Jim Fleming – a lawyer and good acquaintance – wrote on Facebook (and I’m quoting with permission):
“Well, the CDC says . . . .”
Every time someone starts a discussion with me, using this language, I steel myself against the loss of good humor. I do not trust the CDC. Period. Why? Because it is primarily a political organization, which sings the song of those who feed it the most bread. Proof?
Well, try this. In 1995 Criminology Professors Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, published the 1993 National Self-Defense Survey that argued that Americans use firearms to defend themselves (from display gun – no shooting to pull gun and actual shooting with fatal effect) on the order of over 1 million times each year. (Actually they said more likely two to three million times per year).
Of course the anti-gun lobby went absolutely batshit crazy and numerous attempts were made to discredit Kleck and Gertz. Results? Lions – about 11, “Christians” – 0. Kleck and Gertz repeated their studies several times with the same results. Numerous studies attempting to discredit them, were unsuccessful. The part the CDC played in all of this?
“In 1996, 1997, and 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted large-scale surveys asking about defensive gun use (DGU) in four to six states. Analysis of the raw data allows the estimation of the prevalence of DGU for those areas. Estimates based on CDC’s surveys confirm estimates for the same sets of states based on data from the 1993 National Self-Defense Survey (Kleck and Gertz 1995). Extrapolated to the U.S. as a whole CDC’s survey data imply that defensive uses of guns by crime victims are far more common than offensive uses by criminals. CDC has never reported these results.” Forbes magazine, April 2018, author Paul Hsieh..
Now, in 2013, Father Obama (the smartest man in the world – just ask him) yet again ordered the CDC to conduct a study and this time “get the numbers right!” So, eating the bread and clearing its throat to sing, the CDC ordered The National Academies’ Institute of Medicine and National Research Council to conduct the survey. They did, and they came back and reported that, “Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence”: Matching the results found by Kleck and Gertz, lo those many years before. “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”
Obama was outraged, primarily because he was going around telling everybody that it was not true. So,he ordered the results buried. (In the old days, they simply killed the report writers to silence their tongues, but modernly that is frowned upon) And the results were buried, from that day forward, until recently.
Moral: Just because officialdom spews a line of bullshit at you, does not, in any way, mean you have to lap it up like mother’s milk. Being an American, patriotically vigilant about liberty and justice for all, is hard goddamned work. It requires objective, critical thinking, every day. The herd cannot and will not do this. Those who do not run with the herd get really good at it.
Don’t be part of the herd. . .z . . .
We’ve got an awful lot of people in this country – including way too much of the media – who think “guy in a white coat” = “science” – and, by extension, “political appointee boss of guy in white coat” – “science”, too.
And the terrible job out schools do at teaching critical thinking is going to be an even bigger problem in 20 years than it is today, as all those Sander/AOC/Omar supporters become the generation that actually controls things.
…but we can afford to send a kid to blow the leaves off the sidewalk around the Rec Center, which is closed because we are all staying home for fear of $1,000 fine. Joe Doakes
Kevin Williamson puts it well: Politics (in the larger sense – settling society’s matters by means of voting) is the least effective means of allocating resources there is.
Ten years ago, First Ringer and I did a series of anniversary stories about major events in World War 2. I’m re-running, and updating, them on their 80th anniversaries.
It was seventy years ago today that World War II came to Norway and Denmark.
As with the previous episode in this series, the Invasion of Poland, history has spawned all kinds of myths about this campaign.
Norway and Denmark, like many other smaller European nations, had actively embraced the idea of neutrality as their best defense against huge potential enemies like Germany, the USSR and, believe it or not, France and the UK. Indeed, that was what “neutrality” meant, in the full legal sense of the term, for countries that embraced it; they could not distinguish between liberal democracies like Britain and fascist dictatorships like Germany; they had to treat all nations as the same, and all belligerents in a war as equally culpable.
This, believed the Danes and Norwegians, was their best shot at avoiding war; taking absolutely no side in the conflict.
And it’s one of histories great accidents that in Norway’s case it didn’t turn out to be true, at least legally. Winston Churchill noted that much of the steel that ran Germany’s war machine came from iron ore mined in northern Sweden, and exported via train to Narvik, Norway, and thence shipped to Germany. Churchill hatched a plan; to send a brigade of British soldiers to occupy Narvik first, and work out the diplomatic details with the Norwegians later. And so in the days leading up to April 9, 1940, the British embarked a brigade of infantry onto a couple of cruisers and got ready to send them to Norway.
The Germans got there first.
They had engineered a pretty elaborate surprise attack; they put most of their troops on warships, fast cruisers and destroyers, rather than on regular transports and landing ships. They also staged the world’s first major airborne assault, sending the paratroopers (Fallschirmjäger) to capture Norway’s major airport and, they hoped, King Håkon and his cabinet.
King Håkon VII
The German surprise attack wasn’t a complete surprise; British intelligence got some word out in advance. A Polish submarine, the Orzel, which had itself escaped the conquest of Poland only eight months before, sank a transport off Lillesand, and a British sub damanged a cruiser full of troops. And one group of German ships encountered the Norwegian patrol boat Pol the night before the invasion, as the ships were staging to launch their assaults in the morning. They sank the Pol, whos captain became the first fatality of many the next day.
But it was a home-field game for the Germans; Denmark was on their own border, and Norway was much closer to Germany than to the UK or France.
Despite the three naval actions the day before, the word was slow in getting to the governments in London and Oslo; the Norwegian government, realizing they had no hope of preserving peace, ordered an alert – which, being far too late, did little good – and started packing up the nation’s gold reserves (which did succeed).
And so on the morning of April 9, a coordinated six-point assault with elements of six infantry and mountain divisions simultaneously invaded the six most important cities in Norway. Two German battlescruisers carried elements of a Mountain Division to Narvik, well above the Arctic circle, destroying two of Norway’s ancient “battleships”, the Eidsvold and the Norge, leaving a few dozen survivors out of crews totalling 300 men. Other ships landed troops at Trondhjem, Bergen, Kristiansand and Egersund; the biggest detachment sailed up Oslofjord to try to capture Oslo, link up with the paratroopers, and try to decapitate whatever command and control Norway had.
German tanks land in Oslo
And so the Germans essentially drove into Denmark, and debouched from ships and planes into Norway. The Danes, having a tiny military, indefensible terrain, and no real chance at defense, worked out an armistice quickly that enabled them to keep at least some small degree of autonomy under German rule – which would hold for the next couple of years.
For the most part, the strikes on Norway went off with surgical assurance and with little overt resistance; Norway had nearly disbanded her military, and had only very recently realized that pacifism needed some form of defense; they’d begun building a few new destroyers (to replace vessels commissioned in the 1890s), and bought fighter and anti-submarine planes from Britain and the US – although by April 9, only 12 British-built Gloster Gladiator biplanes were combat-ready.
A British-built Gloster Gladiator, flown by Lt. Dag Krohn.
All 12 were destroyed by the end of the first day – although not before shooting down several German planes full of paratroopers first.
But for the key part of the German plan – the capture of King Håkon, his cabinet, the Storting (Parliament), the gold reserves and the legitimate government of Norway ? The wheels came off, unpredictably, bright and early.
The biggest of the German invasion forces stormed into Oslofjord on the morning of April 9. Lead by the heavy cruiser Blücher, the force included two other heavy cruisers, three destroyers, and eight other ships crammed with German infantry. Norway had very few formal defenses – but the Oscarsborg fortress, sitting in at a narrowpoint in the fjord, was one of them. The commander of the fortress, Colonel Birger Eriksen, sensing trouble, had put his troops on alert on his own initiative, disobeying an order to stand down.
Oscarsborg Fortress, in Oslo Fjord. Today the fortress is preserved – its barracks are now a hotel. You bet your life it’s on my agenda when I finally get to Norway.
And at 5:15AM, his searchlights illuminated Blücher; his fortress’ main battery, two 11-inch cannon that’d been installed in 1892, engaged the cruiser.
One of the two Oscarsborg 11 inch guns.
Two hits blew a turret off of the cruiser, and forced it to stop – leaving it a sitting duck for an 1890-vintage torpedo, fired from a glorified log flume on shore, which caused Blücher to tip over on its right side and sink, ablaze, killing 1,000 sailors and soldiers, including many specialists and administrators who were to take over the running of the Norwegian government.
Blücher, ablaze, capsizes in the Drobak narrows
This blocked the fjord, preventing the force from getting to Oslo long enough for the King, Cabinet, Parliament, and the gold supply to evacuate.
The Germans needed Håkon and his Cabinet; if they could be captured and induced to capitulate, it would mean that Germany controlled Norway’s legitimate government. And so they sent an elite force of paratroopers in a convoy of commandeered civilian trucks to try to intercept Håkon’s convoy as it fled into the interior.
And so Håkon and his government managed to escape into the interior, where they led Norway’s tiny, hardscrabble Army in resistance for nearly two months, before evacuating from Tromsö aboard a British cruiser on June 7.
Norway thus became the only country conquered by Hitler to never surrender to the Nazis. Håkon, leading Norway’s legitimate government (no country ever recognized, even by the dubious standards of world diplomacy, Vidkun Quisling’s puppet regime) at the head of over 20,000 troops in exile, 50,000 troops in the underground, and the 22,000 men and hundreds of ships of Norway’s merchant marine.
It was five years to the day later that Håkon returned to Norway at the head of his military (escorted by the US 99th Infantry Battalion, made up of Norwegian-speaking GIs from Minnesota, the Dakotas and Michigan) in 1945.
———-
As I’ve done throughout this series, I’m here to debunk myths.
There are several in re the war in Scandinavia.
No Pushover: While the popular history has it that Norway rolled over quickly for the German attack, the fact is that not only did Norway never surrender (as noted above), but the campaign became a bit of a quagmire, at least initially, for Germany. The initial invasion used six divisions and parts of a seventh, and still couldn’t conquer the whole country.
German troops, under fire from Norwegian troops in rural Norway.
To make matters worse for the Germans, the British expeditionary force originally slated to invade Norway ended up arriving in Narvik after the Germans – to be seen as liberators and rescuers. The British navy task force delivering them, led by the battleships HMS Warspite, wiped out the German naval force at Narvik, including ten destroyers – a blow from which the German destroyer force never recovered throughout the war.
German Berndt von Armin, wrecked at Narvik Fjord
The Allied ground force – including British, French, Norwegian and Polish-Army-In-Exile forces – drove the Germans out of the city, and held until evacuated in June. The Norwegians operating outside Narvik, under General Fleischer, delivered the first tactical defeat suffered by the German Army in World War II.
Polish “Podhalanska” mountain troops with German POWs at Narvik
Farther down-country, the Norwegians – again, mostly gun-club “reservists”, with French and British troops in support- delayed, and then halted, the German advance up-country during the campaign around Namsos, which was finally overcome only through the lack of Allied air support and, finally, the fall of France.
As the quagmire dragged on, the Germans got desperate, carrying out terror-bombing attacks on Nybergsund, Andalsnes, Molde, Elverum, Kristiansund, Namsos and Narvik.
Narvik blazes after German terror bombing
The last Norwegian army unit fighting in Norway didn’t cease organized resistance until June 10; Norway resisted longer than than of any of Hitler’s other conquests.
June 7, 1945: Crown Prince Olaf returns to Oslo. His bodyguard is noted Norwegian commando Max Manus – about whom more soon.
Resistance: Tens of thousands of Norwegians escaped Norway; fifty thousand more fought in some capicity or another in the Resistance. The Milorg achieved some spectacular successes, including the destruction of the German “Heavy Water” supply during the Vemork raid. Germany stationed a total of eighteen divisions in Norway on occupation duty during the war – partly testament to the importance of Germany’s bases, which supported U-boat and air raids on convoys crossing the Atlantic and especially those supplying Lend-Lease supplies to the USSR – and also to the effectiveness of Norway’s resistance. It was the highest ratio of occupation troops to civilians anywhere in Europe.
Denmark resisted as well; indeed, given the more difficult terrain, the Danish resistance was especially crafty, adaptible and ferocious. And both nations pulled off the incredible; during a three-week stretch in 1943, the Danish resistance managed to smuggle 86% of Denmark’s Jews to safety in Sweden, after word got out that Hitler was about to abrogate the terms of Denmark’s armistice and round the Jews up for extermination.
Danish fishing boat en route to Sweden with a hidden cargo of Jewish refugees
Norway similarly got 75% of its Jewish population smuggled to Sweden, albeit in less dramatic fashion. Both nations’ resistance groups are listed collectively among the “Righteous Among Nations” at Yad Vashem.
Exile: Among the Norwegians and Danes who escaped to fight onward, many distinguished themselves. The Canadian government, using airplanes Norway had bought from the US but were not delivered, set up a training base for Norwegian pilots, “Little Norway”, near Toronto. The Norwegian pilots served with distinction; 331 and 332 Squadrons, flying Spitfires, became among the highest-scoring squadrons in the Royal Air Force late in the war, flying air cover over the Normandy invasion, the liberation of Holland, and the crossing of the Rhein River.
A row of 331 Squadron Spitfires at North Weald airfield. The squadron’s letter code “FN” was random – but happened to coincide with the squadron motto, “For Norge” – For Norway.
At sea, Norway’s huge merchant fleet was a huge part of the Allied effort to first keep Britain from starving, and then to support the invasion and liberation of Europe. Beyond that? Norwegian crews on British-built torpedo boats and gunboats, and two British-built submarines – the Uredd, lost in a minefield, and the Ula, which sank more enemy tonnage than any other Allied submarine in the Atlantic during World War II – vexed the occupiers up and down Norway’s long coastline.
HNoMS Ula, highest-scoring Allied submarine in the Atlantic in WWII.
Lessons Learned: Norway has always had a reputation for big-L “liberalism”, which it passed on to its descendants in Minnesota.
But it learned its lesson, too. During the Cold War, when faced with an enemy historically even worse than Hitler (remember – Norway and Turkey were the only NATO nations to share borders with the USSR), they backed up their innate pacifism with a big stick.
NNoMS Kobben, which spent the Cold War watching Soviet ships and prowling the fjords.
Although the nation has about the same population as Minnesota, it built up a sizeable navy to defend its long, craggy coastline from invasion – and turned virtually its entire male population into an army. Norwegians served in a system similar in many ways to that of Switzerland and Israel, keeping their weapons at home, ready for the worst. The nation’s military was trained for guerilla warfare; a hypersecret branch of Norway’s special forces spent the Cold War years building the infrastructure to make another occupation of Norway a horrible and bloody thing for the next round of enemies.
Norwegian Leopoard tanks on exercises in the Telemark, 1982.
For it’s part, the Danish military after World War II developed a reputation for fierceness; Danish troops serving in Bosnia/Herzegovina were reportedly among the most aggressive in smacking down Serb aggression. It’s worth noting that Danish special forces – the Jaegerkorpset, among the most admired special opertions forces in NATO – accompanied the US in its initial invasion of Iraq, along with those of Poland, another nation that had learned the hard way that freedom needed fierce defense.
As we confront our nation’s own tribulations, we’d do well to remember the examples of the people of Norway and Denmark.
Update 2020: A few years of genealogy have given me a deep appreciation of the era; my great-grandfather’s hometown was a conduit on the route from Norway to Sweden, smuggling spies, shot-down allied airmen, Norwegians trying to go to fight, and Jews escaping deportation. Looking at the geneology books for the area, a group of people with the same name – not an uncommon one in that part of Norway, but in a small area nonetheless – were recorded as members of the resistance.
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
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.
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 whompolitics matters an awful lot. And so most cities are simultaneously a) blue, and b) suffering disproportionally from the Covid plague.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
(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 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.
