PROTEST IN DEEP BLUE ENCINITAS, CA: Free the people; sheepies stay home (video).

THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING: Germany sends China £130billion bill for ‘coronavirus damages’ – sparks fury in Beijing.

PANDEMIC WISDOM:

JON STEWART ON JOE BIDEN IN 2015: “It’s apparently a Senate rite of passage that you’re not officially sworn in until Delaware Joe has felt up one female member of your immediate family.”

ROGER KIMBALL ON THE RED STATE VERSUS THE DEEP STATE VERSUS TRUMP: Will the Coronavirus succeed where Russiagate and Ukrainegate failed?

BIG BROTHER IN THE SKY: Police Use Chinese Drones to Enforce Social Distancing. “DHS warned that Chinese-made drones may be sending sensitive flight data back to their manufacturers in China, where the Communist Party-dominated government can access it. The DHS sent an alert last May warning about the drones, almost a year before American mayors decided to use DJI drones to enforce social distancing measures to fight the coronavirus.”

IT’S ASKING A LOT FOR INSTITUTIONS TO BE READY FOR SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS LESS THAN ONCE IN A LIFETIME: “Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.”

I mean, I’d like us to have been in better shape, and we should have been. But peacetime armies are never really ready for war, and war happens a lot more often than once in a hundred years. Expecting bureaucracies to function smoothly and effectively is expecting a lot; it’s expecting even more when they’ve been on idle for decades.

Which isn’t to say that this piece doesn’t state a problem. “You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.”

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IT’S PAYWALLED, BUT I’VE GOT A PIECE IN THE WSJ WITH TAYLOR DINERMAN ON THE TRUMP SPACE PUSH: Trump Opens Outer Space for Business: An executive order and a prospective treaty aim to make celestial mining an attractive investment.

President Trump acted two weeks ago to bring about the kind of 21st century that we expected in the 20th. If all goes well, it will open the way for mankind to become a true “multiplanet species,” as Elon Musk puts it.

An April 6 executive order, “Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources,” is meant to spur a new industry: the extraction and processing of resources from the moon and asteroids to facilitate settlement of the solar system. With this order, Mr. Trump ended an era of legal uncertainty in outer space and laid the foundation for international cooperation on American terms.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans a manned moon mission in 2024, followed by a “sustained lunar presence.” The U.S. National Space Council, led by Vice President Mike Pence, has been quietly working on an international agreement known as the Artemis Accords, which would clarify the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and provide a solid basis for private enterprise to operate on the moon, Mars and beyond.

The Outer Space Treaty, to which the U.S. and all other major countries are parties, bars “national appropriation” and sovereignty over the moon and other so-called celestial bodies, declaring that they “shall be the province of all mankind.” Some have read into that provision a prohibition on the private appropriation of resources. The executive order rejects that position: “Outer space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons.” . . .

The Trump order also rejects the 1979 Moon Treaty, which was intended to supplant the Outer Space Treaty. The Moon Treaty purports to ban private exploitation of space resources and mandate that any such activity take place under the supervision of an international authority with a rake-off going to Third World governments. President Carter initially supported the pact, but facing popular opposition, the Senate never took up ratification. Mr. Trump’s statement specifically notes that only 17 of the 95 members of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space have ratified the Moon Treaty. None have a major space program.

As a follow up to the executive order, the administration has been quietly preparing the Artemis Accords, which it plans to present first to America’s partners on the International Space Station—Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia—and later to other nations. Parties would “affirm that the extraction and utilization of space resources does not constitute national appropriation under Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty.” . . .

There’s a lot of wealth in space. A 79-foot-wide asteroid could hold 33.000 tons of extractable material, including $50 million worth of platinum. The 2-mile-wide asteroid 1986 DA could be worth $7 trillion. But that will require massive investment in new technology, and investors need assurance that they won’t pour billions into capturing an asteroid or mining the moon only to be told the resulting product isn’t theirs.

In some ways the administration’s policy is a logical continuation of the Obama-era drive for space commercialization. In 2015 President Obama signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which provides that “a U.S. citizen engaged in the commercial recovery of an asteroid or space resource . . . shall be entitled to . . . possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.” Mr. Trump’s order ensures that international obligations will be supportive and not destructive of such efforts.

Sorry I can’t give you the whole thing, but there’s the gist.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT MEN: “Police: Woman Filed False Report on Drug-Spiked Drink at UNH Frat.”

SCIENCE: Genetic tracing ‘barcode’ is rapidly revealing COVID-19’s journey and evolution.

INSIDE EVERY LIBERAL IS A TOTALITARIAN SCREAMING TO GET OUT: Nancy Pelosi Wants You to Sit Down, Shut Up, and Obey Government Coronoavirus Decrees.

(classical reference in headline.)

SEEN ON FACEBOOK:

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

WALTER DURANTY SMILES: Trump says New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman should ‘give back’ her Pulitzer Prize. “‘I even read a story where Mark Meadows, he’s a tough guy, he was crying. He was crying. It was Maggie Haberman, you know she won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Russia. But she was wrong on Russia. So was everyone else. They should all give back their Pulitzer Prizes,’ Trump said.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Corey DeAngelis of Reason has some additional thoughts:

FROM THE COMMENTS TO THIS POST:

Top Ten Surprising Consequences of Covid-19 Hysteria:

1: Democrat governors rediscover federalism.
2: Wanna-be totalitarians can’t help but unmask themselves.
3: Trump gets a daily platform to smack the media around (watched by millions).
4: The CDC is exposed as just another dysfunctional gov. agency.
5: FDA, same as above.
6: WHO, same as FDA, CDC.
7: The US media is in China’s pocket.
8: “Models” completely useless except to frighten citizens.
9: We now know Nancy Pelosi has a $24,000.00 fridge.

And the 10th most surprising consequence of the Covid-19 hysteria? Donald Trump was right about China the whole time, and everybody who didn’t know it before knows it now.

Yeah, pretty much. To be honest, I’m kinda jealous of the fridge.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Our Garbage Media.

THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY: I seem to remember a meme about the definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different result. JustTheNews does a round-up of how Dems are berating Trump supporters.

“A Nazi prison guard has been sent back to Germany after years of living in the United States,” Conan O’Brien said. “After a long manhunt, authorities found him hiding at a Trump rally.”

It’s the “basket of deplorables” all over again. Forget the fact that alienating and belittling voters is contrary to alleged liberal principles of open-mindedness or freedom of thought. It’s virtue signalling writ large and even Democratic operatives admit it will backfire.

DON’T GET COCKY: How the Obamas could easily win eight more years in the White House.

HOW BILL CLINTON JUNKED AMERICA’S SUPREMACY: The US-China Relations Act was a monumental mistake.

WHY IS ACADEMIA SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACIST HATE? University lecturer: White men are COVID-19’s ‘ally’ in helping the virus spread.

Remember, when taxpayers tire of funding this sort of thing, we’ll be told it’s because of anti-intellectualism.