Joe Doakes from Como Park tries his hand at one of my patented dramatizations (c):

Mitch Berg is walking through Menards, looking in vain for dust masks so he can sand the Sheetrock repairs where he was banging his head against the wall after reading Penigma’s email, when he sees Avery Liberelle wearing a giant hula hoop hung from strings over her shoulders.  He tries to slip into the nuts and bolts aisle, but she sees him.
Avery:  Merg!
Berg: Uh, hi Avery.  What’s with the hoop?
Avery: It’s my social distancing perimeter. Why aren’t you wearing yours? 
Berg: Uh . . .
Avery (darkly): Everyone should wear one. My aunt died of Covid-19: so they said.

Berg: (clicks his tongue sympathetically)!!!

Avery: (in the same tragic tone) But it’s my belief they done the old woman in.

Berg: (puzzled) Done her in?

Avery: Y-e-e-e-es, Lord love you! Why should she die of Covid-19? She come through diphtheria right enough the month before. I saw her with my own eyes. Fairly blue with it, she was. They all thought she was dead; but my father he kept ladling gin down her throat til she came to so sudden that she bit the bowl off the spoon.

Berg: (startled) Dear me!

Avery: (piling up the indictment) What call would a woman with that strength in her have to die of the bat flu? And what become of her new straw hat that should have come to me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say is, them as pinched it done her in.

Berg: (to Avery, horrified) You surely don’t believe that your aunt was killed?

Avery: Do I not! Them in that nursing home would have killed her for a hat-pin, let alone a hat.

Berg: But it can’t have been right for your father to pour spirits down her throat like that. It might have killed her.

Avery: Not her. Gin was mother’s milk to her. Besides, he’d poured so much down his own throat that he knew the good of it. (To Berg, who is in convulsions of suppressed laughter) Here! what are you sniggering at?  Science denier!  (Avery stomps off, knocking things off the shelves with her hoop).
End Scene
Joe Doakes

It’s barely fiction, to be honest.

Last week, it was Governor Walz’s snitch line, urging MInnesotans to rat out people violating the nebulous and ill-defined shutdown restrictions.

This week? The “insta-hatecrime line!”:

When this epidemic is over, we’re going to have to have a serious discussion about civil liberty.

The CDC advises people over 60 to avoid crowds, stay home to avoid the virus.
If all of us old people are going to be sitting around in our bathrobes, self-quarantined, Netflix should bust out the good stuff. 

Pajama party!

Joe Doakes

Sometimes I wonder if kids today would know what to make of Warner Brothers cartoons…

Like all plagues, Covid19 is a problem everywhere, for everyone.

But like most plagues, you need hosts for a plague to spread – and cities are to viruses what a Super Walmart is to humans; vast collections of everything they need to survive.

Plagues don’t care about their victims’ politics – but cities are stuffed full of people for whom politics matters an awful lot. And so most cities are simultaneously a) blue, and b) suffering disproportionally from the Covid plague.

And it’s hard to escape the fact – as, indeed, not a few blue-city dwellers are realizing – that high density and a transit-centered lifestyle make cities susceptible to epidemics.

But you just can’t tell the “evidence based, science-centered” crowd the utterly obvious without expecting a political retort.

I’ve been seeing stories, here and there, for a few weeks now: “JUST YOU WAIT! RED STATES ARE EVEN MOOOOOORE VULNERABLE! THEY’RE OLD AND FAT AND GO TO CHURCH AND THINK HOPES AND TEH PRAYERS ARE A SOLUTION!”

And yeah, Covid’s been filtering out into the square states; people are dying in Montana and North Dakota and other sparsely populated places. But in a sparsely populated area, not full of five-floor apartments and filthy buses and bars full of people jammed into each other’s laps, the death rate – probably the only rate we can trust, since the numbers are relatively hard – is trailing the big, blue cities by quite a bit so far.

(The concomitant effect, in the long term? In a phenomenon first noticed during the CIvil War, soldiers from urban areas tended to be less susceptible to the diseases that ravaged the Union winter camps, the cholera and typhus and other bugs that killed many more soldiers than bullets or artillery, than their rural comrades; the New York and Massachusetts units had developed at least some herd immunity. Expect a certain amount of that in the next year and a half or so).

But I’ve been expecting this phenomenon – let’s call it “Blue Fragility” – ever since New York City started getting hammered with the virus; blue-checks from the blue states trying to transfer some of the ugly to the red states:

The MSM have been in full-court press mode for the last two weeks in accusing President Trump, Fox News, and conservative media outlets of downplaying the Wuhan coronavirus until it was too late to contain it.

But another related talking point has emerged in recent days which involves the press relentlessly bashing red states for their allegedly slow response in comparison to blue states. In a nutshell, the reason they have supposedly been slower to put restrictions in place is that they are taking their cues from Trump, Fox, and Rush.

Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei is a notable example of a media figure who employed this strategy, and he did so in an interview last week on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program. Here’s what he said:

What you’re seeing here, and this is a bigger problem for society, is information inequality,’ VandeHei said. ‘Like, why (did) Desantis do what he did? Why did Georgia wait so long? They were listening to President Trump. They were watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh. The information was there. In the information bubble, they were basically getting a lot of sort of noise and news pollution.

Not every blue-state talking head, of course:

Polling guru Nate Silver even took issue with those who were pitting red states against blue states when talking about response times:

People sure like to post things about how there are huge disparities between red states and blue states in social distancing… when if you look a the actual numbers the differences aren’t actually that big and may largely be explained by other variables (e.g. urbanization).

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 4, 2020

It’s almost like people who live in an area with 1/100th the population density may be able to get by with less strict measures.

— binge tweeter (@binge_tweeter) April 4, 2020

If what the government is saying is correct, the country still has several more weeks to go before the worst of this is over. So it remains to be seen where the next hot spots will be after New York City has reached its peak. In the meantime, instead of disproportionately attacking red states, the mainstream media should do the following things:

Like many of you, I’ve wandered past the toilet paper aisle, seen the Venezuelan-style devastation, and wondered “what the flaming hootie-hoo are people DOING with all the TP? Are they fixing to eat the stuff?”

Well, no. Hoarding isn’t the problem. A supply chain built on maximum efficiency and minimum reserve inventory – pretty close to “just in time”, in logistical terms – and a re-balancing of home and commercial sales (less TP at work, much much more at home) has left the toilet paper market way out of whack:

“If you’re looking for where all the toilet paper went, forget about people’s attics or hall closets. Think instead of all the toilet paper that normally goes to the commercial market — those office buildings, college campuses, Starbucks, and airports that are now either mostly empty or closed. That’s the toilet paper that’s suddenly going unused.
So why can’t we just send that toilet paper to Safeway or CVS? That’s where supply chains and distribution channels come in.
Not only is it not the same product, but it often doesn’t come from the same mills.
Talk to anyone in the industry, and they’ll tell you the toilet paper made for the commercial market is a fundamentally different product from the toilet paper you buy in the store. It comes in huge rolls, too big to fit on most home dispensers. The paper itself is thinner and more utilitarian. It comes individually wrapped and is shipped on huge pallets, rather than in brightly branded packs of six or 12.
“Not only is it not the same product, but it often doesn’t come from the same mills,” added Jim Luke, a professor of economics at Lansing Community College, who once worked as head of planning for a wholesale paper distributor. “So for instance, Procter & Gamble [which owns Charmin] is huge in the retail consumer market. But it doesn’t play in the institutional market at all.”

It’s sort of like the shortage of .22 Long Rifle ammunition in the early 2010s; accelerated purchasing threw the supply chain out of whack, and since production was inelastic, it stayed out of whack for a long, long time.

The whole piece is worth a read.

Minnesotans know from experience that computer models are not perfect predictors. Every winter, the weatherman tells us, “We’re tracking a storm out of the Rockies that could bring between 2 inches and 9 feet of snow, depending on which direction the storm tracks.” We don’t shut down schools and churches and businesses Just In Case the worst case cenario might arrive. We wait to see and adjust our plans as better data becomes available.

I wonder if the reason we’re cowed by the COVID computer models is because we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that people in white lab coats know more than we do, so we should suspend critical thinking and trust them implicitly? I suspect that’s why presenters in television commercials and the cosmetic saleswomen at Dayton’s wore lab coats.

When the storm fails to appear, the weatherman doesn’t claim to have saved all our lives with his storm advisory. We know that’s bunk. There was no storm, he was Chicken Little.

If the virus storm fails to appear, I doubt Governor Walz will be as humble.

Joe Doakes

Invoking “Science!” (without the including the data to allow critical thought and analysis by those equipped to do so) or its weasel cousin the “evidence-based” argument is certainly a form of logrolling.

As I discussed on my show on Saturday, I see potential good and potential immense bad coming from the Covid19 epidemic. It’s almost like one of those cartoon characters, with an angel sitting on one shoulder and a devil on the other, trying to convince the character of their next action.

Good Angel

On the one hand:

• Americans are tired of their thirty-day trial of communism. Yes, it’s a fake story from a poor copy of Babylon Bee, but they’re not wrong.  
• Maybe, just maybe, Americans are starting to bristle at blunt-force government power backed with epic incompetence. 
• Americans are realizing the depravity of the Chicom government.  WIth a little luck that’ll lead to a lot of  manufacturing coming home, or at least moving to better places. 
• Some liberals – the smart ones, anyway – are realizing the Second Amendment isn’t about hunting, that it’s not just for “fat angry old white men” (as a certain zaftig angry old white and lifetime-banned female commenter referred to them), and that pretty much everything their “leadership” is telling them about guns, and gun laws, is baked wind. 

The Bad Angel

• Progressive politicians are seeing an opportunity to exercise the Emanuel Commandment (“Never Waste a Crisis”), and they’re running with it. 
• For a brief moment, it seemed like identity politics might fall ill with coronavirus.  But not so much.  

Let’s all give the good angel a boost, shall we? 

Is “ICU bed” a technological term, a medical definition, or a billing code?

I’m beginning to wonder if it’s not something like: “In order to receive reimbursement at ICU rate, the facility must pass a Level Three inspection and be certified as having X equipment and Y level of dedicated staff holding Z certificates, and located in a licensed facility.”

If that’s the reason there’s a hard limit in ICU beds – Medicare reimbursement rules instead of medical treatment requirements – then the politicians better hope word never gets out to the people laid off under this fake-martial law, or the next shortage will be pitchforks and torches.

Joe Doakes

I suspect an awful lot of people will be looking for pitchforks and torches when the word gets out about the bureaucracy’s bungling.

If it ever gets out.

Fortunately, as Treacher notes, media’s job is to cover the important stories – with a pillow, until the struggling stops, if the story affects the Democrat establishment.

Governor Walz unveiled a Social Distancing Violators Stasi.

Er, I mean a Social Distancing Violators hotline.

I’m gonna report the Green Line.

Governor Walz explained that we must shut down Minnesota to avoid overwhelming our 235 ICU beds with Covid-19 patients.  Apparently, if the 236th patient showed up, we’d have no choice.  We’d wheel her to the parking lot and leave her to die – there’s simply no way to treat her without an ICU bed.
So why do we have a hard limit on ICU beds?  Why not get more of them?  This is a serious question that maybe some SITDers can answer: what does an ICU bed to treat Covid-19 require?
Not talking about Minnesota luxury standard where you put one ICU bed in a hospital with sandwich bar in the cafeteria, talking about what Hawkeye Pierce would do.  The governor is invoking martial law powers because fighting the virus is the equivalent of war.  So what would a battlefield ICU bed for Covid-19 need?
Let’s say I want to double the number of Covid-19 treatment beds available. Is there anything special about the bed, itself, or can we call Original Mattress Factory to deliver a couple hundred beds?  If the patients need to sit up to breathe, does the bed need electric tilt or could we call that pillow guy to bring us a few hundred of his fancy pillows to stuff behind them?  Space – we’ve got high school gyms sitting empty.  Dividers – call the cubicle people to slap up free-standing cubicle walls between beds.
Ventilator?  That’s a fancy word for fan.  Any leaf blower could push air into your lungs. Speed controller?  Dimmer switch.  Regulator valve?  SCUBA dive shop.  Fan, vacuum cleaner hose, mask, duct tape, let’s get creative.  A CPAP doesn’t push hard enough but is that because the fan isn’t strong enough, or because the software limits it?  Can we overclock the fan to blow harder? 
Not medical grade?  That woman in the parking lot is dying, does ‘medical grade’ really matter to her?  Besides, there’s a machine shop in North Branch making aluminium AR-15 parts on state-of-the-art computer-controlled milling machines.  Give them the software code for ventilator parts, offer them $10,000 per unit, I bet they could pound them out in a week.  
Trained personnel to staff the bed?  Rosie the Riveter learned a new job.  You saying college kids today can’t?  $50 an hour, you’re out of school anyway, sign up here.
Seriously – why is the existing number of ICU beds sufficient justification to impose martial law?  Why not just build more ICU beds?  
Joe Doakes

Seventy years ago, they figured out a way to build antisubmarine patrol boats in Shakopee. Submarines in Wisconsin.

We can figure this out – provided “figuring it out” is the real goal.

I’m not entirely sure it is, for everyone.

Americas public school kids are in the middle of the biggest snow day in national history.

In-school classes in much, perhaps most, of the country are canceled for the rest of the year.. While schools are switching frantically to non-traditional, largely online instruction, it’s safe to say the apple cart has been completely upturned.

A former education bureaucrat and current consultant to the educational/industrial complex, writing in the Washington post, is very, very worried about What It All Means:

There is no research to measure what the effect of this massive break will be. In our lifetimes, Americans have never canceled so much school for so many children. But we know one thing for sure: The impact will not simply disappear. It will linger into next school year and beyond. Indeed, Hanushek and others have found that the effects of a single great teacher or a single substandard teacher can be measured into adulthood. And the negative effects of chronic absenteeism(typically defined as missing at least 15 to 18 days in a school year) on student achievement are clear — and dire.

My prediction: the only “dire” results, assuming the truth ever is let out by a media that is completely in bed with the establishment, will be to the establishment of the educational/industrial complex.; I predict it will be showing that the vast majority of children thrive, learning at their own pace, more or less, from home, and not being jammed into uniform desks in airless classrooms, having material presented to them in assembly line fashion as if they are widgets on an assembly line – which, cynical as it sounds, is the model for the vast majority of education, public and private, today.

I predict that most kids come out of this episode smarter than they would have had they stayed in school.

As the author notes, there will be exceptions; children of poor families, or whose parents aren’t able to devote as much attention to dealing with the kids needs while they’re quarantined.

Another fearless prediction: for the vast majority of those kids, this will still be the best educational time of their lives. And for the rest, they are the same ones that the public schools are leaving behind when they’re in class.

Prove me wrong.



Everybody who was an expert on the Emoluments Clause a while back, is now an expert on epidemiology. Can’t tell you how many people earnestly explained to me how they’re helping “bend the curve” and I should, too.
Which curve? There are two. One is the number of people who have contracted the Corona Virus. That’s the number breathlessly repeated on the news but really, it’s a meaningless number. It’s like asking: “How many Americans had a cold last Winter?” The answer is “All of them” but nobody cares because nobody died from it. In fact, we WANT every American to get the virus, and recover, to build “herd immunity.”
The number we care about is: “How many Americans died from the Corona Virus?” and that’s only meaningful if we have something to compare it to. That’s the curve we’re trying to bend down, so fewer people die. But how many is few enough?

In 2019, influenza killed 50,000 Americans, mostly children and elderly with chronic health problems. The plain old everyday flu. Nobody batted an eye. 50,000 out of 300,000,000 is nothing to get excited about.
In 2019, abortions were down – only 16,500 per week. Last week, Planned Parenthood of Minnesota – one of the state’s largest abortion providers – was still open for business.
COVID-19 has killed about 300 Americans.

For this, we shut down the entire nation? How far down must the curve be bent?
Joe Doakes

Another curve I, and a lot of Americans, keep in mind; how many people in our lives are susceptible to lung problems?

It’s a pretty fair number in my family. That’s a curve I want to keep to zero. And so I’m acting accordingly, as best I can.

Thousands of people have died of Covid19. Thousands more will likely die.

Every one of those deaths is a tragedy, snuffing out a human life of incalculable worth and immense potential.

Well, all of them but one.

One of the casualties is the “Green New Deal”, says Kevin Williamson, as people life with previews of the Green New Deal:

What we are seeing right now is what it looks like when Washington tries to steer the economy. There are times when that is necessary, and this is one of those times. But emergencies do not last forever, and emergency measures should be, by nature, temporary. The attraction of the climate-change crusade is that it creates a permanent state of emergency. The Left wants very much to convince Americans that climate change presents an emergency of the same kind requiring the same “moral equivalent of war” worldwide mobilization.107

One suspects that the people who are missing their paychecks right now, and the ones who worry that they may be missing them soon, are going to need some convincing. The adverse effects of climate change are likely to be significant and may prove severe — as noted, many of our progressive friends insist that they already are. But we have a new point of comparison, and those challenges feel relatively manageable if the alternative is an extended version of the coronavirus shutdown — and no amount of marketing will change the fact that that is precisely what is being advocated.

A couple of months of this is going to be very hard to take. Nobody is signing up for a lifetime of it.

And two trillion dollars of bailout is bad. The Green New Deal is going to cost an order of magnitude and change more. And unlike Covid, it’ll never end.

Moments after the president signed the biggest bailout bill in American history – which included tens of millions of dollars for the Kennedy Center – The Center laid off the entire National Symphony Orchestra:

Hours after President Trump signed a stimulus bill that includes $25 million for the Kennedy Center, its president Deborah Rutter told the National Symphony Orchestra that their paychecks would end this week..

In a conference call Friday night, Rutter told orchestra leaders that the 96 musicians would receive their last paycheck on April 3 and that they will not be paid until the arts center reopens. In addition, she said their health care benefits would stop at the end of May if the arts center is still closed at that time. The announcement was characterized by several NSO members as a shock.

While the orchestra is out on the streets, does anyone want to place any bets on how many key Democrat party figures and donors will get a boost from the taxpayer bonanza?

I can’t think that this bodes well for Team Blue this fall: residents of communities where wealthy New Yorkers have second/vacation homes have had about enough of the epidemic carpetbagging:

People with second homes in the Catskills region of New York are being warned to stay away in venom-laced Facebook posts and blunt messages from county officials.

Boardwalks and beaches in some Jersey Shore towns are barricaded, and residents are urging the closure of coastal access bridges to outsiders.

In the Hamptons, the famous playground for the rich on the East End of Long Island, locals are angry that an onslaught of visitors has emptied out grocery store shelves.

A backlash has grown on the outskirts of the New York region as wealthy people flee to summer homes to avoid the densely packed city, which has become the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis.

This clash between year-round residents and those with the means to retreat to vacation homes intensified Tuesday as White House officials advised those who had passed through or fled New York City to place themselves in a 14-day quarantine.

“They’re pumping gas. They’re stopping at grocery stores,” said Kim Langdon, 48, of Ashland, New York. “If they’re infected and they don’t know it, they’re putting everyone at risk.”

The expletive-filled commentary on a Catskills Facebook page was less subtle.

“The only cases in Greene County were brought here from downstate people so stay down there,” one man wrote. “Just because you have a second home up here doesn’t mean you have the right to put us at risk.”

The paraable of the Ant and the Grasshopper seems, if not appropriate, at least timely.

Physical therapy this morning, the receptionist wanted to know if I had come into contact with anyone who is confirmed by medical testing to have coronavirus.

How would I know? Do they wear a big C on their chest?

You don’t have Corona virus unless you’re tested for it. You can’t get tested for it unless you come into contact with someone else who already has been tested for it. I may be infected but without that link, no test for me.

I distrust the official numbers.

Joe Doakes

I’ve long since switched to counting deaths. They’re harder to hide.

Not impossible – I’m more and more convinced the Chinese are hiding something big.

But the number is a lot less subject to the vagaries of bureaucratic competence.

Why are mainstream broadcast and print news operations looking for excuses to back out of Trump’s COVID news conferences?

Oh.

Oooooooooh.

Yeah, dumb question.

Imagine this:

It’s the middle of June, 1940. Germany has just conquered all of Europe. The British have just withdrawn their army from the continent, in a miraculous evacuation that was the only redeeming note in a catastrophic defeat.

The army had left virtually all of its equipment – just about everything heavier than a rifle – in France; it would pretty much have to be re-equipped from scratch. The Royal Navy had been badly bloodied. The Royal Air Force, likewise, leaving itself under strength to face the German Air Force in the upcoming campaign to try to bomb the UK either to the negotiating table or into a state ready to be invaded. German U-boats were ravaging the merchant shipping on which Britain depended for not only all of its industrial raw materials and oil, but virtually all of its food.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill went on the radio and gave a speech after the last of the British Expeditionary Force arrived home.

What speech did he give?

He could’ve given a realistic speech – pointing out the sobering facts of the situation, and readying the British people for what was likely going to be at best a disheartening and economy-gutting armistice that left them sitting alone on their island, and at worst complete conquest in the face of an invasion that would certainly follow, if the Navy and Air Force failed.

But no.

Churchill gave a speech that was, if all you cared about was the facts on the ground, utterly unrealistic; he told Britain, and the world, that the United Kingdom would fight to the last inch of ground, and if Britain fell the Commonwealth would carry on the fight forever, until Europe was free again.

It was a little like that poster of a mouse holding up a middle finger at a diving eagle; “the last great act of defiance“ was the caption.

And it was one of the greatest bits oratory in the history of the English language.

And it was completely unrealistic.

But it was leadership.

In 1987, Ronald Reagan had already proved he was the best president of my adult lifetime. His leadership had brought America back from the worst case of emotional depression it had ever suffered, and from an economic downturn every bit as nasty as 2008, but much more short-lived. And after running for office on a stridently anti-Communist message, he had already sent the message that Soviet expansionism was off the agenda, and made it stick.

He was scheduled to give a speech at the Brandenburg Gate – the very symbol of divided Germany, and the high watermark of communism in the west.. It was a time when most political and academic “experts“ in the west expected the Soviet union – the “second world“ – was here to stay; well five years later everyone said the USSR was eventually going to collapse, nobody that anybody was paying attention to was saying it in 1987. They had the worlds largest military, the worlds largest nuclear arsenal, and they controlled a good chunk of Europe and Asia.

Reagan’s advisers urged him to take a moderate, conciliatory tone toward the east Germans, the Soviets, their new (or at least newish) leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and the wall he was standing in front of.

To give a “realistic” speech.

 instead, he gave a speech that electrified the resistance in Eastern Europe, that galvanized support for democracy among the downtrodden, and did its part, along with much of the rest of Reagan’s policy, in the downfall of the Soviet union that had a thousand fathers by 1995, but was very nearly an orphan before Ronald Reagan was elected.

It wasn’t “realistic“ to the conventional wisdom of the day. It was leadership.

Donald Trump is no Winston Churchill, and he’s no Ronald Reagan.

This week, he said that he wants America to be “back to work“ by the Easter weekend.

Is this realistic? Maybe not. The experts say it’s unlikely. The legions of not very funny late night comics and blue-checked droogs say the idea itself is risible.. And the whole business of declaring America open or closed is mostly the responsibility of the state governments, and the free market itself. I, myself, plan on working from home (although I am working, knock wood).

But America is a restless, endlessly creative, impatient nation, overstocked with people who are not going to sit on their hands and wait for things to get better; it’s a nation full of people who are descended from people who came from all over the world, uprooting everything they knew, to make things better.

Trump could have echoed the words of the scientists and experts gathered around him. He could’ve lectured the nation like a hectoring schoolmarm, or like Barack Obama. But he’s got a stage full of experts, including his vice president, and more importantly 50 state governors, already doing exactly that.

Trump urging America to “go back to work“ Easter weekend is not the Dunkirk speech, and it’s not the Brandenburg gate speech.

It’s not eloquent, and it’s not going to go down in history.

But it’s leadership..

The economy runs as much on psychology as it does on money, analysis and marketing. It’s trends depend as much on how people are feeling as objective fact. Don’t believe it? Have you checked the toilet paper aisle lately?

The nation’s psyche needs a boost. Trump is setting a tone; the United States is not going to be on sick leave forever. He’s telling a nation with cabin fever that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. When? Maybe Easter, maybe memorial day, but it’s coming.

It was brilliant. It wasn’t scientific. It may not of even been all that well advised.

But it’s what America wants to think, and wants to hear. We’re not stupid, we’ll hash out the details later..

We’re told as of yesterday that Senator Klobuchar’s husband is in the hospital with National Healthcare VIrus.

In the statement, Klobuchar said [husband John] Bessler had a fever and was coughing up blood. He was checked into a hospital in Virginia and is receiving oxygen but is not on a ventilator.

“I love my husband so very much and not being able to be there at the hospital by his side is one of the hardest things about this disease,” Klobuchar said in a statement.

“While I cannot see him and he is of course cut off from all visitors, our daughter Abigail and I are constantly calling and texting and emailing,” she went on to state. “We love him very much and pray for his recovery. He is exhausted and sick but a very strong and resilient person.”

All these years pf campaign appearances and debates and fairground ops and every other kind of contact with her constituents, and I do not recall seeing any mention of John Bessier. Am I dense, or is the media softplaying his existence?

Or, for that matter their status (she’s in DC, he’s teaching law somewhere in Maryland)?

Speaking of Softpedaling: Ih this piece about John Bessier, the Channel 5 report helpfully finishes with this bit:

Klobuchar said she is working in the Senate to ensure Americans receive the help they need.

Sounds like reporter Rebecca Omastiak is bucking for campaign communications gig.

Minnesota’s Democrat congressional delegation sent a letter to Vice President Pence telling him it was unacceptable that doctors in our state didn’t have enough complete Corona virus test kits. Apparently, the test kits ship without an essential chemical and world-wide demand has been so high, there’s a shortage of the chemical.
The law of supply and demand is unacceptable!
Yeah? So roll up your sleeves and get to work, ladies. Start producing the chemical. Do something useful.

Or Shut The Hell Up and let the adults get back to work, dealing with the crisis as best they can with the tools at hand.

Joe Doakes

I’m wondering if episodes like this mean that Smith, Klobuchar, Craig, Phillips, McCollum, Omar and Peterson genuinely think the economy runs by command? (Don’t bet against that with Smith, McCollum and Omar). Or is it just election-year posturing?

Perhaps when this Covid flap is over, we can have a serious discussion about *every single thing* the modern left has to tell us about housing, transit and urban zoning and land use policy.

Mass Transit as it is today might not have actually been built as a contagion transmission mechanism – but if it had been, it’d be hard to see what they’d have done differently. I’m thankful my 18 months of daily use of the Vomit Comet (“Green Line”) didn’t coincide with a major pandemic – I’m pretty sure I caught a cold or two, and most likely the flu, from the train.

Some are trying to start the discussion.

“There is ample documentation that mass gatherings can amplify and spread infectious diseases,” a World Health Organization analysis on “mass gatherings in the context of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza” stated. “Such infections can be transmitted during the mass gathering, during transit to and from the event, and in participants’ home communities upon their return.” The WHO recommended, “Those who are ill should be strongly encouraged to avoid air travel or other forms of mass transit.”

A 2013 “Guide for Public Transportation Pandemic Planning and Response” prepared for the National Cooperative Highway Research Program Transportation Research Board of the National Academies stated that “although some pandemic plans for transportation systems existed, there were limited resources and plans targeted to rural and small urban transportation systems … As a result, although some agencies had all-hazards response plans available, measures for pandemics were not included.”

Last month, the Brussels-based International Association of Public Transport, in its “Management of COVID-19 Guidelines For Public Transit Operators,” conceded that “Public transport systems have to be considered a high-risk environment due to: high number of people in a confined space with limited ventilation; no access control to identify potentially sick persons; a variety of common surfaces to touch (ticket machines, handrails, door knobs, etc.).” Still, it also called public transit “an essential service to be maintained as long as reasonable.” When does mass death become unreasonable, the WHO might be asked in regard to mass transit.

I suspect we’ll see it suppressed sooner than later, if we let it.

Likewise – making it impossible to find anything but “high density housing” (especially by zoning out all alternatives, which has the inevitable, “unintended” effect of jacking up housing prices, which leads to people doubling-up on roommates or living in less-healthy housing they can afford) has *got* to be the dumbest idea out there, if a “resilient” society is what you seek.

On a semi-related side note: I can imagine things more hellish than a couple of weeks of “social isolation” stacked on top of and next to other potentially-contagious people “socially isolating” themselves – but unless all those neighbors get along *really* well, it’s not as easy as you’d think.

This is today’s celebrity class:

This video is Wuhan Virus for your eyes.pic.twitter.com/AaUfgBuzqQ

— Carpe Donktum🔹 (@CarpeDonktum) March 19, 2020

The TL:dw version: A bunch of entitled, overpaid people blessed/cursed with fame, are virtue-signaling the rest of us by “singing” the worst song in pop music history [1] – a mewling paeon to socialism and atheism from a singer who himself became so embittered and disconnected from the world by his fame and wealth that it had become something of a cultural punch line before he was murdered and became the icon for the death of every baby boomer’s innocence – as they hole up in their Manhattan condos, California estates and rural getaways…

…as millions of people wonder how long their paychecks are going to keep coming, or if they will, and the rest of the country waits to see if the army of homeless that crowd California’s streets get completely ravaged by this new plague.

Imagine, indeed.

I’ve never been a hugeLarry the Cable Guy fan, but for today, I am totally on board.

[1] This may be a reach – but work with me, here.

I think “ex-Beatle preference” is a key dispositive indicator of political outlook and personal attitude.

I suspect “progressives” prefer John Lennon. He was the angsty, prickly one, the one who seemed most prone to have a penchant for Sylvia Plath He died tragically, relatively young, and in the grand romantic tradition, illustrating and confirming the progressive’s innate hopelessness.

I’m going to guess conservatives trend toward the sunny, optimistic, irrepressible McCartney.

Me? I’m a guitar player. I’m with Harrison.

On Friday, when Minnesota had 14 cases of the virus, Governor Walz announced schools would remain open because health care workers needed daycare so they could go to work and fight the virus.
 On Sunday, when Minnesota had 35 cases of the virus, Governor Walz closed the schools except for children of health care workers who need daycare so they can go to work to fight the virus.  Everybody else’s kids, stay home. But not to halt the spread of the virus – no, it’s to give administrators time to figure out how to teach kids who aren’t in school. 

Basically, this is another “in service” week, when teachers and administrators try to recreate the wheel that Phoenix University already invented, what every home-schooled parent already uses: distance learning.

Now.  In the middle of the pandemic.  Now, you start thinking about the possibility of doing something different.  Now, after all those years of criticizing and belittling home-schoolers as ignorant and fearful racists, afraid their kids will catch cooties from The Other; now, you’re adopting their methods without admitting they were right all along.

And the Twin Cities media praised keeping the schools open as bold leadership on Friday; and praised the decision to close the schools as bold leadership on Sunday; without ever mentioning the two decisions made two days apart are completely contradictory.

Here’s an alternate possibility.  St. Paul teachers were on strike last week.  If the governor had closed the schools, they wouldn’t have been paid.  So they quick settled the strike and now they’re back to work at full pay when the schools close.  Lucky for them, they settled.  Almost as if they were tipped off.

Joe Doakes

The DFL and the Teachers Union…connected?

Say it isn’t so!

That’d be like saying “progressive” journalists had a sub rosa agenda or something.

And that’s just crazy talk.

As the city of Baltimore notches it’s fifth COVID-19 case, it’s mayor, Jack Young, has issued a plea to some of his most notable constituents; the city needs hospital beds for victims of the public health crisis, so please stop shooting each other.

No, seriously.

He really, really means it:

“I want to reiterate how completely unacceptable the level of violence is that we have seen recently,” Young said. “We will not stand for mass shootings and an increase in crime.”

“For those of you who want to continue to shoot and kill people of this city, we’re not going to tolerate it,” Young implored. “We’re going to come after you and we’re going to get you.”

I am no expert – like, the mayor of a city that’s been controlled by the Democrats for three generations – but something tells me that this should’ve been a priority before the city had a public health emergency, and if the city wasn’t “coming after and getting, criminals when times are relatively easy, the job is going to be just a little…

… well, Captain Obvious is going to skip straight over Major and jump straight to Lieutenant Colonel if he finishes that sentence, isn’t he?

Is offended by government ham-handedness – even in an emergency (although conservatism recognizes the tension between liberty and public order).

However, any talk of domestic travel restrictions that keeps these morons sequestered away from the general public works juuuust fine for me.,

I could just scream.