This Is War

Shizzle just got way too real:

This is getting personal.

Keegans was where I met some of the favorite arcs in my social circle: the NARN guys (Brian, Chad, Ben, Ed Morrissey, King Banaian, Michael Brodkorb), John Stewart and Marjorie Farnsworth Stewart and their kids Patience Stewart and Faith Worley , who at least started the process of meeting her husband Ben Worley (long story) there at a Trivia night one summer. It’s where I first met (socially, at least) David Strom and Margaret Martin, and Christopher K. Senn and Chris Neugent, where we were trivia regulars with Brad Carlson and Nancy LaRoche and Bill Charette and Guy Collins and Peg Kaplan and so many more, a place where Gary M. Miller and Bob Collins shared a table over a couple beers and some sports talk, where I met the likes of Tracy Eberly and Julie Hanson and Mark Heuring and Jacq Smith and Sean Michael and Diane Napper and Bridget Cronin, where I met Don Lokken after 20 odd years. where celebs like Mike Nelson and Lynn McHale’s husband rubbed elbows with a bunch of my other closest friends, and the last place I saw Joel Rosenberg and Sarah Janecek before their untimely passings, and…

…well, so many memories, it’s hard to catalogue them all.

Keegans – and the Savoy next door, both owned by the redoubtable Marty Newman – is closing after Tuesday night. Marty, like Terry (a Marine vet from Vietnam) and Virginia Keegan before him who founded the place, is a classic small businessman, is pretty much SOL.

The place was always jam packed – always – so let’s hear none of this “bars and restaurants close all the time” bullsh*t. This place was killed by the Governor’s ham-fisted quarantine combined with Minneapolis’ unicorn-driven small business policies.

This is a kick in the teeth.

I will be heading there Tuesday night. I guess that would be tonight…

Posted

June 30, 2020

Business, The Economy and The Markets, Minneapolis, Taxes

Mitch Berg

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Comments

86 responses to “This Is War”

Emery Incognito

July 2, 2020

@jfm: Sweden’s confirmed coronavirus deaths, on a per capita basis, are 50% higher than the US’s, and their death rate curve is climbing. This is a good thing?

At some point, people will realize that “developing herd immunity” is code for doing nothing and letting the virus keep killing lots of people until everyone who could ultimately be susceptible to dying from it is dead. This is a strategy?
justplainangry

July 2, 2020

Don’t let real science get in the way of SCIENCEtm. For the sake of brevity, I am not posting what Lindsey Rosales, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services said, but a quick summary via AmThinker.

Most hospitals require a COVID test before elective surgery. This means that patients coming to the hospital for a non-COVID reason are tested for COVID, and if positive are being counted as a “COVID hospitalization.” If a patient goes to the hospital for a new hip or cataract surgery, and happens to test positive for COVID, they are counted as a COVID hospitalization.
Emery Incognito

July 2, 2020

CFP Swiftee wrote:
DJIA Performance
3 Month
+22.88%

Say Tom — what are your YTD stock market returns. Keep in mind the S&P is down 2.66% for the year.
bosshoss429

July 2, 2020

Mitch;
The owner of Lloyd’s Pharmacy gave some pretty emotional testimony to the elected morons yesterday. Apparently, he grew up in the neighborhood, so that’s why he bought it.
bosshoss429

July 2, 2020

Hey Emery,

Might want to read up on your masters at the CDC have been doing with the virus “cases”. Although Gateway Pundit had this posted, the meat of the post came from both the Atlantic and the NY Slimes.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/07/huge-massive-cdc-fraud-uncovered-cdc-grossly-overcounting-active-china-coronavirus-cases-causing-states-keep-economies-closed-indefinitely/

It must be tough to go through life so clueless and wanting the government to run it for you. There are countries where they will do that. China, Cuba and Venezuela, come to mind first.
Emery Incognito

July 2, 2020

If there is one lesson to be learned from this pandemic is that leadership matters. I knew this in an abstract way, but, the absolute chaos this country is going through right now mirrors the absolute chaos that takes place in the Trump administration each day.
jdm

July 2, 2020

Interesting writing style: just go straight to the definitive, adamant even, conclusion without any of that argument building nor presentation of evidence. Does this work in Left-world?
Emery Incognito

July 2, 2020

Blaming everything on Pence is Trump’s only option at this point.

Well, actually doing a good job is also an option, I guess, but for some reason, not the preferred one.

BTW — loved your quick witted comment on >They Own These Towns< thread. Well done sir.
Emery Incognito

July 2, 2020

I wonder if Swiftee has figured out his market returns are not up “+22.88%“ YTD….
justplainangry

July 2, 2020

Class, are you ready for more SCIENCEtm? Please note, this is not a joke, this is what is passing for reality these days and what is used to gin up numbers.

A person, asymptomatic, tests positive for Wuhan flu. Their spouse, asymptomatic, tests negative. It is reported as: “Case Positive, Test Negative”. Boom! another Wuhan flu case! This just happened to our friends. SCIENCEtm!
Emery Incognito

July 2, 2020

Herman Cain, 74, now has Coronavirus. Not good.

Last seen at the Trump rally in Tulsa OK.
https://mobile.twitter.com/THEHermanCain
Emery Incognito

July 2, 2020

Wow, sounds like this guy hates America and freedom

The governor of Texas orders most residents to wear masks in public.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/world/coronavirus-us.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage#link-31087731
Joe Doakes

July 2, 2020

Sweden didn’t lock down. Sweden’s death rate is high. Death is bad. Therefore, we should lock down to avoid death. Stands to reason, right?

Well . . . no. Because Sweden’s non-lockdown death rate is also higher than the death rate in US non-lockdown states, meaning the lockdown isn’t the major factor in preventing US deaths.

Maybe the major factor is that the average age of the population in Sweden is older than the US and this virus kills mostly old people. Or that Sweden’s health care system provides different quality end-of-life care than the US system. Or maybe something we haven’t thought of, yet.

The lockdown argument is not logical, it only looks that way to people who are terrified of dying and grasping at any hope of delaying it. To the rest of us, it looks like the rest of life – a morass of conflicting possibilities with no clear path to success so we’re doing the best we can to muddle through.
Emery Incognito

July 3, 2020

The point is not that “doing nothing” yields roughly the same result as we’re seeing in the US. The point is that Sweden planned their approach against a backdrop of a much stronger safety net than we have.

The Trump administration had no plan, either in the abstract or for the pandemic they were warned about. We had no choice but to hide in our houses.
bosshoss429

July 3, 2020

Once again, Emery, you are proving your ignorance.
Trump didn’t tell people to hide in their houses. Feckless, Mussolini worshiping, left wing governors did. They also added to the death rates of grandma and grandpa by continuing to send infected people into nursing homes, against the clearly set guidelines from Medicare officials.
justplainangry

July 3, 2020

So the mystery continues to unravel. My wife actually listened to the entire 40ish minutes of the council meeting that questioned how 1 Wuhan flu case came to be recorded as 19. And in those 40 minutes she found this nugget – feds provide financial assistance to the state Health department. It was also VERY interesting the person from the health dept, a low level apparatchik who was there to provide clarity, did not know who authorized the revision to the case reporting methodology. If only there were journalists who would do, you know, journalism instead of activism, we may actually get this type of corruption and deceit out in the open.

But the bottom line is, ALL numbers on which any and all decisions regarding lock downs and virtue signaling are made are based on SCIENCEtm and politics. Science had been killed and buried, alongside the truth.
justplainangry

July 3, 2020

dang, it should read feds provide financial assistance per case to the state Health department.
Emery Incognito

July 3, 2020

The economy cannot thrive while there is a pandemic raging. I don’t know how this continues to be confusing. The “choice” between human life and economic dynamism was always a false one. Absent control of the virus, normal commercial activity cannot return.

Look at Sweden, the government may be continuing with its “head in the sand” crisis (in)action plan but both people and businesses are afraid, economic activity is down and the country has turned into an international pariah with border blockades from all its neighbors that managed to control the spread.

The head of the FED, Jerome Powell keeps telling the country this very fact.

The US has no strategy, just a president aiming for reelection avoiding giving bad news to voters…
justplainangry

July 3, 2020

Correction – 1 to 17, not 1 to 19 as I reported earlier. Not that it makes much difference.
This chopper for official use only

July 3, 2020

If the reprobates had any sense of humor at all, they’d tell their brainless believers it was time to wear a clown wig and floppy shoes to flatten that curve.

It would have the same effect on stopping bat flu spread as those stupid maskies, and we’d all get a good laff.

We could all use a laff.
Emery Incognito

July 3, 2020

Just a reminder that every wealthy nation is reopening and has the virus contained, except us.
Mitch Berg

July 4, 2020

False.

Germany, China and much of Asia continue to monitor troubling re-outbreaks.

And let’s not forget that the UK “contained” the virus with a per capita death rate over double that of the US.

“Things EI Says” is rapidly moving up even with “Things Dog Gone Said” as an air-tight anti-lock for determining factuality.
jdm

July 4, 2020

Hey, remember all the fun some of us had making fun of the orange man and his comments about hydroxychloroquine?

https://twitter.com/drdavidsamadi/status/1279044039950639104

Hmmm, health care professionals or the local trolls. Tough call.
Night Writer

July 4, 2020

EI is still a piker compared to playing the game, “Dr. Fauci says…”
Emery Incognito

July 4, 2020

@jdm You do have to admit, though, that it’s funny how quickly those pro-Trump apologists decide CNN is credible when they think the news favors Trump.

As the text of the story notes, the patients were not selected randomly, and they had other differences in their treatment regimens. The patients selected for hydroxy treatment also got double levels of steroids.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/health/hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus-detroit-study/index.html
Emery Incognito

July 4, 2020

Shiftee— still believes his market returns are up “+22.88%“ YTD

In reality he’s still clawing back to break even on his YTD market returns.

Pro tip — buy lakeshore, they don’t make anymore of it….
Emery Incognito

July 4, 2020

MBerg wrote: “Germany, China and much of Asia continue to monitor troubling re-outbreaks.”

In Germany, the virus is under control and the economy stabilized, and already opened in most cities. And yet, according to Trump Merkel is “stupid”…

This is the difference between having a leader that listens to experts, to having one that hides in bunkers.
jdm

July 4, 2020

CNN?
Emery Incognito

July 4, 2020

The tweet wasn’t sufficient — needed a bit more context.
justplainangry

July 5, 2020

Last week, the International Journal of Infectious Diseases reported that hydroxychloroquine cuts the death rate in half when it is administered to hospitalized COVID-19 patients soon after they are admitted.

=CNN?

{shrug}
Emery Incognito

July 5, 2020

@ MBerg: The number of Covid deaths per capita in the US is about 4 times that of Germany, which had less time to prepare and is closer to the infection epicenter in Europe. So this is an awful and abject failure. Facts are stubborn things. Unfortunately due to ignorance and lack of leadership the US death rate is likely to climb further in the next 2-3 weeks (there is a delay between new infections and deaths).

This is what happens when you have a competent government that takes the necessary measures to limit the damage from the pandemic. For a look at what happens when you don’t, just look here in the US.

The US’s coronavirus test positivity rate of 7.2% is higher than all European countries with the exceptions of Sweden and Ukraine, which indicates the virus continues to spread here. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ positive-rate-daily-smoothed?tab=table

Cases are a direct result of people being infected.

Our awareness of those cases is a direct result of testing.

We could do zero tests, and still have as many cases as we currently do.

Testing doesn’t cause a rise in cases.
Emery Incognito

July 5, 2020

Improved Link https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/positive-rate-daily-smoothed
Joe Doakes

July 6, 2020

“We could do zero tests, and still have as many cases as we currently do.”

Correct. And if we quit testing – and quit reporting the testing numbers – people would stop being terrified by the headlines. Life would go back to normal in a few weeks.

Total US deaths from Covid are about 140,000 -:- 330,000,000 total US population = .00042 dead of Covid (even using the phony inflated number). Expressed as a percentage = .042% of the US population has died from Covid, which is less than one-tenth of one percent. Rounded to the nearest whole number = zero.

Covid has killed zero percent of Americans. Each individual death is a tragedy but a disease that kills zero percent of the population is simply not a big deal, certainly not big enough to shut down the entire national economy. Trump was right in January – in setting national policy, it should be treated like the flu.

You can try to spin it as “number of cases” or “per capita deaths” or any other mathematical or statistical con game, but the fact remains that people can see for themselves there are no bodies in the streets and that’s causing massive disconnect between the Left’s insistence that We’re All Gonna Die!! and the ordinary life people live every day. Covid has become more of a laughingstock than global warming.

Masks and social distance are intended to “slow the spread” of the virus. Why do we care if it spreads, when it’s not killing anybody or even making them sick enough to overwhelm the ICU beds/ventilators, of which we now have a tremendous surplus? So what?

It’s a virus. It’s spreading, like the flu and the common cold and herpes and every other virus. Eventually, every single person in the United States will test positive for Covid. What will we do then?
Emery Incognito

July 6, 2020

I’m torn. Is refusing to wear a mask more like drunk driving or more like peeing in the pool?

One metaphor captures how serious the consequences are.

The other how dumb the argument is.

Is there a perfect metaphor?

If Trump had worn a mask at the start of this disaster and recommended that others do the same — ie led by example, he could have secured a second term, and saved tens of thousands of lives. But that was too much.
This chopper for official use only

July 6, 2020

The market surge really got under your skin, didn’t it E. Dimwit? hahahaa! Well, chew on today’s results…

3 Month
+24.86%

My portfolio is rosy and getting better every day. Tuff luck for low IQ slobs who “took profits” and liquidated in January. #Sad

And save your lies, little man. Claiming squatters rights at the marina outhouse isn’t my idea of “lakefront property”, and as we just closed another investment purchase last week, we’re good to go.
Emery Incognito

July 7, 2020

I see your still attempting to claw your way back to even. When you consider your loses on your missed compounded earnings—you have a bit further to go. Similar to Sisyphus…