THEY’RE ONLY OUT OF REGULAR MONEY. THEY STILL HAVE PLENTY OF “DIVERSITY MONEY.” University, in midst of COVID refunds and plans for student fee hike, hires chief diversity officer.
Archive for 2020
April 22, 2020
THE CDC HAS NOT EXACTLY COVERED ITSELF WITH GLORY HERE: CDC’s failed coronavirus tests were tainted with coronavirus, feds confirm: A federal investigation found CDC researchers not following protocol.
I’m beginning to think that the CDC just isn’t very good at its job.
Related: The CDC was Fighting Racism and Obesity Instead of Stopping Epidemics.
Flashback: You had one job, CDC.
POVERTY AND STARVATION (OF HUMANS) IS GOOD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT: You are overlooking the good news from Covid-19!: The world’s citizens have learned to consume less and eat healthier food.
THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE MESSAGING OPERATIVES FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: ‘The View’ ignores Tara Reade’s Biden allegations after championing Kavanaugh accusers.
Also, it’s now obvous that #MeToo is politicized garbage, and always was.
GOOD. THE BAN ON ELECTIVE PROCEDURES IS SHAPING UP TO BE THE BIGGEST MISTAKE OF THE PANDEMIC. Hospitals and doctors are going broke, and people are missing important care — “elective” doesn’t mean “unimportant” — and the hospitals weren’t flooded anywhere but a few hotspots. UPMC says feared coronavirus surge ‘simply hasn’t happened,’ will resume elective surgeries. “Of 5,500 beds in the UPMC hospital system, only 2% are occupied by COVID-19 patients, as are 8% percent of intensive care beds, according to Yealy, who also said UPMC has strong supplies of protective equipment such as masks, shields and gowns.”
CHUTZPAH: Chinese envoy Cui Tiankai takes veiled swipe at Donald Trump for politicising outbreak.
Nearly everything Beijing has done regarding the Wuhan virus has been politicized.
Deadly, too.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Earth Day Musings—Where In the Heck Are My Floating Polar Bears? “I think I’ll spend the day not polluting my mind with any International Mother Earth Day propaganda.”
YES: It’s time to shift tack — and contain the virus while reopening Colorado’s economy. “This is not a trade-off between lives and the economy. It’s a trade-off between lives and lives. Lives lost to CoVid-19 and lives lost to deaths and despair through depression, overdoses and suicide. We need to move beyond the policies we had in place when a larger storm was forecast. The projections have changed and now the policies need to change to match the current risk.”
WELL, THAT’S A TAKE: Biden says he isn’t soft on China, Trump is.
A Biden-aligned super PAC, American Bridge, is running a $15 million ad campaign of its own hitting Trump on China. “Everyone knew they lied about the virus,” the narrator said against the backdrop of eerie music. “China … President Trump gave China his trust.” Last week, the Democratic National Committee’s sixth installment of its “In Focus: Trump’s Disastrous Coronavirus Response” was titled “Trump rolled over for China.” The DNC memo asserted, “Trump’s failure to stand up to China is one of his biggest vulnerabilities.”
The Trump-approved America First Action Super PAC is already running an ad going after four decades of Biden’s China policy. But the main focus is on China and the coronavirus.
“Joe Biden attacked Trump after the China travel ban,” said the spot’s narrator, followed by audio of the ex-vice president calling it “xenophobia and fear-mongering.” The ad continued, “For forty years, Joe Biden has been wrong about China.” America First then cuts to a speech in which Biden declared, “I believed in 1979, and I believe now, that a rising China is a positive development.”
Trump, by contrast, has inveighed against this position for decades before entering politics. “I ran on China and other countries, the way they were ripping us off,” Trump recalled during Sunday’s White House press briefing. “They were ripping off our country. And China understood that.” But his desire to strike a trade deal with China, as well as secure the regime’s cooperation in getting needed medical supplies to the United States, has led him to equivocate publicly on Xi.
“The president can be harsh with foreign governments, but he also knows how to sweet-talk foreign leaders to get what he wants,” said a Republican strategist who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “Everyone knows that.”
This makes Biden look sillier and more full of it than usual — a high bar.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Arizona Law School Dean: Due To COVID-19, International Student Enrollment ‘Is Not Going To Slow Down—It’s Going To Shut.’ “There is no plausible scenario for [international law students] to be here, even if they have the resources, schools are open, and they want to be here. If you can’t get a visa—unless you can start digitally—it doesn’t matter. And it’s not clear that people can start in January either. We may be talking about a year delay, or more, imposed by the realities of immigration policy and the availability of international air travel.”
UPDATE: People in the comments are wondering why this is a big deal. Well, if you click through and read the actual post, it’s this: “International students have become an ever-more-important component of law school admissions and finances, and a major decline in their enrollment numbers will have negative implications for many campuses. Schools rapidly added LL.M. programs in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis when the number of domestic applicants plummeted dramatically. The tuition dollars of foreign students [have] helped to fill the financial gap caused by smaller J.D. classes.”
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Does China Have This Under Control?
Every now and then, some report slips out indicating that China is still dealing with a significant problem.
On April 6, “an official newspaper said there could be 10,000 to 20,000 such [asymptomatic] cases in Wuhan. The report was swiftly deleted online.”
Chinese authorities are still claiming they’ve defeated the virus at home, and almost all of the new cases are coming in from travelers abroad. Unsurprisingly, this official spin is fueling xenophobia and racism among Chinese citizens. You probably saw the reports of out-in-the-open discrimination like the McDonalds in Guangzhou declaring that “black people” were not permitted inside. In Beijing, ambassadors from African nations say they and their staff are being hassled and harassed.
Today, “the province of Shaanxi [in northwestern China] reported 21 new infections from abroad, as well as seven cases with no clinical symptoms, all travelers on a commercial flight from Moscow bound for the Chinese capital of Beijing.”
In the capital city, “Beijing’s Chaoyang district, home to dozens of foreign embassies, has been designated a high-risk area after a family of three became infected, the first new cases in the city for 27 days according to the Beijing Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.”
Chinese state media are continuing to claim that the virus is a U.S. bioweapon.
Commies lie.
FEBRUARY 6th and 17th: California county may have found earliest US deaths from coronavirus.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Michigan Governor Whitmer Awards Coronavirus Contract to Dem Consulting Firm.
THIS WAS THE FIRST SARS, NOT SARS-COV-2: SARS escaped Beijing lab twice: Laboratory safety at the Chinese Institute of Virology under close scrutiny.
This story is from 2004. Lab escapes happen outside China, too. It’s why it’s a very bad idea to work with very dangerous pathogens.
SALENA ZITO: Coronavirus protesters just want to work.
“The center of the demonstration was the return of the dignity of work,” Gerow says flatly.
Gerow, who is a Republican media consultant, is irked at the mockery online of the attendees. “Pennsyltucky” trended on Twitter, an alleged derogatory description of people who are from the more rural stretches of the state and not the urban centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
“Well, first of all, there were plenty of people from suburban Philly and Pittsburgh at this event, so to try to pin on people you consider part of the ‘deplorable’ or ‘bitter-clinger’ crowd is a joke,” Gerow said, referencing derogatory terms used by both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama when they were running for president.
“I think it’s a grossly unfair categorization, because I can tell you that the folks that I was standing with were all highly educated, professional people, at least one of them a Harvard grad,” he said of the friends he attended with that also included someone who made the three-plus hour drive from Pittsburgh.
“Those rural hills and valleys and small towns are made up of the places where our agriculture is grown and produced, but it is also where people from here and people who come to visit here hunt, and hike and camp and fish. So I don’t think they accomplished the insult they so cleverly thought they were accomplishing by using the word ‘Pennsyltucky,’” said Gerow.
“They all stressed they just wanted to work. And the one guy was carrying a sign that simply said, ‘I need a haircut,’ and we all thought that was pretty funny because we all certainly are in that boat,” he said of everyone’s rather shaggy appearance. “There was a woman standing there with us, and she said, ‘I’m a stylist, and I’m out of work.’ She said, ‘I would do anything to be cutting his hair right now.'”
Well, there are Two Americas: The one that’s still getting a paycheck, and the one that’s not.