I’m a contrarian on mansion owners brandishing weapons to discourage looters from said mansion

Which is to say, I think it’s OK. I think several things are OK. It’s OK that there be lefty street mobs with revolutionary energy and also that homeowners discourage looters from wrecking their shit.

St. Louis: https://www.startribune.com/couple-draw-guns-at-crowd-heading-to-st-louis-mayor-s-home/571537622/

Bad, awkward look. But at that point this couple’s big sin is not having a bit more composure. Cuz it’s OK for say a security detail to make a show of discouraging looters, so it’s certainly OK for the homeowners to do it themselves.

The lady is getting demerits for lack of trigger discipline, ie, she’s got her booger hook on the bang switch the the whole time. I cut her some slack there for finger to trigger proximity. She’s got an old school double action semi-auto with an internal steel hammer. It almost undoubtedly has a very hard trigger pull for the first shot of the magazine. It would be difficult for it to go off accidentally in her hand. Glock might be modestly easier to fire inadvertently in the hand, if she was using one (Glock is a plastic fantastic semi-auto with an internal striker pin).

The fella is a being a little more cavalier with the AR, though I don’t know if the claim is true he has the safety off.

Bad look, but not totally crazy behavior.

I knew that Keung was an idealist who…

… was really Fing naive, basically.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/27/us/minneapolis-police-officer-kueng.html Said as much here. https://zingyskywaylunch.wordpress.com/2020/06/06/the-floyd-4-3-strivers-and-the-dead-end-white-guy-that-ruined-their-lives/

But in fairness to Keung, his cluelessness is kind of exculpatory, and he doesn’t deserve much time in jail. Same with Lane. Your culpable parties here are Chauvin, and the one or more people responsible for Chauvin being a training officer. Cuz this is where the rubber meets the road.

See, the MPD has been a retrograde shit show for what… forever? But in MPLS, on the council etc, they know this, and they also know it’s untenable. They have for a while. So for 8+ years (Harteaux onward) MPD is also supposed to be an organization that is pointed in the direction of progressive reform.

The sin of Chauvin is probably not that he wanted to strangle a black man, alright. The sin of Chauvin is that this organization supposedly pointed in the direction of progressive reform assigns Chauvin to be a training officer. Cuz what he was training with the neck restraint etc was the amount of unwritten rule thuggery and brutality to be applied as a matter of practical policing, such that you can assume you will get away with it.

His qualitative attributes as a cop could not have been unknown. His immediate superiors ought to have something to answer for here.

Matt Taibbi’s latest thing is critiquing the excesses of anti-racism

Now his last recent thing was critiquing Russiagate, which he characterized as a hoax and a Comey entrapment gambit. Which is, ya know… reality and the truth.

But this view and anti- anti-racism is at odds with the left, which Taibbi is supposed to be a part of. I don’t know how this is supposed to work, how he maintains his status, how he keeps working at Rolling Stone.

Anyway, maybe he’s a lefty, maybe he’s not… I obviously have a tempermental / intellectual kinship. I read him, I listen to his podcast. He’s been fixated on this Robin DiAngelo book White Fragility. This book would be otherwise esoteric and unimportant to me such that I have a pretty tight filter on what I care about these days. But I know he’s right in all his observations because he nailed her on her ignorance of the what and why of Jackie Robinson.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility

… which she completely misunderstands.

I am a guy who thinks stats prior to 1947 are pretty meaningless.

You can’t pay city cops more, by the way…

… to attract a better quality of people. Lambo has touched on this topically quite a few times over ten years. It’s obvious he still thinks city cops make like teacher money, $42.5k or something. They don’t. They are paid way better.

Mpls cops start at $50k. You get out of votech with your POST certificate, you start at $50k in Minneapolis at say age 25.

If you’ve ever taken a gander at public salary listings, what you observe is they are earning about $70k after 5 years. So you got 30 year olds earning $70k. Their 30 yo peers out of college are generally not earning $70k (unless they were comp sci majors…). A guy like Derek Chauvin, who was 44 with 20 years of service, was almost undoubtedly earning $85k, and taking union assigned security gigs for cash as well. Derek Chauvin was making $100k as a cop and cop side hustler, alright.

What exactly is the city to pay the erstwhile police officer candidates who might be better than Derekl Chauvin? $125k? Is that the plan, pay a uniformed staff of officers $125k each?

Can’t be done…really, it can’t be done, happy to pay more Dems over there commenting at WWP. There isn’t an Overton window imaginable that allows for taxing for twice the money MPD gets now and giving it to their cops…. and wouldn’t solve the problem if it could be done.

45% of guys who become cops do it because they like the bro paramilitary day to day life of driving around in the squad, and another 45% of guys who become cops do it because they they have an authority complex, and this cohort, 90% of the pie…. they’re pretty uniformly not bright enough to be able to pass a technical votech program for HVAC, electric… what have you.

See, its dumb work, is the thing. Bright people are not going to want to do it for $125k such they can do something else for $125k thats not dumb work.

Well how about that, Lambo reads this blog…

… perhaps now and again. I don’t expect it’s necessarily a regular thing. Maybe he was using wordpress search to see if anyone had said anything interesting about Floyd / Chauvin. And he found me.

His blog column today, 6/18/20: "Time after time the curriculum vitae of cops involved in these killings plays along the lines of: high school drop out, GED diploma, junior college drop out, odd assortment of “security jobs”, maybe a hitch in the Army then on to four months at police academy"

Me, 6/620: So where does it start happening for Derek, where does he start getting remunerated for his physicality without much brainpower? Mall copping, rent a copping. He does some army stints, fills in the gaps at Inver Hills and Metro State, gets his POST thing no doubt.

His blog column today, 6/18/20: "Drop-outs and semi-deadenders with guns?" My 6/6/20 column is titled "The Floyd 4: 3 strivers and the dead end white guy that ruined their lives"

It’s fine, it’s not plagiarism. It’s my basic sensibility on this being right, and worldly people discerning that when they read it.

Your Floyd trial digest, 6/9/20

In which my cop trial sensibilities and legal analysis is quite generally correct. I’ve said recently, cop thumper lawyers almost always take their cop thumper clients to trial but this might be a case where cop thumper lawyers assent to a reliable 15 year sentence such that they can get it. The news today: https://www.fox9.com/news/ex-minneapolis-police-officer-chauvin-was-in-talks-to-plead-guilty-before-arrest

If prosecution / defense couldn’t get a deal done, it’s because of the spread of the presumptive / suggested sentence they wanted to bring to the judge. I assume the prosecution is going to want say 15-20 years (Mohammed Noor / Michael Slager prison time) and Chauvin’s defense wants 5. Chauvin’s defense may have been prudent in not committing to 15 years right now such that there’s a lot of clock to run before the trial, but… they should and probably do understand he’s doing way more than 5 years.

Anyway, about me being right, and a calibrated observer / analyst of this stuff, as somewhat a crank conservative by temperament… I made a rare visit to “the” conservative blog in town the other day, Bitch Merg’s Crap in the Dark. He’s got say 20 commenters in this age of blogs being dead, and it’s a total circle jerk of racist misanthropes who want to believe A) the strangulation is a justifiable use of force because Floyd is a big black (ex) felon and B) Chauvin will get off because Ellison is running the case, and Ellison is an incompetant race hustler […and incompetant because he’s black…]. They weren’t having any of me saying Chauvin is going to get convicted cuz Facebook video of 9 minute strangulation. So, F em, those guys are incorrigible dicks.

I watched Keith Ellison appear on Fox with Chris Wallace the Sunday morning before he got the case from the county and A) he was completely responsible in temperament and analysis and B) at that point he was absolutely persuasive as at ease that Freeman would run the case fine at the county level. I do imagine it was Walz who subsequently stepped in to “ask” Freeman to request the AG assistance that kicked the case up to the state level. Anyway, Ellison. It is the man meeting his moment in life. He was a controversial commie firebrand as a younger man, yes… he seems pretty Fing solid, professional, and institutional as a 55 yo or whatever he is. Reminds me of Barack Obama that way.

Earl Gray is actually Thomas Lane’s lawyer, and it’s been an erratic start. He went on CNN to do some legal TV, and got his ass handed to him over his argument that the strangulation wasn’t a big deal such that the bystanders gave their okey dokey by not intervening https://twitter.com/dbrauer/status/1270198022790500352

Worth noting that Gray’s success over the years has always entailed victim smearing. He’s defended U football gang rapers and called their victims sluts who liked gang bangs, defended Yanez and called Philando and his girlfriend pot smoking low lifes on welfare… So this, is that. But besides being about 76 now, Earl’s act is probably not going to work in this case cuz ya know, 9 minute strangulation on video.

It is a curious thing that Gray does media at all while the other lawyers don’t (Tom Plunkett – Keung, Eric Nelson – Chauvin)

Eric Nelson did replace Tom Kelly as Chauvin’s lawyer last week. https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2020-06-03/exclusive-former-police-officer-accused-of-killing-george-floyd-gets-new-lawyer Thing is apparently, the union has a list of local super lawyers who will take the cop cases with whatever invoice arrangement they have, and they do it in some rotating order. The story is Kelly was up when Chauvin was charged, but he’s out now because of “medical issues”. Uh, sure, if by medical issue you also mean septuagenarian like Gray. These cases are not for 61, 65, 71, 76 year old practicing defense attorneys. Nelson is under 45 and has conducted some good defenses (Amy Senser, the fishing hole killer there up north).

Tom Lane has a PayPal go fund me for his bail https://wccoradio.radio.com/articles/family-of-officer-charged-with-aiding-floyds-murder-seeks This should be his bail, ya figure his defense invoice is paid for by the unions legal insurance.

Lane notes on his page he’s being treated with a lack of proportion with the $1M bail yada yada. Here I will deploy the idiom about playing sympathetic music on the world’s smallest violin… Ya know, you read stories about violent police encounters, and the thin bluer liners will invariably dismiss the victims and litter the below the story comment threads with “play stupid games, win stupid prizes”. So there’s that too, Officer Lane “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

Do I find it a compelling observation that Thomas Lane and JA Keung might be grossly over punished in this, over punished way out of proportion to their actual malevolence? I do but… play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Tough shit, Tom.

Medium article by anonymous ex-cop that says everything I already believed about the profession https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759 Big thing: the lying that is a feature of the ecosystem like nitrogen is a feature of our atmosphere.

At trial I see this is as something that gets suppressed due to it being hearsay and overly prejudicial https://twitter.com/CBSEveningNews/status/1270485898585690112 But such that it might be true it speaks, as I’ve said, to the motivation for excessive force being not wanting to chance losing a physical confrontation with a strong black man.

The Floyd 4: 3 strivers and the dead end white guy that ruined their lives

As a rule, I am actually quite prepared to be fairly moderate and contemplative these days, rather than hyperbolic. Just putting that out there… But topically here on cops two things that I’ve laid down over the years and repeated as bedrock pieces of wisdom are:

1) city cops are commonly, either literally or figuratively, ex second string free safeties from whatever suburban high school they came from. Which is to say they are brute-ish but not physically talented, and have a way of trying to make up on all manner of things with over-zealousness. And…

2) these guys commonly don’t have the brainpower / aptitudes to complete a trade curriculum at a votech. Cuz if they did, they would, cuz the trades are better careers than law enforcement, but you actually need to be smart to do them. And one does that such that they can, as I say.

Rather hyperbolic?

Enter our man of the moment, Derek Chauvin… https://www.startribune.com/personnel-records-shed-light-on-four-minneapolis-police-officers-charged-in-george-floyd-death/571019902/

Woulda been say a class of 94 grad from Park Cottage Grove around here, but for some reason or another didn’t graduate with the normies. Was working at the McDonald’s on Weir Ave in Woodbury in the mid 90s and doing a food service curriculum at Dakota Tech. He may have finished that, but it’s not obvious to me from what I read of his city personnel file.

Hey, yes, the world needs food service workers, alright, and all work is dignified. But it isn’t welding, plumbing, machining, or electrical is what I’m saying.

So where does it start happening for Derek, where does he start getting remunerated for his physicality without much brainpower? Mall copping, rent a copping. He does some army stints, fills in the gaps at Inver Hills and Metro State, gets his POST thing no doubt. 1999 or so he’s a community service officer for Minneapolis. By 2001 he’s hired as a cop, and 5 years later in 2006 he’s prolly 32 making $67.5k as a man who knows how to do nothing except bully people around with command presence. Oh, and he’s a big enough, strong enough man to kick the asses he has too and then some, and he’s willing to do it.

So, Thou. 2nd generation Hmong, becomes a cop just as 2nd generation Irish became cops 100 years ago. Doing it on the shoulders of yer parents, entering the mainstream, acquiring professional civil work. Tough beans Thou, your buddy ruined the next 10 years of your life.

This Keung, the 26 year old bi-racial kid that was captain of his soccer team at Patrick Henry. You know he went into law enforcement to make a difference, and be the change. Tough beans kid, your trainer there ruined the next 10 years of your life.

Lane didn’t graduate from high school either… odd that MPD hires so many fellas who didn’t graduate HS. But he went to college. Seems to have had somewhat of an erratic spell in his 20’s (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8394629/One-officers-charged-George-Floyds-killing-hired-despite-having-criminal-record.html?), and he comes to law enforcement from working with at-risk youth, all that jazz… But, he was the guy who wanted to roll Floyd over. Tough beans, Lane.

I’ve probably never disagreed with a George Will column in my life

And don’t now. Had ya going!!

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/02/politics/george-will-donald-trump/index.html

I didn’t vote for Trump, but think there’s wisdom and karma in this country not electing Hillary, and I’ve enjoyed little bits of schadenfreude here and there over the last few years such that Trump enabled some things that I wanted and agreed with (Neil Gorsuch). But… enough.

As far as congressional critters that have to go… That little weasel Tom Cotton with his notions of "no quarter". Its completely un-American.