YUCK: Here’s the Joe Biden That Tara Reade Claims Sexually Assaulted Her.

HERE’S A NICE RUN-DOWN OF THE KNOXVILLE/KNOX COUNTY REOPENING PLAN. Note that they’re expecting cases to go up as the result of the reopening (and of increased testing) and aren’t taking a mechanical approach to the numbers. A key part is making sure that medical facilities aren’t overstressed. It’s basically a soft path to herd immunity, though they don’t characterize it that way.

LOVE, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT, IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS: Ashley Madison Reports Surge In Online Marital Affairs During Stay-At-Home Orders.

TALKING QUARANTINE WITH The Clean Queen.

Her book, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, is excellent.

COVERUP: CHINA IS DESPERATE HERE. China has threatened to stop importing wine and beef from Australia if the Morrison government continues to push for an inquiry into the origin of the global coronavirus outbreak.

I don’t think China is in a position to stop importing food right now. But the more vigorously and obviously they try to cover up the origins of the disease, the more obvious the answer becomes.

WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE THINK THE PRESS IS GARBAGE? IT’S A REAL POSER.

UPDATE: Seen on Facebook:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: For The First Time, Fewer Than 25% Of Law Students Pay Full Tuition.

THREAD: Food-shortage worries are exaggerated. Let’s hope this is right.

DOUBLE STANDARDS ARE THE BEST STANDARDS BECAUSE YOU GET TWICE AS MANY AS LESS-PRINCIPLED PEOPLE DO: Carrie Severino on Joe Biden accuser: Dems have a ‘sudden onset’ of respect for due process.

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KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Press Spins Themselves Into Oblivion Covering for Rapey Joe Biden. “It’s not at all shocking that the Democratic flying monkeys in the MSM are fulfilling their water-carrying duties for Biden on this issue. The perverse prime directive of the Left this year is to get Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. into the Oval Office no matter what because ORANGE MAN BAD. Then Biden can have ‘health issues’ and be replaced with someone who doesn’t drool all of the time.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Post Hoc vs. Propter Hoc.

JIM GERAGHTY: Authoritarian Regimes Are Not Your Friend.

Even by the Chinese government’s own numbers, they’re producing jaw-dropping quantities of medical equipment that aren’t up to the right standards: “As of last Friday, China’s market regulators had inspected nearly 16 million businesses and seized more than 89 million masks and 418,000 pieces of protective gear, said Ms Gan Lin, deputy director of the State Administration of Market Regulation, at a press briefing.”

And that’s just the stuff they’re catching before it goes out the door.

Almost every country that is dealing with the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has ordered masks, tests, or personal protective equipment from China, only to open the boxes and find that the deliveries are unusable. In some cases, the equipment was distributed and used before the poor quality was discovered — offering false protection to medical personnel and exacerbating the spread of the virus instead of mitigating it.

Don’t trust China. China is asshole.

Just to be clear: I’m referring to the communist People’s Republic of China on the mainland, and not the finely-run Republic of China on Taiwan.

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THE CHINA COVID COVERUP: Chinese internet users who uploaded coronavirus memories to GitHub have been arrested.

A group of volunteers in China who worked to prevent digital records of the coronavirus outbreak from being scrubbed by censors are now targets of a crackdown.

Cai Wei, a Beijing-based man who participated in one such project on GitHub, the software development website, was arrested together with his girlfriend by Beijing police on April 19. The couple were accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a commonly used charge against dissidents in China, according to Chen Kun, the brother of Chen Mei, another volunteer involved with the project. Chen Mei has been missing since that same day. On April 24, the couple’s families received a police notice that informed them of the charge, and said the two have been put under “residential surveillance at a designated place.” There is still no information about Chen Mei, said his brother. . . .

Chinese citizens had been turning to Microsoft-owned GitHub after the outbreak began, as it remains one of the few major foreign websites that can still be accessed in China. Now, volunteers linked to these GitHub pages are facing the growing risk of reprisals from authorities. Another GitHub page, #2020 nCov memory, which was initiated by seven volunteers around the world to chronicle personal accounts and news stories of the outbreak, is no longer publicly available. In an email (link in Chinese), the team behind the page said that its members decided to make the page private to avoid “potential risks,” according to a screenshot of the email shared on social network Weibo.

In addition to the GitHub volunteers, three journalists have also disappeared since February while reporting from Wuhan, the city where the outbreak was first discovered. Among them, only Li Zehua, a former employee of the state broadcaster, recently resurfaced, and said in a video that he had been detained and placed under quarantine by police for “disrupting public order,” but also praised the actions of the police. The whereabouts of citizen journalists Chen Qiushi and Fan Bin remain unknown.

Related: China Is Working Overtime to Suppress Research About Coronavirus Origin.

DON’T BE A SCIENCE DENIER: Science says it’s time to start easing the lockdowns.

Related: Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No.

To normalize for an unambiguous comparison of deaths between states at the midpoint of an epidemic, we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21-day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million—e.g.,‒three deaths in Iowa or 19 in New York state. A state’s “days to shutdown” was the time after a state crossed the 1 per million threshold until it ordered businesses shut down.

We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. (The trendline sloped downward—states that delayed more tended to have lower death rates—but that’s also a meaningless result due to the low correlation coefficient.)

No conclusions can be drawn about the states that sheltered quickly, because their death rates ran the full gamut, from 20 per million in Oregon to 360 in New York.

You don’t say.

SHUT UP, KARENS: Stop shaming people for going outside. The risks are generally low, and the benefits are endless.

FASTER, PLEASE: Israel’s IAI tests UV light solution to sterilize passenger aircraft.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: College students clamor for tuition refunds after coronavirus shutters campuses. Most schools say they won’t “give any tuition money back,” said an expert.

KARENISM ISN’T A GOOD LOOK: Undercover Cops Arrest 2 Women for Operating Home Beauty Businesses In Violation of Coronavirus Lockdown Order.

BUREAUCRACY KILLS: For Better Health, Find a Cure for Government: In a time of health crisis, government has proven to be a crippling underlying condition.

HMM: FCC Commissioner Wants To Know About 1000’s Of Phone Record Pages Received Via Schiff’s Secret Subpoenas. “FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has been looking for answers as to why Rep. Adam Shifty Schiff was behaving like his own personal FISA court in subpoenaing US Citizen’s phone deets. And Shiff is ghosting him.”