I note a vague heads up about Monday for those interested in the political implications for the presidential race in this NYT article about a Biden speech to National Guard Saturday:

[...] A spokesman for the president said that on Tuesday, Mr. Trump will visit Kenosha, Wis., where a police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, led to an outpouring of anger and protests that in some cases turned destructive. The president would meet with local law enforcement, the spokesman, Judd Deere, said in a tweet. National Guard troops were deployed to Kenosha last week.

Mr. Biden, who has been a firm supporter of peaceful protests, is expected to travel on Monday to condemn violence, and to note that chaos has unfolded on Mr. Trump’s watch, according to someone familiar with his plans. He is also expected to charge more broadly that the president is seeking to change the subject from the coronavirus and economic challenges the country faces. Details of his Monday plans weren’t immediately clear [....]

Piece in Milwaukee's main paper today:

really good thought-provoking essay 

Kyle Rittenhouse, Kenosha, and the Sheepdog Mentality

Rittenhouse appears to live in a fantasy world where police and car dealerships are more endangered than unarmed Black men, and where he is a warrior.

 By Graeme Wood @ TheAtlantic.com, Aug. 28

I have highlighted in supersized text two phrases that stood out to me in an excerpt:

[....]

The availability of these videos is perhaps the biggest change in gun culture in our lifetimes, and one of the results is mayhem like this. The shift has suddenly made violence against humans (as opposed to animals) imaginable—whereas in the past, most people could live their whole life without witnessing or taking part in a gunfight. The videos emphasize the bad things that can happen to you if your draw time is too slow, or your magazine too small. Now one can watch videos and imagine oneself not stalking a deer but defending others, in improbable heroic scenarios once limited to action movies.

That is the fantasy that seemed to have motivated Rittenhouse’s trip to Kenosha. He was interviewed hours before the shooting by The Daily Caller’s Richie McGinniss. He explained his presence in Kenosha by saying that “people are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business.” He looks preposterously young for this role, not like some ’roid-crazed militiaman but like a kid who has somehow guessed that the code to his father’s gun locker is his own birthday. Rittenhouse has been called a “white supremacist,” but none of his comments during interviews at the scene mention race. (Other comments may surface later, and his social-media accounts reportedly show plenty of sympathy for cops, and none for the protesters.) Instead his comments mention what is by far the most common topic in gun-enthusiast channels, which is what to do to preserve life and property using guns.

Before the advent of these videos, to be a concealed carrier meant entering uncharted cognitive territory. If you have never walked around with a gun in your pocket, you probably have poor intuitions about how it feels—the power; the discomfort of having a hunk of metal or plastic impeding your gait and mobility; most of all, the sense of responsibility. The writer Dan Baum strapped on a .38 in the course of researching a 2013 book on gun culture and described the experience well:

Everything around me appeared brilliantly sharp, the colors extra rich, the contrasts shockingly stark. I could hear footsteps on the pavement two blocks away ... It made me more organized. Wearing the gun, I was Mr. Together. There was no room for screwing up when I was equipped to kill.

Baum would avoid trouble, because he didn’t want to be anywhere near a fistfight, unstable people, or anything that might raise the possibility that he would fire his gun. The feeling of empowerment comes with a wearying imperative of caution: You do not seek out danger, and instead you live the most boring life possible, to avoid using the murder machine you have for some reason decided to attach awkwardly to your midsection.

What distinguishes Baum, who crossed the street to avoid violence, from Rittenhouse, who carried openly and crossed state lines to find violence? One is a seersucker-wearing, middle-aged journalist, and the other is an adolescent. The other salient difference, though, is that at 17, Rittenhouse has never known a world where owning a gun did not go along with what is sometimes known as the “sheepdog mentality”—the belief that your gun exists to protect others, and that you should rush in to perform that duty. Many of the gun videos you find online emphasize exactly this, to an audience of men.

[....]

meanwhile, on what his real attorneys are purported planning to do:

The prosecutors are blowing the case. You don't have a back and forth with the defendant.

Did you travel from your home x miles to Kenosha?

Did you carry an assault rifle with you?

Were you legally allowed to carry an assault weapon in your home state?

Were you legally allowed to carry an assault weapon across state lines?

Did you carry a weapon that you were not legally allowed to possess into the protest?

Did you fire the weapon that you illegally carried across state lines during the protest?

Did you use your illegal weapon to kill anyone?

Lawyer friends say just go for "yes", "no" questions and sit your prosecutorial behind down.

If Rittenhouse broke down into fake tears, remind him that we didn't see any tears in the video that shows him calmly walking away after the shooting.