The missus and I were thinking of taking in a play this weekend at one of the theaters listed below, but, we had no desire to spend the time wearing a mask so we nixed the idea. I was curious so I looked up the covid policies for a number of theaters around town. They’re free to do as they wish. I do wonder though how much business some of these are turning away. I can only assume they’re doing fine.

(This is not an exhaustive list of every theater in the Twin Cities. Also, some are not included here as I could not find any info on covid policies on their websites.)

Guthrie – Effective April 18, 2022, all audience members, regardless of age, must wear a mask that securely covers the nose and mouth (no bandanas, neck gaiters or face shields) when entering and inside the theater. Proof of vaccination is not required to see a performance at the Guthrie.

Ordway – Given the improvement in COVID-19 positivity rates and cases in our community, beginning on April 1 the Arts Partners will no longer require proof of vaccination or negative COVID test results in order to attend performances at the Ordway. Masks will also no longer be required, but will be welcomed and encouraged.

Children’s – As of April 23, 2022, to ensure the safety of our patrons, artists, and staff, Children’s Theatre Company will continue to require audiences to wear a mask in the theatre and lobby spaces. Masks must cover the mouth and nose and fit tightly to the face (no bandanas, face shields, or gaiters).  Proof of vaccination or a negative test is no longer required to attend a show at CTC.

Chanhassen – We highly recommend wearing a mask covering your nose and mouth when not eating or drinking.

Hennepin Theater Trust – Given the improvement in COVID-19 positivity rates and cases in our community, beginning on April 18, our theatres will no longer require proof of vaccination or negative COVID test results to attend performances at the historic Orpheum, State and Pantages theatres, The Hennepin and 824 Hennepin. Masks will also no longer be required but are welcomed and encouraged.

First Avenue – Effective Wednesday, June 1, 2022, concerts and events at First Avenue and associated venues will no longer require proof of a full course of COVID-19 vaccination, or proof of a negative COVID-19 test.

Park Square – Masks are required for theatre attendance except while eating or drinking. Proof of COVID-19 vaccination or negative test results are no longer required to attend performances.

Theater in the Round – Masks are always appreciated in our space, as the intimacy of our venue increases risk of transmission to other patrons and our artists, which could lead to illness and/or cancelled performances. TRP reserves the right to require masks for audiences and/or participants if requested by the cast and crew, guest artists, workshop instructors, volunteer supervisors, for specially designated performances

History – All audience, artists, and staff members will be masked regardless of vaccination status.

Old Log – We recommend the use of facial masks for all guests inside our theatre that are unvaccinated

Jungle – We have been in conversation with our theater colleagues in the Twin Cities area, and like many of them, the Jungle Theater will be requiring masks for audience members, as well as proof of vaccination or proof of negative Covid-19 test within 72 hours of showtime.

Yellow Tree – Along with many other performing arts venues across the state, we will now require Proof of Vaccination from all audience members (digitally on your phone, by email or paper). All audience members are also required to be masked inside regardless of vaccination status.

Illusion – Please note that you must provide proof of vaccination or a negative covid test conducted in the past 72 hours of the event you’re attending. You will be asked to present this with your ID when you enter the building. You must also wear a mask at all times inside the building.

Mixed Blood – All patrons, including children, attending Mixed Blood performances must either show proof of full vaccination against COVID-19 (at least 14 days have passed since the final dose), or proof of a negative COVID-19 PCR test taken in the prior 72-hours. On-site testing will be available on a first come first served basis before every performance. All patrons, regardless of vaccination status, must always wear masks over their nose and mouth while inside the venue.

BLM harpy crashes a block party in the neighborhood that’s actually been complaining loudly enough to get the Governor’s attention.

Gets told – in the middle of “woke”, “progressive” downtown Minneapolis’s condo-land – to take it elsewhere.

The push back against the stormtroopers of the extreme left is starting slowlyi – and from some unlkely (and let’s be honest, safe to them) places rooted in left-wing privilege.

But it’s starting.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve been working on a movie script for an action adventure film. I made sure to be Woke and Diverse to avoid rejection for those reasons.

***

The top 100 richest people on the planet are mostly old straight White men who hate women, minorities, LGBTQ+ and want them to die, with a couple of Asian and Middle Easterners for diversity but no Blacks because Slavery). They meet at a mountain resort in Idaho hosted by an oil tycoon and guarded by the militia. He tells the group that evolution sorts winners from losers and they are the winners who deserve to rule the planet. He proposes to divide the Earth into kingdoms responsible for local administrative affairs operating under a global empire to resolve differences and fairly allocate resources.

Someone points out the public won’t stand for it. No, but they won’t have a choice. The 100 Kingdoms won’t need as many servants as we have population so we’ll reduce the population to a manageable and sustainable level. It’ll be easy since we control the media and the military. Scare the public into giving up their rights by releasing a virus. Imprison dissenters (those who aren’t killed resisting arrest). Shut off natural gas to freeze them; ban them from media so they can’t communicate; shut off gasoline so they can’t travel; shut off diesel so they can’t get food farm to market; defund the police and stage a few false-flag incidents; let anger, panic, starvation and disease do the rest.

What if the people revolt? Order your troops to fire on them. Won’t the generals oppose us? Replace them with boot-lickers (promise to make a general into a Baron under your Kingship and he’ll willingly kill his entire family to serve you). Replace warriors with woke and trans time-servers so they’re no threat to our private security, which will be made up of former warriors serving to protect their families from the mobs we created.

How will we pay for it all? Just print money, flood the economy, inflation will impoverish citizens which will make them frightened and easier to manipulate.

How do you know this will work? We’ve been running beta tests for a couple of years, now. Covid lockdowns. Stimulus checks. Defunding the police. Crushing Canadian truckers and Danish farmers. Sri Lanka. We should be able to destroy the present world order and replace it with The 100 Kingdoms in about five years. Who’s on board?

Somehow, The Good Guys find out about the plan and Our Hero is assigned to stop them. I won’t tell you the rest because I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

***

I shopped the script around to several movie studios but they keep telling me there’s no market for documentaries.

Maybe if I change the setting, make it Sci Fi taking place on a planet far, far away and a long time ago, with space ships and laser beams?


Joe Doakes

It’s just crazy enough to work.

The problem with “mass shootings” is there are just too many of the to cover ZOMG!

“Agonizing decisions”.

We’ll come back to that.

Until then, let’s define our terms.

A “Mass Shooting” is any shooting with 3+ victims, whatever the motive. It might be a school rampage, true – but it also covers botched robberies, sicarios executing suspect mules, a drive-by shooting indiscriminately into a crowd sending 3-5 people to the hospital, a murder/suicide – even self-defense.

A “Spree Killing” or “Rampage Killing”‘s only motive is killing for its own sake, and no other motive – not even terrorism. It includes episodes like Uvalde, Sandy Hook ,the Buffalo grocery store, and of course one that were ended by good guys with guns before they turned into “mass shootings” (thus ensuring no media interest).

There may well have been 320 “mass shootings” – many or most of them in places like Chicago, Baltimore, Saint Louis and Newark, with a few very notable spree killings distributed among the list.

And for some reason, the “agonized decisions” seem to involve ignoring “mass shootings” where the victims don’t look like the relatives of network executives.

Linguists determine cattle in the UK develop local accents:

In a major breakthrough in bovine linguistic research, experts have confirmed that cows moo with accents distinct to their herd, the BBC reports.

John Wells, professor of Phonetics at the University of London, examined West Country farmers’ claims that their beasts were mooing with a local twang.

And the “twang” is, the researchers say, influenced by the local human dialect.

The accent noted is that of Somerset – in the West of England. Where, as Jimmy Carr notes, if you want to nail the accent, just sound like a pirate:

Does this work in America?

I mean, I can’t be the only one wondering of Kamala

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:l

Best possible news for our nation: Lesko Brandon kicks out 60,000 unvaxx military members. All those trained professional warriors just became part of The Resistance. It’s not only us Wolverines anymore. Excellent.

Meanwhile, the military is reducing standards again, desperate to find bodies to replace the trained professional warriors they just let go.

Civilian gun sales continue unabated, the better to face off against Lesko Brandon’s Wokesters in Uniform. The next Insurrection should be a real doozy.

Joe Doakes

I’m going to break with Joe on this one for a bit. I’m going to suggest that if we ever have a real insurrection, the military will be the least of the problems, as they are overwhelmingly not drawn from the “blue“ elites.

As Robert Kaplan noted in his excellent (albeit a generation old) imperial Grunts, an 18-year-old from East Texas is 32 times as likely to serve in the military as one from New York City (and that New Yorker is much more likely a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx, or a blue-collar Irish kid from Staten Island, as opposed to a WASP trust fund baby from Manhattan).

Call me naive, but that’s where I put my faith.

The news last weekend was enough to make your teeth vibrate with rage.

New York bodega owner Jose Alba – a Dominican immigrant, a citizen, and by all rational accounts the good guy – got stabbed by a woman who was irate over her EBT card getting rejected.

Then, her boyfriend – Austin Simon, an ex-con with a violent record – took over.

It went downhill for both men after that. Alba faces murder charges. Simon, for his part, now knows what a pin cushion feels like:

This is yet another case of a Soros-funded district attorney – Alvin Bragg, Manhattan County’s DA, and a man who makes Keith Ellison look like Barry Goldwater – taking the side of the criminal. Bragg initially got $500,000 cash bail – eventually reduced to a $50K bond, even though Alba had a spotless record

Even New Yorkers – well, the ones who go to bodegas – aren’t amused:

The handling of the case has prompted local New York City Council members from both sides of the aisle to demand that the embattled Manhattan DA dismiss the charge. Prominent criminal defense lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman has offered to represent Alba for free. 

Now, in carry permit you’re told that if you use lethal force in self-defense, even if the case is utterly justified, you should expect an arrest, and very likely charges; the bluer the district, the more likely you’re up against a prosecutor who wants in principle to make an example of the law-abiding schnook. Examples to the contrary are often astoundingly unpredictable.

But if you look at the criteria for self-defense – in New York as well as Minnesota – to me the five criteria for self-defense break down like this:

• Reasonable Fear of Death: Seeing what I saw? Absolutely.
• Immediacy: Simon didn’t look like he was waiting for anything.
• Appropriate Force: He used lethal force until the threat ended.
• Innocence: He certainly wasn’t the aggressor.
• Duty to Retreat: I suspect this may be the weasel Bragg’s theory; you have to make every reasonable effort to get away. You see the video – there is no reasonable escape. But using a knife requires one to attack; it’s a much more active act than shooting. It’s an academic distinction when you’ve got someone behind the counter with you – but to a weasel like Bragg, it’s a hook.

I don’t think should have been arrested, much less charged. Hopefully a Manhattan jury agrees.

So – what to do about metastatic legal tumors like Bragg?

A National Review editorial hopes for an electoral solution to the problem of Alvin Bragg:

Bragg is a disgrace, the biggest threat to law and order in Manhattan in decades. The unjust prosecution of Alba is merely the latest example of how recentering the justice system around “equity” amounts to coddling career criminals at the expense of upstanding citizens such as Alba. In a one-party city, Bragg effectively won his office when he secured the Democratic Party’s nomination last June with just 85,000 votes, a margin of only 9,000 over his nearest challenger. Unless Zeldin this fall upsets the liberal Democratic governor Kathy Hochul, who is unlikely to do anything about Bragg except make a few concerned noises, New Yorkers are going to suffer for at least three and a half more years from the disastrous consequences of not bothering to stop Bragg in that low-turnout primary election last summer.

If there isn’t – and the dumping of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco shows that people in progressive cities can be pushed too far – then the alternative is people will start handling self-defense off the books.

And thats going to get ugly.

First, some background to catch up on. In January, in this Newsweek column, Todd Zywicki pointed out how cancel culture has infected even the buttoned-down world of banking.

This past November, Missouri’s conservative Defense of Liberty PAC scheduled a high-profile event featuring a speech by Donald Trump, Jr. On November 9, however, WePay—a JPMorgan Chase subsidiary that provided the payment services for the event—announced the termination of those services. WePay accused the organization of violating its policy against promotion of “hate, violence, racial intolerance, terrorism, the financial exploitation of a crime, or items or activities that encourage, promote facilitate or instruct others regarding the same.” Although WePay eventually reversed its decision, the organization had to cancel the speech.

WePay’s actions followed a series of similar incidents in recent years that includes the cancellation of former president Trump’s personal bank account, Michael Flynn’s credit cards and at least one Christian nonprofit organization. The fossil fuel and firearms industries have been targeted too. Businesses selling controversial materials have had their payments services terminated and consequently shuttered. The decisions to cancel these high-profile individuals or groups are often reversed after public outcry and dismissed as a “mistake” by the providers. But what about individual people who lack the public standing to fight back?

In February then, the Minnesota Bank and Trust threw Mike Lindell (of MyPillow fame) out the frosted glass doors and onto the street.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has been terminated as a client by the Minnesota Bank & Trust a month after the financial institution described him as a “reputation risk.”

Insider viewed two letters sent to Lindell by the bank dated February 11. In one letter, the bank said Lindell’s accounts with the bank would be closed by the end of business on February 18.

Here is some audio of a call a bank rep had with a MyPillow exec on the matter.

In March, Biden issued (er, that should probably be “Biden” “issued”…) an executive order calling for studies on the feasibility and ramifications of implementing central bank digital currencies. The EO calls for several reports due by September 5.

One such report was issued last week by the Treasure Department on a “Framework for International Engagement on Digital Assets”.

China is already taking steps towards a digital renminbi. Here, the central banks have several reasons for being interested in a digital currency. One is the threat that cryptocurrencies pose to their hegemony.

There’s the danger in a cbdc, though. The implementation will probably not involve something like a blockchain or some similar form of distributed ledger for tracking and verifying transactions. Rather, the state, or a state body, will track things in some kind of database.

And that’s why the Left is interested. Imagine the power the Left would have over you if the state can see all your digital transactions, and worse, has the power to stop them.

Hey, Joe Citizen, I don’t want you buying that firearm. Transaction denied. Hey, Joe Citizen, you’ve bought too much gas this month already and you’re killing the planet. Transaction denied.

If Elizabeth Warren is for it, that alone should be a red flag. The Left means to control you, by any means at their disposal. We’re a long ways from the innocent days when your neighborhood bank was part of your community and there to serve you.

SCENE: Mitch BERG has just ordered at a food truck, and is waiting for his order to come up. Avery LIBRELLE steps around the corner. BERG visibly ponders abandoning his food and slipping away – but LIBRELLE sees him first.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, godododoooood golly, Avery, it’s great to see…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. The Supreme Court just took us down the road to authoritarianism.

BERG: Let me guess. The Dobbs case…

LIBRELLE: …was a blow for tyranny.

BERG: Quick question for you, Avery. Six unelected justices, fifty years ago, making up law out of whole cloth…

LIBRELLE: Democracy!

BERG: Thousands of legislators, and 435 Congresspeople, directly representing millions of voters?

LIBRELLE: (Hisses) Tyranny!

BERG: You do realize these series of satirical sketches barely qualifies as parody, anymore, right?

(And SCENE)

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross popularized the notion of the Stages of Grief.

I’m going to need to do one for “progressive” approaches to an issue.

Let’s take a whack at it.

1. Panic: Declare that something is a crucial issue that is going to cause massive, seismic change.
2. Ignore those who dissent.
3. Mock the dissenters
4. Attack, mock and deplatform dissenters.
5. And, when at long last you are proven wrong, Clalm you knew it all along.

As re Covid shutdowns, they just got to step 5:

Perhaps by way of starting over.

Perhaps it’s time for a truth and reconciliation commission.

The Beach Boys sang “Wendy, Wendy what went wrong oh, so wrong/We went together for so long/I never thought a guy could cry/Til you made it with another guy”
Who did she run off with? Apparently Bruce Springsteen in Born to Run, “I wanna die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight/In an everlasting kiss”

Jefferson Starship sang “Sarah, Sarah/storms are brewing in your eyes/Sarah, Sarah/no time is a good time for goodbyes”
Why is Sarah leaving? Apparently she ran off with Thin Lizzy… “When you came in my life/You changed my world/My Sarah”

Steely Dan sang “It’s like a dream come true/So won’t you smile for the camera/I know they’re gonna love it, Peg”
Who did Peg leave to chase fame in the spotlight? Apparently Buddy Holly… “If you knew Peggy Sue/Then you’d know why I feel blue/Without Peggy, my Peggy Sue”
And the Beatles might’ve secretly expressed their love for her with their song P.S. I Love You

Billy Joel sang “Laura/Calls me In the middle of the night/Passes on her Painful information”
What was the painful information? Apparently she told Christopher Cross she didn’t have long to live… “Think of Laura but laugh don’t cry/I know she’d want it that way”

Bruce Springsteen eventually ditched Wendy for Terry on the Backstreets… “One soft infested summer Me and Terry became friends/ Trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in” Apparently Terry left the Everly Brothers to run off with Bruce… “Goodbye to Helen Heartbreak, Rosa Rain/ Susie Sorrow, Paula Pain/Terry Teardrops, Betty Blue”

Speaking of a Terry, both Bob Geldof (Love Like a Rocket) and Jackson Browne (Waterloo Sunset) were stalking a couple named Terry and Julie… Geldof: “Terry still meets Julie every Friday night Down at waterloo underground/Nothing much has changed Except now they’re both afraid” Browne: “Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station Every Friday night/I am so lazy, don’t want to wander I stay at home at night”

First things first: my thoughts and prayers to Armani Hyde, a 14 year old Saint Paul boy shot in the head last week. As this is written he is in critical but stable condition.

Now, The Nine ran this story over this past weekend. The whole story is worth a watch…

…but I particularly draw your attention to 1:45 – Mr. Nasiy Narir X of the Lion of Judah Armed Forces.

The LOJAF is noted as an offshoot of the Black Hebrew movement; it’s nothing if not militant; their firearms are a casual part of their presentation; check out their videos. A casual look at at least the material on the Facebook page shows they are especially interested in stopping the black community from killing itself. But they also have a radical streak that they feel plenty emboldened to flaunt.

That’s all well and good – I care no more about law-abiding black citizens exercising their right to keep and bear arms, or dress up as an army, than I do anyone else’s.

But I have three questions:

1. If a group of white guys were to dress up in army uniforms and walk around with guns, Twin Cities progressives would be projectile-crapping; the media would treat it as a sign of the impending collapse.
2. Speaking of which – all of the above, times twenty, for “Moms Want Action” and “Protect” MN. What gives, ladies? If an “Oath Keeper” group were to parade in front of a courthouse and promise “Revenge” for Derek Chauvin while open-carrying, would you be this sanguine?
3. I was reliably informed that if black guys were to be seen walking around open-carrying, the cops would exterminate them on sight. This doesn’t seem to have happened. Note to my culitural betters: please advise. TYVM.

Me? Every law abiding citizen who follows the rules has the same rights as every one else – Second, First and all the other Amendments.

Fearless prediction: the DFL will come out with legislation to go after “paramilitary groups”. Who are all “white supremacist”, natch.

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v. Wade and giving the job of dealing with abortion back to the Legislative branches of the state and federal governments, some Progressives have been shocked, shocked they tell you, to learn that Congress could have done exactly that, long ago. Twice, the Democrats had the presidency and majorities in Congress – and still they failed to do what that noted conservative powerhouse Ruth Bader Ginsberg told them they needed to do – codify abortion in statute.

In the first half of Bill Clinton’s first term, he had a unified Congress and a slim majority. They could have passed some form of abortion legislation.

But that would’ve involved compromise – at the time, giving on parental notification and waiting periods. And the extremists (of the day – seeing today’s pro-infanticide howler monkeys, “parental notification” and waiting periods almost seem quaint – would have none of that:

As CQ explained:

[FOCA] would have the effect of overturning existing state laws that require 24-hour waiting periods and would nullify some parental notice and consent laws for minors. Many House members and senators want to allow precisely those types of restrictions on abortion. But abortion rights groups and their allies in Congress are adamantly opposed to such limits.

FOCA’s legislative text made plain that no state could restrict abortion “at any time” in pregnancy so long as the procedure was needed to protect the “health” of the mother. The term “health” was left undefined, and an open amendment process could have narrowed its meaning, so that the bill would protect only those with serious physical — as opposed to psychological — health issues.

And again, in the first half of Barack Obama’s first term, there was a similar layout; the Democrats had the Presidency, the Congress, and a pro-Roe majority on the SCOTUS.

And again, the move came up against the extremists:

There were many Democrats back then, including Joe Biden, who opposed taxpayer funding but supported Roe, just as Joe Manchin does today. There were at least 20 pro-choice House Democrats who voted for an amendment limiting taxpayer funding, and at least three House Republicans who supported Roe (Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, Mary Bono Mack of California, and Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey).

If Pelosi had the muscle to get Obamacare through the House, why didn’t she try to ram through a bill protecting Roe? Three factors were at play. First, there were six sitting Supreme Court justices who supported Roe. Second, it had taken significant political capital to pass Obamacare, and a vote on FOCA would have been politically painful. Third, the same sorts of divisions that had killed FOCA in 1993 were still at play in Congress in 2009 — there was likely majority support for some right to abortion, just not for one as broad as FOCA’s.

So it may not have been easy – but given even the most minimal compromise, they could have headed off Dobbs.

But they didn’t. Apparently having a perennial bloody shirt to wave, and having an angry mob at their disposal, suits them.

So – when Justice Alito’s draft opinion on Dobbs leaked (I’m sure the FBI will be getting to that any day now), the Left and Media (ptr) furtively warned that gay marriage might be next.

Like Roe, Obergefell – the SCOTUS case that legalized same sex marriage nationwide – was an incursion into the Congress and the States’ enumerated powers. And, like Roe, it was another area where Democrats in Congress would need to:

• Stop cowering behind the robes of a thin minority of appointed justices, and
• Get out and convince legislators, and thus voters, which would inevitably mean needing to
• Compromise on the most extreme parts of their agenda in order to get the votes they need.

And in theory, codifying same sex marriage should be much easier than abortion would have been:

Gay marriage is not the controversial issue that it was a few decades ago. The religious Right is not the force it once was — the Republican electorate, like the rest of the country, is increasingly secular and un-churched. As a result, its views on theologically informed issues such as marriage are more liberal: As of 2021, 55 percent of Republicans support same sex marriage. Among Americans writ large, support sat at 70 percent — a ten-point increase from 2015. In other words, it wouldn’t be politically toxic for Democrats to hold a vote on codifying same-sex marriage. If anything, as the progressive author Sasha Issenberg argued, a legislative push to codify Obergefell “might actually be politically wise for Democrats”: “The massive and still growing popularity of the gay-rights movement’s signal political achievement lets Democrats flip the script and make the culture wars work for them,” Issenberg wrote. “Reigniting the debate over same-sex marriage could give Democrats the perfect wedge issue.”

Pushing for same sex marriage right now could be as perfect a wedge for Democrats today as it was in Minnesota in 2012, when they used it to help crush the MNGOP in that very ugly year, taking down an otherwise popular Voter ID amendment initiative with it.

So – why don’t they?

Part of it, as Nate Hochman notes in the NR piece above, is that the Democrats may just be incompetent; they didn’t anticipate the weakness of Roe anymore than they did the collapse of Aghanistan.

Part of it? Keeping their voter base in a smugly-ill-informed panic suits them.

A few weeks back, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I knew the same thing everyone in the country who passed ninth grade civics, even if taught by a moonlighting football coach, knew; The decision didn’t “ban abortion“; it merely forces abortion proponents to do what gun rights supporters have had to do for the past 55 years; convince voters.

They, like us Second Amendment people, would have to go through the long, arduous, and provided ones cause is right, ultimately rewarding process of convincing people one voter, one legislator, one bill or issue at a time.

In some cases, I told people; “You keep throwing around polls saying 90% of the American people support abortion on demand. It should be a cakewalk“.

Of course, it might also mean having to make occasional compromises to convince those people.

Maybe this is the problem:

If this poll is accurate, the choice mob is going to have to make some concessions to get to that massive support they claim.

And as we saw in 1993/1994 and in 2009/2010, if there’s one thing abortion supporters hate, it’s any compromise at all, and even the flimsiest margin of the issue.

There are really two sides to the coin I’m looking at, hair: on the one hand, there’s nothing quite as pathetic as a group of people realizing that the information they’ve been given is deeply faulty.

On the other side of the coin, there’s nothing quite as dangerous as a bunch of people who have spent 50 years believing they’ve been entitled to get their way on every particular of an issue, not getting their way on any particular of the issue.

Democrats, nationwide and in Minnesota, are fixated on “Red Flag Laws”. In the wake of Uvalde, it’s become the flavor the the month for the grabbers, yet again – part of the endless cycle that the gun control movement has become.

Now, it’s hypothetically possible to create a Red Flag Law that could work. But it won’t, and can’t, be the Red Flag bill that the DFL keeps dragging out in the Minnesota legislature, which:

1. Lets pretty much anyone turn in anybody, for reasons legitimate or malicious. Various Twin Cities anti-gun groups have already promised to use the measure to “SWAT” Minnesota Second Amendment activists if it passes, which they can certainly do, since nothing about the bill prevents it.
2. Leads to the cops driving away with someone’s guns – but leaving them in a home full of knives, rope and propane.
3. Perverts dues process, with a low standard of evidence to take the guns, and a much higher one to get them back.

All that is bad enough.

But once you get to that, you come to the inevitable realization that if our mental health system can’t effectively intervene in a tragedy like this horrific s**t-show earlier this month, what do you think they can do about cases that present much more subtly, or with much more backstory ?

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

I’m seeing hysteria on the Left. “Roe was overturned. Do you know what this means? It means gay marriage, contraception, inter-racial marriage, affirmative action – all of them are at risk!” Thus far, Conservatives have been trolling Liberals using the same line Liberals always use on us: “Oh, no, we aren’t going after those, this decision was strictly limited to one issue.” Time to take the gloves off.

The Supreme Court’s legal basis for Roe v. Wade was the notion that somewhere in the emanations of the penumbra of rights protected by the Constitution is a right to privacy. The Supreme Court abandoned privacy as the legal basis for abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, substituting the notion that abortion is a liberty protected by the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, the “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The Supreme Court went further in the gay marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges, which caused Justice Scalia to write: “If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: ‘The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,’ I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

Once the Supreme Court decided it could invent new rights based on vague notions of privacy, the meaning of the universe, and personal expression of identity rather than historical analysis or constitutional precedent, state laws which had stood for 200 years were tossed out. But now that the Supreme Court has regained its senses, Liberals are correct that all the fake ‘rights’ which were grounded on fanciful bases are at risk. As they should be. The Supreme Court is not a place to impose through litigation the policies which you could not have achieved through legislation. If gay marriage, contraception, inter-racial marriage, affirmative action, and partial-birth abortion are rights which the nation wants protected by the Constitution instead of being protected by state legislatures, there’s a perfectly good amendment process which has been used more than two dozen times already. Go to it. Knock yourselves out.

Yes, we’re coming for your made-up ‘rights.’ We’re coming after all the abominations imposed on us over the last 50 years, taking back the power usurped by the Supreme Court and returning it to the people in the states, where it belongs. Power to the people! Why should we apologize for that?

Joe Doakes

Joe has anticipated one of my “Avery Librelle” plays in one act.

Thousands of curious spectators had gathered along the Rue du Rhône in Geneva at 11am, watching in earnest as the Swiss Federal Council and the State Council of the Canton of Geneva marched in slow procession, escorted by a small military contingent.  At their forefront, Swiss President Giuseppe Motta basked in the adoration of the crowd as the parade of Swiss dignitaries entered the giant Salle de la Réformation event center.

Inside, a collection of 241 delegates from 41 member nations (minus Honduras, whose delegation was still traveling), waited for Motta to take his seat as a honorary chairman at the dais.  The Acting President of the Assembly, Belgian politician Paul Hymans, rang a bell at 11:16am and declared the meeting open – the first official meeting of the League of Nations had begun on November 15th, 1920.

It had been a long and circuitous path to get to this day and the League’s first moments in formal existence (technically, the body had been organized in January of 1920 and had met in it’s proto form), exposed the flaws in it’s creation.  As League drafted a message of thanks to American President Woodrow Wilson, stating that they had gathered on this day at the American’s request, the United States was absent from the proceedings, as well as the Soviet Union, Germany and roughly another 44 sovereign nations that had either been excluded or had chosen to bypass the organization.  And the debates of the first day proved how fragile the newfound League could be, as France threatened to withdraw within hours when the subject of Germany’s admission was discussed.

In the air of the combative and disorganized proceedings, the ultimately prophetic words of Woodrow Wilson to the assembly could be heard:  “I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.”

The first meeting of the League of Nations – deep divides on policy could be seen from the literal first minutes of the organization

Depending upon one’s historical perspective, the events of November 15th, 1920 in Geneva either represented the end of a nearly 150 year path of diplomatic and small ‘r’ republican political progress or a revolutionary jump from nation states, to competing alliances, to finally a burgeoning sense of global, collective action.  The difference in historical narrative would eventually define those who chose to participate versus those who didn’t, and color the very notion of the purpose and powers of the League of Nations.  Read the rest of this entry »

SCENE: New York governor Kathy HOCHUL is meeting with members of the state assembly.

HOCHUL: The Supreme Court just said we can’t tire person‘s right to keep in bear arms to a completely subjective evaluation of their reasons to want to carry one.

We need to devise a less subjective and arbitrary system.

We need ideas. Go!

ASSEMBLY: how about we have state bureaucrats browse through applicants social media records?

HOCHUL: that sounds like it will be a slow, completely subjective and arbitrary bureaucratic nightmare that will wind up as yet another losing court case.

I love it!

And SCENE.

The Internet has been won.

Come back tomorrow.

The other day, I joked – sort of – that after the violence in downtown Minneapolis on July 4, the city councilman, Michael Rainville, might look for the sort of help that former city council president Lisa bender once referred to as “privilege”.

Yesterdays joke is today’s policy:

Minneapolis City Council member Michael Rainville says Governor Walz is sending in state troopers, as confirmed by the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, to help Minneapolis with policing in the interim. The police department has about 600 officers, down from 800.

The ne’er-do-wells finally found a neighborhood where the sense of entitlement overcame white progressive guilt.

A friend of the blog emails:

I had read a while back that some garbage collectors in Saint Paul were not meeting their obligation to customers and were not collecting trash. Mine was consistently being picked up, so I felt fortunate, especially since I was never a supporter of city wide trash collection, at least not the inefficient way Saint Paul was doing it.

With the heat, I had avoided a great deal of yard work during June, but towards the end of the month, I finally had enough yard waste to put out at the curb.

No collection.

I didn’t worry about it much. I just left it out for the next week.

Still no collection.

I finally contacted my hauler who told me they were contracting with another hauler to collect yard waste and to contact them. Ok. I would guess this wouldn’t be my job, but I did it anyway. That hauler told me they had never heard of me and that is why my yard waste wasn’t collected and they’d investigate more.

So, I reached out to my own hauler again. This time, they told me my yard waste wasn’t out by 7am on collection day. (It’s been out for two weeks.) But, they insisted that this other hauler was ultimately responsible.

I called the other hauler back. This time, I was told that actually, in my part of town, my own hauler is responsible for yard waste collection and that they aren’t contracted to collect yard waste for that part of town.

So, my head is spinning. Yard waste is not important to me. It will break down in the container. I’ll have more space and when they get it figured out, it will get collected one way or another. But, this is very poor practice. As we all know, if we let trash collection happen in a free market, as it should, then the original hauler would be cancelled and I would go with someone who could actually provide the service that I pay for. Since Saint Paul took this control from me, I sit here, with very little option.

The only satisfaction that I get—knowing that those whiny Marshall Avenue people who fought for this exact system are also getting the same poor service as me. And it’s only a slight bit of satisfaction because they’ll still support the same city council and mayor that allowed this to happen.

The only results they really care about are getting government to do exactly what they want

Here’s the saddest thing you’ll read today. An anthropology professor at UCLA is retiring early, another casualty of the mob.

The principal driver of the doublethink in my department and so many others at UCLA is fear of the woke faction.

Signs of this fear are omnipresent. Discussing whether to stop requiring the GRE (a standardized test, like the SAT) from applicants to our Ph.D. program, one colleague told a meeting of the biological anthropology subfield that he regarded the GRE as the most informative part of an applicant’s dossier, but that we had no choice but to vote to stop requiring it. Why? Because otherwise we would be regarded as racists. (I was the only person to vote against dropping the GRE requirement).

…

Why am I pessimistic? For a few reasons.

First, the younger faculty tend to be far more woke than their elders. Second, administrators and student protesters perform elaborately choreographed routines that inevitably end with the former enacting policies that they wanted to enact anyway, for which the latter’s public temper tantrums serve as a pretext. Third, now that standardized tests have been dropped from undergraduate application requirements, a growing number of students will be simultaneously unable to handle university level coursework, and predisposed to denounce their professors for heresy, having been chosen for admission on the basis on their leftist activism as high school students. Meanwhile, California’s K-12 schools are increasingly substituting mind-damaging political indoctrination for education.

…

The rise of alternative institutions, like the University of Austin and Ralston College, are very hopeful signs even though the work is slow-going. But until those new schools are built, I can’t bear to spend one more moment in a place that’s morally and intellectually bankrupt.

That’s it: I’m getting out.

Vast swaths of the culture have fallen behind the Woke Curtain. None more so than academia. Not surprising, since it was the incubator for this plague. I believe that eventually the woke madness will burn itself out because it is not a natural human state. But, untold damage will be done before that happens. Communism is a fair example. It is not natural for people to live effectively as prisoners in a police state and it couldn’t last, but it took a generation or two for the Iron Curtain to fall.

The young people whose heads are being filled with this swill are a lost cause. They won’t be reasoned with. They’ll continue to slither into society and infect the HR departments and faculty lounges and press rooms board rooms where they end up. We’ll have to wait till they fade from the scene, and that, sadly, will be a long time.

Deep thoughts from Chris Cillizza, circa 2015:

Joe Biden’s unique trait as a politician is — and always has been — his honesty. Sometimes that honesty gets him into varying degrees of trouble. Sometimes it makes it seem as though he’s the closest thing to a real person you could possibly hope for in politics.

This didn’t age too well, now did it? I can’t prove Cillizza’s childhood nickname wasn’t Corn Pop, or that he wasn’t at some point a classmate of Biden’s at the Naval Academy, but it’s a useful reminder that our betters have been carrying water for Ol’ Joe for a very long time now. There was more:

The Joe Biden on display with Colbert is the person who has inspired remarkable loyalty — over decades — from a tightknit group of staffers who would form the core of his presidential brain trust if he decided to run in 2016. It’s the guy who, for a time in 1987, was one of the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination. It’s who Barack Obama saw when he decided to pick Biden as his vice president in 2008.

1987. Do you remember why Biden fell from grace all those years ago? I suppose you could ask Neil Kinnock, whose speech Biden plagiarized. You could ask Barack Obama:

One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

After the last 18 months, no one seriously doubts The Leader of the Free World’s ability in that realm. 

This is Paris, France. Named for the Parisii tribe which lived on the banks of the Seine at the time of the Roman Republic. Paris most likely began as a settlement on the Île de la Cité, the island in the Seine where Notre Dame now sits, a very defensible position. The ubiquitous Romans were there. They knew the place as Lutetia. (Notre Dame probably sits on the sit of a former Roman temple.)

Awhile back we had looked at Colchester and York in England and remarked how the past history of those cities could still be seen in the street patterns, especially where the city walls are or were. Looking at this overhead view though, it’s not as easy to tell where the city walls of Paris were, even though Paris saw several major wall constructions as the city grew outwards on both banks of the river. As the city expanded, the walls needed to expand with it.

The first major medieval wall was built from 1190 to 1215 during the reign of Philip II. Philip was the first to be called “King of France.” At the time this wall was being built, Notre Dame was in its reasonably early years of construction, begun in the 1160s by Bishop Maurice de Sully under the reign of Philip’s father, Louis VII.

Why isn’t it as easy as some other places to detect where the walls were? It’s because in the 19th century Paris undertook several major urban renewal projects which altered the old medieval street plans.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Nut with a gun shoots crowd at parade in affluent Chicago suburb. Once again, every Liberal gun-control nostrum failed:

AR-15 style rifles have been banned in Highland Park for a decade (buyer purchased in a different city). Gun ban didn’t work.

The rifle was factory-made, not a ‘ghost gun’ built in the garage. Ghost gun ban didn’t work.

The buyer needed a reference to obtain his Permit to Purchase (his father lol signed). Requiring references didn’t work.

The buyer was over 18 at time of purchase. Raising the minimum age didn’t work.

The buyer passed the background check. Background checks didn’t work.

The buyer planned farther in advance than any ‘cooling off’ period. Waiting period didn’t work.

The buyer threatened to kill his family but his family refused to press charges or commit him to a mental institution (it was handled by a mental health worker). Outpatient mental health treatment didn’t work.

Firearms ownership is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution, but not everyone is entitled to enjoy that right. Historically, criminals, children, and the insane were prohibited. This guy falls into the third category but Liberals have so badly messed up civil commitment law that we can’t stop crazies from buying guns.

We don’t need to take the rifles off the streets, we need to take the crazies off the streets. Time for another look at how mental health treatment is failing in America.

Joe Doakes

There are two different supplies of shooters in this country; crazies, and habitual criminals.

The solution for one has nothing to do with dealing with the other.

And none of them will be solved by disarming the law abiding citizen.