We Are Soooooo Screwed

Wait, whut?

Posted on April 10, 2020April 10, 2020 by Mike

WASHINGTON — US researchers have opened another safety test of an experimental COVID-19 vaccine, this one using a skin-deep shot instead of the usual deeper jab.

“It’s the most important trial that we’ve ever done,” Dr. John Ervin of the Center for Pharmaceutical Research told The Associated Press afterward. “People are beating down the door to get into this trial.”

The experiment, using a vaccine candidate developed by Inovio Pharmaceuticals, is part of a global hunt for much-needed protection against a virus that has triggered an economic shutdown and forced people indoors as countries try to stem the spread.

Inovio researchers packaged a section of the virus’ genetic code inside a piece of synthetic DNA. Injected as a vaccine, the cells act as a mini-factory to produce harmless protein copies. The immune system makes protective antibodies against them — primed if the real virus ever comes along.

Inovio research and development chief Kate Broderick likens it to giving the body an FBI wanted poster so it can recognize the enemy.

But after the skin-deep injection, researchers must hold a device over the spot that gives a little electrical zap. The synthetic DNA is large when it comes to penetrating human cells, and the pulse helps the vaccine more easily penetrate and get to work, Broderick said.

DNA vaccines are a new technology. But Inovio has experimental vaccines against other diseases that are made the same way that have passed initial safety testing.

Hate to be a loony paranoid conspiracy nut, a crank, or a total wet blanket about this, I really, truly do, but…a shallowly-implanted “vaccine” that must be activated electronically? Gee, THAT doesn’t give off a creepy, Big-Brotherish sort of vibe at all. Wonder what else that eensy-weensy, totally benign, harmless “little zap” might be activating in there?

Reminder: I am NOT a doctor, know little to nothing about this sort of thing, and freely confess to being most likely full of crap here. Also, I am not, nor have I ever been, any kind of “anti-vaxxer.” But based on the information above, along with my own knowledge of what the US government truly is and is not nowadays, I can’t honestly say I’d be completely at ease with being given a “vaccine” like this, either. Or required by law to take one.

Without a shot

Posted on April 9, 2020April 9, 2020 by Mike

When it comes to government, always assume the worst.

Back in 1913, if you had predicted the brand new Federal Reserve would steadily debase the currency and exacerbate rather than dampen the business cycle, you were dead right. You would have gotten more points if you predicted its creation was the first step towards abandoning the gold standard and that it would eventually finance government deficits.

Similarly, back in that unlucky year if you predicted the new Constitutional amendment allowing the government to levy an income tax would lead to massive confiscation of incomes and fund gargantuan welfare and warfare states—the blob—you hit it on the screws.

Later, if you predicted that the New Deal wouldn’t reverse the economic contraction that the government had already transformed from a garden variety financial crash and recession into a Great Depression, you were right again. More points for those who foresaw both the abandonment of any effective Constitutional constraints on the federal government, and the fiscal consequence of welfare state collectivism—a spiraling and uncontrollable national debt.

Fast forward to the aftermath of September 11, 2001: if you said that when the US went into the Middle East it would never get out, that “emergency” measures like TSA screening and the Patriot Act would never be rescinded and clearly advanced a police state agenda, and that the George W. Bush administration’s new standard of fiscal and monetary recklessness would soon be surpassed, you were right again.

Fast forward to now. If you predict that governments’ response to the coronavirus outbreak will reveal not so hidden agendas of globalist power and domination (Why do you think they keep saying, “The world will never go back to the way it was”?), terminate the last vestiges of freedom, destroy the economy and financial markets, kill far more people than the virus itself, and set precedents for everything from enforced confinement to martial law to mandatory vaccinations to electronic money to compelled microchipped identification and surveillance whenever a group of experts makes scary projections about lethal microbes—which from now on will be almost always—you’re well on your way to being proved right on all counts.

Anyone who thinks that “emergency” measures will be rescinded or will not serve as future precedents is referred to Draconian Emergency Measures Enacted By Governments Throughout History That Have Been Rescinded and Not Served as Precedents. It’s available for free on Amazon and takes only four seconds to read; the title is longer than the book.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of this whole ordeal is that Americans have surrendered to panic and propaganda without a shot. Molon labe and They’ll take my gun when they pry it from my cold, lifeless fingers patriots—bumper-sticker freedom fighters—are cowering in place, living off their 3, 6, 12, 24, or 60 months of provisions, lest they encounter a germ. Neighbors are reporting on neighbors who leave their houses, take a walk, clear their throats, or other heretofore legal activities (they would still be legal if the Constitution had any remaining relevance). Apps have been developed to monitor and report people’s locations, coughs, sneezes, sniffles, and runny noses. Can one that monitors and reports social distances be far behind? If only one life is saved…

With a few noteworthy exceptions (lewrockwell.com takes the gold medal), the alternative media has been a disappointment. Bloggers who would normally cast darkly skeptical doubts if the government announced the sun will rise tomorrow have accepted official statistics, projections, propaganda, and draconian measures without a peep of skepticism or doubt.

That’s what baffles and irritates me. If there’s anything we’ve known for years—hell, decades—now, it’s that Enemedia, professional politicians, and Deep State bureauweasels are all outrageous, audacious liars. As my grandma used to say, they’re the kind of people who would much rather climb a tree and tell you a lie than stand on the ground and tell you the truth. We also know full well that they’re utterly incompetent, entirely out of touch with how life is actually lived by ordinary Joe Lunchbox-types, and just generally bass-ackwards ign’ernt about so many of the topics they are nevertheless arrogant enough to pontificate at their presumed inferiors about, at wearisome length.

Then all of a sudden a panic is manufactured out of: A) wildly inflated statistics and projections; B) unreliable, incomplete, and/or contradictory information; and C) completely worthless computer modeling…and that inspires a dismaying number of erstwhile skeptics to shed their hard-shell cynicism about politicians, government, and media—cynicism which has been proven eminently justified over and over again—to join the hysterics in a frenzied stampede to the waiting boxcars? To re-embrace the old naive faith in The Powers That Be they remember from childhood and meekly hand over the last battered, tattered shreds of their liberty without demur? To unquestioningly “Go Home, Stay Home” merely because that’s what Big Daddy told ’em to do?

I dunno, does this fail to compute for anybody out there besides me?

The iron curtain descends

Posted on April 9, 2020April 9, 2020 by Mike

Soooo, how’s everybody liking their shiny new Police State, eh?

On Saturday, police in Kansas City “intervened” to shut down a parade of elementary school teachers. The staff of John Fiske Elementary School decided to organize the parade as a way to boost the morale of their students and encourage them in their new distance learning adventure. All of the teachers and administrators were in their own cars. There was literally no chance whatsoever of any virus being transmitted from car to car. But a spokeswoman for the police later explained, after the elicit gathering was descended upon by law enforcement, that the celebration of learning was not “necessary” or “essential.”

Two days before the Kansas City community was saved from the threat of cheerful elementary school teachers waving to children from their sedans, police in Malibu arrested a man who was caught paddle boarding in the ocean. Two boats and three additional deputies in vehicles were called to the scene of the non-essential joyride. How could a man out by himself in the Pacific possibly contract or spread the coronavirus? Nobody knows. But orders are orders, after all. And so the man was pulled out of the ocean and hauled away in handcuffs.

Uh huh. Kinda makes one wonder how well those all-important “social distancing” rules were maintained in that patrol car, as well as at the jailhouse. Best not to think too much about that stuff, I suppose.

Officials in other parts of the nation have banned essential retailers from selling non-essential items like mosquito repellent. I suppose the prevention of West Nile and malaria are no longer considered essential. The mayor of Port Isabel, Texas, has decided, for whatever reason, that residents may not travel with more than two people in their vehicles. What if you’re a single parent with two kids? Well, sorry, one of your kids is out of luck. It’s not clear how this rule will be enforced, but some states have made that easier on themselves by setting up checkpoints to stop and question every car that passes through. A driver from New York who gets caught in Florida might face 60 days in jail. I should stop here to remind you that Florida and New York are places in the United States of America, not Soviet Russia.

Sorry, Matt, but that’s become a very difficult proposition to support of late. A distinction without a difference, one might say.

Apologists for our newly established police state will tell me that states and localities have the authority to impose restrictions in an emergency. That is true, but the question of how far their authority actually goes is complicated, and in this case made even more complicated by the fact that these stay-at-home orders, in many cases, are based not on a current medical emergency in the respective state, but on models that forecast the possibility of an emergency in the future. For example, Minnesota is under a stay-at-home order despite having only 29 coronavirus deaths among a population of over 5 million. Perhaps the situation will get worse. Perhaps not. The point is that there is no current emergency in Minnesota or many of the other states currently under lockdown. There is, rather, a model that projects an emergency. And if projected emergencies can justify the effective nullification of the Bill of Rights, where is the limit? Haven’t we now granted the government the power to seize near-total control on the basis of any real or phantom threat?

I would argue that nothing could ever justify such a thing. Indeed, the First and Fourth Amendments — the provisions of the Bill of Rights that seem to be having the worst time of it, recently — serve no purpose and have no reason to exist if they can be canceled or overridden whenever the government might have a specially compelling reason to do so. It is only when the government has a specially compelling reason to violate the amendments that the amendments have any function. After all, we really don’t need them during the times that the government has no interest in infringing on them. It seems that if we toss aside our right to assembly, our right to practice our religion, our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, etc., whenever the government insists that such protections are hazardous to our health, then we might as well not have the rights in the first place. It’s like locking a criminal in a cell but giving him the key to open it along with a stern warning to only use the key if he has a very good reason. Doesn’t the key make the cell a rather pointless accessory? Sure he might remain in it sometimes, but only when he wants to. And it’s precisely when he wants to be behind bars that you don’t need the bars at all.

Funniest thing about it might be that, while we were all keeping a wary eye on FederalGovCo in expectation of the Big Clampdown being launched from Mordor On The Potomac, it turned out to be the states and localities who were the true threat.

But do tell me again all about how the government “fears” an armed populace, as is appropriate and right; that most cops will resist enforcing blatantly unconstitutional edicts; that the 2A is enough all by itself to protect our “unalienable” rights; that all those eleventy bajillion guns out there (kept unloaded and securely locked away as the law requires, of course) will somehow keep us “free” just by their very existence. As bedtime fairytales go, that one’s my favorite.

What we’ve learned

Posted on April 9, 2020April 9, 2020 by Mike

Another fine missive from Skeptic. A lot of this echoes things I’ve said here many times in my darker moments, so it should all seem familiar to you by now.

First – we are learning that, despite the prattlings of hammerheads like Wittle Benny Shapiro and Hannity, we are not in fact “a nation of laws.” We are a nation of MEN – and at the moment, we are a nation whose elected officials are avaricious, tyrannical men. What is being done right now – the quarantines, the lockdowns – are plainly unconstitutional. The phrase “except for” appears nowhere in the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights. So, by whose authority do these mayors and governors acquire the power to lock down their domains? Why, by their own – they are signing their own executive orders giving them that power! Isn’t that convenient?

We have learned that the American people will, in fact, submit meekly. After all the talk about 70 million gun owners, nary a single shot has been fired. Screw the shots – in the country that has half of the world’s lawyers, not one lawyer has filed a lawsuit or filed for an injunction. We are reduced to debating the “when” of when they will deign to allow us to live a normal life again, rather than rising up and proclaiming, “YOU CAN’T DO THAT!” We have accepted that they CAN – and we are begging them NOT to. They have taken power that would make Stalin blush and we have said, “yes, sir.”

One of the most chilling aspects of all this has been seeing how very many “Americans” are out there clamoring for even more of it.

For all of those little tyrants, there’s no incentive to open back up. They get to do what they always wanted to do – push people around. They continue to get paid; they are spectators to the economic devastation, not participants. And there will be no pushback from the voters because they get to say they Did Something.

We have learned that – again – our President has precious little control. Trump has, in fact, screwed himself on this thing. Even if Trump were to proclaim that the country will “open up” on, say, April 15, he will simply be disregarded by the governors and mayors, who insist that “their” lockdown must be longer because reasons. The only thing Trump would do is the thing he won’t – demand that the Constitution be returned to full effect, and enforce that using the National Guard if necessary.

We have learned that our side (those discontented with the lockdowns) refuses to engage in civil disobedience. There are no rallies, no protests. We sit at home, making sure not to be around 10 people.

We have learned that a majority of “the people” will seize on the stampeding of civil liberties not as an opportunity to stand up for themselves, but instead to scold others who do stand up, and to virtue-signal with the various “stay home” memes. In fact, the divide seems to be between “getting paid and scolding everyone else” and “unpaid and pissed off.”

We have learned that there will be no consequences to China. Even with what amounts to a WMD attack on the United States, there is a vocal minority (majority?) who will proclaim any anti-China conversation as “racist.”

This is perhaps the thing I find most disgusting of all. By allowing our elites to relocate all American industry to China, combined with Clinton’s ill-advised flip-flop to grant the ChiComs MFN trade status, we weakened our position and limited our options in our dealings with Red China to basically just one: sit back, suck on it, and learn to like the taste.

China is neither a friend nor a trustworthy partner. It is a backwards, primitive dictatorship run by a council of wholly evil megalomaniacs who dream of global domination, and do not lack the will or the means to make it so. For the government of any relatively free nation to allow its greedhead corporatists to relocate so much as one damned factory to a hostile, dangerous adversary-nation without penalizing them harshly for it is the very definition of madness.

But here we all are.

My own business – the one I’ve spent fifteen years building – is in ruins; I’m “nonessential,” so therefore my business is illegal. Maybe I can rebuild after our masters decide to allow me to do business again – but what’s the point? They can – and will – do this again. In a month, in a year, in a decade, who cares? It’ll happen again and I will again be destroyed. Maybe I will rebuild, because I need to make a living, but I will never feel the same way about the business I loved, or the country I loved, again. I do not love the United States anymore.

Nor do I. Nor am I sure I ever really did. In fact, the America I loved—the America I still DO love—had ceased to exist before I ever came of age as anything more concrete than an idea, a historical artifact which I usually refer to here as America That Was. Amerika That IS, FUSA, the USSA, on the other hand, can go hang.

I see idiots like Hannity (again) crowing about Trump’s approval ratings, and how he will win in November. Seriously – who cares? Trump is powerless. He’s weak. He’s letting Fauci run the goddamned country. I always thought he was a fighter, but he’s not. Would we be any worse off with Crazy Bernie as President? I can’t imagine how.

Oh, don’t kid yourself, my friend. It could ALWAYS be worse. And one thing you can count on for sure with an avowed Commie like Bolshevik Bernie is that he will always find a way to make damned sure that it is.

Another thing I’ve said many times here: I don’t think so much that Trump’s greatest flaw is that he isn’t really a fighter. It’s that he still truly does believe in this country—that it remains the America of old, that even though the system has been abused, perverted, and betrayed, it is still salvageable. His manifestly obvious love for his country is so deep and passionate that it appears to have rendered him blind to certain unpleasant realities.

And the bastards who are doing this aren’t missing a paycheck. Are you seeing any news about government workers being furloughed without pay? Me neither.

We’re done, Mike. There will be no Civil War. America has been lost without firing a single shot. Eric Swallwell will not need to nuke us. We’ve done it to ourselves.

The evil bastards have won. Fuck them and fuck this country.

Actually, they won a good while back. All they’re doing now is re-confirming their victory, and testing its bounds for a reference as to what further depredations they’ll be able to get away with next time. And you can be assured there WILL be a next time.

Commie tigers never change their stripes

Posted on April 7, 2020April 7, 2020 by Mike

Don’t trust China. China is asshoe*.

Call it the Kung Flu, the Shanghai Shivers, the Wuhan or Chinese virus, or COVID-19 — whatever you want — communist China lied and so far thousands worldwide and the global economy died. The interconnected world has two main hubs, the United States and China. What happens in one will affect the other, as long as China remains the world’s manufacturing and supply hub. You cannot buy antibiotics, Nike shoes, or untold thousands of other products we use every single day that did not originate in part or in whole in China.

Geraghty’s timeline does leave out a couple of dates that bear mentioning. The Democrats in the House passed the articles of impeachment against President Trump on December 18, 2019. On January 15, after sitting on those articles across the holidays, they walked them over to the Senate while the mainstream media gushed over the solemnity of the occasion. That same day, the first human carrying the coronavirus landed in the United States. He traveled here from China, as thousands did every day. Of course, no one knew he was carrying the deadly virus at the time. China and the WHO were still lying about the outbreak.

The impeachment saga lasted until February 5, 2020. Of course, President Trump and his core team were focused nearly exclusively on that, while at the same time they had little choice but to rely on what the WHO was saying about what was happening in Wuhan. Virus outbreaks come and go and none have caused a global crisis in more than a century. Impeachment was an immediate existential threat to Trump’s presidency and a political act designed to destroy him. When President Trump announced the China travel ban on January 31, the Democrats and the media carried China’s water and denounced the action as an attack on immigrants. As if business travelers and tourists are the same things as immigrants.

Looking forward, we need clear and unified thinking in the West when it comes to China. The communists suppress open media and all dissent domestically. The left ought to hate that. They lie for any reason and no reason at all. They punish scientists for discussing facts. They bury findings that don’t suit them. The coronavirus outbreak has exposed both the WHO and the UN Human Rights Council as bad and unreliable actors who favor China’s communists over their own credibility. The Hong Kong protests exposed much of the western media and even the NBA as cowards more concerned with their bottom lines than the freedoms they rely on to exist. China has used the wealth generated from becoming the world’s manufacturer to buy influence across the world with its Belt and Road programs and to undermine American influence at the same time.

Only Richard Nixon could have gone to China, but that trip may have turned out to be his greatest mistake. Decades later free Taiwan is marginalized, Hong Kong is under threat and the communists in Beijing are more influential, richer and more powerful in overt and insidious ways than ever. The whole world is reeling thanks to China’s rulers. In every way, as long as communists rule China, it should be viewed as a hostile and unreliable entity — villainous in the extreme and an enemy of freedom, decency and human dignity.

Amen. Sadly, it’s on us that such an obvious truth—a truth which ought to be the very first assumption informing all intelligent attitudes towards Communist shitrapies one and all—is even a matter of debate at this late date. Through our schools and universities, our news and entertainment media, and our politics, we’ve provided the dark, humid environment in which the parasitic Communist fungus can take root and flourish. We should have been digging up and burning the diseased, moldy thing instead. Exhibit A:

“Mom, can you look at this assignment?” A few weeks ago, before the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic forced my school-aged children home, I looked at the homework sheet my high school-age child was referring to and quickly realized what prompted the question. The freshman world history reading assignment was about parents raising “theybies.”

Scratching my head, I read through the assigned article, which included definitions such as “gender is a social construct” followed by leading questions asking students to regurgitate gender theory. The next day, my child received an assignment that taught him about critical race theory before he read an article about when black singer Lil Nas X’s song “Old Town Road” was kicked off the country music charts. The class? Physics.

Needless to say, now with my kids home and me overseeing their daily e-learning, this is a great opportunity to take a deeper look at the left-wing theories on race and gender, not to mention climate change, that public schools are pushing on my children.

My 11-year-old middle school son was assigned the following two videos for “Integrated Global Studies” class. The first is an alarmist video that promotes donations to a bogus fund. The second has countless grammatical errors and lacks any sort of sourcing.

Before Halloween last fall, the same school sent out this memo regarding cultural appropriation, sharing a Teen Vogue video and explaining that cultural appropriation is “defined as the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another.” (So I guess the school’s annual “Luau Madness” party is also off).

So how are we to reckon with the above-cited truth, about Red China and about Communism itself, when The Long March Through The Institutions—part of a brilliantly-conceived and flawlessly-executed project for bringing about Communist tyranny not through violent revolution but surreptitiously, via the “fundamental transformation” of American culture—has proved to be such a smashing success? Have we in fact committed cultural suicide?

How do societies and cultures end? What causes the death of societies and cultures? It is not always the obvious threats.

Today we are struggling with the coronavirus which has unfortunately sickened many and killed some Americans. The deaths are tragic, but so are the many Americans who die annually from the flu, from cancer, and from auto and industrial accidents. The death rate from the coronavirus will be low, far below any existential threat to American demography.

Here is the critical fact: the death of societies and cultures is usually suicide. Members of the society lose faith in its institutions, reject its cultural values, demonize their fellow citizens, enthusiastically entertain foreign ideologies, and open their doors to foreign adversaries. This is particularly devastating when elites turn against the society’s institutions and culture. The initial result is social conflict, loss of confidence, and eventually civil war and or foreign invasion.

With the Democrat Party, all colleges and universities, the school system, and the mainstream media all devoted to anti-American progressive values and objectives, it is clear that America is 75% gone. Who is left to uphold American society and culture and the values of freedom, opportunity, prosperity, individual integrity, and family unity? We know that the half of the American population in “flyover country” maintains American values, even while the national elites on the coasts despise that population, infamously characterized by the Democrat Presidential Candidates Hillary Clinton as “the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.” The Republican Party, faced with a pro-American candidate for president, retreated in part, while another part fought against, so it is unlikely to be the cavalry coming to save America. Do not bet against seeing the emergence of the United Progressive States of Socialism.

Hate to say it and all, but especially after all we’ve witnessed the last couple of weeks that 75% estimate seems pretty low to me.

*NOTE: The source of that hilarious quote can be found here.

Put not your faith in goobermint “experts”

Posted on April 6, 2020April 7, 2020 by Mike

For they are but morons, and liars as well.

The government models used to predict the extent of the coronavirus pandemic are off by huge margins in the latest coronavirus tracking numbers.

The government predictions reported by the IHME Covid Tracking (https://covidtracking.com/data/ ) for Apr 5th were as follows:

– All beds needed: 179,267 – ICU beds needed: 33,176 – Invasive ventilators: 26,544

These numbers were posted on their website on Sunday.

The actual numbers as recorded at The Covid Tracking Project:

– Actual hospitalizations: 22,158
– In ICU: 5,207
– On ventilator: 656

So overnight the IHME — the official group Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx have been promoting cut their numbers by more than half!

Here is what the IHME NOW HAS for April 5th:

– All beds needed: Was 179,267 … Now is 90,353
– ICU beds needed: Was 33,176 … Now is 17,589
– Invasive ventilators: Was 26,544 … Now is 14,951

They cut their projections by almost HALF!… And THEY’RE STILL TOO HIGH!

They’re making it up as they go along!

This is completely unacceptable.

Millions of Americans will lose their jobs due to these panic-driven lockdowns.

The first people to be fired should be the ones who drove this panic!

I wouldn’t be holding my breath waiting for it if I were you, Jim.

Optimistic update! The Other McCain directs his feet to the sunny side of the street.

New York is the epicenter of America’s coronavirus outbreak, with nearly 40 percent of all U.S. cases and the highest per-capita infection rate (632 cases per 100,000 residents). So if the computer-modeled projections have failed to accurately predict the course of the pandemic in New York, what about the rest of the country? In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis came under harsh criticism for delaying a statewide stay-at-home order. DeSantis pointed out that Florida’s outbreak was mainly confined to three counties (Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach) on the state’s southeast coast, and argued that local restrictions were sufficient to prevent spreading the disease. National media demonized DeSantis as irresponsible, yet his state continues to have relatively low levels of coronavirus infection. Florida’s per capita rate (57 per 100,000 residents) is about 90 percent lower than New York’s, and in many counties is substantially lower than the statewide level. As in New York, the outbreak in Florida has fallen short of the model projections that forecast that the patient load from coronavirus cases would exceed the capacity of the hospital system. The IHME model forecast that Florida would not reach the apex of its outbreak until early May, so we don’t know what numbers the state will be reporting at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak there, but so far the numbers are far below what they were predicted to be at this point.

None of this debunking of doomsday forecasts should be interpreted as an argument against “social distancing.” In fact, the effectiveness of these mitigation efforts may explain why the pandemic has failed to become the disaster that the projection models predicted. We are certainly not past the crisis point yet. Far away from the “epicenter” in New York, local outbreaks are turning into mini-epicenters. In Louisiana, for example, St. John the Baptist Parish and Orleans Parish now have America’s highest per-capita death rates from coronavirus.

While the cumulative totals of cases and deaths continue rising, the media are doing a lousy job of reporting the most important numbers: How many COVID-19 patients are currently hospitalized? How many new patients are admitted to the hospital each day, and how many patients are discharged? The reason for “social distancing” policies was to slow the spread of the disease, to “flatten the curve” of the pandemic and avoid overwhelming the hospital system. We have reason to believe that these policies are succeeding in that regard, and something else may explain why we may be averting the “apex” crisis: chloroquine. The anti-malarial drug which Trump famously touted as a “game-changer” in the fight against coronavirus is now being prescribed to thousands of patients, and anecdotal reports indicate that the drug is effective. The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations may have been reduced by this treatment and, if so, chloroquine was probably a variable not factored into the models that projected a shortage of ventilators and ICU beds.

We are still a long way from the point at which we can evaluate the course of this pandemic with the safety of hindsight. It may be many weeks before it is considered safe to hold large gatherings at church or sporting events. We are doing better than the doomsday models predicted, however, and this is good news. When will the media report that news?

Don’t be ridiculous, man. How on earth is reporting the news fairly and honestly going to help them get rid of Trump and regain power for their Democrat-Socialist partners in crime?

The price

Posted on April 6, 2020April 6, 2020 by Mike

Was it worth it?

It took only 15 days after the coronavirus outbreak was confirmed in the U.S. for Boba Guys, a popular San Francisco bubble tea chain with 400 employees and 17 locations, to shut its doors.

With an average daily income of only $7 above daily expenses, the typical small business has a median cash buffer of 27 days of burn before it runs out of money.

Karen Mills, prior head of the Small Business Administration (SBA), said recently that “20%, even 30%, of small businesses could fail even in a good scenario.” Without immediate support to buffer the cash flows of stalled businesses waiting for the economy to reopen, it is a matter of days until millions begin to shut their doors, driving unemployment up significantly and sending the economy into a tailspin.

Small businesses make up over 99.9% of businesses, employ about 59 million people (about 47% of the U.S. private workforce in 2015), create over 41% of new jobs, and account for 45% of GDP.

A Goldman Sachs survey of 1,500 small businesses found that 96% of owners were already feeling the effects of COVID-19. More than half said their business would not be able to continue operating for more than three months because of the economic stresses caused by the pandemic.

With 47% of the private workforce facing potential layoffs, unemployment could rise rapidly into the double digits, substantially driving down the 45% of GDP that small business represents, and lasting for a substantial, years-long recovery.

Even if the death rate from the Creeping ChiCom Crud suddenly spikes to the scarifying levels our masters have been predicting, I still can’t see that the Great Clampdown was worth the cost that decades of impoverishment and misery from destroying the economy is going to exact. And that doesn’t even take into account the freedom we’ve thrown away, which will assuredly NOT be coming back.

Update! Michael Z Williamson gets specific on which businesses will fail.

By week 2, unemployment went from 3% to 10%.

It really hasn’t occurred to most of you that businesses fail from not engaging in business. This just tells me the socialist indoctrination centers (schools) have utterly failed to explain how business works.

Most businesses operate on tiny margins, especially stores and restaurants. Now, restaurants that can do takeout are managing, mostly (at reduced capacity and with reduced employees). But fine dining establishments or sit-down-only ethnic restaurants aren’t. They’re closed. That means no income for any of the owners or employees, followed shortly by no income for the landlord, who is also probably a small business, so stow your socialist-indoctrinated hate.

Keep in mind that every one that fails means unemployed workers as well. And just because YOU can find a workaround for their product, doesn’t put money in THEIR pocket.

Here’s a partial list I will expand:

Theaters, who have managers, ushers, concessionaires, ticket takers.

Restaurants and bars who have managers, cooks, servers, cleaners.

Restaurants need food suppliers. If they’re not selling food, they’re not ordering food from the suppliers. (One corresepondent reports his factory produces sliced cheese. 80% drop in orders with so many restaurants closed or doing less business.)

Specialty retailers–bookstores, hobby stores.

Hotels–no one is renting rooms if they’re not traveling for leisure or business. Hotels employ maintenance, housekeepers, clerks, often entertainers.

Convention facilities–who have lots of overhead, and lots of staff and/or contractors for support, displays, decorations, etc.

Venues for music or live theater.

Gyms aren’t getting anything without guests and attendees.

He has many, many, many more, as if the above weren’t all too much. Then he gets to the REALLY grim stuff—what the effect of all this will be in only a few more weeks—before asking the big question:

The point is there are ZERO non-essential jobs in even our nominally free (though massively government controlled) market. If a job doesn’t generate income, it goes away.

The question comes down to: How many people are you willing to starve and murder over a virus that the experts agree won’t be significantly worse than the four previous major viruses, in the last half century?

Since it’s way too late to fix this now, and there’s no going back from here, it looks like we’re about to find out.

Portents and alarums

Posted on April 6, 2020 by Mike

Houston, we have a problem.

It has become accepted knowledge that America’s intelligence agencies missed 9/11 warning signs — but that’s not entirely true. Signs were seen, but they impelled no action. We were so convinced that the fall of the Soviet Union as the end of history precluded any need for urgency. Yet, even if there had been, no one, at that point, knew how to react.

I don’t think I need to remind everyone of what happened on 09/11/2001.

Au contraire, I’m afraid. From the looks of things, there all too many American memories in serious need of refreshing.

I share this vignette as a means of showing that there are always signs. We, for whatever reason, miss them, or we ignore them for political purposes, or we refuse to believe them because they contradict the core tenets of our belief system.

I believe that China’s actions today may be telegraphing an intent we are choosing to ignore. They show all the signs of a nation preparing to attack America. China seeks a bespoke world run by China with “Chinese characteristics” — a dream that under Trump was drifting away.

China appears to be laying the groundwork for a “justified” attack on the United States, perhaps in the South China Sea or perhaps elsewhere. It will be a military attack, not an act of terrorism, and the excuse will be America’s deliberate transmission of COVID-19 in Wuhan.

When the Chinese became accusatory, it’s telling that they didn’t blame the CIA, always the usual suspect. No, they blamed it on American soldiers.

American military deliberately infecting China is an act of war worthy of a military response.

In October, the 2019 World Military Games were held in Wuhan. Chinese media triumphantly trumpeted the Americans winning just eight medals, while China won 239. It was then that we supposedly infected Wuhan citizens with the “American virus.”

China is now defenestrating foreign media, sending home reporters from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post at just the opportune moment. No nation wants journalists around when it is planning a sneak attack.

The ChiComs are making a mistake there; the “journalists” of those bastions of collectivist America-hate would certainly come down solidly in favor of the Chinese. They’re “pacifists,” see, in any hostilities America initiates in pursuit of its own national interests, which are considered “illegitimate” each and every time anyway. That peaceable, “war is bad” attitude is subject to immediate revision anytime the US is attacked, for any reason whatsoever.

Even worse, though, is the fact that we live in an age when the portion of the nation roosting in urban-blight zones, college towns, and “blue” states would be out in the streets to cheer the ChiCom invaders on, happy at the eternal dream of the establishment of a Commie shitrapy here coming true at long last.

Then, as always, the useful idiots of the Vanguard will find themselves put up against a wall—UNEXPECTED!™—and the rest of us will be the ones cheering, albeit bitterly.

Whither freedom?

Posted on April 4, 2020April 4, 2020 by Mike

Going, going, gone.

Here’s a sensible question. If the mayor of the most notable metropolis in the country can openly suggest that the government has the right to permanently shutter the doors of a church if it refuses to comply with “social distancing” guidelines, or any other edict the government finds necessary in a given moment, then what can’t the government do?

If ever there was a question better left unasked…

Just a few weeks ago, the threat of COVID-19 was considered by nearly everyone to be potentially far deadlier than it has yet proven to be. The fatality rates, hospitalization rates, and the predictions of American death tolls (once routinely touted as “over 2 million”) associated with infection were all much higher three weeks ago than they are today. And yet, as the dire projections about the impact of infection has become considerably smaller with new data and improved medical readiness, the social restrictions placed upon the populace have become progressively more obstructive and draconian.

Got that? The better the health outlook has become, the harsher the government’s restrictions on you have also become.

Coincidence, I’m sure.

If that isn’t bothersome to you, maybe you should think about the fact that these social restrictions seem to have only become harsher on you. Some Americans are enduring no government obstruction in their lives, and others still are actually enjoying more freedom than they would have before these social obstructions in your lives were introduced.

Consider this. A junkie can wake up on a brisk morning in the streets of San Francisco, defecate on the sidewalk in plain view of onlookers, and insert a used needle into his arm to inject illegal narcotics into his veins. The cops will make no effort to stop him, for, you see, that might be a violation of his supposed “rights.” That’s much the same as it was before the coronavirus pandemic, so I should probably add that this junkie’s sleeping and social arrangements may very well be in violation of “social distancing” guidelines, also.

Now, consider that he is far less likely to incur the attention of law enforcement, or even the news media, than you might incur for the crime of choosing to attend your local church, should it have the audacity to be open. It is you, don’t you understand, who is the public health menace.

To put it mildly, the social fabric is being torn apart. And for what?

It’s healthy for Americans to maintain skepticism about the motives and effectiveness of our government. Right now, there is a lot which calls the government’s motives and effectiveness into question. Like what I suspect is a growing number of Americans, I am completely unconvinced that the harsh measures being foisted upon the American people, as collective units amongst the states, are entirely necessary, and even more unconvinced that a similar outcome could not have been achieved with fewer rigid restrictions upon healthy and less at-risk individuals and American life, in general. And as days pass, I’m ever more convinced that the utter annihilation of the economy that we’ve seen, and the trillions in spending of taxpayer money that we absolutely, positively do not have, could have been significantly less damaging if we had demanded fewer government restrictions throughout this crisis, rather than more.

Sure, but how was THAT supposed to provide our masters with any kind of trial run for making certain America had accepted the bit fully?

If you think it’s bad now, though, just wait till the next time they decide to put the boot on American necks and press down. And if you think there isn’t going to BE a next time, you’re a damned fool.

On the other hand…

Posted on April 4, 2020April 4, 2020 by Mike

A different—and far bleaker—view, forwarded to NC Scout by our old chum Historian.

I work at a hospital. Not as a doctor, to the well-concealed disappointment of my late mother (and the well-concealed satisfaction of my late father, who loathed doctors,) nor a nurse or a medical technician; my job is to ensure that the facility itself is capable of supporting the demands of those who use it. I’m a construction project manager for a mid-sized non-profit hospital in one of the mid-Atlantic united States, and I’m good at what I do.

Generally, this hospital is well run, well organized, and well staffed with high quality people, ranking among the top US hospitals, part of a larger system also well ranked. If friends or family were to need care, I’d take them to my hospital, which I consider one of the two best in the system and the area, one reason I accepted an offer to work there.

For the uninitiated, this is a non-trivial modification. A negative pressure room or isolation room, has to exhaust ALL of the air coming out of the room directly to the outside. Standards are for 12 air changes per hour, and the room must meet certain negative pressure standards. That means that the entire volume of the room gets replaced every 5 minutes. Our facility policy is to filter all of that exhaust to ensure that we are not placing passers-by at risk of infection, further complicating matters. Normal air conditioning, even in many areas of a hospital, recycles most of the air to reduce energy costs, so when you throw that air away, as you must do for an isolation room, you significantly increase the load on the air conditioning system. It is a BIG change.

I’ll spare you, gentle Reader, the details, but in 3 days last week we went from about 10% isolation rooms in our hospital to 15%, i.e., a 50% increase in isolation rooms by dint of much effort by a number of contractors, vendors, and hospital staff. Those rooms were virtually empty last week, and hospital volumes were WAY down. It was rather eerie. After that success, I was directed to convert another 12% of our rooms to negative pressure, and we are working that now.

This is now much more difficult as seriously ill patients are starting to swamp the hospital, and the rooms which were empty a week ago are all now filled or rapidly filling with patients on O2 or intubated, most of whom had been seen a week or two ago, evaluated as not seriously ill, and sent home with instructions to come back if they started to feel worse, not better. Well, they DID get worse, and they are coming back. In significant numbers, and this is just the beginning.

Like I said, this is pretty grim stuff for sure. But there’s a glimmer of hope as well, a demonstration of fearlessness, compassion, and humanity that provides some affirmation to lay upon the scales as a counterweight to horror and hopelessness.

(Via WRSA)

Numbers game(s)

Posted on April 4, 2020April 4, 2020 by Mike

They ain’t adding up.

All admit that the numbers that are scaring the sense out of the country are mathematical projections. All projections are based on assumptions about the ever-changing numbers of “confirmed cases” of COVID-19, as well as of deaths resulting therefrom. But few—and here it seems we must include many “health officials”—consider that the latter numbers are themselves “soft” and tell us next to nothing about how much, how little, or what kind of dangers the virus poses to us.

To make intelligent decisions about countermeasures, we would need have hard data about all these matters. Yet, for two months, doctors such as Anthony Fauci have messed up millions of lives and commandeered trillions of dollars while scaring the hell out of people and watching curves based on projections based on meaningless numbers. Watching the several curves resulting from the testing that is now ongoing and that is projected to continue as the country suffers will provide only more guesses, that will feed more models and more disputes.

The most important fact about COVID-19, its true mortality rate, is the number who die of the virus divided by the number infected by it. No algorithms. Simple arithmetic.

In short, Fauci, et al., are showing themselves to be typical of our bureaucracy: over-credentialed, entrusted with too much power, and dangerously incompetent.

It’s mind-blowing to see how many of us who long since accepted American bureaucratic realities are now willing to set it all aside and squander their faith and hope on those same demonstrably inept, corrupt, and untrustworthy bureaucracies…with no evidence whatsoever of even the slightest change or improvement therein.

Learning the true figures about precisely what danger the virus poses to whom must begin by taking into account one thing we know for sure about COVID-19: that many, if not most, of those infected by this unusually contagious virus show few or no symptoms. This suggests eventual near-universal contagion.

But we don’t know how many of these asymptomatic people there are. Hence, meaningful epidemiological testing must include a random representative sample of the population, regardless of whether they are presumed to be infected or not. The numbers resulting from monitoring what happens to the health of individuals in this sample over a few weeks would tell exactly what percentage of people in each category and subcategory suffer what consequences from whatever contact with the virus they happen to have.

Backed by the media, Fauci and company have contended that actions by anybody, ordinary citizens, elected officials, or physicians that do not follow proper bureaucratic procedures are illegitimate. Who the hell do they think they are? We belong to ourselves. Not to them.

Surely, President Trump’s low point came when he supported bypassing roll call votes in the passage of a $2.2 trillion bill as part of his and other executive officials’ decisions to shut down the country. Making decisions on the basis of meaningless curves and bureaucratic authority rather than through open debate about hard facts followed by roll call votes is not just undemocratic. It’s stupid.

I’d tell you to go read it all, but it’s Codevilla, so I’m sure you know that already,

OHHH yeah, THIS is gonna end well

Posted on April 3, 2020April 4, 2020 by Mike

Hey, remember back when 3.3 million new jobless claims in only one week seemed like big news? C’mon, sure ya do. It was only last week.

Workers claiming new unemployment benefits swelled to a record 6.6 million last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday, as the coronavirus pandemic forced businesses across the country to shut down.

The historic jobless number, about double what forecasters expected, exceeds the previous record set last week of 3.2 million requesting unemployment benefits.

The past two weeks have been record-breakers in terms of job losses as the virus has infected over 215,000 people in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University. The previous record high for weekly jobless claims was 695,000 in September of 1982.

Over the past two weeks, 10 million workers have been separated from their jobs and applied for unemployment benefits, and probably many more have lost work but not signed up for benefits. In other words, about 6% of all payroll workers have lost their jobs, meaning that the unemployment rate is likely already above 10%, as high as it ever was in the Great Recession.

In fairness, thanks to some devious sleight of hand under Ogabe’s misrule that quietly erased those who had thrown up their hands in despair and just given up all hope of finding a job from the “unemployed” category, those Great Obama Recession stats were complete bunk. The true number, according to some more honest estimations, ranged from 12 to 18 percent—with a few sources claiming it might have been over 20, even. Regardless of which of those estimates you go with, though, the rosy fiction promoted by Ogabe rumpswabs of 5 to 7 percent had no relationship whatsoever with the grimmer reality.

God knows where the numbers will end up after the current fiasco finally winds down. But it ain’t gonna be any place we want to be, that’s for sure. And we’ll be a long, long time recovering from it, too.

Update! We’re in uncharted territory now, folks.

We have never seen a week like this before, and we may never see a week quite this bad again. Of course millions more jobs will be lost in the months ahead as this pandemic stretches on, but it is hard to imagine another spike like we just had. When you add the last two weeks together, somewhere around 10 million Americans have filed new unemployment claims during that time period.

As I noted yesterday, the St. Louis Fed expects the unemployment rate to eventually hit 32 percent. That won’t happen immediately, but if we do get there it will be worse than anything that we witnessed during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Because of all the shutdowns that have been instituted nationwide, economic activity has already dropped to levels that we have never seen before in our entire history.

Snyder cites serious food supply disruptions; spiralling mortgage defaults; the sudden tsunami of near-worthless scrip-dollars from Washington in a desperate attempt to stanch the bleeding, and the runaway inflation that will inevitably spawn, before concluding:

Even before any of us ever heard of “COVID-19”, our world was already descending into madness, but now this pandemic has certainly accelerated things.

Millions of Americans have already lost their jobs, and the days ahead are going to be exceedingly challenging.

This is what an economic collapse looks like, and it is just getting started.

Looks like hard times a-coming, with no way to reverse course and avert disaster.

Live and (not) learn

Posted on April 2, 2020April 2, 2020 by Mike

Even when people are chanting the old “everything has changed” mantra, some things never really do.

Beyond China, the issue is preparedness. Actually, for almost twenty years, the issue has been preparedness. Since 9/11, freeborn citizens of advanced democratic societies have been subjected to a level of inconvenience and continuous surveillance they would never have previously entertained, from the pointless security theatre of the shoeless shuffle through LAX and O’Hare to the rubber-stamp FISA court warrants to monitor every aspect of Carter Page’s life for years on end with no probable cause. And what’s the upshot of all this 24/7 surveillance?

They didn’t see it coming.

New York, for example, is a city that has already had a huge smoking crater blown into it – and what’s the upshot? Eighteen years on, as I noted last night, after expenditures of billions on purpose-built federal, state and local bureaucracies, a city of eight million people can’t cope with an extra four thousand patients in critical condition.

Why? It’s not as if bio-warfare wasn’t expected to be part of our future: Immediately after 9/11, you’ll recall, there was the anthrax scare, and enthusiastic modeling about what would happen in the event of a suitcase nuke. And in the end hospitals are as overwhelmed as if all that money-no-object Homeland Security spending had never happened. As Kate Smyth has pointed out in our comments section, if Isis weren’t already planning something like this, the ease with which you can wipe out a third of the Dow Jones Industrials will surely have some of the savvier jihad boys dusting off the old bunsen burner.

The most significant change after 9/11 – “the day the world changed” – was the doubling of the rate of Muslim immigration to the west. Will we do the same now? More open borders, more flights from Shanghai and Beijing, more transfer of what’s left of western manufacturing to the Chinese Communist Party, more shrieks of “Raaaaacist!” at any questioning of Beijing’s official lies, never mind whether any advanced nation needs mass immigration or unscreened self-identified “refugees”…

The changes we make this time will be existential. We are suffused in death not only because of Chinese lies but because of those we tell ourselves, suppler and more beguiling as they are. “Preparedness” does not mean merely PPE and ICU, but requires also addressing borders and immigration and political correctness, and diversity unto death. In much of the western world, we are shutting down the economy and daily life, because our rulers could not bear to shut down their own virtue-signaling diversity bollocks.

Will it go the same next time? Absent serious sustained pushback, what do you think?

From here, I can see two possible ways things might go. Either we will continue on down the path to absolute tyranny, with states escalating from the current lockdowns to the establishment of curfews, then to declarations of martial law and the deployment of National Guard troops to strictly enforce them. The current nascent progression from verbal admonition or a citation and fine from law enforcement for infraction of The New Rules will rapidly advance to arrest and incarceration. There will be grumbling in some quarters, but no effective resistance.

Alternatively, the current restrictions will gradually be eased as it becomes evident that the coronavirus outbreak didn’t quite live up to its billing as a devastating planet-killer, and people who have grown extremely restless from their mandatory “stay home” period will be eager to return to something as close to whatever the hell “normal” used to be as they can. A general, widespread withdrawal from paying such close attention to international affairs and politics will ensue, which will in turn serve to blunt any “serious sustained pushback” against the idiotic, dream-world Leftist policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

Ever alert to any offered opportunity, the Left’s shrieked accusations of “RACISM!” at anyone with the otherwordly temerity to reference both China and COVID-19 in the same paragraph—as if the one could ever possibly have any relationship whatsoever with the other—will resume with vigor and volume. And the dastardly, genocidal perps of such naked atrocities will go back to being cowed by them, and methodically marginalized into fearful silence.

If the example set by our response to late 2001’s mysteriously-motivated “Some People Did Something” man-caused-disaster event is a reliable indication, and the Wuhan Fug doesn’t do a sudden 180 from current trends to more or less depopulate the nation’s close-packed urban areas instead, the latter option is way more likely. Such a relaxation of vigilance will allow the politicians and big-business tyros who collaborated to sell this country out to the ChiComs for a fistful of yen to quietly get back to doing dirty business with the abominable Reds more or less as before.

The treacherous and untrustworthy ChiComs themselves will face no serious consequences for their habitual lies, their brazen deceptions and misdirections, and the fact that they nonchalantly and knowingly poisoned the entire fucking world, murdered a largish portion of its elderly, and inflicted mass terror and tragedy on wholly innocent civilians. They, too, will quickly and quietly go back to Yellow-Peril business as usual, which means infiltrating and undermining as many other sovereign nations as possible, covertly sabotaging their economies, sapping their will and resolve via propaganda and manipulation, and expanding Red Chinese influence and power to heretofore undreamed-of levels.

All this Americans will proudly hail as “victory,” congratulating ourselves heartily for our courage, our perseverance, and our unswerving commitment to defense of our “freedom.” Y’know, precisely as we did after all those other wars we lost.

Bearing the brunt

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 by Mike

Grim tidings from one who oughta know.

Hotel operator Monty Bennett, the CEO of Ashford Inc., went on with Laura Ingraham on Tuesday night.

The hotel, travel, entertainment and leisure industries are being decimated by the coronavirus virus and media-spun panic.

Monty Bennett told Laura Ingraham, “I had to cut 95% of my employees. Even 9-11 or the financial crisis, it took us 5 years and 8 years respectively to fully recover from those calamities. And this tragedy is worse than those two put together time ten. It’s an absolute disaster for our industry. Morgan Stanley recently put out a note that US hotels are the hardest hit industry.”

Let’s pray our political leaders do not allow this pandemic to turn into a national depression.

Ooops, too late.

Update! The longer the shutdown, the more people will be hurt.

The economic predictions for the shutdowns may be as varied as those for the virus itself. The Federal Reserve’s James Bullard has noted that unemployment may rise to as much as 30%. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has estimated a possible unemployment rate of 20%.

Bullard’s number is higher than the unemployment seen in the United States during the Great Depression (25%), and both estimates are significantly higher than the unemployment during the Great Recession (11%). Even if we take the more conservative estimate of 20% unemployment, that is a 16.5% rise in unemployment from its recent historic lows of 3.5% unemployment.

Although it is difficult to estimate how long this downturn may linger, that is a severe shock to the economic system. It is possible that people return to work and economic activity returns in strength in short order after the shutdowns are lifted.

Even then, the costs of shutting down will have been quite large. However, it is also possible that some businesses who had to pause activity for a month or more may not be able to return at all.

Possible? It’s dead certain, a plain and simple fact of life. As is their wont, our incompetent “leaders,” with their arrogance in ignorance, are tinkering with things they can neither control nor comprehend. They aren’t the colossi or Masters Of The Universe they believe themselves to be; they’re very small men mucking about in affairs that are much too big for them—too big for anyone, in truth.

The recession could be longer than some economists are projecting. If the economy does linger in its downturn, the human costs to the shutdown will inevitably begin to increase.

Again: a certainty, a truism so obvious only a self-proclaimed “expert” could miss it.

Coronavirus coinkydinks

Posted on March 31, 2020April 1, 2020 by Mike

Ain’t no such thing.

Time bombs are innocuous until the fuse is lit, counting down to an explosion at some predetermined future time. Did the fuse on this current novel virus just happen to light itself? Or was it lit on purpose? And why now?

Here is where the coincidences begin. Wuhan, where the virus originated, just happens to be the location of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s only level 4 biosafety lab.

Could the virus have originated in that lab? The “consensus of scientists” say no, that this is just a conspiracy theory. Perhaps, but other consensuses of scientists tell us President Trump is mentally ill and that man-made global warming is melting the polar icecaps.

Plus we have that whole Chinese scientists pretty much admitting to it thing, too.

Chinese scientists believe the deadly coronavirus may have started life in a research facility just 300 yards from the Wuhan fish market.

A new bombshell paper from the Beijing-sponsored South China University of Technology says that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (WHCDC) could have spawned the contagion in Hubei province.

Let’s not forget about this, either:

What’s more, the People’s Liberation Army’s top expert in biological warfare, a Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January to help with the effort to contain the outbreak.

According to the PLA Daily, Chen has been researching coronaviruses since the SARS outbreak of 2003, as well as Ebola and anthrax. This would not be her first trip to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, either, since it is one of only two bioweapons research labs in all of China.

Does that suggest to you that the novel coronavirus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, may have escaped from that very lab, and that Chen’s job is to try to put the genie back in the bottle, as it were? It does to me.

Does to me too, and to anybody else who knows anything about Commie regimes in general, and China in particular. Back to the first article for more on how the “coincidences” do keep piling up.

Move from science to politics for more coincidences, under the backdrop of the Trump presidency and upcoming election. The Chinese Coronavirus was first noted in China in December 2019. What was happening politically here at home at that exact time?

The House was holding impeachment hearings over President Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president, alleging election interference, obstruction of justice, quid pro quo, and anything else Reps Schiff and Nadler could fabricate.

The Ukrainian allegations coincidently originated shortly after the Mueller Special Counsel investigation came up empty in their efforts to remove Trump from office. Articles of impeachment were passed on a partisan basis in December but not acted upon until January, despite the “urgency” of removing the “existential threat” from the Oval Office.

Hmmm. Most peculiar, innit? Perhaps. Then again, perhaps…not so much.

Note the sequence of events, each failed plan was followed by another scheme, all with the same goal of destroying President Trump. Why was the impeachment trial delayed until January? It’s almost as if that was the perfect time to distract the president, the media, and American people while a viral time bomb was beginning to explode.

January was when the Chinese virus was spreading. The intel agencies briefed Trump and Congress. Trump took notice and instituted a travel ban on arrivals from China. Congress ignored the warnings and plowed on with a Senate impeachment trial, guaranteeing no media interest or reporting on the new SARS-like Chinese virus. Was the fuse of the time bomb lit when it was apparent that the Ukraine phone call was a dud, with impeachment a good cover for the burning fuse?

Another way to look at this is to ask: who stands to gain by the economic and social destruction this virus is wreaking?

You’ll want to read all of this one. He makes a pretty tight case, and ties it all up in a neat little bow at the end.

Flatten their curve update! Everyone who played a role in engineering and driving this catastrophe needs to face a serious reckoning. Starting with the ChiComs.

The facts are clear. China is not our friend or ally or even a responsible business partner. Right now, between 30 percent and 40 percent of world national economic output is affected by the coronavirus shutdowns, calculated the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in a report for the G20.

China’s President Xi is petrified that after this inferno the U.S. and others will turn their backs on globalization. In a March 26 letter to the G20, Xi pledged to increase active pharmaceutical supplies and implored G20 nations to cut tariffs and keep up the unfettered flow of trade.

Xi’s words don’t match his actions. In the face of this global crisis, China has hunkered down. China has tried to pin the origins of the coronavirus on the U.S. Army and on Italy. These inept, Communist Party responses show China is not ready to act with honesty or compassion. China wants to claim victory in their “peoples war,” as Xi called, it but they don’t want to change anything. Yes, Beijing has sent doctors and face masks. But the Communist Party’s two-month cover-up attempt cost lives around the world.

It’s time for a total reconsideration of China’s role in the world and specifically, the U.S. economic relationship with China. Decoupling won’t happen all at once, but pharmaceuticals, 5G wireless, agriculture policy and of course imports and exports all need a new look post-coronavirus.

We can do this, folks. Canada and Mexico were America’s top two trade partners in 2019, with China ranked third in total value, which is exports and imports combined. Our neighbors Canada and Mexico really are the most important partners, accounting for a combined 30 percent of U.S. total trade vs. just 13.5 percent for China.

While Washington will have much to consider, its increasingly clear that coronavirus ended globalization as we know it: the phase dating from the day China joined the World Trade Organization on Dec. 11, 2001, until December 2019, when China fumbled its response to the Wuhan virus outbreak.

I can’t say I expect much if any of this to happen; with such a huge percentage of US manufacturing now based there, we’re much too completely enslaved to China to be able to exact a proper toll from them for these heinous crimes anytime soon. But it’s still a pleasant topic to ponder while we’re all locked in our homes indefinitely, watching it all burn.

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