Armed vigilantes appear outside Texas businesses to ‘protect their constitutional right to open’  Daily Mail.  Armed! Vigilantes! Pretty scary!

Cops hunt for person wearing creepy 17th-century plague doctor costume  After all, we can’t have people wandering around in creepy costumes.

Our Dress Rehearsal for a Police State  Real Clear Politics.

The Pandemic Road to Serfdom  Joel Kotkin.

Swiss Health & Tranquility Law Sparks “Desperate” Snitching To Counter Lockdown-Deniers

Germany Considering “Coronavirus Cards” To Allow Immune Citizens Freedom Of Travel  ‘Your papers please!’

‘Full Of $hit’ – Swedish City Spreads Manure On Parks To Stop Crowds Gathering

The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis

Sen. Kennedy: If Lockdown Continues ‘The Economy Will Collapse’ And People Will ‘Stop Complying’

Michigan Gov. Whitmer Extends Lockdown, Grabs More Emergency Powers And Executive Authority  If you live in Michigan, it’s time to move.

Blue States Become Laboratories of Despotism

Big Tech’s Big Brother Moves

“No Place For Such Weapons In Canada” – Trudeau Announces Ban On Assault-Style Rifles 

Teen Vogue Teaches Kids: ‘Reopen Protests Are Motivated By Racism’

‘A Bedrock Principled Right’: Louisiana Attorney General Urges Governor To Reopen Churches

Newsom “Put Politics Over Data” With Beach Closure Order, Newport Mayor Says

New CDC criteria points to Apple and Google contact tracing system as a ‘preferred’ choice  The Deep State has spoken.

Joel Kotkin lays out some inconvenient truth.

While Gov. Andrew Cuomo has warned that “we are your future,” since “what happens to New York is going to wind up happening to California and Washington state and Illinois” and the New York Times has blared that “This Is Going to Kill Small-Town America,” the COVID-19 death rate in the United States appears to be more than twice as high in large urban counties as in high-density suburbs, and nearly twice as high in high-density suburbs than in lower-density ones.

New York, by far the nation’s biggest and most transit-dependent metropolitan area, has suffered deaths at 10 times or more the rate of other large urban areas like Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston while Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul, which benefited from experiences with previous pandemic along with far more disciplined, and less diverse, populations, are all facing a new upsurge of cases. In Japan, a third of the cases are in Tokyo, with hospitals stressed from recent rises forcing the country to go back under lockdown.

Read it.

Feng Chen, a Brooklyn resident, was seen looking inside medical collection bins at a closeted medical office and then walking into the gated area of a second building carrying what New York Police Department officers said looked like mail.

The officers confronted Chen and discovered checks, stimulus payments totaling more than $12,000, credit cards, and opened envelopes and letters with names of various individuals.

Yeah, whenever I see the name ‘Feng Chen’ I think ‘New York man’, as I’m sure you do.

Triumph of the Woke Oligarchs

California Preening: Golden State on Path to High-Tech Feudalism

How America is reverting back to the feudal age

Triumph Of The Woke Oligarchs

Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Advocates “Tracking Bracelets” For Vaccine Refuse-niks In 2010 Documentary  Every breath you take/Every move you make/Every bond you break/Every step you take
I’ll be watching you.

MSNBC’s Mitchell and Bash Trash Bill Barr for ‘Politicizing’ Virus on State Lockdowns

NBC Provides Platform for Chinese Propaganda Bashing U.S. Pandemic Response

Tucker: YouTube ‘Officially Banned Dissent’ Deleting Medical Opinions  YouTube’s CEO is rabid proglodyte Susan Wojcicki. Her sister is married to Sergey Brin, so you can tell she got her job at Google subsidiary YouTube purely on merit.

YouTube Launches Fact-Checking Panels for US Amidst COVID-19 Crisis  For sufficiently progressive definitions of ‘fact-checking’….

Paul A. Rahe: Gretchen Whitmer Doubles Down

Ken Burns Dismisses ‘Individual Freedom,’ Cheers ‘Central Role’ of Government

The Paycheck Protection Program: Paying People Not To Work?

The Unseen Costs of Government-Forced Lockdowns

Congress Reportedly Wants A Liz Warren Ally With Past Ties To A China-Owned Bank In Charge Of Policing COVID-19 Bailout Funds

Read it.

The Pentagon’s current Director of the Office of Net Assessment had extensive communications with Washington Post reporter and deep-state conduit David Ignatius during the Russiagate fiasco, according to 143 pages of new records from the Department of Defense obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by legal watchdog group Judicial Watch.

Read it.

They certainly appear not to.

Kevin Williamson does some yeoman work for his Establishment masters.

None of this really comports with the facts on the ground in that “Real America” we hear so much about on talk radio. In the real America, rural farmers are part of a very large and complex network of industrial and scientific innovation, international trade, and business innovations made possible by the “financialization” dismissed by populists Right and Left. American farmers rely on scientific work done at elite universities, on technology from Silicon Valley, on high finance, and — horrors! — on international trade, not least trade with China. Some of them employ a fair number of immigrants, too. The American farmer is as much of a “rootless cosmopolitan” as any Connecticut hedge-funder or California code monkey.

I keep expecting him to break into the ‘resistance is futile’ rant from Howard Beal in Network.

National Review once prided itself on ‘standing athwart history yelling “Stop!”‘. Nowadays they spend their time standing athwart history saying ‘wait for me!’.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #407

Bill Gates calls question about whether China covered up the coronavirus a ‘distraction’

“I Want My Life Back” – German Anti-Lockdown Protests Worsen

Germany Now Favors Apple-Google Contact Tracing API Over Home-Grown Solution

COVID-19 vs the American spirit of resistance

Amid Univision Layoffs, Jorge Ramos Slanders ‘Reopen’ Movement

New York Times Columnist: ‘New York Rules’ Are Unfair to Rest of Country

Britain’s NHS rejects the Apple & Google COVID-19 exposure notification technology

YouTube CEO Relies on WHO Mistakes to Fight Misinformation

Citing Privacy Concerns, Israel Ends Cellphone Location-Tracking For Quarantine Enforcement

New York Outright Cancels Presidential Primary Despite Objections From Sanders Campaign  The Inner Party has spoken; what need have we of such tedious charades?

“We Will Never Return To Free Market Capitalism”: Guggenheim’s Minerd Warns Fed Is Pushing US Toward A Populist Revolt

Reporters Find THESE Protesters Unpopular and Unpatriotic!  Some protesters are more equal than others.

Abrams Once Said Control Of Redistricting Would Prevent ‘White Conservative Coalition’ From Controlling Government  The wit an wisdom of a fat ugly black female Democrat race pimp is always worth listening to.

AG Barr Sics Federal Prosecutors On States With ‘Unconstitutional’ Lockdowns  Imagine what would happen under a Biden presidency.

Judges Rule Against Tyrannical Shutdown Orders in Illinois and Virginia

‘Take Disinfectant & Drop Dead’: Celebs Rip Trump Voters as Nazi-Sympathizers

Illinois Republican State Rep Sues Governor Pritzker Over Lockdown Orders

Pelosi Pitches Universal Basic Income To Cope With Pandemic

This Is A Power-Grab The Likes Of Which We Haven’t Seen Since 9/11

Sarah Hoyt is amazed.

As we start hearing reports of entire dairy herds, refined for generations being sold for hamburger, of entire herds of pigs being slaughtered and buried, and as our chickens are not coming home at all but being destroyed at the peep stage, all because of strangle points in distribution, it is time to ask: Has any other nation ever done this to itself in history? And has any nation done this to itself without an open civil war.

And I can’t imagine any other country — except those who are blindly following our example — doing this for so little reason.

Read it.

Dysfunctional Blue states are using the pandemic as an excuse to raid the Treasury (and the American taxpayer) to bail them out of decades of cronyism in favor of government employees and their unions.

Read it.

White House Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro said Monday that China is flooding the United States with faulty coronavirus antibody testing kits and accused the Chinese Communist Party of profiteering off of the pandemic.

Read it.

More than a dozen countries on four continents recently disclosed problems with Chinese-made coronavirus tests and personal protective equipment. The problems range from test kits tainted with the coronavirus to medical garments contaminated with insects. Defective Chinese face masks, purchased by Spain’s Ministry of Health, were distributed to hospitals and nursing homes across the country, and more than 100 healthcare workers who used them tested positive for Covid-19.

To be fair, everybody whose done business with Communist China knows that they will ship you cheap defective shit in place of what you actually bought unless you stand over them 24/7, so this doesn’t appear to be a deliberate operation but rather a revelation of their Standard Operating Procedure.

Protest of Wisconsin Stay-at-Home Order Among Nation’s Biggest Yet

A Handful Of Cops Are Standing Up To Tyranny With The People

Pakistan uses military spy technology to track Covid-19 cases

Big Tech, Elected Officials Mimicking China’s Surveillance Methods To Police Citizens Amid Pandemic

Contact apps won’t end lockdown. But they might kill off democracy

Court Reinstates California Ammunition Purchase Law

Read it.

The pandemic shutdown is going to do a Major Extinction Event for the nation’s economy.

Small businesses. Restaurants. Oil companies. Farmers. Auto companies. Who will survive the meteor strike?

Think of it as evolution in action.

UPDATE: How Shutdowns Will Keep Killing The Economy, Even When They’re Over

Read it.

When the European Union was preparing a report on government disinformation about the Coronavirus, Chinese officials went ballistic, demanding that the report be altered or cancelled. The EU caved.

As they do.

We can’t let Trump roll back 50 years of environmental progress The Guardian.

Financiers of poverty, malnutrition and death – Part 2

BLACKWELL: COVID-19 Has Revealed The Radical ‘Green’ Agenda

Push to Replace Earth Day with ‘Nature Rights’

David Stockman To Newsmax TV: Virus Lockdown ‘Fraud On Massive Scale’

The Seven-Step Path From Pandemic To Totalitarianism

Why Joe Biden’s America loves a lockdown

Anti-Lockdown Protesters Come To Gov. Whitmer’s House As Michigan Legislature Wants To Limit Her Authority

California Bans ‘Gatherings’ On State Properties After Protests Surge Against Newsom’s ‘Stay-At-Home’ Orders  The Deplorables rise up.

Deadspin Attacks ‘White-Winged’ Lockdown Protest, Praises Kaepernick

AP ‘News’ Story: ‘Coronavirus Shakes the Conceit’ of ‘American Exceptionalism’

Emotional Brzezinski Pleads for Fox ‘Puppets’ to Rediscover Their ‘Goodness,’ ‘Objectivity’

After Holding Up Small Business Relief Funds, Democrats Go Full Throttle On Bailing Out Blue States

Mitchell & Pelosi Push Conspiracy Theory of Trump Delaying Election

Twitter Reportedly Cracks Down on Memes Mocking Biden  No one gets to mock the Dear Leader.

In a Bold Move, Microsoft Office Is Now Flagging Double Spaces Between Sentences as an Error

Appeals court invents fundamental right to a basic minimum education

Governments’ COVID-19 Response “For Your Own Good”: Ban Alcohol, End Free-Speech, & Curb Homeschooling

The Man Who Would Be King

Authoritarianism On The Rise In America In The Age Of Coronavirus

Apple, Google in a ‘standoff’ with Germany and France over contact tracing privacy

Mayor Called Reckless for Urging Vegas to Test Reopening  The Crust need as much economic destruction as they can get, so anybody who leaves the Reservation has to be pummeled.

Nets Pounce on Bogus Claim Doctor Fired for Opposing Drug Trump Pushed

How Does Pelosi Get Away With It?

‘This Woman Is Nuts’: Jimmy Kimmel Goes Off on Vegas Mayor

Human Lab Rats: The US Government’s Secret History Of Grisly Experiments

Common sense about states rights during a pandemic

Global COVID-19 Lockdown – What You’re Not Being Told, Part 2

UK’s Investigatory Powers Act is set to expand

Brutal Realities & Illusions Of Normality: Angry Voters, Destitute Retirees, & Social Unrest

Texas Judge’s 30-Day Mask Order Slammed as ‘Government Overreach’

Judge Andrew Napolitano Tells Gov. Whitmer: ‘Don’t Treat Us Like We Are Children’  But that’s what they do best.

Bill Gates Continues To Push ‘Immunity Passports’ And Tech-Enabled Surveillance State To Combat COVID

‘Not The Mask Police’: Grocery Workers’ Unions Want Store Owners To Deny Non-Mask Wearers Entry

Cardi B Reminds Georgians That They Could Die Alone As State Plans To Reopen Economy  All the establishment mouthpieces unite in the Narrative chorus….

Top Elections Lawyer: Vote-By-Mail Is “The Most Massive Fraud Scheme In American History”

China is using coronavirus to crack down on Hong Kong  ‘Never let a crisis go to waste.’

Eric Weinstein BLASTS Big Tech for Censoring Content on COVID-19, ‘Fantasizing About Being N Korean’

Homeschool Families Protest Harvard’s ‘Biased’ And ‘Elitist’ Homeschool Event

Republicans Vow to Cut Michigan Gov’s Emergency Powers Over Stay-Home Debate

YouTube bans coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts WHO advice  Bow before our new robot overlords.

“Pandemic Drones” To Fly In Connecticut, Hunting For CCOVID-Carriers

Authoritarian Democrat Party Punishes Two Black Office-Holders for Wrongthink

LORD: Re-Open Rebellion Hits Pennsylvania

The Left’s Long War on Parents Over Schooling Their Kids

Read it.

That Putin would have preferred to deal with Obama-Lite is obvious to anybody with two brain cells to rub together.

No wonder the ‘news media’ missed it.

Read it.

A Karen is a person, usually a woman, who is never satisfied with the service she’s receiving and demands to talk to the manager. It doesn’t matter if Karen’s complaints are valid or not.

This is because Karen has been incentivized by cowardly corporate officers and government officials (but, I repeat myself) to get something she doesn’t deserve simply because they want her to shut up and not disturb everyone else.

It was one thing to indulge Karen her entitled behavior when she was getting a free order of fries or month of cable. It’s quite another when Karens become the State’s target audience for public policy.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

If you pay people not to work, guess what? You get more people … not working.

Read it.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization, anti-development banks, the Agency for International Development (USAID), NGO (non-government organization) pressure groups and other eco-imperialists are properly condemned for using their money, power, and control over trade and lending to keep millions of African, Asian and Latin American families from having access to reliable, affordable energy, pesticides and spatial insect repellants to prevent disease, and modern agricultural technologies.

Those outfits perpetuate poverty, disease, malnutrition and death. Yet the eco-manslaughter continues.

Read it.

Left-wing activists and elected officials have pushed for the mass release of inmates to prevent them from contracting coronavirus, which has spread throughout crowded corrections facilities. But the mass releases have been followed by a pattern of inmates getting re-arrested shortly after getting out of jail.

Amazing how that works. You’d almost think they were criminals or something.

Judge Napolitano Blasts ‘Deplorable’ Statement By New Jersey Governor: ‘There Is No Pandemic Exception To The Constitution’

Spaniards Face €2,000 Fine For “Disrespecting” A Police Officer During Lockdown

The “Science” of Caging a Compliant Majority

Tom Brady Booted From Closed Tampa Park

Bethany Mandel: CNN: King of the Gaslighters

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Is the ‘Hero of the Fascist Lockdown Lobby’

Facebook Censoring Anti-Lockdown Protesters. Donald Trump Jr. Calls It ‘Chilling & Disturbing’

Whither Our Nanny Police State? The Case of Dr. Jonathan Geach

Paris Police Fire Tear Gas As Minorities Riot Over “Racist” Lockdown Treatment

Idaho State Rep. Says Shutdown Orders ‘No Different Than Nazi Germany’

Dictators, Double Standards, and More

Anti-quarantine rally in Pennsylvania draws about 2,000 people in latest protest against coronavirus restrictions

Kimmel Trashes ‘Crazy Right-Wing’ Protesters ‘Fighting Hardest for the Things That Will Kill Them’

China Moves against Hong Kong ‘Never let a crisis go to waste.’

HART: The Politics of Pandemics — How Much Tyranny Is Enough?

The War on Homeschooling

AG Barr Says DOJ May Go After Governors Who Persist With Strict Lockdown Rules

Univision Smears Anti-Lockdown Protesters

Judge Won’t Suspend Ga. Handgun Carry Law During Virus Emergency

Zuck’d Again? State Governors Say Facebook Contacted Them About “Reopen America” Events  Let us welcome our new robot overlords.

Republican-Controlled Wisconsin Legislature Files Emergency Petition To Block Governor’s Stay-At-Home Order

California Extends Ex Parte “Red Flag” Gun Confiscation Orders

Facebook Removing Any Posts Quoting The First Amendment For ‘Encouraging Illegal Activity’

Read it.

Bartholet, also faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, says that “homeschooling violates children’s right to a meaningful education and their right to be protected from potential child abuse,” and that parents have “authoritarian control over their children.”

Unbelievable.

UPDATE: Trump Tells Harvard To Give Back Its Coronavirus Relief Money

Sounds about right.

Ace of Spades blows the whistle.

Some of you may disagree with the mandate to wear masks proactively, when you don’t have the disease.

What about when you are diagnosed with it and know you are now a vector for a highly contagious, often deadly disease?

What about if you’re part of the industry mass-shaming Americans for failing to abide by social distancing rules you ignore yourselves?

I once worked in a data warehouse team with a guy who spent his spare time and money skydiving. He would spend his vacations in Colorado at a civilian HALO training facility.

I once pointed out that if he joined the Army he would be able to do this every day at government expense and get paid for it. But he just laughed.

Read it.

Even patients without respiratory complaints had Covid pneumonia. The patient stabbed in the shoulder, whom we X-rayed because we worried he had a collapsed lung, actually had Covid pneumonia. In patients on whom we did CT scans because they were injured in falls, we coincidentally found Covid pneumonia. Elderly patients who had passed out for unknown reasons and a number of diabetic patients were found to have it.

And here is what really surprised us: These patients did not report any sensation of breathing problems, even though their chest X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their oxygen was below normal. How could this be?

We are just beginning to recognize that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” — “silent” because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature.

Steve Sailer: Buy a Pulse Oximeter

In the NYT, an expert on intubation explains the new view among New York emergency room doctors on what is killing so many people: silent hypoxia. Those with pneumonia caused by the coronavirus don’t have enough oxygen in their blood, but they aren’t short of breath until they’ve had pneumonia for several days, so they don’t go to the emergency room until they’ve already suffered severe lung damage.

But if you get to the hospital when pneumonia first sets in, they can probably get you through it without a ventilator.

Fortunately, there’s a simple and reasonably cheap device you can buy right now to detect if you are running out of oxygen and get treatment when treatment can do the most good.

New York Times Often Sends Jeremy Peters to Wage War on Conservative Media ‘Propaganda’

Detroit Police Issue 736 Citations, Shutdown Dozens Of Parties During Lockdown

Sweden Is Right – The Economy Should Be Left Open

WHO Advisory Committee Member Retweets (Then Deletes) Michael Moore Clip Endorsing Anti-Trump Violence

Government: Ain’t It Grand! Authoritarian And Incompetent

Sooner Or Later, Americans Will Have To Choose Between Freedom & A Micro-Chipped Vaccine

NYC Has Formed A Coronavirus Anti-Discrimination Response Team

MSNBC Guest Calls Anti-Lockdown Protesters The ‘Fox News Nazi Death Cult Rump’ Of The GOP

New York Assemblyman Sounds Off On Gov. Cuomo Over Extended Closures

“Just Snap A Photo” – De Blasio Explains How To Snitch On Fellow New Yorkers Breaking Social Distancing Rules

Judge Blocks Kansas From Limiting Attendance At Religious Services

Cuomo hires firm with close ties to CCP to develop reopening plan

Dan Crenshaw Schools Maher on Dems Opposing China Travel Ban

NY Times: ‘Far-Right’ Conservatives in Michigan Protest as Blacks Suffer Virus

Read it.

Here’s the truly crazy part. There have been just under a thousand deaths in California. Bending the curve didn’t save them, nor was it supposed to save them. Instead, it was supposed to have delayed the hospitalizations and deaths so they hit over weeks rather than days. We don’t know, and may never know, the extent of that delay if any.

We do know that most of the deaths are among the group you might call “at death’s door”.

So in California, we’ve thrown at least two million people out of work in order to delay, but not prevent, the deaths of a thousand or so people, most of whom had other serious illnesses.

Am I the only person who thinks that making two million people jobless, merely to delay but not prevent a thousand deaths, is a bad deal for society?

Read it.

It is a rare glimpse inside the Chinese laboratory at the centre of mounting inter-national suspicion about the Covid-19 pandemic – and will do nothing to dispel fears that it was caused by a catastrophic leak which has been covered up by Beijing.

Read it.

While China experts were sounding alarms about a coverup, the WHO continued to praise China’s response and never warned the world that data coming from the regime was suspect.

WHO, an agency of the United Nations, has long been swayed by Beijing’s political preferences. Its current head, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is a former member of a Maoist group in Ethiopia.

Read it.

U.S. workers are failing to improve the skills needed to succeed in an increasingly global economy, according to a government agency report released Friday.

The National Center for Education Statistics asked 3,300 respondents ages 16-to-65 to read simple passages and solve basic math problems. What the researchers found is that literacy, numeracy and digital problem-solving ability in the U.S. have stagnated over the past few years.

I suggest that this is because public schools have turned from training children in skills useful for life to indoctrination centers for proglodyte politically-correct social attitudes. The ‘participation trophy’ tells you everything you need to know about this degeneration.

Read it.

The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to widen even further the growing class divides now found in virtually every major country. By disrupting smaller grassroots businesses while expanding the power of technologies used in the enforcement of government edicts, the virus could further empower both the tech oligarchs and the “expert” class leading the national response to the crisis.

In our increasingly feudal society, the small property owning yeomanry who operate the local businesses essential to Los Angeles shopping streets, and New York neighborhoods are already under threat and will be squeezed further by both the pandemic and its aftermath. But even more hard-pressed will be the growing, propertyless serf class that includes laid-off workers and the roughly 50 to 60 million workers in essential jobs, notes a new report from Richard Florida, and of those, 35 to 40 million require close physical proximity as opposed to those who can retreat to safety behind their computers. Roughly 70% of these workers are in low-wage professions, such as food preparation, and often, despite their increased risk, often lack health insurance from their employers.

Read it.

I had no idea that such things existed, but it makes perfect sense.

Read it.

But nobody cares because, hey, it’s Africa, and white people are having problems of their own.

The moral of this story is that nobody gives a shit about what happens to foreigners when people in your town are having problems.

Read it.

Well, at least this hystericon will prod California to take some steps against this scam.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

In addition, new reporting says that the WHO was complicit in the Chinese cover-up from the very beginning, and that China knew about the virus but allowed it spread throughout Wuhan (and through the world) through six critical days.

Instead of warning their own citizens, China pretended there was no problem at all.

Read it.

Well, that’s what happens when Democrats run your state.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist, is not afraid to go there.

I was surprised when Trump won. The economy was doing well, Trump had charisma but was erratic and made what seemed like many missteps (like disparaging people in the military) that it didn’t seem plausible he could win. Yet, he plowed through the Republican primaries and gathered a base of support that even people who have reason to hate his guts like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham even they kowtowed. I don’t want to revisit the debates about why Trump won but one of the reasons was that his base felt disrespected by coastal and media elites–their religion, their guns, their political incorrectness, their patriotism, their education, their jobs–all disrespected.

And now maybe it is happening again. From the point of view of the non-elites, the elites with their models and data and projections have shut the economy down. The news is full of pleas for New York, which always seemed like a suspicious den of urban inequity, but their hometown is doing fine. The church is closed, the bar is closed, the local plant is closed. Money is tight. Meanwhile the elites are laughing about binging Tiger King on Netflix. It doesn’t feel right. I can understand that or feel that I must try to understand that.

Read it.

Sure, we want to give these people more money and power.

Read it.

If it wasn’t already clear before the coronavirus outbreak, China is particularly aggressive in how it tries to control the spread of information, not just in regard to its own citizens, but people around the globe.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put these efforts on overdrive.

One eye-opener came when President Donald Trump got aggressive last week with a reporter from Phoenix Television, who first stated that Chinese companies such as Huawei and Alibaba have donated supplies to the U.S.

Then she asked the president: “Are you cooperating with China?”

Trump responded by asking if she worked for China or if her company is owned by the Chinese state.

Despite her denial, the answer essentially is “yes.”

Read it.

We often ascribe a basic level of humanity to even the cruelest leaders, but People’s Republic of China leader Xi Jinping’s actions have forced us to rethink this assumption. Although the emergence of the novel coronavirus now known as SARS-CoV-2 was probably not due to China’s actions, the emphasis that its authoritarian system places on hiding bad news likely gave the disease a sizable head start infecting the world. But most ominously, China’s obsession with image and Machtpolitik raises serious questions about its lack of moral limits.

At some point the Chinese Communist Party learned of the epidemic and made a decision to hide its existence, hoping it went away. Exposés in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post and the Chinese mainland’s Caixin show that the information that did flow out of China early in the crisis did so only because of the courage of individual Chinese people in the face of government repression. People in the Wuhan epicenter, however, began to get wise — and scared (here and here) — by the end of December 2019, forcing their government to say something. The authorities gave the impression of a nontransmissible disease already under containment. We know now this was entirely false, likely designed more to ease civil unrest than protect the people.

Read it.

We have to have paper attestations filled out: name, address, date of birth, and only one of five allowed reasons to travel can be selected, one person in the car, and then the form is signed and dated. Six days ago, that was revamped to be signed by the date and the time stated, as outings can be for no longer than one hour. Just to be clear, when Steve cycles to the village early for the bread he must have this with him. We have moved to the app that the police can scan, but again it needs to be altered to reflect the time, etc., each time you go out.

Shopping is a nightmare, as I am supposed to stay here. I am allegedly high-risk, so we tried the web-serviced “Drive” collection system operated by French supermarkets. There are now no delivery systems here and, actually, the dreadful website for the collection system would have had you tearing out your hair – I think we are barely sane. Using it was a nightmare as the search engine was not very good and who ever coded up the products should have been fired.

Read it.

Police in Tasmania are using a surveillance helicopter to track down people camping in remote locations in violation of coronavirus lockdown laws.

Welcome to the new police state.

Read it.

Parts is parts.

Read it.

Bloomberg News shutdown an investigation into Chinese Communist Party elites, fired the reporter on the beat and then targeted that reporter’s wife to keep her mouth shut, according to a new NPR report.

The Bloomberg reporters involved investigating the wealth of Chinese Communist Party elites had their efforts killed by their company six years ago, which was “fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government,” NPR reported Apr. 14. The outlet continued: “The company [Bloomberg News] successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.”

Read it.

My, what a coincidence.