THE GIANT AWAKENS: Ford Readies Respirator Production To Begin This Week Using F-150 Seat Fans.

AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK: After Coronavirus, Marco Rubio Wants to Make Drugs in America Again.

ANDREW A. MICHTA: The Long Hard Road to Decoupling from China.

When bereft of redundancies, networks devolve to hierarchies, which in turn create winners and losers. Hierarchies do not diminish the key importance of state power in international relations. On the contrary, they enable it. As China has grown to become the seemingly irreplaceable core of a globalized economy, the CCP has pursued predatory mercantilism in its commercial relations with the West, in the process tilting the hard power balance in its favor. In an economic system that allows for the flow of technology and capital across national borders, redundancies in the supply chain are essential to the preservation of state sovereignty and government capacity to act in a crisis. The Wuhan Virus pandemic is proving so devastating because the radical centralization of market networks has allowed for failure at a single point in our supply chain to leave the system with no capacity to off-load demand onto redundant networks.

In short, globalization, as preached and practiced over the past four decades, has been shown for what it has always been: profiteering off of a vast pool of centrally controlled labor. While many vast fortunes have been made in the West as a result, and as American consumers binged on low-cost goods, the biggest winner has naturally been the Chinese Communist Party elite. And though even before the 2016 U.S. election there was a growing realization among Western captains of industry that something was not quite right with China’s role in the system, few were willing to ask big enough questions about the system as a whole.

The fundamental question is one of values: Is this kind of globalization compatible with liberty and democratic governance? My simple answer is no. By ignoring the role of nations in the international system—or, if not ignoring, indeed prophesying the nation’s demise—globalization’s boosters have implicitly, if perhaps unwittingly, lessened the accountability of elites and downgraded the voice of voters in these matters.

Unwittingly? Nah, that was by design. Anyway, do read the whole thing.

SONOMA COUNTY, CA NOW REQUIRING MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC TO WEAR FACIAL COVERINGS. “Violation of or failure to comply with this Order is a misdemeanor punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both.”

THERE ACTUALLY IS A MIND-CONTROLLED PROSTHESIS: This ain’t sci-fi, it’s the real thing.

GOOD QUESTION: Should Congress Preempt Coronavirus Liability for Businesses That Reopen? “There’s an important risk-benefit analysis to be conducted when it comes to reopening institutions (as there was when it came to closing them). It’s a complicated analysis that requires considering a vast range of direct and indirect costs and benefits. I’m not sure that either the President or Governors or Congress will do a great job with this analysis. But it seems to me clear that they’ll do a much better job—both in reaching the right result and creating predictability—than would juries throughout the country deciding on a case-by-case basis whether some company’s decision to reopen was ‘reasonable.’ I also think this would be a sound use of Congress’s Commerce Clause powers.”

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Former CNN Producer Says Jim Acosta Loves Nothing More Than Jim Acosta.

IT AIN’T THE WAY I WANTED IT! I CAN HANDLE THINGS! I’M SMART! NOT LIKE EVERYBODY SAYS… LIKE DUMB… I’M SMART AND I WANT RESPECT! Coronavirus-stricken Chris Cuomo trashes CNN gig during radio show meltdown.

As James Hasson‏, formerly of the Washington Examiner tweeted last August, “The funniest part of the Cuomo freakout is that if he’d just said ‘get a life, I’m out with my family,’ then people would have sympathized with him. But because he took it to 11 and compared ‘fredo’ to the n-word—and CNN PR doubled down on it—everyone will now call him Fredo.”

A FAILURE, AND A BETRAYAL: Powerful Americans Were Catastrophically Wrong about China. From Henry Kissinger to Bill Clinton to the NBA Management, don’t let them off the hook.

TRUST THE “EXPERTS:” Public Health Authorities Have Failed America at Every Level.

TO BE FAIR, YOU’VE SEEN WHAT HAPPENS WHEN HE DOESN’T USE ONE: Did Joe Biden Use a Teleprompter During His Livestream Conversation With Bernie Sanders?

BIG CHANGES COMING TO BLUE AMERICA: Joel Kotkin: COVID-19 is hitting dense urban areas the hardest, and accelerating the dispersion of Americans that had already been underway.

The COVID-19 pandemic will be shaping how we live, work and learn about the world long after the last lockdown ends and toilet paper hoarding is done, accelerating shifts that were already underway including the dispersion of population out of the nation’s densest urban areas and the long-standing trend away from mass transit and office concentration towards flatter and often home-based employment.

Amid 20 years of fanfare about how big, dense cities are the future, the country had kept spreading out with nearly all population growth since 2010 occurring in the urban periphery and smaller cities. As a new study from Heartland Forward, where I am a senior fellow, demonstrates, both immigrants and millennials—the key groups behind urban growth—are increasingly moving to interior cities and even small towns.

I predict that we’re going to find that this disease is primarily spread by air travel, dense living, and mass transit.

FROM KAL SPRIGGS:  Fenris Unchained (Rising Wolf Book 1).

The Wolf is Loose.

Ten years ago, after her parents were killed in a terrorist attack, Melanie Armstrong walked away from a military officer’s career to raise her orphaned brother. Since then she’s been captaining a tramp freighter – shuffling from world to world, scraping to barely get by, but content that she’s made the right decision.

But when her ship crashes, authorities make her an offer: take a fifteen-year sentence on a prison world where the average lifespan is a third of that. Or take part in a mission to stop an ancient, and until-now forgotten, robotic warship, the Fenris, from completing its hundred-year-old task of destroying a planet, killing millions.

SURE. WHY NOT?  ALSO IT WOULD BE FUNNY. (BUT THEN IT’S THE BEE):  Poll Finds More People Would Trust Fauci If He Wore One Of Those Giant Doctor Disk Thingies On His Head.

LOL. IT SHOULDN’T BE SO FUNNY, BUT THINK OF HOW MANY “STUDIES” THEY’VE DONE TO CLAIM WE’RE STUPID AND CRAZY AND…  Does Liberalism Cause Mental Illness?

YEAH, BUT WHEN YOU GIVE THOSE, PEOPLE YELL YOU WANT PEOPLE TO DIE. NEWSFLASH: YOU’RE MORTAL. WE ALL ARE:  Some Rational Perspectives on COVID-19.

AND THAT ALONE SHOULD BE ENOUGH NOT TO VOTE FOR BIDEN. EVER:  NY Times Changed Biden Sexual Assault Story at Request of Campaign.

THE GOVERNMENT IS NOT YOUR MOTHER. THE GOVERNMENT IS NOT YOUR FATHER. THEY CAN NEITHER SEND YOU TO YOUR ROOM HOUSE, NOR SHOULD THEY GIVE YOU AN ALLOWANCE. AND IT’S CERTAINLY NOT THEIR JOB TO PROTECT YOU FROM DISEASE. WASH YOUR HANDS. IF YOU’RE VULNERABLE WATCH YOUR INTERACTIONS. AND FOR THE LOVE OF BOB, GROW UP:  Enough Already With The Help.

BECAUSE ORANGE MAN BAD. SO CAN WE DEFUND THIS TRAVESTY OF A JOKE OF A PRETENSE ALREADY?  NPR In The Jihad On Hydroxychloroquine.

THIS IS THE PROBLEM WHEN YOU GIVE PEOPLE A LOT OF POWER. THE PEOPLE WHO REALLY LIKE POWER ALWAYS GO OFF THE RAILS. NOT SOMETIMES. ALWAYS!  Michigan Governor Uses Her SledgeHammer To Ban Everything.

HOW FORTUNATE. AS I RECALL, THEY ALSO CLEARED THE USSR OF GENOCIDE:  Biden Summarily Cleared Of Sexual Assault By NYT.

LOOK, THE MARXISTS WERE FASCINATED WITH “SCIENTIFIC GOVERNMENT” AND WE KNOW HOW THAT WORKED. THE LAST THING WE WANT IS TO GIVE DOCTORS THE KEYS TO OUR ECONOMY:  Anthony Fauci Wrong About A Whole Lot.

Okay, if you guys want a doctor to put in charge of the economy, I have one among my “kids” (fans who are young enough to be my kids) and a couple that comment on my blog.  They, at least, will err on the side of individual freedom.

THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE:  Pandemic likely to exceed Great Recession in number of bankruptcies.

It’s almost like hitting the economy with a hammer is bad for the economy, or something.