Husband and wife beaten with 2x4s for trying to defend store in Rochester, NY.

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Different ending in San Antonio, Texas. Some store owner had a gun and used it.

An email from commenter Marion Stinett to Vanderleun describes Minneapolis today:

Everyone has seen the videos of the Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of a hapless petty criminal. And now looting and arson are happening all over the city. How did a very civilized city come to this?

Well, progressives, of course. But beyond that, do folks know the City of Minneapolis operates a protection racket?

All of the adults on the city council have retired or been voted out, and the council is now composed of earnest young progressives like our boy mayor Jacob Frey. And what does every young progressive like Jacob fear the most? Being called a racist. We also have a few AOC types who want to seize the Lake of the Isles mansions for the (well-connected) people.

Generous welfare benefits combined with importing a few hundred thousand East Africans means that Mary Tyler Moore’s clean, well-run hub of tech, manufacturing, and agriculture is now rather troublesome. The Somalis were actually welcomed for their work ethic and strong family ties. But the next generation–this always happens with any ethnic group imported into a different culture–doesn’t remember what a hell hole they left, and resent that they’re not doing coke off Amber Heard’s tits like all the white people are.

So they get restive and look for opportunities for trouble.

Retail stores are soon found to be easy targets. Chain stores are the easiest. CVS and Walgreens and Chipotle will absolutely fire any employee who looks at a petty criminal in a mean way. The store manager is held responsible for shrinkage –loss due to theft– but if the manager even attempts to stop theft, he or she will be fired.

Now one might wonder how those two drug giants keep the doors open. The answer is the pharmacies. Those make so much money that the retail floor can lose quite a bit. It’s not unlimited; CVS just closed four or five stores in the highest theft areas. But they’ll suffer a fair amount.

Now add in the great progressive paranoia: I cannot stand to be called a racist.

So rather than risk that city and county officials decided to stop enforcing laws against retail theft. Remember that video from a San Francisco store of thieves cleaning out all the makeup in a drugstore in broad daylight? It happens here in Minneapolis also.

Here the thieves will grab a box of trash bags off the shelf, pull out a couple, and fill it with easily fenced stuff like Tide detergent, diapers, and small electronics. If there are cigarettes, they’ll jump over the counter and grab them, along with Similac baby food (that’s already behind the counter due to high theft). Then they will walk out, and if you stand in their way, you may get shoved down. Certainly all of the “Sir, please, stop” which is the corporate recommended solution, will not slow them down.

The really great thing is, a merchant can call the police while burning a DVD of the perp’s faces, and the cops probably will not show up. If someone is injured by the bad guys, probably someone will come and hand the manager a card with a case number, but that is all that will happen. I have seen this many times in many stores.

When this virus thing happened, the city actually announced that they would not prosecute retail theft and transit fare jumping, among other things.

So what is a merchant to do? Well, you have to pay protection, of course. Private security cannot do any more than talk to the thieves. But you can hire a member of the Badge Gang: an off-duty Minneapolis police officer.

This is very expensive. Cops here make 25 or more an hour in a regular workweek. But now it’s overtime, plus whatever “administrative” fees the city chooses to add. And they’re going to add it because these off-duty hours count toward retirement pay. Merchants have to raise prices, and you know that’s racist too.

Of course, the fact that the Auto Zone car parts store, across the street from the 3rd Precinct, has been paying protection for years didn’t help them last night when Arsonists For Justice showed up. The police say they will protect lives and property. However, the council members have made it crystal clear that they expect the cops to hunker down and take the medicine. So Minneapolis PD will not risk those lovely-retire-at-42-pensions.

pic.twitter.com/45s5JszP3r

— Robert Fryer (@RobertF49999387) May 28, 2020

Amy Cooper calling the police. New York City, May 25 2020. (Screengrab via NPR)

We all saw the video of the annoying hysterical woman calling the cops on an apparently harmless African American birdwatcher who had merely remonstrated with her about her violating park rules by letting her dog run off-leash. What a racist!

But, as Kyle Smith informs us, the video, and the Media accounts, omit one rather significant detail: the African American birdwatcher actually did threaten her and her dog.

Once again, further evidence upended the narrative of a viral video — but not before someone’s life and reputation were destroyed.

Funny thing about viral videos: They don’t necessarily give the full and complete context for what happened, do they? They might, for instance, begin only after someone does something bizarre and provocative but record solely the reaction. Covington was only 16 months ago. Did we learn anything from it? Apparently not. A similar thing happened in Central Park this weekend, the world reacted in the same way, and once again a misleading video made it appear that a target of a deliberate provocation was a racist for reacting understandably to the provocateur.

New Yorker Amy Cooper was walking her dog in Central Park’s Ramble area, a little patch of semi-wilderness in an otherwise manicured park. She allowed her dog off the leash, which is against the rules. But on the other hand, the Ramble is the one little-frequented spot in the entire vast park where it kinda, sorta seems like rules don’t apply. For decades, the rules definitely didn’t apply: It was a popular gay pickup location for connoisseurs of anonymous al fresco sex.

On Memorial Day, Cooper, a middle-aged white woman, was allowing her dog to run off-leash, breaking a rule that is widely ignored, albeit crucial for bird-watchers. Nearby was Christian Cooper, a middle-aged black man of no relation to her. Mr. Cooper is an avid birder and doesn’t much like dogs interfering with his avian observations. So he issued what to her sounded like a threat to poison her dog. Ms. Cooper freaked out. Who wouldn’t?

As her freakout was underway, Mr. Cooper filmed her on his phone. And Covington 2 was off and running. The public viewed the conveniently edited video more than 30 million times, Ms. Cooper was denounced as a “Karen,” or self-appointed whistleblower, for her understandable reaction, and few noticed that the inciting Karen of the affair was not the middle-aged white lady but Mr. Cooper himself, for busting her over allowing her dog off-leash. Her employer not only fired her but — far worse — publicly branded her a racist.

News accounts have repeatedly characterized Ms. Cooper as having “threatened” Mr. Cooper. That is the opposite of what happened. We know this because of Mr. Cooper’s helpful Facebook post on the matter, from which I quote:

ME: “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it.”

HER: “What’s that?”

ME [to the dog]: “Come here, puppy!”

HER: “He won’t come to you.”

ME: “We’ll see about that.” . . . I pull out the dog treats I carry for just such intransigence. I didn’t even get a chance to toss any treats to the pooch before Karen scrambled to grab the dog.

Possibly it was an overreaction for Ms. Cooper to call the police. Then again, when citizens feel threatened, calling the police and letting them sort it out is what is supposed to happen. What Mr. Cooper said to her was unmistakably a threat. It was reasonable for her to be scared. “I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it”? That’s a menacing thing to say. He then called the dog over while offering it a treat. He meant her to think he was going to poison her dog to motivate her to leash the animal. By his own admission, he said something calculated to frighten her. Apparently, he does this all the time; he carries dog treats while birding “for just such intransigence.” If there were no threat linked to his offering the dog a snack, he would not have prefaced this action by saying, “You’re not going to like it.” He didn’t say, “Look, let’s be reasonable here, I’ll even give your dog a nice snack to show I mean well.” Mr. Cooper intended to scare Ms. Cooper, he succeeded, and in her fear she called the cops.

Ms. Cooper would probably have been wise to leash her pet and walk briskly away, but when a stranger threatens to poison your dog in Central Park, that is bound to cause consternation. It’s not unreasonable for her to have felt herself (as well as the dog) personally threatened by Mr. Cooper’s saying, “I’m going to do what I want, and you’re not going to like it.”

RTWT

Victor Davis Hanson:

As a general rule, when the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Service, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and CNN begin to parrot a narrative, the truth often is found in simply believing just the opposite.

Put another way, the media’s “truth” is a good guide to what is abjectly false. Perhaps we can call the lesson of this valuable service, the media’s inadvertent ability to convey truth by disguising it with transparent bias and falsehood, the “Doctrine of Media Untruth.”

RTWT

Far Out Magazine publishes Woody Allen’s list of ten favorite films:

The 400 Blows – François Truffaut, 1959
8½ – Federico Fellini, 1963
Amarcord – Federico Fellini, 1972
The Bicycle Thieves – Vittorio de Sica, 1948
Citizen Kane – Orson Welles, 1941
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – Luis Buñuel, 1972
Grand Illusion – Jean Renoir, 1937
Paths of Glory – Stanley Kubrick, 1957
Rashomon – Akira Kurosawa, 1950
The Seventh Seal – Ingmar Bergman, 1957

An overly conventional list, “Seven Samurai” is obviously more worthy than “Rashomon.” “Citizen Kane” sucks. “Paths of Glory” is a tendentious, downer leftie propaganda piece. And “Bicycle Thief” should be singular.

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Last year, the same publication gave us Quentin Tarrantino’s list of twelve favorites:

1. Apocalypse Now – Francis Ford Coppola, 1979.
2. The Bad News Bears – Michael Ritchie, 1976.
3. Carrie – Brian de Palma, 1976.
4. Dazed and Confused – Richard Linklater, 1993.
5. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Sergio Leone, 1966.
6. The Great Escape – John Sturges, 1963.
7. His Girl Friday – Howard Hawks, 1939.
8. Jaws – Steven Spielberg, 1975.
9. Pretty Maids All in a Row – Roger Vadim, 1971.
10. Rolling Thunder – John Flynn, 1977.
11. Sorcerer – William Friedkin, 1977.
12. Taxi Driver – Martin Scorsese, 1976.

“The Bad News Bears”?! “Carrie”!?? Tarrantino’s list is much more populist, but he’s not wrong in rating “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” “Great Escape,” and “Jaws” as great films. Kudos to Quentin for picking William Friedkin’s “Sorcerer,” a neglected, typically unappreciated, but fantastic remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Le Salaire de la Peur” (1953), that is, on the whole, even better than the original.

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I’m a major cinemaphile myself. I ran a film society at college. So, inevitably, I’ve got to do my own top ten twelve list.

Intolerance – D.W. Griffith, 1916.
Earth – Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930.
Grand Illusion – Jean Renoir, 1937.
Children of Paradise – Marcel Carne, 1945.
Smiles of a Summer Night – Ingmar Bergman, 1955.
The Seventh Seal – Ingmar Bergman, 1957
Sword of Doom – Kihachi Okamoto, 1957.
La Dolce Vita – Federico Fellini, 1960.
Jules and Jim РFran̤ois Truffaut, 1962.
8 1/2 – Federico Fellini, 1963.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors – Sergei Parajanov, 1965.
Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland – Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, 1977.

Five complete guitars built by Antonio Stradivari survive, along with some fragments of others. Only one is still playable.

In the above video, Rolf Lislevand performs Santiago de Murcia’s Tarantela on the Sabionari Stradivarius guitar.

The Heritage Foundation recently published a must-read report on the Left’s widely successful effort to first stigmatize, and eventually to criminalize, speech and ideas it doesn’t like, thus shutting down all discussion and debate over very significant cultural and policy issues.

America is the only Western nation that does not criminalize “hate speech.” Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most nations of Europe already do so. The United Nations relentlessly pressures the remaining holdouts to follow suit: “As a matter of principle,” says the U.N. Secretary-General, “the United Nations must confront hate speech at every turn.”

Meanwhile in America, Members of Congress issue their support for speech restrictions, and Big Tech’s digital oligarchs, enjoying a disproportionate power over society, continue to impose speech restrictions in exchange for access to their platforms. So are America’s colleges and universities more and more governed by an aggressive chorus of students, faculty, and administrators who demand and impose speech codes. These fronts promises to grow in size, strength, and confidence in the coming years.

Leading restriction advocates want not only to banish “hate speech,” but also to criminalize it. In the words of Mari Matsuda, an influential professor at the University of Hawaii Law School, “[F]ormal criminal and administrative sanction—public as opposed to private prosecution—is also an appropriate response to racist speech.”

Perhaps most surprising, legal precedents that would bring this revolution fully into existence in America are already embedded in two areas of our legal system: antidiscrimination and harassment laws, and Supreme Court rulings favoring sexual liberation that are based on a new view of “dignity.”

If Americans are to resist this growing movement, they must understand the arguments, the demands, and the consequences of outlawing “hate speech.” No laws of history dictate that America must submit and follow this path.

The debate over “hate speech” reveals a fundamental disagreement about the purpose of America. Either it is political liberty, in which case the freedom of speech is essential for presumptively rational citizens to rule themselves politically and to pursue the truth through science, philosophy, or religion. Or it is the equal self-respect and dignity of marginalized and self-created identities, in which case these must not only be publicly affirmed and celebrated, but also shielded from (even well-meaning) scrutiny and criticism, called “speech violence” or “hate speech.” These two views cannot coexist. Indeed, restriction advocates admit that America’s understanding of speech “comes into tension with the aspiration of equal dignity.”

They want to eliminate the former to make way for the latter.

RTWT

Hodinkee unravels the tale of a rusted Rolex watch once worn by one of the brave men symbolized by a star on the CIA’s Memorial Wall.

It was barely recognizable as a watch when it first came to me. The case shape gave it away, but the dial and hands were hidden behind a rust-colored crystal. The caseback was deeply gouged with what looked like marks made by claws strong enough to scratch stainless steeI. You could tell it was a Rolex – its still bright gold bezel and crown, stamped “Rolex Oyster,” gave that much away, but that was about it. The truth is, it could have been made by anyone, and it wouldn’t have made any difference to its uncanny feel. With its heat-crazed crystal and dented case, the watch looked as if it had risen from the depths of hell – and as if it had come back from the afterlife with a story to tell.

The watch belongs to a man named Erik Kirzinger. It had been worn by his uncle, Norman Schwartz, who flew covert missions for the CIA during the Cold War. The watch bears the serial number 613482, dating it to approximately 1947. …

The time on pilot Norman Schwartz’s Rolex read just before midnight. He had slowed to just above stall speed, and was flying as low as possible over the pitch black forests of northern China, north of the Korean border at the Yalu River.
On board his C-47 were CIA officers John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau. Their mission that night: pick up Li Chun Ying, a CIA agent.

RTWT

All of my grandparents’ sons and one daughter, now all departed, served.

Joseph Zincavage (1907-1998) Navy
(No wartime photograph available, but he’s sitting on a Henderson Motorcycle in this one.)

William Zincavage (1914-1997) Marine Corps

Edward Zincavage (1917-2002) Marine Corps

Eleanor Zincavage Cichetti (1922-2003) Marine Corps