NEWS I HOPE YOU CAN’T USE: So You’ve Run Out of Toilet Paper. What Else Will Flush? Our handy guide to plumbing during a pandemic.
Archive for 2020
March 20, 2020
TRUST, BUT — OH, HELL, FORGET THE TRUST, JUST VERIFY:
RELIEF: U.S. Orders Up To A Yearlong Break On Mortgage Payments. “Homeowners who have lost income or their jobs because of the coronavirus outbreak are getting some relief. Depending on their situation, they should be eligible to have their mortgage payments reduced or suspended for up to 12 months. Federal regulators, through the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are ordering lenders to offer homeowners flexibility. The move covers about half of all home loans in the U.S. — those guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie. But regulators expect that the entire mortgage industry will quickly adopt a similar policy. Under the plan, people who have suffered a loss of income can qualify to make reduced payments or be granted a complete pause in payments.”
GARBAGE PEOPLE: Ayatollah’s American Allies Seize on Pandemic in Fresh Push for Sanctions Relief. “In echo of regime propaganda, critics falsely claim U.S. sanctions target food and medicine.”
VICE FINDS THE REAL STORY IN A GLOBAL PANDEMIC: As Hospitals Prepare for COVID-19, Life-Saving Trans Surgeries Are Delayed.
THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: While Stephen Colbert Argues ‘Chinese Virus’ Is Racist, Let’s Revisit His Jokes About Asians.
I hope no one here catches the Chinese coronavirus from Wuhan, a city in China ruled by Chinese Communists where the Chinese-sourced Sino-virus came from.
UPDATE (Charlie): To be culturally sensitive, please use 功流感 (gong1 liu2 gan3) — “workers influenza” or “kung flu”.
WSJ EDITORIAL: Don’t Get Carried Away With Wuhan Coronavirus Shutdowns.
Financial markets paused their slide Thursday, but no one should think this rolling economic calamity is over. If this government-ordered shutdown continues for much more than another week or two, the human cost of job losses and bankruptcies will exceed what most Americans imagine. This won’t be popular to read in some quarters, but federal and state officials need to start adjusting their anti-virus strategy now to avoid an economic recession that will dwarf the harm from 2008-2009.
The vast social-distancing project of the last 10 days or so has been necessary and has done much good. Warnings about large gatherings of more than 10 people and limiting access to nursing homes will save lives. The public has received a crucial education in hygiene and disease prevention, and even young people may get the message. With any luck, this behavior change will reduce the coronavirus spread enough that our hospitals won’t be overwhelmed with patients. Anthony Fauci, Scott Gottlieb and other disease experts are buying crucial time for government and private industry to marshal resources against the virus. . . .
Perhaps we will be lucky, and the human and capitalist genius for innovation will produce a vaccine faster than expected—or at least treatments that reduce Covid-19 symptoms. But barring that, our leaders and our society will very soon need to shift their virus-fighting strategy to something that is sustainable.
Dr. Fauci has explained this severe lockdown policy as lasting 14 days in its initial term. The national guidance would then be reconsidered depending on the spread of the disease. That should be the moment, if not sooner, to offer new guidance on what might be called phase two of the coronavirus pandemic campaign.
If chloroquine is as useful as it appears to be, two weeks should be enough time to get this cheap, common drug out to hospitals, turning this from a deadly problem to a manageable one and allowing precautions to lighten up.
Related: John Hinderaker says we’ve gone from sensible reaction to “insane overreaction.”
SWEDES DEMAND CHINESE CORONAVIRUS APOLOGY: China should apologize to the world for corona. “The aggressive Chinese attacks on Sweden for our handling of the Coronavirus should be seen against the fact that the Chinese Communist Party wants to escape all kind of responsibility for the spread of the epidemic. Lousy animal husbandry and poor food standards, along with fear of the dictatorship and its culture of silence, are the main reasons why the world is presently wrestling with a terrible global pandemic. Its background lies in the inability of a totalitarian system to take people’s perceptions, security and life into account. It is not Sweden or Europe that is the problem in all this. It’s China. And it is China that, using its economic power, systematically threatens democratic countries in order to destabilize and silence criticism.”
WHY DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS ARE EXPERIENCING THE WUHAN CORONAVIRUS EPIDEMIC DIFFERENTLY:
Democrats tend to gather in the larger urban areas. They are clustered more densely. They are more dependent on government services (i.e. transportation), and are less likely to be independent and self-sufficient.
Republicans tend to live on the outer rings of the urban centers, and spread out from there to the smaller towns, rural areas. These people have their guns, trucks, churches. The are more independent, more self-sufficient and less dependent on their government.
Republicans tend to be more optimistic people about recovery, picking oneself up by your bootstraps, helping your neighbor. Democrats tend to be sorrowful, less optimistic people, hand-wringing not only about the virus, but what we call the virus.
Indeed.
Speaking of hand-wringing about what we call the virus: N.J. Attorney General: It might be unlawful to let your employees call it “the Chinese virus.” He’s an idiot, and unfit for office.
PUTTING OUR DIFFERENCES ASIDE TO UNITE AGAINST A COMMON ENEMY IS THE AMERICAN WAY: New best friends: Trump and archfoes Cuomo and Newsom bond in coronavirus crisis.
At every press conference — and all three leaders are doing daily COVID-19 press updates — praise is bestowed and compliments showered. There are gratuitous namechecks — as with the lover who feels compelled just to repeat the name of the beloved — and many allusions to late night phone calls when details of policy are apparently being hashed out.
In his press conference yesterday, for instance, as Trump detailed the FDA’s expedited approval of a new virus treatment, he managed to work in the news that he’d spoken with Cuomo “at great, great length last night; he wants to be first in line.”
Considering that he and the governor are now besties, Cuomo will probably in fact be first in line to get the prescription drug to his state’s consumers — just as he’s recently gotten everything on his virus wish list, from a national guard deployment to Westchester County, site of an early hot spot, to a mobile testing drive-through, also for Westchester, to an Army Corps of Engineers deployment, to a Navy hospital ship which will soon be docked in New York Harbor in case New York City runs out of hospital beds. . . .
Gavin Newsom has got the love bug too. President Trump does not namecheck Gavin Newsom as much as he does Cuomo, but Newsom — who has excoriated “the corruption and the incompetence in the White House,” has claimed to be “absolutely humiliated” by Trump’s stance on climate policy, and has proudly proclaimed California the “most unTrump” state in the US — is now crowing about the “privilege” of a recent conversation in which the president promised his state more COVID-19 testing swabs.
“The president assured me, not only assured me, he was aware of where those swabs are being procured before I even offered my own insight,” Newsom burbled. “Not only is he on top of it, but they’re securing and beginning the process of distributing those swabs.”
New Yorkers, as some will recall, experienced the “best of human nature” phenomenon for a few weeks after 9/11. For a few golden weeks passersby on the street made full eye contact and wreathed each other in beatific smiles; they deferred, nay argued, about who should go through a door first. They stopped their cars for bicyclists. By December they’d resumed their self-centered ways.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
Indeed.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS KILLS: Politics and Fears of ‘Racism’ Helped Coronavirus Spread in Italy, Virus Expert Warns.
In this case, it was political correctness as propaganda from Chinese Communists.
SUPPLY CHAIN: How grocery stores restock shelves in the age of coronavirus. The shelf-stockers are heroes, and so are the truck drivers, the warehouse staff, the cashiers, and everyone else involved.
MY ILL-FATED FORAY INTO HOME-SCHOOLING: Not mine, actually, but that of Bill McMorris, one of my favorite writers. The sub-head is a foretaste – “Those who cannot teach, reach (for a pistol).”
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: World War V: The Coronavirus Is a Battle Between Freedom and Skynet. “Will ours be a world where populations confine themselves to progressively smaller rooms with ever-dwindling supplies? Or a world where each country, perhaps empowered by equivalents of the Defense Production Act, is busy rearchitecting the global supply chain and creating new workflows? Will it be a world where ‘government will save us’ or one in which we decide to do things differently?”
Needless to say, read the whole thing.
JAMES LILEKS: An Ordinary Evening. “Just so you know: I am not panicking. I am not alarmed. I am concerned. Mindful. We’ll get past this. But we are not there yet.”
THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: Truckers appeal to US to keep rest stops, gas stations open: “In this current crisis, we ask for your help in supplying America, together.”
As the United States gradually shuts down in a bid to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the trucking and tire industry is appealing to the government to allow gas stations, rest stops, and repair facilities to remain open to keep deliveries rolling.
Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation, for example, shut down all of its rest areas and welcome centers to the public on Tuesday. On Wednesday, it agreed to reopen the parking lots at nearly half of them at the request of truckers and the Trump administration.
Other states are considering similar closures, officials said, to try to prevent the spread of the highly contagious virus and discourage people from traveling.
That’s a stupid idea and should be abandoned posthaste.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which counts 160,000 members nationwide, said closures were giving drivers the impression that they were being asked to put productivity ahead of their own personal safety.
“Rest areas aren’t simply places to purchase snacks and beverages from vending machines – they are invaluable locations to rest when fatigued,” the association said in a letter to the U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. It said truckers “rely on rest areas to do just that – rest!”
A spokesman for Chao said the department was asking states to keep rest stops open for parking – even if they no longer had public employees on site.
The issue is especially urgent since the U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) issued an emergency order on Friday to waive the usual time-off requirements for commercial vehicle drivers transporting emergency coronavirus relief.
On Wednesday, FMCSA said it was expanding the order to include other categories of deliveries, including fuel and raw materials – such as paper, plastic or alcohol – used in the manufacture of essential items like sanitizers.
Let the trucks roll. And do everything you can to keep the drivers comfortable. They’re performing an absolutely essential service.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Best and Worst Browsers for Privacy, Ranked.
AGENTS OF INFLUENCE SELF-IDENTIFY: UC-Davis student newspaper says graffiti criticizing Chinese Communist Party is ‘xenophobic.’
WHEN BANKS TRY TO HELP, AND REGULATORS STOP THEM. A reader emails:
Just a little Covid tidbit from the small business world. My bank reached out to me early this week and said that they were allowing all of their commercial customers to go to interest only payments simply by sending them a request. They called back today to say that their regulator, the OCC, had informed them that they would consider any such modifications TDR ( Troubled Debt Restructuring). Needless to say, the bank can no longer do it. It’s almost as if the bureaucracy is actively working against us.
Sheesh. Somebody get on this, pronto.
UPDATE: So pronto I think they were ahead of this post. As noted in the comments, the FDIC chair has has asked the FASB (Financial Accounting Standard Board) for a number of changes, including this one: “Excluding COVID-19-related modifications from being considered a concession when determining a troubled debt restructuring (TDR) classification.”
Okay, FASB, the ball’s in your court. Get it done, and communicated to banks.
ANOTHER UPDATE (FRIDAY): My reader emails: “That was the word that I received yesterday, too. The bankers were not over confident that FASB would listen.”
THANK YOU, NFL, FOR PROCEEDING WITH FREE AGENCY: “To me, shutting down any activity that doesn’t carry an appreciable risk to public health gives a bad look. Maintaining normal activities in times of crisis, to the extent it can done without jeopardizing public health, is a good look. That’s always been the American way. I hope it still is.”
Indeed.™
TUCKER CARLSON ON CONGRESSIONAL INSIDER TRADING: ‘No Greater Moral Crime’: Tucker Carlson Tears Into GOP Senator for Coronavirus Insider Trading.
UPDATE: A friend on Facebook posts:
Chris Plante just read a news story about Sens. Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler, both Republicans, selling a lot of stock right before the bottom fell out. I didn’t catch what news outlet published the story, but he pointed out that it went on and on for 22 paragraphs, and then, in the 23rd paragraph, it reported that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, had sold much more stock than either of them. “That’s not journalism, that’s a cover-up,” Plante said.
As usual. Doesn’t get them off the hook for abuse of power, but it does put the press on it.