Sheer Lindsey Pelas

On Twitter:

😈 👑 pic.twitter.com/rHZSv7OIk0

— Lindsey Pelas (@LindseyPelas) April 21, 2020

Click the photo to see the whole package, whoa.

The American Social Distancing Farce

From Michelle Malkin, "The Grand Farce of American Social Distancing":

We are not a serious country. America’s “social distancing” campaign has gone both too far and not far enough. The restrictions and guidelines are arbitrary, irrational and unevenly applied.

While children’s swings and slides are now crime scenes, golf courses and pickleball courts in my city are wide open.

Weed and booze stores are considered “essential.” Ice cream, dessert joints and fast-food outlets with takeout and delivery services are still operating. But family-owned, sit-down restaurants that have been staples in our community have been forced to shut their doors after decades in business.

Barbershops and hair salons here were ordered to close three weeks ago, but government employees on landscaping crews who cut grass — like the ones I’ve seen all crammed together in a city truck — are still earning paychecks subsidized by the taxpayers sidelined from their jobs in the name of safety and public health.

In my state, and across the country, private gyms have been forbidden spaces for the masses for weeks. But if you’re a celebrity or Beltway elitist, you can still stay in shape while sanctimoniously taping public service announcements telling everyone else to stay at home.

Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez have been racking up social media clicks by sharing cozy family quarantine videos and coping tips from their multi-million-dollar Florida mansion. “We all need to take care of ourselves, mentally and physically, and also be respectful of the health and well-being of others. At a time when people need to stay apart, we can still find other ways to feel togetherness. Stay connected, and most importantly, stay safe,” Rodriguez tweeted to his 1.2 million fans. Yet, last week, the power couple was caught by paparazzi exiting a Miami gym whose front-door sign read: “This gym is not open. Stay home stay safe.”

Actors Mario Lopez and Mark Wahlberg have also become quarantine time favorites, sharing dance routines, home workouts and homeschool scenes to show their commitment to self-isolation. But last week, the buff Hollywood bros ventured out to a posh Los Angeles F45 Training facility to tape a partner workout together (with a two-person film crew) that they told their viewers to replicate in their apartments or backyards...

Keep reading.

The Beautiful Jackie Johnson Enjoying Motherhood and Nature

I miss her nightly weathercasts as CBS News 2 Los Angeles

But she's posting updates to Twitter on her post-weathercaster career as a beautiful and loving mother:

Happy Easter 🌿🐇 pic.twitter.com/1w6bFKM9vW

— Jackie Johnson (@JackieJohnsonLA) April 12, 2020

Love your mother 🌿 #earthday pic.twitter.com/VXT0VGxdjJ

— Jackie Johnson (@JackieJohnsonLA) April 22, 2020

Danielle Gersh's Scorching Weather Forecast

It was 86 degrees at 11:00am this morning when I went out to Walmart for a few things. We've been running the air conditioning all day. A preview of a long, hot summer ahead.

Here's the lovely Ms. Danielle, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles, reporting from home during social distancing:

The Strange Post-Social Distancing Purgatory

From Juliette Kayyem, at the Atlantic, "After Social Distancing, a Strange Purgatory Awaits":

Over the past week, I’ve been informally contacting friends and colleagues in a variety of fields—sports, travel, architecture, entertainment, arts, the clergy, and more—to ask them how their world might look after social distancing. The answer: It looks weird.

We will get used to seeing temperature-screening stations at public venues. If America’s testing capacity improves and results come back quickly, don’t be surprised to see nose swabs at airports. Airlines may contemplate whether flights can be reserved for different groups of passengers—either high- or low-risk. Mass-transit systems will set new rules; don’t be surprised if they mandate masks too.

Changes like these are only the beginning. After most disasters, recovery occurs days or weeks or a few months later—when the hurricane has ended, the flooding has subsided, or the earth has stopped shaking. Once the immediate threat has abated, a community gets its bearings, buries its dead, and begins to clear the debris. In crisis-management lingo, the response phase gives way to the recovery stage, in which a society goes back to normal. But the coronavirus crisis will follow a different trajectory.

Until scientists discover a vaccine, doctors develop significantly better medical treatments, or both, people all over the world will be working around, sharing space with, and sheltering from a virus that still kills. The year or years that follow the lifting of stay-at-home orders won’t be true recovery but something better understood as adaptive recovery, in which we learn to live with the virus even as we root for medical progress.

During this strange purgatory, places such as schools will be governed by direct orders from public officials, and large corporate employers will have tremendous influence on work-related norms. But Americans spend a good amount of our life and money in other spaces. After basic needs are addressed or met, what will it be like to be you?

Face shields—not masks, but clear plastic full-face shields—will be required for fans at sports games or concerts, to the extent that those happen at all. Golf could become the sport of choice as it’s easy to maintain distance and is outdoors. Not coincidentally, the PGA Tour announced plans this week to restart its season in June.

In some of the rosier scenarios, COVID-19 testing and tracking become widespread enough that most businesses can stay open...

Still more.

Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII

At Amazon, Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII.

How Deep Cleaners Kill the Coronavirus

At Popular Mechanics, "Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, we need biohazard cleanup crews now more than ever. These heroes might be the only ones who can disinfect the world back to normal":

Cory Chalmers’s cleaning team looks a lot like Stormtroopers out for a raid.

“We’ve got the white Tyvek suits, the full-face respirators,” Chalmer tells Popular Mechanics. And, of course, the pièce de résistance: electrostatic guns loaded with sodium troclosene, a disinfectant that, when dissolved in water, creates a fine mist of chlorine gas. The guns give the sodium troclosene particles a static charge that makes them cling to objects. When Chalmers and his gang of Galactic Empire cleaners want to disinfect something, all they have to do is point and shoot...

Keep reading.

Via Glenn Reynolds, at Instapundit.

Ruchir Sharma, The 10 Rules of Successful Nations

Just out on March 31st, at Amazon, Ruchir Sharma, The 10 Rules of Successful Nations.

Less Than Zero: U.S. Oil Prices Drop to Negative Territory as Markets Crash

Following-up, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Deletes Tweet Cheering Crash of Oil Markets."

Summary at WSJ, "U.S. Oil Costs Less Than Zero After a Sharp Monday Selloff."

U.S. oil futures plunged below zero for the first time Monday, a chaotic demonstration that there was no place left to store all the crude that the world’s stalled economy would otherwise be using.

The price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude to be delivered in May, which closed at $18.27 a barrel on Friday, ended Monday at negative $37.63. That effectively means that sellers must pay buyers to take barrels off their hands...

More at NPR, "Free Fall: Oil Prices Go Negative."

And at CNBC, "Stock market live Monday: Stocks drop more than 1.5%, oil turns negative, stay-at-home stocks rise."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Deletes Tweet Cheering Crash of Oil Markets

See, at Memeorandum, "AOC cites need to ‘play hardball’ on coronavirus relief packages, in push for $2,000 per month payments."

And NYDN, "Ocasio-Cortez deletes ‘absolutely love to see it’ tweet about oil price crash amid conservative outrage."

And on Twitter:

Think of the COUNTLESS idiotic tweet AOC has posted and never deleted.

She deleted this one. She meant every word, but sometimes you can't be THIS honest. pic.twitter.com/e6bQlW5qet

— Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) April 20, 2020

Never let a crisis got to waste. Sigh.

Big Ones of the Day

At Drunken Stepfather, "TITS ON INSTAGRAM OF THE DAY."

And Katerina Hartlova on Twitter:

Thank you for 80K followers😍 pic.twitter.com/dlou0gP10q

— Official Katerina Hartlova (@Katy_Hartlova) April 19, 2020

'The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile'

This is amazing, at Althouse, quoting an article at the New Yorker, "'Indeed, a number of exiles fell to scowling under the palms.... The composer Eric Zeisl called California a 'sunny blue grave'":

"Adorno could have had Muscle Beach in mind when he identified a social condition called the Health unto Death: 'The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy.'... Such doleful tales raise the question of why so many writers fled to L.A. Why not go to New York, where exiled visual artists gathered in droves? ... [T]he 'lack of a cultural infrastructure' in L.A. was attractive: it allowed refugees to reconstitute the ideals of the Weimar Republic instead of competing with an extant literary scene.... Thomas Mann... lived in a spacious, white-walled aerie in Pacific Palisades... He saw 'Bambi' at the Fox Theatre in Westwood; he ate Chinese food; he listened to Jack Benny on the radio; he furtively admired handsome men in uniform; he puzzled over the phenomenon of the 'Baryton-Boy Frankie Sinatra,' to quote his diaries. Like almost all the émigrés, he never attempted to write fiction about America...."

More.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

The guy's a Marxist.

At Discover the Networks:

* Ethiopia’s former Minister of Health and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

* Was elected Director-General of the World Health Organization in 2017.

* Nominated Robert Mugabe, the Marxist former president of Zimbabwe, to serve as a WHO Goodwill Ambassador in 2017.

* Purposely covered up three separate outbreaks of cholera in Ethiopia, so as to avoid the impact that a public admission of a cholera epidemic might have on tourism and on his party’s public image.

* Was alleged to have helped facilitate a systematic genocide targeting the Amhara people of Ethiopia.

* Was accused of complicity in the commission of “crimes against humanity.”

* Served as a propagandist on behalf of Beijing in a massive coverup of China’s role in unleashing the deadly worldwide coronavirus pandemic in 2019-20.

And FrontPage Magazine, "The Legacy of a Marxist failure – Dr. WHO":

You can't be this stupid Bill. Malicious yes, but ignorant of the attacks on Trump as a racist for taking sensible measures? Also everyone was taking cues from the pawn of the Communist dictatorship that launched the virus Dr. W.H.O. https://t.co/Et3NIWlm9C https://t.co/jpfLybml35

— David Horowitz (@horowitz39) April 13, 2020

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is the name of the top global health official. But what do we know about this man?  The globalization-favoring leftist mainstream media has been silent, apparently reluctant to investigate the total lack of qualifications of this man for the role. 

They give him the moniker of “Doctor”, but he is not really a doctor at all. In fact, he is the first World Health Organization Director-General without a medical degree.

He has never cured a patient in his life. He has a diploma in public health, but even this could not cover his dangerous incompetence as Ethiopia’s Health Minister.

There is growing unhappiness with this man following the disastrous virus crisis. Prominent US senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio joined the global call for Doctor WHO’s removal.

Rubio accused him, with reasonable cause, of pandering to Communist Beijing who, through the office of Dr. WHO, misled the global community. Tedros echoed China’s false claim that the virus had no human-to-human transmission.

In other words, he was the global mouthpiece for Chinese lies.

Former US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, tweeted about Tedros’s unquestioning promotion Chinese lies. “This was posted by the WHO on January 14, that the WHO found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus.”

The World Health Organization didn’t find any because they didn’t look. Tedros Adhanom simply chanted China’s disinformation.

President Trump imposed a travel ban on Chinese entering the United States in late January. He is no medical expert. Trump was right. The World Health Organization under Tedros was wrong.

In February, Tedros, the Chinese front man at the World Health Organization, continued to say there was no need to impose travel restrictions on China. He insisted that measures to restrict travel and trade were “unnecessary” in trying to halt the spread of the virus.

This as hospitals and cemeteries were filling with the victims of the Chinese pandemic.

Because Tedros echoed China’s lies, the global communities lost vital weeks in evaluating and fighting the pandemic to the cost of 100,000 lives and widespread economic ruin, a global ruin that is benefiting China’s Belt and Road foreign and economic global policy. 

Not only does China have a global responsibility to come clean, so does the WHO. But who is going to keep their feet to the fire? The United Nations? Forget it!

In early April, while the China pandemic was raging from country to country, China was elected to sit on the UN Human Rights Council panel, a committee that decides who is a human rights abuser. Any bets that China will be excluded from such a list no matter how many of their citizens were abused, silenced, welded into infected apartment buildings to die, or made to disappear throughout China’s national epidemic.

In February and March, as the world was reeling from the Chinese virus, Tedros continued to praise the Beijing regime.

In February he said, “I was so impressed with my meeting with President Xi and his commitment to take serious measures to prevent the spread of the virus to other countries.”

What “serious measures” was he referring too? We haven’t seen any...

Keep reading.

Trump Opens Space for Business

From Glenn Reynolds, "IT’S PAYWALLED, BUT I’VE GOT A PIECE IN THE WSJ WITH TAYLOR DINERMAN ON THE TRUMP SPACE PUSH: Trump Opens Outer Space for Business: An executive order and a prospective treaty aim to make celestial mining an attractive investment":

President Trump acted two weeks ago to bring about the kind of 21st century that we expected in the 20th. If all goes well, it will open the way for mankind to become a true “multiplanet species,” as Elon Musk puts it.

An April 6 executive order, “Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources,” is meant to spur a new industry: the extraction and processing of resources from the moon and asteroids to facilitate settlement of the solar system. With this order, Mr. Trump ended an era of legal uncertainty in outer space and laid the foundation for international cooperation on American terms.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans a manned moon mission in 2024, followed by a “sustained lunar presence.” The U.S. National Space Council, led by Vice President Mike Pence, has been quietly working on an international agreement known as the Artemis Accords, which would clarify the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and provide a solid basis for private enterprise to operate on the moon, Mars and beyond.

The Outer Space Treaty, to which the U.S. and all other major countries are parties, bars “national appropriation” and sovereignty over the moon and other so-called celestial bodies, declaring that they “shall be the province of all mankind.” Some have read into that provision a prohibition on the private appropriation of resources. The executive order rejects that position: “Outer space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons.” . . .

The Trump order also rejects the 1979 Moon Treaty, which was intended to supplant the Outer Space Treaty. The Moon Treaty purports to ban private exploitation of space resources and mandate that any such activity take place under the supervision of an international authority with a rake-off going to Third World governments. President Carter initially supported the pact, but facing popular opposition, the Senate never took up ratification. Mr. Trump’s statement specifically notes that only 17 of the 95 members of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space have ratified the Moon Treaty. None have a major space program.

As a follow up to the executive order, the administration has been quietly preparing the Artemis Accords, which it plans to present first to America’s partners on the International Space Station—Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia—and later to other nations. Parties would “affirm that the extraction and utilization of space resources does not constitute national appropriation under Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty.” . . .

I love the smell of sovereignty in the morning.

Still more at the link.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New

At Amazon, Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New.

Jessica Simpson, Open Book

She's always been one of my favorites. See, "Jessica Simpson Topless & Sandy on Vacation With Husband."

Also, "Jessica Simpson Huge Natural..."

And at Amazon, Jessica Simpson, Open Book.

Social Distancing in College Classrooms

I really don't know how this is going to work.

First, given reports of the last few days, and especially the news of the Harvard study indicating social distancing may be needed well into 2022, I'm not sure colleges will even be back in the classrooms.

Second, though, how are colleges supposed to do this? At my school, we have enrollment in each class capped at 40 students, which is a full classroom. You're not going to be able to distance students within the class. Either class maximums have to lowered by about half, or teachers are going to have to double their teaching loads, which won't happen.

Man, all of this is crazy.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Social distancing in a classroom? Newsom suggests major changes when schools reopen":

Social distancing in a classroom? Newsom suggests major changes when schools reopen https://t.co/PYSfNIzqZs

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) April 14, 2020

Although campuses are likely to reopen in the fall, the school day may unfold in starkly different ways, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday, suggesting staggered start times, “reconfigured” classrooms that allow for social distancing and some continuance of online learning.

The governor said that physical distancing and other precautions against transmission of the coronavirus could remain in place for a lengthy period at schools after stay-at-home orders are lifted and California begins to gradually reopen.

School district leaders will need to begin considering a host of safety measures, he said.

“Can you stagger the times that our students come in so you can appropriate yourself differently within the existing physical environment — by reducing physical contact if possible, reducing the congregate meal, dressing issues related to PE and recess?” Newsom said. “Those are the kinds of things — those are the kind of conversations we’re all going to be having over the course of the next number of weeks and the next number of months.”

“We need to get our kids back to school,” he added. “I need to get my kids back to school. We need to get our kids educated.”

Such precautionary measures would have a profound impact on the experience of school for the state’s 6.1 million students in kindergarten through 12th grade as well as for students attending college. Since early to mid March, virtually all schooling in California has become “distance learning,” typically involving students and teachers interacting online.

The biggest concern has centered on the effect of the altered learning environment for students who lack computers, adequate broadband or suitable study conditions at home. Many school districts are loaning out computers and arranging for internet access. Los Angeles Unified is spending $100 million on computers and broadband hot spots for its students — 80% are members of low-income households.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said he’s encouraged by the governor’s optimism, the incremental progress in the fight against COVID-19 and the early thinking on reopening schools. All the same, he said, schools need to “continue working on distance learning,” make the most of the current school year and look at using the summer to address academic issues.

On Monday, L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner announced that campuses in the state’s largest school system would remain closed through summer, with online courses available. District officials also said Monday that no student would receive a failing grade for spring classes...

My college is also having online summer classes, and faculty are waiting to hear what's going to happen for the fall semester.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Katie Bell, Laid Back

An amazing woman, dang!

the further you pull me back the further i’ll go 🌩💘 pic.twitter.com/ag2RMvg5DE

— Katie Bell🦋 (@katieeeeebell) April 9, 2020

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

At Amazon, Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall.

Competition, the Coronavirus, and the Weakness of Xi Jinping

From Minxin Pei, at Foreign Affairs, "China’s Coming Upheaval":

The COVID-19 crisis has revealed the fragility of Xi Jinping’s strongman rule, writes Minxin Pei. Could continued pressure from economic stagnation and great-power competition push the regime to a breaking point?https://t.co/MI5jCfZvoN

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) April 13, 2020

Over the past few years, the United States’ approach to China has taken a hard-line turn, with the balance between cooperation and competition in the U.S.-Chinese relationship tilting sharply toward the latter. Most American policymakers and commentators consider this confrontational new strategy a response to China’s growing assertiveness, embodied especially in the controversial figure of Chinese President Xi Jinping. But ultimately, this ongoing tension—particularly with the added pressures of the new coronavirus outbreak and an economic downturn—is likely to expose the brittleness and insecurity that lie beneath the surface of Xi’s, and Beijing’s, assertions of solidity and strength.

The United States has limited means of influencing China’s closed political system, but the diplomatic, economic, and military pressure that Washington can bring to bear on Beijing will put Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) he leads under enormous strain. Indeed, a prolonged period of strategic confrontation with the United States, such as the one China is currently experiencing, will create conditions that are conducive to dramatic changes.

As tension between the United States and China has grown, there has been vociferous debate about the similarities and, perhaps more important, the differences between U.S.-Chinese competition now and U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War. Whatever the limitations of the analogy, Chinese leaders have put considerable thought into the lessons of the Cold War and of the Soviet collapse. Ironically, Beijing may nevertheless be repeating some of the most consequential mistakes of the Soviet regime.

During the multidecade competition of the Cold War, the rigidity of the Soviet regime and its leaders proved to be the United States’ most valuable asset. The Kremlin doubled down on failed strategies—sticking with a moribund economic system, continuing a ruinous arms race, and maintaining an unaffordable global empire—rather than accept the losses that thoroughgoing reforms might have entailed. Chinese leaders are similarly constrained by the rigidities of their own system and therefore limited in their ability to correct policy mistakes. In 2018, Xi decided to abolish presidential term limits, signaling his intention to stay in power indefinitely. He has indulged in heavy-handed purges, ousting prominent party officials under the guise of an anticorruption drive. What is more, Xi has suppressed protests in Hong Kong, arrested hundreds of human rights lawyers and activists, and imposed the tightest media censorship of the post-Mao era. His government has constructed “reeducation” camps in Xinjiang, where it has incarcerated more than a million Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. And it has centralized economic and political decision-making, pouring government resources into state-owned enterprises and honing its surveillance technologies. Yet all together, these measures have made the CCP weaker: the growth of state-owned enterprises distorts the economy, and surveillance fuels resistance. The spread of the novel coronavirus has only deepened the Chinese people’s dissatisfaction with their government.

The economic tensions and political critiques stemming from U.S.-Chinese competition may ultimately prove to be the straws that broke this camel’s back. If Xi continues on this trajectory, eroding the foundations of China’s economic and political power and monopolizing responsibility and control, he will expose the CCP to cataclysmic change.

A PAPER TIGER

Since taking power in 2012, Xi has replaced collective leadership with strongman rule. Before Xi, the regime consistently displayed a high degree of ideological flexibility and political pragmatism. It avoided errors by relying on a consensus-based decision-making process that incorporated views from rival factions and accommodated their dueling interests. The CCP also avoided conflicts abroad by staying out of contentious disputes, such as those in the Middle East, and refraining from activities that could encroach on the United States’ vital national interests. At home, China’s ruling elites maintained peace by sharing the spoils of governance. Such a regime was by no means perfect. Corruption was pervasive, and the government often delayed critical decisions and missed valuable opportunities. But the regime that preceded Xi’s centralization had one distinct advantage: a built-in propensity for pragmatism and caution.

In the last seven years, that system has been dismantled and replaced by a qualitatively different regime—one marked by a high degree of ideological rigidity, punitive policies toward ethnic minorities and political dissenters at home, and an impulsive foreign policy embodied by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a trillion-dollar infrastructure program with dubious economic potential that has aroused intense suspicion in the West. The centralization of power under Xi has created new fragilities and has exposed the party to greater risks. If the upside of strongman rule is the ability to make difficult decisions quickly, the downside is that it greatly raises the odds of making costly blunders. The consensus-based decision-making of the earlier era might have been slow and inefficient, but it prevented radical or risky ideas from becoming policy.

Under Xi, correcting policy mistakes has proved to be difficult, since reversing decisions made personally by the strongman would undercut his image of infallibility. (It is easier politically to reverse bad decisions made under collective leadership, because a group, not an individual, takes the blame.) Xi’s demand for loyalty has also stifled debate and deterred dissent within the CCP. For these reasons, the party lacks the flexibility needed to avoid and reverse future missteps in its confrontation with the United States. The result is likely to be growing disunity within the regime. Some party leaders will no doubt recognize the risks and grow increasingly alarmed that Xi has needlessly endangered the party’s standing. The damage to Xi’s authority caused by further missteps would also embolden his rivals, especially Premier Li Keqiang and the Politburo members Wang Yang and Hu Chunhua, all of whom have close ties to former President Hu Jintao. Of course, it is nearly impossible to remove a strongman in a one-party regime because of his tight control over the military and the security forces. But creeping discord would at the very least feed Xi’s insecurity and paranoia, further eroding his ability to chart a steady course...

Keep reading.