Re draconian restrictions with a goal to “eradicate Covid with zero cases and fatalities”:
How long can this last? If it was up to the drunk-on-power politicians and bureaucrats who have found a winning electoral formula, health experts who have found relevance, and the deathly scared who have found a sense of safety (and, for some at least, the frisson of being a part of something big and important), the answer is “forever.”
It was written about Australia, where celebrity bureaucrats, power-drunk petty authorities and Big Karen have teamed up to create a post-freedom state (which, honesty, I expected to see in the UK, France and Germany long before Australia).
But it applies to Minnesota as well. As we may well be finding out the hard way, when (as I suspect) Governor Walz spins up another “state of emergency”.
Republicans pounce. MPR is reporting that GOP senators threaten another commissioner’s job, Jan Malcolm. Does this play in the next state of emergency? Perhaps yes.
Sen. Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, who had been a supporter of the commissioner, [says] that firing Malcolm is now an option.
But Abeler wants Minnesotans to decide for themselves whether to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
He said he opposes mandates or any heavy-handed efforts to get people to comply and that he believes Malcolm and the administration have failed to tell people the whole story.
“They had been behind encouraging, cajoling these employer mandates, the college mandates strongly, saying that the vaccines are safe and effective,” Abeler said in an interview. “But there are huge safety issues, which no one is talking about, and people should have the right to know that. That’s my simple request.”
I guess it’s lost on morons like Malcolm that thousands of healthcare workers, including doctors, pathologists, immunologists, virologists and surgeons, are refusing to take the jabs, even if it means their jobs. This is a double edged sword for the dictators, because there is already a shortage of nurses and to a lesser extent, doctors. Of course, it’s a follow the money scam. The government has ensured obedience from the big medical complex by giving larger payments for WuFlu related or allegedly related, illnesses.
The safety issues are not trivial. That’s why in the normal course of FDA approval the process takes a long time. For the sake of argument, suppose vaccines exist where safety concerns are at a minimum. There remains the problem that Covid is not going away, so year after year the call will go out to marshal citizens into mass clinics, still with the likelihood that vulnerable elderly will die of the disease. The economic and social costs (school closures, increased deaths from neglected treatment of other diseases, murder, suicide, auto accidents) are tremendous. Time to get real and accept that humanity will arrive at a new equilibrium with this pathogen.
From the linked NPR story Many Republicans have been regular critics of the Gov. Tim Walz administration’s handling of that response, however, which they contend has infringed on personal freedoms.
So it is NPR’s belief that Walz’s actions did not infringe on personal freedoms?
Even Walz and the DFL admit that Walz’s actions infringed on personal freedom.
What a shitty excuse for journalism.
Never trust NPR. Ever.
At some point last year, the DFL convinced itself that the best way to convince people that they had the best plan for fighting covid-19 was to forbid dissent from their plan.
It isn’t just that our elites are stupid, they don’t know that they are stupid, and they forbid the people from telling them they are stupid.
From the MPR article:
“She [Malcolm] and her team lead one of the most highly regarded public health systems in the country” – Susan Kent
She and her team were in trouble, not too long ago, for doing nothing about a massive backlog in reported abuses of seniors.
She and her team were caught taking cues from the Governor on what connections to make with the data they collect this last November.
So the bar must be pretty low for regard of the country, and Susan Kent.
Virologist Dr. Paul Offit has said what many pro-CDC people say when asked about the CDC’s past errors and malicious behavior (the CDC funded the Tuskegee syphilis program through the mid 1960s):
“I’m not saying that the government hasn’t done things that make one trust them less,” Offit responds. “Or that the CDC hasn’t made statements that were incorrect, [but] such is the nature of science. You do learn as you go.””
This is a category error. The CDC is not NASA. It is a political organization, it is about humans and human behavior, not physics. And human nature has no teleology, it is not improving.
The 20th century saw great improvements in our scientific and medical knowledge, it also saw science and medicine used to oppress and murder people at scales never seen before in all of history.
What does “highly regarded” mean in a world where Fauci praised the pandemic response of “Bowery Butcher” Cuomo? It was the CDC that told Cuomo to send covid infected back to care homes where the people most at risk of covid were housed.
MP, that Osterholm fella is highly regarded too.
I’m not saying that the government hasn’t done things…
One of the reasons blacks are vaccine “hesitant” is because of those errors, and especially that Tuskegee syphilis “error”.
How long can it go on? As long as they can find people willing to put up with it.
My employer is adopting a policy of vaccine or weekly testing. I’m looking for test locations to find out what it costs to buy a test. If I refuse to comply and they fire me, will work grind to a halt until they knuckle under and take me back? No. They’ll simply replace me. The new person will probably be a young Asian woman who’s happy to wear a mask, socially distance, take the vaccine and every booser, plus follow any additional rules they decide to impose (that’s who they’ve been hiring recently, seems to be a large applicant pool and besides, they make our diversity numbers look great).
I’ve been thinking about taking Governor Dayton’s “move out” admonition to heart, leaving Saint Paul for Arizona or Texas or Florida, somewhere warmer and more freedom-friendly. Looks as if that plan might be accelerated a bit.
“Or that the CDC hasn’t made statements that were incorrect, [but] such is the nature of science. You do learn as you go.”
What I get from that statement is that once Offit believes that a scientific consensus has been reached, the policies will be executed, and if disaster results, no one will be held accountable. The reason they will not be held accountable is that there was no way to reach a more correct decision than was made.
And that is a problem because science is about real features of the universe. These truths, like the value of the gravitational constant, exist apart from humanity. We discover scientific truths, we don’t create them.
There was nothing wrong with the Tuskegee syphilus project from a scientific stand point. It was a moral failure.
JD, I wasn’t born or raised in MN, so while I have good friends there, I don’t have any deep emotional attachments to the place.
That said, leaving was the very best thing I ever did. It took two jumps to land in safe haven, but the effort was worth it. I can not express the benefits of reading the daily newspaper, and not experiencing an unhealthy rise in blood pressure.
GTFO of there is my advice.
Bill P – the three biggest hold-ups are grandkids who live 1/2 hour away now but a nation away from The South; health insurance (can I afford it if I quit my job); and selling the house (where do I live before we leave the state for good).
These are not insurmountable obstacles, they’re mental barriers. Working on them.
Maybe you can help. What’s health insurance cost for husband and wife with lots of pre-existing medical conditions?
This is what NPR thinks about individual rights:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-constitutionally-speaking
More directly what NPR is saying: Individual Rights are counter-revolutionary, only the rights of the collective matter!
I pay for my own coverage. It’s $350/mo with a $3000 yearly deductible and a $25 co-pay for office visits. We’re covered for all major injuries and illness; I don’t have any health problems, but my wife takes maintenance meds which are very expensive if we have to buy them; 90% of the deductible goes towards those meds. Because my wife is listed as an employee, I write her portion off on my income taxes a business expense.
Of course this will change when we become eligible for MediScam not too far in the future.
I recommend incorporating yourself as an LLC, even if you don’t plan to practice privately.
Keep in mind: no matter where you go (barring a move to a leftist shit hole) you’ll save 25-30% on the state taxes you’re paying right now.
JD, you’ll also get a lot more for your money in the south than in the north. And AC costs less than heating, but do get a generator (we are waiting for ours). Look into Medishare. Just like everywhere else, expertise is in short supply, so if you want to get a new state license, I am sure you’ll be able to get a job here with benies.
Did anyone notice that people in general were blasé about Delta so now we have a scary Mu variant? Let the parade of deadly boogiemen commence!
Waittaminute there, jpa, what happened to epsilon thru lambda?
I guess they were merely blah…
Mac, thank you for that link.
These leftists are, although they don’t know it, and may not want it, advocating for a hard, geographical division of the country. They use the typical migraine inducing, pseudo-intellectual clap-trap (free speech is like gravity…no one can accurately describe the mechanics!) that is click bait to 90 IQ leftists that like to style themselves “the scary smart, reality based community”, but is found utterly indefensible with the most cursory test of logic.
The goal is simple. We will dictate; you will obey. Dissension is sedition; resistance is treason.
I’m beyond arguing with these people. I don’t wish to waste my valuable time testing their twaddle against logic. I simply do not want them to share a country with me; they are not my people.
They don’t really want White people to leave, they want to rule over them. As much as they’d like to believe that is a possibility, it’s just not going to happen.
I want a rho variant dammit, it’s my favorite Greek letter!!!
The biggest mistake I ever made, was leaving Texas and moving back here. But, like Joe, my in laws brow beat us so that their only grandchildren could be closer. They wanted us back so badly, that my father in law paid for the move, which I paid back about two years later. Had I known that my wife and kids were going to become rabid leftists, I may have said; “See ya!”
Update:
Picked up a prescription at the local Walgreens last night. Asked about Covid testing. Nice young lady at the counter said it’s covered by insurance (by law, she thinks), no limit on tests.
There are so many people who need weekly Covid tests for their jobs that Walgreens installed a special drive-through lane with an canister vaccuum system like the bank. Drive up, she sends me a test kit, I swab my nose, I put the kit in the cannister, she whisks it away to be sent to a lab for testing. Results in a few days.
Looks as if we have time for an orderly move South, not a bug-out. Worse comes to worst, I do my weekly nasal swab theatre, Health Partners rates go up next year. What a farce.