Shot in the Dark

Tag: The Endless Emergency

  • Confidence

    When people have confidence in the ability and willingness of the government to protect them, they don’t buy guns to protect themselves. Second straight month of record gun sales.  Forget what they tell the poll takers on the phone – what does that sales figure tell us about the public’s confidence in the local officials…

  • Yeah, We’re In The Best Of Hands

    About a month or so ago, I wondered – why is the Minnesota Department of Health treating its “model” like the plans for a nuclear submarine? One guess – because it was cobbled together over the weekend by a couple of graduate students. Before Friday, March 20, Marina Kirkeide was a part-time research assistant at…

  • Science Fiction

    Pretend Covid is a Science Fiction/Fantasy story. *** President Trump is at the table with his senior advisors, discussing howto deal with Covid.  Suddenly, a being appears in the room.  Eight feettall, red, horns and tail, leering.  People scream, Secret Service tryto rush the President out but the doors won’t open.  They shoot but thebullets…

  • Models: Garbage In, Garbage Out

    I watched Governor Walz’s presser last night. My impressions (borrowing a bit from David Strom): Old And In The Way – The data used in this model is 3 weeks old. The pandemic is three months old in Minnesota at this point. That means the model is ignoring a solid quarter, almost a third, of…

  • A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words…

    …and a video is worth a million of ’em. Kevin Portnoy: What we’ve seen in California re Covid is that Big Left will keep moving the goalposts until they’ve gotten what they need – until they’ve “not wasted the crisis”. Now, say what you will about Minnesotans and the often-bovine sense of communitarianism that the…

  • You Get The Government You Pay For

    Campaign contributions for exemption. Nice. There is speculation that the revelation that the “World’s Largest Candy Store”‘s getting rated as “essential” because their owner is friends with and a donor to Waltz created optics that were starting to hurt Walz, and between that and the fact that Minnesotans are actually acting less sociallyi-distant than Georgians…

  • As Ordered

    Why is the Minnesota Health Department treating its “model” like it’s a state secret? Perhaps because it’s entirely possible it’s not so much predictive as coercive.

  • Techno Peasants, Arise!

    There’s definite technological and age bias in the Governor’s Stay Home order.Sure, curbside and drive-thru are open. But to pick up at the curbside, you must place an online order, and I can never make their menu website work. Old people are less tech-savvy. The order is age discrimination. And to go through the drive-thru takes…

  • Pass This Around

    Jax is sort of a family tradition. Not my family, per se -but my ex in-laws and their side of the family has celebrated their major milestones, including my kids’ major milestones, there for 50-60 years. And so I watched this: To continue one of Mr. Kozlak’s point – he may be able to make…

  • Shot In The Dark: Today’s News, Over A Month Ago

    With all due respect to Professor Glenn Reynolds – who may have done more than any single person to launch this blog, a third of a lifetime ago – I was observing that three of the biggest killers of the Covid plague, density, transit, bureaucracy and censorship, well over a month back. But they all…

  • Surprising Nobody (Who’s Been Paying Attention At All)

    “Unexpectedly”, Minnesota’s neighbors – well, at least the ones run by people who came up through the world of business, rather than public employment or the non-profit/industrial complex – are kicking Minnesota’s passive-aggressive tush at dealing with Coronavirus. You could look at it in terms of deaths per million (South Dakota is 1/3 Minnesota’s rate;…

  • Just One Life

    Governor Walz killed a man today.  He won’t be prosecuted for it. He’ssafe behind papers and attorneys and statutes.  But the man is dead byGovernor Walz’ act, same as if he’d done the deed in person. Governor Walz killed a health care worker today.  The dead man was laidoff from a hospital.  They couldn’t afford…

  • The Turning Point?

    The media and the Walz administration – pardon, largely, the redundancy – is waving around a bunch of polls by a bunch of left-leaning pollsters showing overwhelming support for keeping the state’s economy shut down until…um, they’ll get back to you on that. I’ve noticed that an awful lot of those supporting a vapor-tight lockdown…

  • Civil Disobedience

    Saint Paul barbershop, facing a life-or-death business decision, chooses life: In the shadows of the State Capitol, King Milan Barbershop had, for the first time in seven weeks, its lights on. Milan Dennie is the owner. “It’s my livelihood,” Dennie said. “I’ve been sitting here coming up with strategies and plans on how to open…

  • Government Is The Things We Do Together – Stupidly And Arbitrarily

    A Long Lake restaurant tries to put on a drive in movie, complete with take-out food with all the socially-distance, plague-aware trimmings. The state shut them down: Birch’s On the Lake has lost around 70% of its regular revenue while doing take-out only during the stay at home order. The owner came up with a…

  • Science!

    King Walz the First angrily denounced right-wing kook websites speculating that the newest plan to placate the coronavirus involved sacrificing virgins. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “Our plan is simply to have Joe Biden sniff their hair. It has been amply demonstrated that no person has died from coronavirus while having…

  • The Real Victim Of This Whole Crisis

    New York City – all five boroughs – have been the hardest hit part of the US, and in some ways possibly the free world, by Covid. The most densely packed city in the country and among the densest in the world, dependent on mass transit, jammed into tightly packed offices and restaurants and bodegas…

  • Safety First

    King Walz the First announced new emergency measures to combat the coronavirus. Effective immediately, anyone entering a store to purchase groceries must stand on one foot and flap their arms like a chicken. The evidence proves that no person has died from the virus while doing that; therefore, it is the only sure guarantee of…

  • Press Conference

    SCENE: THE PRESS natters away, focusing their cameras and exchanging black-market hair stylists, waiting for a conference with POLITICS, GOVERNMENT and REALITY. Shortly, the three enter the room and move to the podium. POLITICS – a dapper, 30-something man with CEO hair and a perfectly cut suit, steps to the microphone. POLITICS: Welcome, and thank…

  • More Of This

    The Minnesota GOP has had so many opportunites to grow a pair in recent years – budgets, bonding, single-subject-clause fights, and on and on. But hey – better late than never. Daudt’s in the House, of course – where the GOP is down by quite a few votes. But there have got to be some…

  • Epiphany

    A friend of the blog emails: My child is not going to public school. Now that we are doing home based learning, the school continues to provide the excellent education we expected. We have a high quality teacher who gives a daily schedule that has my child doing educational work, physical activity related to the…

  • Officer Friendly

    There’s a video of two Calumet County Wisconsin Sheriff’s deputies hassling a woman because her kids went to the neighbor’s house to play.  In response, the Sheriff posted this message:   The problem with both the video and the response is the attitude.  This is the kind of behavior that gets people upset at law enforcement.  …

  • Translating “Economic Meltdown” Into The “Urban Progressive” Dialect Of English

    Maybe now some of the “Shut it all down until there’s a vaccine and 50,000 tests a day” crowd will pay attention. Trendy Warehouse District restaurant “The Bachelor Farmer” – run by Mark Dayton’s sons – is one of those places a big swathe of MInnesota’s non-profit/indurial complex was hoping to have dinner in a…

  • One Of The Greatest Deceptions…

    …of the current crisis, is the perception that Big Left is pushing, that Covid can kill anyone, at any time. Now, just so we’re clear: I’ve got a parent in assisted living. I’ve got people in my close circle with immune issues and serious lung issues. I was working from home before it was mandatory,…

  • We’re All In This Together, In One Minnesota

    If you think fighting disaster with economic devastation is a bad strategery, this is what Channel 11’s weather talking head thinks of you: And Sven? When you go on to talk about the “sacrifices we are making”, don’t tell it to social media. Go to the small businesses who are arbitrarily shuttered and tell the…