Archive for 2020
February 2, 2020
DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Bear Casually Opens Door and Strolls into Tahoe CHP Facility. I love the picture; it’s like he’s trying to pretend he’s human by walking on his hind legs to blend in. And yeah, this isn’t a new story, but I just saw it.
SUPER BOWL LIV: Mahomes catches fire late, leads Chiefs to 31-20 comeback win.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Seen on Facebook:
FLASHBACK: KC Chiefs’ Frank Clark Wears Trump Sweater to Super Bowl Press Conference. “During a press conference about the upcoming Super Bowl, Kansas City Chiefs defensive end Frank Clark wore a sweatshirt displaying a photograph of President Donald Trump and musician Kanye West. Clark said that the meeting between Trump and Kanye was ‘a very historical moment’ for the country.”
UPDATE (From Ed): This was the Super Bowl moment Andy Reid deserved.
GUN CONTROL IS ACTUALLY PEOPLE CONTROL, WHICH IS WHY THE LEFT IS SO PASSIONATE ABOUT IT: Anti-Gun States Sue to Stop First Amendment, Impose Controls on Firearms Information.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO ABUSE: Explosive Leaked Confession of Domestic Abuse of Johnny Depp Turns #MeToo Upside Down.
A leaked audio conversation between Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard is blowing up Hollywood. The audio reveals Heard confessing to committing physical violence against Depp. After BuzzFeed published photos of Heard with bruises and accusations of abuse against Depp, his life fell apart. Depp was implicated in the #MeToo movement and branded as a wife-abuser. He was dropped from “Pirates of the Caribbean” in 2018 and many speculate it was because of the allegations.
On Sunday, a taped conversation between Depp and Heard was posted online. In it, Heard admits to “slapping,” “hitting,” and throwing objects at him. Her biggest frustration with Depp appears to be that he tries to get away from her when she turns violent. Depp is heard saying, “There can be no physical violence,” and Heard replies, “I can’t promise I won’t get physical again.”
She’s a real piece of work, but the sisterhood will probably still back her because patriarchy.
YOU’RE RIGHT, RAHM! RUN WITH THAT! Rahm to Bernie Backers: Democrats Can Win Without You.
OPEN THREAD: How was your weekend?
WITH A NAME LIKE THAT, A TOTAL SURPRISE: Revealed: Terrorist shot dead after stabbing two people in south London attack is named as Sudesh Amman, 20, who was freed just days ago after serving jail term for distributing extremist material. It sounds like he wasn’t rehabilitated.
EVERYTHING BRITONS KNOW ABOUT EUROPE IS WRONG: British liberals have created a Europe of their imagination, but how closely does it resemble reality?
Among the recent victims of the gleefully violent French police is a teenager who lost an eye in Strasbourg and an elderly woman in Marseilles who died from her injuries after being hit by a rubber bullet. Just this month prosecutors launched a probe after a video appeared to show a policeman firing point-blank at protestors with a riot control gun.
France is quite far down from Britain in the Freedom International rating, and treats minorities like Roma in a way that would do more than embarrass liberal Brits.
Right-wingers often complain that the horrific behaviour of the French police towards the gilets jaunes has received scant coverage in the BBC; certainly if Hungary or Poland treated their citizens like that, I’m pretty sure it would be on our news more. But then France has always been a politically violent country.
The last mass murder of protesters in England occurred in 1819, when 18 people were killed by authorities in Manchester; in France police in Paris killed up to three hundred unarmed protesters in 1961.
Had anything even vaguely comparable happened during the US Civil Rights era it would have been the subject of about 500 films and even my children in an English primary school would be learning about it now.
That’s different because shut up.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY AND BLETCHLEY PARK: Joy Reid Tells Buttigieg the Word ‘Heartland’ Sounds Like a Racist ‘Dog Whistle.’
More so than MSNBC’s previous dog whistles, such as “golf” and “Chicago?”
ROGER SIMON: America’s Coming Three-Party System.
I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD ABOUT GLENN REYNOLDS’ CARBON FOOTPRINT: Prince Charles flew 125 miles in the Queen’s helicopter before riding in a Bentley for a speech on cutting carbon emissions.
FAST: China Constructs 1,000-Bed Emergency Coronavirus Hospital in Mere Days Amid Epidemic.
Related: Coronavirus Closes China to the World, Straining Global Economy. “A decade and a half ago, when the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak known as SARS rattled the world, China accounted for a relatively small part of the global economy. Today, it’s responsible for almost a fifth of global gross domestic product when adjusted for incomes – more than the U.S.’s 15% by the same measure, adding a morbid twist to the economic adage that when America sneezes, the world catches a cold. . . . China’s heavily-indebted economy has long been slowing. More recently, economists were rushing to boost predictions for Chinese growth this year on relief that Washington and Beijing had called a truce to their two-year trade war. Now the picture is changing rapidly as Chinese industrial activity and consumer spending slow. Ten economists surveyed on Friday by The Wall Street Journal lowered their expectations for first quarter Chinese growth by over a percentage point to a median 4.9%. Those forecast cuts were made hours before the U.S. airline announcements.”
Plus: 2nd Bay Area case of coronavirus confirmed in Santa Clara County; U.S. cases jump to 9.
Also: U.S. universities set up front-line defenses to keep coronavirus at bay. “More than 350,000 Chinese students are pursuing higher education in the United States and 10,000 American students are enrolled in academic programs in China. The sheer number of the students, many of whom have traveled to their home country in recent weeks, makes schools a potential incubator for a widespread outbreak in the United States, given the close proximity of dormitory life.”
And: Former HHS Secretary Tom Price, M.D.: Coronavirus – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Not exactly related, but China-connected: Paradise Lost Looms for German Farmers as Swine Fever Nears.
UPDATE: Wuhan Coronavirus Looks Increasingly Like a Pandemic, Experts Say. “Rapidly rising caseloads alarm researchers, who fear the virus may make its way across the globe. But scientists cannot yet predict how many deaths may result.”
Some possibilities: (1) The Chinese are lying (or self-deluded) and it’s more lethal than their numbers show. Very bad. (2) Their numbers are roughly accurate, and it’s about as lethal as it looks. Bad, but not Very Bad. (3) The numbers are roughly accurate, but it’s more lethal in Chinese with lungs weakened by pollution and chain-smoking than it is in most other people. Probably the best case. At present, we don’t really know enough to choose. At the moment, (3) sounds pretty plausible to me, in which case we’ve got a very contagious but not very deadly disease. But (1) remains entirely possible. [UPDATE: From the comments: “(4) The number of deaths is accurate, but the number of cases is wildly underestimated, which means the virus is both more infectious and less dangerous than it seems right now — lots more people will get it than we think, but the percentage that will come to serious harm will be much smaller than we think.” Good point, though if the number is much higher, you can get to a large number of deaths with a much lower mortality percentage.]
Key bit: “An accurate estimate of the virus’s lethality will not be possible until certain kinds of studies can be done: blood tests to see how many people have antibodies, household studies to learn how often it infects family members, and genetic sequencing to determine whether some strains are more dangerous than others.”
Plus: “’In God we trust,’ Dr. Schaffner said. ‘All others must provide data.’”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Stephen Moore: Coronavirus ‘hurt Chinese economy very substantially.’
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Age discrimination affects people worldwide.
HMM: Far-Reaching Effects of Asymptomatic Coronavirus Transmission.
With asymptomatic transmission of novel coronavirus confirmed outside China, plans to identify the virus by current screening measures may not be enough.
“This underlines that … trying to keep out people symptomatic with respiratory disease is not a guaranteed approach,” Julie Fischer, PhD, of Georgetown University in Washington D.C., told MedPage Today. “Screening for symptomatic people has limited utility in many settings, and it should not be the primary strategy in trying to prevent disease across borders.”
The CDC recently increased its airport screening measures for travelers returning from China, expanding them to 20 U.S. airports.
Fischer cited the reproductive number of around 2 recently reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, saying that based on that number, the virus appears to have a relatively high transmission rate.
“If we assume that transmission is ongoing [there are] going to be many more imported cases and there will be local human-to-human transmission,” she said, adding that this is not the same thing as community-wide transmission.
Fischer said that one of the main questions remains whether we can take action to prevent this virus from spreading outside China, noting that we could see a “shift in strategies in the U.S. and other countries from preventing imported disease to trying to recognize transmission where it happens.”
The outbreak in China continues to rage, with the latest data indicating a total of 9,776 global cases, and 213 deaths, all in China. CDC officials on Friday said the number of cases in China has jumped 26% since Thursday, with over 7,000 cases reported in the last week.
But data published in The Lancet on Friday suggested the real total is much higher — around 76,000 cases in the city of Wuhan alone. The researchers also estimated a higher basic reproductive number of around 2.7.
Fischer noted that confirmed cases are likely only those with severe enough disease to be reported in the formal healthcare system.
“The models are based on best available data [and they] may be trying to point to the iceberg below of asymptomatic disease or mild disease … that would be hard to pick up by health systems,” she said.
On the one hand, it’s good that most cases seem to be mild. On the other hand, it means much more transmission by people who feel well enough to be out and about, instead of sick enough to stay home.
#RIGGED: An oligarch has bought his way into the 2020 race. Why is no one talking about this?
Although some people are:
Just as in 2016, the Democrats’ insiders are doing everything they can to stop Bernie. On the one hand, that’s fine with me, since I think Bernie would be a catastrophically bad president. On the other hand, they’re so blatant about it, even as they moralize about “democracy” while criticizing the electoral college, that they deserve to be called on it.
OLD AND BUSTED? Radical Chic.
The New Hotness? The rise of cancel chic. Liberal journalists are so desperate to be canceled they’ve begun to form secret societies around the theme:
I’d stumbled upon something I hadn’t realized existed: canceled chic. Being canceled — or at least having flirted with a transgression against militantly progressive opinion — gives a media person a certain edge, which leads to another phenomenon: cancel envy. Liberal journalists are so desperate to be canceled they’ve begun to form secret societies around the theme. At these meetings, they compete over who came closest to the ostracization abyss. Nobody wants to fall in, though.
I soon figured out that the other diners also retained cushy bylines in glossy publications despite having sinned. The dinner wasn’t a meeting of minds, more a support group for journalists who’d had a thrilling brush with the thought police.
Each seemed to have arrived at a new identity. They now called themselves ‘centrists’. They’d become Open Minded, Buddha-like, no longer ashamed to plop down a Sam Harris book on the coffee table before guests arrive or admit to having watched a Jordan Peterson video once.
Read the whole thing.
ANOTHER SUCCESS FOR COMMERCIAL SPACE: Rocket Lab successfully launches U.S. spy satellite.
Anything for the good of the country, except give up a cushy gig.
UPDATE (From Ed): LOL! NBC analyst overheard John Kerry talking about how he could run for POTUS and save Dems from Bernie Sanders. The ol’ Winter Soldier denied it with an epic, but quickly deleted tweet:
(Kerry then retweeted the same statement, minus the F-bomb.)
HE’S TRYING TO PEEL MINORITY VOTERS AWAY FROM THE DEMOCRATS: Donald Trump to make ‘school choice’ a major topic at State of the Union address.
UNLIKE VIRGINIA, KENTUCKY SETS A CIVILIZED EXAMPLE OF HOW TO DEAL WITH PEOPLE NONVIOLENTLY EXERCISING THEIR RIGHTS: Fully Armed Rally-Goers Enter Kentucky’s Capitol Building With Zero Resistance.
IT’S PROBABLY REALLY ABOUT TRYING TO GET POLITICAL COVER WHEN HIS FAMILY BUSINESS IS INVESTIGATED: John Kerry overheard discussing possible 2020 bid amid concern of ‘Sanders taking down the Democratic Party.’ Step One: Launch no-hope last-minute bid. Step Two: “Look, Trump’s investigating a political opponent!”