Bass
Pro Shops will be allowed to remain open but only for the “sale of
firearms, ammunition and other goods directly related to responsible
firearm storage and maintenance,” Jackson County said Wednesday in a
statement.
The county issued a stay-at-home order amid the ongoing COVID-19
pandemic March 24 and received complaints March 27 about Bass Pro Shops
remaining open.
“On March 30, the Jackson County Health
Department, in consultation with County officials, notified Bass Pro
Shops that it was not considered an essential business,” the county said
Wednesday.
But Bass Pro Shops appealed the decision, citing state law that prevents restrictions on firearms sales during an emergency.
“Based
upon this information, legal counsel advised county staff that Bass Pro
Shops should be allowed to stay open for the sale of firearms and
ammunition,” Jackson County said Wednesday.
According to a Missouri law that went into effect in August 2007,“
the state, any political subdivision, or any person shall not prohibit
or restrict the lawful possession, transfer, sale, transportation,
storage, display, or use of firearms or ammunition during an emergency.”
Bass Pro Shops remains classified as a non-essential business except for firearms sales.
“All
other in-person sales must cease,” Jackson County said Wednesday. “The
County will allow two business days for Bass Pro Shops to rectify this
issue.”
nationalreview | To the extent that impeachment was consuming the finite attention of
senior policymakers in the White House and on Capitol Hill, we can only
be thankful that Senate Republicans wrapped up the trial by voting down
additional witnesses on January 31. Had the Democrats gotten their wish,
Washington would have been consumed for additional critical weeks into
February looking backward at Ukraine instead of forward at the threat of
the virus.
Key health agencies within the federal government — the CDC and
National Institutes of Health — were not inactive during January, but
aside from a ban on foreign travel from China, there was little public
leadership from the president. There were early, obvious-in-retrospect
missteps such as the CDC’s botching the early coronavirus-testing kits
and the FDA’s dragging its feet on approval of private testing
development and inspection of equipment. While FDA red tape is a problem
inherent to the agency’s design and culture, it is precisely the kind
of problem that can be mitigated by the hands-on leadership of a
bull-in-a-china-shop figure such as Trump. If you read the timeline on the Trump campaign’s website,
which is designed to cast the federal response in the most favorable
possible light, you will notice that the items before February 5 are
almost all agency-level actions rather than White House actions. The
White House Coronavirus Task Force wasn’t formed until January 29.
On February 4, Trump included a brief mention of the outbreak in the State of the Union address:
“Protecting Americans’ health also means fighting infectious diseases.
We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely
together on the coronavirus outbreak in China. My administration will
take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.”
Little of the media commentary on the speech focused on that line. As late as February 19, Lester Holt and Chuck Todd of NBC moderated a Democratic debate without asking a single question about the virus.
Some voices in politics and the media (including, as Ross Douthat notes,
an odd assortment of people on the right) were beginning to sound
alarms about the virus in late January and early February, but they were
a distinct minority. As Zeynep Tufekci details at The Atlantic,
“From the end of January through most of February, a soothing message
got widespread traction, not just with Donald Trump and his audience,
but among traditional media in the United States, which exhorted us to
worry about the flu instead, and warned us against overreaction.” Many
politicians focused more on fear of anti-Asian racism than on the risk
of a real health crisis. Mayor Bill de Blasio spent much of that period giving New Yorkers disastrous health advice.
CNN | The struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic is opening a new front in the long-running conflict between blue cities and red states.
Across
a wide array of states with Republican governors, many of the largest
cities and counties -- most of them led by Democrats -- are moving
aggressively to limit economic and social activity. State officials,
meanwhile, are refusing to impose the strictest statewide standards to fight the virus.
A
growing chorus of big-city officials in red states like Florida,
Georgia, Mississippi and Missouri are now urging their governors to
establish uniform statewide rules, arguing that refusing to do so
undercuts their local initiatives by increasing the risk the disease will cluster in neighboring areas -- from which it can easily reinfect their populations.
On Tuesday afternoon, after weeks of
complaints from local officials and medical officials, Republican Texas
Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statewide order restricting social
interactions to essential activities (albeit with some conspicuous
exceptions).
Robyn
Tannehill, the mayor of Oxford, Mississippi (home of the University of
Mississippi), told me in an interview that the absence of a statewide
rule was undercutting their local efforts to control social interaction.
"As
we are a regional health care and shopping destination, we have people
coming through from surrounding counties that are not [imposing] a stay
at home order," she said. "When they come here, you don't know who you
are passing in the Kroger or the Walmart. ... I think a statewide
stay-at-home order is very necessary."
The
Republican governors most resisting statewide action have almost all
argued that smaller counties should not face the same restrictions as
larger ones. "What may be right for places like the large urban areas
may not be right at this particular point in time for the" smaller
counties with fewer cases, Abbott said last week before relenting on Tuesday.
While
echoing that logic, other GOP governors resisting calls for action from
large cities have also cited more ideological arguments. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves
last week painted extensive shut-down orders as an expression of overly
intrusive government. "In times such as these, you always have experts
who believe they know best for everybody," he said. "You have some folks
who think that government ought to take over everything in times of
crisis — that they, as government officials, know better than individual
citizens."
Similarly, Missouri's GOP governor, Mike Parson,
argued that rather than government action "it is going to be personal
responsibility" that wins the struggle against the virus.
unz |Vladimir Putin has decided how Russia is going to pay for the corona-virus.
He’s going to tax the rich.
It’s
a remedy that most Americans would support if they were given the
choice, but they weren’t asked. Instead, Congress passed a $2 trillion
stimulus package for which the American taxpayer will be held entirely
responsible. Even worse, the new legislation contains a $500 billion
allocation (another corporate giveaway) that the Federal Reserve will
use as a capital base for borrowing $4.5 trillion. That massive sum of
money will be used to buy toxic bonds in the corporate bond market.
Just
as Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) were used to fleece millions of
investors out of their hard-earned savings in the run-up to the 2008
Financial Crisis, so too, “toxic” corporate bonds were the weapon of
choice that was used to pilfer trillions of dollars from investors in
the run-up to today’s crisis. (Same scam, different instrument) The
virus was merely the proximate cause that tipped the sector into
meltdown. The problem had been festering for years and everyone in the
financial community (Including the Fed, the BIS and the IMF) knew that
it was only a matter of time before the market would blow sky-high.
Which it did.
What
every American needs to know is that our crooked bought-and-paid-for
Congress just passed a bill that transfers the credit risk for $4.5
trillion of corporate sludge onto the National Debt. A bailout
of this magnitude could impact the nation’s credit rating (Fitch has
already issued a warning), send interest rates to the moon, dampen
economic activity for years to come, and pave the way for a long and
painful slump. The much ballyhooed $1,200 checks for unemployed workers
are merely a tactical diversion that’s being used to conceal the giant
ripoff that is taking place right under our noses.
In
contrast, Putin has settled on a more rational and compassionate plan.
He’s going to launch a relief program that actually focuses on the
people who need it the most. Then, he’s going to cover the costs by
taxing the people who are most capable of shouldering the burden. His
intention is not to “soak the rich” or to redistribute wealth. He simply
wants to find the most equitable way to share the costs for this
completely unexpected crisis.
RT | Russophobic pundits and red-baiting blue-checkmarks are gasping
in horror and floating bizarre theories as Moscow sends a planeload of
much-needed medical supplies to the US amid its worsening coronavirus
epidemic.
News that a Russian cargo
plane laden with medical supplies and personal protection equipment
would soon depart for the US, a gift from the Kremlin to its
coronavirus-stricken rival, has the usual suspects running around in
circles screeching about ulterior motives.
While President Donald Trump’s announcement on Monday that “Russia sent us a very, very large planeload of things, medical equipment, which was nice”
took many by surprise, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed the
shipment on Tuesday, explaining that President Vladimir Putin had asked
Trump if the US needed help and he had accepted. Peskov added that he
hoped the US would be able to return the favor if it became necessary.
In the minds of the reds-under-beds crowd, this was an unacceptable “propaganda ploy.” How dare Trump allow Russia to supply Americans with lifesaving medical equipment?!
The Wall Street Journal accused Russia of “Viruspolitik,” changing the headline of an earlier story about the “political shift” caused by Moscow’s delivery of medical aid to hard-hit Italy.
No
scenario was too outlandish for Russiagaters. Newsweek contributor Olga
Lautman hinted that Putin might have slipped in something nasty among
the face masks and testing kits, which she assured everyone were
defective.
Reuters | A Russian military transport plane was headed to the United States on
Wednesday carrying tons of medical equipment and masks to help
Washington fight coronavirus, Russian state TV reported and a U.S.
official said.
President Vladimir Putin offered Russian help in a phone conversation
with U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday, when the two leaders
discussed how best to respond to the virus.
The flight, which was organized by the Russian Defence Ministry, took off early Wednesday from an airfield outside of Moscow.
The
shipment was likely to be unpopular with some critics of Trump who have
urged him to keep his distance from Putin and who argue that Moscow
uses such aid as a geopolitical and propaganda tool to advance its
influence, something the Kremlin denies.
“Trump
gratefully accepted this humanitarian aid,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry
Peskov was cited as saying by the Interfax news agency on Tuesday night.
Trump himself spoke enthusiastically about the Russian help after his
call with Putin.
A U.S. official in Washington confirmed the
shipment was a direct result of the phone conversation between Trump and
Putin on Monday. The official said it carried 60 tons of ventilators,
masks, respirators and other items.
unz |A
particularly egregious and also unique example of a state’s economic
policies being manipulated by a dedicated Israeli fifth column in
government is the Virginia Israel Advisory Board. Grant Smith, long a
critic of the VIAB, heads the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP). He has written a new book entitled The Israel Lobby Enters State Government: Rise of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board,
which documents in considerable detail how the conspiracy by powerful
Jews in Virginia to benefit Israel has actually operated, much of it
secretly through special arrangements and deals. He has also had a long interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar.com regarding the book which is well worth listening to.
The
VIAB is unique because it is actually part of the Virginia state
government. It is funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia and is able to
access funds from other government agencies to support Israeli
businesses. It is staffed by Israelis and American Jews drawn from what
has been described as the “Israel advocacy ecosystem” and is
self-administered, appointing its own members and officers. While there
are many Israel business promotion entities active in the United States,
only Virginia has such a group actually sitting within the government
itself, ready to make secret preferential agreements, to arrange special
concessions on taxes and to establish start-up subsidies for Israeli
businesses. Israeli business projects have been, as a result, regularly
funded using Virginia state resources with little accountability. Bear
in mind that this agency exists not to promote Virginia businesses but
rather to give an advantage to Israeli businesses, some of which might
even be competing with existing Virginia companies and putting local
people out of work.
Virginia
already runs an estimated $500 million trade deficit with Israel due to
the federal Free Trade Agreement and the promotion of Israeli
businesses in the state, which repatriate their profits to Israel, adds
considerably to that sum. Smith reports how
VIAB is not just an economic mechanism. Its charter states that it was
“created to foster closer economic integration between the United States
and Israel while supporting the Israeli government’s policy agenda.”
Smith also has observed that “VIAB is a pilot for how Israel can quietly
obtain taxpayer funding and official status for networked entities that
advance Israel from within key state governments.”
insidehighered | Wood doesn’t believe colleges are making any decisions about closures and remote learning with finances at front of mind.
“While financial considerations are always important, I do think …
their decisions are first and foremost being made around their
communities', students', staff and faculties' safety,” she said.
Two-year colleges are somewhat shielded from this particular revenue hit. According to the College Board’s 2019 trends in college pricing report, in 2015-16, 96 percent of full-time undergraduate students at public two-year colleges lived off campus or with their parents.
Still, today most colleges are scrambling to scale up their online
learning resources and put precautionary plans in place. Few have
disclosed whether they will offer room and board refunds to students who
leave campus.
Room and board is a sizable chunk of what students pay each semester,
and the fees are often excluded from scholarship calculations. The
College Board report states that students at a public four-year
universities paying in-state tuition spend on average 43 percent of
their budgets on room and board fees. For out-of-state students, room
and board makes up 27 percent of budgets, and for students at private
four-year colleges, 24 percent of budgets are room and board fees.
Requests for room and board rebates aren't the only way colleges
could lose money as a result of the coronavirus. Many have canceled
admitted student days and student tours, and closing campus could affect
enrollments in the fall. Institutions that rely heavily on endowment
payouts could see them dip in a falling market.
The virus will "certainly roil the admission market" just as student
deposits and commitments are due, said Brian Mitchell, King's co-author
on How to Run a College and the founder of Brian Mitchell & Associates, a higher education consulting firm, in an email.
"Effectively, the crisis has the potential to create a double whammy
-- unexpected [costs] and highly unpredictable future revenue at
tuition-driven institutions," he said.
gulfnews | At least 15,000 people who may have
caught the coronavirus from a 'super-spreader' guru are under strict
quarantine in northern India after the Sikh religious leader died of
COVID-19.
The 70-year-old guru, Baldev Singh, had returned from a trip to
Europe's virus epicentre Italy and Germany when he went preaching in
more than a dozen villages in Punjab state.
It has sparked one of India's most serious alerts related to the
pandemic and special food deliveries are being made to each household
under even tighter restrictions than the 21-day nationwide stay-at-home
order imposed by the government.
"The first of these 15 villages was sealed on March 18, and we think
there are 15,000 to 20,000 people in the sealed villages," said Gaurav
Jain, a senior magistrate for the district of Banga, where Singh lived.
"There are medical teams on standby and regular monitoring," he told AFP on Friday.
Nineteen people who were in contact with the preacher have already
tested positive for the new virus, said Vinay Bublani, a local deputy
police commissioner.
Results are being awaited from more than 200 others.
The guru and his two associates - who have also tested positive -
ignored self-isolation orders on their return from Europe, and were on
their preaching tour until Singh fell ill and died.
TruNews | Today on TruNews we detail the coronavirus solution being put forward by
billionaire eugenist Bill Gates, to fund the deployment of implanted
microchips and vaccines with digital capsules inside every American to
track the tested and infected. We also address the threat of blood tests
and transfusions, as the Red Cross admits donors are not being tested.
Lastly, we react to the shocking announcement by President Trump that up
to 1 million reservists are being called up to active military duty for
up to 2 years. Rick Wiles, Edward Szall, Doc Burkhart. Airdate:
03/27/20.
greenvilleonline | The worshipers filed in row by row,
sedans in front, trucks in back. It was Friday night after a long week
of news centered around the novel coronavirus and this congregation came
to sing, to dance, to laugh and to connect – and to do it all from
their cars.
In a new uncertain era,
American ingenuity notched another victory at Relentless Church in
Greenville Friday evening as Pastors John and Aventer Gray led worship
drive-in style for hundreds of people who each sat isolated yet not
alone – cars running, windows rolled up, listening along on the radio –
as Gray danced his way to the microphone and welcomed them to an
innovative service before a pre-recorded video of an hour-long church
service played on a giant projection screen.
“We are in the middle of a global pandemic, but we are still the church
and we are not going to allow anything to stop us from doing two
things: worshiping God and honoring our elected officials who have told
us to maintain social distancing,” Gray said as he opened the service.
“And so even though the enemy doesn't want us to gather, he can't stop
us from worshiping in our cars.”
LATimes | Pentecostal preacher Tony Spell didn’t just stand before his congregation on Sunday in defiance of the governor’s order to stay home: He leaped into the pews, paraded, hugged and laid hands on worshipers’ foreheads in prayer.
“We’re
free people. We’re not going to be intimidated. We’re not going to
cower,” the Rev. Spell said from the pulpit of Life Tabernacle Church in
a suburb of Baton Rouge. “We’re not breaking any laws.”
Across
Louisiana, the coronavirus has infected more than 3,500 people and led
to 151 deaths as of Sunday, with one of the highest per-capita death
rates in the country down the interstate in New Orleans.
To limit its spread, Gov. John Bel Edwards banned gatherings of more
than 50 people earlier this month and on March 22 issued a stay-at-home
order.
To comply, Catholic churches canceled Mass and
switched to virtual services. Many Protestant churches did too. But some
have continued to gather, with none drawing more attention than Life
Tabernacle.
The 60-year-old church has continued to use its fleet of two dozen buses
to bring hundreds of congregants to services three times a week from
five surrounding parishes, including congregants frommobile home
parks and public housing in low-income neighborhoods. More than 1,100
people of various races worship by age group at seven sanctuaries on the
property. In addition to spiritual guidance, the church offers free
breakfast. Only about 10% have stayed away, said Spell’s father, the
Rev. Tim Spell, 66, including his own 90-year-old father who has been sheltering at home.
japantimes | When the elderly leader of a South Korean religious sect knelt before
the nation on Monday (March 2), he had hoped to defuse public anger
over his church's role in spreading the coronavirus.
Yet Lee Man-hee's apology for the national "calamity" instead whipped up more outrage - due to a watch he was wearing.
The
gold-coloured watch, visible on his left wrist, was apparently given by
disgraced former President Park Geun-hye, who was impeached and jailed
in 2017 for corruption and abuse of power.
Images of the watch
quickly trended on Twitter, while "Lee Man-hee watch" was the most
searched phrase on South Korea's biggest search portal Naver.
"He is bragging about Park's gift," fumed one Twitter user.
"His watch was shiny and crystal clear, like his loyalty and ties with
Park Geun-hye," jibed another.
There was no comment on the
controversy from Lee. But a leader at his Shincheonji Church of Jesus
said there was nothing untoward about the watch, which was given as a
merit award.
"It has nothing to do with politics," the official
told Reuters, noting that Lee was a veteran of the Korean War. "He wears
it because he doesn't have anything else."
MIT | One of the most pressing shortages facing hospitals during the
Covid-19 emergency is a lack of ventilators. These machines can keep
patients breathing when they no longer can on their own, and they can
cost around $30,000 each. Now, a rapidly assembled volunteer team of
engineers, physicians, computer scientists, and others, centered at MIT,
is working to implement a safe, inexpensive alternative for emergency
use, which could be built quickly around the world.
The team, called MIT E-Vent
(for emergency ventilator), was formed on March 12 in response to the
rapid spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its members were brought together
by the exhortations of doctors, friends, and a sudden flood of mail
referencing a project done a decade ago in the MIT class 2.75 (Medical
Device Design). Students and faculty working in consultation with local
physicians designed a simple ventilator device that could be built with
about $100 worth of parts, although in the years since prices have gone
up and the device would now cost $400 to $500 in materials. They
published a paper
detailing their design and testing, but the work ended at that point.
Now, with a significant global need looming, a new team, linked to that
course, has resumed the project at a highly accelerated pace.
The key to the simple, inexpensive ventilator alternative is a
hand-operated plastic pouch called a bag-valve resuscitator, or Ambu
bag, which hospitals already have on hand in large quantities. These are
designed to be operated by hand, by a medical professional or emergency
technician, to provide breaths to a patient in situations like cardiac
arrest, until an intervention such as a ventilator becomes available. A
tube is inserted into the patient’s airway, as with a hospital
ventilator, but then the pumping of air into the lungs is done by
squeezing and releasing the flexible pouch. This is a task for skilled
personnel, trained in how to evaluate the patient and adjust the timing
and pressure of the pumping accordingly.
The innovation begun by the earlier MIT class, and now being rapidly
refined and tested by the new team, was to devise a mechanical system to
do the squeezing and releasing of the Ambu bag, since this is not
something that a person could be expected to do for any extended period.
But it is crucial for such a system to not damage the bag and to be
controllable, so that the amount of air and pressures being delivered
can be tailored to the particular patient. The device must be very
reliable, since an unexpected failure of the device could be fatal, but
as designed by the MIT team, the bag can be immediately operated
manually.
NYTimes | In 2006, the Department of Health and
Human Services established a new division, the Biomedical Advanced
Research and Development Authority, with a mandate to prepare medical
responses to chemical, biological and nuclear attacks, as well as
infectious diseases.
In its first year
in operation, the research agency considered how to expand the number
of ventilators. It estimated that an additional 70,000 machines would be
required in a moderate influenza pandemic.
The
ventilators in the national stockpile were not ideal. In addition to
being big and expensive, they required a lot of training to use. The
research agency convened a panel of experts in November 2007 to devise a
set of requirements for a new generation of mobile, easy-to-use
ventilators.
In 2008, the government requested proposals from companies that were interested in designing and building the ventilators.
The goal was for the machines to be approved by regulators for mass development by 2010 or 2011, according to budget documents
that the Department of Health and Human Services submitted to Congress
in 2008. After that, the government would buy as many as 40,000 new
ventilators and add them to the national stockpile.
The ventilators were to cost less than $3,000 each. The lower the price, the more machines the government would be able to buy.
Companies submitted bids for the Project
Aura job. The research agency opted not to go with a large, established
device maker. Instead it chose Newport Medical Instruments, a small
outfit in Costa Mesa, Calif.
Newport,
which was owned by a Japanese medical device company, only made
ventilators. Being a small, nimble company, Newport executives said,
would help it efficiently fulfill the government’s needs.
WaPo | “I didn’t
think it was going to happen to me just because of where I worked,”
Kerr, 29, said of his first substantial job as a civilian. “We’re going
to have a ton of bills, and I have no idea how they’re going to get
paid.”
The
coronavirus pandemic has sent the United States hurtling toward
recession with startling haste, as dozens of states and cities have
taken drastic measures to battle the fast-spreading disease that has
claimed more than 27,000 lives worldwide. People are sequestering
themselves and nonessential businesses have shuttered as communities
adapt to social distancing, the best defense against infection. But as
last week’s record-shattering 3.3 million jobless claims indicate, the
near-shutdown is taking a toll in almost every corner of the U.S.
economy.
White-collar
workers, who make up a greater share of the economy than ever before,
are increasingly getting caught in the fallout.
“When I
was talking to my parents at first, my dad said, ‘This is going to be a
really big impact for service industry workers,” said Erica Newell, who
was laid off this week from her job in client success at a Salt Lake
City start-up. “But I’m seeing people that are not in the service
industry, like people in tech and whatever, and those people are being
hit really, really hard. So I think it’s safe to assume it’s everybody.”
Blue-collar
jobs, which generally involve trade, manufacturing and labor, had once
been the backbone of the nation’s economy. But the shift toward
automation and a more service-based economy in recent years has caused
many of those jobs to disappear while professional, or white-collar,
jobs in tech, business management and consulting have grown.
White-collar workers in sales, business management, technology,
professional and administrative jobs make up about 54 percent of the
U.S. economy — about 80 million positions, according to a Washington
Post analysis of Census Bureau data from 2018, the most recent year
available.
NYTimes | For about
$80,000, an individual can purchase a six-month plan with Private Health
Management, which helps people with serious medical issues navigate the
health care system.
Such a plan
proved to be a literal lifesaver as the coronavirus pandemic descended.
The firm has helped clients arrange tests in Los Angeles for the
coronavirus and obtained oxygen concentrators for high-risk patients.
“We
know the top lab people and the doctors and nurses and can make the
process efficient,” said Leslie Michelson, the firm’s executive
chairman.
In some respects, the pandemic is an equalizer: It can afflict princes
and paupers alike, and no one who hopes to stay healthy is exempt from
the strictures of social distancing. But the American response to the
virus is laying bare class divides that are often camouflaged — in
access to health care, child care, education, living space, even
internet bandwidth.
In New York, well-off city dwellers have
abandoned cramped apartments for spacious second homes. In Texas, the
rich are shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to build safe
rooms and bunkers.
And across the
country, there is a creeping consciousness that despite talk of national
unity, not everyone is equal in times of emergency.
“This is a white-collar quarantine,” said Howard Barbanel, a Miami-based
entrepreneur who owns a wine company. “Average working people are
bagging and delivering goods, driving trucks, working for local
government.”
Restaurant sales dropped 47% across the U.S. from March 1 to March
22, and 54% of operators now offer off-premise services only, according
to an NRA survey of more than 4,000 restaurant operators.
Seventy percent of restaurants surveyed have had to lay off
employees and reduce workers' hours, and about half of restaurants
expect further layoffs and hourly reductions in the next 30 days. More
than 60% of restaurants have had to reduce their operating hours.
Guardian | Hundreds of US counties and all 50 states now have confirmed coronavirus cases
– despite a widespread lack of testing – underscoring the indifference
of the virus to the familiar political boundaries separating red states,
dominated by Republicans, and blue ones, dominated by Democrats.
But while the virus does not select for party affiliation,
contrasting emergency responses at the state and local levels have split
dramatically along partisan lines.
States with Democratic governors have been quicker
to declare emergencies, close schools, shutter non-essential businesses
and impose limits on bars and restaurants, according to data collected by the Kaiser Foundation. Fifteen of 21 states to have issued stay-at-home orders have Democratic governors.
States with Republican governors, meanwhile, have been less eager to
ask businesses to close, and more likely to downplay the threat. “Go to
the grocery stores. For crying out loud, go to the grocery stores,”
Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia told residents on 16 March. “If
you want to go to Bob Evans and eat, go to Bob Evans and eat.”
The night before, Oklahoma’s Governor Kevin Stitt tweeted a picture of himself and his two sons at a restaurant, boasting: “It’s packed tonight.” The tweet was later deleted.
The divergence in state responses to coronavirus does not cleanly
split along the red-blue line, with Republican governors in states such
as Ohio and Maryland among the most proactive in responding to the
threat, said University of Southern California professor Manuel Pastor.
All partisan disagreements in the United States in 2020 seem to
emanate from or end with Donald Trump. But the president has encouraged a
partisan divide on the coronavirus threat, analysts said, pitting state
governors against each other and setting off bidding wars for medical
equipment.
While states and localities have primary responsibilities for public
health under the American system of federalism, the president has an
important role in focusing the national attention on the emergency and
channeling the massive resources of the federal government to the states
most in need, said Lawrence O Gostin, a professor of public health at
the Johns Hopkins University.
“This is something that’s really unprecedented and clearly American
federalism is not well equipped to do it. You need every oar to work
together. We have fragmentation, name-calling and wildly different
responses,” Gostin said.
forward | If you’re not part of the political or chattering classes, you might
have missed two recent tempests that erupted in tiny teacups on the
devil’s banquet of the coronavirus pandemic. Last week, the President
insisted on calling the virus that causes COVID-19 the “Chinese virus.”
And this week, he’s insulted a number of reporters at his press
conferences. For days, the media couldn’t stop talking about the incidents (yours truly was not exempt).
But while the media obsessed over the President’s nomenclature and
attacks against themselves, no one else seemed to care. As of this
writing, 60% of Americans approve of his handling of the COVID-19
crisis, according to a new Gallup poll. His approval rating is the highest of his entire presidency.
It was a stark reminder of how little the media’s concerns reflect
those of the nation more widely. It’s a gap that’s only growing,
reflected in the incredulous and disgusted tweets of major media figures
when they come across the president’s polling numbers. In fact, the
true polarization in American life is not between Republican and
Democratic voters, but between the American electorate and its
representatives in government and in the media, who exist in a radically
polarizing feedback loop that has disconnected them from the American
people like two moons orbiting each other that have lost the centripetal
pull to the planet they once circled.
Of course, this is hard to see if you’re on one of those moons. So
it’s no surprise that media personalities think that the polarization
that’s happening in their class is representative of how Americans feel.
Thus, Ezra Klein’s new book “Why We’re Polarized.”
The “we” in the title is presumably America, though the question in
Klein’s title is not the one he ultimately answers. “This is not a book
about people,” Klein admits in the introduction. Instead, he focuses on
braiding together the insights of two other sources of information —
“politicians, activists, government officials” and “political
scientists, sociologists, historians” – to make the case that politics
has become more polarized to appeal to a more polarized public,
effectively polarizing the public further in a feedback loop.
The book explores the history of American politics, showing how the two
parties used to be a lot more similar to each other, resulting in a
large percentage of Americans splitting their votes between Republicans
and Democrats. This essentially kept politics from being too polarized
because people’s identities weren’t bound up in it; the parties were
just too similar to allow for that kind of investment. Klein argues that
as the parties differentiated themselves, different kinds of Americans
began sorting themselves into the parties, merging racial, religious,
geographic and cultural identities with political ones and making
politics more personal, more urgent, and crucially more defined against
the other side.
America’s joke of a healthcare system is being highlighted as uninsured COVID-19 patients are racking up $35,000 medical bills and even insured COVID-19 patients are looking at out-of-pocket expenses in excess of $1,300.
Combine this with the millions of Americans getting thrown off of
employer-provided health insurance and you’re looking at a huge number
of people who will avoid getting tested and avoid treatment as much as
possible. Both heads of America’s two-headed one-party system have spent
decades forcefully creating this dynamic.
America’s income and wealth inequality is being highlighted in a nation suffering from all of the above problems while most Americans were already unable to afford a mere $1,000 emergency expense.
A one-time $1,200 payment to a population already stretched that thin
guarantees that millions will be plunged into crushing debt and
destitution in a nation with a historically unprecedented billionaire
class raking in even more unearned wealth.
guardian | In Kansas City’s poorest neighbourhoods, they wait and they watch.
The city’s most vulnerable residents wait for coronavirus to reveal
itself as they watch its daily progression from the edges of the country
to the heartland. But they face another wait too. For the money to run
out, uncertain which of these two potential calamities will arrive first
but dreading the day the two collide.
Chris Brown lost his job as a waiter as soon as Kansas City’s mayor
ordered the closure of restaurants and bars. “I was lucky that I had a
little money in my pocket when this happened. Not a lot. Maybe $100. But
that’s more than a lot of people, especially in my industry. I know a
lot of my comrades out there only had $20 in their pocket when the
restaurant closed. I don’t know what they’re doing,” he said.
Until the end of last week, Brown and his wife, Alex Smith, still had
a lifeline. Smith worked as a bartender at a hotel which remained open
in a neighbouring county. But that closed on Friday and now the couple,
both in their mid-40s, are down to the cash in their pockets with no
savings and no health insurance.
“We took the little money we have and came down to get groceries so
we at least had some food for the next few weeks,” said Brown outside
the Save A Lot discount food store on Kansas City’s east side, one of
the poorest parts of the city.
Coronavirus has been relatively slow to reach the sprawling plains of
Missouri and Kansas, although deaths have been creeping up. But its
impact is already felt among the hardest-up residents of Kansas City,
which straddles the Missouri
River dividing the two states. Both are reporting a spike in
unemployment claims and they’re likely to go on rising with the Kansas
City metro area under a stay-at-home order from Tuesday and more
businesses closing.
Even when they were working, Brown and Smith earned only $2.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage for servers, plus tips.
dailymail |President Trump is considering quarantining New York, Connecticut and New Jersey in desperate efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
The move will restrict travel to and from the three states, which are some of the hardest-hit by the outbreak.
'Some
people would like to see New York quarantined because it's a hotspot —
New York, New Jersey maybe one or two other places, certain parts of
Connecticut quarantined. I'm thinking about that right now,' he said
Saturday.
'We might not have to do it
but there's a possibility that sometime today we'll do a quarantine -
short term - two weeks for New York, probably New Jersey, certain parts
of Connecticut.'
The move would help tackle the issue other
states are facing where New Yorkers are fleeing the city and traveling
to other states and areas, where they are potentially risking more lives
and spreading the disease further afield.
'Restrict
travel, because they're having problems down in Florida, a lot of New
Yorkers going down. We don't want that,' he said.
New York state Governor Andrew Cuomo hit back at the president's plans in a press conference Saturday.
'I don't even know what that means. I don't know how that could be legally enforceable,' said Cuomo.
'And from a medical point view, I don't know what you would be accomplishing.
'But I can tell you, I don't even like the sound of it.'
bloomberg | Rhode Island police began stopping cars with New York plates Friday.
On Saturday, the National Guard will help them conduct house-to-house
searches to find people who traveled from New York and demand 14 days of
self-quarantine.
“Right now we have a pinpointed risk,” Governor Gina Raimondo said. “That risk is called New York City.”
New York is the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., on Friday reporting a total of 44,000 cases.
Rhode
Island has just over 200, and it has begun an aggressive campaign to
keep the virus out and New Yorkers contained, over objections from civil
liberties advocates.
Raimondo, a Democrat, said she had consulted lawyers and said while she couldn’t close the border, she felt confident she could enforce a quarantine.
Many New Yorkers have summer houses in Rhode Island, especially in
tony Newport, and the governor said the authorities would be checking
there.
“Yesterday I announced and today I reiterated: Anyone
coming to Rhode Island in any way from New York must be quarantined,”
the governor said. “By order. Will be enforced. Enforceable by law.”
Raimondo signed an executive order Thursday that applies to
anyone who has been in New York during the past two weeks and through at
least April 25. It doesn’t apply to public health, public safety, or
health-care workers.
CTH | Governor Gretchen Whitmer from the
Michigan Directorate has threatened to turn the eye of the state upon
any doctor or pharmacist who would attempt to prescribe chloroquine to
treat their patients suffering from coronavirus. Medical licenses may
need to be revoked.
The agency’s March 24 letter
warns physicians and pharmacists of professional consequences for the
prescribing of hydroxychloroquine (and chloroquine). Beyond the rational
recommendation against hoarding, the letter includes threats of
“administrative action” against the licenses of doctors that prescribe
hydroxychloroquine.
MICHIGAN
– Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory
Affairs warns that prescribing hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for
treatment of COVID-19 ‘without further proof of efficacy’ may be
investigated for administrative action; reaction from Dr. Jeff Colyer,
former Kansas governor. (video)
It should be remembered that comrade
Whitmer was selected by the party apparatchik to deliver the State of
the Union rebuttal on behalf of the DNC’s totalitarian interests. Heir
Whitmer’s foreboding warnings are in the interest of the State comrades.
However, in defiance of the
dictates from governing officials intent on increasing the body count
to retain narrative favorable to the state, several independent medical
communities have gone rogue.
Studies have shown
significant reduction in viral loads and symptom improvement when
combining these medications in COVID-19 patients. Though these studies
do not prove efficacy, the results were so promising the authors of the most famous study concluded:
“We therefore recommend that COVID-19 patients be
treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to cure their infection
and to limit the transmission of the virus to other people in order to
curb the spread of COVID-19 in the world.”
Additionally, it is
certainly interesting that Bayer gave the US Government 3,000,000
Chloroquine tablets. According to the reports at the time 750,000 doses
went to NY, the rest were never discussed (whereabouts unknown). [LINK]
Why would Bayer provide U.S. authorities 3
million tablets of a medication if there was no curative value to the
distribution? Think about it…
asiatimes | What’s going on in the fifth largest economy in the world arguably
points to a major collusion scandal in which the French government is
helping Big Pharma to profit from the expansion of Covid-19. Informed
French citizens are absolutely furious about it.
My initial question to a serious, unimpeachable Paris source, jurist
Valerie Bugault, was about the liaisons dangereuses between Macronism
and Big Pharma and especially about the mysterious “disappearance” –
more likely outright theft – of all the stocks of chloroquine in
possession of the French government.
Respected Professor Christian Perronne talked about the theft live
in one of France’s 24/7 info channels: “The central pharmacy for the
hospitals announced today that they were facing a total rupture of
stocks, that they were pillaged.”
With input from another, anonymous source, it’s now possible to
establish a timeline that puts in much-needed perspective the recent
actions of the French government.
Here’s the timeline:
On January 13, Agnes Buzyn, still France’s Health Minister,
classifies chloroquine as a “poisonous substance,” from now on only
available by prescription. An astonishing move, considering that it has
been sold off the shelf in France for half a century.
On March 16, the Macron government orders a partial lockdown. There’s
not a peep about chloroquine. Police initially are not required to wear
masks; most have been stolen anyway, and there are not enough masks even for health workers.
In 2011 France had nearly 1.5 billion masks: 800 million surgical masks
and 600 million masks for health professionals generally.
But then, over the years, the strategic stocks were not renewed, to please the EU and to apply the Maastricht criteria,
which limited membership in the Growth and Stability Pact to countries
whose budget deficits did not exceed 3% of GDP. One of those in charge
at the time was Jerome Salomon, now a scientific counselor to the Macron
government.
On March 17, Agnes Buzyn says she has learned the spread of Covid-19 will be a major tsunami,
for which the French health system has no solution. She also says it
had been her understanding that the Paris mayoral election “would not
take place” and that it was, ultimately, “a masquerade.”
What she does not say is that she didn’t go public at the time she
was running because the whole political focus by the Macron political
machine was on winning the “masquerade.” The first round of the election
meant nothing, as Covid-19 was advancing. The second round was
postponed indefinitely. She had to know about the impending healthcare
disaster. But as a candidate of the Macron machine she did not go public
in timely fashion.
In quick succession:
The Macron government refuses to apply mass testing, as practiced with success in South Korea and Germany.
Le Monde and the French state health agency characterize Raoult’s research as fake news, before issuing a retraction.
Professor Perrone reveals on the 24/7 LCI news channel that the stock
of chloroquine at the French central pharmacy has been stolen.
Thanks to a tweet by Elon Musk, President Trump says chloroquine should be available to all Americans.
Sufferers of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, who already have supply
problems with the only drug that offers them relief, set social media
afire with their panic.
Morocco buys the stock of chloroquine from Sanofi in Casablanca.
Pakistan decides to increase its production of chloroquine to be sent to China.
Switzerland discards the total lockdown of its population; goes for
mass testing and fast treatment; and accuses France of practicing
“spectacle politics.”
Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice,
having had himself treated with chloroquine, without any government
input, directly calls Sanofi so they may deliver chloroquine to Nice
hospitals.
Because of Raoult’s research, a large-scale
chloroquine test finally starts in France, under the – predictable –
direction of INSERM, which wants to “remake the experiments in other
independent medical centers.” This will take at least an extra six weeks
– as the Elysee Palace’s scientific council now mulls the extension of France’s total lockdown to … six weeks.
If joint use of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin proves definitely
effective among the most gravely ill, quarantines may be reduced in
select clusters.
The only French company that still manufactures chloroquine is under judicial intervention.
That puts the chloroquine hoarding and theft into full perspective. It
will take time for these stocks to be replenished, thus allowing Big
Pharma the leeway to have what it wants: a costly solution.
It appears the perpetrators of the chloroquine theft were very well informed.
armstrongeconomics | One of the people who has assisted in this panic over the coronavirus has been Neil Ferguson, who led the @imperialcollege
authors who warned of 500,000 deaths and 2.2 million people would be
infected from the coronavirus. Now, low and behold, Ferguson has himself
tested positive for the virus and has suddenly announced a change of
view. Ferguson has been a major contributing factor in causing the world
economy to collapse. He has advocated locking down the economy which has been behind the movement around the world.
I find this very curious that he would
advocate shutting down the economy when he knows the economic damage
this would have. The number of people whose jobs will be lost, and small
businesses destroyed around the world is incalculable. Ferguson
now says both that the U.K. should have enough ICU beds and that the
coronavirus will probably kill under 20,000 people in the U.K. and
interestingly he now admits that more than half of whom would have died
by the end of the year in any case because they were so old and sick.
Ferguson now predicts that the epidemic in the U.K. will peak and
subside within “two to three weeks” after advocating 18+ months of
quarantine would be necessary.
nakedcapitalism | We can make a highly suggestive correlation between globalizers and COVID-19 if we look at two simple maps. First, as is
well known, one of the main distinctions between the places that are “optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward”
(i.e., globalizers) and the
dull provincials in flyover is the possession of passports. (A passport
is a likely marker for the sort of person who asks “Why don’t they just
leave?”; “front-row kids,” in Chris Arnade’s parlance, as distinguished
from, say, grocery workers, who he calls
“back-row” kids.) Here is a map of passport ownership by state:
The correlation is rather neat, don’t you think? It
makes sense that the first case was in a globalist, passport-owning
city like Seattle on the West Coast; and it makes sense that the world
capital of globalization, passport-owning New
York City, now has a major outbreak.
Toward a Biophysics of Poetry
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so-calle...
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*February 4, 1913 -- February 4, 2026*
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Comet 3I/Atlas is on its way out on a hyberbolic course to, I don't know
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Remembering the Spanish Civil War
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This year marks the 90th anniversary of the launch of the Spanish Civil
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Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
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SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
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