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?

…if modern Social Justice chic would or could exhibit the faintest hint of conscience…

…it seems it can.

Although it took an (ostensibly) Catholic university to do it, so…

The House DFL’s redistricting plan couldn’t be more obviously gerrymandered to support the DFL if they re-did CD 6, 7 and 4 to spell out “DFL” in precincts on the state map.

Rep. Jeremy Munson has what I think is the second-best proposal I’ve seen:

Now, I thin the best plan I’ve seen (with all due modesty) is my own: it’d re-do the map so the districts are like huge slices of pie, radiating out from the Metro across the state. I need to find an actual precinct map to try drawing this up…

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!

…that your credit card company overbilled your automatic payments, and you opened your statement to find that your credit card balance was -$1,000. You had literally paid them a thousand more than you needed to.

Is that extra thousand dollars something the credit card company can – or should – then put into more coffee for the break room? Or executive bonuses? Or a new monitor for their accounting department? Or tack it onto someone’s salary, forcing them to keep overbilling you?

Seems absurd, right?

Well, that’s what the DFL is doing with the news that the budget has a “surplus”:

They are Capital One, and they are looking at that overpayment and drooling like a wolf tracking a pack of sheep.

Better idea, Ms. Lucking: have the waves of overpaid, largely deadwood administrators that the schools have been hiring with previous waves of “surpluses” that got turned into permanent education spending, to (judging by the results) negative results, look those students in the eye and tell them what f****** good they’ve done.

We’ll wait

But I digress.

The surplus is a mirage, of course; it includes federal “Covid Relief” money that hasn’t been spent (yet), and other temporal fruit of a distorted economy. It isn’t permanent…

…any more than that overbilling from Capital One.

Apropos nothing all that much, but I really enjoyed this clip by Warren Zanes, the author of the definitive bio of Tom Petty.

If you’re a petty fan, you likely will as well.

If you’re a yuge fan, it might just close the deal on a copy of the biography.

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.

I’m informed by a reliable source that Shot in the Dark is blocked at United Healthgroup!

So – what do you suppose they’re afraid of?

According to Dana Milbank…

…dissenting from Big Left/Big Media/the Brandon administration is “fascism”..

Not sure if they’re trying to foment a civil war.

If they were, what would they be doing differently?

(And how is the Brandon Administration “salvaging democratic norms?” Labeling everyone that disagrees a “white supremacist?”)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If I can see the sign, then I will know I can ask for a menu for the blind?

If I can read the sign in English, then I can ask for a picture menu for people who cannot read English?

I expect this is corporate HR’s attempt to satisfy the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements.

It is worthy of ridicule.

Joe Doakes

Not to be a contrarian, but I suspect Joe’s first paragraph is correct.I would guess that most blind customers don’t walk in the McDonald’s on their own.

Among those that do? The sign is there to remind the staff, as well.

But yes, it is absolutely there to satisfy the ADA – and to placate regulators, and especially the people that wander from store to store looking for ADA lawsuits to file.

A friend of the blog and fellow Midway resident writes, in re last week’s piece on being shamed by the Shiny Happies for telling the truth about what’s going on in the city:

Saw your blog today. In My neighborhood, we’ve felt like we’ve had ghetto tourists since they started building the stadium. They remind me me the young suburbanites you talked about.

As far as us, we too want to stay here. It’s getting harder.

As I was walking [Redacted] home from school the other day, we were half a block from the intersection where two cars were having a shoot out. They were just a little east of the intersection, so didn’t see it, but definitely heard it.

[Redacted] , somehow, knew it was gun shots. I kept saying it was a car backfiring until all the neighbors came out to check on us. This happened at the end of my alley.

Zillow bought the house next-door to me and now is just letting it sit vacant. So far, one of their storm doors has been removed and the other is broken. I reported it as vandalism, but I anticipate much more happening to the house, which actually was one of the better kept house’s pre-Zillow.

All down University on my side of town businesses are moving, leaving vacant buildings.

I told my family that we still like it here, but my moving criteria is if several houses become long term vacant, then we’re moving.

That’s the point I keep trying to make to the Shiny Happies – it’s not like I’m stating, or overstating, the situation in the city to add drama and gravitas to my life.

I’ve invested nearly three decades in my house, my neighborhood and my city. It’s a little depressing to see it run by people who don’t value those tens of thousands of investments as much as they value their demented ideology.

Theory: As mutation-prone viruses evolve, natural selection favors strains that are more contagious, and less lethal to their hosts.

It’s basic natural selection. Dead hosts = viruses that reproduce less,.

Evidence?

While it’s early, there have so far been no confirmed deaths attributed to Omicron, according to those Anti-Vaxxer tools, the WHO and the Guardian.

Of course, we don’t get that until paragraph six – but we get it.

Fearless prediction: Omicron will be more contagious than Delta, and less lethal.

Pi, Rho and Sigma will be more contagious still – and the death rates per case will drop.

By the time we get near Psi and Omega, it’ll be nearly as contagious as the common flu, and about as deadly.

And Karen will need to find another purpose in life.

Uh, because they routinely lie to you, and we know it, but they keep on trying to deny it?

Whistle blown on Bloomington public health director, lying to school parents about the effectiveness of masks:

Emphasis added:

At an August 2 “Return to School” webinar on the district’s proposed COVID plan, Kelley urged parents to get their kids vaccinated, calling it the “cornerstone” to containing COVID. Next up in his presentation, Kelly unveiled a list of best practices for schools to follow in preventing the spread of the virus, emphasizing masks were the most important tool of all.

“They’re called best practices because this is the evidence-based data we have for driving how to protect kids in school environments based on experiences we saw in the last two school years,” Kelley said in the August meeting posted on YouTube. “Masking is at the top of that list. The ability to have source control and some aspect of protection for the wearer is a phenomenal tool to control a respiratory pathogen like COVID.”

Yet in a closed door meeting of Bloomington Public Health staff the week school began, Kelley appeared to offer a markedly different view of the usefulness of mandatory masking at schools, according to a watchdog who attended the virtual meeting.

“In terms of purely broad effectiveness, the least effective mitigation we’re implementing in this process is masking,” Kelley said in a recording provided by the watchdog. “Masking, the quality of the consistency of the fit, all those things are highly variable in a population setting.”

It’s becoming a Berg’s Law; anyone who refers to an argument as “evidence-based” should be distrusted and verified – and, almost invariably, distrusted thereafter.

Congratulations to Tony Oliva and Jim “Kitty” Kaat, who were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday:

The National Baseball Hall of Fame will induct at least six new members in 2022. Sunday evening the Hall of Fame’s Early Baseball Era Committee announced Negro League legends Bud Fowler and Buck O’Neil have been voted into Cooperstown. Also voted in were Gil Hodges, Jim Kaat, Minnie Miñoso, and Tony Oliva by the Golden Days Era Committee.

Few things are more contentious (or more pedantic) than the arguments concerning the merits of those who are on the outside of the Hall. The statistical devotees crank out the metrics in every conceivable way to argue their points, while the old timers often use the same approach to Hall worthiness as Potter Stewart used to define pornography — they can’t define it, but they know it when they see it.

Since the arguments are indeed contentious and pedantic, I’ll try to avoid them here. But I will say this: I am old enough to have seen both Oliva and Kaat play, mostly in the 1970s. Oliva was a shadow of what he once was by then, just as Willie Mays was in his final, awful season as a New York Met. Oliva’s knees were shot and he couldn’t play in the field any more, but his swing was still sweet and he would flash occasional power. I was living in Wisconsin and didn’t see the Twins much, but when they would appear on the Game of the Week you could tell Oliva was a figure meriting great respect — the Curt Gowdys and Tony Kubeks of the world described him in almost reverent tones. In some ways, Tony Oliva and Kirby Puckett had similar careers; great stars cut down by injuries. And both were lifelong Twins.

Kaat was a good, perhaps not great, pitcher for a very long time. He was a contemporary of other pitchers who had comparable careers — Don Sutton, Bert Blyleven, Tommy John, and the Perry brothers, Gaylord and Jim. Of these pitchers, Sutton and Gaylord Perry are in the Hall because they were 300-game winners, usually a surefire ticket to the Hall as long as you’re not Roger Clemens. Blyleven was next to make the Hall, primarily because the statistical devotees championed his cause. Blyleven won 287 games, John won 288, and Kaat won 283. Jim Perry trailed the rest with 215.

As it happens, Kaat, Blyleven and Jim Perry were all Twins for long stretches of their careers. All three were among the best pitchers in the American League. What separates them? I don’t know the answer. But I do know this — Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat are both worthy, whether you use metrics or the Potter Stewart test.

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.

…the Babylon Bee has become America’s newspaper record in recent years

This was the graph The Democratic Congressional campaign committee (DC cc ( released last week, purporting to credit President Branden with a drop, of sorts, in gas prices:

These are the actual prices since the beginning of his regime.

The blue graph above covers, literally, the last little square of the second graph.

It is, I think, further evidence of my theory that the Democrats realize they don’t actually need to push actual facts, since their audience just doesn’t think that critically.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I loved the Artemis Fowl books.  I just saw the trailer for the movie and I feel like crying.

Artemis is a teenaged boy, a genius and ruthless criminal mastermind, assisted by his hulking bodyguard, Butler.  The scriptwriters dragged out all the tropes to make him a naive kid guided by the Wise Old Black Man to Save the Planet from Ancient Evil and Rescue his Father . . . they turned him into a Disney Princess.

Look guys, you bought the movie rights to a wildly popular series of books because you wanted a ready-made fan base.  But that fan base knows the character and knows the story.  They don’t want you to ‘improve’ it, they want you to put the movie in their minds up there on the screen, like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.

Yeah, yeah, Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench and awesome special effects, great stuff.  But couldn’t they have done it with a new story, one that nobody knows so the fans wouldn’t mind if it was butchered?

Joe Doakes

Hey, you’re lucky they didn’t turn him into an ass-kicking girl.

The media yesterday expressed wonder that Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey had created a group of his “political critics“ serves a task force to “work“ on the cities crime problem.

A reader emails describe that group as:

…a veritable who’s who of those with their snout in the trough.

With LA carpetbagger Nekima Levy at the helm nothing but good can come from Mayor Frey’s Community Safety Workgroup

This gets, I think, to the truth that our media won’t, can’t, or aren’t supposed to talk about; this exercise is entirely a matter of greasing all the palms that need to be greased.

Joel Doakes from Como Park emails:

For months, I’ve been saying Democrats stole the election with help from the media and RINO Never-Trumpers, all banding together to rid themselves of the Bad Orange Man.

For months, it’s been obvious Biden and Harris weren’t smart enough to have engineered The Big Steal; they were merely the patsies put forward by The Real Usurper.

For months, we’ve known Joe Biden’s mental and physical health is failing too quickly for him to serve his full term of office and Kamala Harris has virtually no support among Democrat bigwigs.

For months, I’ve been asking how The Real Usurper plans to get rid of the patsies so he can take up the power of the Presidency.

For months, I’ve been suggesting Biden gets rid of Harris, who is replaced by The Real Usurper, who moves up when Biden resigns/is removed from office, but Harris’ supporters claim it’s impossible.

The fact my strategy is being openly discussed in Washington power circles means it is not impossible, it simply is not yet time to act. That time is coming – Biden’s decline will force it to happen.

The question remains: who will The Real Usurper install as his puppet, to finish his efforts to destroy America? Who is being groomed by the media for the job? Who would have an easy confirmation as Vice President?

My money is on Michelle Obama.

Joe Doakes

I should start a pool…

I live in the Midway.

When people think of the Midway, they think urban blight – and they’re not wrong. .

South of Thomas, anyway. So far.

I’ve lived here a long, long time. I’ve been on the rollercoaster – the worst of the “Murderapolis” years (where Saint Paul was also beset with violent crime as well, although as usual to nowhere near the level of Minneapolis.

I’ve got no intention of going anywhere anytime soon.

And most of us live here without much incident.

And throughout the cities, most of us do. Some places it’s harder than others; I know people in North Minneapolis who’ve learned to tune out gunfire that’s not too close, sort of like infantrymen who ignore artillery shells that are passing overhead. Other places it’s harder for reasons that go beyond ambient crime; people stuck in the “George Floyd Autonomous Zone” or whatever they call it these days, or Powderhorn Park last year, where external forces change the neighborhood, against the neighbors will or not.

But for the most part, we live here, more or less like we did five or ten or 25 years ago. Maybe a little less retain, maybe a little more careful at stoplights – but life goes on, the changes slow enough, riots notwithstanding, not to raise any particular alarms.

But things are worse than they were five years ago; the numbers don’t lie. VIolent crime has skyrocketed. In Minneapolis, they were at 82 homicides so far this year. That was the total in 2016…

…for the entire state of Minnesota.

So life goes on – but all is not well, and all is not what it was five years ago, when Minneapolis had very low crime by urban standards, and carjacking was something you read about in Chicago. .We carry on – but we’re aware that property crime is a third above the national average; violent crime, double the national rate.

IShiny Happy People: bring it up because Ive been beset by a small plague of Shiny Happy People lately. Overwhelmingly young women in their late ’20s/early ’30s, visibly and vocally members of “progressive” Christian congregations, resisdents of third tier suburbs, who declare “Don’t believe all the apocalyptic hype; I’ve been to Minneapolis (or Saint Paul), a bunch, and it’s still pretty awesome”.

The message comes with an. implied “Tut tut, all you big angry white men; if lil’. ol’ me can take in a show, I don’t know what you’re jabbering about”.

I’ll meet ’em halfway. I’ve stopped bothering responding to hysterics from Orono and Landfall and their Mad Max fantasies.

But a quick note to the Shiny Happy People, the “progressive” evangelical tourists who drive in, proclaim, and drive back home.

On any given day in Minneapolis last year:

• There were five armed robberies – six times the Minnesota average per capita.
• There were 8-9 assaults. That’s almost triple the national rate, per capita. Note that this doesn’t include the rampant reports of gunfire that don’t produce a victim – each of those is an assault, although usually with. not complainant but a victim, either at North Memorial or out on the street.
• There was a murder, on average, every 4.5 days. The rate is closer to every four days, so far this year.
• There are ten burglaries
• There are thirty reports of theft – everything from reported shoplifting to porch piracy.
• There were ten car thefts.

That averages out to roughly 66 crimes per day- about 14 of them violent.

Spread that across a population of 400,000 people and your odds of being directly victimized by a crime of any kind is about 1/66 (and lower than that if you leave out the burglaries, which won’t apply to the Shiny Happy tourists).

Your odds of being involved in a violent crime on any given day in Minneapolis are about one in 2,666.

So you’re right; if you go to visit a congregation, or a restaurant or a coffee shop in the city, the odds that you’ll get back to Circle Pines unscathed are very, very high. Even in North Minneapolis, the odds favor you.

But for those of us who are here – many by choice, many not – the odds get worse every year. And the crimes that affect quality of life – the ones that make you focus on. personal security, make you leave a car length in front of you at traffic lights, make you run out to an Amazon drop location rather than get deliveries to your door, make you get your catalytic converters branded to help maybe prevent yet another petty but grossly expensive theft, or that make you wonder in the pit of the night “was that fireworks, or was that gunfire?”

Mind your tact, Shiny Happies. We don’t go home to Anoka when we’re done.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

I don’t watch much TV, but a Sci-Fi series was recommended. It has commercials. They’re the same every break: out of four ads there will be one for childhood covid vaccine and one for Medicine for black homosexuals with HIV. Commercial ads are annoying enough, but relentless liberalism is infuriating.

Joe Doakes

The first cold, stormy Saturday we have, I’m going to do an ethnographic study of ads on TV, not so much to prove a political point as to illustrate the sociological absurdity that there is such a thing as “structural racism“ in our society.

…that a city run by Kim Norton, which has been becoming blue-er and blue-er over time, would play passive-aggressive bureaucratic pattycake games with the citizenry…

…right?

A group of parents, with a Twin Cities law firm, are asking for records related to the district’s adoption of Critical Race Theory.

And how did that go over?

“On Nov. 12, an attorney representing the district said that it would cost ‘Equality in Education’ $901,121.15 to obtain the records and they must prepay before the district completes their request,” the report reads.

The battle lines for next November could not be clearer.

It was a generation ago – when I was in high school – that Margaret Thatcher become Prime Minister. The media and popular culture were less tribalized then than they are today – but the drumbeat from the cultural authorities was this is a very bad thing.

And it foreshadowed the great American resurgence that followed; a wave of center-right leaders followed – Kohl in Germany, Mitterand in France, Pope John Paul II in the Vatican, and of course Ronald Reagan – who altered the course of, and in many ways saved (or postponed the demise, at least) of Western Civilization.

Is Eric Zemmour cut from the same cloth?

I don’t know, and he’s only a candidate at the moment.

But if he turns into the man of the moment in France, perhaps there’s still hope for the West.

Here’s his speech announcing his candidacy. Translation here.

It’s an incredible work of political rhetoric and, if not oratory, certainly videography.

Steven Hayward:

Today Zemmour released a video declaring his candidacy for president, and I’ve heard comparisons (including from a French student in my political science class this semester) comparing it to Charles de Gaulle’s famous July 18, 1940 radio broadcast pronouncing the cause of Free France amidst the nation’s collapse before the German army. 

This caught me:

We are worthy of our ancestors. We will not allow ourselves to be mastered, vassalized, conquered, colonized. We will not allow ourselves to be replaced

It’s an overtone of my wish, every Memorial Day, that we leave a society worthy of the sacrifice so many have made for this civilization.

The other overtone?

The moment isn’t a whole lot less grave.

Countdown to anguished “think” pieces on NPR starts now.

This is on the façade of the former uptown theater Dash the long beloved, offbeat art house theater that was a victim of the pandemic, and, perhaps more so, what Minneapolis has become.

“Transtifa”.

Will they be getting into a war with “Anti-“Fa? And will “Anti”-Fa Now I have to change them to “CisFa”, Or risk losing its Progressive cred?

It’s sort of reminds me of the old joke; Q: if the hair-metal bands Poison and Cinderella got into a flamethrower fight, who would win? A: The world.

As many of you noticed, the blog was offline yesterday. And it’s been running slow for a few months before they.

The two were, as it happens, unrelated; there was a move to a new server that caused a few problems, and a denial of service attack bogged the blog down yesterday.

Hopefully we’ve got them both fixed.

Thanks to the good folks at Hosting Matters, who have hosted this blog for the past 15 years, and who are still the best in the business.