So one notes this morning that the Google homepage has a link labeled "See how America is searching to support Black trans communities." Because one is a glutton for punishment (hence one's membership in this illustrious club), one clicked the link. Evidently, the American Medical Association declared a year ago that violence against transgendered people was "an epidemic" worthy of action from the AMA's House of Delegates. According to the cited data, there were about two dozen recorded murders of transgendered individuals in the U.S. in 2018. If two dozen deaths was "an epidemic" a year ago, one can only imagine what kinds of new labels the AMA must be working on to describe the current COVID-related impacts to public health. What a difference a year makes!

This happened yesterday afternoon in the People's Republic of Minneapolis: Council asks "Where are the police?" The quote in the final paragraph really brings the absurdity into sharp relief.

A Harvard University professor claimed...that states use gun laws to "outsource its violence to individual citizens"... As with so much else we hear from Our Betters, this is precisely backwards. We The People created police forces for the same reason we created waste haulers: we'd rather pay somebody else to dispose of our trash properly. If the cop and the garbage man are both outlawed, I seriously doubt that your average Harvard prof would approve of the results.

This entire movement leaves me deeply frustrated. I've preached for police reform for almost two decades. I share the concerns of many who complain about police militarization, no-knock raids, rampant pet-killing, sovereign immunity, the code of Omerta among cops, and the lack of any sort of leadership or accountability when a police department screws up badly. Weak mayors and city councils who can't stand up to their police chiefs, and police chiefs who'll throw their weight around with elected officials but collapse into dust when confronting the police union. It's been going on for decades, and only getting worse. And when a flashpoint comes that could be the catalyst for much-needed reform, what do we get? A stupid fucking race war. So now we get a period of anarchy when the cops are on the back foot. They'll lash out in some profoundly stupid ways, and they'll get away with it, because in the end regular people don't want to be left to fend for themselves. So a few years from now, we'll have cops strutting around and basking in their newfound respect, secure in the knowledge that they can get away with absolutely anything and never be held accountable, because the alternative is chaos. And all because the organizers decided that leveraging events to kick-start a race war was a better idea than forcing much-needed reforms. My one consolation is that they've spurred several million homeowners to purchase personal firearms. I hope that unintended consequence gives them some heartburn.

"Welcome to Coffee Talk I’m yah host Linda Richman. On this show we tawk about coffee, dawters, dawgs, you know no big whoop just Coffee Talk... And oh! That BLM! So many black loives! Now I’m verklempt. Tawk amongst yahselves. I’ll give yah a topic: Scientific American is neither scientific nor American. Discuss!"

We foster exhaustive racial research, research-based policy innovation, data-driven educational and advocacy campaigns, and narrative-change initiatives. Further to Darleen's pithy observation, one cannot help but wonder how wide-ranging this research might be. Will there be any investigation of the comparative lawlessness of black men aged 15-29 versus other demographic subgroups? Will there be any analysis of the upbringing of incarcerated felons, to see if skin color has more or less of an impact than the lack of a father in the household? Will there be advocacy campaigns and narrative-change initiatives to identify and drive out the common reaction among black schoolchildren that any peer who does his homework and pays attention in class is "acting white?" Will there be research into the correlation between "acting white" and successful outcomes later in life? Will there be an analysis of "inherited wealth" which compares the relative privilege of children of different races after four generations of stable families, versus the relative privilege of different races after four generations of broken families? Can you imagine if the Center for Antiracist Research discovered that most of the imbalances in living standards and police interactions were the results of poor decision-making and sub-optimal behavior, and only weakly correlated to skin color? How profound and encouraging such findings would be! Just imagine the public-service campaigns telling young people that their futures were in their own hands, and that they could enjoy comfort and success in their lives if they just put in the work to develop skills and a work ethic. It could be the most successful anti-racism program ever dreamed of! Of course there's no money in telling people that their problems are their own damned fault, so this is about as likely as my appearance on the cover of People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive issue.

Something needed to be done It gets better: a handful of NASCAR drivers are sending stuff to the kid and the homeowner.

...modern, supposedly gay-affirming imagery tends to involve either the cartoonish and grotesque...or the childishly sentimental... Where along this spectrum would C-3PO fall?

That LootSafe site is a work of art. I can't wait to share it with my very trendy friends looking for something to set them apart now that everybody's sporting BLM badges on their clothing, houses, cars and businesses.

As right-wing groups increasingly move to confront protesters in U.S. cities, demonstrators are assessing how to keep themselves safe This is hilarious. First Antifa pressure the Mayor and Governor to keep law enforcement away while they BurnLootMurder their way across entire neighborhoods. Then the property owners and neighbors show up to defend their property and perhaps indulge in some mostly peaceful frontier justice. Then Antifa cry to the Mayor and Governor that there is nobody around to protect them. Do they want an active police presence, or not? We told them what would happen, and we told them they wouldn't like it. We're hardly going to apologize at this point.

I rummaged around the wife's purse sofa cushions and found enough for you and the Other Half to buy a nice bottle of coping sauce.

Compare and contrast. Somebody should inform Kim Jones that Monopoly boards don't have a memory, and that a lot of brown people who showed up 25 years ago with forty bucks and a dream have built successful businesses and comfortable lives. And that Rosewood and Tulsa are a hundred years and a thousand miles distant, and are parables about the 2nd Amendment far more than about George Floyd. And that in the here and now, the police are responsible for a vanishingly small number of the premature deaths in her community. I'm tempted to create a version of Monopoly that includes four "Easy Money" spaces on the board. The spaces are split -- top half is for players holding a card marked "Dad," and cause you to lose a turn because you've been grounded. Bottom half is for players without the Dad card, who collect an extra $100 the first three times, and then go to jail on the fourth. Too obvious?

But, apparently, we mustn’t “tone police,” One of the funniest conversations I can remember came when a feminist friend-of-a-friend had too much to drink at a dinner party and started foaming at the mouth over whatever the cause du jour was at that time. I was the designated driver, so I hadn't had nearly enough to drink to make fighting fun, and so I just rebutted her rants as calmly as I could, trying to channel my inner Dr. Peterson. I realized very quickly that my sense of calm was driving this woman absolutely out of her mind, so I stuck with it. Each calm rebuttal just sent her further 'round the bend. It culminated with her screaming "WHY AREN'T YOU ANGRY? HOW CAN YOU BE SO CALM?!" To which I asked, "Are you really policing my tone?" At that point, the light bulb came on and she told me off properly. Still, for a party with the wife's friends where I had to stay sober, it was a hell of a good time.

Dolls for the different. Very cool project and a heartwarming story, but the euphemisms are a little out of control: "...a unique kind of doll making: look-alikes for those with visible physical differences." Maybe I'm gifted, but I'm able to see 'visible physical differences' between almost everybody.* Heck, I briefly dated a twin and I could reliably tell her from her sister when they thought it would be fun to mess with me. How much time did the writer and editor spend discussing the phrasing? Probably boiled down to "a picture's worth a thousand words," in the end. Still, I continue to find it puzzling that my Moral Superiors can loudly proclaim that Diversity Is Strength, and Different Is Good, and Nonconformity Makes You Special, and in the next breath can condemn any language that might describe ways that a person breaks with the norm. (Can we still say 'norm'?) * Except perhaps the women churned out of Beverly Hills plastic surgeon's offices.

Further absurdity from the People's Republic across the river. On Monday, the major newspaper in Minneapolis ran a story about local businessmen fighting to overturn the City's ban on security shutters for storefronts. The City decided 15 years ago that shutters would make the city "unwelcoming" and could cause people to feel "unsafe" when they came to shop or eat downtown. Three days later, the major newspaper in Minneapolis ran a story about local businessmen cleaning up the shattered glass from all their storefront windows as they surveyed the damage from the fires and looting resulting from our innovative "Black Suicides Matter" program. No comment from the City Council or the Mayor's office on whether months of widespread looting, arson and assault are encouraging more people to come downtown for eating, shopping and entertainment.

Not content to be a little cosmopolitan island in the Flyoverian Sea, Minneapolis has shown a level of innovation and ambition that's the envy of its coastal peers. We no longer require a police shooting to spark the arson and looting -- no, for Minneapolis, all you need is for a murder suspect to turn his weapon on himself and blow his own head off! (No, I'm not linking the footage. This is a classy joint.)

...as they will know there is no authority that will come and stop them. Perhaps no State authority, but as you observe in the conclusion of your comment, there remain some personal authorities that can put a stop to their playful shenanigans. Even here in Progressive Minnesota, 1 in 20 of us have carry permits. I was surprised, in getting to know my neighbors over weeks of front-yard cocktails, that four of them are retired military. (Two Army, one Air Force, one Marine. The trash-talking is relentless, mean-spirited, and hilarious!) I would almost feel bad for the mob who came to burn down our block. Almost.

Worth watching Reminds me of an awkward Happy Hour conversation with a black co-worker several years ago. He asserted that I just "couldn't understand" his perspective on fear of police, since I wasn't hassled regularly for "driving while black" and such. I asked if he'd ever been pulled over or hassled while wearing his regular work garb (golf shirt and khakis), or if this tended to happen when he was running around with his old buddies in their streetwear. Turns out that he'd never been hassled while in business casual attire. I encouraged him to do some multivariate analysis to determine the correlation of various factors of behavior and appearance to interactions with law enforcement, and to let me know where skin color ranked in relation to other factors. He encouraged me to perform anatomically challenging sexual acts upon my own person. We remain friends.

We spent a weekend at a friend's place up on Lake Superior, where they had one of the whisper-quiet half-width machines. I felt like I was living in The Jetsons' apartment in the sky. We seriously shopped for similar machines, but never quite pulled the trigger on the purchase. If this heat keeps up, we may need to revisit the program.

I'm reluctant to admit that a device that works in principle really needs repaired. I've done dishes by hand since I left my parents' household thirty years ago. My tiny little kitchen lacks space, and the wife and I never dirtied that many dishes. That is, until we were locked in our house all day every day. Now it's relentless! We also lack air conditioning, so my new morning routine consists of doing the dinner dishes at breakfast time, when the kitchen isn't hotter than Hades. I'm thinking of downloading an app that makes dishwasher noises, just so I have to turn up the volume on the TV after dinner. I think it would make me feel like a real success! The bright side is that the house is paid for, and so for a couple of years now I've been dumping the former mortgage payments into the Boat Fund. With a bit of good luck, I'll take an early retirement and sail down to the islands to play guitar, enjoy rum drinks and sunsets, and only occasionally hear news about the race wars raging on the mainland. (With my normal kind of luck, I'll be shot in the head by a rioter six months before my retirement date.)

People used to respect, even with some resentment and distrust, government authority. Government authority used to try harder. When's the last time you saw a competent authority figure who commanded respect?

We’ve gone from being careful about how many dishes we use to finding any excuse to fill the thing up. I've noticed a similar phenomenon related to our new washer and dryer. It seems like my wife is changing clothes two or three times a day, just to fill up the laundry hamper. To be fair, the dryer has a two-way door that acts like a chute when you're loading it, and it has a glass window in it so you can watch the laundry tumble, and there's a little light inside that comes on when you open the door, and it plays a happy little song when you turn it on, so I can't really blame her for wanting to play with her new toys. As for the yoots, it appears that the study is talking about punctuation in the context of text messages. From my observations, these have devolved into a form of Egyptian pictographs, so it's little wonder that traditional punctuation upsets and frightens them.

Tony Evers in Wisconsin boldly crosses that line by making a statement in support of rioters... This behavior confuses me terribly. The rioters hate the State and its agents. They want to destroy the State and replace it with their idea of a Workers' Paradise (never mind how that process always ends). They are doing their utmost to force the government to burn through resources chasing them down while simultaneously demoralizing cops and bureaucrats to make recruitment and retention impossible. While this is going on, the leader of the State goes out in public to ingratiate himself to these mobs. He treats them as though they were the Cool Kids in the school cafeteria, and all he really wants is to sit at their table and hang out with them after school. Except they're not just calling you "Poindexter," Tony. They tried to set your house on fire and they're loudly proclaiming that they won't rest until they've chased you out of the school district entirely. Also, you're not a freshman in the chess club -- you're the goddamned Superintendent of Schools. Have some self-respect, for God's sake.

it’s back to normal in Portland I have some leftover fireworks in the garage, but I'm woefully short on Molotov ingredients. Plenty of rags and kerosene, but all the bottles around the house are full of stuff I would much rather drink than throw into the street. I may have to comb the alley for glass before the next recycling pickup. Or maybe just work on emptying my collection of bottles more quickly. It's way past time these austere scholars find out what "abolish the police" really means.

Looks like the usual suspects have their knickers in a twist over a throwaway comment Mike Milbury made last night during the hockey game. Commenting on his co-host's observation about the bubble being a good place to focus on hockey and hanging out with your teammates, he replied, "Not even any women here to disrupt your concentration." Evidently, this is beyond the pale, and now Milbury Must Be Cancelled! Never mind that it's a hard-hitting violent sport preferred by shaggy northern men who happily pretend to go fishing on frozen lakes because it means quality hours away from the wife and kids. Never mind the ten thousand articles women have written about how hard it is to work from home with the distractions of children and spouses and pets and neighbors and whatnot. I don't even like the guy much, but this is just silly. At any rate, it'll be interesting to see if NHL or NBC decide to punish Milbury in some way, figuring it's worth trading 10^6 long-time hockey die-hards in exchange for the 10^2 young wokelings who sorta pay attention to the sport when their knuckle-dragging friends drag them to the sports bar for wings and beer.