This really sums up the entire Democrat messaging, in Minnesota and nationwide, perfectly:

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.

Let’s assume Governor Walz’ response to Covid-19 is not part of a larger
Democrat hoax, not an attempt to frighten voters into believing
President Trump has failed them, not a coordinated attack on the
American way of life.

Let’s assume Governor Walz truly has Minnesotans’ best interests at
heart.  That’s why he declared a Peacetime Emergency.  That’s why he
implemented one of the strictest Stay Home orders in the nation.  That’s
why he implemented the mask mandate and why he refuses to relinquish his
emergency powers.  Assume that’s all true.

What’s his end game?  When does the Peacetime Emergency end – when the
virus is defeated?  How will we know when we’ve won?

Walz was on television September 3rd reminding viewers that masks are
mandatory to prevent the spread of the virus.  But his own Health
Commissioner admitted days earlier that we cannot stop the spread, we
can only hope to manage it at some unspecified level of transmission. 
Oh, and if you are sick, wearing a mask doesn’t protect the people you
interact with.

So we know the virus will continue to spread and that’s okay, just not
as fast as it’s presently spreading.  Why does that matter?  The curve
is flat.  No hospital is overwhelmed.  There was no surge.  The
refrigerated warehouse bought to store plague corpses, sits empty. 
We’re at fewer than 2,000 deaths – even crediting the phony numbers –
which is 72,000 deaths short of the computer model prediction. No child
has died, no teen, but schools are closed.  Daily deaths are in the
single digits which is indistinguishable from the normal death rate (123
Minnesotans die every day, from all causes).

“Cases” tell us that people are carrying the virus in their bodies, but
people carry around lots of viruses.  The rhinovirus causes the common
cold.  Herpes simplex virus causes cold sores. Everybody has them and
they flare up occasionally, but we don’t count “cases” of them because .
. . nobody cares.  People don’t die of a cold sore.

And they’re no longer dying of Covid-19, either.  The vulnerable
population has died off.  The hardy survived, same as every epidemic
throughout the history of humankind. We don’t need to keep fighting the
virus.  We’ve won.

Time to declare victory and move on.

Joe Doakes

All of those assumptions at the beginning of the article were for purposes of argument. I will give Governor Klink the benefit of no such doubt.

To be a conservative in Minnesota (forget for a moment that neither Trump nor today’s GOP are “conservative”) is to assume all hope is illusory, even a little bit cruel.

And yet Biden and Harris are spending time here – a state that should be a gimme for them, at least at the Presidential level.

I hate to harbor hope.

But sometimes I still do.

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.

The bail fund promoted by Kamala Harris kicks another sex offender loose.

This is the same basic bunch that bailed an “Anti”-Fa thug who beat the snot out a Twin Cities’ bar owner for…

…well, we’re not sure yet. But it was a mostly peaceful protest.

200 people were completely encircled by the current round of wildfires in California.

CALFIRE – the agency with the Suharto-esque title responsible for fighting the state’s wildfires – wrote them off.

And then, as the California National Guard went to rescue them anyway, CALFIRE told them to wave off.

The Guard did it anyway.

Entire thread on Twitter:

It was a moment of immense heroism, and a Berg’s Third Law reference if there ever was one.

It’s been a bad year for bureaucratic “experts”.

I rarely watch pay television, I’m generally reading a book or watching a movie on Netflix. So I was surprised at the quality of Joe Biden’s campaign ads.

If I didn’t know he’s been hiding in the basement the last six months, didn’t know he stumbles and flubs his way through interviews, didn’t know he’s been silent in the face of riots across the nation, I’d be impressed. He talks like a patriotic American. 

The ads are lies,  but they are good lies. 

We know hardcore conservatives will vote for Trump and hardcore liberals will vote for Biden. It’s the mushy headed individuals in the middle, who don’t make up their mind until right now, just before the election. Those are the ones who decide the election in the end. If these ads work for them, Trump is in trouble.

Joe Doakes

They are good – although if you listen to the audio, you can tell Biden’s voice-over track is spliced together. There’s no way the old fella did those reads sitting behind a mike in one take.

Donald Raleigh is running for MN State House in District 38A.

On this, the anniversary of the last major catastrophic attack from without, it’s time to look at a potentially vastly more devastating attack from within.

Worse than 9/11?

Very likely, yes.

“Anti”-Fa – which, we are assured, doesn’t actually exist, except in the earnest hearts of a bunch idealistic kids – is worse than a “terrorist organization”. It is an invading army.

Read this account. While the website it’s on my whisper “sketchy”, the narrative presented should scare the living bejeebers out of you, if “defending freedom against “Progressivism’s” direct action arm” is your goal.

The final graf:

Bottom line: don’t go to an Antifa protest where you can put yourself in that situation. And if you find yourself in that situation, expect them to employ tactics that take away your situational awareness, and complicate the use of force continuum.”

But you should read the whole thing.

Worst part?

There are two, really.

First – the Normals, Real Americans, believe that because the good guys have most of the guns that Big Left – which they see as a bunch of aging hippies, Grievance Studies professors and shrieky, spoiled, over-schooled / undereducated millennials, and not without justification over 90% of the time – will lose if civil society ever does collapse and anarchy reigns.

But there are things more important than just having the guns. A plan. Some semblance of training, leading to some semblance of teamwork under stress. Infrastructure to support your operations.

Big Left has all these. And, now, guns.

The Second Amendment alone isn’t enough.

And, we’re told, either is the First Amendment – where Big Left’s information analogue is doing to “journalism” what their neo-Brownshirt arm is doing to opposition on the streets.

It’s high time Real America took this seriously. This isn’t “protest”. It’s not even “rioting”. This is an armed, trained, organized insurgency. It needs to be treated as such.

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.

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.

Kyle Rittenhouse. Murder.  Another tough case for the prosecution. 

Sure, the prosecution has a tape of a kid shooting people.  But the defense gets a turn, too.  Here’s their opening salvo.

And that’s not to mention that all three of the people he shot were convicted felons – not exactly the kind of people Kenoshans want roaming their streets.

Three criminals trying to destroy our town.  A good kid standing up for what’s right.  A racist prosecution to appease the mob.  Liberals may not think those themes will resonate with the jury.  I suspect they will.

Joe Doakes

If he gets acquitted – and I’m far from sanguine, but I think there’s hope – heads will melt.

And that melting will express itself in yet more riots.

We’ll take a break from stanching the flow of blood from Western Civilization to reach across the aisle to admire on of the civilization’s crowning achievements.

Submitted for your fan-geek edification, this very long, gloriously detailed oral (well, transcribed) history of perhaps the greatest single episode of comedy television of the 2000s, the “Dinner Party” episode of The Office.

Verdict…:

…true.

Lenin, Stalin and Castro were all children of the middle-to-upper middle classes – people with a certain amount of privilege in the context of their times.

Hitler was from a bourgeois background. Most of the “Hitler Cabinet” that ran Germany and then the Nazi empire fro 1933 to 1945 were artists, self-styled or successful or, often, not – painters and writers, playwrights, sculptors, musicians, mostly mediocre at best, but all from the class where that kind of pastime was possible.

Most of America’s rioters in the 1960s were the children of the upper middle class – people who could while away their draft eligibility in college, back when college was simultaneously affordable and not the default post-high-school option for vast swathes of society.

The woman who coined the term “white privilege” was, herself, from a family that personified class privilege, who coined the term largely to racialize her, and her colleagues’, immense class advantages.

But has that changed? After 120 years, is the radical left actually made up of the workers whose struggles they’ve appropriated?

Mitch, please.

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.

“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.

This was posted on one of those insidious neighborhood Facebook pages around which America’s newest plague, “Karen”, congeals:

So, let me get this straight: people, mostly college students, being in an age bracket that has suffered precisely zero COVID-19 deaths in the state of Minnesota, are going to a bar staffed mostly by people in their 20s and 30s (who have also experienced zero COVID-19 deaths so far), To celebrate going back to school after six months of absurd, ineffective, potentially counterproductive and onerous quarantine that has left them, like the rest of society, aching for some kind, any kind, of social contact at a time in their life when that is what they’re supposed to be doing?

What did I get wrong?

I’ll tell you what the paragraph above got wrong: They haven’t gotten into the bar yet.

Plums (a reliable, responsible-drinking source tells me) observes standard sociall distancing inside, as well as on the patio out back, notwithstanding the fact that they are nearly no confirmed cases of outdoor spread of the virus, no matter what your distance, no matter whether you’re wearing a mask or not.

I’m not saying the Karen involved is a totalitarian.

I am saying actual totalitarians need lots of people like her in society to have a chance of taking over.

“So, Mitch – why are the Democrats and media (ptr) spending so much time saying that Trump wants to delegitimize the election?”

The answer, of course, is because they need to deflect away from the fact that they are trying, in advance, to delegitimize the election.

The Story of the Little Governor Who Cried Surge, by Joe Doakes

Once there was a Governor named Timmy.  He had a fine house and many servants, but he was bored.  “I know,” he thought, “I’ll cause some excitement. That’ll be fun.”

So Timmy ran through the streets yelling “Curve! Curve! We’re all gonna die!”  People panicked and bought hand sanitizer, toilet paper and bottled water.  But they did not die.

Timmy laughed and laughed.  But then he got bored again.  He ran through the streets again, yelling “Covid! Covid! We’re all gonna die!” People panicked and worked from home.  They wore masks.  They ate take-out food. But they did not die.

Timmy laughed and laughed.  But then he got bored again.  He ran through the streets a third time, yelling “Cases! Cases! We’re all gonna die.” But the people had read the headlines.  They knew there were many new Covid cases but hospitalizations had fallen and nobody died.  The people did not panic. 

Timmy was furious.  This was no fun.  He argued with the people.  “We’re on the edge of a cliff.  As cases spread, hospitalizations will rise and people will die, in a surge!  A massive surge!  I warned you all Spring that it was coming in May, could be June, or possibly July.  We got lucky in August but now it’s September and look out!  The Surge!  The Surge!  We’re all gonna die in The Surge!”

But the people turned away.  They threw their silly masks in the rubbish bins.  They went to weddings for young people starting a new life.  They went to funerals for old people ending a long life.  They went to backyard bar-b-ques with friends to celebrate the good life.  The did not listen to Little Timmy at all.

And Little Timmy cried and cried.

The End

In much of the Metro today, it pretty much is a children’s story. More later.

OK, that’s not the real tag line on the story.

Yet.

But it doesn’t seem implausible at all, does it?

Minneapolis couple out on the town in the North Loop, attacked by 8-10…

…well, the piece leaves that wide open:

Probably more white supremacist Hells Angels. They’re behind everything that’s wrong in Minneapolis.

Darned white supremacists.

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.

A friend of the blog emails:

Last night at a prayer meeting one of the members of the group told us that Minneapolis public schools made a change to job titles. This friend of mine is a teacher at Minneapolis South. He said it was announced yesterday that all titles in the Minneapolis public school system with the term Chief in them will be changed. It’s the end of racism as we know it.

Excising a word that existed in a constant context in the English language for hundreds of years?

Yeah, that oughtta fix it.

If I told you that scientists had discovered a new virus which was
guaranteed to kill one guy living in Schenectady, New York unless the
entire nation went into super-strict lock-down, should we do it?

No, because public policy isn’t made for one guy, or ten, or 100, or
1,000 or even 10,000, which is more than the number of confirmed deaths
due to Covid-19, according to newly revised figures from the CDC.

Liberals are scrambling to explain that the new number doesn’t mean what
it says it means.  To them, ‘died of’ and ‘died with’ are the same.  If
Covid is listed as a ‘contributing factor,’ then it’s still a deadly
disease and we should still be in lock-down.

Nonsense.  When I die, the cause of death will be heart failure and the
contributing causes of death will be obesity, diabetes, high blood
pressure, high cholesterol and cirrhosis of the liver. But I didn’t die
of any of those contributing cases.  You don’t pick and choose which of
the underlying causes is the scariest. You pick the cause that killed me.

The existence of the virus is not a hoax.  The panic response is a
hoax.  And this is proof.

Joe Doakes

This is one of those areas where I thing both sides are putting out terrible information.

If someone who’s 100 pounds overweight and has hypertension and diabetes gets Covid and dies, what killed her? You could say all the comorbidities were at fault . You might not be wrong, per se – but if she’d have hypothetically lived another ten years but for the Covid, what then?

Medicine involves a lot of ambiguity. Politics – at least, political messaging – doesn’t.