The rape allegation against Biden slowly percolates out into the mainstream media, Biden’s brain melts (more), Slow Joe stumbles through interviews (again), and more memes than you can shake a stick at. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
A remarkable thing happened Monday: The New York Times executive editor, Dean Baquet, actually had to answer questions about his paper’s very different coverage of sexual-assault allegations against Joe Biden and Brett Kavanaugh. It did not go well. It is simply impossible to read the interview and the Times coverage of the two cases and come away believing that the Times acted in good faith or, frankly, that it even expects anyone to believe its explanations. The paper’s motto, at this point, may as well be “All the News You’re Willing to Buy.”
For all their lectures to the public about transparency and fearless independence, prestige journalists tend to be very reluctant to face accountability of their own. Ben Smith, who only recently left his position as editor in chief of BuzzFeed for a perch as media reporter for the Times, deserves credit for putting Baquet to some tough questioning. Let’s walk through the Times’ very belated report on the Biden allegations and Baquet’s defenses of that reporting. The article, blandly titled “Examining a Sexual Assault Allegation Against Biden,” ran on page A20 of the Easter Sunday edition of the paper. On the same day, the Times opinion page ran a much more visible op-ed by Biden himself on his proposals to reopen the country.
Snip.
Tara Reade was one of the women who accused Biden in early 2019, but at the time, she did not accuse Biden of sexually assaulting her by penetrating her with his hands under her skirt, as she has now. Biden has never been asked personally to respond to Reade’s allegation. The Times assigned multiple reporters to the story but printed his campaign’s formal denials without addressing whether it had asked Biden himself to comment. Its report expressed no concerns that there has been inadequate investigation of the charge.
Smith started off by asking Baquet why it took until April 12 for the Times to even mention the allegations, which were made in a podcast interview on March 25 and reported at National Review and elsewhere within days:
Lots of people covered it as breaking news at the time. And I just thought that nobody other than The Intercept was actually doing the reporting to help people figure out what to make of it. . . . Mainly I thought that what The New York Times could offer and should try to offer was the reporting to help people understand what to make of a fairly serious allegation against a guy who had been a vice president of the United States and was knocking on the door of being his party’s nominee. Look, I get the argument. Just do a short, straightforward news story. But I’m not sure that doing this sort of straightforward news story would have helped the reader understand. Have all the information he or she needs to think about what to make of this thing.
So much for “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” This does not pass the laugh-out-loud test. Does any sentient being believe that the Times would have waited more than two weeks to even mention such an allegation against a Republican or conservative figure, while it tried to figure out how to tell its readers what “he or she needs to think about what to make of this thing”? Recall its wall-to-wall instant coverage of the Trump “Access Hollywood” tape, which by the next day had a full news analysis by Maggie Haberman asking why Trump had not apologized yet.
In Kavanaugh’s case, on September 14, 2018, before Christine Blasey Ford had even put her name to a public allegation against Kavanaugh, the Times published a 31-paragraph story on the then-anonymous charge. Two days later, the very day that Ford agreed to come forward publicly, the Times blared out a Sheryl Gay Stolberg story, which opened
President Trump’s bid to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was thrown into uncertainty on Sunday as a woman came forward with explosive allegations that Mr. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers more than three decades ago.
Unlike here, the story led with the most inflammatory line in Ford’s allegations (“I thought he might inadvertently kill me”) and contrasted that with what it described as “a terse statement” from the White House, terms it did not use in framing the allegations against Biden. Then, the Times complained that “some of the president’s allies on the right excoriated Ms. Ford — a registered Democrat — as a partisan.” Here, regarding Reade, the Times reported its reasons for skepticism of her political motivations (supporting Marianne Williamson, then Elizabeth Warren, then Bernie Sanders) without putting those accusations in the mouths of people primed to be disliked by Times readers.
Snip.
It got worse: When undeniably disreputable figures came out of the woodwork to offer lurid and preposterous tales of Kavanaugh’s supposed predations (many of which have since been recanted or thoroughly debunked), the Times ran with them. As Smith notes, when since-convicted lawyer Michael Avenatti pushed forward the charges by Julie Swetnick of Kavanaugh’s involvement in gang rapes, “The Times wrote that story the same day she made the allegation, noting that ‘none of Ms. Swetnick’s claims could be independently corroborated.’” Baquet’s response:
Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh’s status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation. And when I say in a public way, I don’t mean in the public way of Tara Reade’s. If you ask the average person in America, they didn’t know about the Tara Reade case. So I thought in that case, if The New York Times was going to introduce this to readers, we needed to introduce it with some reporting and perspective. Kavanaugh was in a very different situation. It was a live, ongoing story that had become the biggest political story in the country. It was just a different news judgment moment. . . . Kavanaugh was a running, hot story. I don’t think it’s that the ethical standards were different. I think the news judgments had to be made from a different perspective in a running hot story.
This is entirely circular: If the media make something a story, it becomes newsworthy; if it’s not reported, the readers don’t know about it, so it’s not newsworthy. No purer distillation can be found of the idea that the media set their own agenda.
How on earth do you pretend that Joe Biden’s character is not instantly newsworthy? He’s the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for president. He was the vice president of the United States for eight years. He’s been a front-page news figure since the 1980s. Thought experiment: Imagine that an allegation came forward against Ken Starr. We all know that, because Starr was involved in pursuing the Lewinsky story, any whiff of sexual impropriety would instantly be framed as a hypocrisy story even long after Starr has left public service. Biden chaired the Hill–Thomas hearings in 1991; how is that not the same thing?
We were constantly told that the Kavanaugh allegations should be judged by a low bar because the hearings were “a job interview” and he’d be confirmed to a powerful, life-tenured job. Well, presidents have a lot more power than any individual Supreme Court justice, including the power to appoint lots of life-tenured federal judges and justices. Isn’t this Biden’s job interview?
Rick McHugh previously reported on Weinstein’s many victims, so he’s not new to this rodeo.
In the interview below, he says the following:
* Tara Reade says she told her mother, her friend, and her brother about the sexual assault just after it happened. The mother has passed, but the friend and brother confirm they were told about this at the time.
* He further says his interviews of the friend and brother were “not short conversations,” but long ones, where he “drilled down” to discover if their recollections matched the story Reade was telling now. He says they do in fact match.
* He notes further that the timing of this claim tracks with Reade’s sudden demotion at the Senate.
* Tara Reade says she also filed a complaint with the Senate about sexual harassment (not assault, which happened later) after her complaint to the Biden staff was ignored. McHugh cannot find this document, but says it seems to be located (assuming it exists) at the University of Maryland’s collection of Joe Biden’s papers — which is conveniently under seal.
“NYT: We Looked Into the Accusations Against Joe Biden and Determined He’s A Democrat“:
“While the charges of sexual assault by Biden’s former aide, Tara Reade, are something we would call extremely credible in any other situation,” reads the article, “our investigation revealed that legitimizing them would be politically unhelpful to Democrats. Thus we conclude the allegations are false for reasons we will fill in later — unless we can just go back to not talking about them and not give any reasons at all. We also find it absolutely necessary to consider Biden’s habit of inappropriately touching women to be ‘charming.’”
CNN? Not so much. The published over 700 articles on Christine Blasey Ford, but as of April 16 had yet to mention Tara Reade.
CNN’s political campaign against Kavanaugh included sympathetic articles toward Blasey Ford, hostile articles about Kavanaugh, supportive pieces about the importance of believing women even when they provide no evidence, hostile pieces about the danger of due process and empathy for men, and targeting of key Republican senators. CNN’s work culminated with their award-winning efforts to sway Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, broadcasting a confrontation between a professional activist and the wavering senator.
It’s a low bar but Tara Reade’s accusation is undoubtedly stronger than the one made against Kavanaugh. Unlike Blasey Ford, she told multiple people about the alleged incident at the time it happened, not three decades later. And unlike Blasey Ford, she has evidence she met the accused, in her case when she worked for him in the U.S. Senate.
Since then they’ve done one article on her April 17, then mentioned her in another.
Former Bill Clinton advisor Dick Morris doesn’t think Biden has the stuff. “It’s hard to see. It’s like a suicide march with them. But they’re pretty stubborn people.”
Former Bernie Sis Shoe0nHead on the hilarity of watching a Biden-Trump election. “Biden’s brain is melting. He doesn’t know where he is half the time, he loses his train of thought, he wanders off camera, and Trump is like a 12 year old on Xbox Live. The combination of these two these two titans coming together will be hilarious! Trump will beat Joe Biden like a pinata, an old, senile pinata, and the DNC will be forced to watch helplessly as their golden goose gets boiled alive right in front of their eyes! Hilarious!”
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) April 16, 2020
More on the theme:
BIDEN: "Um, you know, there's a, uh, during World War II, uh, you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing, uh, that, uh, you know, was totally different than a- than the- it's called, he called it, the, you know, the World War II, he had the war- the the War Production Board." pic.twitter.com/CwFSW2UITD
Lacking such a ring, Stephen Green tries unsuccessfully to decode from the Bidenese. “When most politicians speak, audiences have to suspend their disbelief. When it’s Biden speaking they have to suspend their incomprehension.”
OC makes this comment and then poof, just like that, Biden calls her up and they are in talks for an endorsement. It’s almost as if the #metoo movement has been turned into a complete joke, able to be covered up at will via political agreements.
Joe Biden obviously wanted no part of having AOC and her wing propagating the sexual assault claim against him. He’s succeeded in having outlets like the Times and the Post run interference for him, even trashing Tara Reade along the way, but he has no such control over Bernie’s fanbase. Getting an endorsement from their biggest star gives him that.
I have to give it to her though. AOC is nothing if not cunning. She’s managed to go from a nobody freshman congresswoman to the upper echelons of Democratic party influencers in a very short period of time. We can make fun of her all we want, but that takes skill and a lack of shame usually relegated to the Adam Schiff’s of the world.
“Pro-Trump PAC hits ‘Beijing Biden,’ cites China cheerleading.”
Hey, remember that Chinese company Hunter Biden says he’s no longer affiliated with? Well, guess what?
Hunter Biden received wall-to-wall media coverage and praise from his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, in October when he announced he would resign from the board of a Chinese private equity firm by the end of the month.
But six months after Hunter Biden pledged to relinquish his position with BHR Partners, no evidence has surfaced to prove he actually followed through on his promise.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in early November that his client had resigned from BHR’s board, but he did not provide any evidence of his departure from the Chinese private equity firm at the time.
Chinese business records the DCNF accessed Tuesday still name Hunter Biden as a director of BHR. He also retains a 10% equity stake in BHR through his company, Skaneateles LLC, business records for the Chinese private equity firm show.
Related tweet:
Oh wow. Hunter Biden got the Chinese company to say he’s no longer on the board that seems credible so they just lied on their business filings in March? pic.twitter.com/1TwlzklC09
A global plague has shut down much of American society. The virus is particularly deadly to the elderly, and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee will turn 78 later this year. In November, voters will want more than anything a VP who is ready on a moment’s notice to lead the country out of a crisis. So the Democratic veepstakes is suddenly much more important than it otherwise would be.
Joe Biden has pledged to name a woman as his running mate, and he has indicated that he would very much like that woman to be an African American. Stacey Abrams checks both boxes, and she is auditioning for the job. But while she might excite the Democratic base, a failed gubernatorial candidate who has never held a public office more powerful than state legislator obviously has no chance of getting the nod during the present pandemic. Maybe the coronavirus will, against all odds, abate in the coming months. But it would be an act of political insanity for a geriatric presidential nominee to select a former state legislator as his running mate under the current circumstances.
If Biden wants his VP to be a black woman, then, he is left with only one real choice: Kamala Harris. While the California senator has three years of experience as a senator and six years more as her state’s attorney general, her presidential campaign was a disaster, doomed by vacillation and equivocation on important matters of policy. She proved herself capable of delivering scripted attacks during debates, but her most famous such attack came at Biden’s expense: She hit him on his past opposition to forced busing, practically calling him a racist. That would be difficult, to say the least, for her to explain away were Biden to choose her. It shouldn’t be an insurmountable obstacle, and she still makes sense on paper. But her primary performance failed to generate much enthusiasm among Democrats, and her indecisiveness made her seem unready to step up in a crisis.
What about Elizabeth Warren? If Biden wants ideological balance on the ticket, the senator from Massachusetts makes the most sense. But does he really need ideological balance?
For most of the left, Biden’s pledges to lower the Medicare-eligibility age to 60, establish a public option for health care, and defeat Donald Trump will be enough. Bernie Sanders’s most alienated, angry, hardcore supporters are not going to turn out because of Warren; they hate her just as much as they hate Biden. The greater number of 2016 Sanders voters who didn’t turn out for Hillary Clinton in key Midwestern states could be swayed by Warren, but my hunch is that they were turned off more by Clinton’s persona than her ideology, and it’s hard to see how Warren would connect with them on a cultural level. More importantly, Warren’s pledges to radically transform the nation’s economy could scare away the moderate suburbanites who powered Democrats’ successful 2018 effort to retake the House — and Biden really can’t afford to lose those voters in 2020.
All of which suggests that a relatively moderate woman from the Midwest would make much more sense as Biden’s VP.
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks, but a fair amount of it has been negative. Whitmer only has one year of experience as governor, and voters may come to view Michigan’s especially stringent lockdown restrictions as arbitrary and excessive in the coming months. She seems like a long-shot for the second spot on the national ticket.
The darkhorse VP nominee from the Midwest is Tammy Baldwin, who has been a senator from the potentially decisive, perpetually polarized swing state of Wisconsin for the last seven years, and won re-election in 2018 by eleven points even as GOP governor Scott Walker lost his bid for a fourth term by just one point. The existence of Baldwin–Walker voters, plus the fact that Baldwin was the first openly gay women in Congress, must be attractive to Democrats. The major drawback is that Baldwin has never endured the national spotlight.
That leaves just one name: Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota senator who is still the leading contender for the job. She won’t scare away crucial suburban voters the way that Warren would and Harris might. She is serving her 14th year in the Senate, so she has experience, and having run for the presidency this cycle, she has survived the scrutiny of a national campaign.
Politico also has a veepstakes roundup. Toward the end we have this from an unnamed Biden adviser: “Anyone who is telling you about who’s leading in the so-called ‘veepstakes’ is full of shit and doesn’t know anything.” Well then, I guess you don’t need to click that link…
"It's apparently a Senate rite of passage that you're not officially sworn in until Delaware Joe has felt up one female member of your immediate family."
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.
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.”
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…
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 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, 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.
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 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…
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.)
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?
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.
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.)
Here’s a double-shot of Tucker Carlson on two different lies being bandied about but our media (and parts of our various governments) on effective tools to fight the Wuhan coronavirus.
Hydroxychloroquine given in combination with antibiotics looks like an effective combination. So why do so many Democrats insist it doesn’t work, going so far that a douple of Democratic governor’s have tried to ban it’s use for treating coronavirus? “If Trump is for it, they’re against it, even if it might save American lives.”
Seeing huge praise for this on Twitter, including Scott Adams saying it’s the best he’s ever seen. I’ve cut off 37 minutes of waiting at the beginning. Skip to 40 minutes in for President trump to start speaking.
The bad news is evidently that the lockdown recommendations are going to be extended through April 30.
It is what it is.
I just started watching it. I’m offering it up here as a Full Service Blog post.
Here’s a Joe Rogan interview with epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, co-author of Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, talking about the battle against the Wuhan coronavirus. It’s informative but not exactly encouraging:
People with underlying conditions or risk factors like smoking or obesity suffer much higher death rates. 10% of Chinese men over 70 who smoked who contracted the Wuhan coronavirus died.
Don’t expect coronavirus to go away in short order; we’re going to be dealing with it for a while.
Don’t expect summer to kill the virus; MERS thrived on the Saudi Arabian peninsula.
It could be ten times worse than a seasonal flu.
Keep doing the hand washing, but don’t think it’s going to stop the virus, whose transmission vector is primarily airborne.
N-95 masks are effective, but there’s a shortage.
Fecal transplants > Probiotics.
There are coyotes in New York City’s Central Park.
It’s easy to make a cornavirus, but it’s hard to make a safe vaccine. It could be years before we have a vaccine…
Also features discussion of various other diseases.
