Two-Mask-Tony has famously decreed that if one mask is good, two masks
is better.  I figured out where he got the notion: from software
security people.

My password to remotely log into the work computer is the same password
as I use to log into the various software programs on the work server. 
What’s the point of every program having a password if they’re all the
same?  Since I know the password to get into the computer itself, I know
the password for everything else, too.

It’s as if they expect to thwart some cartoon villain tapping on my
keyboard.  “Dammit, I made it through the first nine passwords, but now
I can’t get into the timesheet system to report my hours for payroll. 
Curses, foiled again!”

Joe Doakes

I’ve cracked wise about this in the recent past.

It’s easy to design “perfect” safety: wear ten masks, and never leave the house!

The costs of that approach never seem to enter these peoples’ thinking.

Perhaps because it costs them nothing.

As Minneapolis heads towards what is almost certain to be a metaphorical and fiscal bloodletting, if not perhaps a literal one, the city is going through its crisis preparedness checklist:

1. After nearly a year of calling public safety a privilege, erecting lots and lots of privilege around itself.
2. Continue not only proving that public safety is a “privilege” in Minneapolis, but continue contributing financially to keeping it that way.
3. Keep on gaslighting the proles. Er, taxpayers. Same/same.
4. Transferring more wealth to adjunct members of the political class.
5. Focusing on politically correct irrelevancies – perhaps to earn carbon credits for all the smoke the city expects to see generated.
6. Ponder turning downtown into a social justice park and business-free zone.
7. Keep letting Keith Ellison try, and fail, to pretend he’s a prosecutor, rather than the anti-market version of a personal injury attorney?
8. Start reading up on life in Grozny, Baghdad, Beirut and Detroit.

You’re in the best of hands, Minneapolis.

The city looks for leadership.

And jumping into the vacuum is…

…Kate Knuth.

The exceptionally undistinguished former state representative who went on to be a city wealth-transfer bureaucrat who was distinguished, if “Anti-Distinguished” is a thing [1].

Remember – if the ineffective, over-his-head Pajama Boy Frey gets replaced, it’ll be by someone worse, farther to the left, and an even more overt puppet of the far-left interests that are calling all the shots in the city.

[1] And whose mother was in fact the bureaucratic gargoyle in the denouement of this story. While the sins of the mother aren’t necessarily visited on the child, I’m guessing the pie doesn’t fall far from the cow. .

I’m old enough to remember when AOC…

…referred to “influx facilities” as “concentration camps”.

I send an email which Mitch posted on February 4th in a column called
Surprised, Not Surprised. I complained about the Post Office’s on-line
system to request they hold my mail while I went on vacation, which
ended up being postponed.

I was informed in the comments by a person who claimed to be an expert
on the subject, that Informed Delivery was a great success and “your
disappointed experience with Informed Delivery is either an aberration
or a result of unrealistic expectations, and is not persuasive to a
larger argument about the post office.”

Maybe so but the story doesn’t end there. I finally got signed up. I
rescheduled my trip to Texas leaving February 12 and returning the
22nd. I used the on-line system to place a Hold My Mail request and
then . . . blizzard, trip postponed again. So, I went back on-line and
cancelled the Hold My Mail request.

Just checked the box . . . no mail. I can think of two possibilities:
either every junk mailer in the nation suddenly dropped me from their
lists, or the Post Office is holding my mail even though I cancelled the
request.

No, I’m not going to call. First, I hate navigating automated phone
trees. Second, even if I got a live representative, the best they could
do would be to put in a Cancel request and by the time it filtered down
to the Rice Street Station, the hold period would be over so my mail
would be delivered anyway.

Another aberration? More unrealistic expectations? Maybe so, but they
keep happening. It’s sad, because the Post Office is one of the few
activities the federal government is constitutionally authorized to do.
It’s a shame they do it so poorly.

Joe Doakes

When I was in a computer science class in college, the prof – who’d been a software engineer just long enough to pick up some terrible habits and beliefs – declaimed often that “90% of problems with system involve stupid users”.

It’s a view that governs a lot of how “systems” people – from technocrats and systems analysts at a high level all the way down to programmers – view the world; “if only our customer was as smart as we. Or me”.

The field I work in is the group brought in when the customer – the business paying for those systems, and who realize that actual users just aren’t adopting, using or appreciating their technocrats’ genius – realizes that kind of arrogance isn’t a strategy.

Notably, government is simultaneously very good at adopting my particular discipline (check out the human factors of an F35 cockpit) and really, really bad (the MNSure, MNLARS and “Please give me a vaccine” websites).

File this accordingly.

An argument over a fender-bender in Saint Paul last May 1 led to a shooting, and a self-defense claim. The case is currently at trial, and both the prosecution and defense are presenting their cases to the public.

I’ve heard speculation on both sides as to whether the defendant – Mr. Trifiletti – has a good self-defense case or not. His attorney presents some of the right talking points in the article above, but it’s a crapshoot.

Only two real points for me, so far:

The Last Resort: It’s as my first permit instructor, Joel Rosenberg, said – using a gun in self-defense sets off an atomic bomb in your life. One can point to a few “best cases” – like the shooter in the Evanovich case, where the case was so absolutely unambiguously strong that even anti-gun extremist Mike Freeman hailed the shooter as a hero, and the good samaritan wasn’t even arrested.

The Trifilletti/Lewis shooting is a lot more normal; ambiguous circumstances, conflicting stories, impossible choices. The shooter is on trial, and guilty or acquitted, this will affect, badly, the rest of his life.

I’ve got some acquaintances in the field who say Trifilletti’s case is going to be a tough one. We shall see.

The Numbers: But even if Trifilletti is convicted, he will be (by my count – it’s possible I’m missing something, although not super likely) the second carry permittee to be convicted of an unjustified homicide in the almost 18 years since the passage of “Shall Issue” carry permitting.

Minnesota’s homicide rate in 2017 was 2 per 100,000. In that same year, Minneapolis’s homicide rate was 10 per 100,000.

There are currently nearly 300,000 carry permits in circulation in MInnesota. That amounts to close to one in ten non-prohibited adult Minnesotans. That number has been steadily over 200,000 for nearly a decade, after taking several years to rise into six digits (the MN House research office predicted a maximum of 90,000 Minnesotans would get permits in 2003). So let’s call it an average of 150,000 a year for 17 years. That’s a total of 2.55 million permit/years.

That amounts – or may amount, if a conviction happens to a murder rate among Minnesota carry permit holders of roughly less than one per million (that’s .07 per 100,000) per year.

Carry permittees are literally 20 times safer than the general public.

Keep that in mind, since the shrieking ninnies in our editorial caste will not.

A friend of the blog emails:

The people of Portland and Seattle might get a break seeing so many will be in Minneapolis.

Super Bowl, Basketball Final Four, and Chauvin trial, come to Minneapolis.

We used to call them “professional protesters”. And they most certainly do exist.

But I think we also have a class of “riot tourists”.

And it looks like the Twin CIties are a destination.

In the olden days, people and goods traveled by ship.  Nowadays, people and goods travel by car.

In the olden days, pirates took ships by force, leaving people and goods stranded.  Nowadays, carjackers take cars by force, leaving people and goods stranded.

In the olden days, law enforcement officials were spread too thin to prevent piracy so private persons were granted Letters of Marque allowing them to seize ships from pirates, deliver the pirates to the authorities, and keep the ships as a reward. 

Minnesota law enforcement officials are spread too thin to prevent carjacking.  Maybe we should . . . ?

Joe Doakes

Last week, I expressed – half tongue-in-cheek – an interest in running for Mayor of Saint Paul on the “Criminals Suck” ticket.

My platform:

• Legalize “booby-trapping” (non-lethal, of course – gotta keep the plaintiff’s bar away) to catch criminals.
• Offer rewards for the most creative trick, trap or subterfuge a citizen uses to catch a ne’er-do-well.
• Pay for those rewards by cutting 23 of the roughly 24 deputy mayor’s offices, the Resiliency Office, and every city office that competes with more than three Saint Paul businesses
• Direct the City Attorney to actively participate in the defense of any citizen deemed to have a legally sound claim of self-defense against.
• Hold a tax holiday the week of the Fourth of Jully and the week before Christmas, to get people from outside Saint Paul to actually come to Saint Paul.

It’s not really a “letter of Marque”, but the spirit is there…

A longtime friend of the blog emails:

With the impending Derek Chauvin trial, the fortification of the 4th Precinct has begun this morning.

A wall of cement traffic barricades are being set around the perimeter. Back last summer it was reinforced with razor wire.

I am so deeply saddened by what has happened to my city.

Sad. And disgusted.

Kevin Williamson was right. This isn’t decay. This is municipal suicide.