THAT GOOD OLD MALE PRIVILEGE:  Male blood contains more coronavirus-growing enzymes: study.

YEAH, AS SOMEONE WHO IS VERY SUSCEPTIBLE TO ALL OF THEM, MOST VIRUSES THAT CAUSE URIs DO THIS:  How coronavirus attacks the body — damaging the brain, kidneys and more.

Not saying it’s not nasty. It’s just not that unique.

JOHN GALT, PARTY OF TWO, YOUR TABLE IS READY:  Restaurants told to keep log of customer contact info after reopening in Phase 2.

“Weird. I didn’t know so many guys were named John Galt.”
“Yeah, that and Lazarus Long.”

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OPEN THREAD: He’s a one-way rider on the shriek express.

OBVIOUSLY, SOMEBODY’S TRYING TO LAND A SWEET GIG WORKING FOR BILL DE BLASIO: Outrage in Ukraine as Letter Emerges From Top Police Official Demanding ‘List of Jews’ in Western City of Kolomyia.

Related: Ukraine Police Chief Orders Official Investigation Into Demand for ‘List of Jews.’

DEMS: WHO CARES WHAT RAND PAUL SAYS, WE SHOULD ONLY LISTEN TO DOCTORS! Critics freak out over Rand Paul’s reasonable call to reopen schools.

Related: Nothing says “scientific rigor” like a cult of personality.

Last year it was Robert Mueller being canonized. How did that work out?

UPDATE: Richard Fernandez:

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING: “Social Distancing” Is Snake Oil, Not Science. There was never good evidence to support its efficacy.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): One of the things I find most annoying about Dr. Fauci is his scientific version of Jon Stewart’s clown-nose-on-clown-nose-off routine. Sometimes he demands double-blind studies, other times — as with lockdowns and social distancing — he goes with his gut. It’s not that that’s necessarily wrong, but he’s very shifty in not explaining why he’s changing his standards.

UPDATE (From Ed):

Earlier: Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic.

(Updated and bumped.)

SPACE: After Demo-2: SpaceX is already prepping for 1st operational Crew Dragon mission.

I HAVE A FIRST-GEN VIOLET DEFENSE UNIT, WHICH THE FOLKS THERE SENT ME A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO: Scientists Consider Indoor Ultraviolet Light to Zap Coronavirus in the Air.

MOCKING THE KARENS: IT’S A START. Kevin James’ Short Film Mocks Coronavirus Minders.

I DUNNO, THERE’S A LOT OF COMPETITION FOR THAT SLOT: The Week’s Dumbest Narrative.

WHY WE FOOLISHLY BELIEVED THE COVID MODELERS: A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for Our Destiny in Data. In the Middle Ages, the physicians of Paris “forecast” the ebb and flow of the Black Death using the conjunctions of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars. The way we’re seduced by complex mathematical models today isn’t all that different from how we were seduced by astrology for millennia, as the physicist and data scientist Alexander Boxer explains in his entertaining history of this obsession.

Astrology was the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained for centuries by some of history’s most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler. Just consider that for much of the last two thousand years, the word “mathematician” (mathematicus) simply meant an astrologer; there was no distinction. . . . Astrologers were the quants and data scientists of their day, and those of us who are enthusiastic about the promise of numerical data to unlock the secrets of ourselves and our world would do well simply to acknowledge that others have come this way before.

And learn from their mistakes as we look for an escape from lockdown.

RAND PAUL ACTUALLY IS A DOCTOR, WHO VOLUNTEERS AT A HOSPITAL BECAUSE HE’S HAD IT AND IS IMMUNE, but that won’t stop blue-check losers from beclowning themselves.

NOW IS YOUR CHANCE:  If you ever said — even in good faith — that Trump “colluded” with Russia, or that Trump was Putin’s “puppet” or that Russia “gave” the election to Trump, now is your chance to say you were fooled. The wheels are coming off the train of lies. Mollie Hemingway is following the roadmap of deception, and it’s not looking good:

“Not only was information on Russia not fully shared with the incoming Trump team, as Obama directs, the leaks and ambushes made the transition chaotic, scared quality individuals away from working in the administration, made effective governance almost impossible, and materially damaged national security. When Comey was finally fired on May 9, in part for his duplicitousness regarding his handling of the Russia collusion theory, he orchestrated the launch of a Special Counsel probe that continued his efforts for another two years. That probe ended with Mueller finding no evidence of any American colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election, much less Trump or anyone connected to him.”

Insiders say Obama, Rice and Schiff are terrified of facts coming down the road. You can hate Trump all you want, that’s your right. But Due Process means nothing if it’s denied to those you hate. Ask the Scottsboro Boys or Reuben “Hurricane” Carter.

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THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN: Economic Well-Being Matters, Too. The poorest counties are suffering the most from lockdowns.

DECAY ON THE BAY: I Left My Home in San Francisco. The exodus from a beautiful city going to seed.

TRUMP-RUSSIA INVESTIGATION: Obamagate Is Not a Conspiracy Theory.

Meanwhile, this is CNN: Projection: Brian Stelter Accuses Conservative Media of ‘Obsession’ With Russia Probe (video).

TYLER COWEN: Did We Lock Down Some Parts of America Too Early?

I fully understand that Denmark and Austria did well because they locked down early (and took other measures). There is good evidence that NYC should have locked down earlier yet, but maybe (and I do mean maybe) other parts of the country — most of all rural America — should have locked down later, so they would have their lockdown active “when it really matters.”

In the meantime, we could have restricted or somehow taxed travel out of NYC, which seems to have been a major national spreader.

This is one reason why I am skeptical about models of epidemiology (and economics!) that do not consider political sustainability. I am by no means sure that the claims in this post are correct, but they could be correct. And a model that does not consider political sustainability and time consistency won’t even pick up these factors as concerns. . . .

But that was perhaps one of our big mistakes, namely to shut down many of the less dense parts of America before their problems were sufficiently acute, thereby rendering the whole program less sustainable.

And moralizing and blaming our current predicament on “Trump,” or “the yahoos who watch Fox News” is — even if correct — washing one’s hands of the responsibility to incorporate political sustainability into the model.

I fully admit, by the way, that I did not myself appreciate the import of this factor at the time. This is all a sign of how backward our science is in this entire area.

I think one surprise is that things spread out of the NYC/Boston axis and the West Coast much more slowly than we expected a couple of months ago. Of course, part of that was because of all the lockdowns, and the voluntary social distancing that went on as well. It may also be, though, that American society, with lower density, more cars and less mass transit, etc., is just less friendly to the spread of coronavirus than, say, China or Western Europe.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Covid-19 and Partisan State Control. “Of the top-3 states, with the highest deaths per million, all 3 are under exclusive Democratic control.”

PROFESSOR JACOBSON: The center did not hold under prolonged and arbitrary lockdowns, as predicted. Two weeks would have been a blip, a month would have been fine, two months is bad, and longer would be disastrous.

It’s made worse because it was sold as two weeks to flatten the curve, and now it’s being sustained many places based on justifications that were never mentioned at the start. Resistance is inevitable. Heck, even the Germans are chafing.

SHAREHOLDERS PRESSURE AMAZON TO DROP CORRUPT LEFTIST GROUP BEHIND ‘VIEWPOINT DISCRIMINATION.’

IT’S COME TO THIS: To reopen, Washington state restaurants will have to keep log of customers to aid in contact tracing.

SQUARING THE CIRCLE ON THE HOUSE GOP’S DEFENSE OF THE FBI: Tucker Carlson’s pointed questioning of Trey Gowdy last night has a lot of people asking why he and others defended the FBI and intelligence agencies when it now appears they knew there was no “there” there with regard to collusion, Gen. Flynn, etc., suggesting that they were secretly happy to get rid of President Trump. I suggest that, in light of the unaccountable powers these agencies wield now, the historical abuses in which such secret agencies around the world have traditionally engaged, and Sen. Schumer’s famous remark that “you take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” we can’t rule out the possibility that some members of Congress didn’t feel like they had a choice.