The recent school shooting in Arlington Texas was all things to all people.

To “progressive“, it was a sign that “gun violence“ was still a huge bogeyman.To some fairly reductionist people on what is sometimes called “the right“, the news that the shooter was a black teenager, especially after a video of a chillingly violent altercation in a classroom that was said to have led up to the episode, confirmed a raft of biases about black teens, public schools and the possibility of rehabilitating violent teenage boys. Which, it was assumed, the shooter was.

To others, it was yet another sign that the law enforcement system had failed to put a repeat offender in jail, allowing him to continue to predate on society. Although to be fair, coming from people in the Twin Cities,

Turns out the story may be a lot more complicated than that, and that nobody had “wealthy black kid from a loving home, who has been bullied and robbed for being fairly well to do, shooting in self-defense“ on their Urban juvenile crime bingo card.

Berg‘s 18th Law is called a Law for a reason.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve been following the debate on whether vaccine mandates will cause staffing shortages. Had a few tests done at the hospital this morning. Quietly asked the RN about the vaccine. She hasn’t gotten it, does not intend to. She’s with an “agency” which means she’s not part of the giant conglomerate health care provider and isn’t bound by their rules. She’s seen stuff, read stuff, she affirmed – strictly off the record and between her and me – that I’m not the only one with serious doubts. We’re not crazy no matter what they tell us.

I received excellent care from a non-corporate nurse, for which I am grateful and also amused. The regulation says any employer with more than 100 nurses must . . . oh, we’ve only got 90. Our sister (but completely independent) companies also have 90, each. And each nurse only works 29 hours for each company. They’re exempt. No vaccine. But excellent patient care. And the giant conglomerate can proudly announce their in-house staff is fully vaccinated with no staffing shortage.

Potemkin compliance all the way down. You watch, they’ll be ‘independent contractors’ next.

Joe Doakes

People underestimate the cost of widespread ignoring of laws because they are widely considered to be wrong, stupid, corrosive of freedom and the like.

It doesn’t end well. And it’s not the peoples fault.

To: All Republican Candidates for Everything, Everywhere
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Your 2022 Plans

Dear GOPers,

There are a lot of good things to run on against Democrats in this cycle:

• Crime
• The collapse of education
• Crime
• The economy
• Crime

But if you’re not running on the, not merely “erosion”, but the affirmative assault on freedom by the government, you don’t deserve to win, and this nation deserves what awaits.

To wit:

Your mission is – or should be – clear.

That is all.

35 years ago, during Minneapolis’s first ground of gang violence, a police sergeant, perhaps in a combination of hyperbole and fatigue, told me that the safest place to be in a gang shootout is the target. Gang-bangers don’t spend a lot of range time; they love that John Woo horizontal grip; they spray and pray – never moreso now that the streets are full of illegal Glock full-auto trigger conversions, which will empty an 18 round magazine in a second and a half with all the accuracy of trying to knit while riding an untamed bronco.

That Sergeant, God bless him, just keeps getting proven right:

Miles of full auto gunfire at car-to-car range – and no casualties. One dead and four injured – from the car crash.

Thanks, Sarge.

Chicago / Cook County prosecutors are declining to charge gang members for homicides – partly because witnesses are terrified to speak out…

….and partly because they, to quote a line that hardly ever works for rapists, “consented” (I’ve added emphasis):

While she wouldn’t specify what other evidence prosecutors needed to file charges, the police report acknowledged that victims of the shootout weren’t cooperating with investigators.

But the report also framed the state’s attorney’s office’s decision to decline charges in a different light: “Mutual combatants was cited as the reason for the rejection.” Mutual combat is a legal term used to define a fight or struggle that two parties willingly engage in.

This should revolutionize self-defense cases: “Your honor, the decedent voluntarily entered my client’s house. My client voluntarily shot him”.

Well, that’d be too simple, wouldn’t it?

On the one hand, I see stories like this Dash people protesting at the home have a school board member…

…and point out that what they’re doing isn’t really a whole lot better than what John Thompson did.

On the other hand, I read stories like this, and wonder if a little well focused fear wouldn’t be a very good idea for a lot of public officials?

From a letter to the editor:

And, in cozy bungalows in Highland Park, and Victorian proto-mansions in Crocus Hill, and condominiums down by Raymond, dozens of smug, cosseted nonprofit employees no doubt chortled “Good! More city for us!”, too snugly molded in their ideological bubbles to see what this means.

Victor Davis Hanson, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, explains why he longer works for the magazine of William F. Buckley:

I think there were certain people in the Republican movement, or establishment, who felt it is their duty to internally police their own, and that’s kind of a virtue signal to the left.

We are just part of your class, we share the same values as you do, and we keep our crazies. And they are not empirical.

Empiricism is hardly a growth industry, but clinging to tradition has its charms, especially if doing so allows you to strike down your rivals. There’s a long history of keeping crazies at National Review. During his long reign at NR, Buckley famously put paid to the Birchers and anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard, casting them to the outer darkness. Later on, Buckley cast out writers he had championed, including Joseph Sobran and Pat Buchanan, both for anti-Semitism. My father subscribed to NR and I would read it cover to cover in my youth. Once I set up my own household, I subscribed for over a decade, but after a while the value proposition wasn’t there.  

Buckley has been gone for over a decade now, and while his beloved NR is still in operation, it hasn’t been a serious enterprise for a long time. Back in 2016, NR tried to cast the Bad Orange Man to the outer darkness, marshaling dozens of arguments against the Dread Pirate Drumpf, but all their sound and fury signified, well, nothing. Why was that? No one really took NR seriously any more.

While Victor Davis Hanson doesn’t need a particular platform to be heard, his departure from NR means the cupboard is bare. It’s not surprising, truth be told — Republicanism generally signifies nothing. Hanson knows why:

I think there’s an image that a lot of Republicans have, both in politics and they sort of represent a sober and judicious way of looking at the world, and we are the adults in the room.

And it’s more about a culture than it is an ideology.

I’m not convinced it’s even a culture. From our perch in flyoverland, the conservative movement NR embodies is a pose rather than an attempt at understanding, let alone defending, a culture. Back to Hanson:

The original Republican conservative movement, I thought, was going to go back and look at the Constitution, when Jefferson said it won’t work if you pile up everybody in the cities because they will be subject to mass hysteria. Or de Tocqueville, and you look at certain ideas, I thought that’s what we were.

I thought they would be champions of the middle class, but I don’t think they were. I don’t think they wanted to be.

Hanson is clearly disillusioned, but he had to know the truth — any classicist of his erudition understands that grandeur and the trappings of the elite are powerful intoxicants. And currying favor with our betters is lucrative. 

Caught this on social media over the weekend:

Sort of the opposite of the “Free State Project” – the “idea” would be to export Manbuns from slave states to free states to tip the Senate.

And part of me would love to see 85,000 Manbuns trying to move to North Dakota. To survive in North Dakota.

And who on earth came up with these numbers?

In practical terms, it means 85,000 Manbuns – about 12% of the entire state’s current population – jamming into Fargo, since much as I’d love to imagine these effete hamsters moving to Fort Berthold or Scranton or WIllison or Dunseith, they did specify “work from home” Californians. You want broadband, you gotta go to Fargo, Grand Forks, Bismark or Minot. Which would increase the combined population of those four cities by 30%, pronto, making each of them more expensive than San Francisco. And you can wander any of those cities for the rest of your life looking for Avocado Toast, and find nothing.

It’d be even more pronounced in Alaska, and especially Wyoming, where an influx of 75,000 useless club drones would increase the entire state’s population by nearly 20%, and make its breoadband-enabled metro areas, Cheyenne and Casper, look like Del Rio Texas.

And Montana?

In practice, those 60,000 ofay fops would land in Missoula, the closest thing any of those states have to a San Francisco, blowing that city up.

And then? Winter.

Oh, good Lord. I hope you try, Manbun. I pray for your safety and your sanity in the middle of a North Dakota winter in an electric car. But I hope you try.

Is there anything re Covid that Florida’s governor can’t affect?

And I bet the Texas Abortion Law has something to do with it too.

Even liberal Democrats are figuring out the “Moderate Joe Biden” image was a bill of goods. A canard. A gull for the gullible.

Baked wind.

…when Cillizza, of all people, devotes a column to “the utter radicalness of Joe Biden’s presidency,” maybe it’s time to acknowledge that Biden is trying to implement extremist policies considerably outside the mainstream. Biden’s initiatives, writes Cillizza, amount to a “massive outlay of federal spending” that “will add massive sums to the federal budget deficit.”

Of course, Cilizza was one of the people behind building the myth in the first place – meaning he’s either a PR flack or an idiot.

One of the most futile memes in the conservative alternative media is “If this were happening to (fill in a democrat, or Democrats), this would he treated as a hate crime”.

It’s futile because the people who care have no power, and the people in power don’t care.

Still and all, it applies.

A protester – inoculated from blame in some quarters by being an “immigrant youth” – followed Kristen Sinema into a rest room at Arizona State (where SInema teaches) to…

…well, badger her:

And while the meme is threadbare, the fact remains – if anyone were to do this to Ilhan Omar or Tide Pod Evita, this would be treated by the media as a hate crime, accompanied by “think”Pieces about the vanishing of civility.

CBS News tales a break from its saturation coverage of the murder of Gabby Petito to bring up the elephant in the media room:

The discrepancy is even greater among missing women and girls. From January 1 to September 27, the number of Black, Hispanic, American Indian/Alaska Native and Hawaiian/Pacific Islander women missing were a greater proportion of cases than their respective demographics nationwide.

Hm.

If only there were institutions, with satellites and transmitters and printing presses and cable systems and huge websites, staffed by, I dunno, a pseudo-monastic order of self-appointed high priests of information-relaying, to deal with this imbalance…

During the Twin Cities marathon yesterday, former Viking and former Minnesota supreme court justice Allen Page…

…cheering on the runners by playing the sousaphone.

Got to say, Page is looking pretty good for a 76-year-old guy, especially for a former NFL lineman from back in the “concussion? We don’t care about no stinking concussion“ stage of the game.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We need a new word to describe an establishment conservative, someone who claims to be conservative but is always willing to stab in the back any truly conservative movement (the Tea Party) or candidate (Trump.) StabCon, as in, “Geez, Romney is such a StabCon.”

It is well established that the Constitutional right of habeas corpus can be suspended in times of rebellion, insurrection and war. We’ve spent the last year learning that any governor can suspend the Constitutional rights of religion, assembly, and private property by declaring an emergency, no questions asked. Nevada is now the cutting edge. Bureaucrats describe unapproved statements as a ‘public health crisis’ so the Constitution no longer protects dissenting speech. And, of course, the CDC wants guns declared a ‘public health crisis‘ so the Constitution no longer protects the right to keep and bear arms.

Pretty much the only thing that is Not a public health crisis is my blood pressure going up when I see my tax bill rising, year after year. That’s perfectly okay.

Trouble Down Under. You can tell it’s a mob of vicious Neo-Nazis by the woman walking her dog. All Neo-Nazis bring their dogs to the rally. Those police are safe when firing on unarmed civilians protesting government regulations because Australians have no guns to fire back. Pro tip: do not try this at home.

Joe Doakes

Dr. Scott Jensen is running for Governor.

Hold this thought:

“When people don’t trust the institutions in authority to uphold order fairly and justly, they create their own institutions to do it, to a more self-centered standard of “Fair and Just”. That’s almost always a bad thing”.

This just in from Ramsey County. Read the whole Twitter thread (available here in one convenient page):

Mr. House would seem to be a regular guest of Ramco law enforcement – but not a long-term one. Even with his long record of not using his indoor behavior, he just can’t seem to get a charge to stick enough to matter.

Why, it’s almost like he’s above the law – in a city that fines homeowners whose grass gets too long.

“When people don’t trust the institutions in authority to uphold order fairly and justly, they create their own institutions to do it, to a more self-centered standard of “Fair and Just”. That’s almost always a bad thing”.

Now, it’s nothing new that Ramsey County, while bellowing on cue about “gun safety”, goes nerfy on actual criminals using guns. Three straight Ramco Attorneys, going back thirty years – Tom Foley, Susan Gaertner and John Choi – have had access to a significant set of sentence enhancements to use on gun criminals, tools that have had measurable effect on crime over the past three decades, where they are applied.

Which they are not, in Ramsey County (or Hennepin, either). Foley, Gaertner and Choi, at best pled it away, and at other times didn’t even bother applying it, sometimes for the very crimes for which the measures were designed.

But don’t you dare put a security shutter on the window of your small business.

“When people don’t trust the institutions in authority to uphold order fairly and justly, they create their own institutions to do it, to a more self-centered standard of “Fair and Just”. That’s almost always a bad thing”.

It’s almost like they want public order to collapse.

That’s absurd, of course.

But if it were true, what would they do differently?

The new dean of the Hamline Mitchell law school says it’s time to do away with the bar exam, since it’s not “inclusive“ enough.

With all due respect to someone who, I suggest with all humility, hasn’t quite earned it yet, allow me to suggest alternatives approach; do away with law school as we know it today.In

Not every country requires a would-be lawyer to spend three years and $200,000 in law school as a prerequisite to taking the bar exam. In the United Kingdom, for example, it’s perfectly acceptable to “read“ for the British equivalent of the bar exam – One can walk in (figuratively, I’m sure; I imagine there are fees, registrations and so forth) and take the exam, and on success, become a practicing Barrister.

I would suspect it’s harder to pass the test without three years of motivated study, to say nothing of getting a job worth the effort without the degree (and the alumni guide) from a high-end law school.

But opening the profession up to people who are motivated to practice law, rather than acquire the most prestigious sheepskin, couldn’t hurt the ailing profession.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Some Liberals say $15 an hour minimum wage is too low, it should be $26 instead.

Cheap bastards. I agree with William F. Buckley: if raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, why stop at $15 or even $26? Let’s make it $100 and we’ll all be rich.

Yesterdays sardonic quip is today’s proposal and tomorrow’s law.

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Joe Doakes