untethered

Ted Wheeler declares war, calling out antifa and anarchy both 10:26;

Pro-criminal DA Mike Schmidt inaugurated live 12:21;

Officer 44 Update 1:28:30;

Criminal accused of attempted murder of a police officer escapes from the Justice Center, because of Covid protocols:

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police…

While Dahlen was in the holding room, two members of a contracted cleaning crew were doing COVID-19 disinfecting in the Detective Division. The protocol during the pandemic has been to do daily enhanced cleaning and disinfecting to protect suspects who are being held in those rooms. One of the cleaning crew members opened the door to the holding room, then closed it again after they realized the room was occupied. Preliminary investigations leave investigators to believe that the door did not fully latch after it was closed. Sometime after the cleaning crew members left, investigators believe Dahlen pushed the door from the inside, found it to be insecure, and got out.

intro:

Underworld, “Jumbo” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i56xz…

“Lights of Portland”, Derek Dahms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW0i8.

subscribe to channel

I came across the “pronouns” ve/vem/vir somewhere and, I don’t know why, looked it up (with the ongoing profusion of these I expect something like a narrative Thirty Years’ War to winnow out the weak ).

Ve/vem/vir is the new “universal pronoun” not indicating sex.

Singular they, while not horrible, adds unnecessary ambiguity to the language – we never know whether “they” refers to one person or many in sentences like “they’re making a real mess of the place.” It also sounds extremely unnatural when coupled with a proper name (e.g. “Casey knew they were running out of time.” or “Rory tripped over their laundry.” )

ze/hir has often been used as a personal pronoun by people of nonbinary (neither strictly male nor female) gender. If you talk about someone using ze/hir pronouns, it’s often assumed that these are that person’s personal pronouns. ve/vem/vir, on the other hand, is a universal gender-neutral pronoun – it gives no indication of its subject’s gender. It can be used for people of any gender (or unknown gender) without confusion.*

*Some people prefer you stick to using their personal pronouns rather than any universal gender-neutral sets. Please respect their wishes!

The linguistic carnage effected by the reign of “pronouns” and the moral logic of that reign made the de-sexed “universal” pronoun, where one may infer sex(ual identity) only upon consent, inevitable. It is a mystery to be revealed, or not, I guess. The ultimate right, in the logic of pronouns.

The lunatics behind this don’t care about damage to the language caused by the pronoun confusion they’re enforcing, of course, but it does make the whole project that much more ungainly and, despite all evidence, I don’t think our pain and confusion is the end goal. Also they too have to labor under their silly rules and seek relief.

Many of us now personally know the fraught experience of working with the gender-confused and the necessity to police one’s language. I’ve been there more than once–I find myself not engaging these people at all, knowing I’ll trip up quickly. They, in their turn, think I’m unfriendly–and despite the evil madness of this movement, many, many of those caught up in its sway, particularly young women seeking to become men or sexless, are in fact sympathetic people up close.

But my clamming up and the inference they probably make–that I’m unfriendly or bigoted–is a dynamic playing out all over right now, I imagine. So if there is a pronoun reckoning, Vevimvir stands waiting, to clear up all the confusion–which has only just begun. If no one can keep track of all the pronouns–and who can?–then we’ll eventually have to sweep away the profusion of ever-more particular pronouns and institute a benign dictatorship of the one approved Mother of all Pronouns (just don’t call it that) Vevimvir.

And everybody will have to adopt it–to be fair.

At some point this year Portland’s marijuana stores started getting robbed as part of an increase in crime resulting from the summer riots. Armed guards can often now be seen posted in front of stores with names like Peaceful Cannabis and Mellow Dreams (not actual names).

Yesterday police cordoned off an area in the Hollywood District in apprehending suspects who knocked over a store there, and the arrestees’ names suggest they are a gang of young Ugandans:

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — The five suspects apprehended Friday night in relation to the armed robbery of a cannabis store in Portland have been formally charged, according to the Portland Police Bureau.

The following suspected were booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center:

-Daniel Mugisha, 20, of Portland on charges of Robbery in the First Degree and Robbery in the Second Degree
-Abdi Guhad, 18, of Portland on charges of Robbery in the First Degree and Robbery in the Second Degree
-Sammy Bulambo, 22, on charges of Robbery in the First Degree and Robbery in the Second Degree
-Dan Gajhabukha, 19, of Portland on charges of Robbery in the First Degree and Robbery in the Second Degree

One juvenile male, 17, of Phoenix, Arizona was booked into the Donald E. Long Juvenile Detention Center on charges of Robbery in the First Degree and Robbery in the Second Degree…

Mattie Cagle, who lives in the area, said it would be easy for officers to respond to that location quickly because there are always heavy patrols in the area.

“I’m a little bit surprised by that honestly. I wondered why all the cars were out here,” Cagle told KOIN 6 News. “I’m a little bit surprised that things are happening over here because there is usually a police presence and that kind of thing, but, hey, people get bold.”

Reported shootings, murder and other crime at least doubled in 2020’s racial reckoning. I say “at least” because I suspect that reporting has gone down as new levels of violence and criminality become normal.

Antifa assembled at Portland’s Justice Center last night in a reprise of last summer’s continual occupation and protest there and forced an undermanned federal force to retreat.

The crowd of demonstrators in Portland are actively pushing back the DHS. pic.twitter.com/IdF8L9JLIz

— Garrison Davis (@hungrybowtie) January 1, 2021

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

The event was planned for 10 PM. Black bloc started filling the park blocks across the street a couple of hours beforehand. Small fires were lit early on.

The feds were later backed up by Portland cops–the federal deputation of some 100 of them expired with the year at midnight, which was not lost on antifa. The de rigueur smashing of a Starbucks–first of the year!–happened.

The crowd was about a hundred. Stumbling home myself later I saw a typical young woke white couple in full “bloc”, black-clad head-to-toe with shiny new gear, waiting for the elevator in their expensive downtown apartment building.

The year begins.

Portland homeless advocacy group Street Roots says 113 homeless have died in Portland this year.

At least 113 people experiencing homelessness in Multnomah County died last year — the most since county officials started tracking in 2012.

That year, the county and the homeless advocacy group Street Roots released the first “Domicile Unknown” report, an accounting of all the people who died living within the county without a home address. Since then, homeless deaths have more than doubled, from 47 in 2011 to the 113 counted in 2019.

The report, released Monday, did not delve into the factors that fueled a steady rise in deaths over the decade. But in a press conference announcing the results, Multnomah County Health Officer Paul Lewis and county Chair Deborah Kafoury said the jump might be attributed, in part, to steadily rising rents and the accompanying increase in homelessness.

“If there’s more folks who are homeless and houseless, we’re going to have more deaths in that group,” Lewis said. “It’s not like there’s a new special plague.”

There isn’t? That’s a relief. Someone tell our state legislators, who held a private session yesterday over some new, special virus. Also the people rioting outside over the penurious restrictions supposedly necessitated by it. The OPB article, somehow, makes no mention of Covid or whether the deceased are tested.

Homeless advocates, led by Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury, characterize the homeless problem as primarily a shortage in housing, as they push high-density progressive policy that includes neighborhood integration along the lines of Barack Obama’s soon-to-be resurrected Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program. Eager developers and other business interests in this way fund the transformation of once nice, white cities. The grift and ruin follows the money, when a place like Portland becomes desirable.

Of course our desirability is fading faster than a coked-up starlet’s, and a cratering real estate market might render all bets off. Downtown is a depressing place psychically and economically; its venerable old Benson hotel closed its doors, probably forever, recently, citing bookings in the ten percent range. Who knows, maybe they’ll use it to house the homeless.

The majority of those on the streets are chronic drug users who cannot work or keep a home. The only question seems to be whether the accompanying high rate of mental illness is more cause than correlation, and I think it is.

According to the report, alcohol or drugs — most commonly methamphetamine or opioids — caused or contributed to about half of the deaths of unhoused people. A third died of natural causes, often complications from drug and alcohol abuse or chronic diseases. Six were homicides and 15 were suicides — up from nine suicides the year before. Ten died in “traumatic accidents,” such as a fire or a car crash. And most of those deaths could have been prevented, said Kafoury.

The curious phrase “experiencing homelessness” is part of the narrative ploy, the “there but for the grace of God” fallacy excising the moral element. One experiences homelessness (“houseless” is actually the preferred nomenclature, now, Dude–you see, they have a “home”, they are in fact our neighbors) the way once experiences weather. For some reason I think of people “experiencing weightlessness”, and picture a bunch of bums floating in air in a cargo plane. The fact is many choose to live on the streets because there they can use–drugs are cheap and plentiful, and thanks to progressive legislation, now legal–and make their own rules. Any program offering them housing–as far as I know, though progressives may fix this–comes with drug rehabilitation and program of socialization involving rules. Failure rates are high for the few who seek help and make it through the process; for those who don’t want anything to do with a structured life? Good luck with that, as they say.

The mural above has been lording it over a neighborhood in downtown Portland for about a month. Vertically oriented it towers over the street; the feet of the black woman with the dowdy aboriginal features are suspended in air as if she’s rising from the overturned pedestal of the George Washington statue toppled here in Portland last June 18, Summer of (another) George. The Father of the Nation’s name is crossed out.

The text below it reads:

“I choose to prepare a place and a future for our grandchildren, a place where they will live outside of oppression, a place where they will know it’s okay to be black, native and afro indigenous.

I see you ancestors.”

Of course if you live in any major urban area of the United States, you’ve become used to black uplift kitsch. I remember watching, depressed, as the mural below went up. An innocent black child looking hopefully to the future; such a thing would be harmless if not for its ubiquity and context–that no similar image of a white child can be offered, now. Portland has long been contorting to accommodate its tiny but troublesome black population–a whole six percent, with the usual outsized contributions to dysfunction. Before the mask came off this summer, propagandists came at us with the usual weapons, such as innocent children looking off into a hopeful future. Who could object? What monster would?

Woodrow Wilson High School is to be rechristened after the summer riots washed away any opposition to the campaign to rename a slew of schools honoring white men (or, if there are any left, the indigenous, ironically). The city has determined the school will now honor one of five black Oregonian women of achievement they claim to have found. This of course would be hard if we used traditional metrics of achievement–such as, say, building schools. But we’ll have to find a lot more of them, and others underrepresented in our besieged annals of achievement; there are so many schools, monuments, buildings and the like to claim.

When statues of Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln came down on antifa’s “Indigenous Peoples Day of Rage” of October 11, the Oregon Historical Society across the way wasn’t spared. A mural of Lewis and Clark with (I assume) Sacajawea and Clark’s slave York, who served on the expedition, was defaced with red paint.

Poor York, who did not gain his freedom after serving ably in the Lewis and Clark expedition but at least earned an honored place in history, is treated like an embarrassment now by the pasty enlightened on behalf of the “indigenous”. His statue came down at the University of Portland in June:

The University of Portland has removed at least one figure from its Captain William Clark Monument on its North Portland campus.

The bronze statue of York, who was Clark’s slave, was gone Wednesday afternoon. Workers appeared to be preparing the monument’s two remaining figures, of Clark and an unnamed Native guide, for removal.

The monument, dedicated in 1988, is intended to depict Clark naming Mount Jefferson, called Seekseekqua or Kuassal Teminbi by tribes that originally inhabited the land. The eastern portion is on what is now the Warm Springs Reservation.

The university has yet to respond to questions about the removal of the York statue and the school’s future plans for the monument.

Historical monuments tied to slavery and colonization have drawn renewed attention in the weeks the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.

“These statues stand as a visual reminder that three races contributed to the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition — symbolic of the first integrated society in Oregon country,” a plaque on the monument reads.

Notably the monument went up with all the good intentions of liberal convention of the time, even praising diversity. The cultural takeover eats its young when swallowing up its platitudes from just a few years before. Progressives now aren’t just hostile to liberals, they’re hostile to last season’s progressives.

The Historical Society has long been on board with conventional progressive wisdom, of course. The depressingly unappealing “She Persisted” exhibit praising suffragettes appears to have in fact persisted through the Trump years (I haven’t been inside). The walls inside the lobby that antifa broke into and tossed as part of their Day of Rage are adorned with sepia-toned photos of black and indigenous women who, we’re told, were instrumental in the state’s history. Despite the lack of genuine impact on Oregon by its black population (up to last summer’s impact, let’s say) the museum, like every institution in the city, holds as policy to never not be focusing on their “contributions” and wonderfulness. Perusing their website I found the standard pledges to diversity and eradicating whiteness, but no mention of the rioting and looting.

Public art need not celebrate white achievement to fall prey. The Elk Statue across from the city jail had to be rescued from rioters after its fountain became a nightly bonfire pit. Inspired perhaps by Native American wisdom, the rioters used every part of the monument they’d taken down, leaving none to waste, breaking it down with pick axes and using the rubble for projectiles. Overnight it became the equivalent of a Roman ruin; the city declared complete defeat and removed what was left.

Historically colonies of settlement arose from an excess of population and the ensuing excess of energy. The Greeks establishing colonies as far as Sicily, for instance.

We suffer from neither excess population nor excess energy now, and the postmodern empire is inverted, establishing and empowering foreign colonies in the homeland, setting them against the natives.

“Afro Indigenous” is a phrase being thrown around a lot now. Pairing “Indigenous” with the central theme of black oppression, putting it on a par with that Holy of Holies, suggests to me deliberation from on high. No one, not even Donald Trump, stood in capable defense of a slandered and abused white America this last summer. The nation, such as it is, surrendered to BLM not without a shot fired, but without shooting back. We’re still getting shot at–the terms of our surrender, which are vague, don’t seem to include a cease of hostilities.

So our progressive moral overlords are expanding operations and tactics. Thus the prominence now of the “indigenous” cause–even if you still won’t see many indigenous on the ground and fewer and fewer the higher you look in their cause. But that’s a feature, of course, not a bug for those running things. As for the real Indians out there, I’m beginning to envy their position–established sovereignty in their reservations. They are in the unique position of having pre-established sovereignty as a racial nation, with a claim to land–as the US heads into breakup. No one else has that. It would be ironic if, someday, whoever ends up inheriting the former US clashes with independent Indian nations in the former United States.

Invoking “stolen land” is the assertion you have no right to be here, thus no rights here. Everything follows from that, of course; the invalidation of private property, of law, of you. The mere invocation in the gale of moral panic and propaganda that is the present confers power on the invoker and disempowers his target–anyone with the slightest objection to this surrender.

“Stolen land” has a simple clarity black civil rights, comically contradicting reality, has not. It’s also comprehensive; it’s the left’s neutron bomb, as they see it, a way to separate the people from what they’ve built. The land is stolen so everything built on it–by its “thieves”, us (though dare not suggest “white people built America”)–is stolen and forfeit; the imagination, intellectual energy and courage that were invested in all this creation, likewise forfeit. This latest rhetorical device seeks to make explicit and total our dislodging from America and its land.

“Stolen land” is absolute and all-encompassing. Because real “land” and everything valuable built on it–that measure of ruin left in our nation–is still out there in abundance to be plundered.

Expect to hear a lot more about the “indigenous”, as part of the project to displace the natives.

Comes now the humiliations. Seattle Police brass are volunteering their cops to be subjected to “peer intervention” training by progressive law professors–condescending to train them to intervene when fellow officers cross the line. The Seattle Police Blog:

The Seattle Police Department has been accepted into the Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement (ABLE) Project, Georgetown University Law Center’s national training and support initiative for U.S. law enforcement agencies committed to building a culture of peer intervention that prevents harm.

By demonstrating agency commitment to transformational reform with support from local community groups and elected leaders, the SPD joins a select group of more than 60 other law enforcement agencies and statewide and regional training academies chosen to participate in the ABLE Project’s national rollout. To date, hundreds of agencies across the country have expressed interest in participating.

Backed by prominent civil rights and law enforcement leaders, the evidence-based, field-tested ABLE Project was developed by Georgetown Law’s Innovative Policing Program in collaboration with global law firm Sheppard Mullin LLP to provide practical active bystandership strategies and tactics to law enforcement officers to prevent misconduct, reduce officer mistakes, and promote health and wellness. 

ABLE gives officers the tools they need to overcome the innate and powerful inhibitors all individuals face when called upon to intervene in actions taken by their peers.

Project ABLE (Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement) is the project of former Obama Justice Department lawyers settled in at Georgetown’s law school and wreaking the usual havoc.

The insincere last bullet point must come like a twist of the knife for police, who will sit for 8 hours of this “training”.

Building upon a training developed by Dr. Ervin Staub, the Founding Director of a program on the psychology of peace and violence, to help police officers stop unnecessary harmful behavior by fellow officers, in 2014, Dr. Staub, other consultants, and the New Orleans Police Department developed the EPIC Peer Intervention Program. Project ABLE builds upon EPIC and Dr. Staub’s prior work to develop and deliver practical, scenario-based training for police agencies in the strategies and tactics of police peer intervention.

Ervin Staub says he was rescued from Hungary by Raoul Wallenberg, leading him to study the psychology of bystander intervention. It appears he was mostly retired when the Obama Administration came along and his ideas, such as they are, were picked up by lawyers in Eric Holder’s Justice Department launching the Black Lives Matter campaign in the more aggressive second Obama term. Some of those same lawyers of course are now behind the Georgetown project.

The majority black New Orleans Police Department was the nation’s most corrupt for a time, but it was after Hurricane Katrina that it would get investigated and slapped with a consent decree for the usual “pattern of civil rights violations”.  Law firm Shepard Mullin, a major donor behind the ABLE project, was selected to act as “Consent Decree Monitor”.

Dr Staub, who appears to be Jerry Seinfeld’s long-lost bald twin, seems to be having a blast:

Portland police lost a fight with antifa yesterday.

A family facing eviction for defaulting on a second mortgage had become a cause for antifa when our summer of rioting kicked off this year. Antifa use the term “afro indigenous” like an honorific when championing them; the matriarch was let go from some native rights activist group recently. The house was purchased for cash sixty-five years ago, when the neighborhood was redlined. The history since then sounds familiar, with the family refinancing a paid-off home to, purportedly, finance the criminal defense of a family member, in 2004. That loan was defaulted on and after two years of legal wrangling, a real estate developer who bought the property has been trying to claim it, despite an eviction moratorium in effect due to Covid (which the city says doesn’t apply in this long-running case).

A tent encampment has occupied a large vacant lot next to the home, and through the summer “The Red House on Mississippi” was a venue for BLM activists, antifa and hangers-on in the midst of a nicely gentrifying neighborhood–gentrification being the broader issue invoked in the squatters’ stand. Antifa returns now I suspect with some relief to gentrification and homeless sweeps–recently resumed by the city–as causes, after a riotous summer dominated by Black Lives Matter which in the end yielded 15 million dollars cut from the Portland Police Bureau’s budget, the election loss of a hardcore progressive city councilmember, re-election of Ted Wheeler and the loss of public sympathy.

Every protest is an anti-police protest of course, and has been since before even Trump came on the scene. And every protest is an opportunity–sometimes it seems the whole point–to provoke police into excess that can be fed back into the Narrate-o-Matic as more proof of the need to de-fund the police.

Yesterday Portland police came to clear out the complex and were chased off:

As soon as the cops were routed the victors set to erecting barricades, and have claimed a couple of blocks, on a beautiful early December day:

#Portland pic.twitter.com/5v7YesTEjV

— Untethered (@UntetheredDale) December 9, 2020

As I write this they remain, dug in and calling via social media–their accounts are rarely shut down, still–for reinforcements. It’s the city’s play now.

Yesterday Ted Wheeler tweeted his determination to close the house down. The family took out an unwise variable-rate second loan in the middle of the mortgage bubble; their champions cite this without mentioning the bubble (I guess to cast their case as unique, rather than common) as if no one’s ever heard of it, and maybe no one here has at this point.

Unverifiable claims say they owe less than they’ve raised in donations. The family insists the vacant lot next door is worth over a million and it just might be, even now.

Antifa clarify it isn’t an autonomous zone, but an eviction blockade on indigenous land:

The Red House family held a press conference today.

The eldest son of the Kinney family speaks pic.twitter.com/uD0cBwt6Iq

— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) December 9, 2020

At the moment the occupiers await the police assault.