FASTER, PLEASE*: Texas Lt. Gov. Announces Task Force to Work on ‘Restarting the Economy.’
* At least in Texas’ myriad smaller counties.
Archive for 2020
April 8, 2020
WELL, THEY’VE BEEN COMPLAINING THAT TRUMP HASN’T BEEN DICTATORISH ENOUGH IN THE WAR ON THIS DISEASE: Lincoln’s Example, and Trump’s Battle With the CCP Virus. And many media outlets have been shutting down speakers, removing posts on Medium and Twitter, etc. in the name of fighting disinformation.
Sure, this piece is just trolling, but given their support for canceling people and platforms over “wrong” messages, on what ground could the press object to silencing “dangerous” talk on disease? Well, besides Orange Man Bad, of course.
MY OWN MIND HAS BEEN WORKING ON SIMILAR LINES: After the Hysteria Dies, What Rough Beast Slouches Towards Bethlehem To Be Born? The Answer Might Surprise You.
(BTW I love the way Richard’s paintings capture, in a highly evocative way that can’t be expressed in words “our national moment. I’ve seen it time and again, and find it fascinating as someone who ALSO gets bossed round by a subconscious that doesn’t always share everything it knows.)
CONNECTING DOTS: Wuhan Coronavirus – An Origin Hypothesis.
YOU NEED A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH LIKE AN HYENA. MY HEART IS NOT STONE: State Department Refuses To Help Hillary Clinton Avoid Deposition.
SOME PEOPLE ENJOY THE LIMELIGHT SO MUCH THEY’D PREFER WE KEPT LOCKED UP FOREVER! Hydroxychloroquine Sparks WH Task Force Squabble.
BELIEVE ALL LEFTISTS? #MeToo? Not When the Accused is Joe Biden, According to Actress Alyssa Milano.
IT DOESN’T MAKE HIM WRONG: Pastor who criticized coronavirus ‘mass hysteria’ dies from illness.
“We just never thought our father would pass away because of this,” Jesse Spradlin told the outlet. “But he wasn’t the type of person to just live in fear and let it rob him of the joy of the life that he had.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Finland to begin randomized coronavirus antibody testing.
THEY DO HAVE A LOT OF PRACTICE WORKING REMOTELY AND KEEPING SOCIAL ISOLATION: NASA details plans for putting base on moon.
NOTHING BIDEN DOES IS HELPFUL. INCLUDING TO HIMSELF: Biden campaign coronavirus offer making governors’ jobs ‘difficult’.
I’M VERY, VERY TIRED OF THIS: A Plague of Madness.
April 7, 2020
ADAM SCHIFF IS A DISGRACEFUL POSEUR.
AT AMAZON, save on Men’s Underwear.
In the Age of Trump, White House press briefings have become a time for some reporters to have their fifteen minutes of fame. Reporters no longer try to disguise their own personal political opinions in the name of professional journalism. Few reporters are able to participate without looking like they are more concerned about a gotcha question against the president, his administration, or even the press secretary herself or himself. A prime example of this behavior is CNN’s White House correspondent Jim Acosta. He’s even written a book about covering Trump though the president is not even finished with his first term. He’s not the only one to do that, he’s just the most obvious example.
During the Great Hunkering Down period of the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump and his coronavirus task force have been giving daily press briefings. He’s been so good at it that his approval ratings are up and his harshest critics in cable news, CNN and MSNBC, decided to stop carrying them in their entirety. Imagine that – cable news networks so unhinged about a president that they don’t bother to cover press briefings concerning a pandemic. It is as though they cheer for failure just to be able to say Trump couldn’t handle the crisis. Those networks are only too happy to do puff piece interviews with the likely Democrat nominee Joe Biden, though.
Indeed they are.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Ventilators Are No Panacea.
#JOURNALISM: “The answer, I’d say, isn’t that nurses in general reject professional medical care, it’s that the NYT chose to quote this particular rejecter of medical care because she happens to have been a nurse. I experience this NYT article as part of the ‘death panels’ agenda — getting old people to accept their fate and go down easy.”
OPEN BORDERS: Disaster in motion: Where flights from coronavirus-ravaged countries landed in US. “From December through March, as severe outbreaks cropped up in China and then Italy and Spain, among others, thousands of flights from the hard-hit nations poured into U.S. cities, according to an ABC News analysis of more than 20 million flight records obtained from the tracking service Flightradar-24. While it is unclear the precise number of passengers into the U.S. who were infected with the coronavirus, the medical experts told ABC News such a huge pool of people virtually assures that a number had the highly contagious disease.”
But stopping them from coming back then would have been xenophobic, and probably racist.
UPDATE: That was fast, the ABC story seems to have been taken down. Here’s the Google Cache version.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh says it’s still available at this URL.
OPEN THREAD: For one more time, let your madness run with mine.
RIP: John Prine, One of America’s Greatest Songwriters, Dead at 73. “The cause was complications related to COVID-19. Prine’s family confirmed his death to Rolling Stone.”