CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: As Coronavirus Stifles China, Economic Logjams Build Worldwide: A tumble in commodity markets reflects the spreading ripples of an outbreak.

Healthcare Workers in China Hit Hard by Novel Coronavirus.

New coronavirus cases lowest since Jan. 31 in China province at outbreak’s epicenter.

Only 1 in 19 people who might have the coronavirus are being diagnosed in Wuhan, new research suggests.

Coronavirus: seven more cases confirmed in Hong Kong, taking city’s total number to 49.

Crew Members Plead For Rescue As Coronavirus Outbreak On Cruise Ship Grows To 135 Cases.

Germany confirms two new coronavirus cases.

What’s known and unknown about how the new coronavirus spreads.

The coronavirus outbreak has upended office life in Asia, as many work from home or undergo temperature checks while others fear losing their jobs.

Does My Travel Insurance Cover Coronavirus? Read The Fine Print.

Coronavirus vaccine could be ready in 18 months, WHO officials say: ‘We are not defenseless.’ On an 18-month timeline for a vaccine, we pretty much are.

A cruise ship has been turned away by 5 countries despite no passengers testing positive for the coronavirus.

The silent threat of the coronavirus: America’s dependence on Chinese pharmaceuticals.

Face masks fly off shelves in Central New York as fear of coronavirus grows.

EU Economy: Christine Lagarde’s $186 Billion Coronavirus Fear.

Virus storytellers challenge China’s official narrative. “After nearly a week of roaming China’s epidemic-struck city, filming the dead and the sickened in overwhelmed hospitals, the strain of being hounded by both the new virus and the country’s dissent-quelling police started to tell. Chen Qiushi looked haggard and disheveled in his online posts, an almost unrecognizable shadow of the energetic young man who had rolled into Wuhan on a self-assigned mission to tell its inhabitants’ stories, just as authorities locked the city down almost three weeks ago. Until he disappeared last week, the 34-year-old lawyer-turned-video blogger was one of the most visible pioneers in a small but dogged movement that is defying the ruling Communist Party’s tightly policed monopoly on information.”

THEY’RE WAITING FOR THE TORNADO. DUH. Cluster of sharks in one spot off Carolinas coast grows more intense, and mysterious.

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TITANIA MCGRATH AND THE POLITICS OF WOKENESS: An Interview with Andrew Doyle.

Titania McGrath thinks you’re scum. That is because of how tolerant she is.

In April 2018, Oxford-educated comedian and journalist Andrew Doyle created a satirical Twitter persona, an “activist,” “healer,” and “radical intersectionalist poet” who self-identifies as “selfless and brave.” Titania, an imaginary amalgam of all the worst excesses in the modern social justice movement, fancies herself a voice for minorities of all kinds (whether they know they agree with her or not). What she lacks in self-awareness, she makes up for in conviction.

There are other parody accounts in a vein similar to Titania’s: Jarvis Dupont of the Spectator USA, for example, or Wrightly Willowleaf (who moved to Williamsburg before it was cool). But none of them has achieved Titania’s notoriety, or her reach (418.4K followers). Doyle attributes some of this success to a much-publicized Twitter ban. But that’s perhaps too modest: Titania is a note-perfect creation, as frighteningly accurate as she is screamingly funny. “[Y]ou need to understand that which you are critiquing,” Doyle told me: more than anything, his tweets as Titania demonstrate an incisive grasp of how radical progressivism functions and why woke politics commands such hypnotic power over the 21st-century Western psyche.

Note this comment by Doyle:

S.K. That’s something I’d like to ask you more about: this mode of gaining power. On the one hand you suggested that there might be a strategy behind it, but you’ve also compared it to a kind of religion, as we have done also here at The American Mind. Which would suggest a more unconscious impulse, less than an explicit strategy.

A.D. Yes, that’s the theme of Tom Holland’s last book, Dominion. Holland makes that point that in the absence of Christianity, there’s something instinctive about finding these belief systems. And it does have the same hallmarks: it has the aspect of original sin, the Augustinian concept of original sin which now comes in through whiteness, or being heterosexual—having these immutable characteristics that make you a sinner. And then you’ve got the heresy concept, the idea that anyone who doesn’t think the right things is a heretic who needs to be cancelled, and then you get the metaphor of cancel culture, which is a lot like witch hunting, and burning people at the stake as the Inquisition might have done.

And of course so much of the theorizing behind woke ideas is based on entirely unsubstantiated, faith-based positions. They believe in unconscious bias, and institutional power structures—things that you can’t quantify or put your finger on that just sort of exist in the ether like spirits. And to ask them to prove any of these positions is to simply get the response that well, they do exist because we know they do. Which is what a religious zealot would say.

So I think that certainly the best way to understand the social justice movement is to see it as a cult. Because then it all makes sense, and it also makes sense why they’re able to behave so barbarically toward those who don’t subscribe to their belief system. Because the hallmark of many religions is tolerance to a degree. And then where things start going wrong, where witches start getting burned at the stake and heretics start getting executed is where that tolerance runs out. And I think that’s what happened here: the social justice movement is a fundamentally intolerant movement. And fundamentally illiberal. There’s nothing liberal about it.

Read the whole thing.

COME AND SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Where’s the Outrage? Suspect Who Drove Van Into Trump Campaign Volunteers Admits Political Motive.

Donald Trump Jr. responded to the public release of the report on Twitter. “Where is the outraged media? Why are they so silent on this? This would be the number one story in the world right now if it was a Trump supporter doing it to a group of liberals.”

“It’s a disgrace that they don’t even pretend to pay attention to growing leftist violence,” he added.

No enemies to the left.

WELL, THAT SUCKS: An Alzheimer’s Drug Trial Fails: ‘We Don’t Have Anything Now.’ “Few experts want to give up on the hypothesis that amyloid plaques in the brain are intimately involved in Alzheimer’s disease.” Well, maybe it’s time to think outside the box a bit.

KING OF COMEDY UPDATE: Jussie Smollett Indicted On New Charges Related To Attack Police Called A Hoax.

TEST: Is a $1000 Aftermarket Add-On as Capable as Tesla’s Auto­pilot and Cadillac’s Super Cruise? “This device from Comma.ai can steer, stop, and accelerate a car. We tested it against the best factory systems.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD POUNCES! MSNBC Reports Republican Voter Registration Tent Deliberately Rammed Unsuspecting Van In Florida.

HEH, INDEED: Electile Dysfunction: Joe Biden Pulls Out Early from New Hampshire.

Related: Watch: Joe Biden asks Boston Herald reporter why she’s ‘so negative.’

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NICE: Trump Has Some Words for Bloomberg After Leaked ‘Racist’ Audio Goes Viral.

For what it’s worth, I covered this story for BillWhittle.com back in December.

“SMELLING THE COFFEE IS ABLEIST”: British conservative polling guru Lord Ashcroft is out with his 2020 edition of “smell the coffee” – a warning to the defeated party (Labour in this case) of why they *really* lost the last British election. The Labour establishment has said it was all about Brexit. Lord Ashcroft’s findings:

[T]he feeling that the Labour Party was no longer for [former Labour voters] went beyond Brexit and the Corbyn leadership. While it had once been true that “they knew us, because they were part of us,” Labour today seemed to be mostly for students, the unemployed, and middle-class radicals. It seemed not to understand ordinary working people, to disdain what they considered mainstream views and to disapprove of success. The “pie in the sky” manifesto of 2019 completed the picture of a party that had separated itself from the reality of their lives.

As far as many of these former supporters were concerned, then, the Labour Party they rejected could not be trusted with the public finances, looked down on people who disagreed with it, was too left-wing, failed to understand or even listen to the people it was supposed to represent, was incompetent, appallingly divided, had no coherent priorities, did not understand aspiration or where prosperity comes from, disapproved of their values and treated them like fools.

I couldn’t possibly comment about possible parallels with American politics.

WOULD THEY FEEL BETTER IF THEY KNEW THERE WEREN’T ANY CORRECT CHOICES ON THE DEM BALLOT? In New Hampshire, Democratic Voters Are Paralyzed by Fear of Making the Wrong Choice.

FASTER, PLEASE: Laser LiFi Could Send Data Speeds Soaring.

DON’T GET COCKY: Most Expect Trump Will Be Reelected; Sanders Overtakes Biden Among Dem Voters. “Enthusiasm up from 2016, but with a partisan gap.”

Mind the gap:

Currently, 39% of American voters say they feel more enthusiastic than usual about the 2020 election, 21% say they are less enthusiastic, and 40% say they feel about the same level of enthusiasm as they have in past elections. In August 2016, 21% were more enthusiastic, 46% less enthusiastic, and 31% about the same. All partisan groups feel more enthusiastic than they did four years ago, including Republicans (47% more enthusiastic now versus 32% in 2016), Democrats (36% now versus 20% in 2016), and independents (34% now versus 15% in 2016).

“Enthusiasm is up compared to 2016, but optimism has split along party lines. These conflicting findings in public opinion seem to reflect the muddled state of the race on the Democratic side right now,” said Murray.

That last line was a bit of unnecessary (not to mention lame) spin. If Democratic voters can’t get enthused about the huge field of candidates they have to choose from, that says more about the quality of the field than it does about anything being “muddled.”

PERILS OF INBREEDING: Ancient Genes Reveal The Last Mammoths on Earth Were a Sickly Mess.

THESE ARE SOME FUN VIDEOS: 50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round vs…

FAILING UPWARDS: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute made FIRE’s Top 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech list for a lot of reasons, several involving wacky misadventures in policing (like claiming students could not hand out flyers because of “eminent domain“). So, of course, there’s now a bill in the New York State Senate that would upgrade RPI public safety officers to “real” police, for reasons that I can only assume are super-awesome and not at all part of the administration grabbing even more power.

’80S MOVIE NIGHT GETS AWKWARD AS BERNIE SANDERS KEEPS ROOTING FOR ALL THE VILLAINS.

From the Babylon Bee, America’s Newspaper of Record.

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ANARCHY IN THE NYC: NYPD Protesters to De Blasio: Don’t Blame Our Anti-Police Hysteria for Officers Being Shot.