Archive for 2020
March 9, 2020
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: LOL We’re All Gonna Die Coronavirus Edition. “The media is stuck in a permanent state of awful on any subject which requires President Trump’s input, and they’ve certainly lived down to their reputation with this story. In fact, the CPAC coronavirus angle provided new opportunities for them to be awful.”
It’s what they do.
WARTHOG IN STRIPES: Red, white and blue, with a 30 mm. The photo was taken at a Heritage Flight Training Course fly-by at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., Feb. 29, 2020.
THANKS, SOCIALISTS, FOR PROVING HER RIGHT: UChicago coed threatened with violence for saying socialism more dangerous than coronavirus.
Disgracefully, the University of Chicago administration didn’t back her up.
CORONAVIRUS: Reasons Not To Panic.
ENTITLEMENT MENTALITY: Elizabeth Warren staffer tells reporter to ‘eat s**t’ for not ‘actively’ supporting Warren’s campaign.
Politico reporter Alex Thompson, who was assigned by his editor to cover Warren’s campaign, posted screenshots of messages that Warren staffers have been sending him.
One of the staffers chided him for not “actively supporting” Warren’s campaign while others told him to “eat s**t.”
Thompson explained, “Some Warren campaign staffers don’t have a good understanding of campaign journalism. Not my job to ‘actively support the candidate that you were assigned’ It is my job to contact as many ppl as possible rather than just rely on what the campaign wants to give me.”
That’s refreshing.
WELL, THAT SEEMS REASONABLE: “Trump is going to try dampening black voter enthusiasm for Biden by contrasting the two men’s criminal justice records.” But lefties are appalled.
CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: Confirmed Coronavirus Cases Outside China Tripled in Past Week: Total number of cases of virus that causes Covid-19 surpasses 110,000, with infections in 108 countries and regions.
Coronavirus Cases Reach 43 in India.
Hofstra Cancels Campus Classes for a Week over Coronavirus Concerns.
“Too Early” To Size Up Virus Impact.
Regal Princess cruise ship cleared to dock at Port Everglades.
Vietnam Vows To Punish Hiders Of Coronavirus After New Cases.
Brooklyn Sees 1st COVID-19 Cases as Tri-State Total Surges 136% in Days; Some Schools Close.
Coronavirus Kills 237 in Iran, 7,161 Infected: Health Ministry.
Italy quarantines millions as coronavirus death toll jumps by 50% in one day.
Are U.S. hospitals ready for coronavirus?
Apple sells fewer than 500,000 smartphones in China in February amid coronavirus.
Infectious Disease Expert Warns Panic More Dangerous Than Coronavirus Itself.
UPDATE: In a crisis, the EU can’t cope: Europe, With Eye on Italy Coronavirus Quarantine, Plans Next Moves. “Officials in Brussels appealed fruitlessly to France, Germany and the Czech Republic to lift controls on the export of protective medical gear, which they imposed to head off shortages at home.”
“VEEP” WITHOUT ANY OF THE LAUGHS: Amy Klobuchar Misspeaks, Accidentally Tells Campaign Crowd She’ll Be Biden’s VP, Receives Applause.
OH, HIM AGAIN … THE GUY WHO SAID LET THEM F*****G DIE”: Trinity College sociology professor still doesn’t like white people. What’s odd is that the Hartford Courant thinks his op-ed is worth publishing. Can you imagine a newspaper publishing the same sort of drivel from a KKK Grand Dragon?
PROMISING: Are Trump’s MAGA rallies a hotbed of ‘hidden voters’? “In total, the campaign has identified more than 1.4 million potential voters from their events since Inauguration Day 2017, primarily the raucous Make America Great Again rallies. But most importantly, the campaign says that dataset includes thousands of people who have failed to cast a ballot in recent years, people who aren’t traditional Republican voters, even people who say they are Democrats. Nearly 10 percent of those registered, for example, had not voted in at least three of the last four elections while up to a quarter are Democrats, the campaign claims.”
I GUESS IT’S NOT IMPOSSIBLE, BUT …: “If Biden’s the Nominee, Might He Pick Michelle Obama as His Vice President”?
CORONAVIRUS: Bahrain Grand Prix to run behind closed doors. “This year’s Bahrain Grand Prix will take place without spectators as the race organizers opted to make it a ‘participants-only event’ in response to the coronavirus outbreak.”
AT AMAZON, Lightning Deal, FORTEM Digital Tire Inflator for Car w/Auto Pump/Shut Off Feature, Portable Air Compressor, Carrying Case.
FALLOUT: OPEC deal collapse sparks price war: ‘$20 oil in 2020 is coming.’
″$20 oil in 2020 is coming,” Ali Khedery, formerly Exxon’s senior Middle East advisor and now CEO of U.S.-based strategy firm Dragoman Ventures, wrote Sunday on Twitter. “Huge geopolitical implications. Timely stimulus for net consumers. Catastrophic for failed/failing petro-kleptocracies Iraq, Iran, etc – may prove existential 1-2 punch when paired with COVID19.”
The comment came as oil prices are down 30% for the year and a day after Saudi Arabia announced massive discounts to its official selling prices for April. Plunging price forecasts are also coming amid reports of a possible increase in production by the OPEC kingpin from its current 9.7 million barrels per day (bpd) to more than 10 million bpd.
Here’s where we find out how well American frackers are hedged, and how far they’ve really come in getting costs down.
LILEKS ON THE MSM AND PANDEMICS, THEN AND NOW:
I suspect this will seem, in retrospect, as the last “normal” week. The one in which there was other news.
This doesn’t mean everything will be actually horrible. It means the news will be horrible, in that it gives a sense of a rapidly escalating catastrophe that produces mass unease and uncertainty.
A few weeks ago, I think, I mused about some previous pandemic about which I’d forgotten, except that I bought masks, and noted a run on rice at Costco, That was the Swine Flu pandemic, of course. It was declared by the WHO to be A Thing in June 2009. I decided to go back to the StarTribune archives to see how it played out. From what I recalled, there was concern, but nothing like we’re seeing today. See if you recall any of this, or your local variant.
Read the whole thing.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Coronavirus shows US needs to restore pharmaceutical production — in Puerto Rico. And elsewhere in the United States.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Virginia to Force Anyone Who Buys Any Firearm to Undergo Background Check. “There are 19 such questions where answering “yes” to any one of them could deny you your constitutional right to bear arms.”
GOOD: In Pennsylvania, natural gas industry prepares for battle.
After years of ideologues and elites using the natural gas industry as a punching bag for politics and climate change activism, Nick DeIuliis, the CEO of CNX Resources, one of the largest natural gas producers in Western Pennsylvania, has had enough.
In remarks at a Rotary Club speech at the storied William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh last week, the blue-collar man who earned degrees in engineering and law, and his job at the top, decided to speak out to defend an industry that has become a regional economic game-changer.
“Natural gas and manufacturing have been demonized and ridiculed on a consistent and regular basis by a cabal of misguided, insulated elites,” DeIuliis stated in his speech in front of 80 of the region’s top business and professional leaders.
The usually reserved DeIuliis said in an interview with the Washington Examiner after the event that he had decided to speak out because he was tired of the natural gas and manufacturing industries being held to a completely different standard than other industries, tired of being used a political wedge issue, and tired of the people working with him being portrayed as the enemy of the well-being of our climate.
It is a stand in this lead-up to the presidential contest in the fall that a variety of local Democrats and Republicans will consider a blueprint for how to stand up to elites.
In the speech, the well-respected business leader took umbrage with how the mayor of Pittsburgh, William Peduto, has used the industry as a personal weapon. He was referring to Peduto’s speech last fall to environmental groups, in which he advocated a ban on further petrochemical development in the region.
DeIuliis also took aim at some of the public pension managers and foundations that are divesting their fossil fuel investments, as well as tech giants who, on the one hand, say they are doing this to save the climate even as they help China — far and away the world’s largest carbon polluter — silence its pro-democracy youth.
Punch back twice as hard.