Walz off

I am not a fan of Tim Walz.   I went back and read from this blog's archives of the end of May 2020 into the following June...

...when he let the Twin Cities rioting get so bad that multi-county curfews had to be imposed...

...on and past my baby's due date.

My baby was smart and waited until well into June to be born; thankfully with no need for emergency transportation.

Many places that we had been to as a family over the years were looted and burned.  Several of those places were totally destroyed.  $500 million dollars damage in the Twin Cities.

I've also seen the ways Walz has been devastating Minnesota since then, which accelerated once the Democrats took control of the Legislature for the "trifecta".  

And it's not just Minnesota; Minnesota is now a destination state for abortions and gender transitions. 

Walz and Harris are centering their campaign around "joy".  Walz has a very convincing jolly warrior act, partly because he's had a lot of training.  He is probably not an organically-grown candidate at all; I think he may have an interesting history with the teachers' union.  He certainly favors them now, despite increasingly dismal education outcomes, which are both bad and barely above the national average.

A few years ago, Walz said something about how if Minnesotans don't like living with immigrants, they should leave.  I have not yet unearthed the exact quote.

Anyway, when I see Harris-Walz, I don't see joy.  I see fire, destruction, and death. 

Activities

Dehydrated some cabbages.  Sewed a shower curtain.  Replaced the covers of various chair seats, re-using tacks from earlier armchair.  Put a second bar across a closet to support a laundry basket holding all of the family swimming gear.

Have also been watching the squirrels chew up all of the black walnuts and spit the shells onto the driveway.

The local homeschool association has been putting more effort into the diversity statement on their website than into providing accurate information about homeschooling laws or keeping the membership sign-up page updated.  Doubt that's going to end well.

Mother-in-law has been doing some interesting experiments with natural dyes...avocado pits to produce a rose pink.

Paper towel outlook: poor

After the Affordable Care Act was passed, I quit buying paper towels as a protest.  

That protest will be continuing into 2021, as our health insurance is about to increase by 16%, after increasing by 15% last time.  

There are also some changes to the provider network; the base network remains the same, but the insurance company has created an additional, extra-restricted network, and an incentive for people to use it:  a lower deductible.

This annual ratcheting-down of services just to keep the costs on the painful side of "affordable" is not sustainable, especially when health insurance is required by law to provide coverage for a number of services.

Turning things over

Sallie Borrink has a new community called Christian Women Seeking Truth going, with a mix of free and subscriber-only content from her.  She's a wise, mature Christian woman with a gift for searching out interesting and informative links.

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I've covered two more boxes with paper for the shelf, and I'm still working hard on my big project, which is now passing through The Stage Where It All Goes to Crap, and entering the Maybe I Can Still Stick the Landing phase. 

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I've also done a lot of organizing of children's clothing. A family at our church regularly hands down their children's outgrown clothing to us, and so I received two more bags to sort out and put away into our "kids' clothes pantry", which now contains sizes from baby all the way up to teenager.

Worth reading

After finishing Thomas Sowell's Race and Culture, I went on to Migrations and Cultures. Now I see there's a new article out about his life and work and ideas; I highly recommend it.

Sowell is 90 now, and much of what we're seeing in the news today is a direct consequence of people failing to listen to him in past decades.

Gov. Walz adds more dials

After directing all school districts to construct plans for scenarios of in-person, distance, and hybrid (a mix of both to reduce student density to 50% school capacity) schooling, Governor Walz finally unveiled his executive order for how schools can re-open in the fall.

It is based on the 14-day number of new cases per 10,000 in population, by county--which is very much a moving target.  It separates the older and younger students, so that the lower grades shift to hybrid or distance learning a step behind the higher grades, thus helping somewhat with the issue of parents needing school-provided child care.

There has already been a lot of confusion among adults about that 14-day number:  is it the total number of new cases over the 14 days, or the daily average?  The low numbers of the thresholds (in the few tens of cases per 10,000) imply that it's the daily average, but in the Safe Learning Plan, it is clear that they mean the total number. This article has a graphic showing where the counties currently fall in this scheme.

The devil is in the details, as usual.  The executive order allows school districts some discretion, but really only in the direction of being more restrictive, as it threatens intervention by state officials in schools that stay open where the numbers of new cases are too high. State officials may graciously allow schools to continue in-person instruction if a local outbreak happens but is concentrated outside the school.

Parents are allowed to choose distance learning for the entire school year, and teachers may request to work from home.

According to a FAQ, if a student tests positive, then they will contact trace, and request that all close contacts found stay home for 14 days.  Their definition of close contacts:

Close contact is when someone is within 6 feet of the ill person for at least 15 minutes.

From the Safe Learning Plan:

Close contacts are defined as someone who was within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes starting from 48 hours before illness onset until the time the patient is isolated

More than fifty close contacts from one individual may trigger a Testing Event, which is apparently a gathering for mass testing, with help from the state. Universal testing within a school community is also mentioned, if there's a big outbreak.

In the Safe Learning Plan, it is clear that they are thinking of sending the entire classroom home for distance learning if exposed. 

Minneapolis has already decided to go to all-distance learning for the year.  St. Paul is likely to follow.  The suburbs seem to be leaning toward trying the hybrid model.

Walz is a former teacher, by the way.

So, well, and Sowell

Minnesota's mask mandate began Saturday, by governor's fiat, but is being challenged by Republicans with a lawsuit. Also, it appears to directly contradict Minnesota law which bans masks and other disguises--unless the "medical treatment" exemption in the law is read as including infection prevention.

Cases and deaths are embarrassingly far below model predictions; deaths have not yet reached the level predicted for the end of May.

One of the Republican legislators remarked that the mandate should be at least be paired with further opening up the state.

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We've been getting cucumbers. tomatoes, peppers, and a few peas out of the garden.

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A few Thomas Sowell quotes, from Race and Culture:
 

Throughout history, one of the great sources of cultural achievement, both for groups and for nations and even civilizations, has been a borrowing of cultural features from others who happened to be more advanced in given fields at a given time....Exaggerated group "identity" makes copying others akin to treason.

If all differences between the earnings, occupations, and employment rates of different groups are simply defined as "discrimination," then it is circular reasoning to say that discrimination causes these differences, and compounded meaninglessness to quantify these "effects" of discrimination.

Government may use its power to forbid, coerce, confiscate, punish, or expel.  Goals achievable by these means are well within the effective control of government.  Goals which depend upon the creativity, skills, thrift, work habits, organizational abilities, and technological knowledge in the population at large are much less within the power of incumbent officials to achieve within a politically relevant time period.

Ready to sew

I had a little time, and pulled out some fabric from a sheet and a homemade pattern, and cut out pieces for a blouse.

The pattern is drawn from a thrift store blouse that I had, which was probably home-sewn, since it had no tag. It fit me well, and I eventually wore it out. This will be the fifth blouse that I have made from the pattern.  I’ve gotten better at sewing buttonholes, but still am working on getting the collars to turn out well.

While I was looking for the pattern, I found some interfacing that I had forgotten about; that will probably help.

The other things I’ve been doing lately are mending, and slowly catching up on yard work.

So far Minnesota is not seeing an explosion of coronavirus cases, from the protests or from any other form of opening back up. There have been smaller protests every weekend so far.

How the Democrats will lose in 2020

Or at least, how they richly deserve to lose:  through the continuing slow-motion failure of the Affordable Care Act.  Democrats keep talking about health care and how it needs to be reformed, hoping that no one will remember that they were the ones who shoved that 1000+ page law through in 2009.  People who especially are being screwed by it:  young adults (subsidizing costs of older adults), parents of younger adults (having children staying on their plans until age 26), people getting health insurance through their employers (being ineligible for subsidies), single-income families (paying way more than Obama’s “affordable” 9.5% of income), and lower-income people nearing retirement age (paying far more than they can afford).

Out of curiosity, I looked into health insurance options in the high-unemployment coronavirus economy.  COBRA still exists, and now sucks worse than ever, because the ACA requirements generally raised premiums.  Thanks to Trump, there are now short-term plans available, but they may not count as having had “minimum essential coverage” when you try to get on a better plan later. Christian cost-sharing plans have not yet developed adequate fraud protections, I believe—without any evidence, just based on intuition. Going on Medicaid leaves the possibility open that the program could seek to recover the money it spent on you from your estate after you die, although at present they usually don’t bother to.

That leaves buying insurance yourself, either on or off the exchanges, or self-insuring.  My question was how a change in income would be reflected in a change in premium subsidy, for an exchange plan. It appears from this article that most of the time, an income change earns you a 60-day Special Enrollment Period, with subsidy re-calculation, aside from perhaps being required to report changes in income anyway. But with exceptions and changing rules and state-to-state variations, it just looks like a giant headache...one that could continue into next year with tax return preparation for tax year 2020, since the amounts of subsidies received versus subsidies qualified for have to be reconciled and squared up.

I’m tempted to think that the options presented there would be more understandable if they were presented in flowchart form, but there are too many unknowns. As I have said before, this system was designed to fail. It is simply too complex.

One minor point from near the end of the piece:  changing insurance plans will usually reset your out-of-pocket costs counter to zero. That’s a cost to factor in.

Joel Rosenberg and the MPD

This was almost a decade ago:  the story of his arrest, and the sad ending before he got his day in court. 

A signal for the sickroom

Sickroom isn’t quite the right word for the bedroom where the newest Baby of Unusual Size and I have been hanging out since his home birth last week. It is at the far end of the house, and can go without attention from the rest of the family for hours at a time...which is sometimes too long.

A couple of weeks ago, my husband looked into why the doorbell, an older wireless model with a button and a chime that communicate by radio, wasn’t working. We had a similar one, new in the box, that had been handed down to us at some point. I’m not sure exactly what he ended up doing, something like replacing the original button with the new one we had, I think. They can work on the same frequency.

Later on, I got the idea of taking one of the buttons and using it to ring the doorbell and summon assistance when needed. He must have given me the only one that worked. Anyway, it works fine from the bedroom, and it has been very helpful more than once.

In other topics, I am finding this pantry/craft space inspiring; it has been a while since I have been able to have a little crafting space of my own.

Kevin Roche looks at Minnesota coronavirus trends. The case numbers have remained fairly flat to slightly declining. The number of long-term care facilities with cases is over 200 now, I read somewhere last week, out of something like 1700 total in the state. While the state has been working to contain this epidemic-within-a-pandemic, I still see a high potential for these facilities to be infected. It will just be spread out over several years, and considering the turnover of residents that can happen over such a time period, it is likely that places that had been cleared before will see fresh outbreaks later on.

So I still expect to see cumulative Minnesota deaths run up into five digits, eventually. They are at about 1300 now. At the same time, I think it is time for Governor Walz to stop twiddling the dials. There is an effort being made now to recall him, but apparently the law requires trying him in the state Supreme Court, and only if that is successful can there be a special election held to try to vote him out.

Waiting

The weather has been very hot and humid the past few days; we are ready for a break from the heat. There were several protests over the weekend.  The Minneapolis City Council promising to eliminate the Minneapolis Police Department probably is going to do more damage to the city’s tax base than the rioting and looting did. It was surreal to see them saying this with violent protests still going on all over the country, but for what’s going on here at this point, it is getting near the end of the psychological opportunity to shove through such a radical change. It bears repeating that relations between the MPD and various city factions have long been strained and hostile.  Also, the characters of the different neighborhoods can vary quite widely, and having “community policing” that presumably would include more neighborhood-level input and oversight seems appealing to many.  I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if some neighborhoods have begun to look into the feasibility of legally separating themselves from the city.

The 3rd Precinct building that was abandoned, looted, and burned had been designed and built as an imposing fortress, overlooking a commercial area that is more on the scale of a village crossroads.  That exaggerates the difference in physical scale, but not the emotional impressions. I always felt unsettled when we drove past it. It seemed to belong to an occupying force. The rioters, most of them from outside the neighborhood, certainly treated it that way. Not many people are going to miss it.

Agenda revealed

Some on the left have been using the law enforcement responses to the protesting and rioting to propel calls to Abolish the Police, saying that the cops are violent thugs, and that the social problems like mental illness and homelessness and drug addictions that we have been leaving for the police to handle should be addressed through nonviolent social interventions. Minneapolis City Council members have been talking about this, and about the new programs that they want to create.

But addressing social problems top-down through government intervention maximizes the resources needed, while minimizing the effectiveness of their utilization. The Bible very strongly says that this should happen from the bottom up:  personal responsibility, then family members caring for each other, on up through neighbors, extended family, local worshiping community, city, clan, tribe, nation. The main job at the higher levels is to protect the lower levels from predation and to strongly discourage behavior that is obviously dysfunctional. At the lower levels, close connections between people motivate them to cooperate and help each other, which minimizes the need to draw from the resources of the broader community, and so maintains overall stability and sustainability.

That’s not what the Abolish the Police people are proposing to do. Instead of a police state, they want to create a Nanny State on Steroids. Neglecting to mention that there would still be a big helping of Police State on the side.

It makes more sense if you realize that the primary goal of the people in back of it all is to gain power, not to have a healthy society. Instead of restricting freedom only through the use of physical force, they want to also use therapeutic force...”It’s for your own good, you know.”  Which is terrifying, because while a police beating will end at some point, therapy can go on indefinitely.  It’s basically the same thing as in that famous C. S. Lewis quote about do-gooders, and as he portrayed it all playing out in That Hideous Strength. It has already been partially accomplished.

One of their steps that preceded Abolish the Police was to Abolish the Family. That’s not yet complete, but they have been working hard at it for generations. It was probably Abolish the Faith before that. They work to create social problems, and then “solve” them, and when the solutions don’t work, they take it up a notch and “solve” them some more.

So when I look at the videos of police brutality that they have harvested from the protests and riots, I am getting quite angry about how callous they are about using peaceful protestors as pawns in this campaign to seize and extend power. The protestors serve both as cover for rioters to escalate the level of violence, and as photogenic victims of the police retaliation...the more blood, the better for the Cause.

Looking back at coronavirus, and how it ties in

It’s now long enough since the state started opening back up that the predicted eruption of cases toward a late June or early July peak should have begun. I’m not seeing it yet in the graphs; new positive tests per day, hospital beds, and ICU beds are all basically flat.

I think that the protests may not have much of a net effect on the spread of the virus locally.  Thousands of people were out protesting and rioting, but hundreds of thousands were sitting at home under curfew. Less shopping went on overall because of stores being closed or destroyed, but there was possibly a higher concentration of people in the fewer open grocery stores; some stores were having whole shelves emptied out as people bought food to donate.

Floyd’s April 3 positive test was interesting, because at that time tests were scarce, and commoners were only tested if symptoms were present. From my post from just before Minnesota shut down, I’m reminded that he may have needed to have been exhibiting “severe symptoms“ to have been tested.

I was also sick around that time, but not tested, and my breathing isn’t great even now, although in my case mild seasonal allergies and extreme pregnancy are factors.

I just watched the New York Times’ compilation of videos around the arrest and restraint, until it froze up on me. What the video shows well is the sequence of main events from multiple perspectives. What it shows poorly are the real-time length of each event, and the flow from one thing to the next. The video is about half as long as the whole thing actually took to play out.

Steps further

The county released the autopsy report.   Points of interest: no physical injuries to neck; COVID-19 test positive, but not necessarily from an active case because he had also tested positive in early April (when the number of positive tests per day in Minnesota was approaching but not quite at 100); numerous bruises, none on neck; traces of multiple drugs found, and some of the results seem to indicate use on the day of his death, if I am reading right.

More locally, police said there were reports of threatening letters being left in some people’s yards, in reaction to the politics expressed on their yard signs.

Haven’t heard of anything else around here, besides Chauvin being charged with second-degree murder, and the other officers being given lesser charges. Charges for all of the officers was one of the loudest demands of the protestors. Tomorrow is the funeral, or at least the first funeral, closed to the public, which is likely to be a focus of further protests.

The beginning of the end?

Last night the biggest happenings as far as I know were a group of protestors who lingered at the Capitol after curfew to be arrested, and a beat-up old van with red tape crosses on the windows that a reporter had previously pointed out as a makeshift ambulance turned out to be a supply vehicle for organized rioters. They seem to be using them in other cities, too.

Police allowed a peaceful protest at the site of Floyd’s death to continue well past curfew.

People have been donating enormous quantities of food to the area worst hit by the rioting.

The gas tanker driver was released with no charges; investigation ongoing. The story is that he was the only driver at his company willing to deliver to a black-owned gas station in Minneapolis during the unrest, and that the owner stood up in support for him after the arrest.

Today, we had afternoon thunderstorms, and the news is more focused on the charges that are beginning to be filed on the rioters. And also returning to doling out scoldings about coronavirus risks. The governor is having the state Department of Human Rights do a civil rights investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, going back ten years.

This post by a Ferguson resident has riot preparation tips, but the one I want to highlight is #9.  The media coverage of the violence in Ferguson died down long before the actual violence did. Most everyone who was doing the rioting is probably still in town. There are reports that a number of vehicles have been fleeing police tonight. Other than that, the crime watch/scanner monitoring Twitter accounts are reporting only a few normal-sounding incidents. Curfews continue.

Not over

Only the gas tanker driver was arrested on the bridge last night; today it is reported that somehow the highway shutdown missed him, and he came right into the bridge area full of protestors at speed, and panicked. The protestors had been peaceful up until then, but they perceived it as an attack, some responding by swarming the truck. He was pulled out of it, and received minor injuries only, thanks to intervention by more peaceful protesters.

A couple of hours later, after curfew began, police surrounded and arrested a group of 100+ protesters, peacefully.  Altogether 276 arrests in Minneapolis.  Evidence found of pre-placed incendiary supplies, and use of stolen cars and stolen or missing license plates. Federal charges for an  Illinois man who helpfully posted evidence of his various crimes on Facebook. No evidence that confirms reports made of guys in KKK robes, however.

Tonight there are two large protests going on—one at the governor’s mansion in St. Paul—some other groups beginning to gather, and a number of isolated instances of lawlessness. I don’t know how the last compares to “normal” crime levels, probably still on the high side, even with the increased police and National Guard presence and level of resident vigilance. Curfew starts later, at 10 pm, and ends earlier, and highways are open for now, but will be closed if needed.

A couple of other takes on the past few days:  by Mitch Berg, acquaintance and former neighbor, and by James Lileks, Star Tribune columnist we’ve spoken to in person a couple of times.

“The full force of goodness and righteousness”

Words of Governor Walz before last night’s action.

Protestors/rioters tried to cross the river from Minneapolis to St. Paul last night, but the St. Paul police held the bridges. Police and National Guard apparently kept most of the protestors on the move, splitting the large groups into smaller groups, and not allowing them to rejoin. They seemed eager to be taking offensive action finally, and not much concerned about niceties like media credentials—according to reporters, who reported about as much on this as on anything else.

There were a number of reports of cars without license plates, which continued into today, and while there were some reports of out-of-state plates on several police calls, most of the 150+ arrests made seem to have been of Minnesotans.

Shots were fired at various times, and there were reports of visible guns.  There may have been a campaign to flood 911 with fake calls; Minneapolis’s web site was under cyber attack last week.

People were defending their streets and businesses, in at least one case making a group of protesters
turn around and choose a different route, by brandishing baseball bats and clubs.

Two bodies were found in the last couple days, although the story that there have been no deaths so far is persisting.

Tonight there is curfew again, and a 5 pm closure of major highways.  There were protests at the Capitol this afternoon, and now the protesters are marching along the freeway toward Minneapolis. Other protests under way in Minneapolis, with two hours until curfew.

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Update:  For some reason, they were unable to close Highway 35W on time.  Many protestors/rioters now on the 35W bridge—the one that replaced the bridge that collapsed into the river with people on it some years ago.  There’s a gas tanker on the bridge which they are attacking; it is reported to be empty, aside from the poor driver.

One thing I noticed last night is that a bridge could be a bit hard to get off of, if your opponents are at both ends of it. Hmm.

That did not go well

Most of the protesters ended up at the 5th precinct police building, which became the center of more destruction for a couple of hours. Police and National Guard mostly disappeared during that time, leaving many people asking where they were. Even a couple of Minneapolis City Council members. Around midnight, hundreds of police and National Guard troops advanced on the 5th precinct location to disperse the crowd, and were met with resistance, including some gunfire, but they appeared to be retaking the area and to finally be starting to make some real arrests. Metro Transit had said at some point that they were not going to help transport arrestees.

I took a break, and came back not much more than an hour later to see Governor Walz doing a press conference and admitting to failure. The TV station's sidebar said there had been "several" arrests.

Power Line's take on the night and the press conference is here. Includes links to press conference videos. Walz did really say something like "Sorry we couldn't protect your small, minority-owned business, but we had to protect the Federal Reserve first." Mayor Frey (paraphrasing):  "This all makes me so sad...I just know we're better than this!" Walz said Frey had been awake for 72 hours straight.

Walz gave his overall priorities as preserving lives, protecting property, and re-establishing order, in that order. He seems to be trying to avoid the appearance of using force that could be characterized as excessive or lethal, under a belief that it would provoke a shift away from rioters primarily damaging property, to widespread person-on-person violence. He claimed that they didn't have the "resources" to make arrests, and were going to increase National Guard numbers to 1700.

Notable from the press conference is that he put some blame on organized rioters, specifically "white supremacists" and drug cartels. What about Antifa? I'm listening to some of this morning's press conference now, and this point about organized rioting is being very strongly emphasized. Walz said he believes only 20% of the rioters are Minnesotans! There were pleas for protestors to obey curfew and to not provide cover for outside agitators, and he was definitely painting it as an Us versus Them situation. That is new, and it's an interesting shift in the psychology of the response to the rioting.

Finally some overnight arrest numbers were given:  about 20 in St. Paul. I didn't catch exactly, but it was said that all, or most, or many, of them were from out of state. St. Paul was much quieter than Minneapolis last night.

Minneapolis had 15 to 20 arrests. Total! The number of buildings damaged must be into the high hundreds by now.

Even the Star Tribune was criticizing Walz on Friday.

About to start

Minneapolis and St. Paul announced 8 pm curfews this afternoon, followed after a while by inner-ring suburbs, and two neighboring counties. Probably many people have yet to hear about them. There are some exemptions apparently, including traveling to and from work

There’s a large protest going on now in Minneapolis, which blocked the 35W freeway for a while, that doesn’t look like it is going to comply with the curfew.

Businesses all over the place have been closing early, many being boarded up.  Many volunteers were helping with clean-ups today.  The governor appeared for a news conference this morning, announced that he had taken over from Minneapolis Mayor Frey in the middle of the night, and was asked what he intended to do about protestors violating his executive order by meeting in groups greater than ten.

National Guard last night were given limited roles, mainly defending the Capitol and firefighters.