UNEXPECTEDLY: Democrats Prep to Blame Trump for the Coronavirus Economy.
Archive for 2020
April 6, 2020
NEWS FROM MY NECK OF THE WOODS: Coronavirus in Tennessee: 119 cases in Knox County, recoveries up to 70.
The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Knox County is now 119 following an update from the Knox County Health Department.
Knox County reported a total of 119 positive local cases on the health department website Monday with 70 recovered cases. The total number of cases in Knox County stood at 110 with 60 recoveries on Sunday, hours before Surgeon General Jerome Adams warned this could be the hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives.
Deaths from COVID-19 in Knox County remained at one Monday. The first Knox County death was announced last week.
16 of the 119 cases have resulted in hospitalization at any point during the illness, a number unchanged from Sunday. This figure does not reflect the number of patients currently hospitalized in the county.
The total number of tests conducted grew to 1409.
Recoveries seem to be largely keeping pace with cases, despite a considerable acceleration in testing.
WHY, IT’S ALMOST AS THOUGH TRUMP HAD BEEN RIGHT ABOUT CHINA ALL ALONG:
(Neoclassical reference in the headline.)
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Toyota Supra is the perfect car for the Apocalypse.
#JOURNALISM: How Misinformation About the U.S. Needing ‘1 Million Ventilators’ Spread. “The error conflates the total number of ventilators required with the number of patients who may need the use of a ventilator over the course of the pandemic. How the error spread is a cautionary if convoluted tale.” The press has also done with ventilators what they accuse Trump of doing with chloroquine, turning a sometimes-useful treatment into a talisman. Only about 50% of patients on ventilators are surviving at best. And coronavirus aside, ventilators are dangerous: If you put a bunch of healthy people on ventilators for ten days, a nontrivial number would die. If you need a ventilator and don’t get one you will almost certainly die; if you need a ventilator and do get one, well, you might not die. Securing enough ventilators is part of dealing with this epidemic, but it’s not the only part, or even the most important part.
GLOOM AND DOOM GOT YOU DOWN? How About Some Good News on the Economy?
“IS CHINA GROUND ZERO FOR A FUTURE PANDEMIC?” That was the headline in the November 2017 edition of Smithsonian Magazine. The lead photo is a wet market in China. Clearly, Trump is late to this fact pattern.
HT: Jim Geraghty, The Morning Jolt, “All Signs Point to China.”
IN THE MAIL: The Body: A Guide for Occupants.
I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT: Bronx Zoo Tiger Infected with COVID-19 by Zookeeper. Could Your Cat or Dog Be at Risk?
THINK OF THE PRESS AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH THE PERSONALITY AND INTELLECT OF MIDDLE-SCHOOL MEAN GIRLS AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: News media, liberals mock conservatives for early pandemic comments they made themselves.
UPDATE: The thing to remember about these people is that they’re not very bright, and they don’t think that you are either.
Actually, it’s gone for as little as 89 cents per gallon recently. No, that’s not the average. But then, nobody said it was. I’ve also seen journalists with an IQ under 90, but that’s not the … well, hell, who really knows?
I’M DISCERNING A THEME HERE WHERE HARVARD STUDENTS ARE CONCERNED: Harvard Law students want licenses without having to take bar exam.
MINXIN PEI: Competition, the Coronavirus, and the Weakness of Xi Jinping.
During the multidecade competition of the Cold War, the rigidity of the Soviet regime and its leaders proved to be the United States’ most valuable asset. The Kremlin doubled down on failed strategies—sticking with a moribund economic system, continuing a ruinous arms race, and maintaining an unaffordable global empire—rather than accept the losses that thoroughgoing reforms might have entailed. Chinese leaders are similarly constrained by the rigidities of their own system and therefore limited in their ability to correct policy mistakes. In 2018, Xi decided to abolish presidential term limits, signaling his intention to stay in power indefinitely. He has indulged in heavy-handed purges, ousting prominent party officials under the guise of an anticorruption drive. What is more, Xi has suppressed protests in Hong Kong, arrested hundreds of human rights lawyers and activists, and imposed the tightest media censorship of the post-Mao era. His government has constructed “reeducation” camps in Xinjiang, where it has incarcerated more than a million Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. And it has centralized economic and political decision-making, pouring government resources into state-owned enterprises and honing its surveillance technologies. Yet all together, these measures have made the CCP weaker: the growth of state-owned enterprises distorts the economy, and surveillance fuels resistance. The spread of the novel coronavirus has only deepened the Chinese people’s dissatisfaction with their government.
The economic tensions and political critiques stemming from U.S.-Chinese competition may ultimately prove to be the straws that broke this camel’s back. If Xi continues on this trajectory, eroding the foundations of China’s economic and political power and monopolizing responsibility and control, he will expose the CCP to cataclysmic change.
FLASHBACK FROM YOURS TRULY: Coronavirus, Xi Jinping, and the Mandate of Heaven.
Xi has another problem on his hands: His own overweening ambition. From the death of Mao until Xi himself, the CCP leadership functioned largely on consensus between the top men. Nobody wanted to see a return to one-man totalitarianism, when Mao was free to murder on a whim while the country barely subsisted. But the CCP was hardly willing to surrender any power, either. Consensus was a way to show the CCP as a whole enjoyed the Mandate: The economy began its long and unprecedented boom, guided by a ruling clique that agreed on all the big details. When trouble erupted, a head or two might roll, but the consensus continued unchanged except for a new head or two to replace the rollers.
But Xi has moved from consensus to one-man rule. No rival power centers remain within the CCP, so there’s no consensus committee to roll on if Xi’s head rolls off. If Xi stumbles badly, whether it’s due to coronavirus or some other crisis in the future, he’ll leave behind nothing but untrusted, untested yes-men.
That one is just for our VIP members, and I hope you’ll use that VODKAPUNDIT discount code if you’ve been thinking of becoming a supporter.
IT’S EASTER WEEK AND NO, JESUS IS NOT A FAIRY TALE: The “Jesus is just another child’s story, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny” claim will be repeated in the mainstream media this week. But what if it’s wrong?
FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS: ‘Two Fat Professors’ are afraid of COVID-19 causing ‘fatphobia.’
Like all the other political “phobias,” there’s no such thing as “fatphobia,” it’s just a term made up by grifters and control freaks.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Virtual(ly Empty) Coronapocalypse Holy Week Begins. “I think what may get really weird for people this week is that Easter Sunday is a big social gathering day for secular people too. Of all the things we’ve been told not to do, avoid family and friends on Easter Sunday is one of the biggest tasks. Yes, we had to get through Saint Patrick’s Day, but Easter is a bigger deal because it ropes in all of our relatives who don’t party.”
STACY MCCAIN: Coronavirus: The Wrong Numbers. Will the media ever admit the failure of doomsday projections? “What matters, from the perspective of avoiding a crisis that overwhelms our health-care system, is not how many people are infected with the coronavirus, but rather the number of patients hospitalized. As tests for the Chinese virus have become more widely available, a majority of people who test positive — more than 80 percent in some states — are never hospitalized. Earlier projections of a system-crashing crisis have so far been proven false, but the media refuse to acknowledge the failure of the doomsday prophets and their computer-generated pandemic models.”
I’d say it’s a little early to declare victory yet, but I did just hear from a doc in New Orleans that his ICU was full, but not overloaded. And is it really that cheery to point out that “However, at least 95 percent of those infected survive — in some states, the death rate is less than 2 percent?” A 2% death rate is awful, and a 5% death rate is catastrophic.
PROPERLY TARGETED, BUDGET CUTS WOULD PROBABLY MAKE THE FDA MUCH MORE PRODUCTIVE: FDA Bureaucracy Grows 79% Since 2007.
SOMEONE SHOULD DO A DEEP DIVE INTO HIS FAMILY’S FINANCES: Roger Simon: Adam Schiff’s Dereliction of Duty Regarding Communist China.
DON’T BE CRUDE: Saudi Arabia, Russia push negotiations for global oil pact.
Saudi Arabia and Russia both say they want the U.S., which has become the world’s largest producer thanks to the shale revolution, to join the cuts. But Trump had only hostile words for OPEC on Saturday, and threatened tariffs on foreign oil.
“If the Americans don’t take part, the problem which existed before for the Russians and Saudis will remain — that they cut output while the U.S ramps it up, and that makes the whole thing impossible,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a research group that advises the Kremlin.
It’s not clear if Russia and Saudi Arabia will require the U.S. to publicly commit to cut production — a challenge in the private, fragmented American industry — or if a compromise gesture would be enough. Alexander Dynkin, president of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow, a state-run think tank, said Moscow would like the U.S. to lift some sanctions as a compromise.
There’s so much oil being produced, and so much less than usual being consumed, that somebody somewhere has to cut because we’re running out of places to store the stuff.
MICHAEL BARONE: Contrast between China and its neighbors shows communist regime’s true character.
There’s no greater contrast between how countries have treated the COVID-19 pandemic than that between nations on both sides of what might be called the Asian Iron Curtain.
It’s a contrast that tells us much about how to handle the disease, and how events now in the distant past can determine the fates of hundreds of millions of people today.
On one side is the People’s Republic of China, where the novel coronavirus apparently transferred from animal to human hosts. There, the government deliberately lied about human-to-human transmission, persecuted to the point of death doctors who warned of its dangers, and is still almost certainly lying about its continued spread.
On the other side of this Iron Curtain — actually, a virtual barrier penetrated, until the virus appeared, by dozens of airline flights every day — are places which seem to have responded most successfully to the pandemic: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Indeed. For its sins here, China should have to give Hong King independence.
WELL, YES: China Will Do Anything to Deflect Coronavirus Blame. “Not a single reputable epidemiologist has shown any evidence that the coronavirus came from anywhere else but China, and the Italian doctor whose comments were taken out of context to boost the case has publicly refuted it. Yet this is important because by permanently, or even temporarily, injecting doubt into the origins of the coronavirus through this question, Beijing hopes to escape blame for its initial cover-up of the outbreak in December and January, which cost the world precious time to rally resources and create a potentially successful containment strategy.”
Well, China has important allies in the press.
Related: China’s Coming Upheaval: Competition, the Coronavirus, and the Weakness of Xi Jinping.
Plus: How WHO Became China’s Coronavirus Accomplice.
And just for fun:
