MORE PROFESSORS NEED TO BE REMINDED OF REALITY: Prof alleges ‘gender bias’ in ‘masculine’ jobs. Business owner reminds her of reality.

COLLUSION: Did WHO director ‘help’ China downplay coronavirus? This prof says yes.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.

Plus, Best Selling Products – Updated Every Hour.

Also, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

BECAUSE IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE, AND CHINA’S KNOWN TO LIE? Why the World’s Doing a Double-Take on China’s No-New-Infection Claim.

Still, skepticism about China’s no-new-local-infections claim is widespread, including, at least according to the anecdotal evidence, inside China. The doubt is fueled both by China’s Communist Party’s long history of propaganda and by the obvious benefits of changing the focus from the government’s initial efforts to suppress information about the coronavirus to its supposedly glorious victory over the disease crippling much of the world.

“A propaganda spokesman’s job is the turn messy facts into a clean narrative,” Andrew J. Nathan, professor of political science at Columbia University and a leading China expert, said in an email. “China is trying to bury the embarrassment of the Covid-19 cover-up in a happy story of triumph over the virus.

“But it feels like overreaching to say that transmission has completely stopped,” Nathan continued. “It seems that the message is political, not epidemiological.”

Indeed. Plus, seen on Facebook:

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Senate Unanimously Passes Coronavirus Relief Bill—Someone Should Check on Granny Boxwine. “Pelosi engaged in some of the most shameless politicking for personal gain of her career, and that’s saying quite a lot. Thankfully, it was all for naught. However, as Tyler mentioned in his headline, she was gambling with people’s lives. This should be a permanent stain on her career, but the thoroughly evil press is no doubt working on ways to run interference for her.”

It’s all true, but mostly I enjoy that Kruiser starts my day by making me do things like add “Boxwine” to my SpellCheck.

SPAIN: Spain extends state of emergency until April 12 as coronavirus crisis worsens.

TERRIBLE NEWS: Longtime gunblogger SayUncle lost his wife, to a sudden cardiac arrest. There were never any previous symptoms or warnings. We know them both, and she was a lovely woman. So very sorry for this awful loss.

ROGER SIMON: Possibility of Cuomo Nomination by Democrats Rising by the Day.

YOU WILL BE MADE TO CONFORM: Mayor Garcetti announces water and power will be shut off for nonessential L.A. businesses that don’t close.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Can’t Find TP? Check a Local Restaurant.

CLOSE QUARTERS: 3 Sailors on USS Theodore Roosevelt Have COVID-19; Port Calls Canceled as Navy Investigates Outbreak.

JIM TREACHER: The Virus Is a Fire, and the Arsonist Is China. “China did this. It’s not racist to say so. Telling the truth doesn’t make you responsible for the actions of racists. Thinking so, saying so, only helps the people who did this to you.”

CHUTZPAH: Biden: Trump should stop talking.

How about a deal? Trump will stop talking just as soon as Biden learns to speak in complete sentences.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Coronavirus May Make Trump Stronger: Gallup finds 60% of voters approve of his handling of the crisis. As usual, the establishment is clueless.

This is not what his critics expected. At 49% overall job approval in the latest Gallup poll, and with 60% approval of the way he is handling the coronavirus epidemic, President Trump’s standing with voters has improved even as the country closed down and the stock market underwent a historic meltdown. That may change as this unpredictable crisis develops, but bitter and often justified criticism of Mr. Trump’s decision making in the early months of the pandemic has so far failed to break the bond between the 45th president and his political base.

One reason Mr. Trump’s opponents have had such a hard time damaging his connection with voters is that they still don’t understand why so many Americans want a wrecking-ball presidency. Beyond attributing Mr. Trump’s support to a mix of racism, religious fundamentalism and profound ignorance, the president’s establishment opponents in both parties have yet to grasp the depth and intensity of the populist energy that animates his base and the Bernie Sanders movement. . . .

That a majority of the electorate is this deeply alienated from the establishment can’t be dismissed as bigotry and ignorance. There are solid and serious grounds for doubting the competence and wisdom of America’s self-proclaimed expert class. What is so intelligent and enlightened, populists ask, about a foreign-policy establishment that failed to perceive that U.S. trade policies were promoting the rise of a hostile Communist superpower with the ability to disrupt supplies of essential goods in a national emergency? What competence have the military and political establishments shown in almost two decades of tactical success and strategic impotence in Afghanistan? What came of that intervention in Libya? What was the net result of all the fine talk in the Bush and Obama administrations about building democracy in the Middle East? . . .

On domestic policy, the criticism is equally trenchant and deeply felt. Many voters believe that the U.S. establishment has produced a health-care system that is neither affordable nor universal. Higher education saddles students with increasing debt while leaving many graduates woefully unprepared for good jobs in the real world. The centrist establishment has amassed unprecedented deficits without keeping roads, bridges and pipes in good repair. It has weighed down cities and states with unmanageable levels of pension debt.

The culture of social promotion and participation trophies is not, populists feel, confined to U.S. kindergartens and elementary schools. Judging by performance, they conclude that people rise in the American establishment by relentless virtue-signaling; by going along with conventional wisdom, however foolish; and by forgiving the failures of others and having their own overlooked in return.

The blame game playing out over how the president has handled the coronavirus epidemic reflects the dynamics of this struggle. Mr. Trump’s establishment critics want a narrow fight over the dismal trail of bluster, evasions, missed opportunities and failed predictions that marked the president’s approach to the virus earlier in the year. Like many criticisms of Mr. Trump, these arguments against him are by and large correct and significant and it is part of the proper job of a free press to make them.

However, Mr. Trump’s supporters are not comparing him with an omniscient leader who always does the right thing, but with the establishment—including the bulk of the mainstream media—that largely backed a policy of engagement with China long after its pitfalls became clear. For Americans who lost their jobs to Chinese competition or who fear the possibility of a new cold war against an economically potent and technologically advanced power, Mr. Trump’s errors pale before those of the bipartisan American foreign-policy consensus.

The establishment’s massive, decadeslong failure to think through the consequences of empowering Communist China and creating a trading relationship that, among other things, left the U.S. dependent on Beijing for pharmaceuticals is a much less excusable and more consequential error than anything Donald Trump has done in 2020—and it has a direct bearing on the mess we are in.

Indeed it does.

Plus, bottom line: “But the U.S. establishment won’t prosper again until it comes to grip with a central political fact: Populism rises when establishment leadership fails. If conventional U.S. political leaders had been properly doing their jobs, Donald Trump would still be hosting a television show.”

PULITZER! WaPo firefighter calls parents of Twitter rando who has unpopular opinion about the Coronavirus shutdowns.

McMillan had 395 followers on Twitter at the time of his doxxing by the Post.

YES, THIS IS A BIG AND IMPORTANT FOLLOW-ON PROJECT FOR NEXT YEAR: A Litany of Useless Laws Have Been Exposed By the Coronavirus: The ability to suspend these laws without fear of endangering the public opens the door to questioning their purpose.

ELITES GOTTA ELITE:

We don’t actually have the worst ruling class in history. For example, there was, uh, Caligula in that movie.

SENATE UNANIMOUSLY PASSES $2 TRILLION CORONAVIRUS BILL: “The deal now goes to the House for approval. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Tuesday she wants to pass the bill by unanimous consent without calling lawmakers back to vote in person. Two House members were diagnosed last week with COVID-19, and others are in quarantine.”

WHO SAYS THIS INDUSTRY ISN’T ADAPTABLE? 100% Of Higher Education Has Shifted Online Due To The Coronavirus.

BUT THE NARRATIVE! Johns Hopkins Study: USA More Prepared for Pandemic Than Any Other Country.

JOEL KOTKIN: The Coming Age of Dispersion.

Pandemics naturally thrive in large multicultural cities, where people live “cheek by jowl” and travel to and from other countries is a fact of international tourism and commerce. Europe’s rapidly advancing infection rate is, to some extent, the product of its weak border controls, one of the EU’s greatest accomplishments. Across the continent, cities have become the primary centers of infection. Half of all COVID-19 cases in Spain, for example, have occurred in Madrid while the Milan region, with its cosmopolitan population and economy, accounts for half of all cases in Italy and almost three-fifths of the deaths.

In the US, known cases and deaths are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Seattle area, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and New York. Gotham, with six percent of the US population, now accounts by itself for nearly half of the 18,000 cases in the country. Even the New York Times, a consistent booster for packing people into small spaces, now acknowledges that the city’s high densities are responsible for its much higher rate of infection even than relatively dense but far more dispersed areas like Los Angeles.

I do think this will change the psychology.

AND SO YOU DON’T MURDER YOUR PETS OR YOUR FAMILY, AND MAYBE EMERGE SANE FROM THE INSANITY AROUND US:  Ways to pass the time in lockdown.