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LinkSwarm for April 10, 2020

Friday, April 10th, 2020

Happy Good Friday, everyone!

Are we finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel? The Wuhan coronavirus numbers have gone from doubling every two or three days to taking more than a week to double, which suggests successfully bending the curve. If hydroxychloroquine is indeed effective against the virus, we should think about opening the economy back up sooner rather than later, as our ICUs won’t be too overwhelmed to save lives.

Speaking of which…

  • Are fears of the Wuhan coronavirus overblown? This roundup of reader reports from various hospitals around the country suggests that it is. Lots of hospitals having layoff because so many elective procedures have been cancelled and projected coronavirus ICU cases never materialized. Maybe we’ve flattened the curve enough?
  • Democrats are going to fight Trump to the death over a stimulus aimed at small business. How are they supposed to get their beaks wet there?
  • “Dem Governor Who Banned Hydroxychloroquine Gets Caught Hoarding It.”
  • CNN tells the truth that Democrats blocked GOP funding for small business, then changed it, because telling negative truths about Democrats is always bad. (And speaking of bad, Powerline, I’m really not enamored of you launching a full-screen popup ad every time I click on a story (at least on the machine that doesn’t have Ad-Block for everything.)
  • “How US bureaucrats deepened the coronavirus crisis to deadly effect“:

    Public officials across the United States are flying blind against the novel coronavirus epidemic. Because of a government-engineered testing ­fiasco, they don’t know how fast the virus is spreading, how many people have been infected by it, how many will die as a result of it or how many have developed ­immunity to it.

    The failure to implement early and widespread testing — caused by a combination of shortsightedness, ineptitude and bureaucratic intransigence — left politicians scrambling to avoid a hospital crisis by imposing broad business closures and stay-at-home orders.

    The grand failure of federal health bureaucrats foreclosed the possibility of a more proactive and targeted approach, focused on identifying carriers, tracing their contacts and protecting the public in a more measured way through isolation and quarantines.

    The initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, was ­reported at the end of December. The first confirmed case in the United States was reported on Jan. 20, by which time it seems likely that many other Americans were already infected.

    At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ­monopolized COVID-19 tests. When the CDC began shipping test kits to state laboratories in early February, they turned out to be defective.

    The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration initially blocked efforts by universities and businesses to develop and conduct tests before relaxing the restrictions that made it impossible to assess the progress of the epidemic. Making a false virtue of necessity, the CDC set irrationally narrow criteria for testing, which meant that carriers without ­severe symptoms or obvious risk factors escaped detection.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Is Twitter using the health emergency to settle political scores?

    Nate Jones and I dig deep into Twitter’s decision to delete Rudy Giuliani’s tweet (quoting Charlie Kirk of Turning Point) to the effect that hydroxychloroquine had been shown to be 100% effective against the coronavirus and that Gov. Whitmer (D-MI) had threatened doctors prescribing it out of anti-Trump animus. Twitter claimed that it was deleting tweets that “go directly against guidance from authoritative sources” and separately implied that the tweet was an improper attack on Gov. Whitmer.

    I call BS. Hydroxychloroquine has looked very effective in several tests in France and China, but it hasn’t passed any controlled trials, and along with all the other promising drugs, it won’t pass those trials until the wave of death has begun to recede. In a world of bad choices, the drug looks like one of a few worthwhile gambles, as even Gov. Whitmer recognized by reversing course and asking to be allocated a lot of doses. Giuliani was closer to right than Whitmer. But Twitter decided that Giuliani’s view was so far from the mainstream that it had to be suppressed.

    To be clear, Twitter management decided to suppress a legitimate if overstated view about how to survive the coronavirus. Twitter readers would not be allowed to see that view. That’s a stance that requires some serious justification.

    Only Verified Official Coronavirus views are allowed, because Orange Man Bad.

  • Point/Counterpoint: National Review says that Sweden’s non-lockdown solution to coronavirus (isolate elders, but no shutdowns) has been better than our own, but Time disagrees. “Sweden has a relatively high case fatality rate: as of April 8, 7.68% of the Swedes who have tested positive for COVID-19 have died of the virus.”
  • Does the virus have an Achilles heel?
  • Could the Wuhan coronavirus have been in California already last fall? “[Victor Davis] Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China.”
  • Another 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.
  • Texas is doing comparatively well:

  • But: “Texas unemployment agency plagued by tech issue, backlogs as claims near 750K.”
  • Texas local governments need to start trimming their budgets right now.
  • A World Poker Tour organizer’s diary of the Wuhan coronavirus’ onset. I’m not really interested in poker tournaments, but this piece is really valuable for it’s detailed, almost minute-by-minute breakdown of those crazy days less than a month ago when the Wuhan Coronavirus went from Something We Might Have To Worry About to The Event Horizon of Absolute Change.
  • “Diamond Comics Announces They Will ‘Hold Payments To Vendors‘ Amid Coronavirus Pandemic.” Also, they won’t ship comics to stores, either. Given that Diamond has a defacto monopoly on comics distribution, this is going to drive a lot of indie comics makers completely out of business. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)
  • Another weird coronavirus wide effect: You can no longer ship packages to Saudi Arabia.
  • New York Democratic represntative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez draws a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. “Word broke yesterday that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is reportedly planning to endorse Caruso-Cabrera, probably because they don’t want to be the first with their backs up against the wall after AOC’s glorious people’s revolution.”
  • Colleges and universities are already starting to panic over the loss of revenue. “How long will it take for Democrats to propose a higher education bailout? When that happens, Republicans should hold out until schools start cutting pointless administrators and departments.” Like a malware-infected Windows system, what higher education needs is a shutdown, reboot, reformat and reinstall before it’s safe to start up again.
  • Laredo mandates masks.
  • Keir Starmer replaces Jeremy Corbyn as head of UK’s Labour Party:

    Corbyn’s tenure has cost Labour the trust and patience of millions, including political observers around the world. By rights, it should have been Corbyn’s hidebound socialism and barely concealed tolerance for anti-Semitism that did him in. But what ultimately cost Corbyn the support of his party was electoral defeat. And not just any defeat, but a disastrous one.

    British Labourites and voters more broadly knew who Corbyn was well before the summer of 2017. His first shadow cabinet was a mess. His nostalgic Marxism was laid bare in a manifesto that called for the nationalization of infrastructure and industry alike. His fondness for terrorists—from the IRA to Hezbollah and Hamas—was no secret. But the conservative government under Theresa May plodded into the general election with all the grace of a muskox, confirming voters’ fears that the government could not completely manage Brexit and transforming a 20-point margin in the polls into a 13-seat loss for the Tories. Though it was a defeat for Labour, Corbyn’s party managed a halfway decent showing. It was enough to avoid the impression that Labour had suffered a rebuke.

    In the interim, Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism problem rapidly became Labour’s anti-Semitism problem. The party was wrought by schism when it pledged to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism but amended it to allow its members more freedom to criticize Israel, all without consulting relevant Jewish organizations or even the party’s Jewish members. The unearthing of a variety of Corbyn’s anti-Semitic online affiliations compelled his own members to openly criticize their party’s leadership. Under Corbyn, his party’s affinities trended steadily in one odious direction, leading to the high-profile resignations of many longtime Labour MPs. “I am sickened that Labour is now perceived by many as a racist, anti-Semitic party,” said outgoing MP Mike Gapes.

    All this weighed heavily on British voters. One survey found that 85 percent of Britain’s Jews believed Corbyn was himself anti-Semitic, despite his pro forma denunciations of Jew-hatred. Britain’s chief rabbi denounced the Labour Party’s leader as “unfit for office,” a sentiment with which the Archbishop of Canterbury agreed. By the eve of the 2019 general election, only the most unwavering of Labour voters told pollsters that their primary concern about the prospect of a Labour-led government was “Jeremy Corbyn being prime minister.” But the inevitability of the disaster headed Labour’s way was not acknowledged until it was upon them, and by then it was too late. On December 12, Labour turned in the party’s worst electoral performance since 1935. It wasn’t the anti-Semitism that did Corbyn in. It was his failure to deliver at the polls.

    Technically, that’s Sir Keir Starmer, providing just the right amount of irony that a party theoretically representing the interests of the working class is now lead by an Oxford-educated lawyer-knight.

  • That Hungary emergency act the left was screaming “dictatorship!” about last week: worrisome, but not that worrisome:

    The tests are those most people would impose. Is this emergency law within the constitution or a violation of it? And there’s no doubt that it’s constitutional. It was passed by the super-majority that such a law requires. Are there safeguards in it? There are two. First, the constitutional court could reject it in whole or in part, either today or after the epidemic has receded. That is unlikely since all the required constitutional procedures were fulfilled in its passage, but constitutional courts are unpredictable. The second is that Parliament can vote to end the state of emergency at any time by the same two-thirds majority by which it passed the law. I would not entirely rule out that happening if the Orban government were to abuse these powers, but I judge both serious abuse and a parliamentary rebellion against it to be unlikely. Third, are the emergency powers granted to the government too broad? Some of them may be. The fines and prison sentences for breaking quarantine and spreading false rumors, though not unreasonable in themselves when panic and plague are in the air (the latter quite literally), look to me to be too high. But those sentences won’t be imposed arbitrarily; courts will determine them; and the terms of the legislation are tightly written to prevent its being used for political censorship or anything unrelated to the pandemic. So I would urge moderation on the courts and government, and leave it at that. Finally, shouldn’t the legislation have a sunset clause — say of one year on the British model — rather than staying in force indefinitely or until ministers judge the epidemic to be over? And there I think that it should.

    Plus it’s not like other European countries haven’t passed similar liberty-abridging laws in response to the crisis.

  • “‘Voter fraud’? California man finds dozens of ballots stacked outside home.” “The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.”
  • Austin’s holy homeless don’t need to practice the social distancing that mere citizens are required to observe:

  • UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is out of the ICU for coronavirus. Best wishes for a speedy recovery.
  • Rand Paul has also receivered from his bout with the coronavirus and volunteered to work at a local hospital.
  • Man steals guns from police firearms store…to sell them to cops. I don’t think you thought your cunning plan all the way through there, sport…
  • Feminist media personalities have no idea what it takes to run a business, details at 10:

  • Don’t trust Jussie Smollett in scrubs.
  • Dwight has a good anniversary roundup on the Newhall shooting.
  • Beast Mode.
  • Classic footage of the Gipper, showing what a thoughtful and learned man he was:

  • Cry. Me. A. Freaking. River. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Here’s a really good essay by Open Blogger over on Ace of Spades about Quintin Tarantino. I was unaware of the Terry Gilliam connection.
  • FINALLY! Former Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich is being inducted into the basketball hall of fame. A long-overdue honor for the man who guided the Houston Rockets to two NBA championships.
  • Awww:

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Texas | No Comments »

    Coronavirus 1, American Regulation 0

    Saturday, April 4th, 2020

    One reason the coronavirus fight has been hampered is America’s lumbering regulatory state:

    Entrepreneur Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, and New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo have each touted chloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria, as a promising treatment option for those infected with Covid-19. Some media quickly pounced on the president’s statement. The commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Stephen Hahn, quickly clarified that the agency had not in fact approved the drug as a safe and effective treatment for the new disease, shortly after the president claimed that the drug was “approved very, very quickly and it’s now approved by prescription.”

    Chloroquine is in fact available for prescription in the United States. It’s already being tried as a treatment for the new virus in U.S. hospitals. And multiple manufacturers are rushing to produce more and get it to doctors.

    The confusion over chloroquine—along with the broader performance of U.S. regulatory agencies during this epidemic—highlights how our federal process for reviewing and approving drugs and medical devices still leaves much to be desired. Our regulatory regime is costing lives. The early administrative failings of the FDA and Centers for Disease Control, which greatly worsened the crisis in the United States, show how ugly that can be.

    Getting a new pharmaceutical compound to market in the U.S. is an extraordinarily complex process. Development time is usually more than a decade. Costs add up to hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. After an innovator submits an Investigational New Drug application, the FDA requires a three-stage testing process, then the submission of a formal New Drug Application that typically includes hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation.

    Some Chloroquine discussion skipped.

    With cases and deaths growing exponentially, federal regulatory authorities can be expected to fast-track new approaches. The agencies were much less willing to afford latitude to the private sector just weeks ago, though—and the United States is now much more vulnerable as a result. Chinese authorities uploaded the SARS-CoV-2 genome onto the Internet on January 10. The CDC developed its own testing protocol by January 21; international scientists developed a different test by the same date, which was soon disseminated en masse by the World Health Organization.

    The U.S. testing process failed. The day that the CDC announced it had developed its testing protocol, January 21, was the date of the first documented American case of coronavirus. South Korea documented its first case the same day. But by March 17, the United States had administered only 125 tests per 1 million people; South Korea had administered more than 5,000 tests per 1 million over the same time span. By aggressive testing, South Korea was able to trace viral spread and contain it. Without it, the U.S. was left with little choice but the draconian measures that have shut down much of American life.

    As has been widely reported, the CDC’s in-house testing design was flawed, thus compromising early testing results. Mistakes happen, but the impact of the test-design flaw was much greater than it should have been—owing to the U.S. bureaucracy’s tightly controlled process. Even had the CDC test worked perfectly, not nearly enough tests would have been available for wide-scale testing on the South Korean model.

    More on the same theme:

    We’re happy to note that in recent days and weeks, President Trump has helped ease the regulatory burden of our response to the coronavirus, pushing Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, our main health agencies, to bend, suspend and in some cases upend useless rules.

    But that doesn’t mean every useless regulation was excised from the rulebooks. Or that our major health care regulators made good decisions with the billions of dollars entrusted to them for basic research.

    Far from it. And the coronavirus pandemic and the public panic that ensued is a case in point. To be blunt, U.S. health care regulatory agencies mishandled the crisis.

    Indeed, both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) fumbled the ball early when it came testing for the Wuhan coronavirus, largely because of bad regulations.

    “Even now, after weeks of mounting frustration toward federal agencies over flawed test kits and burdensome rules, states with growing cases such as New York and California are struggling to test widely for the coronavirus,” the New York Times noted in a March 11 story. “The continued delays have made it impossible for officials to get a true picture of the scale of the growing outbreak, which has now spread to at least 36 states and Washington, D.C.”

    The Times highlights Dr. Helen Chu, who early on had taken swabs from the noses of patients in Washington State who seemed to be suffering from a particularly nasty virus. She proposed to local, state and federal officials testing those swabs for unusual coronavirus infections.

    Instead, the CDC told Dr. Chu she’d have to get FDA approval for her test. The FDA nixed it because the lab she worked in wasn’t “certified” to conduct such tests, something that takes months to do.

    So early data that could have helped fight what later became a raging pandemic weren’t available. All because a bureaucracy went strictly by the book.

    Let’s hope the current crisis results in significant regulatory reform.

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    LinkSwarm for March 20, 2020

    Friday, March 20th, 2020

    I hope you’re enjoying your splendid isolation on the first day of spring. As in previous weeks, the Wuhan coronavirus dominates the news with the reminder that the Gods of the Copybook Headings are never far away…

  • President Donald Trump invokes the Defense Production Act of 1950 to fight the Wuhan Coronavirus. “The legislation allows the president to require production and orders from certain industries to prioritize the response to a national emergency.”
  • Not just the flu. “On a scale of 1 to 10, he said, the pain was 15… Imagine your lungs turning solid. It’s like suffocating.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci: You better believe the China travel ban made a difference.
  • Don’t let the MSM revisionism fool you; President Trump was relentlessly slammed by Our Media Betters for that decision:

  • So many dead bodies in Iran that trenches for them can be seen from space.
  • The problem with the CDC isn’t underfunding, it’s refusing to focus on its actual job:

    The Centers for Disease Control has a $6.6 billion budget and one job which it messes up every time.

    The last time the CDC had a serious workout was six years ago during the Ebola crisis. Back then CDC guidelines allowed medical personnel infected with Ebola to avoid a quarantine and interact with Americans until they showed undeniable symptoms of the disease. There were no protocols in place for treating the potentially infected resulting in the further spread of the disease inside the United States.

    At the height of the crisis, confidence in the CDC fell to 37%. Meanwhile, CDC personnel had managed to mishandle Ebola virus samples, accidentally sending samples of the live virus to CDC labs. And the heads of the health bureaucracy blamed the lack of funding for their failure to have an Ebola vaccine.

    Snip.

    During the Ebola crisis, the CDC had been spending a mere $2.6 million on gun violence studies. But the CDC has a history of wasting money on everything from a $106 million visitor’s center with Japanese gardens, a $200K gym, a transgender beauty pageant, not to mention promoting bike paths.

    The occasional outbreak only calls the CDC’s general incompetence to everyone’s attention. The rest of the time its incompetence, like that of other government agencies, just ticks along wasting money.

    In 1999, the CDC announced a plan to end syphilis in 5 years. The Clinton era National Plan to Eliminate Syphilis was an unserious social welfare proposal that wanted to battle racism and was such a success that by 2018, syphilis rates had hit a new record high. But Democrat presidential candidates using the CDC for imaginary proposals to end a disease, not by utilizing science, but social welfare, had become a bad habit under Obama, diverting resources from what the CDC could realistically do for political scams.

    In 2011, Hillary Clinton had promised an “AIDS-free generation” by, in part, using the CDC. Like her presidency, the “AIDS-free generation” never arrived and was never going to.

    The CDC isn’t prepared to fight epidemics because it’s too concerned with pushing gun control, fighting obesity, and waging social justice. (Hat tip: Zerohedge.)

  • If you calculate Wuhan Coronavirus deaths per capita, America is crushing it.
  • “Beijing Fears COVID-19 Is Turning Point for China, Globalization.” Ya think?

    What Beijing cares about is clear from its sustained war on global public opinion. Chinese propaganda mouthpieces have launched a broad array of attacks against the facts, attempting to create a new narrative about China’s historic victory over the Wuhan virus. Chinese state media is praising the government’s “effective, responsible governance,” but the truth is that Beijing is culpable for the spread of the pathogen around China and the world. Chinese officials knew about the new virus back in December, and did nothing to warn their citizens or impose measures to curb it early on.

    Instead of acting with necessary speed and transparency, the party-state looked to its own reputation and legitimacy. It threatened whistleblowers like the late Dr. Li Wenliang, and clamped down on social media to prevent both information about the virus and criticism of the Communist Party and government from spreading.

    Unsurprisingly, China also has enablers abroad helping to whitewash Beijing’s culpability. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus refused for months to declare a pandemic, and instead thanked China for “making us safer,” a comment straight out of an Orwell novel. This is the same WHO that has refused to allow Taiwan membership, due undoubtedly to Beijing’s influence over the WHO’s purse strings.

    Most egregiously, some Chinese government officials have gone so far as to claim that the Wuhan virus was not indigenous to China at all, while others, like Mr. Tedros, suggest that China’s response somehow bought the world “time” to deal with the crisis. That such lines are being repeated by global officials and talking heads shows how effectively China’s propaganda machine is shaping the global narrative. The world is quickly coming to praise the Communist Party’s governance model, instead of condemn it.

    The reality is that China did not tell its own people about the risk for weeks and refused to let in major foreign epidemiological teams, including from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Thus, the world could not get accurate information and laboratory samples early on. By then, it was too late to stop the virus from spreading, and other world capitals were as lax in imposing meaningful travel bans and quarantines as was Beijing.

    Because of China’s initial failures, governments around the world, including democratic ones, now are being forced to take extraordinary actions that mimic to one degree or another Beijing’s authoritarian tendencies, thus remaking the world more in China’s image. Not least of the changes will be in more intrusive digital surveillance of citizens, so as to be able to better track and stop the spread of future epidemics, a step that might not have been necessary if Beijing was more open about the virus back in December and if the WHO had fulfilled its responsibilities earlier.

  • Are Chlorequine or Hydroxychloroquine a cure for the Wuhan Coronavirus? They just got approved for that use so I suspect we’re going to find out. Props to reader Greg Timoney for pointing out this post a few days before the news broke more generally.
  • Debunking Cornavirus lies about the Trump Administration.
  • Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar endorses President Trump’s policies to combat the Wuhan Cornavirus:

    And the moon became as blood… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • CNN praises Trump’s coronavirus leadership. And the stars of the heavens fell unto the earth…
  • “After this, whenever after is, we should never let the relationship with the Chinese state go back to normal.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Pretty good thread on what is and isn’t available in various supermarkets in various parts of the country. This week week at my local HEB, chicken was low but ground beef was available, as well as bread and eggs. Lots of things were picked but usually alternates were available if you were willing to switch brands or sizes. Didn’t check toilet paper.
  • Texas-based used bookstore chain Half Price Books has closed all it’s stores due to the coronavirus.

    I’ve bought a number of books there over the years…

  • List of which Austin-area employeers are letting their employees work from home, and which aren’t. I can well understand semiconductor manufacturers like Samsung and AMD keep running their fabs; an idle fab line can lose up to $1 million an hour, and you’re not going to catch coronavirus in a bunny suit in a cleanroom anyway…
  • Nancy Pelosi tried to slip taxpayer-funded abortions into the coronavirus relief bill, because of course she did.
  • Important data reminder:

  • Another professor caught shilling for China.
  • The Austin City Council has decided that there’s no need to clean up homeless encampments in the present crisis. “In the current situation, however, homeless encampments ought to be the first place you look to shut down transmission of infectious diseases. Instead, those are the one place that will be left completely alone.”
  • “GOP wins three special Pennsylvania [State] House races, including a ‘Hillary district.'” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Harris County finally settles a lawsuit to provide information on foreign nationals illegally registered to vote.

    After two years of hiding public voter data, the state’s biggest county will finally disclose records of foreigners illegally voting in Texas elections, ending a court battle initiated by an election integrity group.

    This week, Harris County settled a lawsuit brought against its top voter registration official and agreed to release all records of noncitizen voters requested by Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm that specializes in fighting to enforce federal voter roll maintenance laws.

    Snip.

    PILF sued Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar Ann Bennett in 2018, after Bennett’s office refused access to records of registered voters identified as noncitizens, as well as actions taken by the county regarding those registrations.

  • “Baltimore Mayor Begs Residents To Stop Shooting Each Other So Hospital Beds Can Be Used For Coronavirus Patients.”

  • Production on Saturday Night Live shut down. I’m so old I remember when it was funny…
  • Christopher Hitchens, anti-identitarian:

    Hitchens detested tribal and parochial feelings of any kind, which is why he was dismayed when he witnessed the emergence of identity as a catalyst for political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens attacked radicals who thought it was “enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic ‘preference,’ to qualify as a revolutionary.” When Hitchens first heard the expression “the personal is political,” he knew “as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news.” As he put it in a 2008 article:

    People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.

  • Cancel culture comes for Woody Allen.

    In the summer of 1992, actress Mia Farrow found out that her adopted daughter Soon-Yi was still romantically involved with Mia’s ex-long-time-boyfriend and collaborator, Woody Allen. According to then-21-year-old Soon-Yi, Mia responded by telling a psychologist that Woody was “satanic and evil,” and that she needed to “find a way to stop him.” Three days later, seven-year-old Dylan Farrow, Mia’s daughter, accused Allen of molesting her in Mia’s Connecticut house. But when the child’s accusations, which were captured on videotape with reported coaching from Mia, were investigated by the Connecticut State Attorney, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital and the New York Department of Social Services, no credible evidence could be found to support the allegations. As Kyle Smith reported in a definitive National Review article, Mia’s own nanny “quit the family rather than support Mia’s version of events.” And Dylan’s brother Moses wrote in 2018 that the Mia-Dylan abuse narrative simply made no sense given the architecture of the Connecticut house where the abuse allegedly took place. Yet Woody Allen was nonetheless smeared as a rapist and pedophile. And last week, his publisher, Hachette Book Group, announced it would cancel its deal to publish Allen’s memoirs.

    The accusation always struck me as bunk. You can believe that Allen marrying his girlfriend’s stepdaughter is a creeper move without believing he’s a pedophile.

  • Former Ars Technica writer and Anti-GamerGater Peter Bright found guilty of attempted enticement of a minor for sex.
  • “Trump Says, ‘I Don’t Want Any Americans To Die’, NYT Quotes As ‘I… Want… Americans To Die.'”
  • Funny dog tweet the first:

  • For Dwight:

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

    President Trump’s Coronavirus Press Conference

    Thursday, February 27th, 2020

    Here’s President Donald Trump’s press conference on fighting the coronavirus:

    Some takeaways:

    1. Vice President Mike Pence will lead the task force on fighting the virus.
    2. President Trump talks as though the he takes virus figures coming out of China at face value. That may be the right decision to avoid causing a panic, but I hope he doesn’t treat those figures as gospel, as most observers seem to feel the real numbers are 5-10x higher.
    3. America is rated the country best prepared for a pandemic.
    4. There are plans to address a larger nationwide outbreak “if needed.”
    5. Calls Nancy Pelosi incompetent.

    A few other Coronavirus tidbits:

  • The outbreak continues to widen in South Korea, and both China and Japan have closed all their schools to stop the virus spread.
  • How coronavirus could have leaked from the Wuhan virus lab:

    Add to this China’s history of similar incidents. Even the deadly SARS virus has escaped — twice — from the Beijing lab where it was — and probably is — being used in experiments. Both “man-made” epidemics were quickly contained, but neither would have happened at all if proper safety precautions had been taken.

    And then there is this little-known fact: Some Chinese researchers are in the habit of selling their laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them.

    You heard me right.

    Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash. One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made a million dollars selling his monkeys and rats on the live animal market, where they eventually wound up in someone’s stomach.

  • By an amazing coincidence, Nancy Messonnier, the CDC official saying that a coronavirus outbreak is “inevitable” just happens to be Rod Rosenstein’s sister. Evidently undermining Republicans is the family business…
  • This is not good:

  • Is Coronavirus 1000 times more infectious than SARS?
  • Chinese car sales drop 92%.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, video | 2 Comments »

    Coronavirus Update: China’s Economy Burns

    Saturday, February 15th, 2020

    Some interesting news on the coronavirus front.

    First the official infection figures everyone believes are understated:

    Total confirmed cases: 67,097
    Total deaths: 1,527
    Total recovered: 8,578

    Behind the official figures, how badly is coronavirus and the resulting quarantine hurting China’s economy? By some measures, it’s all but ground to a halt:

    However, it is the far more important – for China’s GDP – construction steel sector where apparent demand has literally hit the bottom of the chart, down an unprecedented 88% Y/Y or as Goldman puts it, “construction steel demand is approaching zero.”

    Snip.

    And while we already noted the plunge in coal consumption in power plants as Chinese electricity use has cratered…what is perhaps most striking, is the devastation facing the Chinese real estate sector where property sales across 30 major cities have basically frozen.

    Finally, and most ominously perhaps, as the economy craters and internal supply chains fray, prices for everyday staples such as food are soaring as China faces not only economic collapse, but also surging prices for critical goods, such as food.

  • China says that 1,716 health workers have been infected by coronavirus. I can understand a few hundred contracting it at the beginning of the epidemic before much was known about it (and the government was suppressing the news), but such a large number suggest a staggering lack of basic hygiene and quarantine procedures among Chinese medical personal. Which wouldn’t surprise me at all.
  • Indonesia’s government still claims their nation is coronavirus free. People aren’t buying it.
  • Next to China, it appears that one of the most likely places to contract coronavirus is on a cruise ship.
  • CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield says that coronavirus is probably going to be a concern in the U.S. all year.
  • Here’s a Twitter thread that suggests that China is literally burning, with numerous fires breaking out in the quarantine area. Confirmation bias? Maybe. In a country as densely populated as China, I’m sure fires break out on a regular basis, just like here. But it could also suggest a breakdown in basic government services.
  • Japanese man traveling back from Hawaii comes down with the virus. “News of the man’s case comes a day after Hawaii officials announced that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) sent flawed coronavirus testing kits to Hawaii.” Oops!
  • Closer to home, there’s finally been a confirmed case in Texas, but it’s from someone returning from China to and already quarantined at Lackland Air Force. Chances of additional infections from this patient would seem to be very small.
  • In fact, almost 800 U.S. citizens have been have been in quarantine on U.S. military bases after evacuation from China. 195 were just discharged. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

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