Let’s have a musical interlude for the times with the late, great Warren Zevon doing “Splendid Isolation” on Late Night With David Letterman:
Transverse City is a really underrated album…
Let’s have a musical interlude for the times with the late, great Warren Zevon doing “Splendid Isolation” on Late Night With David Letterman:
Transverse City is a really underrated album…
I hope you’re enjoying your splendid isolation on the first day of spring. As in previous weeks, the Wuhan coronavirus dominates the news with the reminder that the Gods of the Copybook Headings are never far away…
Holy crap—flashback to @wapo quoting the Chinese FM slamming the Trump administration's 1/31 travel ban AND noting that WHO (still operating under Chinese disinformation about #COVID19) was against Trump's move to stop entry into the US from China. pic.twitter.com/kkHfgwrv4Y
— Lyndsey Fifield (@lyndseyfifield) March 19, 2020
From the Verge 1/31 – apoplectic that Trump was going against WHO recommendations (because he's such an anti-science xenophobe…) pic.twitter.com/G83YAaVhsT
— Lyndsey Fifield (@lyndseyfifield) March 19, 2020
All of this PALES in comparison to Laurie Garrett in @ForeignPolicy lavishing praise on the Chinese for their response while viciously admonishing the Trump administration for going against WHO recs—calling the travel ban an “improvisation”
I bet the CCP won't be banning Laurie! pic.twitter.com/MUdPiunyPi
— Lyndsey Fifield (@lyndseyfifield) March 19, 2020
I think this has to be the last one I post for now because after this I need to go walk my dog and have some wine. Maybe at the same time.
My God. pic.twitter.com/tsJ4kWqjVR
— Lyndsey Fifield (@lyndseyfifield) March 19, 2020
The Centers for Disease Control has a $6.6 billion budget and one job which it messes up every time.
The last time the CDC had a serious workout was six years ago during the Ebola crisis. Back then CDC guidelines allowed medical personnel infected with Ebola to avoid a quarantine and interact with Americans until they showed undeniable symptoms of the disease. There were no protocols in place for treating the potentially infected resulting in the further spread of the disease inside the United States.
At the height of the crisis, confidence in the CDC fell to 37%. Meanwhile, CDC personnel had managed to mishandle Ebola virus samples, accidentally sending samples of the live virus to CDC labs. And the heads of the health bureaucracy blamed the lack of funding for their failure to have an Ebola vaccine.
Snip.
During the Ebola crisis, the CDC had been spending a mere $2.6 million on gun violence studies. But the CDC has a history of wasting money on everything from a $106 million visitor’s center with Japanese gardens, a $200K gym, a transgender beauty pageant, not to mention promoting bike paths.
The occasional outbreak only calls the CDC’s general incompetence to everyone’s attention. The rest of the time its incompetence, like that of other government agencies, just ticks along wasting money.
In 1999, the CDC announced a plan to end syphilis in 5 years. The Clinton era National Plan to Eliminate Syphilis was an unserious social welfare proposal that wanted to battle racism and was such a success that by 2018, syphilis rates had hit a new record high. But Democrat presidential candidates using the CDC for imaginary proposals to end a disease, not by utilizing science, but social welfare, had become a bad habit under Obama, diverting resources from what the CDC could realistically do for political scams.
In 2011, Hillary Clinton had promised an “AIDS-free generation” by, in part, using the CDC. Like her presidency, the “AIDS-free generation” never arrived and was never going to.
The CDC isn’t prepared to fight epidemics because it’s too concerned with pushing gun control, fighting obesity, and waging social justice. (Hat tip: Zerohedge.)
What Beijing cares about is clear from its sustained war on global public opinion. Chinese propaganda mouthpieces have launched a broad array of attacks against the facts, attempting to create a new narrative about China’s historic victory over the Wuhan virus. Chinese state media is praising the government’s “effective, responsible governance,” but the truth is that Beijing is culpable for the spread of the pathogen around China and the world. Chinese officials knew about the new virus back in December, and did nothing to warn their citizens or impose measures to curb it early on.
Instead of acting with necessary speed and transparency, the party-state looked to its own reputation and legitimacy. It threatened whistleblowers like the late Dr. Li Wenliang, and clamped down on social media to prevent both information about the virus and criticism of the Communist Party and government from spreading.
Unsurprisingly, China also has enablers abroad helping to whitewash Beijing’s culpability. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus refused for months to declare a pandemic, and instead thanked China for “making us safer,” a comment straight out of an Orwell novel. This is the same WHO that has refused to allow Taiwan membership, due undoubtedly to Beijing’s influence over the WHO’s purse strings.
Most egregiously, some Chinese government officials have gone so far as to claim that the Wuhan virus was not indigenous to China at all, while others, like Mr. Tedros, suggest that China’s response somehow bought the world “time” to deal with the crisis. That such lines are being repeated by global officials and talking heads shows how effectively China’s propaganda machine is shaping the global narrative. The world is quickly coming to praise the Communist Party’s governance model, instead of condemn it.
The reality is that China did not tell its own people about the risk for weeks and refused to let in major foreign epidemiological teams, including from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Thus, the world could not get accurate information and laboratory samples early on. By then, it was too late to stop the virus from spreading, and other world capitals were as lax in imposing meaningful travel bans and quarantines as was Beijing.
Because of China’s initial failures, governments around the world, including democratic ones, now are being forced to take extraordinary actions that mimic to one degree or another Beijing’s authoritarian tendencies, thus remaking the world more in China’s image. Not least of the changes will be in more intrusive digital surveillance of citizens, so as to be able to better track and stop the spread of future epidemics, a step that might not have been necessary if Beijing was more open about the virus back in December and if the WHO had fulfilled its responsibilities earlier.
Politics aside, this is incredible and the right response in this critical time. 👏🏽 https://t.co/MUzGkAxNaO
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) March 19, 2020
And the moon became as blood… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

I’ve bought a number of books there over the years…
Last year, ProPublica published a list of ER wait times at New York hospitals. Keep these pre-Wuhan virus wait times in mind when media begin to claim, in order to foment fear and hysteria, that long waits at NYC ERs are a new phenomeneon (they're not). https://t.co/rMhfdnXXlt pic.twitter.com/ET2nEMGvJc
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) March 19, 2020
After two years of hiding public voter data, the state’s biggest county will finally disclose records of foreigners illegally voting in Texas elections, ending a court battle initiated by an election integrity group.
This week, Harris County settled a lawsuit brought against its top voter registration official and agreed to release all records of noncitizen voters requested by Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm that specializes in fighting to enforce federal voter roll maintenance laws.
Snip.
PILF sued Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar Ann Bennett in 2018, after Bennett’s office refused access to records of registered voters identified as noncitizens, as well as actions taken by the county regarding those registrations.

Hitchens detested tribal and parochial feelings of any kind, which is why he was dismayed when he witnessed the emergence of identity as a catalyst for political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens attacked radicals who thought it was “enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic ‘preference,’ to qualify as a revolutionary.” When Hitchens first heard the expression “the personal is political,” he knew “as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news.” As he put it in a 2008 article:
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.
In the summer of 1992, actress Mia Farrow found out that her adopted daughter Soon-Yi was still romantically involved with Mia’s ex-long-time-boyfriend and collaborator, Woody Allen. According to then-21-year-old Soon-Yi, Mia responded by telling a psychologist that Woody was “satanic and evil,” and that she needed to “find a way to stop him.” Three days later, seven-year-old Dylan Farrow, Mia’s daughter, accused Allen of molesting her in Mia’s Connecticut house. But when the child’s accusations, which were captured on videotape with reported coaching from Mia, were investigated by the Connecticut State Attorney, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital and the New York Department of Social Services, no credible evidence could be found to support the allegations. As Kyle Smith reported in a definitive National Review article, Mia’s own nanny “quit the family rather than support Mia’s version of events.” And Dylan’s brother Moses wrote in 2018 that the Mia-Dylan abuse narrative simply made no sense given the architecture of the Connecticut house where the abuse allegedly took place. Yet Woody Allen was nonetheless smeared as a rapist and pedophile. And last week, his publisher, Hachette Book Group, announced it would cancel its deal to publish Allen’s memoirs.
The accusation always struck me as bunk. You can believe that Allen marrying his girlfriend’s stepdaughter is a creeper move without believing he’s a pedophile.
The 125cc Husky 🤔🤔🤗🤗🤭🤫🤫🤭🤭🤭🤭🤭🤭
The dog gone to bikes 😬
Crank it up..literally 🥴🤔🤫😬😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
pic.twitter.com/9Ia3hZxtN8— 🗡⚔️🗡Templar🗡⚔️🗡 (@aTeXan575) March 17, 2020
This is as good a time as any to tell you that my dog sings along to the Law & Order theme song every time he hears it pic.twitter.com/4HNVPWrzmE
— Peter Schultz (@pete_schultz) March 19, 2020
Enough with the spin and lies out of the People’s Republic of China. It’s the only nation in the world that bears primary responsibility for spreading the Wuhan coronavirus.
To the degree that we are suffering death and economic hurt from COVID-19, we can also attribute the toll to the Chinese Communist Party. Had it just called in the international medical community in late November, instituted early quarantines, and allowed its own citizens to use email and social media to apprise and warn others of the new disease, then the world and the U.S. would probably not have found themselves in the current panic. The reasons China did not act more responsibly may be inherent in communist governments, or they may involve more Byzantine causes left to be disclosed.
China could have told the truth an nipped the problem in the bud. But China didn’t because truth is not a concept valued by communist regimes. In fact, Chinese scientists destroyed Wuhan coronavirus evidence in December:
Chinese laboratories identified a mystery virus as a highly infectious new pathogen by late December last year, but they were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news, a Chinese media outlet has revealed.
A regional health official in Wuhan, centre of the outbreak, demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1. China did not acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.
The detailed revelations by Caixin Global, a respected independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak. Censors have been rapidly deleting the report from the Chinese internet.
Snip.
Ai Fen, director of Wuhan Central Hospital’s emergency department, told Chinese magazine People that a colleague sent her a diagnostic report in late December of a worrying infection that mirrored severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), according to the South China Morning Post.
Ai shared a picture of the report on a WeChat group on December 30, and then its members circulated that photo more widely. Whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang, 34, who was silenced by Chinese officials and then died of the COVID-19 virus, was part of that group.
Ai said she also gave hospital authorities a heads-up about the virus.
“I even grabbed our hospital respiratory department director, who happened to be passing my office, and told him that one of his patients was confirmed to have been infected with a SARS-like virus,” Ai said to People magazine, the Post reported….
The next day, Wang Wenyong, who leads infectious disease control at Wuhan’s Jianghan district disease control center, told Wuhan Central hospital to alter a suspected coronavirus report to say that patients were suffering from other illnesses.
Moreover, China is poised to take ruthless advantage of the chaos:
The virus that originated in Wuhan, China poses a double threat to America.
The first is to our health as the virus spreads through the U.S. population. The second is to our economy as more businesses, schools, and events shut down to slow the spread of the contagion.
We must not underestimate the economic threat because the Chinese Communist Party is using the pandemic to achieve its goal of supplanting the United States as the world’s leading economic, diplomatic, and military power.
Sounds unbelievable?
A new report from Horizon Advisory consultants details Beijing’s post-virus strategy—already operational—to leverage the pandemic to seize global market share in key industries, further global dependence on Chinese manufacturing, and reverse efforts in the United States and elsewhere to decouple from the People’s Republic.
“Beijing intends to use the global dislocation and downturn to attract foreign investment, to seize strategic market share and resources—especially those that force dependence, and to proliferate global information systems; to as Chinese sources put it, ‘leap-frog’ industrially, ‘overtake around the corner’ strategically, capture the ‘commanding heights’ globally. Beijing intends to reverse recent U.S. efforts to counteract China’s subversive international presence; at the same time to chip away at U.S.-Europe relations. In other words, Beijing will use COVID-19 to accelerate its long-standing, strategic offensive,” the Horizon report states.
We’re witnessing Beijing’s attempt to scrub its culpability for the pandemic from the world’s memory. Chinese Communist propagandists declare, “China is owed a thank you for buying the world time” and the New York Times dutifully repeats it.
After covering up the novel infection and unleashing it on the world, Beijing’s rulers bought up the world’s supply of protective gear and respirators.
Then they sell these critical goods to Italy while portraying themselves as the heroic humanitarian savior of the world, not unlike a pyromaniac who takes credit for calling the fire department.
Now, as China’s factories come back online at the same time the West’s economies shut down, Beijing sees further opportunity to extend its soft power and tighten its grip on global supply chains.
— China Virus (@GayPatriotTM) March 18, 2020
Amazingly, China’s useful Social Justice Warrior idiots have swarmed out of the woodwork to declare that calling COVID-19 the “Chinese Coronavirus” is somehow racist.
Thanks China! #ChinaLiedPeopleDied
(Yes of course I mean the Chinese government, not the Chinese people. Can't believe this disclaimer is necessary every freaking time.) pic.twitter.com/10KA0vXeBJ— Undoomed (@Undoomed) March 18, 2020
Many of the same leftist tools hurling accusation of racism were also calling it “Chinese Coronavirus” less than two months ago.
Once upon a time, calling the Chinese coronavirus the "Chinese coronavirus" wasn't racist…#Coronavirus#TrumpDerangementSyndrome pic.twitter.com/hV3n9XmemS
— Larry Elder (@larryelder) March 19, 2020
https://t.co/3lAwqzUBko pic.twitter.com/plFJTqA8lE
— jon gabriel (@exjon) March 17, 2020
The sad thing is that those leftists tools hate President Donald Trump so much they willingly spout Chinese communist propaganda in an attempt to hurt him and anyone who supports him.
China lied and people died. That’s the bottom line.
The Wuhan Coronavirus hits Austin right in its artisanal hipster belly:
Austin on Tuesday joined other major Texas cities in closing bars and restaurant dining rooms to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, which has now resulted in the state’s first death.
Dr. Mark Escott, director of Austin-Travis County Health Authority, also announced that pubic gatherings in the Texas capital are now limited to 10 people, following recommendations released a day earlier by the Trump administration. That’s more restrictive than similar measures taken in Dallas, which on Monday ordered that public gatherings should not exceed 50 people.
Those shutdowns are scheduled to last through May 1st. “Food establishments must now close common dining areas and are encouraged to give take-out, delivery or drive-thru options.”
Six weeks is a long damn time for a restaurant or bar owner, many of whom just barely scrape by. I wonder how many restaurants and bars this will drive into bankruptcy.
Williamson County has issued a decree limiting crowd sizes to 50 for the next eight weeks.
With all these draconian bans coming down, do you think the city of Austin will do anything about the illegal encampments of transient drug users Mayor Steve Adler has lured here?
🤢 20 mins We watched a homeless man walk around @WholeFoods hot bar/cold bar helping himself by sampling touching food then stealing food after coming right out the 🚽 #CityofAustin @WholeFoods #coronavirus #austin #sxsw Employees did nothing #johnmackey pic.twitter.com/HXVUmHGUJK
— WASH YO HANDS & 6ft AWAY Smith&Co ⚖ ™ (@Justica4all) March 6, 2020
I’m betting not…
I was not on the “oh don’t panic the Wuhan coronavirus is just the flu” bus. It’s a real pandemic with, as far as we can tell, a death rate about ten times that of the flu. People are dropping dead at an alarming rate in Italy. It’s real, it’s deadly, and a lot of the government reactions to it (the China travel ban, the emergency declaration) made sense. I believe in flattening the curve, no matter how many unknown variables there.
Now we’re well past the “making sense” part of the pandemic and onto the “bullshit overreaction and power-grab” portion of the pandemic.
Officials in seven San Francisco Bay Area counties issued a sweeping shelter-in-place mandate Monday affecting about 7 million people, ordering residents to stay at home and go outside only for food, medicine and outings that are absolutely essential.
The order says residents must stay inside and venture out only for necessities for three weeks starting Tuesday in a desperate attempt by officials to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.
How this is compatible with American constitutional rights is not explained. Also, what do you want to bet that absolutely nothing will be done to clear out San Francisco’s huge population of mentally addicted drug addicts shitting in the streets despite the fact that COVID-19 can likely be transmitted by fecal matter?
Hey, remember back in January when Democrats were slamming President Donald Trump for banning all flights from China as an overreaction?
Good times, good times…
Hot off the tubes, here’s a Norm Macdonald standup bit on the coronavirus.
And given the words “Norm Macdonald” and “standup” should let you know it’s NSFW.
“Funny how Big Pharm is evil until now!”
“The last step between us and happiness anyway were people.”
Evidently it took the near-end of the world for Norm to come back and do a standup set…
The “Andrew Gillum,” “Busted” and “Meth” parts of that headline are all spelled out on the police report, whereas the “gay orgy” part is only suspected.
Candace Owens, the conservative activist and founder of #Blexit, a campaign that encourages black voters to leave the Democratic Party, dropped a bombshell Friday on social media.
According to Owens, who included screenshots of what appears to be a Miami Beach Police Department report, Florida’s 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum “was involved in a crystal meth overdose incident.”
An incident that allegedly took place in a Miami hotel, where Owens said an orgy was “suspected, but unconfirmed.”
“Removing one page of report that had @AndrewGillum’s personal address listed which was wasn’t my intent— but YES— BREAKING: Democrat Andrew Gillum was involved in a crystal meth overdose incident last night in a Miami hotel. Orgy suspected, but unconfirmed,” she tweeted.
You may remember Gillum from such hits as “I’m not going to be governor of Florida despite George Soros and Tom Steyer’s money” and “I just paid a $5,000 campaign violation fine.”
Let’s repeat that the “gay orgy” part is only suspected, while the “busted for crystal meth” part is confirmed. It’s entirely possibly that three men just showed up the same hotel room at the same time merely to smoke crystal meth, and not to have a gay sex orgy.
Gillum, of course, denies everything. Drunk at a wedding, went to assist a friend, yadda yadda. The usual “veneer of plausibility” story no one believes.
Personally, I feel that a juicy Democratic politician gay meth orgy scandal is exactly what America needs to distract it from all the Wuhan Coronavirus gloom.
And now some tweets:
when they told Andrew Gillum to rock the vote they should have been clearer
— Michael Malice (@michaelmalice) March 13, 2020
Andrew Gillum is retiring from politics to spend more time with his meth.
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) March 13, 2020
On the plus side, their survival odds seem much better with @AndrewGillum than Ed Buck…
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) March 13, 2020
I’m not going to say anything negative about democrat Andrew Gillum,
who was found inebriated in a hotel room —
where meth was recovered —
because of a drug overdose.
Instead, I just want to say thank you to everyone who elected a Republican FL Gov. & Sen. in 2018.
— #ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) March 13, 2020
Rarely, in the history of politics, is a choice so clearly validated as the correct one as the choice of DeSantis over Gillum in Florida given today’s events.
— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) March 13, 2020
Andrew Gillum is *not* understanding social distancing… https://t.co/dvJ91tG7x1
— Carol Roth (@caroljsroth) March 13, 2020
Andrew Gillum revealed as Hunter Biden's running mate
— Michael Malice (@michaelmalice) March 13, 2020
Update: BOOM! Confirmation: “Man busted with Andrew Gillum in hotel room with meth was gay escort.” (Hat tip: Andy Ngo.)
Happy Friday the 13th! This is the world we’re living in now:

From the outset of Donald Trump’s entry into the world of politics he espoused a series of key tenets around what he called his “America-First” objectives:
- The U.S. needed to have control over our borders, and a greater ability to control who was migrating to the United States. A shift toward stopping ‘illegal’ migration.
- The U.S. needed to stop the manufacture of goods overseas and return critical manufacturing back to the United States. A return to economic independence.
- The U.S. needed to decouple from an over-reliance on Chinese industrial and consumer products. China viewed as a geopolitical and economic risk.
Donald Trump was alone on these issues. No-one else was raising them; no-one else was so urgently pushing that discussion. In 2015, 2016 and even 2017, no-one other than Trump was talking about how close we were to the dependence point of no return.
Given the status of very consequential issues stemming from the Chinese Coronavirus threat; and the myriad of serious issues with critical supply chain dependencies; wasn’t President Trump correct in his warnings and proposals?
This is brutal pic.twitter.com/bHTRnr2ypG
— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) March 12, 2020
The Chinese Communist Party has gone into overdrive pushing the lie that the #Wuhanvirus started in the US. It started in #China, and it was spread around the world thanks to Chinese government negligence and lies. They are 100% responsible for every death. #Coronavirus #CCPvirus
— Pat Condell (@patcondell) March 13, 2020
Before the coronavirus epidemic, U.S. companies were heading for record-low profitability in China as business conditions deteriorated and China’s economy slowed to its lowest rate in decades, according to a new survey of U.S. companies with operations in China…
American companies surveyed by AmCham reported their lowest levels of profitability since the Chamber first began asking the question 18 years ago: 61% of members described their 2019 financial performance as profitable or very profitable, an eight-percentage point drop from the year before.
He is charged with embezzling more than $1 million in union funds and properties to buy “luxury condos” in California, “lavish” dinners with “premium liquor,” five sets of custom-made golf clubs, horseback riding on a beach, and other non-union expenses that prosecutors allege the UAW covered up by mislabeling them as payments to vendors or meals for UAW officials, according to Matthew Schneider, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.

No, not that Python
I wasn't kidding pic.twitter.com/oYabgF77tI
— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) March 12, 2020
National Park posters created based off their worst Yelp Review, I’m dead pic.twitter.com/eQtdwC9QT6
— Madi Kay (@madiikay) March 11, 2020
Sadly, Troy Hurtubise is no longer around to design a monkey-proof suit…
The World Health Organization has announced that dogs cannot contract Covid-19. Dogs previously held in quarantine can now be released. To be clear, WHO let the dogs out.
— Liam Hackett (@DiageoLiam) March 12, 2020
Let’s be careful out there…
Update: “Austin Public Health has received two presumptive positive cases of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Austin-Travis County. These are the first cases to be confirmed in the area.” Not community spread.
Everyone and their dog is doing a Wuhan coronavirus roundup, so let’s make this update Texas-specific (which may make it easier to get into the other roundups).
Stay safe out there…