[Donald Sensing] - A zombie is actually dead, it is just too stupid to know it. And all it wants to do is find you, a non-zombie, and bite big chunks of flesh from your body. This turns you into a zombie, too.
Key point: Zombies are very bad! Avoid zombies, even if it means staying holed up in your house, never leaving, stocked with 500 rolls of toilet paper and all the hand sanitizer you can buy!
However, this is a Covid-19 sufferer:
Please note the difference. Covid-19 patients do not attack you. They do not eat your living tissue. They are not dead, like zombies are. The great majority of them recover and the ones who do not are too sick before death to track you down and infect you, even if they wanted to. Which they do not.
Even as Covid worsens in America - and it will - it will not cause the collapse of our civilization. Workers will still work, although many businesses and industries will take a hit. Farmers will still farm. Ninety percent of the toilet paper we use is made right here in the USA. Almost all the other 10 percent comes from Canada and Mexico.
Social distancing does not mean you can never leave your house. It does not mean that you will become infected by walking down the street. Even if you are at high-risk for the infection, it does not mean you must now stockpile 500 rolls of toilet paper and all the hand sanitizer you can get.
We are not going to run out of hand sanitizer or toilet paper. Or food. And even if you do not want to risk going to a (potentially) crowded store to buy more, someone else will go for you. Ask a family member, neighbor, friend. Ask a local church or synagogue for help.
...So chill, Americans. Just chill. Take all the proper precautions against the virus. But nothing about this disease requires stockpiling. Face the future with confidence and planning, not panic. We simply are not at this point, not by a long shot:
BLUF:
[Patriot Post - Culture Beat] To reframe that last paragraph amidst the current COVID-19 pandemic:
"This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by a virus, let that virus when it comes find us doing sensible and human things, but with social distancing in the near term to slow it down ‐ teaching remotely, reading, listening to music on our stereos, bathing the children, exercising at home, chatting to our friends over a video conference ‐ not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about viruses. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."
[Patriot Post] In 1942, America began the Manhattan Project. It was driven by the fear that Nazi scientists were developing an atomic bomb and that Adolf Hitler was prepared to use it. Today, America needs a new Manhattan Project to respond to the reality that China ‐ an enemy every bit as determined to rule the world as the Nazis were ‐ controls the supply of 80% to 90% of U.S. antibiotics. And for those Americans who think the word "enemy" is too strong, the Chinese Communist Party’s media mouthpiece has boasted about that nation’s ability to impose pharmaceutical export controls that would push America into "the mighty sea of coronavirus."
That media mouthpiece is a state-run agency known as Xinhua. It is now casting China as heroic for containing the virus as long as it did. "We should say righteously that the U.S. owes China an apology, the world owes China a thank you," an editorial stated. That would be the same China that blatantly lied about when the outbreak began, ignored offers of outside help for weeks, and arrested whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang, forcing him to sign a letter saying he spread "untrue speech" about the danger. Li subsequently succumbed to the virus.
In America, succumbing to communist thugs, to the point where loyalty and patriotism have been completely supplanted by the globalist agenda, has now reached catastrophic levels. It’s a catastrophe enabled by a self-anointed "New World Order" elitist class that no longer hides its contempt for ordinary Americans who’ve seen their cities and towns decimated by outsourcing leading to despair, homelessness, massive drug abuse, and now a communicable disease that threatens our entire way of life ‐ even as they are told globalism is a "net benefit" for the nation.
Net benefit? Ordinary Americans were supposed to be mollified by cheap consumer goods, while elitists amassed historically unprecedented levels of wealth. Moreover, those same elitists lectured us about how the nationalist agenda of the Trump administration was akin to Nazism, and that any hesitation to embrace globalism was xenophobic. Even now, despite this being the second virus originating in China (SARs emerged in 2003), our own media insists that referring to COVID-19 as "Wuhan virus," the "Wuhan coronavirus," or the "Chinese coronavirus" is racist.
In the midst of a pandemic, it doesn’t get more intellectually or morally bankrupt than that. The hypocrisy is astounding: Many of the same media sources now browbeating Americans for their racism initially used precisely the same terms to describe the virus.
#3
The elitists could also go to their cocktail parties and congratulate each other for "eliminating those messy polluting big factories with their nasty smokestacks from the cities (and upwind of their condos)." All of those workers could now "Learn How to Code!" or find a job as a government drone...
Excerpt from the March 13 2020 DIA release:
Source and Spread of the Virus
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in people and many different species of animals, including camels, cattle, cats, and bats. Rarely, animal coronaviruses can infect people and then spread between people such as with MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV, and now with this new virus (named SARS-CoV-2). Graphic depicts off-loading of potential COVID-19 culprits.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a betacoronavirus, like MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV. All three of these viruses have their origins in bats. The sequences from U.S. patients are similar to the one that China initially posted, suggesting a likely single, recent emergence of this virus from an animal reservoir.
Early on, many of the patients at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China had some link to a large seafood and live animal market, suggesting animal-to-person spread. Later, a growing number of patients reportedly did not have exposure to animal markets, indicating person-to-person spread. Person-to-person spread was subsequently reported outside Hubei and in countries outside China, including in the United States. Some international destinations now have apparent community spread with the virus that causes COVID-19, as do some parts of the United States. Community spread means some people have been infected and it is not known how or where they became exposed. Learn what is known about the spread of this newly emerged coronaviruses.
[American Thinker] First of all, Wuhan is a place and not a race, and to identify the coronavirus by its place of origin, like naming the Ebola Virus for a river in Zaire, is not racist or xenophobic ‐ it's merely accurate. There is no racism or xenophobia in labeling an infection "Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever" or calling something "Lyme Disease" after a nearby town in Connecticut.
What calling this latest virus the Wuhan Virus is is a reminder of the multiple contagions China has spawned and released on an unsuspecting world. Nor is connecting some very big, ugly, and obvious dots just another conspiracy theory to be dismissed out of hand.
From the beginning China has been less than forthcoming about this virus and resisted sharing critical data and access to WHO and CDC specialists. And have we forgotten Dr. Li Wenliang, the 33-year-old ophthalmologist based in Wuhan, the epicenter of the contagion, who tried to tell the world that China was hiding something malevolent, only to be silenced and imprisoned by Chinese authorities for allegedly fabricating lies about the disease's deadly potential? He would later die of the disease he tried to warn us about and the Chinese tried to keep under wraps:
#4
i'm sure the Chinese government will have Dr Li Wenliang reappear publicly if enough people demand it. He might be taller, older, have a different accent, not remember details of his pre-Wohan life, but these are factors of being infected and to point these things out is racist.
BERLIN (AP) ‐ It’s 7 p.m. on a Friday night, a time when Aurel Johannes Marx’s three-room brothel on the edge of Berlin would normally be preparing for its first customers. Sex for sale has long been a staple part of the German capital’s freewheeling nightlife. But amid concerns over the new coronavirus, even the world’s supposedly oldest profession is suffering a sudden slump.
At the "Lankwitzer 7" brothel, with its soft red light and bawdy paintings on the wall, disinfectant dispensers have been installed next to the washbasins. Marx say he’s ordered staff to hot-wash all towels and sheets, and open the windows more often to let the warm, sticky air escape.
Still, customers just aren’t coming round anymore.
#2
Lots of jobs face ruin amid virus fears and closures.
Other jobs like journalism will face irreparable harm to their profession for the scare-mongering they did early on trying to hurt the president.
#4
Don't insult prostitutes by comparing them to journalists!
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
03/17/2020 8:11 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Journalists, bah! I trust people who are doing it for money more than people who are doing it for ideology. Skin in the game, and all that. No pun intended.
[Patriot Post] It was just a little over 10 years ago, at the height of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said one of the dumbest things in modern times. The best way to stimulate the economy, she declared, was with "unemployment insurance and food stamps." Right. Paying people not to work will get more people to work.
Now here we go again. In the throes of the COVID-19 financial crisis, Pelosi is still spreading her economic pixie dust. Maybe it is just an inviolable rule of politics that politicians never seem to learn from their past mistakes.
The economy is now partially paralyzed from fear of the virus, so Republicans and Democrats want to do something to juice the economy. President Donald Trump’s big idea is to cut taxes.
This may not do much to suspend the fear and gridlock that has gripped the economy, but it can incentivize more work (by allowing every worker to keep more of their own money) and can accelerate spending at a time when demand has fallen off the cliff.
Economists can debate back and forth about how well a tax cut will work to avert an economic calamity, but it can’t hurt. What is for sure is that this plan is far more likely to succeed than what Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues want. They favor paid leave for workers who don’t come to work (which incentivizes nonwork), unemployment insurance, Medicaid expansion, bailouts for hard-hit industries and so on.
Spend, spend, spend.
History teaches us that these kinds of so-called stimulus plans always fail. The mother of all government spending plans was the failed $830 billion fiscal stimulus during Barack Obama’s first months in office. Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, explained the rationale in early 2009 by stating: "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."
Time magazine put Obama on its cover with a cigar and a top hat, looking like a dapper Franklin Roosevelt circa 1932. It was fitting because Obama had in mind a supersized New Deal. The promises were alluring. Obama told us that the money would be spent quickly on vital "shovel-ready projects." Soon after it passed, Vice President Joe Biden famously predicted that 2009 would bring "the summer of recovery" ‐ which never happened because the unemployment rate continued to rise.
The giveaway was always less about resuscitating the economy and more about spreading hundreds of billions of dollars to left-wing interest groups. There would be money for the National Endowment for the Arts (how does that stimulate the economy?), Head Start, unemployment insurance and food stamps for illegal immigrants, renewable energy subsidies, high-speed rail, Cash for Clunkers and Medicaid expansion. The whiz kid economists in the Obama administration predicted a 2009 growth rate north of 4.5%. It barely got to 2%.
By the Obama administration’s numbers, every year from 2009 to 2011, unemployment came in much higher than Obama’s team predicted it would have if we had done nothing. Many of the shovel-ready projects, such as the $535 million that went to the now-bankrupt solar company Solyndra, turned out to be lemons or scams.
The stimulus didn’t work because it ignored the very nature of government activity, which is the feds can only give money to Peter by taking money from Paul. With a tax cut, instead of making money from Peter, it lets Peter keep it.
Harvard economist Robert Barro explained during the Great Recession why the spending spigot didn’t grow flowers: "Every time heightened fiscal deficits fail, the policy advice is to choose still larger deficits," he concluded. "The results from following this policy advice are persistently lower growth and an exploding ratio of public debt to GDP."
[American Thinker] Desperation has set in among the Politburo in China as their deliberate mishandling and obfuscation of the Chinese Coronavirus outbreak has threatened, and in all likelihood derailed, their grandiose plans for global hegemony. In what can only be described as one of the most ham-handed propaganda efforts in recent memory, China is now trying to deflect blame onto the United States for the Coronavirus outbreak that has been recently categorized as a global pandemic. Further, they are unabashedly claiming that any criticism of their "valiant" efforts to stem the spread of the virus or using the nomenclature of Wuhan Virus or Chinese Coronavirus is racist and xenophobic.
While their attempt to implicate the United States may appear on the surface to be absurd, the reality is that much of it will fall on fertile ground previously tilled and seeded over the past 25 years with vast amounts of money and investments.
An end-product of China’s infiltration of the American media and education establishment is the almost immediate regurgitation of China’s racist and xenophobic argument by the American mainstream media and the predominantly left-wing professional class. Hollywood and the entertainment cabal, already awash in Chinese capital and desperate for access to the Chinese market, has refused to criticize China’s handling of the Coronavirus focusing instead on President Trump. It is almost a certainty that when the pandemic recedes there will be nothing produced that is even remotely critical of China.
The European Union is now China’s largest trading partner and investor. They are beginning to exert increasing influence in nations such as Italy and throughout the continent. Which is why the European Union refused to initiate a travel ban from China during the entirety of the Coronavirus outbreak, leading to Europe now being the global epicenter of the pandemic as well as the source of the bulk of the infections in the United States.
With this overall backdrop the Chinese leadership is confident that their near clownish propaganda efforts will succeed. Their only obstacle is the re-election of President Trump, who is the only world leader in the past 25 years to understand what animates the Chinese and to stand up to their intimidation tactics.
The establishment of the Democrat Party believes they have a solution to that obstacle in what appears to be the inevitable nomination of Joe Biden.
Joe Biden, in his days in the Senate, was very partial to China, as he voted against all legislation aimed at curtailing China’s ambitions. In 2007 he opposed the idea of applying any tariffs on China despite their obvious unfair trade practices and theft of proprietary technology that was causing the loss of millions of American manufacturing jobs. America’s dependence on a communist regime for materials and goods, such as pharmaceuticals, continued to grow unabated. However, it was as Vice President that he became wholly enamored with the country and its leadership. My emphasis added at para 4.
#2
From ibid Ten day later, Hunter’s two-year-old company, Rosemont Seneca, signed an exclusive $1 Billion (later expanded to $1.5 Billion) deal with the state-owned Bank of China, creating an investment fund called Bohai Harvest, with money guaranteed by the Chinese Government.
[Al Jazeera] Over the past few years, The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...Qatar's satrapy in Asia Minor... and Russia have had to repeatedly sit at the negotiating table to strike a deal on opposition-held areas in northwestern Syria. Yet, in spite of these agreements, the situation in the area, particularly the northwestern province of Idlib, has only gotten worse, with no clear solution in sight.
The latest Ottoman Turkish-Russian deal, which Ottoman Turkish President His Enormity, Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan the First
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
03/17/2020 00:00 ||
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[JPost] - Amid all the chaos caused by the coronavirus tidal wave, it may also rid the world of many of its worst terrorists or at least freeze their activity.
There are no statistics for how its is impacting ISIS supporters and will be none as the group would never report negative data and has no connections to international groups like the WHO or the civilized world.
But ISIS’s stunning recent order to its followers to stay away from Europe means not only that it is afraid of future infection if its agents go there, but that its network of followers there is likely already being hit.
This would make lots of sense since ISIS members tend to be disconnected from the Western world and could have gone longer ignoring the dangers of infection than average persons.
Further, ISIS persons will be weary of accepting medical assistance from the authorities in their host country as their faces may already be on a wanted list or their coming forward could unintentionally out them as an ISIS operative.
Iran is the paradigm case of a regime sponsoring terrorism which is known to be getting hit harder than any other countries besides China and Italy.
The Islamic Republic is notoriously dishonest about numbers which can hurt its public relations.
So when on Tuesday its official count of dead reached close to 1,000 and over 14,000 persons infected, the real numbers would likely be far higher.
Most significantly, top Iranian leaders, including an ayatollah, ministers and senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officials have been killed and infected by the coronavirus.
...Iran is also having a much harder time fighting the coronavirus wave because years of sanctions caught the country at its weakest and most undersupplied point economically and medically.
Of course, the flip side of a country where there are many backwards attitudes toward science and medicine (one reason for the spread was Qom religious leaders urging followers to visit to receive blessings right as Qom became greatly infected) is that the regime may be more ready to suffer.
...Outbreaks of coronavirus have started to surface in Somalia where large portions of the country are under control of the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab armed group.
...Coronavirus has not yet had a major impact on Gaza, but the beginning of it having an impact and Hamas’ fear of it getting out of control have likely halted or virtually halted attempts to provoke Israel.
...Top Hezbollah officials have reportedly been infected with coronavirus during a visit by their Iranian sponsors. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah may even have been infected. ^ We can only hope
[Town Hall] - "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time," said Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey to a friend on the eve of Britain's entry into the First World War.
Observing from afar as the coronavirus pandemic ravages the Old Continent, Grey's words return to mind. And as the Great War changed Europe forever, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be changing the way European peoples see each other.
"All for one and one for all!" These were the words by which "The Three Musketeers" of Alexandre Dumas lived their lives.
This was the ideal upon which the EU and NATO were built. An attack against one is an attack against all. The Schengen Agreement by which citizens of Europe are as free to travel through the countries of their continent as Americans are to travel from Maryland to Virginia is rooted in that ideal.
Yet, suddenly, all that seems to belong to yesterday.
How the EU's nation-states are reacting to the coronavirus crisis brings to mind another phrase, a French phrase, "Sauve qui peut," a rough translation of which is, "Every man for himself."
The New York Times has written of the new reality. In Sunday's top story, "Europe Locks Up and Faces Crisis as Virus Spread," the Times wrote:
"While some European leaders, like President Emmanuel Macron of France, have called for intensifying cooperation across nations, others are trying to close their countries off.
"From Denmark to Slovakia, governments went into aggressive virus-fighting mode with border closings."
...Closing borders is a grievous offense against liberalism that is supposedly rooted in the sin of xenophobia. But what governments in Europe are saying by closing their borders, what Americans are saying by banning travel from Europe, is that while all men may be created equal, we will always put our own people first, ahead of the rest.
When a crisis comes, be it a war in which the survival of the nation is at stake or an epidemic where the health and survival of our people is at stake, we take care of our own first.
This is human nature. This is the way the world works.
#3
Trump has been doing that in the US regarding federalism and trusting the US marketplace of ideas by allowing the states to declare their own closures and emergencies and providing help when asked.
Of course the left sees this as inaction instead of avoiding going all in with the potential wrong action, and the left really want him to be the dictator they've always said he was. Interesting dynamic.
#4
Flights arriving from Iran were only banned yesterday.
F**** morons.
Posted by: European Conservative ||
03/17/2020 10:35 Comments ||
Top||
#5
People may also be noticing that while Italy and Germany and France and Spain have doctors, nurses, and ventilators, the EU per se does not, although it does have a bunch of apparatchiks who one day declared they were in charge and somehow got people to believe them.
[American Thinker]- When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. When life hands you coronavirus, start looking at all the good that can come from it. In that regard, if you haven’t already read Gordon Wysong’s delightful article about the benefits that can flow to America from its brush with coronavirus ("The Coronavirus Will Save America"), you should. It will lift your spirits.
In keeping with Mr. Wysong’s premise, here’s one more beneficial change that might flow from the coronavirus interlude in America: It may weaken America’s institutions of higher indoctrination, also known as America’s colleges and universities.
...Online education also means colleges need less money because there aren’t students on campus. The enormous administrative staffs that are primarily responsible for the increase in college costs become unnecessary.
It turns out, though, that there’s another, unexpected upside to coronavirus, which is that the changes to academia will take foreign money, especially Chinese money, out of college campuses. At the Daily Caller, in an article that’s behind the Patriots paywall, Marlo Safi explains that "U.S. Colleges May Suffer Billions In Revenue Loss Due To Coronavirus Travel Restrictions.
IMO, Universities should be a place for research and scholarship. Professional training should be handled by trade schools.
#1
harder to divide students by race if they have no physical presence on campus. Harder for students to make crazy leftist demands of the administration if the administration can just shut off their access to the school and shut down their voice.
But Academia will fight to maintain the brainwashing, somehow.
#2
One more benefit: we gave the opportunity to run very large, unbiased experiments about the efficacy of distance learning vs traditional onsite instruction.
If it turns out that students learn just as much from the former as from the latter - I doubt it but we shall see - then the whole premise behind charging families nearly half a million dollars for a four-year elite college BA will collapse.
Even more interesting will be seeing which student cohorts perform well in the stay-at-home distance learning model. Null hypothesis: student performance will closely track students' aptitude for college work as revealed by SAT/ACT scores and also degree of high school preparation for college as revealed by # of college prep courses taken.
Which would be still more evidence that our current higher ed model contains many redundancies and represents a huge waste of years of young people's lives and trillions of their parents' money.
#5
As a result of the virus, more and more online teaching is occurring. Students can go at their own pace if the course is "canned." That could mean that course materials are subject to more scrutiny. Not so much money is required for bricks and mortar.
#11
Great corporate speak for standing behind a sports ball logo podium in an $80,000 Pinto Colvig suit to lecture us on the virtues of the Chinese government.
#13
It would be interesting to have students identifies protected in some way so they were all treated identically. Even names could be atomized so the teacher couldn't show favoritism based on ethnic names.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Patriot Post] In 1942, America began the Manhattan Project. It was driven by the fear that Nazi scientists were developing an atomic bomb and that Adolf Hitler was prepared to use it. Today, America needs a new Manhattan Project to respond to the reality that China ‐ an enemy every bit as determined to rule the world as the Nazis were ‐ controls the supply of 80% to 90% of U.S. antibiotics. And for those Americans who think the word "enemy" is too strong, the Chinese Communist Party’s media mouthpiece has boasted about that nation’s ability to impose pharmaceutical export controls that would push America into "the mighty sea of coronavirus."
BERLIN (AP) ‐ It’s 7 p.m. on a Friday night, a time when Aurel Johannes Marx’s three-room brothel on the edge of Berlin would normally be preparing for its first customers. Sex for sale has long been a staple part of the German capital’s freewheeling nightlife. But amid concerns over the new coronavirus, even the world’s supposedly oldest profession is suffering a sudden slump.
[American Thinker] Desperation has set in among the Politburo in China as their deliberate mishandling and obfuscation of the Chinese Coronavirus outbreak has threatened, and in all likelihood derailed, their grandiose plans for global hegemony. In what can only be described as one of the most ham-handed propaganda efforts in recent memory, China is now trying to deflect blame onto the United States for the Coronavirus outbreak that has been recently categorized as a global pandemic. Further, they are unabashedly claiming that any criticism of their "valiant" efforts to stem the spread of the virus or using the nomenclature of Wuhan Virus or Chinese Coronavirus is racist and xenophobic. 
