No, honest, I burned up all the cash.

Pinky swear!

No, honest, I burned up all the cash. ~ Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at February 5, 2020 11:51 PM

Besides, it was Canadian money, so it's not like I burned an actual $1 million.

"China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World From Coronavirus"

…China’s Hubei province, the landlocked region of 60 million people….

(That's the populations of New York State and California combined.)

Really strong McArdle piece on what (moderate) Democrats are up against. Big Mac, Big Mac'ing.

Also, I forget. Is Bernie a Democrat this year, or still independent?

For the last few years it's been fun to say that 'Trump shattered both the Democratic & Republican parties.' It's becoming clear that they were collapsing anyway.

Also, I forget. Is Bernie a Democrat this year, or still independent?

He's still an independent. One might say he's an undocumented Democrat. As for Trump, he's the symptom, not the disease. To riff on your China link, one might say the US sacrifices two parties to save the world.

We need at least three if not four. Or even more. The libertarians need to stop hitting their blunts if they want any real traction.

Oh. Wonder if it were the disease, or the CCP denying him care? natural causes are the best way of getting rid of troublesome people.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/06/asia/li-wenliang-coronavirus-whistleblower-doctor-dies-intl/index.html

Pretty sure that's a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Harvey Weinstein jurors shown naked photos of movie mogul

https://pagesix.com/2020/02/04/harvey-weinstein-jurors-shown-naked-photos-of-movie-mogul/

> One might say he's an
> undocumented Democrat.

Indeed one might, and indeed I will! Thank you for that.

Favorite new sarcastic word, from someone on T: Anecdata.

But I always kinda liked how the two-party system minimized extremism.

That's kind of what's happening now, right? Trump didn't get elected by being outlandish… He's not bright enough to do anything willfully revolutionary. (Like build a wall.)

Trump got elected as an expression by tens of millions of unsatisfied voters that they too expect to have their needs addressed by America's cultural, financial, and governmental machinery.

They're not otherwise politically coherent enough that they could fracture into meaningful factions.

There can only be two political parties in the US system. It is the only stable shape.

Same way you can only have three or one family governing an area. With three groups you can have long term stability as the two unite against the one that is on top. But if you have two then one will inevitable consume the other.

Wishing that unstable geometries would be stable is pointless.

Same way you can only have three or one family governing an area. With three groups you can have long term stability as the two unite against the one that is on top. But if you have two then one will inevitable consume the other. ~ Ben at February 6, 2020 11:01 AM

IDK, that bipolar post-war world was pretty stable.

Florida Cops.

https://twitter.com/HCSOSheriff/status/1224710945911558147

Hours later, the 2019-nCoV lockdown provinces include-

60M — Hubei
43M — Liaoning
44M — Jiangxi

Even if it doesn't spread beyond Chinese borders, one imagines there should be consequences, especially as there appear to be meaningful suspicions about the origin of this.

The ̶y̶o̶u̶n̶g̶ old man's fantasies turn to peaceful revolution within the authoritarian nation.

Or at least this kind of thing.

Can you imagine what's going on in all these beds right now?

We're approaching the Sinking Russian Sub scenario... It will soon be time to send in the American military (et al) for support.

1. The world will shortly demand it if us anyway.
   
   
2. No other nation has the competence, the resources, the decency or the balls.

Hi Donny! How's you week been?

See this and consider the words of Hitchens:

'This is an all-out confrontation between the literal and the ironic mind.'

So China has a PR problem? Why in the world would that be???

Elizabeth Smart was assaulted again, on a plane...

https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/02/06/elizabeth-smart-says-she/

She reported it last year, but she didn't go public until now. (CBS said that she hadn't decided whether to press charges - but I hope she realizes how wrong it would look if she didn't!)

Commments at the bottom are interesting too - a few pointed out that even soldiers who have had a good deal of training often freeze up when the enemy gunfire starts.

I think Cornhuskers were involved in the Great Iowa Debacle of 2020.

https://twitter.com/Barnes_Law/status/1225329829790146560

Alternatively, the Dems are trying to steal an election in plain sight.

And, regarding her more grim past...

Well, this explains why her bishop, back then, felt the weird need to explain to his congregation that despite the rapes, she was still "pure before the Lord." Gross.

https://www.sltrib.com/religion/local/2017/09/19/elizabeth-smart-reveals-she-considered-suicide-after-she-was-raped/

Excerpts:

The first time 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was raped, she wanted to kill herself.

Smart, Mormonism’s most high-profile sexual assault survivor, believed her kidnapper had robbed her of “virtue” — or virginity — and thus she had become worthless.

“For me, because I grew up in a very conservative Christian neighborhood, the first time I was raped I remember feeling devastated,” reveals Smart, now 29 and a special correspondent for Crime Watch Daily With Chris Hansen, in an interview to be aired Tuesday. “I felt like it would be better to be dead than to continue living being a rape victim, being a rape survivor. … I felt in that moment if there had been an easy way out, I probably would have taken it.”...

...Multiple books and movies have told and retold Smart’s tale, and the poised wife and mother now works as an advocate for survivors of sexual assault — and an advocate for eliminating the kind of lessons about sexual purity that can cause guilt and shame.

For decades, some leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints taught that a woman had to fight off any attacker with all her strength and energy or she might be “guilty of unchastity.”...

...Smart didn’t try to escape, she later told national audiences, because she felt like a “chewed-up piece of gum; nobody rechews a piece of gum, you throw it away” — repeating an analogy she had heard growing up.

Today, the LDS Church takes a healthier approach in its official pronouncements...
________________________________________

I mean, if virginity is so important, how about giving the sanctity of teenage MALE virginity equal time, in sermons?

That's 147 million people.

Jesu Cristi. I've heard some compare it to USSR's Chernobyl. If 1% of that population contract the illness, and 2% of them die because of it, that's a 300K deaths. That may not be an unfair comparison.

I don't know if that's enough to get the population at large to kick the CCP into the dustbin of history, but it might get the ball rolling.

With Kongers in a holding pattern, this virus couldn't have happened at a worse time for the CCP. Wonder if Xi has a go-back packed?

Folks, always remember this whenever you read something like this.

Coronavirus Live Update Thread Feb 6th, 2020 (Agenda Free TV)