment to defend your life, your family, your property, your community and your freedom.

And truth be told, I feel it too. The Thursday night after Memorial Day, when the destruction came to Saint Paul, the temptation to strap up and sit out on the porch with a book and a couple of poieces of ugly black insurance would have been pretty dang tempting if all of my guns hadn’t fallen into Mille Lacs, and they didn’t terrify me besides.

It’s even ore overwhelming when you have a government that seems, at least in Minnneapolis, Saint Paul and Minnesota at large, to be on the wrong side.

It’s times like this the urge to get some friends and gun up and find some bit of real estate to protect from the mob – your own, someone else’s, it matters little – is palpable.

It’s a lousy idea for two reasons.

For starters – in most states, the odds are good that you’ll come off worse, legally, than the scumbags.

And the scumbags want a civil war.

Let’s look at both problems.

Self-Defense – As we’ve noted in this space before, the rules for claiming self-defense are (intentionally?) a little opaque in many states, including MInnesota and Wisconsin.

To sum up the confluence of a little statute and a lot of case law:

1. You must reasonably, immediately fear death or great bodily harm.  Reasonable means “it’ll convince a jury”.  Immediate means now; if someone says “I’m gonna kill you…tomorrow”, you can’t kill them first.
2. You must use appropriate force.  In other words, you can only use the force needed to end the threat.  No more.
3. You must make a reasonable effort to retreat.  Reasonable.  If you’re pushing your baby in a stroller, you don’t need to leave it behind.  If you’re a 70 year old man with a knee replacement attacked by four youths, you don’t need to try to out run them.  And in Minnesota, it doesn’t apply in your house.  In “Stand Your Ground” states, this provision is disregarded.  Minnesota is not a Stand Your Ground state.
4. You must not be a willing participant: you can’t start a brawl, and then shoot someone who breaks a bottle.Put another way, you must not be the aggressor.

Berg’s 18th Law is in full effect, here – but given what we might know about the crime, it would seem that Rittenhouse may have the same problem as Alan Scarsella, the man who shot at some “protesters” who were chasing him and his friends away from the Fourth Precinct in North MInneapolis a few years ago. Scarsella likely met three of the criteria for self defense – but the prosecution painted him, successfully, as the aggressor . He didn’t have to go to North Minneapolis, and he certainly didn’t have to post a stupid video bragging about it.

We’ll see what happens.

Say You Want A Revolution – In 1933 as German president Paul Hindenburg mulled giving emergency power to a cabinet led by Adolph Hiter, among the biggest supporters of the power giveaway were…

…the German Communist Party. The Nazi’s “enemies”. They figured extremism woulds benefit them – when the middle becomes untenable, the extremes become self-preservation. It’d worked for the Communists in Russia, and showed promise in other European countries; the Hard Left’s discipline and organization enabled it to win a batte of the extremes over right wings that weren’t anywhere near organized enough to prevail against Big Left’s discipline and regimentation.

They banked wrong on the batatle against Hiter – but got the formula down in North Korea, China, and a fair chunk of the Third World in the fifties through the seventies, and evena few since.

They are banking on the same thing today. Not without good reason.

If you run a business in the Twin Cities, this is what you are up against:

Lotus has been a tradition in the Twin Cities as long as I’ve been here, and considerably longer. Even as Vietnamese restaurants got taken over by Thai joints (Unjustifiably, in my book), the Lotus has carried on.

But will they come back downtown? Will Ruth’s Chris? Brit’s?

Especially given that the photo above described, exactly, the support they can expect from the city of Minneapolis?

Would you?

Pennsylvania county offers drive through carry permits, whereas in Ramsey County I had to make an appointment a month in advance and it took them another month to process it.

Joe Doakes

Minnesota government reflects the passive-aggression of its supporters.

To: Governor Walz
From: Mitch Berg – Former Rock and/or Cow, current Deplorable
Re: “Healing”

Governor,

Last night, as yet another round of looting began over a false rumor of another police shooting, you tweeted:

Heal?

You don’t “heal” from cancer while your tumors are still metastatizing.

Minneapolis’s disease is the long-standing tolerance of lawlessness toward political ends.

Every blocked freeway. Every “Anti”-fa outrage given a faint whisper of a slap on the wrist. Every child of the political class whose arson and looting and thuggery gets ignored. Every “progressive” city that declares itself above Federal immigraiton law. Every time you nudge and wink at progressive thugs – the spoiled, entitled, emotionally brittle, violence-prone, over-schooled / under-educated children of our political class (including, it might seem, the daughter of a certain sitting governor), every time you conflate “First Amendment” with “Room to Destroy”, every time you abandon parts of the city to the mob?

Every time you treat minority votes as your chattel?

Every time you and your party treat minority and immigrant neighborhoods as a place for people to take out their real or ginned-up frustrations with fire and baseball bats?

That’s the disease.

There is no healing until the disease is gone.

There will be no “healing” while cities like Minneapolis are nothing but Jimmy’s First Political Experiment Kit, for the political class to twirl the knobs and yank the levers and try to build a “progressive” utopia, rather than places where people live, work, and expect some level of fiscal and social return on the “investment” that is their taxes.

I’m not going to say “progressivism is the disease”.

But it’s the delivery system for everything Minneapolis needs to “heal” from.

That is all.

To: Rep. Ryan WInkler, House Majority Leader
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Timing

Rep. Winkler,

Yesterday you tweeted in re the shooting in Kenosha:

Rep Winkler, I say the following with all due respect.

I’m just spitballing, here, but maybe a white, suburban Harvard grad who called one of the leading jurists in the nation an “Uncle Thomas” because he departed the Democrat Party’s plantation, might want to sit out the whole “white supremacy” thing.

That is all.

My name is spelled J-O-E D-O-A-K-E-S but henceforth, shall be pronounced

“Throatwobbler Mangrove.” 

Or else you’re a hateful racist.

That is all.

Joe Doakes

While we’re on the subject, my preferred pronouns are “Your Excellency / First Sea Lord”.

Politics – the process that controls government – is the single least effective way of allocating resources of any kind.

Case in point: remember when a “shortage of ventilators“ was going to be the crisis that led to carnage? If memory serves, that was sometime before “lack of tests“ was the crisis du jour.

And so politicians posture for the cameras, and ordered – ordered! – the economy to produce more of them.

And then, we learned that once a person went on a ventilator, they almost never came off, and other therapies were much more effective.

But that doesn’t mean the politicians’ priorities didn’t continue to hold sway

“In the fog of war against the virus, we were trying to do our best to protect the health and safety of the American people,” said Peter Navarro, White House trade adviser and Defense Production Act policy coordinator. “In this particular chess game, the best move was to make sure we had too many ventilators rather than too few.” Navarro said that excess ventilators will be used to help other countries fighting the novel coronavirus, either as revenue-generating exports or as donations.

The misalignment between the availability and need for ventilators shows that the medical understanding of and response to the coronavirus has moved faster than companies can adapt. And for Ford, which got the order to supply the largest quantity of ventilators to the federal stockpile, production and delivery were delayed, further throwing it out of sync with the pandemic needs.

Government is the things we do together – stupidly and hamfistedly.

This is the kind of detailed, reasoned explanation for Floyd’s death that the jury will hear from defense experts.  It includes the Power Point slides right out of the Minneapolis Police Department training on when and how to properly kneel on a suspect’s neck.

If I were on the jury, I would be hard pressed to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that all four cops were acting from malice or hatred or racist intent to kill.  On the contrary, it looks to me as if they followed the department-approved policy to the letter, exactly as their superior had instructed and trained them to do.

The fact it all went sideways isn’t these cops’ fault.  They shouldn’t be the fall guys for it.

Joe Doakes

Any bets on whether the “Unintentional 2nd Degree Murder” charge gets dismissed before trial?

Among the left’s long list of abusive rhetorical techniques, and the one that has me in a particular state of pique, is the phrase “SAY HIS (or HER) NAME”.

It’s a pretty ghastly bit of emotional manipulation – basically a bit of on-the-spot brainwashing, and the crudest, most blunt-force kind of framing there is.

With that in mind, Governor Klink is clearly getting the message – the suburbs, which gave the DFL the majority that keeps his dictatorial power in place, are clearly not amused by last weekend’s shenanigans and malarkey in Hugo.

But he can’t quuuiiiiiite put it in words without getting his progressive puppetmasters to whack him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper:

Well, just a doggone minute, Governor.

What threatening behavior? What bloodthirsty rhetoric?

From whom?

Say his name.

And his party.

Hint: it’s the party – from the leadership on down – that is always the one actually attacking people and breaking things.

Go ahead, Governor Walz. Or, let’s be honest, Flanagan.

If you live outside the Jonestown cult that is the DFL in the Twin Cities, you need to make sure your neighbors seriously absorb this episode. It tells you everything there is to know about today’s DFL.

John Thompson – the DFL-endorsed candidate currently awaiting coronation in House District 67A, the East Side – is the guy who we saw the other day standing in Bob Kroll’s driveway, bellowing that he’d be perfectly happy to burn exurban Hugo to the ground at the little group of tweenage girls standing by the garage.

Turns out there’s been a bit of a backlash, and Thompson doesn’t like people…

…well…

…harassing him and invoking his family.

In videos circulating on social media, John Thompson, a DFL-endorsed candidate for House District 67A, threatened to burn Hugo and said “Blue Lives ain’t sh–.” He also appears to yell at young white girls watching from an open garage, calling them “racist mother-f—–s.”

On Monday, Thompson said he was getting death threats and declined an interview out of concern for his family’s safety.

“When people are calling my family and telling my family they are going to put a bullet in my son’s head, I’m not in a space right now to talk to the press,” he said.

To my amazement, the backlash has been such that even the DFL had to exhibit at least a vestige of shame:

“We expect our candidates and elected officials to live up to our highest values when they represent our DFL Party,” said DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin. “The Minnesota DFL does not condone any rhetoric which is violent, hateful, or inflammatory.”

To perhaps my greater amazement, the article in the PiPress doesn’t use the phrase “GOP pounced…” or “GOP seized on” Thompson’s racist tirade.

I’m sure that’ll be rectified.

Democrats want me to believe 160,000 Americans died on Trump’s watch because he could have prevented the virus and didn’t; therefore. we should elect Biden to replace him

Really?

Perhaps someone could lay out the step-by-step plan by which President Trump could have prevented a virus from killing old sick people this Spring or the step-by-step-plan by which President Biden will prevent it from killing them next Winter.

A timetable and citations to statutory authority would be helpful.

Joe Doakes

It’s a generally known fact that the ‘Gender Pay Gap” is nothing but a rhetorical trap to gull the gullible. Yes, all women make 77% of what all men make – but that’s almost entirely a matter of choice, As this bit from PragerU explains, the college majors that pay the best after graduation – things like Petroleum Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Computer science – are, despite decades of outreach and cajoling young women to try ’em out, overwhelmingly male. In the meantime the degrees that pay least – Early Childhood Education, Human Services, Social Work – are overwhelmingly female. Add in choices like taking time off to raise families, and virtually the entire pay gap is explainable by choice.

But our nation’s media class, set to work as it is mongering our nation’s grievances, won’t be letting that out.

Last Friday was “Black Womens’ Equal Pay Day” – observing the notion that black women earn 68% of what white men get.

Full stop.

That’s it.

No breakdown of majors. No analysis of choices – one wonders if our shrieking classes think “critical thought” is “racist”, too.

Wonder what our society would be like if we had a group – perhaps with printing presses and transmitters, maybe staffed by a pseudo-monastic order of information seekers – that would ask questions about this sort of thing, rather than serving as stenographers and press-release regurgitators.

But I dream.

While the Democrats work at quietly deflecting the nation’s attention from their senile soon-to-be-nominee, the media would seem to be working hard on keeping anyone from digging too hard into Kamala Harris’s past.

With good reason.

During her decade-and-a-half tenure as a chief prosecutor, Harris would fail to prosecute a single case of priest abuse and her office would strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred, despite the protests of victims’ groups.

Harris’s predecessor as San Francisco district attorney, Terence Hallinan, was aware of and had prosecuted numerous Catholic priests on sexual misconduct involving children. And he had been gathering case files for even more… Hallinan’s office had launched an investigation and quickly discovered that the San Francisco Archdiocese had extensive internal records concerning complaints going back some seventy-five years. In spring of 2002, Hallinan demanded the church turn them over to his office.

Now, there were reasons for this – some of them legal…

…and some of them apparently, er, convenience:

…many of the cases were past what had been the statute of limitations. And just as the cases were heating up, the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturned a 1994 California law that retroactively eliminated the statute of limitations for sexual abuse cases. So instead of criminal prosecution for the older cases, Hallinan was forced to change his strategy. He wanted to hold the offenders accountable by releasing the clergy abuse files to the public and aiding the victims in civil cases.

But then Terence Hallinan made a big mistake. He lost his reelection bid to Kamala Harris. Of course, she had a little help from the local Catholic organizations that were freaking out over the prospect for Hallinan releasing the documents and helping the abuse victims.

The media’s job is covering stories about Democrats.

With a pillow.

Until the convulsions stop.

I’ve been a voracious reader all my life.  My brother can sit at the breakfast table to eat a whole bowl of cereal without reading a single word on the cereal box.  I have no idea how he does it.

I never cared about the authors.  I lived for the stories.  The Archmage Ged, Kip Russell, Archie Goodwin, and Miss Marple were more real to me than Ursula LeGuin, Robert Heinlein, Rex Stout or Agatha Christie.  I relied on national book awards to steer me toward the best stories: the Hugo, the Nebula. 

So when the latest Hugo Awards controversy erupted, I felt left out.  I don’t know who any of these people are, or what their race or gender or politics might be.  And I really don’t care.  Can they write good stories?  Sadly, the answer appears to be No.  If they could, they wouldn’t need affirmative action awards to make themselves feel better. 

Joe Doakes

I’m not a huge SciFi fan – but Joe’s premise confirms Dennis Prager’s dictum: the left destroys everything it touches.

This is DFL-endorsed candidate for the MN House, Bob Thompson, this past Saturday in Hugo, outside the home of Lt. Bob Kroll.

It certainly didn’t end there:

Additional footage of Thompson’s speech showed him wondering why protesters “were so peaceful.” He then told a man holding a blue lives matter sign to “take that sign” and “stick it in [his] ass.”

“We coming for everything that you motherf–ers took from us,” he added. “This whole [vulgarity] state burned down for 20 [vulgarity] dollars. You think we give a f– about burning Hugo down?”

Huh.

The story has evaded the Mainstream Media, of course – they want the DFL to hold those suburban seats. You’ve got to go to the honest, conservative media to get the story.

By the way – when former state rep Matt Dean asked one of the area’s freshman DFL reps to comment, this was what Amy “Profile in Courage” Wazlawik had to say

Pretty sure Rep. Runbeck’s position on the demonstration is clear.

Unlike Wazlawik’s.

Or those of Ken Martin, Melissa Hortman or Ryan Winkler, for that matter.

Quick question for our DFL readers – do you disavow this?

Yes or no.

Oh, yeah – we know where Governor Klink stands:

This is the party that wants to rule Minnesota. Not govern – rule.

…claim the Democrats are just a little bit deranged.

No sirreebob:

UPDATE: And Kim Du Toit – long time no hear! – agrees. With the concept, anyway.

Rioting in Portland for 60 days now, most recently trying to burn down a police station. The Press says the riots are “mostly peaceful.” 

Puts me in mind of a certain movie. I can imagine our anti-fa hero coming up from the basement, dressed in black, telling Mom he’s going out with his friends. “That’s nice dear, have fun storming the courthouse.”

Joe Doakes

It’s all funny until self-government becomes impossible because nobody trusts our institutions…

Far be it for me, a mere peasant, to question the journalistic integrity of the New York Times…But, may please the court of opinion, there might be a slight difference in the way the “newspaper of record” carried the two different announcements of vice presidential candidates, four years apart.Well, the key and I might notice it, anyway. Let’s see how you do:

Flashback four years:

But don’t you dare say the media is biased.

Charges have been filed and the destruction of the state owned Christopher Columbus statue on the Capitol Mall last June.

The episode – which occurred as cameras from all for local TV news stations and every newspaper that can still afford photographers churned out footage, and as state patrol officers looked on – has been “under investigation” for two months since, as the full resources of the state “criminal justice“ system were able to swarm on several bars and a rodeo in Outstate Minnesota practically while the seats were still warm.

The discrepancy between the events was enough to get some sex to say it looks as if there might be a two-tiered justice system in Minnesota; one for progressives who are tightly connected with the metro political system, and everyone else.

Oh, yeah – as usual, the cynics were right:

According to the attorney’s office, [the accused, Michael] Forcia, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, acknowledged at the time that he wanted to be held accountable for the statue being pulled down, with the investigation finding he was the “organizer, leader, and executor of the incident.”

He will get the same brand of “justice“ that Woody Kane got, of course; it is good to be part of the ruling class.