A few years ago, when The Walking Dead was dominating the cable schedule, I noted – maybe here, but probably on Facebook – that the message was hard to miss, for everyone but, I suspect, the show’s creators; crisis breeds conservatism.

When one has to focus on finding toilet paper and eggs, and is silently eyeing the property and violent crime rates in the neighborhood, hectoring people about pronouns and carbon footprints, at least for the moderately sane, slides down the priority list

And gun control?

Gun shops on the outskirts of Blue America report a surge of new purchases more brisk than the Obama years – and heavily comprising first-time, often left-of center, gun owners.

I caught this piece, in BearingArms.com.

Pull quote:

At noon, a woman in her sixties came in. She wore plastic gloves and had a scarf wrapped around her face, and she traced a wide arc around the only other non-employee in the store. “I’ve been doing this since the beginning of March,” she said, referring to her protective gear. “I don’t feel sick at all. I’m self-quarantining.” She left her house only for essential activities. This was one. “I’m buying a gun,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

She went on, “My son was a little upset about it.” (He preferred his bow and arrow.) “I’m old and I live alone, and we don’t know if there’s going to be civil unrest. The world is not the same.” She added, “It didn’t have to be this way.” Unlike many of the shop’s regulars, she was no fan of Trump: “He’s a divider all the way. First he said, ‘Five people have died, big deal.’ Now he’s saying, ‘I always knew it’d be dangerous.’ ” Talk turned to Portland. “It’s a ghost town,” a young woman said. Her name was Rosemary, and she was helping Bales out, since the restaurant where she waited tables had closed.

“I don’t like to go in cities anymore, anyway,” the customer said…Bales helped her customer choose a weapon. (“Pick three,” the customer told her.) As Bales rummaged around, the customer said, “I’m going to have a soldier train me. A friend of my son’s.” Bales returned with the first option. “A .22 Mag,” she said. “Holds thirty rounds.”…“I like the color of it,” the customer said. “It’s not black.” She picked it up. “It feels good. And it’s got a safety…This is just going to be for close range,” the customer said. “In my house. If it happens.” (Asked what “it” was, she said, “In two months, if the cities are starving, they’re gonna come out. And I understand that.”) …

“I think she’s a liberal,” Bales said, once the door closed. “There’s so many coming in. First-time-gun-owner liberals. I’ve probably seen ten this week. It’s so funny, because I hope it just turns them on to liking the Second Amendment. I mean, the Constitution was created for a reason. To protect us.”

Whoops. Did I say Bearing Arms? I meant The New Yorker.

If you are a new gun owner? Perhaps coming from the left?

On behalf of everyone who’s spent decades fighting to keep the right to keep and bear arms safe, you’re welcome.

Hope you remember this when the crisis lifts.

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.

This far.

New bill in the legislature.

Does “knows” mean “has actual knowledge” or does it mean “didn’t have actual knowledge, but under the totality of the circumstances, after reasonable inquiry such as a background check, should have known and therefore is presumed to have known, so it’s okay to punish him as if he had actually known the buyer was prohibited.”

Joe Doakes

I think in this case it means “whatever an ambitious prosecutor with ambitions in the DFL wants it to mean.

True 

Americans are, to say the least, distracted these days. The epidemic, and its economic fallout, are pretty much front and center for most of us.

Perfect cover, if you’re a weasel.

Georgia Democrat Congressman Hank Johnson is a weasel. He’s introducing a bill that doubles as an encyclopedia of all the Democrats true hopes and dreams when it comes to gun control: bans of classes of weapons, “Universal” registraiton, age limits, purchase limits, and pretty much name it.

This is today’s Democrat party – exploiting misery to grab power.

“…why do you oppose cities running munipical utilities for vital services like water, electricity and trash collection?”

Because it gives tinhorn autocrats an excessive amount of coercive power:

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the city is preparing to launch enforcement efforts against nonessential businesses that have remained opened, starting with a warning.

Those that remain open face misdemeanor penalties, citations, fines and the possibility of the city Department of Water and Power shutting off utility service, Garcetti said.

More power. That was really the intention all along.

There are presidential primaries coming, but who’s going to stand in line to vote, risking the virus?
Isn’t this a clear case of foreign interference in the presidential election?  Since it harms Democrats by lowering turnout and complicating the race, Trump benefits.  Isn’t that an emolument, or collusion, or something impeachable? 
Joe Doakes

Reality is what the media says it is.

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..

This popped up on Twitter the other day. It’s from “Rick Wilson”, who lists himself as an “apostate GOP media guy”, which means he’s a pretty over the top Never-Trumper.

Comeuppance was delivered fast and hot. Wilson pretty well doggoned it:

What are we looking at, here?:

1. A heat map of people who sniff down their noses at Fox News?
2. An overlay of Covid deaths at this point?

Answer: Why choose?

I suspect it’s really more a matter of population density than intellectual density – densely-packed, transit-dependent people have always been more susceptible, at least initially, to pandemics (and they also develop immunity faster). Nobody knows what that map’ll look like in a year.

The only thing we know for sure?

Rick Wilson is going to have a hard time earning a living from seriousl people.

Mitch, I wanted to write a novel like you, but I need professional
help.  The notes in parenthesis are the editor’s:

“I was doing my homework when someone knocked on our door.  An Asian
(RACIST) girl (SEXIST) about my age (AGEIST) stood (ABLE-IST) on the
doorstep. She must have been shy (ASSUMPTION), she was holding a book
against her chest the way girls do (SEXIST) and kept looking down
looking at our feet (UNNECESSARY DETAIL). She was slender (FAT SHAMING)
and short (HEIGHT-IST), with nice hair, dark (RACIST STEREOTYPE) and
glossy, that fell around her face, hiding it (OFFENSIVE STEREOTYPE).”

Revised version:

“I was doing my homework when someone knocked on our door.  A person
stood there holding a book.  The person had hair.”

I dunno – does it lose something in the translation?

Joe Doakes

And people ask why I made the villains in Trulbert the Methodists.

Conservatives, especially conservatives who are “out” critics of the mainstream media, get routinely accused of “hating” journalism. The late Nick Coleman was particularly, er, “acerbic” in his criticism of those who had the gall to criticize the news/industrial complex, claiming in one bout of hysteria that bloggers “wanted to kill the Strib”.

While we correctly savaged the Strib, and especially Coleman, on issue after issue, it was still baked wind. Self-government, small-“D” democracy, needs a functional, and above all trustworthy, media (among many other institutions) to survive.

And by “”trustworthy”, we mean “can be trusted to report the news, truthfully, regardless of its own institutional and individual political opinions.

In Europe, the media are pretty honest about their political points of view, on an editorial level; the Times of London and the Frankfurter Allgemeine are center-right; Guardian and Die Zeit and Le Monde are all various degrees of left. You know the slant before you pick up the paper. You can account for it.

American media has built a myth of objectivity, or at least of being a so-called “neutral voice”, around itself; Minnesota Public Radio news even made “No Rant, No Slant” their motto for a while, and it’s not much different than the mythology American media built for itself over the past hundred years or so. In my freshman year journalism class,

And it’s never really been true. Some journos do in fact do their best to separate their personal views, of course – I’ve got nothing but respect for the best of them.

Many journalists also do their best, but inevitably reflect the fact that their entire frame of reference is left-of-center. Their education, their workplace, their social circle, are an ecosystem where some variety of The Left is the old, current and future Normal. When they confront a different point of view, they can seem a little like Jane Goodall venturing out among the gorillas.

And when things are chugging along like normal, who cares, right?

The New Abnormal . But then something pops up that threatens the order, and not in a good way. What then?

The media has been rightly seen as slanted to the left for close to fifty years. With the rise of talk radio and alternative news 30 years ago, you could sense that the “elite” media were starting to give up on the pretense of balance and detachment. The notion of the “neutral voice” has been

But with the election of President Trump, the floodgates got dynamited.

The “neutral voice”, isn’t.

“Oh, Mitch – you and your hyperbole”.

No. Not at all.

The Gatekeepers Speak: “On the Media” is a production of WNYC Radio in New York. It’s a public station, one of the flagship station in the National Public Radio chain. Like a lot of NPR productions, sometimes it’s excellent. Sometimes the smug rolls off it like fog off a loch.

And sometimes, it accomplishes its mission – which in the case of “On the Media”, is to serve as the exposed id of the “elite” media in this country.

With that in mind: this show was broadcast on December 1, 2016 – probably as fast as could be put together on NPR timelines. It had four segments:

1. The first gazed navel-ly about “how the media should cover President Trump“. Because conveying the facts and letting the audience make up their own mind was presumably not good enough anymore.
2. How talking about Trump “Normalizes” him – unless the media changes the rules when discussing him. This featured reprentatives, not from The Nation and Slate.com or Buzzfeed or Samantha Bee. No, they were from the NYTimes and Washington Post. That led to another segment…
3. How the language itself needs to be understood, and harnessed.
4. And, lest the foregoing was too oblique for the casual listener, a segment linking the (as yet unstarted) Trump administration to Putin’s variety of autocracy, and laying out the imperative for the media to use it’s power to prevent “Normalizing” the president-elect.

And the media’s behavior in the three and a half years since has mapped to that template, as the media has grasped at every possible straw to try to “take down” the President.

We didn’t even need to get this leaked to us, like ‘Journo-list’ – although I suspect I may have been the only conservative listening to that groaningly pompous program, and I suspect that’s WNYC’s assumption as well.

TL:dr – At least some of the people at the apex of the “layers and layers of gatekeepers” have abolished the old rules of journalism, publicly but yet internally, as re Donald Trump.

The “elite” media’s entire coverage of Trump over the past four years, on every issue, has followed the template that’s suggested, sub rosa, in the four On the Media pieces above.

Will the rules change back when Trump leaves office? Of course not – the media had the same general attitude toward Republicans, conservatives and the issues of the right for a generation before 2016.

But the institutional imperative to use the media’s power toward political and social ends? That’s not going to end.

Distrust, but verify. And then, almost inevitably, if some smidgeon of partisan politics is involved, distrust some more.

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?

During last Fridays press conference with Gov. Walz, the prospect of a statewide “Shelter In Place” order, rumors of which have been percolating for a while, got broached. The concept of “essential workers” – people who are allowed out and about without getting hassled – got broached.

Some were obvious – first responders, healthcare workers, people who work in grocery stores, pharmacies, in the supply chain, and similar businesses.

One of the reporters asked “and journalists?”

“Of course”, Walz responded, to a smattering of clubby chuckles.

But the questions keep popping up, especially on journos social media: they see themselves as genuinely essential.

Let’s ignore whether journalism is what journalists say it is, anymore – more on that in a piece coming up tomorrow morning.

The extent to which journos seem to need to think of themselves as class above and beyond the proles strikes me as a little unseemly.

I’m asking:

When you hear journalists scrambling to get themselves counted as “essential” workers, rather than mere lumpen proles, what jumps to mind?

— Mitch “Socially Distant” Berg (@mitchpberg) March 23, 2020

The four options in the poll strike me as about even.

It’s your turn!

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.

I get that the Coronavirus is The End Of The World As We Know It.  I watch the media so I’m fully informed.  But I’m also puzzled by the behavior of Liberals.
Went to the store yesterday, saw shoppers hauling carts full of bottled water.  Wait – I thought plastic water bottles were killing the planet.  I thought we were supposed to be using Nalgene or stainless steel. What are you Liberals doing with them? 
And I thought Cheryl Crow spoke for all you decent people: one sheet of TP per session, to save the trees that eat CO2 and thereby prevent global warming.  There are 500 sheets on a roll of TP.  You’ve got enough in that cart for 6,000 dumps.  How long a siege are you preparing for?
Joe Doakes

I keep trying to tell people – do your panic shopping a few years before the panic. It’s much easier.

Gary Heyer is running for MN House in HD50B.

Sia Lo is running for the GOP nomination to take on Betty McCollum in the Fourth CD.

Patrick Neville – a survivor of the Columbine Massacre, and a Colorado State Representative – is pushing a bill that’d allow qualified Colorado school staff to carry their legal firearms for self-defense:

“The only thing that is going to stop murderers intent on doing harm is to give good people the legal authority to carry a gun to protect themselves and our children,” Neville said in a statement, according to The Hill.

“More of my friends would still be alive today.”

The bill put forward by Neville, a Republican, would let teachers with concealed weapons permits carry guns at the state’s schools in an attempt to halt future shootings.

Neville introduced the same bill last year, which failed.

“Unfortunately, the current system continues to leave our children as sitting targets for criminals intent on doing harm,” he said.

Big Left, of course, only grants a platform to the right survivors.

But this sort of thing needs to be pushed in front of the public early and often.