The University of Helsinki gives climate activist Greta Thunberg an honorary PhD in Theology .
The Babylon Bee should sue for trademark infringement.
When Reality Is Absurd, Parody Is Pointless
5
Category Archives: Science
Ripped From The Headlines Of Junk Pop Culture
Is there anything “climate change” (TM) can’t do?
Like, spawn a zombie apocalypse?
No, it’s no the Babylon Bee:
Of course it’s Berg’s Seventh Law in effect; most adherents to the Religion of Climate are pretty much the Walking Intellectual Dead already.
The “Party Of Science” (TM) In Action
I was down at the State Capitol yesterday morning for the Gun Owners Lobby Day.
While there, I ran into a bunch of legislator friends, including former Representative, now Senator Eric Lucero.
Who told me this story, which I’m pleased to pass on to all of you now.
Anyone get the impression Senator Mitchell was a “Meteorologist” at a failing small-market TV station before becoming part of the DFL machine?
Maybe Steve Carell studied her before doing “Anchorman?”
Career Opportunity
Is there a career option as solid in the long term as being a leftist alarmist, whether one is never, ever right or merely always wrong?
No. There is not.
New Feudalists Vs. The Free Market
Remember Compact Fluorescent Bulbs?
Government and the expert class all but brought them to your house and forced you to change out incandescent bulbs at gunpoint. Government tried to jam them down with by force of law, notwithstanding their cost (to purchase, and to dispose of), and their many other drawbacks.
And then, just about the time the jamdown was complete, the free market came up with the LED bulb: cheaper, better light, easier to dispose of (and they last longer, so there’s less need to dispose of them) and they use even less energy.
Point, free market!
That same expert class is saying we need to switch to electric vehicles to “save the planet”.
Steven Hayward at Breitbart spells out how there’s no rational way to look at this as anything but returning the world to feudalism.
We’re already getting there, under “unusual” (for the moment) circumstances.
Of course, yet again, the free market may well have a better answer – more sustainable (especially if society kicks its unscientific superstition about nuclear power), more affordable, and capable of keeping the world, not just the top 10% of it, mobile. More on this in the future.
Watch to see how the would-be ruling class tries to gundeck hydrogen power.
Continue readingCloud Control
Senator Amy Klobuchar thinks the stakes of this election are very, very high:
Sen. Amy Klobuchar was slammed Tuesday for appearing to suggest that voting for Democrats in the November midterm elections could help thwart hurricanes and the effects of climate change.
The evidence is all around us: Democrats not only think their voters are stupid, they are counting on it.
Cranking The Screws
If it seemed to you that the Administration and Dems jammed down the “Inflation Reduction Act” – an agglomeration of “Build Back Battered“ and “Green New Deal“ policies – really really hard?
You were probably right. It’s because people are losing interest in “climate change“:
mericans are less concerned now about how climate change might impact them personally — and about how their personal choices affect the climate — than they were three years ago, a new poll shows, even as a wide majority still believe climate change is happening…Overall, 35% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the impact of climate change on them personally, down from 44% in August 2019. Another third say they are somewhat concerned. Only about half say their actions have an effect on climate change, compared with two-thirds in 2019.
The story is, in fact, more climatemongery, and goes on to try to re-bury the lede – but between the lines, the message is there; other priorities are taking over for people in the real world, outside the upper-middle-class progressive bubble.
And if people ever make the connection between the output of the “green/sustainable/equitable“ mafia policies, and the depression in their standard of living, that’s going to be a big problem for the greens.
Poor people don’t solve problems.
Stuff Linguistics Geeks Love
Linguists determine cattle in the UK develop local accents:
In a major breakthrough in bovine linguistic research, experts have confirmed that cows moo with accents distinct to their herd, the BBC reports.
John Wells, professor of Phonetics at the University of London, examined West Country farmers’ claims that their beasts were mooing with a local twang.
And the “twang” is, the researchers say, influenced by the local human dialect.
The accent noted is that of Somerset – in the West of England. Where, as Jimmy Carr notes, if you want to nail the accent, just sound like a pirate:
Does this work in America?
I mean, I can’t be the only one wondering of Kamala
The music of the spheres
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres
-This Is My Father’s World, hymn
Music is mathematical. You hear it instantly when a talented musician opens their mouth to sing, or when they play their instrument. Our brains recognize the consonance when notes are played within the same key. That is because the frequencies of notes in the scale form integer ratios.
Octaves are a 2:1 ratio, thirds are 3:2, fourths are 4:3 and so forth. These combinations of notes are pleasing to the ear.
Integer ratios don’t occur by chance in random noise. We instinctively respond to the intent behind the notes, the intelligence that deliberately put the notes together in that order.
Our brains are wired to look for patterns, though. Even when we hear seemingly random noise, such as these radio emissions from around Jupiter, we can’t help but go looking for those integer ratios and the notes behind them.
But, while Nature may not play the same notes that Bach knew, integers have a surprising way of popping up in nature, if we know where to look.
The Fibonacci Sequence appears often where a swirl is present, such as in the pattern of a snail’s shell, or spiral galaxies, or arrangement of seeds in a plant.
Integers are also found in something called orbital resonance. This is where two satellites have orbital periods that form integer relationships. For instance, the Earth and Moon have a 1:1 relationship. The Moon spins once on its axis for every trip around the Earth. (This is why one side of the Moon always faces the Earth.) Pluto and Neptune have a 2:3 relationship. Heading back to Jupiter, the moons Ganymede, Europa and Io have a 1:2:4 relationship. It’s not exactly magic, it just turns out that these are gravitationally stable orbits.
The heavens sang again last night. It was quite a performance, though, perhaps not surprisingly, not a random one. The interval between successive lunar eclipses can be 1, 5 or 6 lunar months. The music of the spheres indeed. Bravo to the Composer.
Pay To Play
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
An individual who kills an eagle can be fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in jail. An organization, $200,000. Penalties increase for subsequent offenses.
But a windmill energy company will be paying less than $30,000 each for dead eagles, with no jail at all.
Quite a deal: a bulk discount on dead birds and immunity from imprisonment. I guess that’s the price Mother Nature pays for saving the planet from global warming.
Joe Doakes
I fully (and only partially satirically) expect electric car drivers to get away with traffic tickets for running down pedestrians.
Trust but Verify
Some exciting news from sunny California… The power of the sun has now been harnessed.
Renewable electricity met just shy of 100% of California’s demand for the first time on Saturday, officials said, much of it from large amounts of solar power produced along Interstate 10, an hour east of the Coachella Valley.
While partygoers celebrated in the blazing sunshine at the Stagecoach music festival, “at 2:50 (p.m.), we reached 99.87 % of load served by all renewables, which broke the previous record,” said Anna Gonzales, spokeswoman for California Independent System Operator, a nonprofit that oversees the state’s bulk electric power system and transmission lines. Solar power provided two-thirds of the amount needed.
It is an achievement. However, Canary Media points out that there’s a bit more to the story…
Understanding the full picture requires first unpacking how CAISO calculated the 97% figure. California’s in-state renewable energy production was calculated as a percentage of energy demand after accounting for transmission losses. This demand figure omits demand met by rooftop solar, which generates power for more than 1 million California customers. Because large hydropower does not qualify for the state’s renewable portfolio standard, it is also not included in this figure.
Another important caveat: The figure does not account for all demand in California, even leaving aside demand met by rooftop solar. CAISO’s system does not include the areas served by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, two publicly owned utilities that together make up roughly 10 percent of electricity sales in the state.
April 3 was a big wind and solar day for California, coupled with relatively low demand due to mild spring weather. Across the whole day, wind contributed 24% toward meeting demand and solar contributed 22%, followed by large hydro at 8% and geothermal at 4%. Add in minor contributions from biomass, biogas and small hydro projects, and the total renewable percentage for the day was 61%.
But even on this banner day for renewables, 39% of CAISO’s demand was met by non-renewable sources. And even at the 3:35–3:40 p.m. interval when CAISO hit 97% non-hydro renewables, other power plants in the state were running, including gas, nuclear and hydro facilities.
That means California still burned enough gas to meet about 15% of demand at the same moment that it had enough non-hydro renewable production to meet 97% of demand; again, the excess was exported to other states.
Adding large hydro and nuclear into the CAISO mix during the renewables peak yields a maximum of 107% carbon-free power that day, as shown in the chart below. During the three hours when clean electricity was being produced in excess of demand, California was exporting its carbon-free energy to neighboring states, almost certainly offsetting fossil power.
The Party Of #Science
So over the weekend, DFL representative Kelly Morrison, and other DFLers, ran a loooong series of tweets from her district (SD45, the far west ‘burbs) endorsing convention on Saturday.
Looks like a typical bunch of urban DFLers; masked up like bank robbers:
I mean, their healthcare decision, their business. I don’t tell them what to do, and they don’t tell me…
…oh, Right.
But then we move on. Her staff was certainly with the program…
…as was her (presumably) husband or significant other…
(I mean, I have no idea who he is, or about Ms. Morrison’s personal life).
But wait – apparently you go to the other corner of the building, and – apparently, the Russians have invaded, because Covid has vanished – or at least, the masks:
And then – people with masks shunted to the back of the shot?
And then, posing cheek-to-cheek with Congressman Phillips, with their masks scientifically dangling from the ears – perhaps waiting for word of Russian invasion?
Good thing the #science is so settled…
Panic in Donkville
It’s almost impossible to put enough lipstick on the porcine Biden administration. All the polls are in the crapper and the only numbers that are going up are in the grocery aisles. Meanwhile, as Joel Kotkin notes, Biden and the rest of the party are doing their best Thelma and Louise imitation, especially where the environment is concerned:
The cave-in to the greens has increased the Democrats’ economic vulnerability, particularly in the wake of Russian aggression and the continued role of China as the world’s dominant greenhouse-gas emitter. The well-funded American environmental elite lack the grudging sense of realism of their German counterparts, who have been forced to reconsider some of their energy policies in light of the invasion. But in resource-rich America, the green grandees still oppose boosting fossil-fuel energy supplies, despite 80 per cent of voters, and an equal percentage of Democrats, favouring the use of both fossil fuels and renewables. Public support for Net Zero / the Green New Deal hovers around 20 per cent.
You don’t want to get crosswise of the ol’ 80/20 rule, but somehow the Donks have pulled it off. And it’s got the old Clinton hands up in arms. Back to Kotkin:
Cultural issues represent another fault line between the bulk of the electorate and the tin-eared elites of the party. Democrats’ have embraced what former Bill Clinton strategist James Carville scathingly labels ‘the politics of the faculty lounge’, such as support for the increasingly discredited Black Lives Matter movement and its calls to ‘defund the police’. This idea may be beloved at places like Harvard, but among the less elevated mortals it is widely unpopular, even among minorities, including two of the nation’s Democratic African-American mayors, Houston mayor Sylvester Turner and New York City’s Eric Adams.
Voters view crime as the second-most pressing issue, after the economy and inflation. Here again the survey results are equally distressing for the progressive agenda. Voters, according to one recent survey, blame the Democrats for the current crime wave by a margin of two to one. Moderate Democrats, like retiring Florida congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, herself a refugee from Vietnam, found her support for legislation that would penalise undocumented criminals got her labeled as ‘anti-immigrant’ by the party’s dominant progressive mob.
Now it may surprise those of us in Minnesota that Black Lives Matter is increasingly discredited; Esme Murphy and the KARE Bears haven’t mentioned it much. But it should surprise no one that someone like Stephanie Murphy would lose support of the party apparat; on the bright side, she has thus far avoided being called a Russian operative, but it’s early and she might still get the full Tulsi if she’s not careful. Closer to home, it will be interesting to see how self-styled moderates like Dean “Everyone’s Invited” Phillips navigate the electorate.
There’s a long time between now and November, but it’s difficult to envision a reversal of the trends. One should never underestimate the ability of the Republican Party to blow it. Still, the Donks find events in the saddle and all the narrative engineers at their disposal can’t change the prices at Hy-Vee or Holiday. For nearly half a century, Joe Biden has wanted to be president in the worst way. And he’s getting his wish.
The Next Battle
David Strom, writing on Facebook, sums up what I’ve been wanting/trying to say for much of this past 23 months:
Follow the science is a bullshit phrase, not because science itself is bullshit, but because science at best can only provide input and data on what are not scientific questions.
Science is a branch of knowledge seeking. It is not equipped to provide answers to what are in fact judgment calls. Public policy is at its root about making judgement calls–weighing risks and rewards, costs and benefits, and of course balancing competing rights and goods.
And in fact, no actual scientist believes that the scientific method is, in and of itself, superior to the other methods of seeking knowledge: history, logic, math, philosophy, and so on . They’re all just different tools to similar ends.
Science can help us better understand risks and rewards (when done well, with good data, and the right questions), but it can’t help us weigh those and come up with a “right” answer. If you have ever had a difficult conversation with a doctor you understand this. Doctors give you information upon which you make medical decisions, but in the end they ask you what you want to do based upon your own set of values.
When somebody tells you to “follow the science” they aren’t just making claims about what the science say (and in many cases it isn’t clear), but also to accept their values about how to weigh the costs and benefits.
Consider this extreme example of how important values are in making judgements about behavior (not a public policy example):
Alex Honnold is the world’s best “free solo” climber, and is admired by millions for his skill and grace. He is also, by any measure that values survival above all else, utterly insane. This is true of extreme athletes in general.
Science can tell us nothing about whether what he is doing is admirable or is just off his rocker, but if you watch any interview of him he seems perfectly rational–he just values preservation of his own life as less important than the things he gets from performing his craft.
It’s no different for a ballet dancer or football player, who both sacrifice their body and endure horrible pain to create their art/sport. They balance the risks and rewards based upon their own judgement of what is important. And obviously the answers vary by what individuals value most.
I’m going to emphasize this next bit:
Public policy exists in that same realm, although on a different scale. And public policy in a pluralistic society means that decisions about such matters are made with an eye to balancing the judgments of millions of people and finding artful compromises that garner enough support to be maintained. It’s why we have elections.
“Follow the science” is nothing more than a bullshit way to tarnish the values of people who have different visions of the good society. Science doesn’t speak to values and morals. Ask Josef Mengele. Science is just one of several means to get knowledge. A useful way. But no scientist can use it to tell you whether Monet is a great artist or not.
And yet we have bred a generation and change that believes science…
…no, conclusions given by people in real or rhetorial lab coats = morality.
Science Evolves
Exhibit 1: Now, the CDC is saying openlly…
…things that got people suspended from social media, and ostracized by Big Karen, six short months ago.
Science!
I’m Old Enough To Remember…
…when saying this sort of thing would get you a 12 hour time-out on Twitter.
“Science changes!”
Yep. It changes into things that used to get you ostracized.
See: Galileo.
Even Odds
When President Brandon talked about the rising price of fuel and the hob that’s playing on the world economy at the big “climate” summit in Scotland…
…I asked myself – has he forgotten that his administration canceled Keystone XL and revoked exploration permits on federal land?
Or is he just assuming that Democrat voters aren’t bright enough to remember it?
Feeling Strangely Scientific
I caught this the other day.
So let me get this straight: a virus transmitted almost exclusively by being expectorated into the air by infected people coughing, is spread less by people who aren’t coughing as much?
What manner of sorcery is this?
Yet again, science seems to be bearing out my knee-jerk assumptions, by the way.
I’ll Stipulate In Advance…
…that actual science is about skepticism, about diligently questioning one’s assumptions, about relentlessly searching for the facts on either side of them, pro or con.
All of that being said?
I’m astounded at how many of my knee-jerk responses to Covid turned out to be scientifically valid.
Natural immunity is significant and long-lasting.
The virus is spread via the air – not surface contact.
And the latest among them? The J&J vaccine appears, despite some early hysteria from the US government, to be the better bet against Delta – in addition to its initial sales pitch, it’s efficacy against hospitalization and serious symptoms (which, having reason to believe that natural immunity was itself a serious hedge against infection, was my biggest goal), appears to be better at allaying the Delta Variant than Moderna or Pfizer.
It’s not quite a Berg’s Law, but it’s getting there.
“Science”
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
New CDC guidelines on masks. We’re told it’s necessary because we must follow the SCIENCE. Let’s review how we got here:
In March of 2020, when the Covid panic really took hold, there weren’t enough test kits specific for Covid. States were told to count all deaths from respiratory illness (pneumonia, influenza, emphysema) as Covid deaths even without a test. And Congress passed the CARES act, which gave hospital administrators a financial incentive to over-count Covid cases to receive the 20% higher reimbursement rate. The number of deaths attributed to Covid shot up, giving rise to fears of a Surge which would overwhelm hospitals and morgues. It never arrived. The refrigerated warehouse sits empty.
House arrest, mask mandate and social distancing were imposed by Governor Walz with vague references to “science” but no scientific studies were cited to support the measures. The Peacetime Emergency remains in effect. Governor Walz retains the authority to ‘adjust the dials’ governing every aspect of life, at whim.
In July, the FTC approved RT-PCR test kits. Reported case numbers skyrocketed as more people tested positive but hospital admissions for confirmed cases of Covid did not. Instead, the graph of Covid resembled the graph of seasonal influenza – peaks in winter, gone in summer. The national charts of Covid cases versus mask mandates show mask mandates made no difference to Covid cases.
By the election, President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed had delivered results but mask mandates, social distancing and lock-downs remained in place as case numbers rose (following the same graph as seasonal influenza). Thanksgiving was cancelled. Christmas was moved outdoors. No studies were provided to support the orders. In December, the FDA issued emergency approval of Covid vaccines. It also withdrew its request for emergency approval of the RT-PCR test which some critics had said resulted inover-counting of cases to artificially inflate the numbers to justify extreme measures.
On April 14, 2021, Governor Walz extended his restrictions again but on April 29 he ended many of them. No new scientific studies were cited to support the change. Covid case numbers continued to fall, following the pattern of seasonal influenza.
On May 1, 2021, the CDC stopped counting ‘breakthrough’ cases of Covid among vaccinated persons The obvious result is Covid cases are only counted among un-vaccinated persons, which gives rise to claims that the vaccine is working when the truth is we have no numbers to support that claim because we stopped collecting those numbers.
The change is significant because it makes a year-to-year comparison impossible. In 2020, millions of Covid cases were reported but was that because there were millions of infected persons or millions of false positives? In 2021, far fewer Covid cases will be reported but is that because the vaccine works or because we no longer count Covid cases in vaccinated persons, making them the statistical equivalent of false negatives? And where are the scientific studies which justify mask mandates, social distancing and distance learning? Where is the SCIENCE?
It’s difficult to make public policy recommendations when the severity of the threat is unknown because the numbers are unreliable but as far as I can tell, the new CDC mask mandates make no sense and are not supported by any scientific justification. The verifiable evidence supports the conclusion that Covid is a bad flu and should be treated like one – quarantine the sick, liberate the healthy. The best Covid site on the web is Healthy Skeptic. This post from last April is a good summary.
Joe Doakes
If only there were a group – in or out of government – devoted to providing Americans (and their policymakers) reliable, unvarnished, unpoliticized information.
But I dream.
Urban Progressive Privilege: My Scientific Research Project
Title: Analyzing the Propensity of Modern Feminists, Progressives and the Media to Overstate Accrued Virtue.
Aim of the Experiment: The aim of the experiment is to test whether there is any activity approved of by “Big Left” that a woman can do, that will not be turned into a example of supreme personal moral virtue.
Hypothesis: It is predicted that, provided the activity is one promoted by “Big Left”, that there is no activity a woman can carry out that will not be referred to as “Brave”, “Courageous”, “Fierce” or other such superlatives.
Background Theory: It is believed that the rhetorical “Bar” for an action to be considered an act of personal moral courage, when the action is:
- Congruent with the values of modern political and social “progressives”, and
- Performed by a woman
…has dropped to the point of nearly being indistinguishable from any normal activity.
Methodology: The research team:
- Observed an extensive list of actions
- We specifically looked for examples of morally unremarkable, mundane, even counterproductive activities not being referred to in morally superlative terms
- We documented the results.
Results: We found no examples.
Discussion of Results: In comment section
Conclusion: There is literally nothing a woman can do (provided it’s congruent with the values of Big Left) too unremarkable, mundane or even destructive that won’t be called ‘Brave’.
You Were Warned. Fat Lotta Good It Did.
Politicized “Science” in Public Health is to “Science” as Scientology is to “Science”. .
Case in point: Vaping was a godsend for millions of smokers who wanted to quit smoking tobacco, but couldn’t.
Big Left, riding a wave of prohibitionism driven by (pick one) (or two, or all of them, I don’t know, it may be entirely appropriate):
- Self-righteous dudgeon, or
- A pathological hatred of people enjoying themselves, or
- The aesthetics of putting something in one’s mouth for fun, or
- A need to control everyone’s behavior
…drove a wave of rules and statutes that treated vape like cigarettes.
And the “unintended” consequences?
Well, what do you think?
When San Francisco voters overwhelmingly approved a 2018 ballot measure banning the sale of flavored tobacco products — including menthol cigarettes and flavored vape liquids — public health advocates celebrated. After all, tobacco use poses a significant threat to public health and health equity, and flavors are particularly attractive to youth.
But according to a new study from the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH), that law may have had the opposite effect. Analyses found that, after the ban’s implementation, high school students’ odds of smoking conventional cigarettes doubled in San Francisco’s school district relative to trends in districts without the ban, even when adjusting for individual demographics and other tobacco policies.
The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics on May 24, is believed to be the first to assess how complete flavor bans affect youth smoking habits.
“These findings suggest a need for caution,” said Abigail Friedman, the study’s author and an assistant professor of health policy at YSPH. “While neither smoking cigarettes nor vaping nicotine are safe per se, the bulk of current evidence indicates substantially greater harms from smoking, which is responsible for nearly one in five adult deaths annually. Even if it is well-intentioned, a law that increases youth smoking could pose a threat to public health.”
In other words: to “safeguard” people from addiction to a chemical that’s about as dangerous as caffeine, they drove people from a delivery system with minimal, largely edge-case dangers, to one that literally involves drawing concentrated air pollution into the lungs.
It’s almost too obvious to be a Berg’s Law: when you mix science and politics, you don’t get scientific politics; you get politicized science.
New York Bookstores And Suburban Gas Stations
We’re a week past the lifting of the mask mandates. But as Miranda Devine notes in the New York Post, confusion reigns:
This is how confused New Yorkers are about masks. At Barnes & Noble Wednesday, no mask was required to browse the bookshelves, but on the other side of Union Square, the Strand bookstore had mandated masks for all shoppers. Practically everyone inside both stores was wearing a mask, anyway, despite CDC advice that you don’t need one, indoors or outdoors, if you’re vaccinated against COVID-19.
Considering that more than half of Manhattan has been fully vaccinated, something is very wrong with the way we are processing risk. The trust between public health experts and the public is broken and now no one knows what to believe.
Why is that? Devine has a culprit:
We can blame one man above anyone for this parlous state of affairs: Saint Anthony Fauci, the coronavirus czar once hailed as the most trusted man in America for his leadership through the pandemic. He has flip-flopped on every piece of advice, never admits doubt and tells lies with brazen indifference.
True, Fauci is a dissembler for sure. But the weirdness must be just in places like Manhattan, right? But what are we seeing here in Minnesota?
Mitch shared a few examples yesterday. Here is what I’ve seen: I get a cup of coffee every morning at a gas station near my home. While I live in Ramsey County, I am not a St. Paul resident and there is no mask mandate for our community. The mask requirement signs are all taken down. But based on what I’ve observed, just about everyone who enters the station, at least in the morning rush, is wearing a mask. I started watching this behavior midweek. In the two days I observed, I saw about 25 people enter the store. Almost all of them were still wearing masks. The only guys who consistently didn’t wear a mask going into the store were the guys delivering milk. And, um, me.
Is there a health benefit to still wearing a mask, especially if you’re vaccinated? Or is it theater? Back to Devine:
It was just on Tuesday that Fauci admitted it was not science but theater that kept him wearing a mask — even double masking — despite being fully vaccinated for almost five months.
“I didn’t want to look like I was giving mixed signals,” he told “Good Morning America.” “But being a fully vaccinated person, the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low.”
So it is. But even then, he squirted out more octopus ink:
“I think people are misinterpreting, thinking that this is a removal of a mask mandate for everyone. It’s not,” Fauci told Axios. “It’s an assurance to those who are vaccinated that they can feel safe, be they outdoors or indoors.”
And Devine isn’t having it:
Fauci at this point is being deliberately confusing. He is feeding the mental disorder of vaccinated Karens who cling to their masks. He needs to tell them the truth and stick to it.
I agree. And don’t expect Governor Walz to help straighten things out.
V-K Day
Mr. Mask Mandate, he dead:
Gov. Tim Walz said Thursday he’ll sign an order Friday ending Minnesota’s statewide mask-wearing mandate following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance allowing fully vaccinated people to stop wearing masks.
Calling it a great day for Minnesota, the governor continued to plead with unvaccinated Minnesotans to get their shots to hold back the spread of COVID-19.
“So those peacetime emergencies are done and the business mitigations are coming to an end. I want to be clear it’s not the end of the pandemic, but it is the end of the pandemic for a lot of vaccinated folks,” he told reporters.
It’s the end of many things, actually — most importantly, it’s the end of Karen Nation enforcement and forcing shopkeepers and restaurateurs into indentured scolding, at least on this particular issue. Walz’s Nurse Ratched, Jan Malcolm, admitted as much:
“When things are no longer a rule or a mandate, they think therefore that everything is safe,” she said, noting that Minnesota still has a relatively high level of COVID-19 spread. “People may translate this guidance meaning that the pandemic is over.”
Malcolm said if it were feasible to keep a mask mandate just for unvaccinated people, “I definitely would have liked to see that. I just think that it’s not practically enforceable at this stage.”
I’ll bet she would have liked that. But apparently there is a limit after all. Maybe you don’t need to laminate the ol’ vaccine card.
The economic and social toll of the lockdowns is incalculable — how many families were separated, how many graduations were canceled, how many businesses were shuttered, how many of our elderly were consigned to death in nursing homes without being able to say goodbye or even have a final hug? Meanwhile, we’ve had the joy of experiencing Walz and his coterie treat our fair state as a protectorate. Now, suddenly, we say Goodbye to All That. The signs will come off the doors as soon as tomorrow, but the reckoning is about to begin.
A Ton Of Prevention Is Worth A Gram Of Cure
Went to Regions to visit a relative who is recovering from a heart attack. New Covid rules: only one visitor per day. Not one visitor at a time – one per day. If her spouse visits from 10 am – noon, nobody else can visit until 10 the next day when visiting hours start again.
Visitor must wear a mask at all times; must stay in the patient room, use the bathroom there; cannot bring in food or drink but must order from room service and pay by credit card; must leave by 8:00 pm and cannot stay overnight no matter how much the patient begs not to be left alone in the hospital.
Turns out it’s not only the hospital. Different relative dying of cancer in a long-term care facility cannot have visitors at all, not even with masks and social distancing. Might bring in Covid so she spends her days dying alone.
Covid, you see. Science. What am I, a science denier? Do I want people in the hospital to die? Do I want to kill old people in the nursing home?
Not necessarily. But heart disease and cancer aren’t the only things that people die from. People can die of loneliness, too, and from hopelessness.
Joe Doakes
In the meantime, some facilities have radically different rules. Some long term care facilities are pretty much open (with precaution similar to but less than the ones Jo described in the hospital, above); others, like Joe says, are in full blown lockdown mode.
Science!