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.
That John Feinblatt, kommissar of Everytown for Gun Control, wasn’t trying to highlight the intellectual vacuity of the gun control movement when he wrote this:
“While there is much we don’t know about COVID-19, this much is clear: Guns don’t make you safer from it. Because despite what the NRA would like you to believe, you can’t shoot a virus.” – @JohnFeinblatt, president, Everytown for Gun Safety https://t.co/qE36WmA7So
— Everytown (@Everytown) April 6, 2020
…but if he were, it’s hard to see how he’d have written it differently.
The GOP-controlled Senate passed an Insulin bill yesterday…
…but apparently they didn’t give House Majority Leader Ryan “Uncle Tom” Winkler the adulation he so craves:
My son has Type 1 diabetes. It was poor form to express myself as I did, and for that I am sorry. But after months in which Senate Republicans blocked the emergency insulin bill, it was also poor form of them to claim credit alone after we are all on the edge of a deal.
— Ryan Winkler (@_RyanWinkler) April 7, 2020
And what is he, er, “apologizing” for?
This little outburst:
Looks like Majority Leader @_RyanWinkler didn’t like our message today on Insulin. “Character is what you do (when you think) no one is watching.” #mnleg #Insulin4All pic.twitter.com/V7siWMZu53
— Minnesota Senate Republicans (@mnsrc) April 7, 2020
He’s flipping off Senator, and Doctor, Scott Jenson – on of the most moderate Republicans there is, BTW.
This is what half your neighbors voted for.
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:
“States of Emergency” are like catnip for government. Transparency rules get “relaxed” in “everyone’s best interest”, so government can “get things done”.
Of course, it’s not all “Emergency” stuff getting done. The Saint Paul City Council is jamming down an exquisitely expensive rework of Ayd Mill Road – a road that rides like an Andean goat path, whose repaving has been held hostage as the Right Crowd tries to get it turned into their pet path, a bikeway with one lane of car traffic in each direction rather than the current two-ish, at at least quadruple the cost.
And…whatdya know, the dog ate the public hearings.
This is life in a one-party town with an “emergency”.
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.
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:
The Bad Angel
Let’s all give the good angel a boost, shall we?
Maybe I’m missing them, but doesn’t it seem as if the media is curiously short of stories on how the shutdown is affecting the Little People? The joke headline is “World Ends, Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.”
As the economy shuts down, aren’t a lot of those people hurting? I would wager the number of out-of-work women waitresses vastly exceeds the number of men waitresses. How come we’re not hearing about those people?
I noticed it again this morning. I had to run up to the office for a couple of things that could not be done remotely. Off-ramp bums are still out there, but there’s virtually no traffic and no one’s willing to roll down a window to get within six feet of them. They’ve got to be hurting, and they’re already homeless. Where’s the media love for them?
When the media abandons its normal inclinations in favor of reporting only stories about the Bad Orange Man, it makes me suspect a political agenda.
Joe Doakes
And to think that people – the ones who didn’t think it was a joke to begin with – think that the shutting down of “Journo-List” ended media collusion.
A reader emails:
Several months ago, when white, urbanist homeowners were busy advocating for rental housing for everyone else, I would ask why. Why would we advocate for renting over ownership? I never got a good answer- it was determined to be mostly racist to ask the question, which to me seems to be more of a racist answer than the question is.
Anyway, now with COVID-19 shutdowns, I started to see this hashtag pop up- #cancelrent
I searched the hashtag on Twitter. More than 80 within the last hour.
The biggest complaint seems to be that it is now suddenly wrong for someone else to earn money by “doing no more than allowing you to have a place to live.
Great, then it’s settled. Can we stop building luxury $2000 per month apartments and go back to building single family homes or at least make the apartments that are being built condos or both?
I’m a little concerned that the generation that thought milk came from cartons, now thinks housing, healthcare, and benefits descend from the skies in velveteen treasure chests on the backs of unicorns.
It’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s brilliant:
You just knew this was coming, didn’t you?

The only thing separating “progessives” from “tyrants” is opportunity.
Does this infringe on Second Amendment rights?
Churches are closed – did that infringe on First Amendment rights?
Do we believe the Founders intended God-given, inalienable rights to be subject to the whims of the Chief Executive declaring an “emergency?”
Joe Doakes
I can’t speak for the collective “we”, but this blog does not.
I’ll point out that the statement (from Oakdale Gun Club) has at least a whiff of private property owner’s discretion – which this blog supports.
That being said, think about this for a moment: until 2015, it would have been perfectly legal for a Governor to order the confiscation of firearms in a state of emergency; see New Orleans after Katrina. Minnesota’s gun rights groups fought and won that battle in the 2015 legislature. If you think things couldn’t be worse than they are now, you’ve not been paying attention.
If you’re a gun owner, and not involved in your area’s 2nd Amendment group (like this group in Minnesota), you need to be. Now.
As the Covid pandemic, and its attendant panic-buying, started, I noted that there was a good news, bad news thing going on.
The good news? Americans had learned a thing or two about disaster preparedness.
The bad news? They learned it from The Walking Dead.
Tangentially related? Everyone whose idea of “preparedness” involves some variation of “bugging out for the boonies” might wanna rethink that, before a real emergency hits.
Rhode Island wants to start going door to door looking for New Yorkers fleeing the pandemic’s hot spot.
It’s probably unconstitutional, and it’s probably going to get shot down in court…
…long after the pandemic has retreated into the past.
But be advised – the locals are not amused.
The Reverend Nancy Nord Bence led “Protect” MN for four gloriously inept years.
In those years, she never – not once – made a statement about guns, gun owners, gun crime, self-defense, gun hardware, gun laws, the Second Amendment, its history, its jurisprudence or its application that was simultaneously substantial, original and true.
This blog spent four years calling our her constant prevarication and fabulism. The content never ended…
…well, until she “left” PM last month.
And now, we’re moving on. At least for a while. “Protect” MN has an “interim” director:
Lest anyone was in doubt about “P”M’s place in the Minnesota Non-Profit/Industrial Complex, Mueller was an executive at “Planned Parenthood” for ten years. She’s got a background in “Public Health”, although apparently not the kind of pubic health that’s of any use during epidemics.
Welcome, Ms. Mueller. When you start lying, we’ll be right here waiting for you.
By the way – about that “if you’re in a home with guns and feel unsafe, reach out…” bit?
What if you’re in a home without ’em and feel unsafe? Or feel safe because you have ’em? Can I call?
I’ll try to invite her on the NARN.
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.
…only by a musician that hasn’t been a complete waste of time for most of his career:
NPR does what journalists actually should, and provides the needful – a list (and playlist) of all the songs referenced in “Murder Most Foul”.
(And before all the Billy Joel fans start beefing – Joel’s had two good moments in his career – and “Piano Man” was neither of them. There’s this song – which he wrote for Ronnie Spector, who covered it with the E Street Band in the background…
…and one whole, glorious album where I managed to mostly forget it was Billy Joel doing the singing.
And with that, I return to this blog’s official status quo: Bob Dylan is an eccentric genius, and Billy Joel is a talented douchebag.
Governor Walz unveiled a Social Distancing Violators Stasi.
Er, I mean a Social Distancing Violators hotline.
I’m gonna report the Green Line.
From the American Heritage dictionatry, the word “Distillation”
With that definition in mind: this article in the Atlantic is as pure a distillation of Berg’s Seventh Law as rhetorical chemistry will allow.
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.
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