Posts Tagged ‘China’

Wuhan Coronavirus Origins Part 2: Timelines of China’s Lies

Wednesday, April 15th, 2020

The problem with blogging about China’s lies over the Wuhan Cornavirus isn’t what to include, but what to leave out. There are at least two pretty useful timelines:

  • The Center for Security Policy
  • The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
  • From the Center for Security Policy:

    November 17, 2019

    Patient Zero. Official Chinese government sources say the first case of coronavirus emerges on November 17, but is not recognized at the time. The unidentified victim is to become known as “Patient Zero.”

    December 26

    Wuhan virus detected with 87% similarity to SARS. A medical lab received samples from Wuhan hospitals “and reached a stunning conclusion as early as the morning of Dec. 26. The samples contained a new corona virus with an 87 percent similarity to SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome.” This account will be revealed late in January 2020 by multiple unauthorized Chinese sources.

    December 27

    Lab executives urgently brief Wuhan health officials. A day after discovering the new corona virus, “lab executives held urgent meetings to brief Wuhan health officials and hospital management,” according to a lab technician.

    Officials order labs to suppress scientific findings. Chinese genomics scientists sequence the virus and discover a resemblance to SARS, but Chinese regime officials order them to surrender or destroy the virus samples. The regime suppresses the scientific findings. Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censors delete the news report of the destruction, revealed by Caixin Global, from the Chinese internet.

    Snip.

    Late December 2019 – Early January 2020

    Authorities report no new infections or deaths. “. . . in Wuhan, local cadres were focused on a days-long Communist Party conclave that was scheduled to run from Jan. 11 to Jan. 17. During that time, the Wuhan Health Commission each day claimed there were no new infections or deaths,” the Washington Post‘s Gerry Shih, Emily Rauhala, and Lena H. Sun would later report from Beijing. (They would later be banned for their reporting.)

    Snip.

    January 8

    Infection information is suppressed. Regime officials in Wuhan suppress information that medical workers in the city had been exposed to the virus by patients they were treating, and that they, too, had become infected.

    US CDC issues alert for patients who had been to Wuhan. The Centers for Disease Control in Washington issues an alert for clinicians “to be on the look-out for patients with respiratory symptoms and a history of travel to Wuhan, China.”

    Snip.

    January 16

    Wuhan officials say health crisis is over, and encourage large public gatherings. Wuhan residents go to a government sponsored fair, citing government statements that the health crisis is over.

    Chinese officials encouraged hundreds of millions of people to travel over previous month. Mid-December 2019 to mid-January 2020 “was a time when Chinese officials were beginning to grasp the threat of a new contagious disease in Wuhan but did little to inform the public — even with the approach of the Lunar New Year holiday for which hundreds of millions of Chinese travel,” the Washington Post would report.

    January 24

    Still no human-to-human transmission outside China, according to WHO. Science News: “No human-to-human transmission has yet been reported outside of China, the WHO said.”

    Chinese government bans ‘group travel’ within China but allows travel to foreign countries. Beijing bans “group travel” within China but still permits travel abroad. “But in a blunder that would have far reaching consequences, China did not issue an order suspending group travel to foreign countries until three days later, on Jan. 27,” Japan’s Nikkei reports.

    February 5

    New York Times runs op-ed saying it’s safe to travel to China. The New York Times publishes an op-ed by a travel writer who objects to the notion that it is unsafe to travel to China. The piece is headlined, “Who says it’s not safe to travel to China?” (Subsequently, the op-ed does not appear on the writer’s website that contains her list of published works.)

    Chinese government urges US and others to abide by WHO policies. The US and other countries should follow WHO guidelines and not impose their own measures, China’s consul general in New York tells reporters. “‘We understand all the measures taken by the US and many other countries. But I think still we should follow the guidance from the WHO and not to issue measures stricter than that or overreact,’ Huang said, referring the World Health Organisation’s opposition to restrictions on travel and trade, despite having declared the outbreak a global emergency,” according to the South China Morning Post.

    Plus how Communist Party control made everything worse, as local officials were too terrified of doing something wrong to act for fear of receiving blame from the national party, so the truth about the outbreaks was repressed at every level until the problem was too big to ignore.

    On the American response:

    January 8

    US CDC issues alert for patients who had been to Wuhan. The Centers for Disease Control in Washington issues an alert for clinicians “to be on the look-out for patients with respiratory symptoms and a history of travel to Wuhan, China.”

    January 17

    US starts implementing airport health entry screening for virus ‘exported’ from Wuhan. The Centers for Disease Control announces implementation of “enhanced health screenings to detect ill travelers traveling to the United States on direct or connecting flights from Wuhan, China. This activity is in response to an outbreak in China caused by a novel (new) coronavirus (2019 nCoV), with exported cases to Thailand and Japan.”

    Plus the WHO’s repeatedly parroting the communist line, and zillions of news outlets calling it “Wuhan coronavirus” until they suddenly decided (no doubt at China’s urging) that it was racist to tell the truth.

    The Victims of Communism is less detailed on a day-by-day basis, but includes a good timeline on the WHO’s complicity in the coverup.

    The Chinese Communist Party’s deception has had a terrible human cost, with more than 100,000 global deaths and counting. Entire countries are shut down and economies are contracting, pointing to a global crisis that will likely outlive the pandemic itself. According to a study by the United Kingdom’s University of Southampton, if Beijing had acted three weeks earlier, the number of COVID-19 cases could have been reduced by 95 percent, and its geographic spread would have been severely limited—thereby preventing a pandemic.

    If you’ve got the time, both are well worth reading through.

    Questioning The Official “Wet Market” Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus Part 1: The Video

    Tuesday, April 14th, 2020

    Links have been continuing to build up questioning the official “wet market” Wuhan Coronavirus origin story. This Epoch Times video presents the case that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the likely source of the virus.

  • Bats were not sold in the Huanan Seafood Market.
  • A third of the early Chinese victims had no connection to the Huanan Seafood Market.
  • If we are to believe the two experts cited, evidence from the coronavirus amino acids and protein spikes suggests an artificial origin in the original SARS completely separate from the postulated bat origin.
  • In early January, the Chinese government ordered all existing Wuhan coronavirus samples to be destroyed.
  • Prominent mention of Shi Zhengli, AKA The Bat Lady, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as previously discussed here. She’s been researching coronavirus since 2003. “From 2010 onward, the focus of Shi and her team, was redirected to identifying the capacity for coronavirus transmission across species, specifically putting the spotlight on the S [spike] protein of coronaviruses.”
  • “In November, 2015, Shi and her team at the Wuhan lab once again published a paper, this time in the British journal, Nature Medicine. They discussed the creation of a synthetic virus, a self-replicating Chimeric virus. This virus had the SARS virus as the framework, with the key S protein replaced by the one they had found in a bat coronavirus she mentioned in her 2013 paper. This new virus demonstrated a powerful ability for cross-species infection.”
  • Her next research was on primates.
  • On November 14, 2018, Shi gave a speech at a Chinese university on bat coronavirus and its cross-species infection. “reports of this event have since been deleted from the university website.”
  • As part of the Thousand Talents program, China took coronavirus samples from Canada and the United States and sent them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
  • ” January 2nd, an email from the Director-General of the Institute to all internal staff was circulated. The subject was “Notice regarding the strict prohibition of disclosure of any information related to the Wuhan unknown pneumonia.”
  • “February 3rd, Dr. Wu Xiaohua blew the whistle using his real name, that Shi Zhengli’s haphazard laboratory management may have led the Wuhan virus to leak from the lab. February 4th, Chairman of Duoyi, Xu Bo, blew the whistle using his real name, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was suspected of manufacturing and leaking the Wuhan virus. February 7th, top biochemical weapon expert of the People’s Liberation Army, Chen Wei, officially assumed control over Wuhan Institute of virology’s P4 laboratory.”
  • Notes the previously discussed mysterious scrubbing of alleged Patent Zero Huang Yanling from the institute’s website.
  • “February 17th, institute researcher Chen Quanjiao blew the whistle using her real name, that Director General of the institute, Wang Yanyi was suspected of leaking the virus.”
  • There’s a “Military Management Office” at the institute.
  • There follows a lot more analysis of China’s geopolitical strategy of unrestricted warfare.
  • “Every person that it kills, every person that it harms is directly attributable to the Chinese Communist Party.”

    Caveat: I’m not a virologist, and have no knowledgebase with which to evaluate the claims presented here. I also note that the video only cites two virology experts, which makes their conclusions less than iron-clad. I would also like more background on the various Chinese whistleblower assertions about the institute.

    But there’s certainly a lot of smoke here.

    Tomorrow: More analysis of the timeline

    Bill Maher Blasts SJW Opposition To Calling It “Wuhan Coronavirus”

    Sunday, April 12th, 2020

    Bill Maher may be a smarmy liberal, but when he’s right he’s right.

    This time he’s calling out the sudden Social Justice Warrior hissy fit over calling it the Wuhan Coronavirus.

    “I say liberalism lost its way when it started thinking like that and pretended that forcing a woman to wear [burkas] was just a different way instead of an abhorrent human rights violation. It’s not racist to point out that eating bats is batshit crazy. In 2007 researchers at the University of Hong Kong wrote the presence of a large reservoir saw of SARS CoV like viruses in horseshoe bats together with the culture of eating exotic animals in southern China is a time bomb.”

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

    Want to guess how The Daily Beast responded to his point that it wasn’t racist to name a virus after it’s point of origin? That’s right: They called him racist. Social Justice Warriors are as predictable as they are moronic…

    Our Horrible, Incompetent Media: Coronavirus Edition

    Saturday, April 11th, 2020

    America’s mainstream media is lousy even in the best of times.

    This is not the best of times.

    All the bias, incompetence, mendacity and just plain manifest stupidity of national media has been on even sharper display than usual during the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.

    Consider this roundup just a small sampler of the many ways our media has failed to provide accurate, unbiased news during the crisis:

  • First up is NBC channeling the communist Chinese government:

    The mainstream media’s routine parroting of propaganda from China’s communist government as it relates to their Wuhan coronavirus cases has been well-documented here at RedState and elsewhere. But what continues to be shocking is how many national news media outlets keep doing so without any trace of shame whatsoever.

    Case in point, NBC News, who tweeted out this gem early this morning about the number of Wuhan coronavirus deaths reported in the U.S. in a 24 hour-plus time period in comparison to China in the same timeframe:

    U.S. reports 1,264 coronavirus deaths in over 24 hours.

    Meanwhile in China, where the pandemic broke out, not a single new coronavirus death was reported. https://t.co/ooXkR9X2L5

    — NBC News (@NBCNews) April 7, 2020

    Two things came to mind to me when I read that tweet:

    First, it came across as an unnecessary cheap shot “gotcha” similar to how the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler tried to dunk on President Trump by saying his comments about the low unemployment rate during the SOTU “did not age well” in light of the millions of jobs lost in recent weeks.

    The second thing was that it sounded like something you’d read on any one of the number of Chinese government-run “media” accounts on Twitter, bragging about how they were doing so much better at combating the virus than the United States.

  • Not only does CNN lie, but they lie about having lied:

    It’s pretty clear that there is a concerted effort by outlets like CNN to bury their erroneous reporting and downplaying of the Wuhan coronavirus threat by deflecting to Fox News, but the evidence shows CNN was among the worst offenders.

    Beyond that, CNN has also been a willing participant in the Chinese government’s propaganda war against the United States, slammed Fox News for covering New York’s response failures – even though CNN’s Jake Tapper covered them the very next day, has purposely and deceptively used the “per capita” label on a selective basis when reporting on US cases in a way that paints the U.S. in an unflattering light, and ran with the absurd “man dies from swallowing fish tank cleaner” story as a way to falsely blame Trump.

  • Why is the New York Times reporting that President Trump had a financial interest in hydroxychloroquine, a patent-expired drug that several different manufacturers produce? To ask the question is to answer it.

    The only conclusion to draw from this is that the paper’s report is another example on a long list of them on how the MSM actually seems to be rooting against the use of hydroxychloroquine as a promising treatment for suffering Wuhan Coronavirus patients because Orange Man Bad, so much so that they’re willing to deceive their readers as to the nature of Trump’s supposed “financial interest” in it.

    Further, this alleged link is that a company that makes a name-brand version is a small percentage of the holdings of a mutual fund President Trump has money in:

    By this standard, I evidently have a “financial interest” in every company in the Fortune 500…

  • There was yet another “sources say” (i.e., #JustTrustMeBro) report that the Pentagon knew about the Wuhan coronavirus in November promoted by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos (speaking of Democratic Party tools). It took all of twelve hours for the Pentagon to point out that Stephanopoulos was full of shit.
  • On the mendacity front, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes manages to lie on both sides of the same issue: “Chris Hayes, One Month Ago: Trump ‘Personally Pressured’ Health Officials to ‘Manipulate the Numbers Downward.’ Chris Hayes, Yesterday: Trump Inflated the Death Count So He Could Brag When The Numbers Came In Lower.”
  • On the “just plain stupid” front, a reporter asks President Trump why he doesn’t just shut down all grocery stores. Evidently the grocery fairy brings him all his food every week.
  • And stupidity isn’t just limited to the big things: Lots of media figures fell for a fake “Colin Kaepernick signed with the Jets” hoax on Twitter. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Our media even hates just the possibility of hope, as with noted CNN media tool Brian Stelter.
  • Once again, this is just a small sample of the horrible state of our current media. If I wanted to include every cornavirus screwup, I’d still be writing it…

    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:

  • All China’s Lies

    Tuesday, April 7th, 2020

    A roundup on what China is lying about today:

  • Dr. Anthony Fauci talks about China’s Lie Zero:

    According to the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), things became apparent in early January when China claimed “the virus jumped from an animal reservoir to a human and wasn’t being transmitted from human-to-human.”

    “Well, it became very clear pretty quickly that that was not the case, that the virus was being transmitted from human-to-human. But not only that, but the nightmare that we have is that not only is it transmitted human-to-human, it does it very efficiently,” he explained. “And when the numbers started coming in as to what the morbidity and the mortality was, it was during that period in early to mid-January that it became clear to me that this was not just another SARS. It wasn’t another MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. This was different.”

    He also said he didn’t think that would have changed the spread of the disease, but now we’ll never know…

  • How much higher is the death rate from the Wuhan coronavirus than China’s official death rate? The Washington Post says maybe 16 times higher. “Using photos posted online, social media sleuths have estimated that Wuhan funeral homes had returned 3,500 urns a day since March 23. That would imply a death toll in Wuhan of about 42,000 — or 16 times the official number. Another widely shared calculation, based on Wuhan’s 84 furnaces running nonstop and each cremation taking an hour, put the death toll at 46,800.”
  • Remember how relentlessly the mainstream media scoffed at the idea the virus might have gotten loose from the Wuhan virology lab? Very sober people are beginning to rethink that:

    It is understandable that many would be wary of the notion that the origin of the coronavirus could be discovered by some documentary filmmaker who used to live in China. Matthew Tye, who creates YouTube videos, contends he has identified the source of the coronavirus — and a great deal of the information that he presents, obtained from public records posted on the Internet, checks out.

    The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China indeed posted a job opening on November 18, 2019, “asking for scientists to come research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats.”

    The Google translation of the job posting is: “Taking bats as the research object, I will answer the molecular mechanism that can coexist with Ebola and SARS- associated coronavirus for a long time without disease, and its relationship with flight and longevity. Virology, immunology, cell biology, and multiple omics are used to compare the differences between humans and other mammals.” (“Omics” is a term for a subfield within biology, such as genomics or glycomics.)

    On December 24, 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted a second job posting. The translation of that posting includes the declaration, “long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses has confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases such as SARS and SADS, and a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.”

    Tye contends that that posting meant, “we’ve discovered a new and terrible virus, and would like to recruit people to come deal with it.” He also contends that “news didn’t come out about coronavirus until ages after that.” Doctors in Wuhan knew that they were dealing with a cluster of pneumonia cases as December progressed, but it is accurate to say that a very limited number of people knew about this particular strain of coronavirus and its severity at the time of that job posting. By December 31, about three weeks after doctors first noticed the cases, the Chinese government notified the World Health Organization and the first media reports about a “mystery pneumonia” appeared outside China.

    Plus more discussion about “bat woman” Shi Zhengli and missing institute researcher Huang Yanling. “Most people believe her to be patient zero, and most people believe she is dead.”

  • “China floods Facebook with undeclared coronavirus propaganda ads blaming Trump.”

    Chinese state media is flooding Facebook and Instagram with undisclosed political adverts whitewashing its role in the coronavirus pandemic and pinning blame on Donald Trump.

    Three official news outlets – Xinhua, China Central Television and the Global Times – have targeted users across the world with promoted stories in English, Chinese and Arabic.

    The ads, seen millions of times, extolled China’s efforts against Covid-19, downplayed its domestic outbreak, depicted Mr Trump as misguided and racist, and suggested that the virus might have originated in the US.

    Yet all of them initially ran without a political disclaimer, allowing them to hide information about who they were targeting and sometimes letting them sidestep Facebook’s strict rules on political advertising….

    How are people supposed to tell Chinese propaganda from the usual background noise of Trump Derangement Syndrome?

  • More on the same subject:

    China is waging a propaganda war against the coronavirus on several fronts.

    In well-documented efforts, China has sought to deflect attention from its early suppression of information about COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and to claim that, among all nations, China has halted the scourge.

    But China’s communist government also is pushing an alternative explanation of the origins of the new coronavirus—namely that it didn’t start in Wuhan after all, but was a creation of a military biochemical lab in the United States and brought to China by an American team that competed in the Military World Games in Wuhan last October.

    Although that conspiracy theory was quickly noted and dismissed in much of the West, it is continuing and broadening all over social media in China–a country that strictly monitors what appears on online platforms, regularly scrubbing what the authorities call “rumors.”

    (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.)

    I probably missed several of China’s other cornavirus lies. Feel free to talk about any I missed in the comments below.

  • ChiComs Demand Aussie Journalist Tim Blair Apologize; Blair Shoves A Fork In Their Eye

    Sunday, April 5th, 2020

    This is how you respond to communist tyrants who demand you apologize for telling the truth about them:

    The Daily Telegraph this week received a letter from the Australian Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China, who took gentle issue with our excellent coverage of the coronavirus crisis.

    Following is a point-by-point response to the Consulate General and China’s communist dictatorship:

    Recently the Daily Telegraph has published a number of reports and opinions about China’s response to COVID-19 that are full of ignorance, prejudice and arrogance.

    If a state-owned newspaper in China received this kind of complaint, subsequent days would involve journalists waking up in prison with their organs harvested.

    Tracing the origin of the virus is a scientific issue that requires professional, science-based assessment.

    Sure it does. How professional and science-based was the claim published on March 12 by China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan”?

    The origin of the virus is still undetermined, and the World Health Organization has named the novel coronavirus “COVID-19”.

    The World Health Organisation also appointed Zimbabwean murderer Robert Mugabe as its Goodwill Ambassador and declared on March 2 that the “stigma” of the coronavirus “is more dangerous than the virus itself”.

    The World Health Organisation does a lot of stupid stuff.

    So what is the real motive behind your attempt to repeatedly link the virus to China and even stating that the novel coronavirus was “made in China”?

    Our motive is accuracy. That’s why we don’t link the virus to Bognor Regis or state that it was “made in Panama”.

    Snip.

    The effectiveness of China’s epidemic prevention and control has fully underlined the people-centred philosophy of the Communist Party of China and the strong advantages of the Chinese system.

    In 2018, Amnesty International reported that China executed more citizens than the rest of the world combined.

    Please tell us more about your “people-centred philosophy” and how many bullets it requires.

    Instead of admitting and facing facts, the articles in your newspaper have wantonly attacked and smeared the CPC and the Chinese government with vicious language.

    And yet we haven’t been jailed or shot! Where’s the justice in that?

    Is your judgement based on the well-being of the people or do you have an ideological prejudice?

    We will admit to an ideological prejudice against deadly tyranny. It’s a tragic failing on our part.

    That’s the way you do it…

    (Hat tip: Iowahawk via Amy Curtis.)

    LinkSwarm for April 3, 2020

    Friday, April 3rd, 2020

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I hope all of you are avoiding going stir-crazy. I bet you can guess the top topics this week:

  • U.S. Intelligence confirms what anyone not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome figured out long ago: China’s communist government has been lying about the Wuhan Coronavirus all along:

    China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.

    The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.

  • British Prime Minister Boris Johnson thinks that Chinese coronavirus cases may be 40 times higher than stated.
  • China’s viral coronavirus propaganda campaign:

    China is waging a propaganda war against the coronavirus on several fronts. In addition to its well-documented efforts to deflect attention from its early suppression of information about the disease and to claim that it has among all nations now halted the scourge, it is also pushing an alternative explanation of its origins—namely that it didn’t start in Wuhan after all, but was a creation of a military biochemical lab in the United States and was brought to China by an American team that competed in the Military World Games in Wuhan last October.

    While that conspiracy theory was quickly noted and dismissed in much of the West, it is continuing and broadening all over social media in China – a country that strictly monitors what appears on its online platforms, regularly scrubbing it of what the authorities call “rumors.” But a lot of it, put on platforms that are banned in China, seems aimed outward, part of a concerted effort to convince the world that China, once the villain of the coronavirus story, is actually its hero, and that the real villain is America.

  • The Chinese Communist Party vs. America:

    The Chinese Communist Party, led by Chairman Xi Jinping, has a membership of 90 million out of a country of 1.4 billion. Not all may be doctrinaire Marxists or Maoists, but they form a ruling elite for a regime that has managed to bring wealth and prestige to a once-poor people. They have overseen the building of a modern industrial base, and the creation of a first-world military complete with an advanced nuclear arsenal. Their intelligence services are larger and more sophisticated than those of any other nation on earth.

    At the heart of China’s communist ideology is a deep-seated resentment against the world. After the Century of Humiliation where China was exploited by the Western powers, Russia, and Japan, they are committed to never letting that happen again.

    If one doubts the CCP’s resolve, one need look no further than the fact that they have killed, through famine and other means, almost 100 million of their own countrymen in a series of communist social and economic reforms they believed necessary to modernize their country. In other words, these are not a people to be taken lightly. The presidency of Donald Trump presents the greatest strategic threat to their desire to establish themselves as the world’s preeminent economic and military power.

    Although it is not the position of our government that the CCP was behind the creation and weaponization of the Chinese virus, we need to at least entertain the notion that a nation that has, in the recent past, killed tens of millions of its own people would not think twice about killing thousands or even millions of other peoples from other countries if it meant putting them in a greater strategic position and helping them fulfill their objective of a communist world order.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of China, I’ve been thinking of doing a separate post on this piece on just how filthy and unsanitary China is, but the topic is just too gross for me to deal with it at length.
  • Speaking of filthy: “Chinese markets again selling bats.” Ain’t that a kick in the head?
  • I’ve seen a lot of experts debunking the idea that the current coronavirus pandemic originated at the Wuhan virology lab. But here’s one expert that thinks it might well have. “Richard H. Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday that there is a real possibility that the virus entered the human population due to a laboratory accident.”
  • The Wuhan Coronavirus has eight different strains.
  • Dr. Vladimir Zelenko has now treated 699 coronavirus patients with 100% success using Hydroxychloroquine Sulfate, Zinc and Z-Pak.
  • Coronavirus dispatches from a New Orleans ER doctor. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Looking at Dr. Anthony Fauci’s coronavirus projections, both past and present.

    The 15-days Guidelines allowed the nation to prepare to get the equipment and resources needed in-place before a wave of hospitalizations would be required. The 15-days also provided time to garner information possible treatment options for those experiencing symptoms. These include lopinavir-ritonavir, interferon-1β, the RNA polymerase inhibitor remdesivir, chloroquine, a variety of traditional Chinese medicine products, and intravenous hyperimmune globulin from recovered patients.

    Based on Task Force briefing discussions with Fauci and fellow member Dr. Deborah Birx, it appears that the team projects that the coronavirus will disappear during the summer, and return in the fall. They are working with the President and the rest of his team to expedite testing, find and produce vaccines, and identify effective treatments while keeping the mortality rate as low as can be achieved in this first wave of infections….

    If the curve flattens to around 33,000 deaths, then that is approximately the same as a moderately bad flu year, and far short of the 100,000 the media was presenting this weekend.

    President Donald Trump is working hard to reduce the number to as low as can be achieved, based on the advice of Fauci and other team members. They may have access to additional information that indicates the extension of guidelines to the end of April is warranted.

    Fauci and his team continue to gather data, and adjustments will be made in the models as speculation is replaced by hard information and results. For now, it appears that Fauci and his team’s original roadmap for the pandemic was good.

  • More analysis of the numbers. “Germany and the United States have significantly better coronavirus death rates per capita than Italy, Spain, Iran and France. A lot better. This is why the media avoids per capita measurements for confirmed cases, but conveniently remembered when it wanted to fact-check Trump’s testing numbers.”
  • Scary story about a Washington state choir rehearsal of 60 people, none of whom exhibited any symptoms of illness. “Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Funny how all the leftist sorts are insisting you can’t call it the Chinese coronavirus or the Wuhan coronavirus. Almost as though they all received the same marching orders from…somewhere. But no, that would be silly. All the useful idiots can’t be on China’s payroll…
  • “If you claim that calling it ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ is racist, you are part of the cover-up.”
  • Last week’s unemployment numbers were horrible. This week’s are worse. “US jobless claims skyrocket to 6.6 million.” We knew this was coming. We just need to get to the other side of the “V”…
  • Know what other numbers are hugely up? NCIS firearms checks run. 3,740,688 checks were run in March, easily a new record.
  • “Italy Risks Losing Grip in South With Fear of Looting, Riots.”

    As Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte fights to hold Italian society together through a crippling nationwide lockdown, the depressed south is turning into a powder keg.

    Police have been deployed on the streets of Sicily’s capital, Palermo, amid reports gangs are using social media to plot attacks on stores. A bankrupt ferry company halted service to the island, including vital supplies of food and medicines. As the state creaks under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic, officials worry the mafia may be preparing to step in.

    Preventing unrest in the so-called Mezzogiorno, the underdeveloped southern region that’s long lagged behind the wealthy north, has become the government’s top priority, according to Italian officials who asked not to be named discussing the administration’s strategy.

    With the European Union’s most dangerously indebted state already fighting the Germans over the terms of the financial aid it needs, the fallout may reach far beyond Rome if Conte fails.

    Keep in mind that any postwar Italian government’s grip on power is tenuous in the best of times…(Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • Speaking of Italy, they’re burning the EU flag and threatening to leave over the EU’s lousy coronavirus response.
  • Panama is fighting the coronavirus by segregating shipping days by gender. What, are Panamanians so randy they can’t see a member of the opposite sex without wanting to get jiggy with them?
  • The danger of Huawei’s 5G rollout:

    Does anyone not on the payroll of the Chinese Communist Party trust Beijing’s dictatorship with the power to pervasively monitor communications (spy locally as well as globally), interrupt, deny or corrupt digital services, and possibly take surreptitious control of digital devices, say, the air traffic control computers at Los Angeles International Airport?

    Outrageous scenario? No, given Huawei’s baggage is a legitimate worry exacerbated by the regime’s criminal dishonesty (e.g., lying about COVID-19/Wuhan virus). For all practical purposes, Huawei is a Chinese Communist Party tool. In spy lingo, a cutout company can hide an espionage operation. Abundant evidence suggests Huawei serves as a cutout.

  • Alexandria Ocasio Cortez encourages Amazon workers to strike, because Unions. “AOC is so devoted to the commie common good that she wants some of the only people in America who are guaranteed work to voluntarily give that work up for some union talking point.”
  • What the hell, Vermont? “State officials in Vermont are ordering large retailers that sell critical items such as food and prescription drugs to stop the in-person sale of nonessential products such as clothing and electronics.” An emergency doesn’t give you the excuse to be Shopping Basket Dictator.
  • Justice Department finally weighs in that boys and girls are biologically different. About damn time…
  • Venezuelan patrol ship sinks after ramming cruise ship with reinforced hull. The only way this story could be any better is if the cruise ship was labeled “Donald Trump” and the Venezuelan patrol boat was labelled “The Media.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Don’t use Zoom. All sorts of security and privacy concerns. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • “Have you tried powering down and then restarting your Boeing 787? Try that and see if it fixes the problem…”
  • “China: ‘We’ve Completely Cured Coronavirus And Everything Is Fine Here And No One Is Allowed In To Check.”
  • Well, that wasn’t very smart. (Hat tip: johnnyk2001.)
  • Analysis: True:

  • Dwight offers handy tips on vehicle ambush counterattacks, for when the roving cannibal antifa hijack mobs try to attack you later this year.
  • “Chick-Fil-A Temporarily Changes Slogan To ‘Eat Fewer Bats.'”
  • “New York To Raise Taxes On Coronavirus Causing It To Flee State.”
  • Heh:

  • Heh with music:

    (Hat tip: Carpe Donktum.)

  • Good boy!

  • So! Many! Good! Boys!
    

  • Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 30, 2020

    Monday, March 30th, 2020

    The no campaigning campaign continues, Biden gets #MeTooed, a rare Bernie victory, and A New Challenger Appears! It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!

    Delegates

    Right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Joe Biden 1,217
    2. Bernie Sanders 914
    3. Elizabeth Warren 81*
    4. Michael Bloomberg 55*
    5. Pete Buttigieg 26
    6. Amy Klobuchar 7
    7. Tulsi Gabbard 2

    *Both these counts have dropped since last week. Do we blame these shenanigans on the media or the DNC?

    Polls
    Once again, there’s not a single poll that has Sanders up over Biden at the state or national level, and polling itself seems to have dropped off to almost nothing, a victim of the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.

  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets.
  • Pundits, etc.

  • 13 Presidential Primaries Have Now Been Delayed Over The Coronavirus”: Connecticut, Indiana, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and Delaware have all delayed primaries, and Pennsylvania is about to, while Texas, Alabama, North Carolina and Mississippi have all delayed runoffs. California, Maryland, Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming are all changing various aspects of their respective voting processes.
  • Remember how all those Democrats swore off SuperPacs?

    The anti-super PAC frenzy reached new heights in this year’s Democratic primary. Candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and others effectively told their supporters to stay on the sidelines, either explicitly requesting that super PACs not support them, or blasting the groups at every turn.

    As things got desperate, many of these candidates appeared to realize their mistake. They scrambled to get a new message out: I’ll take any help I can get. Joe Biden was the first to reverse his opposition to super PACs, doing so by late October. A month later, as California senator Kamala Harris’s campaign was falling apart, she, too, dropped her rejection of independent support.

    The party’s backtracking on super PACs came full circle in February when Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren reversed course. Her early and forceful rejections of super PACs had set the tone for the field, and she went even further by making corruption and money-in-politics the top themes of her campaign. But that was when her campaign was a powerful front-runner — after poor showings in the early primary states, Warren needed a Hail Mary, and so changed her tune.

    For every candidate except Biden, the reversal was too late, and the campaign could not be saved.

    Warren claims she only dropped her opposition to super PACs because her opponents were accepting their help. But she surely knew that not every candidate would play by her rules. The pledges to reject super PAC support were an electoral ploy by candidates to brand themselves as cleaner than the other guy. It simply didn’t pay off.

    Instead, with independent speakers on the sidelines, the candidates who entered the primary with the biggest advantages coasted.

  • Interested in what Pete Buttigieg has to say about his presidential run? Me neither, but here it is.
  • Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Former congressional staffer accuses Biden of penetrative sexual assault. What do you bet those thousands of Democratic media figures who parroted “credibly accused of sexual assault” for the nonsense Kavanaugh charges won’t be using that phrase this time around? Let’s see what Biden previously said about the issue:

    When it comes to #MeToo sexual misconduct issues, former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive 2020 presidential nominee, has made it no secret where he stands: automatically believe women.

    “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real,” said Biden during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who faced accusations that as a teenager he had assaulted a woman at a party.

    As vice president, Biden played an important role in the Obama administration’s efforts to compel colleges and universities to take sexual violence more seriously—and to adopt policies that limited the due process rights and presumption of innocence for the accused. In recent years, his rhetoric on these issues has been in lockstep with #MeToo activists.

    Despite his public pronunciations on the subject of never touching women without their explicit verbal consent, Biden has previously faced accusations that he was too handsy with people. But now the former vice president is facing a much more serious accusation of sexual assault, from an alleged former staffer named Tara Reade.

    No, not that one.

    It remains to be seen whether the mainstream media will assign Reade’s story as much credibility and importance as that of Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Kavanaugh; they certainly have not done so yet. In any case, supporters of Biden—as well as the candidate himself—should take this opportunity to reflect on whether automatic belief is a useful or practical approach for handling decades’ old claims of misconduct.

    What has the mainstream media had to say about these accusations? You know as well as I: virtually nothing. What is the main things Democrats expect of Joe Biden? A pulse:

    For the foreseeable future, there will be no more speeches in front of hundreds, or lines of people waiting to shake Biden’s hand. There may not even be the glossy fanfare of a convention with a prime-time address. But, truthfully, all those things were always sort of beside the point. Like on that morning in McClellandville, and countless other ones besides, Biden was never really convincing anyone on the stump—his political power at this point is an idea, held collectively, about how to defeat Trump. The work now is to keep that idea convincing enough, for long enough, among as many people as possible, for the corporeal man to actually win.

    Biden backed Pelosi’s obstructionism while millions lost their jobs:

    Amid this partisan wrangling, Biden released a video condemning Trump and McConnell for putting a “corporate bailout ahead of millions of families,” echoing the arguments Pelosi and others used for their obstruction.

    “President Trump and Mitch McConnell are trying to put a corporate bailout ahead of millions of families. You know, it’s families. It’s simply wrong. We should be focusing on families, but the White House and the United States Senate Republicans have proposed a $500 billion slush-fund for corporations,” Biden says in the video. “Republicans refused to increase social security at the same time, to forgive student loans, to take the necessary steps to stop evictions, ensure food and nutrition for vulnerable families.”

    Joe Biden called on McConnell to hold a vote on Democratic priorities, rather than voting on the compromise bill that had been worked out ahead of time. He suggested the compromise bill would not help small businesses, workers, and communities — even though it includes cash pay-outs to most Americans, an increase in unemployment benefits, and more.

    Pelosi’s busted power play hurts Biden:

    Unlike the 2008 financial crisis or any other burst bubble, the coronavirus is an outside force, a threat forcing the government to ask that all nonessential workers either work from home or forgo their paychecks. The nation has proved willing to take the immediate economic hit without any promises, but if the government wants to maintain the status quo for weeks or even months, workers and small businesses need immediate cash relief. This is a conclusion that has united the political spectrum from Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders and manifested itself in the Senate Republicans’ imperfect but necessarily broad relief package.

    But after a week of bipartisan discussions, congressional Democrats have tried to nuke the bill, denying direct cash payments to the overwhelming majority of the nation and small businesses. And now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is out with her own bill, a Trojan Horse of a socialist Christmas list disguised as an emergency aid package.

    As businesses shutter around the country and workers struggle to make their final paycheck for the foreseeable future last long enough to feed their children, Pelosi produced her own crisis bill that would bail out the U.S. Postal Service, provide $10,000 student loan bailouts, and demand that companies accepting federal aid offer $15 minimum wage and permanent paid leave.

    The entire thesis of the Biden campaign goes something as follows: Trump is a uniquely partisan president who engages in trollery and trickery unbecoming of the White House. Joe Biden, contrarily, is a respected statesman with a documented history of working across the aisle. If you want a president who doesn’t tank the stock market with vile tweets, or even one who doesn’t force the nation to obsess over the federal government, vote for Barack Obama’s (former) BFF.

    Biden can sell that message, and as his primary proved, he does so effectively. But the rest of his caucus cannot. It’s one thing for Democrats to try and tank openly bipartisan bills like Trump’s criminal justice reform legislation or even impeach him during a time of peace and prosperity. It’s entirely another to sabotage a week of negotiations in the hopes of passing the discount Green New Deal while laid-off workers wonder how they’ll pay their water bill next month.

    Joe Biden may value bipartisanship, and we already saw the Obama administration rise to the occasion and work with Republicans when crises arose. But the rest of the Democratic Party isn’t playing Uncle Joe’s game, and the voters who gave Democrats the House in 2018 are seeing the evidence in a horrifying, real-time display.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) “Biden’s First Coronavirus Shadow-Briefing Was a Disaster:”

    Biden’s first attempt at appearing presidential and ready to handle a crisis was another gaffe-prone disaster that his campaign most certainly regrets doing.

    In the middle of his Monday briefing, Biden apparently lost his train of thought while explaining what he thinks Trump should do during the crisis.

    “I’m glad the president has finally activated the National Guard. Now we need the armed forces and the National Guard to help with hospital capacity, supplies, and logistics. We need to activate the reserve corps of doctors and nurses and beef up the number of responders dealing with this crush of cases,” he said, before shuffling papers and then gesturing to someone off-camera that there was a problem. “And, uh, in addition to that, in addition to that, we have to make sure that, we are… Well, let me go to the second thing.”

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Like Obama, Biden only sounds smart and together when his TelePrompTer is working. A low-energy campaign for a low energy candidate:

    Sidelined and confined to his house by the dictates of coronavirus social distancing, the former vice president has been limited to intermittent appearances from a makeshift studio in his basement. They have been awkward and low-energy, but that doesn’t really set them apart from most other Joe Biden appearances.

    If there’s any candidate who could thrive by having very limited public exposure and existing mostly as a line of a ballot, it’s the longtime presidential aspirant who hadn’t won a primary until a couple of weeks ago.

    Biden is winning the Democratic nomination on the basis of not being Bernie Sanders and wants to get elected president on the basis of not being Donald Trump. He’s as purely a negative candidate as we’ve seen in a very long time, running largely on who he isn’t and what he won’t do.

    He’s the presidential candidate as cipher.

    Biden’s pitch to young progressives: Hey babe, talk a walk on the mild side. Is Biden launching a podcast? I look forward to listening to that in the same sense I look forward to watching the Cats movie: in joyous anticipation of an epic train-wreck. The Decline of Sundown Joe:

    Joe Biden on China: A triptych:

    This one, though, hey, we’ve all been there:

  • Update: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Convention Substitute? With more than half the possible delegates already allocated, it would be impossible for Cuomo to jump into the race and win an outright delegate victory, but there’s been a lot of chatter about him being a brokered convention substitute for Biden. Meet “Mr. Contingency Plan“:

    Democrats are publicly talking about “contingency options” for their July convention in Milwaukee in case the coronavirus persists in being a public-health threat. But privately, some are also talking about needing a Plan B if Joe Biden, their nominee apparent, continues to flounder.

    Some Democrats are openly talking up New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose profile has soared during the crisis, as a Biden stand-in. Yesterday, a Draft Cuomo 2020 account on Twitter announced that “Times have changed & we need Gov. Cuomo to be the nominee. Our next POTUS must be one w/an ability to lead thru this crisis.”

    Snip.

    Democrats are increasingly worried that Joe Biden will have trouble being relevant and compelling in the long four months between now and when he is nominated in July. Lloyd Constantine, who was a senior policy adviser to New York governor Eliot Spitzer from 2007 to 2008, puts it bluntly: “Biden is a melting ice cube. Those of us who have closely watched as time ravaged the once sharp or even brilliant minds of loved ones and colleagues, recognize what is happening to the good soldier Joe.”

    Indeed, Biden seemed to disappear when the virus began dominating the news cycle early in March. Biden’s media presence “abruptly shriveled,” writes Kalev Leetaru, a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security. In contrast, daily mentions of Cuomo as of last Sunday “accounted for 1.4 percent of online news coverage compared with 2.9 percent for Trump.”

    Of course, if that actually came to pass, it would bring up two questions: What do Bernie Sanders fans think about the party deciding second place means bupkis when the DNC can just anoint a replacement? And how would millions of Biden’s black supporters feel upon finding out that their votes don’t matter compared to the will of a tiny clique of party insiders? How about Cuomo as Veep pick? Well, aside from the problem that Biden promised to pick a woman, there are other problems:

    Party poobahs would be against it: Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez tends hard left; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has no love for Cuomo, and African-American leaders, ­arguably the organization’s single most powerful bloc, see the governor as an impediment to party diversity and thus to their own interests.

    Certainly, Cuomo’s 10-year tenure itself bodes caution. Yes, he has been a reliable progressive, especially on guns, trendy egalitarian economic legislation and the various woke social causes. But he has also been aggressively pro-charter schools and thus a poison pill to teachers unions, an often thuggish and influential special interest; this alone could kill his candidacy.

    Moreover, Cuomo’s various ­upstate economic-development schemes — most disastrous in execution and each scandal-plagued along the way — are in the background now. But they’d move center-stage if he was on the ticket, so why would Biden want that to happen?

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He won the Democrats abroad primary, netting an estimated nine delegates to Biden’s four. Is he staying in the race until June? More on that theme:

    James Zogby, a Democratic National Committee member who is on the board of “Our Revolution,” said in an interview that he saw no reason for Sanders to give up his national platform now.

    “We don’t know what will befall us,” he said. “I mean, who knew two months ago that we’d be where we are with the virus. Who knows where we’ll be two months from now? Who knows what Bernie does, what Biden does, what else happens that will change the dynamics, so it would be irresponsible to leave the race, as some have suggested.”

    Zogby said Sanders should not exit the race unless Biden becomes the presumptive nominee — which he could do by hitting the necessary threshold of 1,991 pledged delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination on the first ballot at the convention.

    “But even then, don’t forget, Bernie Sanders is not just a candidate,” Zogby said, pointing to Sanders’ place atop the progressive movement. “He has every reason to stay in for that reason.”

    “Bernie’s supporters say that the coronavirus provides an opportunity for him to get back in the race, but of course they would. Bernie didn’t feel a need to vote on the stimulus package, preferring to livestream with members of the squad. 15% of Sanders supporters say they’ll vote for Trump if Biden is the nominee. Speaking of which:

  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020 and endorsed Warren)
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard (Dropped out March 19, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.(Dropped out March 2, 2020 and endorsed Biden.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 20020)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. (Dropped out March 5, 2020)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020, later endorsed Biden)
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    What’s Going On In China?

    Saturday, March 28th, 2020

    Yesterday’s LinkSwarm included a good bit of reporting on Communist China’s Coronavirus perfidy, both in covering it up and exporting it to the world. But what’s going on inside China right now? Everyone outside of the Democratic Party and the MSM (but I repeat myself) doesn’t believe for a second that China has actually controlled the outbreak the way their obviously fake figures suggest.

    There’s an awful lot of countervailing evidence that the outbreak there hasn’t been contained the ways China’s phony baloney numbers would have us believe:

  • The Chinese Communist Party has shut down all movie theaters again, just two weeks after giving them the greenlight to reopen.
  • “China has reported 3,299 coronavirus-related deaths, with most taking place in Wuhan, the epicenter of the global pandemic. But one funeral home received two shipments of 5,000 urns over the course of two days.”
  • We tend to think the Chinese communists have a lid on the anger and resentment of their own people, but recently stories have surfaced out of Hubei that indicate that’s not the case:

    Residents of Hubei province in China teamed up with their local police force to battle the police from neighboring Jiangxi province – who set up a roadblock on the Yangtze River Bridge to prevent the people of Hubei from crossing and returning to work.

    Footage of Hubei residents overturning Jingxi police vehicles was captured and uploaded to Chinese social media – where Chinese authorities have reportedly already scrubbed it.

  • So how are the Uighurs faring during the pandemic? Not well:

    The Chinese government has subjected tens millions of its citizens to draconian restrictions to try to contain the coronavirus. But for millions of Uighur and other ethnic minorities who were already living under severe repression, Beijing’s cruel and thuggish response to the pandemic is now compounding their anguish and pain.

    In Xinjiang, in China’s northwest, millions of people already have plenty of experience with the police state mentality. Over 1 million Uighurs and other ethnic minorities are currently imprisoned in “re-education camps,” where they are deprived of basic freedoms, religious practice, contact with their families or any legal recourse whatsoever. Those camps are especially vulnerable to contagious disease due to the cramped cells, lack of medical resources and generally dire conditions.

    Now Uighur activists are presenting evidence that the Chinese authorities’ reaction to the epidemic is causing hunger and panic even outside the camps. There are also separate reports that the Chinese authorities are forcing Uighurs to return to work at factories that had been shut down because of the epidemic — despite the ongoing risks.

    The Uyghur Human Rights Project released a briefing Wednesday that included Uighur-language videos and social media posts about the dire conditions in Xinjiang. The videos, which could not be independently verified, show Uighurs confronting a desperate shortage of food. The group says its claims are corroborated by news reports and messages members of the Uighur diaspora have received from family and friends in recent weeks.

  • The “terror famine” is an old play in the Communist Oppression Handbook, used everywhere from the Ukraine Holodomor to the tens of millions killed in Mao’s own collectivization famine.

    Keep in mind that most observers in the west didn’t have a good idea what was actually going on in the interior of China before the cornonavirus outbreak, and there’s little reason to believe that the fragments of social media flotsam and jetsam that make it to us are presenting an accurate or complete picture of it now.

    It’s widely believed that Wuhan coronavirus infection and death figures are understated by a factor of 10-20. But what if even that is too low?

    What if it killed fifty times as many Chinese people as their government claims?

    What if it killed a hundred times more?

    How would we know?