Let’s Stir Up Another Republic-Threatening Hornets Nest: Part I

I saw “The Fall of Minneapolis” again last week.

Now, when I first mentioned seeing it a few months back, a few smart people whose opinions I never discount asked “is there anything new that the courts didn’t settle?”

That brings up a couple of questions.

In our society, we usually think that if a court – an impartial jury of our peers, a couple of adversarial attorneys patiently digging out the facts, a fair and impartial judge facilitating it all via “due proces” – decides something, that’s that. The truth has been found.

There’s problems with that.


The was this guy, James Fleming, a Facebook friend, shooter and criminal defense attorney. He used to snap at people who referred to “due process” by itself as a reason to trust something. Paraphrasing: due process isn’t a guarantee of fairness, much less justice. It means the proceedings all check the same checkboxes and standards. The fairness and justice is all in the details.

So – how can that go wrong?

Years ago, I was *very* tangentially involved in the case of a man who’d been accused of a fairly grisly rape and murder in 1982. He had been kind of a lowlife, a petty criminal and drug addict, the kind of guy you’ve seen on a thousand episodes of “Cops” insisting to the officer “I have NO IDEA whose gun and cocaine that is!” He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.

The courts settled the matter.


A decade and change later, a group of people did enough digging and agitating on his behalf to get the attention of “The Innocence Project”, a group of pro-bono lawyers that works on what they believe to be unjust convictions.

The lawyers found that the original conviction had been secured via:
– A jailhouse snitch with a history of perjury whose testimony nonetheless was allowed
– A District Attorney hiding exculpatory evidence.
– An incompetent public defender.

The exculpatory evidence included forensic evidence that, with modern DNA testing, could have shed some light on who the attacker was. But it vanished as completely as whispering “due process” in the wind.

After years of legal wrangling, the lawyers found the evidence – and with more modern DNA testing, determined that the man, who’d been convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt” after “due process”, couldn’t have possibly been the murderer. In 2003 he was released, after 21 years on Death Row.

And he’s not alone. In the past 50 years, *185* inmates have been released from Death Row. Not granted new trials. Not commuted to lesser sentences. *Released* from Death Row to the world – because their “convictions beyond a reasonble doubt” were in error, due to perjury, official misconduct, incompetence, and even some honest but terrible mistakes.

So – do I think the answer to “is it true?” is “the courts have spoken?”

Let’s just say I believe in (grudging, conditional) trust but verification. Throw in a heaping dollop of skepticism about the integrity of public officials and systems.

More later this wee4


Compromise

Someone walks up to you with a baseball bat. They say they want to kill you.

Your response is “no, I don’t want to get beaten to death with a baseball bat”.

Looks like you have a standoff. A controversy. A conundrum.

Someone else steps in and asks “How about we compromise? Will you settle for a traumatic brain injury?”

It’s the middle way, after all. The guy with the bat might even say “sure, I just wanna hit you, hard!“

You might respond “No – in fact, I don’t want anyone hurting me in any way. At all”

And the buttinski responds “Why won’t yiou compromise?”

Who’s right?

You?

The guy with the bat?

Or the person striving to find the middle ground between the two of you?

If your response is “I’m putting my foot down; nobody is hitting me with a bat for any reason at all“, and the other to ask “why do you hate the guy with the bat?“, does that change anybody’s mind?

Point being, sometimes the middle path, the compromise, is not the most moral path forward.

If We Take An Originalist View…

…of Berg’s Twentieth Law of Social Justice Warmongering (“All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise”), it’s hard not to look at this story – “Klan literature” being handed out in a swing-y part of northeastern Minnesota long controlled by a DFL that’s not happy about losing ground in the are, four days before an election where the DFL is poised to lose, maybe big – and not presume it’s a hoax.

Open Letter To Governors Abbot And DeSantis

Governors,

Seeing the hair pulling response of upper middle class leftist to actually have to pay the freight for their own policies on the border is, to put it frankly, utterly glorious:

Put another way:

Might I humbly suggest you send a couple of buses to:

  • Merriam Park in Saint Paul
  • Kenwood in Minneapolis
  • City Hall in Rochester
  • Crocus Hill in Saint Paul
  • Linden Hills in Minneapolis
  • Lexington at Chatsworth in Saint Paul
  • The DFL headquarters, down on Plato Boulevard.

The footage will be off the hook.

That is all.

Renters Remorse

A friend of the blog emails:

These amendments wouldn’t have changed my vote, but I wonder if it would have even passed if rent control as defined through the council’s amendments had been on the ballot?

Not likely, which is how it should have been in the first place – not passed.

I ask, as if in a vacuum, will this teach voters a lesson, change how they vote? The answer to that question is also not likely. 

Indeed, I’d wager a shiny new quarter that this will be used by the hard left to push for even more “progressive” city councilbeings.

Cranking The Screws

If it seemed to you that the Administration and Dems jammed down the “Inflation Reduction Act” – an agglomeration of “Build Back Battered“ and “Green New Deal“ policies – really really hard?

You were probably right. It’s because people are losing interest in “climate change“:

mericans are less concerned now about how climate change might impact them personally — and about how their personal choices affect the climate — than they were three years ago, a new poll shows, even as a wide majority still believe climate change is happening…Overall, 35% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the impact of climate change on them personally, down from 44% in August 2019. Another third say they are somewhat concerned. Only about half say their actions have an effect on climate change, compared with two-thirds in 2019.

The story is, in fact, more climatemongery, and goes on to try to re-bury the lede – but between the lines, the message is there; other priorities are taking over for people in the real world, outside the upper-middle-class progressive bubble.

And if people ever make the connection between the output of the “green/sustainable/equitable“ mafia policies, and the depression in their standard of living, that’s going to be a big problem for the greens.

Poor people don’t solve problems.

Resetting The Reset

Green, “sustainable” energy policies that make middle class live unsustainable.

Transitioning from houses to apartments, from cars to mass transit.

Moving from meat to vegetables, with maybe some insect thrown in as a treat.

Hyperinflation, which serves mainly to make common savings and investment worthless, but does wonders for the wealth of the plutocrats, “futurists” and pols – who will give up no cars, houses, yachts ,warmth or food.

Seems like the “new world order” looks a lot like the old, pre-1776 world order, doesn’t it?

Victor Davis Hanson – perhaps more optimistic than I feel at the moment – in a piece you should read. Pull quote:

So a reset reckoning is coming—in reaction to the “new orders” championed by Biden and the Davos set. 

In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic “No!” to the orthodox left-wing agenda that has resulted in unsustainable inflation, unaffordable energy, war, and humiliation abroad, spiraling crime, racial hostility—and arrogant defiance from those who deliberately enacted these disastrous policies. 

What will replace it is a return to what until recently had worked. 

I hope he’s right. The boundless stupidity of the “send me more stimmies” set – whose votes count just as much as those of smart people – serves as the counterexhibit.

Spoils

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

A reader emails describe that group as:

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

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

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

Hard To Believe…

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

right?

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

And how did that go over?

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

The battle lines for next November could not be clearer.

Nativx

I just started nioting the “Land Acknowledgment” – the laborious-yet-offhand “acknowledgment” that an event was being held on land once occupied by Natives – in the last couple of years, mostly among the sorts of Twin Cities “social justice” non-profits that exude self-righteousness like some people exude bad breath.

It’s struck me as mawkish and purposeless, the sort of consequence-free moral preening that, well, defines the modern “social justice” mob, while putting none of their own skin in the game. It is to history what the term “Latinx” is to sociology and linguistics; a way to make a complex subject palatable to socially fussy white progressive social justice lemmings.

I finally have an arsenal of responses, from this article, which has almost too many great points to try to pullquote.

I said “almost”:

It is difficult to exaggerate the superficiality of these statements. What do members of the acknowledged group hold sacred? What makes them unique and identifies them to one another? Who are they, where did they come from, and where are they going? The evasion of these fundamental questions is typical. The speaker demonstrates no knowledge of the people whose names he reads carefully off the sheet of paper. Nor does he make any but the most general connection between the event and those people, other than an ancient one, not too different from the speaker’s relationship with the local geology or flora.

Things get more substantial, but no less acerbic. I recommend it.

Word Salad With A Side Of Crocodile Tears

Madame Vice President [1] on the Rittenhouse verdict:

So – the woman for whom giggling about putting black men in jail for simple weed possession was pillow talk with Willie Brown, and who came out in favor of prosecutors hiding exculpatory evidence in death penalty cases, has been…

…sorry. Couldn’t finish that with a straight face.

[1] Keep checking back on this.

Something Tells Me…

…that Duke Ellington HIgh School in Georgetown, DC is going to regard this as a, er, tactical error; they’ve canceled a fundraiser involving one of their alums, Dave…

…er, let me try that again…

DAVE FREAKING CHAPPELLE

because transgender::

The students said they were uncomfortable supporting Chappelle because many of their classmates identify as LGBTQ+. In his new Netflix special, The Closer, the comedian compares being transgender to wearing blackface, says “gender is a fact” and says that he’s a member of “team TERF,” meaning “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.”

I’m hoping I’m around in 30 years to see what comedians say about this era.

Definitions

SCENE: Mitch BERG is eating a skewer of souvlaki at a local greek joint when Avery LIBRELLE walks in. BERG tries to hide behind a menu, but LIBRELLE sees him, walks over.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, hey, Avery…

LIBRELLE: You people are so paranoid!

BERG: OK, I”ll bite. How, this time?

LIBRELLE: They’re not teaching Critical Race Theory in schools.

BERG: Do tell.

LIBRELLE: Critical race theory is taught in law schools and sociology programs.

BERG: Y’know, this reminds me of the conversation I have with anti-gunners, condescendingly cooing “nobody’s coming for your guns.

LIBRELLE: More paranoia. Nobody’s coming for your guns

BERG: Right. So I point out that politicians say that that’s exactly what they’re going to do – Joe Biden said it himself on is campaign website…

LIBRELLE: That’s just talk, not policy…

BERG: Right. That’s the inevitable next line. So I point to gun control legislation jammed down in New York, Colorado and Virginia in the past few years, and they say…(motions toward LIBRELLE)

LIBRELLE: They’re not coming for your guns right this moment.

BERG: Right. According to you all, I can’t be concerned about gun control until there’s a BATFE agent beating down my door with a photocopied warrant.

But let’s get back on subject. CRT…

LIBRELLE: Isn’t being taught.

BERG: The VIrginia Department of Education says it is.

LIBRELLE: But you can’t prove that it’s being taught in classrooms!

BERG: Teachers are most definitely teaching students that America is inseparably and irredeemably rooted in racism, that “whiteness” and racism are inseparable, that the police were originally an extension of Slave Patrols, and that the Second Amendment was framed to defend slavery and nothing more. All of which are part and parcel of CRT.

LIBRELLE: Again, CRT is taught in law schools and post-secondary education.

BERG: So none of those things are taught in schools.

LIBRELLE: Of course they are.

BERG: And they are all inseparable from CRT.

LIBRELLE: No. Its not CRT.

BERG: What is it, then?

LIBRELLE: It’s a theory about race, that criticizes.

BERG: But not CRT?

LIBRELLE: Of course not.

BERG: (looks down at menu). Look at how the price of pita has gone up…

LIBRELLE: (Looks down) Huh?

But BERG has slipped away.

And SCENE

Unexpectedly

I wasn’t living here in 1980. I’m not sure how Minneapolis’s Loony Left reacted to the “Solidarity“ protests in Poland – where the Polish “Solidarity“ trade union led a year of demonstrations against Poland’s communist government. The demonstrations – which newly elected President Ronald Reagan supported morally, symbolically and materially – were the beginning of the end of the communist bloc, and the Soviet Union with it.

I have vague memories, arriving in the Twin Cities years later, of sensing that an awful lot of Minnesota leftists had bet on the wrong side in that particular episode. I mean, two decades later some of them still did, in my comment section.

Now, 40 years later, as a similarly benighted country protests for similar reasons, a Democrat government is lending the Cuban demonstrators a bit of rhetorical support from a senile president, along with an executive branch that is, as we noted yesterday, laying down the law hard in favor of the regime.

And the Minnesota left?

They are showing themselves to be as morally depraved and intellectually bovine as ever:

Facing an economic crisis, food and medicine shortages and rising prices, the Cuban people are demanding that the communist regime give up power.

“We have to see the larger context of the pandemic, COVID-19. The economy has also collapsed, Cuba depends on tourism,” said Nimtz. The Minnesota Cuba Committee is also calling for an end to the U.S. trade embargo.

“What we are doing here is to demand, demand that the Biden administration end the embargo, lift the embargo, and do as he promised,” said Nimtz.

Minnesota Progressives; reliable communist useful idiots for 60 years.

Over The Target

The Center for the American Experiment has had to reschedule a “Critical Race Theory“ event in Duluth.

Due to threats.

Three times:

For the fourth time in a month, a Duluth venue was pressured into canceling the Raise Our Standards event put on by Center of the American Experiment. Within minutes of the announcement yesterday that the Cast Iron Bar and Grill would host the event, the owner received threatening phone calls pressuring them to cancel. American Experiment will now hold the event in the Lafayette Park Community Center in Duluth.

 

Hundreds of Minnesotans attended the first 16 stops on the Raise Our Standards tour focused on the state’s draft social studies standards and Critical Race Theory. The original Duluth appearance was postponed on June 17 after the Northland Country Club and Holiday Inn both backed out of hosting the event. The AAD Shrine Meeting & Event Center also canceled with American Experiment after signing a contract to host the event next Tuesday.

You see, that’s why Big Left is making such a huge deal about “January 6“; it allows them to deflect away from the way they behave every day, everywhere.

This Ain’t No Foolin’ Around

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!

After Nearly A Year…

…of constant violence that he encouraged not only with as many words but with as many actions, Portland, Oregon mayor Ted Wheeler says people are “sick of” the constant sturm und drang that has made parts of the city unlivable:

Portland became a hotbed of civil unrest last summer during demonstrations protesting the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis. Similar demonstrations in cities across the country were largely peaceful. But in Portland, some of the demonstrations have deteriorated into widespread arson, looting and assaults. ADVERTISEMENT

Rioters in the city, who have called for the defunding of the local police department along with other measures, have on several occasions targeted a federal courthouse, spraying it with graffiti, setting fires and destroying nearby storefronts and other property.  

“The people who work here support the voices of racial and social justice and will not be intimidated from doing our jobs by the ugly graffiti or broken windows,” Scott Erik Asphaug, a U.S. attorney for the District of Oregon, said during the press conference, the AP reported. “We do not confuse the voices of the many with the shouts of the few who hope to hold our city hostage by petty crime and violence.”

The first two things that jumped to my mind?

  1. After ten months of Wheeler all but setting Portland up as an “Anti”-Fa staging area, I wonder what powerful “progressive” constituency finally figured it was time to rein the party in?
  2. Reading Asphaug’s quote, am I the only one who thinks it sounds like they’re trying to pin the violence on…”the right”?

Indoctrination

Whatever you do, don’t you dare suggest public schools have become leftist indoctrination factories:


According to whistleblower documents and a source within the school, a fifth-grade teacher at the inner-city William D. Kelley School designed a social studies curriculum to celebrate Davis, praising the “black communist” for her fight against “injustice and inequality.” As part of the lesson, the teacher asked students to “describe Davis’ early life,” reflect on her vision of social change, and “define communist”—presumably in favorable terms.

At the conclusion of the unit, the teacher led the ten- and eleven-year-old students into the school auditorium to “simulate” a Black Power rally to “free Angela Davis” from prison, where she had once been held while awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. The students marched on the stage, holding signs that read “Black Power,” “Jail Trump,” “Free Angela,” and “Black Power Matters.” They chanted about Africa and ancestral power, then shouted “Free Angela! Free Angela!” as they stood at the front of the stage.

Apologists may respond “this is an anomaly! Not all public schools try to get away with this kind of thing!”

No. Just the ones in districts so blue that there will be no consequences – serving both to socialize (heh heh) the concept with other teachers, and to lower the bar of what’s “acceptable” elsewhere; “Oh, fer gosh sakes, Edina doesn’t have them chant “Free Angela” and talk about black “ancestral power”. No, perish the thought. We just study why Angela Davis is a hero (omitting all context about her crimes and communism itself, naturally), and why “whiteness” is a social cancer. Totally different things!”

Remember – Berg’s 21st Law is pretty clear on this: “When it comes to “progressive” policy, yesterday’s absurd joke is today’s serious proposal and tomorrow’s potential law”

Don’t be surprised.

Berg’s 20th Law Rules All It Surveys

It’s gotten to the point where hearing about any emotionally charged claim of abuse gets me thinking “deep breath, wait – the odds it’ll be a hoax are just about even, if not better”.

I mean, there’s a reason it’s not called “Berg’s 20th Suggestion“.

Keep it in mind, and you’re disappointed…well, pretty rarely, to be honest.

(Not gonna pullquote it – the whole thing is worth a read).

Not An Animal

“Protect” Minnesota has a new executive director.

We’ll come back to that.


Modern American “progressivism”, like all its many forebears in the past 200 years, has been all about rallying people against boogeymen. From “monarchists” in the French Revolution, to “Wreckers” in Stalin’s USSR to the Wobbly’s “Bosses”, up through “the patriarchy” and “the man” and “counterrevolutionaries” in Red China and San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, and if you have a hard time distinguishing between ’em, join the club.

Today, the boogeymen…er, boogiepeople on the left are pretty much all the things that people who are included are told to be “anti”. “Anti-Racism” “Anti-Misogyny” (not just sexism, anymore – it’s the more active, more malevolent noun these days), “Anti-Fascism”, “Anti-Transphobia”, and on and on – all of which sounds like good things to be “anti”…

…and, unsurprisingly, when you dig into the “Root Causes” of all those nouns, all things trace back to “Western Civilization” in all its particulars: the Judeo-Christian value on the individual and their worth, value, rights and responsibilities and potential of each and every person, as a person with a mind, a point of view, and at the end of the day an indivisible soul of personal, societal, political, intellectual and metaphysical worth.

Those aspects of humanity are anathema to progressivism in all its flavors. The focus is on the group – the Marxists “classes”, the Nazi’s irreducible focus on race, the modern academic Left’s obsession with a byzantine network of intersectional identity groups. The individual is nothing but a vote (for now), an appetite, a widget to be moved through the production line of life (like Obamacare’s awful caricature of Progressive humanity, “Julia”). Progressivism is “Materialist”. Souls, individual intellects and thoughts and reams, all are ephemeral; humans are widgets that consume and produce, and whose worth and value (to those in power) is expressed via their membership in the collective.

Those widgets have a term. “Bodies”. Not people. Not brains. Not souls.

Bodies.


Anyway – “P”M has a new director. And unlike the dotty, dizzy neverending font of comedy that was Heather Martens, or the serial fabulist The “Reverend” Nancy Nord Bence, the new director presents us with a few surprises.

She’s “a gun owner herself” – which might be seen in several ways. Is “P”M moderating? Are they realizing that the culture war has slipped far enough away from them, especially over this past year, that they have to start speaking to people who need to be convinced?

And she’s apparently incredibly famous, since she apparently just goes by “Rashmi”. I’ve turned “Protect” Minnesota’s website, Facebook feed and other social media upside down, and not been able to find any reference to a last name, which is Seneviratne, by the way.

But even during the reign of the serial fabulist the Reverend Nord Bence, “Protect” MN wasn’t nearly extreme enough in its hatred of guns and (law-abiding) gun owners, enough for some people.

“P”M spawned a breakway group, “Survivors Lead” – basically a woman, Rachel Joseph, with a long history of progressive activism and a story; an aunt who was murdered, according to Ms. Joseph’s story, by a gun.

Quick aside: I don’t minimize anyone’s trauma over having a loved one murdered. But in the many times I’ve heard Ms. Joseph’s story, she’s never once mentioned a perpetrator, someone actually holding and using the gun that killed her aunt; that persons evil motivation, the legal fallout from the murder, whether that person was sentenced or not. It’d be wrong to crack wise – “what, did the gun animate itself?” – but omitting a perpetrator, his/her motives and the like from the conversation is incredibly intellectually dishonest.

Anyway – “Rashmi” and her apparent moderation are not going over well with “Survivors Lead”:

The extreme heckling the not-as-extreme about getting less extreme. That qualifies as “dog bites man”, at the very most.

Rather less so? There followed some more, er, ethnically pointed traffic on one social media feed (from which I’ve long been blocked) or another.

After which “P”M – operating through its usual social media persona, the omniscient third person that used to be Martens and Nord Bence – responded:

On the one hand, watching the agents of Big Left eating each other is one of my favorite spectator sports.

And if the biggest semi-organic anti-gun group in MInnesota (shaddap about Moms Want Action already) is pivoting from pushing Linda Slocum’s gun grab bill to highlighting the inequity of gun control (“Race, class and geography all play into who gets to have a gun and who doesn’t” – which is something every Second Amendment activist has known for 50 years) and speaking in the first “person” to the prudence of victims of violence to arm up, then in culture war terms that’s the sound of the first tank crossing the pontoon bridge at Remagen.

But…”white bodied privilege?”

What the flaming hootie hoo?

I thought for a moment – is this a shot back at the Rachel Dolezals and Elizabeth Warrens of the world, with their flip-flopping identities, by “actual” “people of color”, reinforcing the idea that while you might “identify” with one degree melanin or another, your apparent appearance still wins out in the great privilege lottery (which will, I suspect, get pilloried hard by the Trans crowd, for whom perceived identity is everything? I’ll let the fight that one out).

But no. It’s much less hilarious than that.

It’s “inclusion language” – slang or argot that one class of people use to track who is in, and who is “out” – to be sure. That’s part of it, and people are noticing:

Referring to people as bodies is a reminder, writer Elizabeth Barnes says in an interview, that “racism isn’t just about the ideas that you have in your head.” Barnes is the author of “The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, The Girl Behind the Wall.” In intellectual discussions, theories about social oppression sound almost disembodied; “we talk about prejudice,” Barnes says, “like it’s just a matter of ideas.” The point is to emphasize the physical violence done to black people through slavery, lynching, and police brutality. In the case of women, the term “bodies” highlights “what happens to women’s bodies in health care contexts, in sexual contexts, in reproductive contexts.”

But behond that?

It’s a nod to the materialism of the left – that the mind, the thoughts, the indivisible soul of the indivisual human being is not merely irrelevant, but inconvenient to the obsession with identity.

Your melanin defines you.

In some ways its a cheap ad hominem – “of course you’d think that, you are (add a reference to your target’s melanin, or lack thereof)”. But pointing logical fallacies out to the foot soldiers of Big Left is a little like arguing salinity with sharks; it’s just part of the water they swim in.

So – gun groups eating each other? Good.

The debate contributing to the ongoing hijacking of the language? Bad.

The whole thing participating, in its own little way, in the further erosion of one of the ideals that’s made Western Civilization the most successful, and humane , civilization in human history?

Worse.

Student Senate Is Haaaaaard

Minneapolis police note that they were kept from the crime scene of a recent shooting near “George Floyd Square“ near 38th and Chicago in south Minneapolis, and that parts of the “citizens committee“ that have turned the area around the intersection into a de facto “autonomous zone“ contaminated the evidence that could be used to try to prosecute the perps, if they are ever found.

A couple of the inspectors involved have emailed a few members of the student Senate… um, City Council.

To give the minimum possible credit where it is due, and indicate how very low the actual bar is, Councilman Andrea Jenkins seems to have a veered close to something within rifle shot of common sense in her response:

Jenkins told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS she supports the memorialization of George Floyd Square and wants it to become a permanent fixture as she and others on the City Council pursue racial justice and police reform. But she does not condone any action which inhibits police investigations.

‘We want justice for everybody and it concerns me and I am not happy with what I read in the email,’ said Jenkins. ‘To somehow disrupt or delay that kind of response is completely irresponsible and an obstruction of justice.’

My fearless prediction; Jenkins will be castigated as a conservative reactionary, and will have a primary opponent from the left. be castigated as a conservative reactionary, and will have a primary opponent from the left.