Canigilia v. Strom is an extreme case, but if traditional Fourth Amendment precedent holds, Red Flag laws will also be held unconstitutional.
Joe Doakes
Forty years ago, the Second Amendment was on the brink of oblivion. A grassroots movement and a whole bunch of good lawyering and litigating fixed that, hopefully for good.
Hopefully we can do the same thing for the Fourth.
And if we’re going to save this Republic, the Tenth.
We’re a week past the lifting of the mask mandates. But as Miranda Devine notes in the New York Post, confusion reigns:
This is how confused New Yorkers are about masks. At Barnes & Noble Wednesday, no mask was required to browse the bookshelves, but on the other side of Union Square, the Strand bookstore had mandated masks for all shoppers. Practically everyone inside both stores was wearing a mask, anyway, despite CDC advice that you don’t need one, indoors or outdoors, if you’re vaccinated against COVID-19.
Considering that more than half of Manhattan has been fully vaccinated, something is very wrong with the way we are processing risk. The trust between public health experts and the public is broken and now no one knows what to believe.
Why is that? Devine has a culprit:
We can blame one man above anyone for this parlous state of affairs: Saint Anthony Fauci, the coronavirus czar once hailed as the most trusted man in America for his leadership through the pandemic. He has flip-flopped on every piece of advice, never admits doubt and tells lies with brazen indifference.
True, Fauci is a dissembler for sure. But the weirdness must be just in places like Manhattan, right? But what are we seeing here in Minnesota?
Mitch shared a few examples yesterday. Here is what I’ve seen: I get a cup of coffee every morning at a gas station near my home. While I live in Ramsey County, I am not a St. Paul resident and there is no mask mandate for our community. The mask requirement signs are all taken down. But based on what I’ve observed, just about everyone who enters the station, at least in the morning rush, is wearing a mask. I started watching this behavior midweek. In the two days I observed, I saw about 25 people enter the store. Almost all of them were still wearing masks. The only guys who consistently didn’t wear a mask going into the store were the guys delivering milk. And, um, me.
Is there a health benefit to still wearing a mask, especially if you’re vaccinated? Or is it theater? Back to Devine:
It was just on Tuesday that Fauci admitted it was not science but theater that kept him wearing a mask — even double masking — despite being fully vaccinated for almost five months.
“I didn’t want to look like I was giving mixed signals,” he told “Good Morning America.” “But being a fully vaccinated person, the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low.”
So it is. But even then, he squirted out more octopus ink:
“I think people are misinterpreting, thinking that this is a removal of a mask mandate for everyone. It’s not,” Fauci told Axios. “It’s an assurance to those who are vaccinated that they can feel safe, be they outdoors or indoors.”
And Devine isn’t having it:
Fauci at this point is being deliberately confusing. He is feeding the mental disorder of vaccinated Karens who cling to their masks. He needs to tell them the truth and stick to it.
I agree. And don’t expect Governor Walz to help straighten things out.
A few weeks back: U of M “student government” official (and Tina Smith employee) calls for students to resist the U of M police – in as many words, to “make their lives hell“.
University of Minnesota police are warning students, staff and neighbors to be on alert after a rash of sometimes violent robberies and thefts in the Dinkytown and Stadium Village areas of Minneapolis…One of the more violent incidents occurred midafternoon Sunday at SE. University and 14th avenues, where a young man took someone’s phone and fled in a stolen vehicle. As the suspect drove off, he hit his victim with the car, causing minor injuries.
Y’know, for all the flak being heaped on all conservatives for the first-ever act of political violence in American history, January6, you’d think someone might do the same for all the damage “progressive” rhetoric has wrought…
Yes, yes, Literally Hitler, embodiment of Evil, Holocaust, blah, blah, blah. But what if he had not broken the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact to invade Russia? Could Russia have conquered all of Europe?
Could the truth be less absolute and more nuanced than we’ve been led to believe?
Churchill told the House of Commons, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it,” a paraphrase of Santayana’s famous quote. But what is the correct lesson to learned from Operation Barbarossa?
Joe Doakes
On the one hand, the USSR had built up an awful lot of troops on their western frontier.
On the other hand, even Stalin had to have known that the Soviet Army, in the wake of the purges, wasn’t in much shape even to defend the USSR (as Barbarossa showed), much less conduct a coherent offensive (as the Winter War showed). Even the most Stalin-indulgent history I’ve read so far indicates Stalin wasn’t entertaining the idea of invading the West until well into ’42, if not later.
Note: anyone in the comment section equating a serious discussion of the “what ifs” of the most consequential event of the past 200 years with pining for Naziism will be blocked. Forever. As in, you’ll be looking way, way up to see “Dog Gone”, status-wise.
It was interesting, a few years back, watching the retrospectives of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Here’s a sjhort one:
It’s as fun to watch now as it was otherworldly and unbelievable back then: after decades of complete control, a government official’s inadvertent slip causes and uproar; another official’s resigned ad-libbed decision opens a single gate; from there, the entire Eastern Bloc, the Communist world that all the experts reminded us was here “forever”” disappeared inside a couple years.
I thought about that last week, as CDC director Rochelle Walensky abruptly changed course on masks. One week after President Harris was “inadvertently” photographed trying to french-kiss her husband through paper masks on an airport tarmac in front of a random mob of press cameras, one week after “President” Biden did a press conference wearing a mask standing 20 feet from other people, the CDC flipped.
And people started ditching the masks. Major retailers jumped off the Karen Train, joining vast swathes of the country that have changed course, to protecting the vulnerable.
And just like that night at the Bornholmer Straße gate over the Berlin Wall, many – but not all – people ditched the masks. Roughly 10% of the entire population of East Germany roamed the streets of West Berlin, at one point that glorious night, tasting and smelling and buying freedom.
The Communists spent a few years trying to put that genie back in the bottle, and failed. Their distant cousins here are trying to do the same thing.
Promptly, Big Karen – a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Left – leapt into action.
Some cities, and other subsidiaries of Big Left, clung to the ban. Given that the ongoing mask mandate had nothing to do with science – the CDC said so – the only logical conclusion is that “Masking Up” is a statement of faith, almost a religious exercise in self-abasement and rule following.
And Big Left, being the Curia of this particular church, is all about keeping people following rules.
And that explains a lot about Karen, whoever he or she is; they seem to be people whose connection to logic, fact, even “science”, involves logrolling others into following the rules they’ve mastered. It’s the ugly side of the Scandinavian culture to which so much of Minnesota traces its roots – the flip side of close-knit communitarianism is passive-aggressive rule-lawyering.
And that passive-aggression seems to have worked. A casual count of people at newly-mask-free Target in Shoreview yesterday showed about 80% of customers, and probably more among employees, still wearing masks. We know that at least half of those people, likely more, are vaccinated, so the exercise is more or less pointless.
It’s been 30 years since the Berlin Wall fell. There are still people who pine for the days when the Stasi and ZOMO kept things nice and tidy and in order.
And watching some of the urban social media groups, plenty of little Karens are already feeling pretty bereft.
Remenber the old japes about both Presidents Bush, and for that matter Trump, were utterly safe from threat of assassination, because their various Vice Presidents, Quayle and Cheney and Pence, were “even worse?”
Given Vice President Harris’s performance so far, I’d call that a retroactive case of Berg’s Law.
Harris caught a major career break when Joe Biden more or less committed to having a black woman as his running mate, leaving Harris as the obvious choice, but she didn’t seem to take much advantage of it. With the elderly, frail Biden making few campaign appearances, one might have thought that Harris would be more visible on the campaign trail. Then again, maybe the Democrats didn’t want her to expose the hollowness of Biden’s excuses for staying out of sight. In any event, her vice-presidential run seems to have done little or nothing to enhance Harris’s standing with the electorate.
Now, a YouGov poll finds Harris under water, with 41% viewing her favorably and 48% unfavorably. The Washington Examiner points out that this negative perception contrasts strongly with other recent vice presidents. Dick Cheney, Mike Pence and Joe Biden himself, in 2009, all polled quite a bit better at a similar stage.
Harris has never shown much skill or appeal as a politician. Her path to the top in California, essentially a one-party state at this point, was paved by her illicit relationship with Willie Brown. I am not sure what it is about Harris that repels voters, but it should scare the Democrats.
The current theory is that Biden will hold on until at least mid-terms,, so that Harris can run on her own twice.
Barring massive fraud and retroactive doctoring of her record, I think she’s a one-and-done, whenever Biden shuffles off.
I’ll just leave those qualifications hanging htere.
Amateurs at work in the Southeast. What a disgrace.
You know that a group of hacker/terrorists shut down an oil pipeline. As a result, there’s a shortage of fuel in North Carolina. Their Governor issued an Emergency Order addressing the crisis to ensure everybody had enough fuel.
How did he do it? Ban all unnecessary travel? Impose a state-wide curfew? Confiscate personally owned vehicles? Impose a $1,000 per gallon tax to prevent hoarding?
No. He lifted the load limits on fuel trucks bringing gas into the state. Trucks can run heavier and haul more fuel during the emergency.
He didn’t punish his citizens at all – what on Earth was he thinking? Can you imagine Governor Walz missing an opportunity like that? Unbelievable.
Joe Doakes
Depriving “Big Karen” of the prerogative to chant “we’re all in this together”, with “this” meaning “some petty hardship foisted on us all, involving a set of rules of which I, Big Karen, am the custodian?”
I was more than a little shocked to see this report from Channel 9 yesterday – partly because the Nine is the second-farthest-left leaning TV newsroom in town, and the station runs pro-BLM PSA liners during its newscasts…
…and partly because BLM has been strictly “hands off” as far as questioning in the local media goes.
But darned if they didn’t:
"Why is this community not angry? We only march when it’s against the police, huh?"
A 3rd child was shot in Minneapolis less than 8 hours after the grandmother of 10-year-old Ladavionne Garret, Jr poured her heart out https://t.co/gWWD1Dq7PU
Another woman from the neighborhood took a tart swipe at “Black Lives Matter”, asking (I”m paraphrasing, since the Nine is going to make sure guns, not gang-bangers, are the enduring villains) why the protesters only seem to care if there’s a cop involved.
(If you can find the footage of the other woman, please post a link in the comments – it was one of the most startling things I’ve seen on local media…ever).
* first and most gratifying even the liberal judges on the SCOTUS would not support the extreme Biden administration and the gun grabbing Democrats,
* second the opinions by Thomas, with Roberts, Breyer, Alito, and Kavenaugh concurring all provide ammunition to address and refute the Red Flag laws that are currently being considered by State legislatures and the US House,
* and finally viewing the case timeline* before the court it is notable that The Gun Owners of America did the heavy lifting in amicus curiae briefs while the NRA was effectively MIA.
I’d hoped this might be a preview of New York State Rifle And Pistol Association Vs. Corlett – and to some extent they might be, although I suspect Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer will defect from the majority on those.
Iowa State University professor tries to limit contact with White People. Sounds fair. I try to limit contact with groups of Black people for my own safety, because I’ve read the statistical proof. Of course, that essay is nearly 10 years old so the numbers may be out of date. Anecdotal supporting evidence came last year, in the Third Precinct in Minneapolis, and also in recent airport melee videos, and I live in a city committed to diversity entitlement above law enforcement, so the principles are still valid.
The professor lives in a town of 65,000 people that is 92% White/Asian (they’re the same nowadays, at least for affirmative action purposes) and she teaches at a school that is 85% White/Asian. True, there have been racial crimes reported in Ames, but they’re Black-on-White crimes so the professor’s safety is not at issue. What’s her reason for avoiding White People?
Joe Doakes
The “progressive” electorate isn’t going to call her on it. Who would know better than one of the people whose job is to un-teach critical thinking skills?
Vice President Kamala Harris keeps a list of reporters and other political types who might be racist, according to a profile published in the Atlantic on Monday.
“The vice president and her team tend to dismiss reporters. Trying to get her to take a few questions after events is treated as an act of impish aggression,” writes Edward-Isaac Dovere. “And Harris herself tracks political players and reporters whom she thinks don’t fully understand her or appreciate her life experience.”
In important ways, the less said about Harris’s life experiences, the better. But while most may not consider her an old school politician, her little list is straight outta 1885:
As some day it may happen that a victim must be found I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list Of society offenders who might well be underground And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!
List keeping is kind of a thing for our current leadership and their mentors. Consider this exchange from a previous administration:
“Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother,” Obama told [Oregon Congressman] DeFazio during a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic Caucus, according to members afterward.
After reading this story, I’m overwhelmed with a desire to lead a movement to get conservatives to eschew smashing their own faces into rock or cement walls.
No true conservative would ever smash their face into a cement or rock wall.
Military adopts “grading on the curve” for physical fitness. The usual suspects are up in arms but that’s just White Male Hatred speaking out.
Reducing physical fitness standards for women in combat will not affect performance. We’ll simply assign them to battle against women’s units in the enemy army.
The real question is: what will the military do when cis-male military members realize they can slack off by declaring themselves trans and demanding to take the women’s test, thus wrecking the curve for cis-women?
Joe Doakes
The part I wonder about is, when a helicopter heads upcountry to a firebase in the the middle of insurgent territory, is it going to make room for maintenance hormones along with ammo, food, water and first aid supplies?
SCENE: Mitch BERG is biking through Como Park when he hears some muted sobbing. He looks toward a park bench, where he notices Avery LIBRELLE sitting, wearing four masks, which are becoming slowly soaked in tears. BERG visibly hesistates, but his sense of compassion overwhelms his reflexes. He gets off the bike and walks over toward LIBRELLE
BERG: Er…hey, Avery…
LIBRELLE: (Stifles a sob) Stay at least 12 feet away!
LIBRELLE: …Walz ending mask mandates early, I just feel…(sobs again)I.
BERG: How?
LIBRELLE: Strangely… empty.
BERG: Like part of your purpose in life has been removed.k
LIBRELLE: (Small sob)
BERG: Like all your moral authority has been snatched away.
LIBRELLE: (Bigger sob)
BERG: Like you’ve lost your only response to that evolutionary instinct you have to respond to what you see as an existential threat – a sabertooth tiger or a famine or Pearl Harbor? That you’ve had your power to fill the void left by generations of plenty, safety and security has been ripped from your life?
LIBRELLE: (Wracked with a convulsive sob).
BERG: (Lets LIBRELLE cry a bit, then) Well, the good news is, most people have been vaccinated…you’ve had your vaccine, right?
LIBRELLE: (mustering some irate composure). Of course.
BERG: Well, there. you…
LIBRELLE: Twelve doses.
BERG: (jaw flaps in breeze for a moment before he shakes it off). Makes sense. To go with the four masks.
Roger Daltrey, lead singer of The Who for the past 57 years or so, tees off on the “Woke” generation:
“The woke generation — it’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves,” the rocker said in a recent interview with DJ Zane Lowe on Apple Music.
“I mean, anyone who’s lived a life — and you see what they’re doing — you just know that it’s a route to nowhere, especially when you’ve lived through the periods of a life that we’ve had the privilege to,” Daltrey added. “I mean, we’ve had the golden era. There’s no doubt about that.”
The English rock legend went on to point out the differences between “the woke generation” and generations of the past, noting, “we came out of a war,” and have actually “seen the communist system fail” firsthand.
“But we came out of a war, we came out of a leveled society, completely flattened bomb sites and everything,” Daltrey said. “And we’ve been through socialist governments. We’ve seen the communist system fail in the Soviet Union. I’ve been in those communist countries while they were communist.”
“I’ve seen how ‘wonderful’ — really? — it was,” the rocker added, sarcastically.
People today forget, or never knew, that after UK went full-bore Labour at the end of World War 2, it subsequently took them nine years to end war-time food rationing. And while the food situation gradually improved, once “rebuilding” ended, the rest of the economy went in the tank.
Also – not bad for a guy that’s gonna be eighty in the next few years.
“What books made you forget it was a book, and just want to eat at the George and race through the NeverNever on spell-box powered motocycles and play with the band, command that ship, and run with the pack?”
I had that feeling when I was a kid, devouring the Sci Fi section of the local public library. I haven’t had it for a long, long time. Modern literature just doesn’t grab me and suck me in as it once did.
I miss that.
Joe Doakes
Possibility 1: we focused on the generally-acknowledged great books when we were younger. They seemed better because they were, pound for pound, better than the stuff you grabbed off the “New Releases” shelf at Barnes and Noble.
Possilbility 2: the stuff coming out today really does suck.
Drivers along parts of the East Coast piled into gas stations on Tuesday, resulting in long lines and shortages as motorists reacted to what could be a weeklong shutdown of the nation’s largest fuel pipeline because of a cyberattack.
Colonial Pipeline Co., operator of a 5,500-mile conduit for gasoline, diesel and refined products, said Monday it hoped to substantially restore service by the end of the week. It shut the pipeline late last week after a ransomware attack that U.S. officials have linked to a criminal gang known as DarkSide.
We haven’t seen gas lines too often in recent years. I remember those gas lines in the 70s. OPEC was at the height of its powers and while the cartel didn’t conduct ransomware attacks per se, the effect was about the same. It happened the first time in late ’73 and into ’74, right as Watergate was starting to gain traction, and then again in 1979, when many of my friends were getting their driver’s licenses. We were eager to start cruising the main drag, but gas was hard to find at times, limiting our early forays into car culture and adulthood.
In the middle of that summer (July 15, to be precise) Jimmy Carter gave his infamous “malaise” speech. While the chattering classes were supportive, Carter’s hangdog expression and mien sent an unmistakable message of weakness, which other players noticed. Weak politicians don’t prosper, so Carter blew up his career that evening.
A few days earlier, a Chicago disc jockey Steve Dahl had blown up a large box of disco records at Comiskey Park, starting a melee that tore up the field and causing the White Sox to forfeit the second game of a scheduled doubleheader. About a month later, members of the provisional IRA assassinated Lord Mountbatten, detonating a bomb on his boat while he was out sailing with members of his family. One way or another, it seemed like things were about to blow in that summer of ’79.
We’re more than forty years on. Tensions have been high lately, but it’s been calm since the jury came back against Derek Chauvin. It’s likely our current gas shortage will be temporary and may not directly affect the Upper Midwest at all. History does not necessarily repeat, but it’s easy to sense weakness in our leaders at all levels of government. Some have already noticed. Joe Biden was on the scene in 1979, so I’d like to believe he was paying attention. Summer’s coming. I hope it doesn’t blow.
Gov. Tim Walz said Thursday he’ll sign an order Friday ending Minnesota’s statewide mask-wearing mandate following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance allowing fully vaccinated people to stop wearing masks.
Calling it a great day for Minnesota, the governor continued to plead with unvaccinated Minnesotans to get their shots to hold back the spread of COVID-19.
“So those peacetime emergencies are done and the business mitigations are coming to an end. I want to be clear it’s not the end of the pandemic, but it is the end of the pandemic for a lot of vaccinated folks,” he told reporters.
It’s the end of many things, actually — most importantly, it’s the end of Karen Nation enforcement and forcing shopkeepers and restaurateurs into indentured scolding, at least on this particular issue. Walz’s Nurse Ratched, Jan Malcolm, admitted as much:
“When things are no longer a rule or a mandate, they think therefore that everything is safe,” she said, noting that Minnesota still has a relatively high level of COVID-19 spread. “People may translate this guidance meaning that the pandemic is over.”
Malcolm said if it were feasible to keep a mask mandate just for unvaccinated people, “I definitely would have liked to see that. I just think that it’s not practically enforceable at this stage.”
I’ll bet she would have liked that. But apparently there is a limit after all. Maybe you don’t need to laminate the ol’ vaccine card.
The economic and social toll of the lockdowns is incalculable — how many families were separated, how many graduations were canceled, how many businesses were shuttered, how many of our elderly were consigned to death in nursing homes without being able to say goodbye or even have a final hug? Meanwhile, we’ve had the joy of experiencing Walz and his coterie treat our fair state as a protectorate. Now, suddenly, we say Goodbye to All That. The signs will come off the doors as soon as tomorrow, but the reckoning is about to begin.
Google Earth street images, which have a timeline feature, have not had any new images of Minneapolis since Summer 2019. Places where for past years there are numerous dates to choose from, simply have no images later than June of 2019. Covid prevented cameras from working on the streets ever since the riots ‘mostly peaceful’ protests started? I just checked Cup Foods at 38th and Chicago: no Saint Floyd Memorial. No images of boarded up or burned down buildings. It’s weird how Covid has had such unique and selective symptoms.”
***
Joe Doakes
Weird.
Could be jiggering the algrorithm.
Could be the class inclined to drive Google camera cars is mostly Karens.
