It was barely after midnight on July 17, 1918 when the former royal family of Russia had been disturbed from their sleep.  Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, children, and a handful of members of the royal entourage had made their home in Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains just a couple of months earlier, all under the intense and abusive watch of Bolshevik guards.  After the abdication in February of 1917, Nicholas II had lived in relative comfort as the Provisional Government allowed them a standard of living comparable to their former reign, even attempting to negotiate the Tsar’s relocation to Britain.  But with the rise of the Bolsheviks, Nicholas II and his family were now prisoners of the State; their fates a topic of debate at the highest levels of the Soviet government.

In Yekaterinburg, the Romanovs lived in rooms with sealed and painted over windows, and were given two half-hour periods outside the house where they sat in a tiny garden surrounded by 14-foot walls.  “Luxuries” like butter and coffee had been cut out of their meals.  No visitors or newspapers were allowed, nor was any conversation allowed with the 300 guards assigned to watch them, all under the threat of being shot and other verbal abuse.  Surviving diary entries from the family show a slow realization towards their eventual fate.

As the family and their remaining servants gathered in the basement of home, ostensibly to be evacuated due to the advancing Czechoslovak Legion, the head guard read from a letter:

“Nikolai Alexandrovich, in view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you.”

Before the family could react beyond Nicholas II asking “What?”, the guards opened fire.  The tiny basement quickly filled with smoke, ricochets and screams.  When the gunshots stopped, the guards realized how poor their aim had been – outside of the Tsar and his wife, most of the family and others were still alive.  Over the next 20 minutes, the guards shot and stabbed the children and servants, mutilating and sexually abusing the bodies.  The remains were stripped, covered in Sulphuric acid, lye, then burned and buried.  Such was the level of concern over giving the advancing Czechoslovaks and the burgeoning White Army any standard bearer upon which to rally – even a royal corpse.

The last act of the House of Romanov was among the first acts of the Russian Civil War.

White Cossacks charge – the Cossacks were the initial backbone of the White Army

The historic descriptor of the loose confederacy of activists, politicians and generals that opposed the Bolsheviks as the “White” Russian movement could be seen as truly apt.  If “white” as a color is often seen as formless, bland, lacking contours and definition, so to was the nature of the “White” Russian resistance to the “Red” Bolsheviks that took power in the fall of 1917.  While later definitions of the Whites would oversimplify them as a conservative, reactionary force, the White movement constituted political leaders ranging from Mensheviks, to Social Democrats, Monarchists, and ultra-nationalist militias.  The Whites were a movement without philosophical grounding or even consistent political leadership, with most efforts to organize failing and leading to dictatorial control from former Tsarist generals and local warlords.  At their core, to be a “White” often simply meant to stand in opposition to the Bolsheviks. Read the rest of this entry »

…when using crosshairs in political messaging was an incitement to terrorism?

Either does the DFL.

A few weeks ago, when the “city of Minneapolis” first “tried” to “Clear” George Floyd Square, at 38th and Chicago, they spun it (with the willing connivance of our media) to try to make it appear that a community group had somehow gotten a bunch of city trucks and their unionized employees out to one of the edgiest flashpoints in America without the mayor knowing about it.

As if it just…happened. Spontaneously.

Go ahead. Get your community group to try it.

It’s apparently spreading. Lisa Bender seems to think city crews are out wildcatting.

After city employees went to clean graffiti off the streets of Minneapolis, City Council President Lisa Bender allegedly stopped the process. When Bender first heard about the cleanup work being done, she wrote that she assumed the city employees “were talked into this [cleaning up the graffiti] by the business association.”

In a later tweet, she said that the public works employees “mistook the drive aisle” at the location of the Winston Smith memorial for a “public space.”

I remember the good old days, when Minneapolils just competed with Portland and Seattle for “miles of bike lanes per capita”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Two weeks ago, Joe Biden declared the greatest threat facing America is global warming.  He has now announced his plan to deal with it: take away your guns. 

No plans to take criminals off the streets with aggressive crime prevention tactics, more cops, longer sentences.  But plenty of federal money for programs to keep teens out of trouble which means Midnight Basketball may be coming back, so that’s something.

Joe Doakes

And y’know, intervening with at-risk kids isn’t the dumbest idea for dealing with crime.

Naturally, most of the programs to which “intervention” money will be transferred will be shams, the usual crap from the non-=profit/industrial complex, at least in the “Blue” cities most affected.

But as Joe said, that’s true of pretty much all the areas where they’re spending. It’s all a wealth transfer.

Back in 1987, the Guardian Angels short-lived Twin Cities chapter “closed down” the Cecil Newman housing project in North Minneapolis – basically blockading it from criminals, keeping everyone out but the residents.

Legal? No less so than the CHAZ in south Minneapolis today is. Make of that what you will.

Needed. Pffft, yeah. Newman was a hotbed of drug dealing and crime, as the Twin Cities first wave of gang violence was just getting started, still years before “Murderapolis”. .

I was producing the “Geoff Charles Show” at the time. As we covered the story on day, Geoff said – one of the clear blue, live on the air, as he was wont to do, “Get me Curt Sliwa”, the fouorn2run

So I called the Guardian Angels in New York. “He’s in Minneapolis”.

I called the Guardian Angels at their Minneapolis number. “He’s at Cecil Newman”.

I called Cecil Newman. The phone rang a couple times. A New York accent said “Hello”.

“I’m looking for Curt Sliwa”.

“Tha’ts me”.

It was one of my favorite moments of that part of my career.

34 years later, he’s got the GOP endorsement for Mayor of New York. And he’s talking sense:

I mean, I’ll be realistic; a Republican has about as much chance of winning in New York as one does in Chicago, these days; I doubt Giuliani could make a dent these days.

But it’s sure fun to think about.

From Minneapolis Crime Watch – one of the tiny fringe of feeds that make Twitter worthwhile – yesterday:

That’s right – if you’re a 98 pound woman, and you get bodily tossed from y our car by a coulpe of 250 pound White Supremacists who theaten to curb stomp you to death, and you don’t report a gun, the MPD isn’t nallowed to pursue.

The other side of the Looking Glass called, and asked Minneapolis to dial back the crazy.

I’ve observed, with tongue half-heartedly about a quarter of the way into my cheek, that you could tell there not a significant number of “white supremacists” in last year’s riots, because as the Midway burned, vandalized and/or caked with graffiti, Allianz Field, the playground of upper-middle-class white progressive Europhiles and, we were once told, immigrants, protected by not so much as a row of barberry bushes, had not so much as a squiggle of Sharpie on it.

So the notion that “white supremacists” were behind the riots seems…far-fetched.

But it’s interesting that the owners of Allianz Field and “Minnesota United” would seem to be the only people who stand to profit, maybe immensely, from the riots.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Usurper says people cannot Resist without Eagles and Fat Men.

One chick with a cardboard sign – in the right place at the right time – can cause utter chaos costing millions of dollars of damage. And she didn’t even have a ‘ghost gun.’

Imagine what 80 million insurrectionists can do.

Joe Doakes

Leaving aside for a moment that the United States was founded in an insurrection against, proportionally, the greatest, most powerful empire the world has ever known? Tending to indicate the Harris administration isn’t very literate about history, to say nothing of mass movement?

Bidens jeep was not the first time some “progressive“ has tried that line. “What, you’re going to go after a tank with an AR 15?“

They forget that The American military is exceedingly disproportionately drawn from the same parts of society that “gun culture“ exist soon. An 18-year-old kid from East Texas is 32 times as likely to join the military as an 18-year-old in New York City (and even that kid is most likely a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, or someone from Staten Island, not the children of Manhattan hedge fund trash).

So the battle is not going to be between the putative “Fat, angry white man“ and a tank. It’s most likely to be between that guy, and his son with his tank, and his niece with her drone, against a bunch of non-profiteers with pre-printed protest signs and pink knit “pussy“ hats.

Which is, I expect, why the administration is putting so much effort into trying to “wokify” the military.

When people can’t trust the “Justice” system, they create their own.

From Irish cops to legends of The Godfather and Goodfellas and The Sopranos to the various warlords and cartels of Central America (and what is a cartel but a warlord with a product people want to buy?), the long legacy of people, even in a place that’s prided itself on this justice system, who find themselves needing to turn to their own communities (read: the elements of their communities with the fewest scruples about applying force to gain power) to get, if not “justice”, at least a order they as a group can live with, albeit at a cost.

The trick? Get the locals to fear you, and the erstwhile authorities at least to give you some room out of mutual convenience, if not outright getting on your payroll. And/or both.

So – can we, the people, trust our institutions?

• Our “elite” media is a joke. They are nothing but propaganda shills, and they only pay lip service to the contrary to gull the gullible.
• The FBI and the Justice Department are thoroughly politicized.
• So are academia and education and the bureaucracy.
• While lefist groups get the run of major cities without even the formality of a slap on the wrist, those perceived as “right of center” come in for, let’s not mince words, oppression.

And when the Normals color inside the lines, as we did during the Tea Party, we get both sides sliming us; when they learn the lesson and elect a candidate who doesn’t play by the K Street rules, they get slandered as a group. Oh, yeah – and told they’re defectives who are wired to hate from birth, and are just waiting to blow up.

It seems like Big Left is a bully kicking sand in the Normals’ faces, trying to provoke a fight.

Am I the only one who can’t possibly think it’s a coincidence?

Keith Ellison’s Attorney General’s Office is soliciting “victim impact statements”…

…from, literally, everybody.

Community impact statements are statements submitted by those who have been impacted by a crime. Those statements then may be read at the sentencing hearing.

On a form on Ellison’s website, people can submit their own community impact statement describing “how Mr. Chauvin’s offenses have had a social or economic impact” on their lives and community. When submitting, people must select whether they reside in Minneapolis, the state of Minnesota, the United States, or elsewhere.

“It is not common to facilitate the submission of community-impact statements in this way, but this is not a common case,” a spokesman for Ellison’s office told FOX 9.

Reading between the lines: the DFL has to keep the outrage stoked, since none of the other Democrat issues are polling well at all.

Recent mass shooting in Colorado was ended by a civilian with a legal firearm:

“[John Hurley] did not hesitate; he didn’t stand there and think about it. He totally heard the gunfire, went to the door, saw the shooter and immediately ran in that direction,” [colleague Bill]] Troyanos said. “I just want to make sure his family knows how heroic he was.”

A manager at a business nearby who asked not to be identified said he was outside when he heard Hurley urge people to get to safety.

“He turned back and looked towards everybody at the restaurant and told us that he (the gunman) is coming, that he is coming back and that we should get inside,” the manager said. “I ran to the back of the store, closer to the alley, kind of ‘nooked’ myself in a corner just to feel safe.”

It’s an object lesson – being the “Good Guy with the Gun” doesn’t necessarily ensure one’s safety.

But by all indications, it’s a spree killing deterred.

UPDATE: He was apparently killed by the responding cops.

Gotta be careful out there.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I hate these tests. 

Joe Doakes

I put nothing past Captcha.

Background.

Today is the 17th anniversary of the opening of the Metro Transit Blue Line – the beginning (or re-beginning) of light rail transit in the Twin Cities.

So on this anniversary, let us remember the people who gave their lives – unwillingly and in many cases unwittingly – to further Big Minnesota obsession with feeling like a Big City.

The Blue Line has claimed 15 lives – eight pedestrians, three bikers, a man in a wheelchair, and three people in cars. There was also a stabbing death this past winter on the Blue Line, and two more murders at stations along the line. That’s an average of just one death per year.

The Green Line has taken eight victims in only five years – the first just six weeks after the train started operating, mostly pedestrians trying to navigate the badly-designed street-level crossings. The most recent was in the last couple years.

The Northstar line has five fatalities so far.

That’s 29 dead, so far. 29 lives sacrificed so that the Met Council, the various governments, and other people who love to play with the dials and levers of government can feel like they’re “running” a big city with all the trimmings. 

Let’s take a moment today to remember these innocent victims of government megalomania.

So why did the Democrats back off the whole “Election Refoirm” thing in Congress so hard?

Oh.

Fearless prediction: being able as they are to count on the fact that the typical Democrat voter thinks Samantha Bee is “news”, they’ll keep talking about “voter suppression” anyway.

So is this a tourism ad, or a cry for help?

Odd tourism ad, doncha think? Usually you get a picture of nature, or a soaring skyline, or beatiful people enjoying dazzling nightlife. But not this time.

So what does a tourist do in Portland? Apparently you can cross a bunch of bridges. That might have some allure. I have it on good authority that Portland has a number of restaurants, but it’s difficult to tell what the bill of fare might be from this brown paper ad. It’s possible the restaurants in Portland feature word salad. “We’re a place of dualities that are never polarities.” What does that even mean? Does it mean this?

That might be the dazzling nightlife? After all, things are going well:

Every member of a police crowd-control unit in the US city of Portland has resigned after one of its officers was indicted on an assault charge.

The charge stemmed from violent anti-racism protests that rocked the city, in the state of Oregon, last year.

Prosecutors allege the officer used “excessive and unlawful use of force” against a protester in August 2020.

But Portland’s police union described the decision to prosecute the officer as “politically driven”.

The reporting here is from the BBC. Looks like they didn’t get the “mostly peaceful” memo. 

As the state heads toward a mid-term election with the control of both the House and Senate, to say nothing of the Constitutional Offices, at stake, a poll shows MInnesotans are un-thrilled with government’s handling of events:

Considering opinions on Gov. Tim Walz’s approach to handling crime, the results have virtually flipped since last year in terms of approval. In June of 2020, 59% approved and 35% disapproved of the governor’s approach to crime, but in June of 2021, 55% disapproved and only 39% approved…Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they visited Minneapolis less than normal in the past year, compared to 4% who said they visited the city more frequently than in the past.

Despite this, a majority of Minnesotans do trust law enforcement to keep the city safe — far more than they trust elected leaders in the state to do the same.

Ample reasons for dissatisfaction are obvious. And some are not so much . More tomorrow in this space.

Fearless prediction: the adherence of the left’s official opinion-makers to this video:

…whether its’ Samantha Bee or Ibram Kendi, to an almost plagiaristic level (but for the fact that it will be in earnest, not at all satirical) is going to take six months.

This quote popped to mind…

“We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

…when I read this twitter thread:

To plumb the depths of our culture’s intellectual collapse, here’s the NR article Cooke wrote on the subject.

It was a typically sweltering summer day in Canton, Ohio on June 16th, 1918, but it hadn’t stopped an estimated 1,200 locals, bolstered by a healthy contingent of press, from gathering in a city park.  Nor had it stopped the day’s speaker, former 4-time Socialist candidate for President Eugene Debs, from wearing a heavy tweed jacket and buttoned vest, sweating profusely as he spoke.  At 62 years of age, Debs had barely recovered from an illness in time for his midwestern anti-war speaking tour and looked worse for the wear.  His audience was a Socialist convention picnic and federal agents wandered through the crowded, randomly demanding draft cards.  

Debs, always the political firebrand, heaped praise on the Bolshevik Revolution and defended three local Socialists who had been recently imprisoned for speaking out against the war.  “They have come to realize,” he intoned, “that it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world.”

Two weeks later, Debs would find himself arrested under the same charges and become the most well-known defendant against the recently-passed Sedition Act.  

Uncle Sam picks up a variety of individuals – an IWW supporter, a Sinn Fein activist and a “traitor”

While the Sedition Act of 1918 – and it’s precursor, the Espionage Act of 1917 – most assuredly had their roots in America’s involvement in the Great War, President Woodrow Wilson’s interest in far-reaching legal authority related to the domestic end of national security pre-dated the American declaration of war.  In late 1915, as Europe’s war raged on, Wilson delivered his State of the Union, declaring:

“There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt …  Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Trigger warning – clear thinking ahead.

If you’ve never thought “perhaps it’s time to just re-boot the whole thing”, you might start.

I talked about this on the show on Saturday. Climatelitigationwatch.com has evidence that progressive plutocrats with deep pockets – the Rockefeller Foundation, Michael Bloomberg – are not only pouring money into Minnesota elections (as is their First Amendment right), but apparently paying for two attorneys in Keith Ellison’s Attorney General’s office to run the office’s “climate” litigation:

New documents obtained under state open records laws
reveal important details about the expanding, and arguably
improper, deployment of law schools by or on behalf of donors
in the climate litigation industry. That latter, national effort,
which we now know is being coordinated by donors out of
New York, enlists local activist groups, faculty, and attorneys
general to bring lawsuits in state courts against traditional
“fossil fuel” energy companies, as well as others involved in
energy production and transport. As described by the plaintiffs’
lawyers and advisors, these suits have been brought to impact
public policy and to find new sources of revenue for activists
and state budgets.
Numerous schools including public universities now have
donor-funded faculty advising the tort firms and AGs. They enlist
students to assist, and they serve in the media to support the
litigation campaign, often without disclosing relationships with
the litigants or their funders. Law schools are described as a
“secret weapon”1
in the litigation campaign targeting companies.
The roster of schools assisting the donor-driven campaign
has expanded beyond elite universities, to public institutions
in jurisdictions where the national coordinator has arranged
for an allied state attorney general to target industry. Newly
obtained documents show a much broader group of faculty
quietly assisting this litigation industry.2
They also show faculty
being quietly advised and guided by activist attorneys engaged
by financiers of this campaign. This extends even to allowing
the activist attorneys — described as “the lawyers advising the
Rockefeller family fund [sic]” — to ghost co-author supposedly
academic pieces published on university letterhead, apparently
in violation of rules governing these public institutions

You’d think there’d be a law against people buying executive branch officials. And you’d probably be right.

So what are you going to do – go to the Attorney General’s office?

Minnesota’s level of corruption is creeping toward Chicago levels.

“Government is run by those who show up” – apparently with a checkbook.

A friend of the blog emails:

Given that I am pretty sure that the low birth rate is among the class that can afford to have kids, I am also sure that this op ed is unrelateable to most people.

The frightening part is the end where after her rant, we learn that the author is actually going to have a baby. 

I read the article, and wondered – what must it be like to see the world entirely in terms of caricatures and stereotypes?

Warning up front: It’ll be an investment of time. Over two hours, to be exact.

It’s Jordan Peterson, interviewing former NYTimes editor Bari Weiss, who famously resitned from the paper, roasting it all the way for its obseisance, not to “journalism”, but to the feelings and politicized motivation of a small, “woke” faction of the staff.

It’ll be worth the investment:

If we can’t trust our institutions – law enforcement and the judiciary, the bureaucracy and the media – to act fairly and dispassionately – then the Republica has a huge problem.

Also: the Republic has a huge problem.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails, citing the title of a “Crime Prevention Research Center” article “What is the danger to allowing Concealed handguns on University property?: Shootings by permit holders from 2012 to May 2021”:

Obviously because college students are too stupid, too immature, too emotionally volitile to safely and wisely use guns.   Unlike sex, drugs, alcohol and Tide pods, for which they are perfectly well suited. 

Turns out college kids who are mature enough to go through the process of getting carry permits, don’t use them in fraternity hazing rituals.

Go figure.

The anxiousness in the Austro-Hungarian trenches along the Piave river in Italy was obvious at 2:30am on June 15th, 1918.  In 30 minutes, hundreds of thousands of men, supported by nearly 7,000 pieces of heavy artillery, would launch themselves at the Italian line as part of a massive, nearly one-million man offensive designed to finally push Italy out of the war.  Despite the rapidly increasing political disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, if Italy could be dealt one more major blow like they had received the preceding fall at Caporetto, the Dual Monarchy’s last major remaining front would close, perhaps meaning that the Empire could successfully negotiate their way out of the war.  Coupled with Germany’s gains in France as part of their Spring Offensive, a glimmer of hope that the war could be conventionally won, despite all evidence to the contrary, was seen.  The Empire had staked everything on this offensive – either it would be one of the greatest moments in the Dual Monarchy’s history, or it would be a failed gamble that would hasten the polyglot Empire’s end.

At 2:30am, the Piave roared to life with the crashing sounds of artillery.  The offensive wasn’t suppose to begin for another half-hour.  It was Italian artillery.  Rome knew exactly what was about to occur – and was throwing their own million-man army into the attack.

A Bridge Too Far – crossing the Piave would become the major hurdle in the offensive

The disaster of Caporetto had shaken the Italian army – and society – to its core.  305,000 casualties, essentially one whole Italian army group, had been destroyed and the Austro-Hungarians sat on the doorstep of the Italian plane.  Only the Piave river blocked any further advance and if Vienna could cross it, there would be no natural boundaries to prevent them from driving deep into northern Italy and capturing most of the Italian industrial base.  Such a strike would almost guarantee that Italy would be forced to sue for peace. Read the rest of this entry »