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Lies, More Lies and Damned Lies

By December 17, 2020January 30th, 2021Commentary

The IB was in unusually prevaricatorious (I know, that probably isn’t a word) form yesterday, even for him.  I think it is because he knows he is clueless and he knows that his orders, and the revisions he announced to those orders yesterday, are as rational as a Timothy Leary LSD session.  How do I lie to thee, sayeth he, let me count the ways, since I obviously can’t count anything related to the epidemic.  You can count on this, a tsunami of mind-numbing verbiage that leaves one feeling like the cartoon character wandering through an endless desert, hallucinating that the end is in sight, that that oasis is really there.  Bad news, when you wake up the IB will still be Governor and if you live in Minnesota, you will still be subject to his inane and fatuous orders.  The question and answer session was notable yesterday because there was just the slightest more pushing from the normally compliant press corps on whether these orders make any sense.  Usually the press sits around like the kids in Oliver Twist, holding up their bowls and asking “May I have another (lie) sir”.   And you have to watch this session to hear the incredible stream of consciousness rambling from message to message and to watch the shifty eyed performance of our fearful leader.

In terms of actual actions, they are pretty hilarious and completely devoid of rationality.  Bars and restaurants can do limited capacity outdoor dining.  Uhhh, this is Minnesota.  The IB tried to say that the industry asked for that and a reporter quickly made him drop that misleading statement.  His vacuous economic commissioner acknowledged that it wouldn’t help 99% of restaurants.   Gyms can reopen at limited capacity.  Elementary schools will be encouraged to reopen to real learning by mid-January.  They should all be open now, but he is owned by the teachers’ unions.  You can socialize with one other household.  There is zero data that in any manner any of these things contribute significantly to spread.  Maybe they do, but the state is too incompetent to figure that out.  The health commissioner tried to say, well yeah, there aren’t many primary cases from bars and restaurants, but you have to remember there could be lots of secondary and tertiary ones.  But of course, they have no actual data demonstrating that; they are hypothesizing and flailing around for any lifesaver for their ineptness.  And the socializing restriction is pure totalitarian Nazi, Chinese Communist, Stalinist behavior.  Completely unacceptable in a constitutional democracy and definitely unconstitutional in our country.  I strongly encourage you to socialize as you see fit and to definitely at Christmas celebrate in whatever way you think best.

First, let’s talk for a minute about the “pause”.  Our leaders now are all about framing and euphemisms.  I can absolutely one hundred percent guarantee you that they sat in a room and trying to come up with the best way to describe literally telling people that they couldn’t see their own family members who don’t live in the same household.  And I can ensure you that “pause” was intentionally chosen because it didn’t sound as bad.  We have been living with the IB’s nutty orders for ten months; that is not a “pause”.

Next, I have to note my favorite lie–defined as saying something as truth when you know it isn’t.  He said, the epidemic is “not slowing down”.  Five minutes later, a reporter challenged him saying that the state’s own data shows cases and hospitalizations are decreasing.  He said ” I didn’t say it is not slowing down”.  That is how blatantly he thinks he can lie and get away with it.   My second most favorite lie, Minnesota is repeatedly recognized as having the best data of all states.  I think I debunked that earlier this week, but I also want to note that nowhere have I seen anyone ranking states’ data and saying Minnesota is the best.

We got the usual blaming the virus, blaming our neighboring states, blaming the federal government.  It is all their fault that we have cases in Minnesota and again, we hear that other countries have done better.  I don’t know what data he is looking at, but one lesson that can pretty clearly be taken is that all countries, regardless of mitigation attempts, are pretty much ending up in the same place, certainly the countries comparable to the US.  The exception may be parts of Asia, but even that isn’t clear, and may be due to much greater levels of pre-existing immune responses, and in terms of cases, is certainly due to far lower testing levels.

He has taken to hiding behind the health care system, saying he has to protect them and they are telling him he needs to do these things.  This is just another method of evading his responsibility, which is consider the overall effect on the population, rather than indulging his passion for coronamonomania.  He called this a 100 year pandemic, which it isn’t.  1957 was almost certainly far worse and if other epidemics were treated like this one, CV-19 would be pretty far down the list.

Look, one more time, here is the real truth.  These case surges come and go, almost certainly because there is a pretty narrow (fortunately) band of environmental conditions that CV-19 thrives in.  Mitigation measures don’t have much impact.  Why not just acknowledge that?

In the actual session announcing his gift of less restrictions on the peasants and in the press conference, the IB said that our case surge wasn’t as bad as our neighboring states and that we came down faster, ostensibly due to his orders.  Covid Clarity has done a better job than I could of visually giving the lie to these lies.    (Twitter Link)

 

 

Join the discussion 9 Comments

  • Jason says:

    Thank you, Kevin, for providing some commentary on our MN leader who seems to come straight out of Oz- A man truly “behind the curtain” fiddling with dials and levers to see what works. All the while using a big voice and blanket tactics to make us think he’s this overwhelming figure. We need more and more citizens that will pull back the curtain with truth and facts, instead of governmental spin doctors!

  • Ganderson says:

    I may have posted this here before, but here in Massachusetts our very own IB Charlie Baker has taken to telling folksy stories about ‘friends of his’ who ignored his orders and wound up with the Covid. In addition, his heath department is sending us text messages instructing us on the proper way to celebrate Christmas. The “journalists” at his pressers don’t seem interested in confirming these tales.

    One other thing: the media has been absolutely disgraceful throughout- the big TV networks are all panic-porn all the time, but even our local news radio station is in full crazy talk mode. The report I heard this morning was as if it were April again (or at least what they told us April was going to be). Shameful.

    I will defend Governor Walz, though, (and I posted a version of this over at Powerline), there is a long tradition of winter drinking outside in Minnesota- when I was in high school (a high school whose name is a synonym for ‘not all that bright’) a favored spot was on top of the hill overlooking the ninth green at Town and Country Club. I can’t remember if we social distanced or not.

  • David Krieg says:

    Are there any lawsuits using evidence like this to bust the foundation of Walz’s over-reach? I read the “Findings of Fact” in the Lynd, Minnesota restaurant owner’s lost court case. Out of desperation, and in the name of fighting for what’s right, she opened her restaurant against Walz’s unconstitutional e.o. The basis of the judge’s decision was the propagandized “Covid is a killer!” It was a biased, partisan decision, ignoring facts.
    There is so much more data about this virus now but nothing about how Walz, et al. is handling it has changed. It’s heart-breaking and aggravating to watch the collateral damage from the insane shut-downs.
    Action against this is way past due.

  • Orenv says:

    Maybe Turkey and family gatherings are what stopped the peak infection. Thanksgiving indeed.

  • eclecticmn says:

    Your data for post Thanksgiving is clearly in error. The experts said there would be a post Thanksgiving surge in cases but your chart shows a decrease. They similarly predict a post Christmas surge. Please change your data to match the experts. it’s science!

  • Geoff M. says:

    We have a real winner here in Michigan with Whitmer. When she instituted another lockdown in the 2nd week of November she issued restrictions on gathering sizes and urged people not to travel for Thanksgiving. When it was apparent that people didn’t obey her directions, she then said that because all of the traveling and family gatherings, she was braced for a spike in cases post-Thanksgiving.

    On December 18, she then announced another (big surprise) extension to most of her restrictions, but said that because cases are dropping she was lifting some of them now. She then had the temerity to claim that the drop in cases was because people listened to her and did “what was needed” over Thanksgiving. This overlooks the fact that our Rt values started dropping in mid-October, well before her restrictions, plus the fact that the post-Thanksgiving “spike” never happened (here or anywhere else.)

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