Minineapolis has been through crime waves before. The thirties, the late sixties/early seventies, and of course the “Murderapolis” years almost thirty years back.
Not sure if this sort of thing happened at any of those times:
Sounds like Beirut in 1984.
1985:
“Progressive” “In” Crowd (academics, media, non-profiteers, etc): “It is good to be politically correct”.
(Months of mockery, from conservatives and just plain real people ensue).
1986:
“Progressive” “In” Crowd: “Political Correctness” doesn’t exist, and is just a term made up by right wingers to try to ‘satirize’ us”.
1994:
“Progressive” In Crowd: “It’s time for comprehensive Gun Control . Join Handgun Control, Incorporated!”
(Months of mockery, from conservatives and just plain real people. and a tidal wave of political annihilation, ensue).
2000:
“Progressive” “In” Crowd: “Gun Control” doesn’t exist, and never existed, and is just a fairy tale the right uses to scare its followers and increase gun sales!”.
2002:
“Progressive” In Crowd: “It is good to be diverse”.
(Months of mockery, from conservatives and just plain real people ensue).
2002006:
“Progressive” “In” Crowd: “Diversity” doesn’t exist, and is just a term made up by right wingers to try to ‘satirize’ us”.
2018:
“Progressive” In Crowd: “It is good to be ‘woke'”.
(Months of mockery, from conservatives and just plain real people ensue).
2021:
“Progressive” “In” Crowd: “Wokeness” doesn’t exist, and is just a dog whistle the “alt right” uses to try to ‘satirize’ us”.
2022: What will be next?
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
There have been a spate of shootings in Minneapolis. Liberals reflexively trot out the same tired solutions: close the gun show loophole and tax ammunition to make it more expensive and therefore harder to obtain. No guns, no bullets, no shootings. Simple, right?
It occurs to me there’s a real-world way to obtain empirical data to test these theories. I’m all about the SCIENCE. Show me the numbers.
Dictator-for-Life Walz issued Executive Order 20-4 closing public accommodations during the pandemic. His order had the effect of cancelling all gun shows as nobody could rent a hall to hold a public gathering. No gun shows are scheduled until the end of June 2021. Okay – loophole closed 15 months. Any measurable effect on criminals’ ability to acquire firearms to commit shootings? Are there fewer guns on the streets? Fewer people being shot, car-jacked, robbed at gunpoint? What are the numbers?
Ammunition shelves have been bare since before the election. 9mm pistol ammunition which cost $0.20 per round last June peaked at $0.70 and is holding around $0.50 now, but only on the web. There is none on the shelf. If price and scarcity affected criminal shooting patterns, we should be seeing it. Are we? Criminals conserving ammo? Firing fewer shots? Switching to knives or bats because bullets aren’t available? What are the numbers?
Or do the numbers show that criminals can get guns and ammunition pretty much at will, meaning those same tired solutions don’t work in the real world any more than Prohibition or the War on Drugs worked in the real world? It’s important to know the numbers, because if we have empirical evidence showing those same tired solutions don’t work, shouldn’t Liberals stop nattering on about them? Aren’t Liberals interested in SCIENCE? Don’t they care about proof?
Joe Doakes
Why, it’s almost like Twin Cities gangs are actually as immune to the free market as the Minneapolis City Council thinks it is.
Look over this news story, about “Palestinian” sympathizers attacking a Jewish familiy in Florida.
What word is missing from anyplace in the story?
A friend of the blog emails:
So, if the cops think they got one of the shooters of those young kids in Mpls, they can’t pull him over if they have a taillight out?
Just asking.
Snark aside, I am trying to imagine the actual process of sorting calls between, at the most extreme case:
Mental health cases routinely escalate. As the FOTB notes above, traffic stops find felons all the time; two of Ted Bundy’s arrests, to pick a random example, started as traffic stops; not a few homicides started as mental health calls.
The gnashing and grinding at the 911 center alone will be epic – as will the hordes of cross-department staff that wind up getting laboriously dispatched to calls after the the first social worker or unarmed hall monitor,…er, traffic cop gets “unexpectedly” killed.
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance/I’m getting used to it now.
That wasn’t off in the distance. It was the scene at 38th and Chicago yesterday, also known as George Floyd Square. Sure, it was the middle of the day, but it’s always a good time to bust a few caps, right? This news report was, ahem, deadpan:
The Minneapolis intersection where George Floyd died was disrupted by gunfire Tuesday, just hours before it was to be the site of a family-friendly street festival marking the anniversary of his death at the hands of police.
Nothing quite says family-friendly street festival like random gunfire. But fortunately, a bona fide journalist was on the scene:
Journalist Philip Crowther, who was shooting live video from 38th and Chicago, reported hearing as many as 30 gunshots about a block east of the intersection. Crowther said a storefront window appeared to have been broken by a gunshot.
“Very quickly things got back to normal,” Crowther said. “People here who spend a significant amount of time, the organizers, were running around asking, ‘Does anyone need a medic?’ It seems like there are no injuries.”
Mr. Crowther? There’s nothing normal about any of this. But hey, we appreciate the narrative!
The DFL put this out on social media over the weekend:
“In partnership with the USDA?”
Isn’t there some kind of rule against using taxpayer money (or things bought with taxpayer money) to directly benefit a political party?
I mean, they put this event at their headquarters – down an obscure little side road along the river, far from where most of the hungry people are – for a reason, right?
There are few statements I personally find less convincing than “my ancestors suffered, so I have absolute authority on a completely different question“
Almost 35 years ago, reacting to the Democrat bias in the media, Rush Limbaugh brought fearless, joyful paleoconservatism [1]. Spends thirty years dominating the ratings.
Decades ago, reacting to “liberal” slant from the Big Three and CNN, Rupert Murdoch creates Fox News [2]. It dominates cable ratings for decades.
2021: reacting to a landscape of deadly dull, smugly “progressive” late night hosts that all have different names but may as well be reading off the same deadly dull script [3], Fox Launches Gutfeld.
What’ll be happening in decades? Time will tell, but the roll-out has been pretty spectacular. I’ve added emphasis:
Gutfeld!” averaged 1.6 million viewers for the week ending May 14, beating Kimmel on ABC and Fallon on NBC, though it trailed CBS’s “Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Nielsen data shows.
May 13 was the Fox show’s best night so far, with 1.8 million viewers, placing second only to Colbert’s show, which drew 1.9 million viewers. Gutfeld’s show beat Colbert slightly in the key 25- to 54-year-old demographic.
The free market will provide.
Which is why the Harris Administration is trying to hard to kill it.
[1] “But but but but he was so hateful!” He was no such thing. You’re projecting.
[2] “But but but but but but they’re teh biased!”. In terms of news coverage? Less so than CNN. In terms of opinion programming? Who cares (other than “you, because you’re threatened by dissent and have no productive, adult way to deal with it”, I mean).
[3] The fact that Stephen Colbert has a late night show at all shows that the late-night comedy gene pool is very, very shallow. The fact that Samantha Bee and Jimmy Kimmel have late-night shows tells us that gene poll is inflatable and gets filled with a hose.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
This is the “infrastructure” that ordinary people think the Susan Rice Administration wants to spend money on:
This is where the money actually would go:
Joe Doakes
The left, as Dennis Prager notes, destroys everything it touches.
Including words.
It’s rapidly becoming a Berg’s Law: if the media doesn’t give any demographic details about a violent criminal (say, a white Hell’s Angel with an umbrella), you can infer the rest.
When I saw the initial coverage of Saturday morning’s bloodbath in the Warehouse District, I treated it as a test.
Up until noonish yesterday (Sunday)? Even after the arrest was made? Not a word about the shooter.
So – was I right?
What do you think?
Carroll was arrested in 2016 for a variety of felonies egregious enough for Mike Freeman to put down his bottle for a moment at try to make an example of.
Carroll ended up getting all charges dismissed, in exchange for pleading guilty to “disorderly condcut”.
Remember – public safety is a privilege.
Saturday, after a bloodbath in downtown Minneapolis and the “inadvertent“ shootings of three Minneapolis elementary school kids, chief Madaria Arradondo released a statement:
“Brazen senseless acts of…”
What?
Say its name, Chief.
They are acts of gang violence.
Friday Morning: local media cover the bejeebers out of a press conference – the sort of coordinated coverage that screams “a PR flak is working this hard”:
While challenges remain, downtown Minneapolis’ progress toward a post-pandemic revival is picking up steam, according to the panelists who joined a Friday morning online forum hosted by the Minneapolis Downtown Council…“My take on all of this is that you haven’t seen anything yet. Downtown is going to come back stronger and bigger than ever,” said Fhima, who leads the kitchen at Fhima’s Minneapolis.
Still, the panelists said, downtown is currently battling the perception that it’s unsafe — a perception Fhima [1] said was fueled by the lack of foot traffic on downtown streets during the pandemic, when many office workers shifted to working from home and widespread closures of restaurants and venues kept visitors away. Just as an empty restaurant might make diners question the quality of the food, he said, an empty downtown can leave visitors unnerved
“Challenges remain”, indeed.
18 hours after that coordinated burst of manufactured sunshine blowing up the Twin Cities collective nethers:
Two people were killed and 8 wounded in a shooting in downtown Minneapolis, police said early Saturday.
“Preliminary investigation reveals that two people were standing in a crowded area and got into a verbal confrontation,” the Minneapolis Police Department said in a statement.” Both individuals pulled out guns and began shooting at each other.”
Look – I enjoy downtown. I’ve worked there, and 2-3 years ago I used to go down there for concerts fairly regularly – move the Dakota than the First Avenue these days, but whatever. And as a taxpayer, I’ve had a lot of taxpayers money “invested” in it on my behalf, so it’d be nice if the current occupants at the City Council stopped screwing things up.
Not holding my breath, of course.
[1] Have any of Dave Fhima’s restaurants ever succeeded? . I haven’t paid much attention to the restaurant scene, but going back ten years or so, any of his places turned into their own vacant slices of downtown in a year or so.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
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.
Speaking Proudly – an oratory contest for high school girls – is coming up October 23. Deadline for applications is between August 1 and September 11.
And here’s the song list:
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.
Ryuichi from Richfield writes:
Your blog has been really remiss in failing to cover the finer points of modern Japanese Self Defense Force armored combat doctrine.
I know, I know.
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“.
Today – the U is turning into a cold Newark:
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…
…oh.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails re an argument that has kept historians ripping each others hair out for seven decades:
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.
There will be no more warnings.
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.
A friend of the blog email:
So, if the cops think they got one of the shooters of those young kids in Mpls, they can’t pull him over if they have a taillight out?
Just asking.
What, you think Jeremiah Ellison, Philippe Cunningham and Lisa Bender have thought this through from a law enforcement perspective?
And people call me a pollyanna .
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.
Power Line on the little veep who just can’t:
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.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
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?”
Can I imagine Walz doing it?
What’s that, Joe? A rhetorical question?
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:
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).
A friend of the blog beat me to writing me about Caniglia v. Strom:
Monday May 17th the SCOTUS handed down a unanimous decision in Caniglia v. Strom, see:https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-157_8mjp.pdf
Several things stand out about this decision;
* 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.
SCOTUSBlog has the timeline for the case.
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.
You are currently browsing the Shot in the Dark weblog archives.
