Politics of Covid-19

[GURPS]

First off, a higher percentage of black people are dying from coronavirus, due to preexisting conditions. The vices SG Adams listed make that worse. Why the hell wouldn’t he encourage people to quit? Does Yamiche think they’re good things?

Three minutes later, Yamiche tweeted again. “Jerome Adams, U.S. Surgeon General, tells black people, Latinos and other ppl of color to avoid alcohol and drugs and adds: 'Do it for your abuela, do it for your grandaddy, do it for your Big Mama, do it for your pop pop.' Context: Many found this language highly offensive,” she said.

Who were these “many”? How did she know and why would she care? Are journalists supposed to actively seek offense on behalf of people they assume to exist?

Minutes later, Alcindor, in a statement masquerading as a question, said, “There are some people online who are already offended by that language…” Who were these “some people”? She didn’t say, nor did she retweet them. If they exist, she was clearly following them.

Weirdly, someone so tuned in to social media while in the midst of a presidential press briefing, never commented on the trending topic later in the day which sprang from her question: “Uncle Tom.” Attacks on Adams inspired by her didn’t seem to bother her, yet the Surgeon General of the United States giving advice to people that could save their lives, virus or not, did. She spent the rest of the day retweeting other liberals commenting on her stupid question. Disgusting.


What The Hell Is Wrong With These Democrats?

 

[GURPS]

Washington Post’s ‘Conservative’ Writer Is Now Just Beyond Parody After Her Last Tweet About Trump


I mean, this is now just parody. If not, it’s now confirmed as one of the worst cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome thus far. This was a long time coming, but The Washington Post’s so-called “conservative” writer, Jennifer Rubin, is back at it again, blaming Trump for the death toll from the Wuhan coronavirus.

“Biden must say it: Trump will get more people killed” is the headline of her column. It’s just absurd. First, no one will ever convince me that the only way to save the Republican Party or conservatism is to vote for a Democrat, especially one that’s called Joe Biden. For those who are opposed to ‘destroying the village to save it’ logic, this is it in its most pure form. What the hell are people thinking? And this goes double for the Republicans who voted for Hillary Clinton, the ultimate traitors to the cause. Now, granted, I will give some latitude here; Rubin does make a good point that going back to normal too soon will lead to a resurgence in infections, but it’s also true that some major companies and scores of small businesses cannot survive a lockdown for another 4-6 weeks.

 

[kwillia]

Really interesting read. Talks about Darwinism in humans as well as businesses.

America faces what feels like a Darwinian moment on coronavirus

As with so much in American life, the coronavirus draws out the sharp divides.

www.axios.com

 

[GURPS]

Schiff: I Am ‘Diving Deeply’ into What Warnings Trump Ignored on Coronavirus


On “real-time oversight,” Schiff said, “We are right now going through our intelligence holdings. What did the intelligence community make us aware of at the end of last year or earlier this year? Other committees are doing like analyses.”

He continued, “It is very important, I think, in reviewing the intelligence component to this to realize the intelligence piece is just one piece of the warnings coming to the administration. A lot of those warnings were in the public domain. They came from public health organizations, like WHO or CDC or his own National Security Council, and ignored those warnings.”

He added, “We are diving deeply into what does the intelligence community know, what resources we would bring there, and what do we need to do prospectively to better protect the country in the future. That last piece, how do we protect the country in the future, is really the mission of that independent commission we based on, we used the model the 9/11 commission.”

 

[herb749]

Schiff: I Am ‘Diving Deeply’ into What Warnings Trump Ignored on Coronavirus


On “real-time oversight,” Schiff said, “We are right now going through our intelligence holdings. What did the intelligence community make us aware of at the end of last year or earlier this year? Other committees are doing like analyses.”

He continued, “It is very important, I think, in reviewing the intelligence component to this to realize the intelligence piece is just one piece of the warnings coming to the administration. A lot of those warnings were in the public domain. They came from public health organizations, like WHO or CDC or his own National Security Council, and ignored those warnings.”

He added, “We are diving deeply into what does the intelligence community know, what resources we would bring there, and what do we need to do prospectively to better protect the country in the future. That last piece, how do we protect the country in the future, is really the mission of that independent commission we based on, we used the model the 9/11 commission.”

Someone should ask him since he is the chair of the House IC what was he doing at the time of these reports. Oh that's right, he had his head up his ass over impeachment.

 

[GURPS]

China Puts Restrictions On Publishing Academic Research On Coronavirus Origin, Report Says

“Under the new policy, all academic papers on Covid-19 will be subject to extra vetting before being submitted for publication. Studies on the origin of the virus will receive extra scrutiny and must be approved by central government officials, according to the now-deleted posts,” CNN reported. “Since late January, Chinese researchers have published a series of Covid-19 studies in influential international medical journals. Some findings about early coronavirus cases — such as when human-to-human transition first appeared — have raised questions over the official government account of the outbreak and sparked controversy on Chinese social media.”

A Chinese researcher, who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity citing fear of the communist government, said that the move by China’s government was worrying because they fear China is going to try to rewrite history.

“I think it is a coordinated effort from [the] Chinese government to control [the] narrative, and paint it as if the outbreak did not originate in China,” the researcher told CNN. “And I don’t think they will really tolerate any objective study to investigate the origination of this disease.”

The researcher warned that the “international scientific community must realize that any journal or manuscripts from [a] Chinese research institution has been” filtered through China’s communist government, which lied about the outbreak and tried to cover it up.

 

[Kyle]

 

[GURPS]

A particular sloppy story in Slate, by one Jane C. Hu, accused me simultaneously of being wrong for suggesting that arriving Chinese visitors, on direct and indirect flights from China to the U.S., at a time when the Chinese government was aware of the virus’s infectiousness, spawned its appearance here (“limiting Chinese nationals’ access to the U.S. wouldn’t have prevented those transmissions, or the cases that entered the U.S. via other countries, like Italy”), and of being racist for even suggesting it (“the trope of the Chinese as disease harbingers has been used to justify anti-Chinese travel bans and dehumanization for centuries, and the coronavirus lends a new opportunity to revive those arguments”).

If the author really does not believe there were any epidemiological consequences of flying directly from Wuhan to SFO, then she should at least have the courage now to advocate that we lift all such “anti-Chinese travel bans” and stop such “dehumanization,” given that there’s supposedly even less risk now from Chinese arrivals than during the initial peak outbreak that she believes posed little risk through travel.

And according to her own strange logic, if a writer of non-Chinese ancestry is racist for suggesting that direct flights from China to the U.S. sparked an epidemic, then one could just as stupidly suggest that someone of Chinese ancestry is racist for exempting the Chinese government from obvious culpability in allowing its citizens to fly into the U.S. from Wuhan at a time when it was already forbidden to fly from that city to other Chinese destinations.

So, there was no infectious danger from Wuhan residents arriving in the U.S., but the Chinese government itself believed there was a danger from these same residents visiting other Chinese cities? Are the Chinese then racists for stopping their own citizens’ travel, while the Americans were not racist for still allowing it?

The author did not seek to verify her sources, although she warned in the following that “it might be worth considering the source”:

So what’s really behind this theory? It might be worth considering the source. KSBW’s piece begins by mentioning Stanford Medicine’s research, then quotes Victor Davis Hanson, a Stanford-affiliated source; the piece reads as if Hanson is one of these aforementioned Stanford Medicine researchers. But Hanson is a military historian, not a doctor or scientist; he is affiliated with Stanford’s Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank.* (I reached out to Hanson for comment, but he has not responded; we will update this article if he does.) The piece makes no effort to clarify what the Hoover Institution is, and it delves into Hanson’s “theory” as a prelude to a brief explanation of Stanford Medicine’s study. Hanson’s recent work, published in National Review, suggests he is eager to reopen the American economy. It would be quite convenient, then, to claim that the virus has already torn through the U.S. and granted us immunity. (In that article, Hanson also claims that “much of the virus modeling is nearly worthless” and refers to it as “science,” in scare quotes.)
Hanson also (incorrectly) suggests that the virus’s spread in California came from “Chinese nationals” visiting California. Looking more closely at his recent work reveals a potential political motive for that claim; in a recent op-ed for Fox News, he argues that we already have too many Chinese nationals visiting, studying, or collaborating in the U.S., and that post-coronavirus America should “wake up” and make changes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020...mic-california-experience-remains-mysterious/

 

[GURPS]

Boston Restaurants Want To Sell Groceries. Bureaucrats Say No Way.


"We were essentially just told that we don't have the correct permit," says Li. "So none of the sales are permitted."

City officials did not provide her—or any other Boston restaurateurs—a way forward for obtaining the proper permissions.

"Food services and food retail are two different licenses that we issue," Lisa Timberlake, a spokesperson for Boston Inspectional Services, tells Reason. "Restaurants have food service licenses, which require submission of new plans and procedures if the business is going to deviate from the original plans. It's not as simple as lifting the zoning restrictions on takeout that we've done. It's more complicated than that."

​

Is it?

Over the course of the same conversation, Timberlake pivoted from the city's original justification for ordering Li to stop selling groceries (lack of the proper permit) and laid the responsibility on grocery packaging regulations.

"The City of Boston as well as businesses, we're required to comply with state laws regarding the change in plans, they must adhere to the federal laws regarding packaging of raw animal products or what have you, so the authority to lift or soften any regulations would require compliance with the state and federal laws," Timberlake says. "That's above us."


https://reason.com/2020/04/14/boston-restaurants-want-to-sell-groceries-bureaucrats-say-no-way/

 

[GURPS]

Police In North Carolina Arrest Peaceful Protestors, Declare Protesting A ‘Non-Essential Activity’


A group of peaceful protesters gathered in Raleigh, North Carolina on Tuesday to call for the re-opening of the state. They stood outside and observed social distancing guidelines. More importantly, they observed the guidelines of the First Amendment, which, plain as day, protects “the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” They were assembled. They were peaceful. And they were petitioning their government for a specific and reasonable thing, namely the right to go back to work and feed their families.

But the protestors forgot that our Founding Fathers, when codifying our inherent human rights into the legal document known as the Bill of Rights, included the important caveat that all rights immediately evaporate whenever there’s a virus and people are scared. You can’t see it because it’s written in invisible ink. That appears to be the legal theory of the governor of North Carolina and his law enforcement agents, anyway, as Raleigh police descended upon the peaceful assembly and instructed it to disperse. At least one of the protestors was arrested.

When asked to justify their actions, the Raleigh Police Department explained on Twitter that — and this is a direct quote — “protesting is a non-essential activity.” I expect that the bootlickers who support the government’s right to arrest people for going to church will find this reasoning totally acceptable. But Americans who value freedom will recognize it as Orwellian insanity. If a politician can unilaterally abolish our fundamental liberties simply by declaring them non-essential, then we have no fundamental liberties. The whole idea becomes a farce. Or, at best, a symbolic concept that we sing about in our songs but that has no practical application in the real world.

 

[GURPS]

It’s also not clear how testing would necessarily improve coronavirus response. Without mandatory, continual testing and tracking of test subjects using an information dragnet — neither of which the U.S. government could Constitutionally require — “availability” and not “completed tests” may become the benchmark.

Unfortunately for Pelosi, Chris Wallace was quick to point out that, even as the Trump administration moved to block travel to the United States from China, she was encouraging Californians to visit Chinatown in San Francisco and take part in Chinese New Year festivities — a party that defied social distancing suggestions in place at the time and could have put a number of California residents in danger.

That was different, Pelosi insisted. She was, she said, trying “to end the discrimination, the stigma, that was going out against the Asian-American community.”

Pelosi Trashes President Trump, Calls Him ‘Weak Leader,’ Says Coronavirus Reponse A ‘Failure’

 

[GURPS]

A Teenager Posted About Her COVID-19 Infection on Instagram. A Deputy Threatened To Arrest Her If She Didn't Delete It.


A family in Oxford, Wisconsin, is suing the local sheriff's department after a patrol sergeant threatened to arrest a teenage girl for disorderly conduct for posting on Instagram about being infected with COVID-19.

[clip]

After she returned home from this visit, she posted again on Instagram and included a picture of herself at the hospital wearing an oxygen mask.

The very next day, Patrol Sergeant Cameron Klump from Marquette County Sheriff's Department showed up on the family's doorstep. He was there under orders from Sheriff Joseph Konrath to demand that Amyiah and her father, Richard Cohoon, remove Amyiah's Instagram posts. If they refused, Klump said the family faced charges for disorderly conduct and Klump told them he would "start taking people to jail," according to the suit.

Konrath's justification was that there had been no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the county. He found out about the Instagram post from Amyiah's high school. The Cohoon family had contacted the school to let them know about Amyiah's infection, but nobody ever contacted them back to get more information. It appears that instead the school contacted the police. Under the threat of arrest, Cohoon complied and deleted the allegedly illegal Instagram post.

 

[GURPS]

I watched with amusement as Fauci fenced with Tapper in regard to whether or not the president “had gotten started too late” on mitigation efforts against the coronavirus, and was therefore responsible for thousands of deaths. Fauci began his response with a catchphrase that should be used by every guest who appears on Tapper’s show: “You know it isn’t as simple as that, Jake. I’m sorry.” Unfortunately, he proceeded to try to treat Tapper like an adult capable of nuance and rational thought, which led him to make self-evident statements of little probative value, but which Tapper (and his fellow wolfpack journalists) twisted into a condemnation of the president.

“Obviously, could you have done something a little earlier? Would it have had an impact? Obviously,” Fauci stated, but he then shot down Tapper’s attempt to make a comparison between South Korea and the United States when it comes to deaths from the virus.

“It’s a little bit unfair to compare us to South Korea, where they had an outbreak in Daegu and had the capability of immediately attempting shutting it off completely in a way we may not have been able to do in this country,” he said. “I don’t think you could say that we are where we are right now because of one factor. It’s very complicated.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/a...her_sickens_the_fevered_media_mob_142976.html

 

[GURPS]

Leftist Journalists Rip Americans Protesting Lockdowns: ‘Nazi, Confederate Death-Cult … Want More Black And Brown People To Die’

On Sunday, leftist journalists appearing on MSNBC’s “AM Joy” vilified Americans across the nation who have gathered to call for opening the country from stay-at-home orders and lockdowns. Comments ranged from “They don’t care about America. What they care about is Donald Trump” to they “don’t care about these black and brown people who are dying” to “they are the Fox News, Nazi, Confederate death-cult rump of the Republican party.”


Dave Zirin of The Nation ranted:

They’ve gone from all lives matter to no lives matter. These folks are — let’s be honest about what they are — they are the Fox News, Nazi, confederate death cult rump of the Republican party and their very existence is a slap in the face not only to the health care workers on the front lines risking their lives every single day, but it’s also a slap in the face to the people who are actually dying from this virus in disproportionate numbers, black and brown people.
These aren’t economically disenfranchised folks; these are small business owners; these are retirees; these are people who want their workers to be sent back to work, not themselves. It’s a complete and utter farce. It’s an Astroturf farce. And also, I think it needs to be said it’s unrepresentative of the Republican party as a whole. I just saw a poll that said 70% of Republicans want a national stay-at-home order. So this represents nothing except the narrow Astroturf interests and the hard-racist interests that combine and form the modern-day Republican party.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/watc...-cult-want-more-black-and-brown-people-to-die

 

[Grumpy]

 

[GURPS]

“They spawned the virus probably in that P-4 lab right there in China and then they hid the virus behind the shield of the World Health Organization,” Navarro said. “What that did over a six-week period is allow hundreds of thousands of Wuhanians basically to get on aircraft and seed the world.”

“While they were doing that, and this is just disgusting, what they did was they vacuumed up all of the world’s masks, gloves, goggles, personal protective equipment, 2 billion masks, Sean, 2 billion masks,” Navarro continued. “That’s why in Milan, New York and other places, our people didn’t have them. Now, Sean, you know what they’re doing? What they’re doing is profiteering from this crisis, charging prices for a 50-cent mask, of $3, $4, $5 and more and sending us counterfeit tests.”

“That’s the four kills, the killing of Americans and people internationally,” Navarro concluded.


https://www.dailywire.com/news/trad...ommitted-four-kills-with-coronavirus-response

 

[BOP]

Really interesting read. Talks about Darwinism in humans as well as businesses.

America faces what feels like a Darwinian moment on coronavirus

As with so much in American life, the coronavirus draws out the sharp divides.

www.axios.com

"All week, we saw a stream of new data showing a shockingly disproportionate toll among African Americans."

Welp, given how racist the Chinese (in general) are, maybe we should ask them about whether or not this was an "on purpose." If it was, they didn't do a very good job.

 

[BOP]

It’s also not clear how testing would necessarily improve coronavirus response. Without mandatory, continual testing and tracking of test subjects using an information dragnet — neither of which the U.S. government could Constitutionally require — “availability” and not “completed tests” may become the benchmark.

Unfortunately for Pelosi, Chris Wallace was quick to point out that, even as the Trump administration moved to block travel to the United States from China, she was encouraging Californians to visit Chinatown in San Francisco and take part in Chinese New Year festivities — a party that defied social distancing suggestions in place at the time and could have put a number of California residents in danger.

That was different, Pelosi insisted. She was, she said, trying “to end the discrimination, the stigma, that was going out against the Asian-American community.”

Pelosi Trashes President Trump, Calls Him ‘Weak Leader,’ Says Coronavirus Reponse A ‘Failure’

It's always different when "we" do it.

 

[GURPS]

Welp, given how racist the Chinese (in general) are ......

Racist Xenophobic, Cheaters ...... pretty much have disdain for anyone NOT Chinese

 

[GURPS]

Obamacare Architect Thinks Old People Should Just Die

According to Yahoo News, he will co-host a four-part special on Lawrence O’Donnell’s “The Last Word” that will “examine the public health crisis from a variety of perspectives, including the governmental response, the strain on hospitals, the latest research into treatments and how the disease works, and the heroes — nurses, doctors and medical personnel — who are fighting COVID-19 on the front lines.” Emanuel recently told MSNBC the United States has “no choice” but to remain in lockdown for the next 18 months to fight the virus.

Now seems a good time to remember that Emanuel believes people — particularly the aged — who aren’t contributing materially to society should get out of the way for the benefit of the strong. It’s an argument that seems especially ironic at this time, given that President Trump is getting pounded by the left daily for purportedly putting the health of the economy over the well-being of the vulnerable.

Writing for The Atlantic back in 2014, Emanuel outlined the reasons he hopes to die at the age of 75. He wasn’t outright advocating euthanasia or assisted suicide, but stating his intention, when he reaches 75, to eschew any medical treatments designed to prolong his life — not only aggressive measures such as chemotherapy, but also treatments as basic as antibiotics.

His argument was a purely utilitarian one: by the time someone has reached 75, he is on the downhill slope — in mental acuity, creativity, physical strength, productivity, and ability to contribute materially to society. Rather than prolong a life that Emanuel deems of lesser quality and worth than it was at 20, 40, or 60, he plans to accelerate the arrival of death and, theoretically, compress the period of suffering that precedes death. He doesn’t want his children to go through a lengthy time of watching him decline and die, only to be left “with memories framed not by … vivacity but by … frailty.”