Do You Quarantine 400 Million For a Virus No Worse Than the Flu?

I am not going to draw any conclusions , but ask yourself the following questions. Why would a government that is obsessed with retaining control go to these measures, if less disruptive and draconian measures would have resulted in fewer deaths, say, than the common influenza? 

China's economy, and soon the world's economy, is going to grind to a halt with the disruption in supply chains due to factory shutdowns in the PRC. Airlines, travel and tourism related business, and many others are already losing money hand over fist. Debate the particulars of this virus all you like. 

You may never get the truth of it all. But...what you can see, everywhere from China to the rest of the world, is the reaction to this outbreak from governments. Their reactions are wide ranging, severe, and most importantly, they are costing many many companies huge amounts of money. THAT is the difference between this outbreak and earlier ones such as swine flu, sars, and others. Look at governmental reactions. 

Follow the money...or in this case...watch how much money companies are losing as a direct result of those government reactions.

NPR |   And we are reporting on another big story this morning. The coronavirus - it has been spreading and so has anti-Chinese sentiment, even among some of China's friends and neighbors in the region, many of whom have banned flights and visitors to and from the mainland. Tourism-dependent Thailand has so far resisted this, even though there are at least 32 confirmed cases in that country. Michael Sullivan reports.

MICHAEL SULLIVAN, BYLINE: It's 10:00 in the morning, and I'm standing in Sop Ruak in northern Thailand in the Golden Triangle, where Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet. And I'm staring out at a beautiful picture of the Mekong River right in front of me now. From this vantage point, at this time of day, there are usually hundreds of Chinese tourists here snapping photos.

But today, there is absolutely no one here, and that's because a week ago, the Chinese government banned all outbound travel groups from China in an effort to contain the coronavirus. Now, that's made some people in this tourist town happy, but it's made others unhappy.

PANG PEERADA: We don't hate Chinese, but we have to hate coronavirus.

SULLIVAN: Pang Peerada has good reason to hate the virus. The manager of the Serene Hotel here on the Mekong says business has taken a beating since last week's Chinese ban on outbound tours.

PEERADA: Actually, the group - cancel for two group and a big group, around 50% of the hotel.

SULLIVAN: They were taking half your rooms and now they've canceled.

PEERADA: Yes. Right.

SULLIVAN: She says she still gets the occasional individual Chinese couple, who she says are still more than welcome.

(SOUNDBITE OF BEEP)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Hello. Welcome.

SULLIVAN: Sop Ruak's 7-Eleven is ground zero for Chinese tourists who stop in this town. Manager Siriporn Wongchai reckons about 80% of her 1,500 customers a day were Chinese before the group ban. Today, there's just a few Chinese, plus some Spaniards and Thais.

SIRIPORN WONGCHAI: (Through interpreter) I'm not afraid, and none of my staff are afraid or have gotten sick because we wear masks and use gel.

SULLIVAN: But she says it'd still be a good idea if the Chinese stopped coming altogether for now.

WONGCHAI: (Through interpreter) I feel the Chinese should stay home until the virus is over. We have nobody sick here in our town, but if they keep coming, we could have soon. I don't want anyone from my team getting sick or their families.

You Knew That China Has A Woefully Tiny Modern Healthcare System, Right?

nakedcapitalism |  ....so like mebbe they have no business phukking around with bioweapons laboratories until they get their basic modern healthcare steez up to snuff? jes sayyin...., DEFENSE IS #1, until that isht blows up in your face.

Delivery of high quality effective medical care and public health solutions in China suffers from a variety of problems. One of the most challenging is low levels of human capital in health care systems. According to one study, China has only 60,000 general practitioners or one per roughly 23,000 people. By comparison, in the United States there are 1,500 people per general practitioner. If all things were equal, this would mean Beijing one of the largest cities in the world would have fewer than 1,000 general practitioners. Nor are many medical professionals well trained. In community health centers, less than one fourth of doctors have a bachelor’s degree. Even as recently as a decade ago, only 67% of Chinese doctors had only been educated up to the junior college level, hardly enough under any reasonable standard to be a highly qualified medical professional.

The human capital deficiencies are compounded by government priorities. Buoyed by nationalistic support from Chairman Xi Jinping to traditional Chinese medicine, it occupies the second largest market share of the retail drug market behind chemical pharmaceuticals 29% to 43%. Leaving aside the weak evidence of traditional Chinese medicine efficacy in clinical trials, it diverts enormous resources from mainline medical service delivery and research at the altar of nationalistic sentiment. Addressing major public health challenges are better targets for public spending than boosting nationalist fervor.

Then oddly enough, health centers might be the only construction market in China to have missed out in the past decade. In 2009, China had 917,000 health institutions but by 2018 this number had only increased to 997,000 increasing roughly 1% a year. What has been happening however is a concentration of larger hospitals who are responsible for majority of growth in visits, bed space, and new institutions. This has led to wildly divergent health services. Primary level hospitals, the smallest hospitals in smaller towns, have bed occupancy rates of 57% while third level hospitals, which are the biggest and most advanced in bigger cities, register 98% in 2018 and 102% in 2014. In other words, in cities like Wuhan, hospitals the primary center of care for corona were already stretched beyond the breaking point.

These facts confirm our reaction when China rushed to construct a new hospital in Wuhan: so what? If you can’t staff it, what are you accomplishing? We had assumed it would be difficult to impossible to get qualified personnel (doctors with expertise in pulmonary ailments) to come to Wuhan even before we learned of the scarcity of medical personnel in general in China. Is the new hospital for show or merely to isolate people known to be sick? My understanding is that another constraint in any medical system, and it is bound to be much worse in China, is that the best hope of saving a severely ill coronavirus victim is to put them on a respirator…equipment not in great supply even in Western hospitals.

Pretty Sure the 1918 "Spanish" Flu Started at Ft. Riley Kansas

doctorsreview |  Camp Funston was situated within Fort Riley, Kansas, a military training facility housing 26,000 or so doughboys-to-be, the young men packed into barracks on 8100 cold and remote hectares. Soldiers dreaded the frigid winters and the gruelling hot summers as much as the severe dust storms in between. Still, their ultimate destination was far less pleasant; the Great War had been waging in the muddy trenches and foxholes of Europe for four long years. Right before spring, however, hell hit a little closer to home.

On Monday, March 11, 1918, mess cook Private Albert Gitchell awoke feeling achy and hot, his throat burning terribly. It would prove to be more than just your average case of the Mondays. Gitchell suited up and dragged himself down to the infirmary where the medic on duty realized this was no ploy to get out of serving up hard bread and bad coffee. With a fever over 103°F, Gitchell had chills as well as aches and pains just about everywhere.

As a precaution, Gitchell was ordered to the tent reserved for soldiers with potentially contagious conditions. But nothing could change the fact that Gitchell had been serving up meals to soldiers until the previous evening. A few hours after the cook was admitted, Corporal Lee Drake came in with almost identical symptoms. Then, Sergeant Adolph Hurby showed up. He too had frighteningly similar complaints. One by one, men with fevers of 104°F, blue faces and horrendous coughs made their way to the infirmary. By midday, Camp Funston had 107 cases of the flu, a total of 522 reported within the first week alone, and a staggering 1127 by the time April rolled around. In the end, 46 of those afflicted at Fort Riley died.

Though the situation was unusual, both the government and the military were distracted by the war effort. Officials called it a pneumonia outbreak and chalked it up to the strange combination of conditions in Fort Riley that week. Not only had the camp been shrouded in a vicious prairie dust storm, soldiers had been breathing in something even more noxious: putrid black ash created by tons of burning manure courtesy of the camp's thousands of horses and mules. In retrospect, the fact that countless swine and poultry were also living in close proximity to the soldiers may be a more likely place to lay blame since pigs can be susceptible to avian influenza viruses -- those strains responsible for most serious forms of flu -- which can then mutate and be transmitted to humans.

CATCH THE WAVE
As Camp Funston neared recovery from the outbreak, crowds of coughing American soldiers, many barely over this mysterious flu, were shipped off to Europe to live in even more cramped quarters. And, unfortunately, they brought the Spanish flu with them, spreading it first to France, England, Germany and then Spain. It followed not only the movements of the troops, but also travelled rapidly along shipping and trade routes throughout the world. By the end of the pandemic, only one major region on the entire planet had not reported an outbreak: an isolated island called Marajo, located in Brazil's Amazon River delta.

In September 1918, a second wave of the epidemic hit North America and this time it could not be ignored. It had mutated since its Fort Riley appearance and was now deadlier than ever. First, soldiers began dying at military bases around Boston, whose bustling port was working hard to manage all the much-needed war shipments. New shipments of soldiers brought the mutated form of the virus back to Europe, where more soldiers on both sides were felled by the flu than by enemy fire. It's no wonder. Crowded and unsanitary living conditions, damp trenches, and weakened immune systems proved the perfect breeding ground for the killer flu. At home, things were just as bad for civilians. By October, the domestic death toll reached staggering heights: some 200,000 Americans died in that month alone, with millions more infected. With the end of the war in November came a third wave of disease for the US and Canada as victory parades and massive parties spread yet another round of the fearsome flu.

It's Very Simple, Orthodox Swindle Section 8, E-Rate, and Abuse Black and Brown Folks..,

unz |  A fascinating feature of coverage of the Winter 2019/2020 attacks on Jews by Blacks in New York has been the total absence of media enquiry into why the assaults took place. Like so much historiography on European anti-Semitism, there is simply no room for the question Why? As in Kiev, or Odessa, or the Rhine Valley, or Lincoln, or Aragon, or Galicia, the assaults on Jews in Brooklyn apparently emerged from the ether, motivated by some miasmic combination of insanity and demonic aggression. NBC New York reported bluntly on a “spree of hate,” but had nothing in the way of analysis of context other than a condemnation of “possible hate-based attacks” — one of the most remarkably opaque pieces of analytical nomenclature I’ve ever come across. Former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind has said “The attacks against Jews are out of control, and we must have a concrete strategy to address the rise of these attacks,” but how he can develop a strategy to address something that apparently does not yet have an explanation is another question left unanswered.

What is clear is that Black anti-Semitism presents Jews with an objective problem in terms of their (publicly-expressed) self-concept as a people and the received wisdom regarding the nature of anti-Semitism (now given quasi-legal standing in many countries via the IHRA definition). The multiple ways in which Jews have sought to deal with this challenge will be addressed in a forthcoming follow-up essay, but it should suffice here to close with the remarks of Steven Gold on the Jewish response to growing Black anti-Semitism in 1940s Harlem:

Being well organized, Jewish communal associations took note when Jewish merchants were accused of inappropriate behavior. When African-American journalists or activists complained about the exploitative behavior of ghetto merchants, Jewish spokesmen often resisted accepting responsibility and instead labeled accusers as anti-Semites for referring to the merchants’ religion. Contending that Jewish merchants treated Blacks no worse than other Whites did, they objected to being singled out.[17]

An age-old pattern had thus been employed with a 20th century twist. Denials of responsibility and accusations of blind and unfair bigotry had been honed to perfection for centuries in Europe, but now came the masterful flourish of the pluralist culture — to dissolve into “Whiteness” at will and direct Black anger at that mask instead. After all, isn’t the Jew the best friend a Black could ask for?

The Black Desk Killed Malcolm X: That's FBI Not FOI...,

Hipped y'all to the Black Desk in the summer of 2017 -  remember this cat here?

NYTimes |  “The vast majority of white opinion at that time was that this was black-on-black crime, and maybe black-extremist-on-black-extremist crime,” said David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian. “And there was for decades a consensus in black communities that we are not going to pick up that rock to see what’s underneath it.”

At the time Malcolm spoke at the Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965, he was a marked man — spied on by the F.B.I. and the police, denounced as a traitor by the Nation leadership, viscerally hated and beloved. Mr. Farrakhan declared him “worthy of death.” A week before his assassination, his home in Queens was firebombed while he and his wife and four daughters slept inside.

Mr. Muhammad in 2010 uncovered the identity of one of the supposed assassins named in Mr. Hayer’s affidavit, William Bradley, who had changed his name to Almustafa Shabazz and was married to a prominent Newark activist. It was Mr. Bradley’s shotgun blast, researchers contend, that killed Malcolm.

Mr. Shabazz, who died in 2018, denied any involvement in the murder, and lived in plain sight. “I knew him well,” Cory Booker says in the documentary, adding that he was not aware of Mr. Shabazz’s past identity.

Mr. Muhammad published Mr. Shabazz’s name and photograph on his blog in 2010, and then shared his research with Manning Marable, who was working on his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.” Mr. Muhammad believes that the other three men named in Mr. Hayer’s affidavits are dead.

After the book came out, Alvin Sykes, a Kansas City activist who helped persuade the F.B.I. and Justice Department to create a cold case unit for civil rights-era killings, lobbied federal prosecutors to reinvestigate Malcolm’s murder. The department declined. When Mr. Shabazz died, the last remaining loose end was Mr. Aziz, the former Norman 3X Butler, now 81, who served 20 years for a crime he insists he did not commit.

Kwestining Chinese Communist Party Han Elites is WAYCISS!!!!

cbsnews | AMBASSADOR CUI: First of all, America experts are on the list recommended by the W.H.O. We certainly respect- I think all of us respect the W.H.O. as the most professional intergovernmental body in the world and for the U.S. CDC, they have very frequent regular contact with the- their Chinese counterparts, the Chinese CDC. And even beyond that, some American experts have come to China already on their own individual basis. So there's ongoing contacts not only between the two governments, but also between the two CDC's and between the academic institutions and even some American companies are also offering help, technical help.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, I- I asked the question, because it also gets at there's a lot of unknown and a lot of suspicion because of that. And in fact, this week, Senator Tom Cotton, who sits on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committee, suggested that the virus may have come from China's biological warfare program. That's an extraordinary charge. How do you respond to that?

AMBASSADOR CUI: I think it's true that a lot is still unknown and our scientists, Chinese scientists, American scientists, scientists of other countries are doing their best to learn more about the virus, but it's very harmful. It's very dangerous to stir up suspicion, rumors and spread them among the people. For one thing, this will create panic. Another thing that it will fend up racial discrimination, xenophobia, all these things, that will really harm our joint efforts to combat the virus. Of course, there are all kinds of speculation and rumors. There are people who are saying that these virus are coming from some- some military lab, not of China, maybe in the United States. How- how can we believe all these crazy things?

MARGARET BRENNAN: You think it's crazy. Where did the virus come from? 

AMBASSADOR CUI: Absolutely crazy. 

MARGARET BRENNAN: Where did the virus come from? 

AMBASSADOR CUI: We still don't know yet. It's probably according to some initial outcome of the research, probably coming from some animals. But we have to- to discover more about it.

MARGARET BRENNAN: There has been some outcry on social media, particularly after the death of Dr. Li Wenliang. He had made public warnings for weeks before the government acknowledged this was happening. In fact, authorities had forced him to disavow what he had said previously, which turned out to be true. The Communist Party of China is now investigating this. Why?

AMBASSADOR CUI: Well, we are all very saddened about the death of Dr. Li. He is a good doctor. He was a devoted doctor, and he did his best to protect people's health. We are so grateful to him. But you see, he was a doctor and a doctor could be alarmed by some individual cases. But as for the government, you have to do more. You have to base your decisions, your announcement on more solid evidence and signs.

MARGARET BRENNAN: But do you think silencing him in the beginning was a mistake?

AMBASSADOR CUI: I- I don't know who tried to silence him, but there was certainly a disagreement or people were not able to reach agreement on what exactly the virus is, how it is affecting people. So there was a process of trying to discover more, to learn more about the virus. Maybe some people reacted not quickly enough. Maybe Dr. Li, he perceived some incoming dangers earlier than others, but this is- this could happen anywhere, but whenever we find there's some shortcoming,--

Ethnic Differentiation of Airway Epithelia - I Hope Melanin is a Factor

NIH |  Studies of patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) demonstrate that the respiratory tract is a major site of SARS-coronavirus (CoV) infection and disease morbidity. We studied host-pathogen interactions using native lung tissue and a model of well-differentiated cultures of primary human airway epithelia. Angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the receptor for both the SARS-CoV and the related human respiratory coronavirus NL63, was expressed in human airway epithelia as well as lung parenchyma. As assessed by immunofluorescence staining and membrane biotinylation, ACE2 protein was more abundantly expressed on the apical than the basolateral surface of polarized airway epithelia. Interestingly, ACE2 expression positively correlated with the differentiation state of epithelia. 

golemxiv |   Like every issue of consequence, in our Age of Incomprehension, opinion about the truth concerning the  Corona virus outbreak is divided.  Either China is taking all prudent steps, the virus, while transmissible, has a low mortality rate and the West, with its travel bans, is over-reacting in a vaguely racist manner, or China has the virus far from contained, we don’t know just how transmissible it is nor its mortality rate because the figures from China can’t be trusted and therefore travel bans are a wise precaution.

If travel bans to and from the infected parts of China turn out to have been justified then one country in particular may be worth watching, Ethiopia.  Ethiopia’s Bole International airport is the main African gateway to and from China. On average 1500 passengers per day arrive from China every day.  Ethiopia scans them all for symptoms which essentially means taking their temperature.

Many of those passengers then fly on to other parts of Africa where Chinese companies are doing business. These are 2018 figures courtesy of Brookings.

The three main areas of Chinese business in Africa are transport, which generally means building airports and railways, energy which means building power stations and grids and metals which means mines.

One of the airports the Chinese funded and built is Bole International Airport in Ethiopia.

Infodemic Quarantine Explains My Two-Week Traffic Drop-off - Interweb Giants Indispensable to Control

NYTimes |  The reality is that the coronavirus is a rapidly spreading respiratory infection that originated in Wuhan, China. Most of the cases, and nearly all of the deaths, have so far been in China, though the germ has reached dozens of other countries in recent weeks.

Medical misinformation on the virus has been driven by ideologues who distrust science and proven measures like vaccines, and by profiteers who scare up internet traffic with zany tales and try to capitalize on that traffic by selling “cures” or other health and wellness products.

“There are self-appointed experts, people working from anecdote, or making up wild claims to get traffic or notoriety,” said Mr. Pattison of the W.H.O.

The groundwork for the coordination around the coronavirus was laid two years ago, when Mr. Pattison went to the W.H.O. general director, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and suggested a full-blown effort to connect with social media titans to combat health misinformation. Now about a half-dozen W.H.O. staffers in Geneva are working on the issue, building relationships with digital and social media sites. Over time, the cooperative efforts have grown. For instance, last August, Pinterest teamed up with the W.H.O. to link to accurate information about vaccines when people search the service for that topic.

Ifeoma Ozoma, public policy and social impact manager at Pinterest, said the company “has been working with the World Health Organization over the last year,” with an aim to “make sure people can find authoritative information when it really counts.”

The W.H.O. seeks no money, nor pays any, in these relationships, Mr. Pattison said. Rather, he explained, it is lending its credibility and hoping to use “their reach.”

The relationship has borne concrete results.

Google launched what it calls an “SOS Alert,” which directs people who search for “coronavirus” to news and other information from the W.H.O., including to the organization’s Twitter account; that was expanded Thursday to include information in not just English but also French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The W.H.O. has also worked with the major Chinese-owned social media site WeChat to add a news feed featuring correct information, translated into Chinese by the W.H.O.

The health agency has worked especially closely with Facebook. The company has used human fact checkers to flag misinformation, which can come to their attention through computer programs that identify suspicious keywords and trends. Such posts can then be moved down in news feeds, or, in rare cases, removed altogether.

Stop Lying, Cheating, Stealing, and Killing! Then the "Agents of Chaos" GOT NOTHING!!!

WaPo |  At first glance, the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak and the Democratic Party’s bungling of the Iowa caucuses don’t seem to have much in common. Yet take a closer look and you’ll see that both attest to the growing power of the agents of chaos who are prepared to twist information to nefarious ends.

It’s the uncertainty and the fear surrounding the Wuhan virus that have made it a global news story. The Chinese Communist Party reacted to the initial outbreak just as it has in the past — by suppressing any information from the source of the epidemic, including cracking down on a doctor who revealed it early on.

That has created a fertile environment for overheated media coverage, half-truths and conspiracy theories. No, the Wuhan virus almost certainly didn’t emerge from Chinese bioweapons research. And no, you can’t cure it with oregano oil.

Which brings us to Iowa. The state Democratic Party’s catastrophic mismanagement of the caucus vote count would have been bad enough in its own right. On Thursday, the chair of the Democratic National Committee said that he wants to see the results recounted. Yet the spreaders of disinformation have been working around the clock to exacerbate the damage — and here, too, Facebook, Google and Twitter have proved completely incapable of reining in the falsehoods.

The reality is that too many people have figured out that undermining the truth is easy, fun and profitable.The agents of chaos have the upper hand. We’d better figure out a way to fight back, and soon.

World Health Organization Never Held China Accountable

WaPo |  As a mysterious virus spread through Wuhan last month, the World Health Organization had a message: China has got this.

And as the coronavirus swept across the Chinese heartland and jumped to other nations, WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, applauded the “transparency” of the Chinese response.

Even as evidence mounted that Chinese officials had silenced whistleblowers and undercounted cases, Tedros took a moment to extol the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Now — more than a month into an escalating global health crisis — there are questions about whether the WHO’s praise in the early weeks created a false sense of security that potentially spurred the virus’s spread.

Some experts have defended the comments as sound strategy.

“WHO has really tricky balancing act,” said Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. “If that means praising China publicly, that’s what he has to do.”

Others worried that it could shake faith in the U.N. body.

Praising China’s leaders “is not a bad idea, but do you want to do it in a professional and credible way,” said the Council on Foreign Relations’ Huang.

For now, WHO seems to be sticking with the strategy.

At a new conference on Thursday, Tedros was asked, again, about China, including the death of one of the Chinese doctors who sounded the alarm on the virus, only to be detained by police. (He later died of the virus.)

He first deferred to a colleague, then took the chance to speak again, defending China’s handling of the epidemic. “It is very difficult, given the facts,” he said, “to say that China was hiding.”

Push Your Sheeple Mind to Track the Competing nCoV Propaganda Schemes

vox |  We’re at a pivotal moment in the outbreak of the new coronavirus in China. Depending on whom you ask, we’re either already in a pandemic, meaning there are ongoing epidemics of the virus on two or more continents; we’re hurtling toward one; or we’re on the path to averting a spiraling crisis. 

As of February 6, more than 28,000 people have been infected with 2019-nCoV, as the respiratory virus is known, and 565 people have died. There are also nearly 200 cases in 26 countries besides China, including one death in the Philippines. This toll represents a tragic and stunning increase from a month ago, when it looked like there were no more than 50 patients with the virus in Wuhan, the mainland Chinese city where the virus is thought to have originated. 

There’s still so much we don’t know about 2019-nCoV, including how exactly it’s transmitted, where it’s spreading, and how deadly it is. And that uncertainty is important because viruses have funny ways of surprising us: H1N1 “swine flu,” which was a pandemic, turned out to be much less deadly than feared. (A disease can be pandemic and not particularly severe.) Ebola, meanwhile, was known to science for decades and then behaved in ways that caught infectious disease experts off guard during the 2014-2016 epidemic in West Africa.

Given the unknowns about 2019-nCoV, in the coming days and weeks, we’re in for some twists and turns. For now, many experts believe this outbreak could get a lot worse: burdening the Chinese health system, spreading in poorer countries with weaker health systems, and sickening and killing thousands more people along the way. Alternatively, it could get much better, with new cases and deaths steadily dropping. Here are the key factors that will determine which way it goes. 

Expired Snowflake Says "Wuhan Coronavirus" - Name is WAYCISS!!!

salon |  Some day, I will draw up a visual flowchart to explain how epidemics are named for the public. Specifically, there is a logic employed by both the media and the scientific community, though neither speak it aloud. It starts with the question of where the virus originates: is it currently spreading in the US, or in another Western country? If so, give it its numerical designation (e.g. H1N1), or reference the animal in which we think it started (e.g. Swine Flu, or Mad Cow Disease). 

But if it started in a country that Americans have stereotypes towards, naming it after that region — as with Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Asian Flu, and now, Wuhan Coronavirus — is a great way to play on xenophobic and racist tropes. 

Yes, that means that white supremacy can be a factor even in the way that we name viruses — such as when the language around it, purportedly objective and scientific, stems from a white-centered, xenophobic perspective. Fears over a possible pandemic over the 2019-nCoV coronavirus (tagged by most media outlets, including the New York Times, the "Wuhan Coronavirus") has transmogrified into unchecked xenophobia and racism, with children being barred from music lessons and people running away from any person who looks East Asian. In New York City there have been several reports of assaults on Asian people, an assailant punching and kicking a woman, calling her a "diseased b*tch," and Trump-enabled racists @-ing him on Twitter, suggesting the entire country of China should be "nuked."

Trump's overheated rhetoric on migrants and people of color — and "s**thole countries," as he calls much of the world — are absolutely fanning the flames of the racist response to the Coronavirus. Yet it is important to recognize that this bias against Asians is nothing new; that the engine of white supremacist culture and language continually hums underground until something like 2019-nCoV makes it visible.

The idea that Asians are dirty, eat strange foods, and are vectors of disease has existed for as long as Asians have been in the U.S., and these ideas continue to exist today. In the 1850s, Chinese immigration was first welcomed because of our growing country's dire need for labor, and the Chinese were admired for their reputation as hard, uncomplaining workers.

In subsequent years, when the continued influx of immigration began to threaten the job prospects for white laborers, calls for immigration restrictions began alongside rumors that the Chinese were disease vectors. During an outbreak of smallpox in San Francisco in 1876, a population of 30,000 Chinese living there became medical scapegoats, Chinatown was blamed as a "laboratory of infection," and quarantined amidst renewed calls to halt immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration law based on race, was enacted in 1882.

Trump Wants to Know if nCoV is an Engineered Bioweapon

zerohedge |  The real reason behind the viral spread, we suggested, was that a weaponized version of the coronavirus (one which may have originally been obtained from Canada), was released by Wuhan's Institute of Virology (presumably accidentally ), China's only top, level-4 biohazard lab, which was studying "the world's most dangerous pathogens."

At the time we summarized the series of dots and asked "real reporters" to connect them:

1. One of China's top virology and immunology experts was and still works at China's top-rated biohazard lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some have affectionately called the real Umbrella Corp.
2. Since 2009, Peng has been the leading Chinese scientist researching the immune mechanism of bats carrying and transmitting lethal viruses in the world.
3. His primary field of study is researching how and why bats can be infected with some of the most nightmarish viruses in the world including Ebola, SARS and Coronavirus, and not get sick.
4. He was genetically engineering various immune pathways (such as the STING pathway in bats) to make the bats more or less susceptible to infection, in the process potentially creating a highly resistant mutant superbug.
5. As part of his studies, Peng also researched mutant Coronavirus strains that overcame the natural immunity of some bats; these are "superbug" Coronavirus strains, which are resistant to any natural immune pathway, and now appear to be out in the wild.
6. As of mid-November, his lab was actively hiring inexperienced post-docs to help conduct his research into super-Coronaviruses and bat infections.
7. Peng's work on virology and bat immunology has received support from the National "You Qing" Fund, the pilot project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the major project of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Of course, that is all ancient history and Zero Hedge was permanently banned from Twitter for raising such a conspiracy theory about a publicly-searchable person working a publicly-searchable place.

But, bygones being bygones, we moved on... until today when no lesser entity than The White House began asking questions about the origin of the deadly coronavirus.

Specifically, ABC News' Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton asked the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease about concerns that stem from misinformation online that the novel coronavirus could have been engineered or deliberately released.

China's Han Elites Sacrificed a Province to Save Themselves...,

 bloomberg |  Scenes of chaos and despair are emerging daily from China’s Hubei province, the landlocked region of 60 million people where the new coronavirus dubbed 2019-nCoV was first identified in December, and where it has since cut a wide, deadly swathe.

While cases have spread around the globe, the virus’ impact has been most keenly felt in Hubei, which has seen a staggering 97% of all deaths from the illness, and 67% of all patients.

The toll, which grows larger every day, reflects a local health system overwhelmed by the fast-moving, alien pathogen, making even the most basic care impossible. It’s also an ongoing illustration of the human cost extracted by the world’s largest-known quarantine, with China effectively locking down the region from Jan. 23 to contain the virus’ spread to the rest of the country, and the world.

But Hubei -- known for its car factories and bustling capital Wuhan -- is paying the price, with the mortality rate for coronavirus patients there 3.1%, versus 0.16% for the rest of China.

“If the province was not sealed off, some people would have gone all around the country to try to get medical help, and would have turned the whole nation into an epidemic-stricken area,” said Yang Gonghuan, former deputy director general of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 

“The quarantine brought a lot of hardship to Hubei and Wuhan, but it was the right thing to do.”

“It’s like fighting a war -- some things are hard, but must be done.”

Wuhan, home to 11 million people, is a “second-tier” Chinese city, meaning it’s relatively developed but still a step below China’s major metropolises of Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou. It has well-regarded hospitals, but resources lag behind those of more prominent cities.

In the early days of the virus’ spread, prevarication and delay by local officials also allowed the pathogen to circulate more widely among an unsuspecting public.

Han Elite's Rapidly Deployed "Hospital" Looks a Lot Like a Prison

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

taiwannews |  Video has surfaced allegedly shot from inside the instant "hospital" hastily constructed in Wuhan appearing much more like a prison than a center to care for sick patients.

On Monday (Feb. 3), Communist China claimed to have completed the Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan to house 1,000 of the city's residents infected with the novel coronavirus (2019nCoV). The rapid construction of the hospital was widely trumpeted by Chinese state-run mouthpieces and parroted by Western media outlets as an example of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) superior ability to quickly respond to crises, while a de-emphasis was placed on the initial slow response that arguably allowed the virus to mushroom out of control.

However, the dissident organization Himalaya Global released a video on its Twitter page Monday which was apparently secretly filmed by a Chinese contractor inside the new facility. The video starts with the contractor introducing the Spartan interior of Ward 1.

The man starts out by ominously saying, "Once you are in, you can't get out." He then asserts that patients would be better off staying at home than checking into the new compound.

The camera then focuses on the tiny windows that he said would be used to serve food to patients. In the background, another man can be heard saying that "the dead will be removed from that door."

One Might Ask Why the CCP Has Such a Talent for the Rapid Construction of ____________?

moneymaven |  That images is from the FT article WHO expert says China too slow to report coronavirus cases.

The article notes that John Mackenzie, a senior member of the WHO's emergency committee broke ranks and called China’s response “reprehensible”.

“There must have been more cases happening that we weren’t being told about," said Mackenzie.

Previously, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, lavished praise on China for its response.

Questions Abound

1. Is the world saved?
2. Is China?
3. How many have really died?
4. What about medical supplies?
5. Are those images of functional hospital or deathatoriums?

Only 500 Dead?

and the WSJ reports Wuhan Coronavirus Hospitals Turn Away All but Most Severe Cases

In light of "All but severe cases turned away," do we have an answer for question 5?

This is truly sad.

Economically, a "Made in China" Economic Hit is Coming Right Up.

Lawfare Throws House Impeachment ClownCar Under the Bus

lawfare |  But how the impeachment inquiry itself was conducted had an effect as well. Undoubtedly, the process suffered in part from the inherently political nature of the House. As political scientists are wont to emphasize, Congress is a they, not an it. Democratic leaders were cross-pressured by factions within their coalition who were eager to rush ahead with an impeachment and by those who were uncertain and reluctant about the political desirability of an impeachment. The House stumbled through a messy process in part because the majority was uncertain where it was going.

The House also seemed to struggle to contain the egos and ambitions of its own members. When the Ukraine story broke and it became obvious that an impeachment inquiry was on the horizon, Democrats proved unable to make the choices necessary to put the best case forward. Rather than entrusting the inquiry to a single permanent committee or appointing a select committee for this particular task, the Democrats allowed the inquiry to be divided across multiple committees with no clear leadership. Rather than keeping the focus on the administration’s misconduct, the House catered to the political needs of individual members looking to get their own share of the national spotlight. Rather than systematically exposing the available facts and constructing a coherent narrative of events, the House generated a confusion of soundbites and political posturing.

Having begun the investigation without any clear plan for proceeding, the impeachment inquiry lacked both transparency and organization and generated needless procedural puzzles and oppositional talking points. The president’s defense team has made a great deal out of the House conducting depositions in a “basement bunker” closed to the public. Yet not only is there nothing wrong with a congressional process for investigating diplomatic conduct that includes a phase in executive session behind closed doors, but it is the only sensible approach. However, the Republicans were given more of a talking point by the Democrats’ inability to outline a comprehensive plan for how the investigation would proceed. Members of the Democratic leadership themselves struggled to get on the same page on whether and when an impeachment inquiry had been launched, and even when Pelosi was willing to declare that a formal impeachment inquiry had begun, she was unwilling to provide a blueprint for how such an inquiry would proceed.

Trump Needs to Take Off the Kid-Gloves and Start Cracking Skulls

off-guardian |  After dragging the country through three years of Russiagate which never panned out, the Democrats appear to be scoring yet another own goal. Even a near brush with war against Iran does not seem to have impacted Trump’s favorability, which could have been seen as a reversal of his campaign pledges to end America’s forever wars that were arguably a significant factor in his unlikely victory.

It was Trump’s rhetoric as a peace candidate suggesting rapprochement with Russia which made him a target of the political establishment and intelligence community, who subsequently blamed his shocking win on still-unproven allegations of election interference by the Kremlin. 

Since he took office, Trump has done nearly everything short of declaring war on Moscow to appease the bipartisan anti-Russia consensus in Washington but to no avail. One such step was the decision to provide military aid to Ukraine amid its ongoing war in the eastern Donbass region against Russian-speaking separatists, a move the Obama administration decided against because of Kiev’s rampant corruption. 

Trump’s predecessor tapped his Vice President, Joe Biden, to head up an anti-corruption drive in Ukraine who instead used the opportunity to personally enrich his family by landing his son, Hunter, a job on the executive board of the country’s largest private gas company, Burisma Holdings.

Biden led the U.S. role in the 2014 coup d’etat in Ukraine which overthrew the democratically-elected government of Viktor Yanukovych after he turned down a European Union Association Agreement for an economic bail-out from Russia that was the flashpoint for the subsequent Donbass war. 

Contrary to the Trump-Russia ‘collusion’ narrative, one figure who tried to lobby Yanukovych into signing the pro-austerity treaty was none other than Paul Manafort, the future Trump campaign manager indicted during the Russia probe for failing to register as a foreign agent while consulting for the deposed Ukrainian president. 

Manafort’s influence went against Russian interests in favor of the EU and was years before Trump was ever a candidate, but this did not stop the Democrats from later misconstruing it as evidence he was a backchannel to the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Biden’s hand in the junta was revealed in an infamous leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.

Nuland, who is the wife of leading neoconservative figure Robert Kagan, also spilled the beans that the U.S. invested as much as $5 billion dollars on regime change in Kiev when we were led to believe the Maidan was a spontaneous, popular revolt.

Shortly after the putsch, Hunter Biden joined the board of directors at Burisma despite having no experience in Ukraine or the energy sector. 

The embattled fracking company was founded by a notorious oligarch and corrupt minister from the Yanukovych era, Mykola Zlochevsky, yet who unlike the former did not have to flee to Russia and curiously escaped prosecution in a money laundering case under the new Western-friendly regime — did he obtain immunity with Hunter Biden’s appointment?

When the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, reportedly began to investigate the energy firm, the elder Biden did not just blackmail the post-Maidan government of Petro Poroshenko into sacking him by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees but openly bragged about it on camera:

A BitchMade Snowflake Got Me Suspended From Nextdoor For A Week For Liking KCXL

Told you about this station a couple weeks ago, and the McCarthy-ite mess being stirred up locally by the MSM to censure and censor its programming. Anyway, not only is the station a broadcaster non grata, anyone with the audacity to listen to it and like it may be subject to persona non grata status on these interwebs with a quickness. This cancel culture is desperately in need of some rough disciplining.

kcur |  The man responsible for broadcasting Russian state programming in the Kansas City area says he always dreamed of owning a radio station.

Today he owns two, plus a small fleet of radio transmitters across the Kansas City metro.

But money remains tight, he laid off his staff years ago and the stations sell airtime to local residents and religious organizations at cut-rate prices. He hasn’t given himself a paycheck in months. 

So Pete Schartel’s ears perked up a while back when he heard that Radio Sputnik pays $30,000 a month to broadcast its programming in Washington, D.C.

“I’m going, ‘Oh my Lord, that’s twice what my whole budget is,’” he told KCUR in a two-hour interview at his flagship station, KCXL, last week. “They must have some money. Let’s investigate this.”

Schartel found Arnold Ferolito, the broker who negotiated the 2017 deal to broadcast Russian programming 24 hours a day in Washington, and made his pitch: “We’re right in the middle of the country. This would be a good test market.”

Ferolito agreed. Late last year, Schartel began broadcasting Radio Sputnik for a couple of hours each morning on KCXL, an AM radio station based in Liberty, Missouri. 

The English-language broadcast is produced by the U.S.-based branch of Rossiya Segodnya (“Russia Today”), an organization created in 2013 by Russian President Vladimir Putin to promote Russian interests abroad.

Schartel’s listeners — accustomed to eclectic programming that ranges from music to Bible study to far-right conspiracy theorist and talk show host Alex Jones — seemed to react positively. 

“And I’m going, ‘Hmm, I think we’ve got something that some people like here,’” he said. “And if they’ll pay me for it, that’s even better.”

In January, Schartel and his wife, Jonne, agreed to broadcast Radio Sputnik for six hours a day for three years on three frequencies: 1140 AM, 102.9 FM and 104.7 FM.

Escalating State Violence in France Shows Why There'll NEVER Be Gun Control in the U.S.

jonathanturley |  We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here and here). A teenager has sparked a national debate about blasphemy in France after an Instagram post calling Islam a “religion of hate”.

Indeed, France has emerged as one of the greatest threats to free speech in the West and we continue to face calls for European-style speech crimes, including calls by its President on the floor of the House of Representatives. Now a teenager in France has triggered a debate over its plunge into speech crimes and regulation after characterizing Islam as “a religion of hate.”

She can now be criminally investigated for hate speech under the notorious French speech law.

I was Hoping for the Pentangeli Rant but Trump Went FreeForm 13 Year Old Boy Instead..,

vox |  Thank you very much, everybody. We’ve all been through a lot together, and we probably deserve that hand for all of us because it’s been a very unfair situation. I invited some of our very good friends, and we have limited room, but everybody wanted to come. We kept it down to a minimum, and believe it or not, this is a minimum. 

But a tremendous thing was done over the last number of months, but really, if you go back to it, over the last number of years. We had the witch hunt. It started from the day we came down the elevator, myself and our future first lady, who is with us right now. Thank you, Melania. [Cheers and applause] 

And it never really stopped. We’ve been going through this now for over three years. It was evil, it was corrupt, it was dirty cops, it was leakers and liars, and this should never, ever happen to another president, ever. I don’t know that other presidents would have been able to take it. Some people said, no, they wouldn’t have. 

But I can tell you, at a minimum, you have to focus on this because it can get away very quickly no matter who you have with you. It can get away very quickly. It was a disgrace. Had I not fired James Comey, who was a disaster, by the way, it’s possible I wouldn’t even be standing here right now. We caught him in the act. Dirty cops. Bad people. If this happened to President Obama, a lot of people would have been in jail for a long time already. Many, many years. 

I want to start by thanking — I call them friends because, you know, you develop friendships and relationships when you’re in battle and war much more so than in a normal situation. 

We’ve gone through more than any president or administration, and really, I say for the most part, Republican congressmen, congresswomen and Republican senators, we’ve done more than any administration in the first few years. You look at all of the things we’ve done. I watched this morning as they tried to take credit for the stock market from — let me tell you, if we didn’t win, the stock market would have crashed.

Trump Prayer Breakfast Amuse Bouche...,

publicpool.kinja |  But this morning, we come together as one nation, blessed to live in freedom and grateful to worship in peace. As everybody knows, my family, our great country, and your President, have been put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people. They have done everything possible to destroy us, and by so doing, very badly hurt our nation. They know what they are doing is wrong, but they put themselves far ahead of our great country.

Weeks ago, and again yesterday, courageous Republican politicians and leaders had the wisdom, the fortitude, and strength to do what everyone knows was right. I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong. Nor do I like people who say, "I pray for you," when they know that that's not so.

So many people have been hurt, and we can't let that go on. And I'll be discussing that a little bit later at the White House.

Trump Is A Consummate Showman - He Knocked This One Out of the Park

airforcemag |  President Donald Trump honored Tuskegee Airman Charles McGee during his State of the Union address on Feb. 4, hours after pinning stars on McGee’s shoulders in the Oval Office.

McGee, who turned 100 on Dec. 7, was honorarily promoted from colonel to brigadier general in the 2020 defense policy bill. 

The Air Force legend served three decades in uniform, launching his career in the U.S. Army Air Corps. McGee escorted bombers over Germany, Austria, and the Balkans in the P-39Q Airacobra, P-47D Thunderbolt, and the P-51 Mustang during World War II. During the Korean War, McGee flew the F-51 on 100 interdiction missions from Japan, and he flew an additional 173 reconnaissance missions in the RF-4C during Vietnam. 

Throughout his career, McGee flew a record 409 combat missions, more than any other pilot in the three wars.  

“Incredible story. After more than 130 combat missions in World War II, he came back home to a country still struggling for civil rights and went on to serve America in Korea and Vietnam,” Trump said. He added, “Gen. McGee, our nation salutes you. Thank you, sir.” 

Trump also offered a glimpse of future generations of airmen, touting the U.S. Space Force—the nation’s newest military service—and honoring McGee’s grandson, Iain Lanphier, an eighth grader in Arizona, who “aspires to go to the Air Force Academy” and one day work for the Space Force. 

“Most people look up at space. Ian says, ‘I want to look down on the world.’”

There Has Never Been a More Blatant Example of Election Tampering...,EVER!!!

I've never seen a more blatant example of concentrated money rigging an election than Iowa Dems releasing a random percentage of the vote after self-dealing grifters tied to Buttigieg fucked up an election, followed by the NYT, WaPost, CNN, and MSNBC announcing 'partial results.'

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 4, 2020

theintercept |  David Plouffe, a former campaign manager to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid who joined Acronym’s board, also distanced himself from the company during an MSNBC panel last night. “I have no knowledge of Shadow,” said Plouffe. “It was news to me.”

But previous statements and internal Acronym documents suggest that the two companies, which share office space in Denver, Colorado, are deeply intertwined.

Last year, McGowan, a co-founder of Acronym, wrote on Twitter that she was “so excited to announce @anotheracronym has acquired Groundbase,” a firm that included “their incredible team led by [Gerard Niemira] + are launching Shadow, a new tech company to build smarter infrastructure for campaigns.” McGowan also noted that “With Shadow, we’re building a new model incentivized by adoption over growth.” The acquisition was announced in mid-January of last year.

In an interview on a related podcast last month, McGowan described Niemira as “the CEO of Shadow, which is the technology company that Acronym is the sole investor in now.”

What’s more, internal documents from Acronym show a close relationship with Shadow. An internal organizational chart shows digital strategy firm Lockwood Strategy, FWIW Media, and Shadow as part of a unified structure, with Acronym staff involved in the trio’s operations.

In an all-staff email sent last Friday, an official with Lockwood Strategy reminded team members about “COOL THINGS HAPPENING AROUND ACRONYM.” The list included bullets points such as, “The Iowa caucus is on Monday, and the Shadow team is hard at work,” and “Shadow is working on scaling up VAN integration with Shadow Messaging for some Iowa caucus clients.” (VAN refers to the widely used Democratic voter file technology firm.) Acronym staffers also attended the Shadow staff retreat.

A person with knowledge of the company’s culture, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, shared communications showing that top officials at the company regularly expressed hostility to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s supporters. McGowan is married to Michael Halle, a senior strategist with the Buttigieg campaign. There is no evidence any preference of candidates had any effect on the coding issue that is stalling the Iowa results.

Poor Symone Sanders - Lying, Sweating, Sold Out for a Nickel...,

npr |  Right now we're going to hear from the campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden. Symone Sanders is a senior adviser to Biden, and she joins me now from New Hampshire.

KELLY: Glad to have you with us. So you have been sharing some of your campaign's projections on Twitter today. I've been following along. You said you're thrilled with Joe Biden's performance in Iowa. The other candidates are citing different projections, ones that make them look good, that don't look so good for Biden. So are you confident that when the numbers eventually come out, Joe Biden will be a front-runner in Iowa?

SANDERS: Look - we are very confident about our internal data. But I'd also like to caution folks to understand that any data any campaign is sharing is based on internal data. These are not the final numbers.

SANDERS: The reality is, we don't know the final numbers, which is why our campaign sent a letter to the Iowa Democratic Party last night urging and imploring that they check the data, check again and triple-check the data before releasing anything. So I know that there are reports that there is some type of data coming today, shortly, soon, in the coming hour.

KELLY: Right.

SANDERS: But the reality is, we need total numbers from precincts all across the state. There was a real breakdown in the process last night, from what was happening at precincts on the ground in Iowa to the app that the Iowa Democratic Party was using to the backup phone system and even with the collecting and recording and filling out a presidential preference card.

KELLY: Right. To your point...

SANDERS: So we really need to make sure we get this right.

KELLY: ...They're telling us that when they do put out results about an hour or so from now, we still won't get all of them. These will be partial results. So we still won't have full clarity about what exactly happened in Iowa and what it means going forward in the race.

SANDERS: And I think that's unfortunate. I think the voters are owed clarity, frankly, but - and the caucusgoers in Iowa. But, you know, we left Iowa last night, again, as I've said on Twitter and all day today, proud of our organization. We're in New Hampshire today. We have a full day of campaign events. We will be campaigning here aggressively over the next week. And we're looking forward to the primary on Tuesday. We've always thought...

KELLY: May I just press you on this for a minute...

SANDERS: I would just say, we've always thought...

KELLY: If I may, may I just press you on this? Because you said this is a shame for the voters. What about for candidates? Does the delay in results steal momentum from whoever ultimately comes out on top in Iowa?

SANDERS: I mean, I think that's a hypothetical. The reality is, this process has never just been about Iowa. It's not just about New Hampshire. And it's not just about Nevada or South Carolina. These first four nominating contests, we have always said, should be viewed as individual parts of one whole. They should be viewed as a package. And you don't get the full depth and breadth of anyone's strength or the lack thereof with just the Iowa results or just the New Hampshire results, frankly.

Since 1992, the Democratic nominee - no Democratic nominee has been the nominee without a substantial amount of votes from the African American community. You don't get that coming out of Iowa or New Hampshire.

House Kneegrow Busted Unselfconsciously AssKissing and Bootlicking

nakedcapitalism | On one level, this is an illustration of America’s descent into banana republic status. Pundits and the media keep reinforcing American exceptionalist fantasies, our brand fumes of vaunted democracy, yet we can’t even run elections competently. Is is just the grifting, that introducing more tech creates more opportunities for vendor enrichment? Or is it yet more proof that a lot of people in charge really hate democracy and are at best indifferent to doing things right?

It’s not hard to see the Iowa fiasco as an illustration of an even more deeply-seated pathology: elite incompetence. Too many people with the right resumes get to fail upwards or at worst sideways. And remember, unlike our older WASP-y leaders who were a combination of people from the right clubs and self-made men, our current crop of people in charge pride themselves on being the end products of a meritocratic system, as in their claim to legitimacy stems from the claim that they are more talented (gah) than mere mortals and therefore obviously should be in the top slots because they’ll do oh so much better than everyone else.

And it’s the Democratic party, as the representative of the 10% professional managerial classes, that really owns this disease. Recall in Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal how he set forth, without irony, a conference that was treacly with the self-regard, with the way every participant was lavished with embarrassing exaggerations of their accomplishments. No one had the slightest sense of how narcissistic and pampered they seemed. And it wasn’t hard to imagine they’d all collapse in a heap if presented with a real challenge, like suddenly becoming destitute or being dumped in a remote area with neither a water bottle nor GPS.

And we keep seeing this leadership class succeed in rent extraction and not much else. Go down the list: The post-crisis failure to reform the banks or even go through the motions by incarcerating a few execs and turfing out some board members. Our grossly over-priced, underperforming health care system. Our student-impoverishing higher education system. The F-35. The botched Obamacare rollout. Our Middle-East nation-breaking, which has scored geopolitical own goals like destabilizing Europe, facilitating Russia asserting itself a geopolitical power despite having an economy the size of South Korea and in the face of our economic sanctions, and making us deservedly disliked around the world. Hillary Clinton losing to of all people Donald Trump despite spending twice as much as his campaign spend because her team was enamored of Robby Mook’s models and somehow forgot about the Electoral College. 

And if you believe, as Team Dem does, that every problem can be solved with better PR, the corollary is you never admit to failure, you never do post mortems, and you keep incompetents around who you allow to fail and fail again.