…it’s great to find Minnesota is the champion at something again.
Well, not “good”…:
More “notable”, I guess.
Read the whole thread.
After 29 Years…
8
Category Archives: 2020 Riots
The Inmates
Don’t let the title – or the fact that it’s in the generally unforgiveable Slate, for that matter – put you off from reading this piece, “The Store That Called the Cops on George Floyd “.
This piece captures not only the history of CUP Foods, the South Minneapolis bodega whose employee called 911 on George Floyd last Memorial Day, a Palestinian immigrant family that’s worked a couple of generations of butts off to succeed in a “transitioning” neighborhood through a couple of waves of blight.
More than that, it captures the successive waves of fervid racism (Black on Arab, Black on European, Arab and Black on European), community spirit, delusion, and the unlikely trifecta of community spirit infused with delusion and racism:
Toussaint Morrison, a Black Lives Matter organizer in Minneapolis, said he doesn’t actually see any problem with CUP Foods reopening. But he doesn’t necessarily think anyone should shop there…On CUP Foods reopening, he said, “I say get a Black-owned corner store near there, and say shop here. We’ll beat all of their prices. Even if we lose money, whatever.” The point, he said, is to keep Black money in the Black community: “Whether they open or not, it’s on us as a community to not buy their shit. It’s that simple.”
So – far from dismissing it because of a “woke” copy-editor’s inelegant titling, or its laughable origins (Slate, for flock’s sake), I urge you to read it as a guide to everything that’s going to slowly strangle Minneapolis.
And to maybe hang onto it as a time capsule showing future generatons how “community” became impossible.
Tipping Point
Jen at Redhead Ranting, by way of a visit to her her family’s area in a local cemetary, notes a reminder of a crime that had a disproportionate impact on law and order in the Twin Cities a generation ago:
Not far from my grandparents are the markers of the graves of the 5 Coppage children who died in a fire ordered by a rival gang member of their older brother in 1994.
The deaths were horrible. Few in the community were left untouched by the 1994 tragedy. The cops, as they always do with brutal crimes involving children, took it personally and declared war on the gang, building a federal drug case that led to the convictions of about 22 gang members in 1998. (full article)
This happened at about the apex of of the “Murderapolis” years, and I think it’s fair to say it marked a tipping point in law enforcement in Minnesota. People demanded that government do its one unambiguously legitimate job – preserve order, the job that makes living in close conjunction with other people, and the commerce, society and community that result, possible.
What followed was a period of relative (!) order and tranquility – or so it seems in retrospect. Minnesota became, up until this past spring, the safest state in the union that had a major metropolitan area; the Twin Cities, especially Saint Paul, were for all their faults quite a safe metro area.
The stats are up this year – but perceptions about crime aren’t about stats, especially when “rational critical thought” is near the bottom of the priority list.
But eventually, people will demand order. They’ll either get it from government, or they’ll get it themselves (that’s the romantic notion a lot of people have – and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was occasionally one of them) or they’ll get it from whatever “strongman”, be it a street gang or a mob racket or a “vigilante militia” that offers enough of it in exchange for what they take to make it worth it, or worth it enough.
Here’s hoping sane heads prevail.
“It’s An Ideology!”
“Anti”-Fa, we’re told, is not a real group, but rather an ideology.
So, for that matter, was Al Quaeda.
An the comparison holds up all the way down to the root level:
There are different types of bloc organization styles. The building block of antifa is what’s called an affinity group, people you live and work with and trust and know in real life. All the planning is done within that closed bloc, and they don’t let everyone know [what they’re going to do]. I didn’t know that they were going to burn the Portland Police Association when I joined. What they did was put a call out that said, “Anyone show up in black that night at this place, and you can join the action.”
That’s called a semi-open bloc. The planning is done within the closed group, but anyone who’s dressed in black can come join the action. If you know what you’re looking for, you can spot affinity groups that are working together. One thing they’ll do sometimes is have written agreements with other protest organizations that aren’t in black bloc. I know of one from Berkeley that illustrates this: “We agree that to not take pictures of anyone in antifa.” It will say that literally in writing, so everyone’s working together. It’s like a combined arms type thing, almost like the military. They work together and are mutually reinforcing.
Cells, “Affinity Groups”, tomayto tomahto.
Toward A More Awesome Union
The first requirement of an orderly society is order which must be imposed by an impartial judiciary. That cannot happen when the judicial system is afraid of violence.
***
Old:
From: Chief Judge
To: All Employees
You may have read or heard that the Court House was locked down today for about 15 min. After a sentencing hearing on a homicide, the families of the defendant and victim engaged in a dispute that was broken up by deputies. Soon after, gun shots occurred on Wabasha and 6th St. Deputies locked down the courthouse as a result of the gunfire. It is not clear to me if the events were related.
Based on information I have received, no one was injured and bullet casings were collected. The matter is under investigation. It appears that at no time was our courthouse security compromised. The deputies took swift and appropriate action throughout this disturbing incident.
New:
From: Chief Judge Joe Doakes
To: All Employees
In the past, when the judicial system was subject to violence, we hid and hoped to be killed last. From now on, when a violent situation arises, all employees shall report to the nearest Arms Locker where the Master at Arms will distribute restraints, gas masks, and weapons, at which time use of deadly force to protect both judicial property and employee lives is authorized. Employees may stand their ground to do so; the requirement to retreat is suspended.***
That ought to help. Now, let’s talk about the George Floyd trial, and about Supreme Court nominees.
Joe Doakes
The policies that’d go into effect if Mitch Berg were in charge – suffice to say it’d be more than judicial branch employees.
Once the governor declared “state of emergency” related to the breakdown of public order, the order to retreat would go the way of the Hibbing chopstick factory, and the sign of a weapon in the hands of a violent mob would serve as reasonable threat of death or great bodily harm, and one’s property would be every bit as defensible as lives.
Make me Governor, and this, I promise.
Dead, Dead, Dead
A friend of the blog emails:
Downtown St Paul does need some improvement. It has been pretty lifeless for a while.
But, I don’t think collecting more money from the few businesses that remain there is quite the way to improve it, though I guess it is better than burning it down as they did for the Midway Improvement Project.
If you see both projects as glorified transfers of wealth from whatever private sector remains in Saint Paul to the political class, it all makes perfect sense.
Representative Molotov
Once upon a time, I got some great life advice.
“Find what you’re good at, and run with it”.
John Thompson, would-be DFL rep from District 67A, the East Side, apparently got and practices the same advice.
He does seem to like burning down suburbs. Or at least talking about it.
Sure, that’ll solve police overreach against blacks. Run with it.
Hey, DFLers – this is the mainstream of your party.
It’s Better To Look Good Than To Be Good
June – Minneapolis City Council President on CNN – expecting police to prevent crime comes from a place of white privilege.
June, July, August – Minneapolis City Council to all Minneapolis Police Officers: You’re horrible people and we’re going to de-fund your entire department, to start from scratch and reinvent public safety.
September – Minneapolis City Council to Minneapolis Police Chief: Crime is out of control and residents are terrified. Why aren’t police officers doing a better job of preventing crime?
The Minneapolis Chief of Police is Medaria Arrando, a Black man. When the Council fires him, he’ll join the ranks of other Black police chiefs fired as scapegoats for White city council virtue-signaling gone wild including Le’Ron Singletary, Carmen Best, and U. Renee Hall.
But firing the Black police chief flies in the face of a study claiming to prove that police departments run by Black police chiefs have Fewer shootings.
It’s almost as if Liberals don’t care about actual results, only about looking good to the media.
Joe Doakes
Among “progressives”, participation trophies are good enough.
Also mandatory.
DIY Part 2
When law-abiding citizens realize they can’t count on their government for justice – and they are – they’ll establish order for themselves. As we noted earlier, that isn’t always a “good” thing in any sense a modern American would understand.
But for the first time since the thirties – the seventies, in some quarters – people are thinking about it:
NSSF president and CEO Joe Bartozzi spoke at the 2020 Gun Rights Policy Conference over the weekend where he delivered the news on the surge in ammunition sales. He also noted that gun sales were 95 percent higher in the first six months of 2020 than they were during the same time period in 2019.
Bartozzi noted there were nearly five million first-time gun buyers in the first part of the year. He explained that “of all firearms sold to first-time gun buyers, 40 percent were sold to women and personal protection was by far the main purchase driver.”
He suggested there are a few driving factors behind the current surge in gun and ammo sales — one of the key ones being the anti-gun rhetoric of Joe Biden. He suggested Biden looks at gun makers as “the enemy” and recounted Biden’s vow “to bring them down.” He observed that the talk of “mandatory buybacks” of certain firearms is a driving force as well.
We noted some time ago that in most of the country – geographically, at least – gun rights have long since gone viral, and stand to win the parts of the culture war that’s taking place there.
Has the last six months moved the needle in Blue America? We’ll see.
Watching The Defectives
Am I the only one watching the various prosecutions underway from the riots a couple weeks ago, and wondering which ones are the “white supremacists?”
Any guesses?
I’m sure stumped.
Worst Ever
2020 – “I’m the worst yar in history!”
1942 – “Oh, that’s so *cute*…”
1933 – “Aren’t these years just so…precocious?”
1916 – (Makes inaudible sound of disgust)
536 – “No kidding”
2021 – “Hold my beer”
DIY
When people can’t trust “the system” to keep them safe, they take matters into their own hands.
Italian immigrants – with social, religious, linguistic and cultural impediments to assimilation, cutting both ways – brought their underworld organizations from the old country to get some order (at a price) in their lives.
Ditto the Irish in New York and Chicago, and Jews all over the place.
Blacks? Remember Malcolm X and the Black Panthers?
And now? Middle class Minnesotans of all races, creeds and backgrounds. are strapping up. Gun purchase background checks (which, remember, only apply to handguns and “assault weapons”; shotguns, varmint rifles and plinkers require no contact with the government) are up well over 50% between August 2019 and last month.
And – as we’ve observed elsewere – the new buyer is a lot less likely to fit the stereotype Big Left puts out:
Dave Amon, an agent at Gunstop of Minnetonka, said the demand shows no signs of slowing especially as the changing role of law enforcement is in the spotlight, the Star Tribune reported.
“I’ve seen a lot more single moms that are scared and need something to protect them,” he said. “They’re scared when people talk about defunding the police.”
Given how long the DFL has bet on gun confiscation in the past year – clearly drooling over taking control of the Senate – I wonder if this is going to slow down the rush to grab, or accelerate it to try to get ahead of broad social acceptance?
Being a pessimist, I choose “B”.
Surpising Nobody…
…who has been paying attention: Violence in Portland is being orchestrated by a behind-the-scenes organization who, we are told, doesn’t exist:
We have overwhelming intelligence regarding the ideologies driving individuals towards violence and why the violence has continued,” Murphy wrote. “A core set of threat actors are organized, show up night after night, share common TTPs [tactics, techniques and procedures] and drawing on like minded individuals to their cause.”
But Minneapolis and Saint Paul?
It’s gotta be “white supremacists”.
Question
There’ve been 27 people charged so far in connection with the rioting over Memorial Day week.
Just curious – look at the list.
Anyone appear to be a “white supremacist” to you?
Because on the one hand, white supremacists are a bunch of inbred losers. On the other, they evade capture like Mossad agents.
Weird.
The Worst Thing Ever
Ryan Winkler, the House Majority Leader, isn’t thrilled with President Trump stealing Joe Biden’s thunder:
Then the Majority Leader has had a pretty sheltered life.
Know what’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard?
Other than the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, the Gulag, the Holodomor, the Rape of Nanking, the subjugation of Tibet, the history of Haitian slavery, or pretty much an garden-variety genocide?
Well, not this…
But it was pretty bad anyway. And if Bogdan Vechirko – who owned no “white supremacist” paraphernalia at all, and heroically avoided hitting anyone (who wasn’t trying to get hit) wants to sue for slander, I’ll host a fundraiser.
Have you people call my people.
Ted Antoinette
Remember when your “progressive” acquaintances would scoff and say “there’s no such thing as a ‘limosine liberal’, a ‘condo pink’, or any of that?”
I do.
And they’ll do it again.
But here – along with Lori Lightfoot’s haircut and the blowout that was apparently inflicted on Nancy Pelosi by GOP operatives – is Exhibit A.
The Phantom Boogeyman
Salem had “witches”.
The far right and far left in Europe from the middle ages through the 1940s (and beyond) had “Jews”.
Jordan, Minnesota had “satanists“.
And Governor Klink and Mayor McDreamy had “white supremacists”.
It seems like such a long time ago that Big Left started predicting an imminent wave of “right wing white supremacist terrorism“.
And, like OJ, they are still looking:
This notion – that Big Left has been getting ready to launch a violent war against dissent, while blaming mostly-phantom “right wingers” – is where Berg’s Seventh Law ceases to be funny.
Bombshell
On May 31, prosecutors learned Floyd died of an overdose. On August 25, they admitted it in court.
Charges against the officers still have not been dismissed. One remains in jail, in super-max prison, in Oak Park Heights.
I seem to recall someone in the comments lecturing me on the ethical duties of a prosecutor as explanation why he was confident the state would win a conviction. Yeah? Not when your own medical examiner concedes it was an overdose.
I’m ready for my apology. I bet Chauvin is, too. I wonder if the Lawyer’s Board of Professional Responsibility is taking complaints in person these days, or on-line only. Because sitting on exculpatory evidence for three months, publicly branding a man you know to be innocent as a murder, encouraging people to riot to protest a crime that never occured . . . those acts seem to violate the Rules of Professional Conduct, particularly Rules 3.8 (a), (d) and (f).
Joe Doakes
Part of my enduring pessimism about politics in Minnesota is that, between the media, the irregularities in the election system, and the mass of brainwashed droogs that would vote DFL if Josef Mengele came back from the dead and got the DFL endorsement by standing on his head while chanting “Black Cadavers Matter” and give him 70% of the vote anyway, is that accountability – at least, the accountability not manifested by people voting with their feet – always evades them.
If it doesn’t happen soon – in some form other than “Minneapolis turning into a cold Flint” – I’m not sure that it’ll matter anymore.
Statement Against Interest
“Prog” columnist looks at the statute and the evidence, concludes Kyle Rittenhouse will likely be acquitted.
I don’t disagree – and find that there’s ample grounds for caution for all the rest of us that take the Second Amendment seriously.
I homed in on these two passages:
When [the first “victim”, Joseph] Rosenbaum, who was unarmed, finally cornered Rittenhouse, he grabbed for the teenager’s gun. Multiple shots rang out, and Rosenbaum fell, mortally wounded.
Did Rittenhouse have a reasonable belief under the circumstances that if Rosenbaum got his gun he would suffer death or great bodily harm? Jurors in Wisconsin are instructed that “reasonable” means “what a person of ordinary intelligence and prudence would have believed … under the circumstances that existed at the time.”
And this bit here:
A third victim, Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, of West Allis, Wisconsin, who survived, first held up his hands in a gesture of surrender at a distance of a few feet. In one of his hands, he held a gun. But when he “moved toward” Rittenhouse, prosecutors said, Rittenhouse fired, striking him in the arm.
That final shooting “will be the most serious problem” for Rittenhouse at trial, Kling said. ”The guy did have a gun in his hand. But he wasn’t pointing it at or threatening Rittenhouse.”
My first carry permit instructor, the last Joel Rosenberg, used to put it this way: “You’ll be making a life-or-death decision in a split second, likely under incredible stress, in the dark, with incomplete information. The prosector will have weeks and months in a warm, well-lit building, protected by metal detectors and deputies, to decide whether you were right”.
Another of Joel’s sayings: “Shooting in self-defense is a choice between losing your life, and ruining it”.
Because while there’s a lot of rhetoric about deterring the madness, to say nothing of resisting it, it’s still incredibly risky, and under normal circumstances – and even some garden-variety extraordinary ones – best avoided:
Overwhelmingly I hear from the professionals that their plan for dealing with riots and mayhem is “Don’t be there.” Check the ego. Back away from the social media siren call to “be part of the solution.” Inserting yourself into a riot (AKA “war zone”) where we now know there are armed violent criminals (often felons) who are there with the expressed intent to do extreme violence to someone is, in my view, just foolish.
It’s said that good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement. I sure have found that to be true a lot of times. In flying, we say you have a skill bucket and a luck bucket. You hope to fill your skill bucket before using up everything in the luck bucket.
For your consideration.
I’m Joe Biden, And I Approve This Bit Of Gaslighting
My jaw dropped to the floor when I saw the latest Biden ad, about the violence in our cities.
It’s not what’s in the ad, per se. It’s what’s missing.
Go ahead. What do you not see in this ad?
I’ll wait.
No identifiable “Anti”-Fa or BLM.
The only identifiable people in this ad are “right wing” protesters – in no case violent, not of of which burned or looted anything.
Biden – well, the people operating his animatronic controls, anyway – would have you believe the rioting, burning and looting, the coordinated and paid tantrum of the American Left (TM), was Trump’s fault.
This is what every spousal abuser says about their victims.
Cop Out
Hopkins School Board Vice-Chair Chris LaTondresse – did he tell you he’s an “Obama administration alum” yet?
The Defund the Police movement hitches it’s wagons into the western suburbs.
In the apparently halcyon days of April 2018, students and school officials of the Hopkins School District gathered together in what was called “National Walkout Day” in memory of the horrific tragedy of the Columbine school shootings 19 years earlier. Students spoke of issues of gun control and school safety. And while none of the student speakers were even alive when Columbine occurred, a common theme of seeking safety at school echoed in the various speeches.
A time-traveler from that April day in 2018 would have a hard time reconciling the Hopkins School District of just two and-a-half years later as the School Board voted to keep guns out of their schools – guns in the form of local police protection:
The Hopkins school board on Tuesday night embraced a student-led call to remove police from Hopkins High School — with the action to come at year’s end.
The 6-1 vote brings a suburban voice to a national movement that has sought to end the use of school resource officers, or SROs.
The move to defund Hopkins School Resource Officers comes after several months of intense online lobbying by a group calling themselves “CopsOutHHH” and a poll of Hopkins students in favor of the movement – a poll in which only 183 of the District’s 1,600 students voted. By the end of the year, Hopkins will sever it’s relationship with the Minnetonka Police Department (the Hopkins School District includes parts of Edina and Minnetonka) in a move that supporter and Board Vice Chair Chris LaTondresse bizarrely described as not actually “defunding” the police since the contract was due to expire anyway.
LaTondresse, a DFL endorsed candidate for Hennepin County Commissioner who touts his consulting work for USAID as making him an “Obama administration alum” in the same way that I apparently was a member of Congress because I visited Washington D.C. once, claims the move will allows for more mental health funding. Considering the SRO budget is $113,142 out of a budget of $91,502,418, the idea that shifting 0.01% of the School Board’s resources away from security and towards mental health will address either issue is laughable at best and incredibly dangerous at worse.
It’s also a conclusion that files in the face of peer-tested research. Carleton University conducted a two-year study of SRO programs and in their report, published by Routledge in 2019, they concluded that for every dollar invested in the program, a minimum of $11.13 of social and economic value was created. While attention would likely focus on the role the SRO could or did play in the estimated 525 school shootings over the past decade (a number in partial dispute as it groups any gun-related incidents on a school campus together), left unreported are the number of incidents prevented by early SRO intervention. The group Averted School Violence has begun to attempt to collect and analyze such data, a task made somewhat difficult by the very nature of the endeavor – incidents that don’t escalate into violence rarely make the news.
LaTondresse and the Hopkins School Board also want to cite that SROs make students of color fundamentally uncomfortable. While data can’t contend with feelings, even a Brookings Institute report from 2018 which was less than fully supportive of SROs as agents of school safety didn’t see any correlation between SROs and race. Brookings believed context for arrest records and racial backgrounds were lacking and thus a poor metric to judge whether or not SROs were more likely to discriminate or otherwise negatively impact minority students.
But no amount of data – or even common sense – was present on Tuesday night as the Hopkins School Board voted to eliminate basic security without even so much as a concept of what would replace their School Resource Officers. Instead, a small but vocal minority has continued to push a partisan agenda that endangers students for the goal of striking symbolic blow against the police.
“Nice Country You Got. It’d Be A Shame If It…Broke…”
Why, it’s almost as if Biden knows something:
No, Mr. Vice President, I firmly believe that if you lose that part of this country will consider it a casus belli.
That’s what your party has wrought.
For Posterity’s Sake
Stipulated in advance – we don’t know yet how the Rittenhouse case in Racine is going to end up.
Acknowledging up front that Berg’s 18th Law is in effect, it would appear that Rittenhouse’s first shooting might just be problematic, and that the second two appeared to be textbook legitimate self-defense.
Of course, earlier we noted the provenance of the two “victims”. The first person shot was a rather unsavory person whose behavior hash’t really been the subject of any public scrutiny:
The second person killed (and the ones wounded with him), either:
So – while it’s entirely possible the kid committed murder, it’d seem the idea that he’s a “white supremacist” might be just a tad bit of a stretch – and while all lives are precious to God, the path from the pedo and the thumper to “black” seems a little insurmountable.
With all of that exhaustively noted, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say this tweet from Ayanna Pressley needs to not fall down the memory hole:
Heh.
UPDATE: Lin Wood and Rittenhouse’s defense team is on the ground swinging.
More later.
This Is Today’s News Media
This may be the greatest lower-third super (aka “Chyron”, aaka the graphic at the bottom of the shot)) in the history of propaganda:
When life gives you rotten fruit, ferment it down until you can make a flaming sambuca:
He’s Baaaaack
Ryan Winkler, Minnesota’s House Majority Leader – let that thought rattle around in your head a bit – replies to Senate Majority Leader Gazelka yesterday:
“Trump’s America is deadly!”
But the Tim Walz and Peggy Flanagan’s Minnesota is the part that is rioting, burning, looting, shedding businesses and jobs, boarding up, moving to the burbs or Wisconsin or the Greater or Lesser Dakota, buggering off, hitting the dusty trail for freer and safer horizons.
Alondra Cano’s Minnesota is the part that can’t run itself even in good times without massive transfers of wealth from the parts of the state that work (for now), the Republican parts.
Lisa Bender’s Minnesota is the part that considers “law and order” a form of unsustainable “privilege” for all you plebs, but pays a lot of your money so that it has that privilege for itself.
Ryan Winkler’s Minnesota is the part where a Harvard graduate and machine politician from a lilywhite “progressive” suburb full of NIMBYs can call one of the most distinguished jurists of our time an “Uncle Tom”, and then turn around and yap about “white supremacy” when his opponent compliments the men and women who are taking time off from their real lives to clean up yet another DFL mess.
If Ryan Winkler didn’t exist, the GOP would have to invent him.