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The debate over immigration is over: restriction wins.

The debate over borders is over: they are needed.

The debate over globalization is over: the era of autarky begins.

The debate over Europe is over: it is a geographic expression, not a polity.

The debate over global warming is over: it is irrelevant.

The debate over international institutions is over: only nations matter.

The debate over the People’s Republic of China is over: it is a menace to the community of nations, not a member in good standing.

Crisis is clarity.

Well, at least someone is taking matters seriously

Gabon bans eating of pangolin and bats amid pandemic.

Pangolins are critically endangered and have long been protected, but they are sold in the markets of the capital Libreville and

Gabon on Friday banned the sale and eating of bats and pangolins, which are suspected of sparking the novel coronavirus in China where they are highly prized in traditional medicine.

President Ali Bongo Ondimba also announced the government was planning to lock down the capital Libreville and unveiled an emergency package for those hard hit by the pandemic.

The novel coronavirus is believed to have come from bats, but researchers think it might have spread to humans via another mammal.

Pangolins are critically endangered and have long been protected, but they are sold in the markets of the capital Libreville, as are bats, and their meat is popular.

The central African nation is 88 percent covered in forest and hunting and bush meat have long been a way of life.

Coronavirus: The European Union Unravels

As the coronavirus pandemic rages through Europe — where more than 250,000 people have now been diagnosed with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and 15,000 have died — the foundational pillars of the European Union are crumbling one by one.

Faced with an existential threat, EU member states, far from joining together to confront the pandemic as a unified bloc, instinctively are returning to pursuing the national interest. After years of criticizing U.S. President Donald J. Trump for pushing an “America First” policy, European leaders are reverting to the very nationalism they have publicly claimed to despise………

In an article titled, “Coronavirus Threatens European Unity,” Bill Wirtz, a political commentator based in Luxembourg, observed:

“As the coronavirus unfolds, Schengen countries are shutting their own borders. Whether or not they do so because they believe that a coordinated European response would be inefficient, or whether they believe that their own voters wouldn’t buy it — at this stage it’s irrelevant. The mere fact that borders have resurfaced in Europe is a failure for the integrity of the Schengen open borders agreement….

Darren McCaffrey, the political editor of the France-based news channel Euronews, wrote:

“In the past couple of weeks, solidarity has collapsed in the bloc. Countries have started imposing border controls on neighboring EU countries, and even Germany has taken steps to manage the flow of people entering and leaving its territory.

In an article titled, “Nations First: The EU Struggles for Relevance in the Fight against Coronavirus,” the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel noted:

“As the pandemic takes hold in Europe, the decades-old union is showing its weaknesses. While the EU managed to survive Brexit and the euro crisis, the corona crisis may yet prove to be an insurmountable challenge.

The signal is clear: When things get serious, every member state still looks out for itself first — even 60 years after the founding of the community.”

Someone is shocked that the Chinese gubbermint might be lying?
Cue the meme.

Why the World’s Doing a Double-Take on China’s No-New-Infection Claim.

China’s announcement this month of nearly a week of no new infections in Wuhan, the hard-hit city where the coronavirus pandemic originated, was both hope-inspiring — and hard to believe.

Medical professionals said the draconian set of policies imposed by the Chinese government – including widespread testing, isolation of all infected people and anyone they came in contact with – are proven methods for limiting contagion. Other countries, South Korea and Taiwan, for example, have followed similar courses, and they have also reported steep declines in new infections, though neither says it has achieved no new local infections, as China claims.

“What we don’t know is the degree to which they’re being transparent and the degree to which they’re following up on existing infections,” Don Goldmann, a professor of immunology, infectious diseases, and epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a phone interview.

Dr. Goldmann said Chinese scientists have been extremely transparent about what they’ve discovered about the coronavirus so far; they have shared information on the genetics and sequencing of the virus and details  of autopsies, clinical care and outcomes, he said, plus fatality rates among different age groups.

“So I’m not sure why they would make this up,” he said, “especially since risking another wave of this would not be in their interests or in the interests of their leadership.”

Still, skepticism about China’s no-new-local-infections claim is widespread, including, at least according to the anecdotal evidence, inside China. The doubt is fueled both by China’s Communist Party’s long history of propaganda and by the obvious benefits of changing the focus from the government’s initial efforts to suppress information about the coronavirus to its supposedly glorious victory over the disease crippling much of the world.

“A propaganda spokesman’s job is the turn messy facts into a clean narrative,” Andrew J. Nathan, professor of political science at Columbia University and a leading China expert, said in an email. “China is trying to bury the embarrassment of the Covid-19 cover-up in a happy story of triumph over the virus.

“But it feels like overreaching to say that transmission has completely stopped,” Nathan continued. “It seems that the message is political, not epidemiological.”

The last time Baltimore had a Republican mayor was over 53 years ago.

Baltimore Mayor Begs Residents To Stop Shooting Each Other So Hospital Beds Can Be Used For Coronavirus Patients

BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Baltimore Mayor Jack Young urged residents to put down their guns and heed orders to stay home after multiple people were shot Tuesday night amidst the coronavirus pandemic.

Young said hospital beds are needed to treat positive COVID-19 patients and not for senseless violence. Seven people were shot Tuesday night in the Madison Park neighborhood, as Baltimore reported its fifth positive coronavirus case Wednesday.

“I want to reiterate how completely unacceptable the level of violence is that we have seen recently,” Young said. “We will not stand for mass shootings and an increase in crime.”

“For those of you who want to continue to shoot and kill people of this city, we’re not going to tolerate it,” Young implored. “We’re going to come after you and we’re going to get you.”

He urged people to put down their guns because “we cannot clog up our hospitals and their beds with people that are being shot senselessly because we’re going to need those beds for people infected with the coronavirus. And it could be your mother, your grandmother or one of your relatives. So take that into consideration.”

 

Bloomberg wins American Samoa caucus

And in other meaningless news………

Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii have won their first delegates thanks to American Samoa.

The island has six Democratic delegates and their caucus awarded five to Bloomberg and one to Gabbard, who hails from Hawaii.

That last article about swarms of  Locusts coming to China like a biblical plague?
How about Frogs!
Yeah, and earthquakes fit right in with those plagues too.

Tens of thousands of frogs have appeared on suburban roads in Wuhan and Nanjing, prompting fears among residents that they could be signalling an imminent earthquake.

Tens of thousands of frogs have appeared on suburban roads in Wuhan and Nanjing, prompting fears among residents that they could be signalling an imminent earthquake.

However, earthquake authorities in both cities say that massed ranks of the amphibians do not herald quakes. A resident in the town of Dunkou in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, found the road in front of her home covered with thousands of tiny brown frogs, each about the length of a thumbnail, on Monday morning.

‘They are packed so densely that it’s easy for people to stamp on them, leaving a horrific situation,’ she told the Wuhan Evening News.

She said she had to use a broom to drive away some frogs trying to enter her house. Other villagers said the frogs began to gather on the road on Sunday night and many had been squashed by cars.

The woman, who lives in Dunkou, said she was worried because she had heard that animals often acted strangely before a quake and she wondered if the frogs were an omen.

Residents of the town of Jiangxinzhou in Nanjing, Jiangsu , about 600 kilometres away, have encountered a similar phenomenon, the Modern Express reports.

One resident said she was astonished to see a large number of small frogs near her home on Saturday morning.

A Jiangsu Earthquake Bureau official was quoted as saying that the gathering of frogs was a normal phenomenon and there was no need to panic.

‘Animals like chickens, dogs and cats will actually exhibit abnormal behaviour before earthquakes. But it doesn’t mean that once animals behave unusually there will necessarily be an earthquake because there are many factors that can cause animals to act strangely,’ the official said.

A Hubei Earthquake Bureau official said the frogs were gathering on roads because their natural habitat had been reduced.

However, the public panic is not completely baseless. Two days before the deadly Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, the West China City Daily reported that hundreds of thousands of frogs had been seen on the roads of Mianzhu, which was wrecked by the quake.

Locusts Could be the Next Plague to Hit China

HONG KONG—Swarms of desert locusts have devastated crops in East Africa, hit the Middle East and moved into South Asia. They’re breeding fast thanks to changes in global climate patterns that have brought about major cyclones and heavy rains, and they are feeding off human food supplies across continents.

So far, India has managed to prevent a swarm of biblical proportions from spilling over into Bangladesh, Burma, and then China—where the coronavirus has already paralyzed much of the country’s activity. But it’s not clear how long that line will hold.

Eastern Africa has been hit the hardest by the xanthic bugs, with fields in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia ravaged by 360 billion locusts. Swarms can be city-sized, and one of the largest—located in Kenya—covers about 37 miles by 25 miles. It is so dense that it turns daylight to darkness for anyone caught within.

Alarmist headlines are proliferating, too, many of them drawing parallels with the plagues in scripture. “Bible coming to life?” asked the Jerusalem Post. The swarms appear in the Old Testament, most notably in Exodus as one of the plagues Moses calls down on Egypt, which also is referenced in the Quran. In the New Testament locusts are associated with Revelation 9:3, where they emerge in ferocious swarms that also have the sting of scorpions.

Allusions to the Apocalypse aside, the real life potential for disaster is huge…..

For now, the Himalayan range is acting as a natural barrier for China, insulating its southwestern border from the scourge that is in Pakistan. But the locusts could bank into Southeast Asia, flowing through Bangladesh and up into Burma, landing in China’s Yunnan province, hitting a country that is already locked down because of the coronavirus’ rapid spread.

As fears rise, the state-run media outlet Global Times has been offering ludicrous consolation to the public, claiming that the desert locusts are “eaten by ducks, fried for food,” and “not a threat to China.” And the international arm of state-run CCTV even released a bizarre video of “duck troops” amassing at the border. But the species of locust that is on the country’s doorstep emits phenylacetonitrile, a foul-smelling secretion that is meant to deter predators. Birds typically do not seek them out as a food source.

Spokespersons for China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs claim that there is a “very low risk” of locust plagues hitting China, but a researcher at the Beijing-headquartered Institute of Plant Protection of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences suggests more caution.

The agriculture expert, Zhang Zehua, said that Yunnan province (which borders Burma), Guangxi (an autonomous region east of Yunnan), and Sichuan province (north of Yunnan) could be affected in June or July if the plagues are not brought under control in neighboring countries.

Zhang may be right, at least according to India’s Ministry of Agriculture, which issued a notice saying that it expects 200,000 square kilometers (77,200 square miles) of farmland to be blanketed by locusts in June during the onset of monsoon season—when conditions are perfect for ravenous insects to breed.

For now, whether the summer may bring another catastrophe to China depends chiefly on Delhi and Karachi’s efforts to exterminate a storm of insects in a race against the seasons.

Greek and Latin are hard: Oxford classics faculty proposes dropping Homer and Virgil from required curriculum so female students will do better on the tests.

From The Oxford Student:

The Oxford Student has been notified about a proposal by the Classics faculty to remove the study of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid from the Mods syllabus, a decision which has surprised many across the faculty.

This proposal forms part of a series of reforms aimed to modernise the first stage of the Classics degree, known as Moderations (Mods), which take place during Hilary term of second year for all students taking Classics courses across the university.

The Mods course, which is assessed by a set of ten exams at the end of Hilary, has been increasingly criticised in recent years, due to the attainment gaps found between male and female candidates, as well as between candidates who have studied Latin and/or Greek to A-Level (Course I) and those who have not (Course II).

The removal of Virgil and Homer papers, which take up two out of the ten Mods papers, have been marketed as a move that will reduce the attainment gaps and thus improve access to the subject.

Evidently girls just can’t get into the Trojan War.

The Oxford Classics course, known more formally as litterae humaniores is thought to be one of the oldest at the university, with Classical texts, including those of Homer and Virgil having been taught here since the University’s foundation.

Since it’s [sic! This is Oxford???] founding, the course has gone through a number of changes, the most recent one being the introduction of ab initio language teaching almost five decades ago….

The new decade presents the degree with new challenges, with Classicists saying it must adapt to a constantly evolving demographic of students and their needs.

I don’t know how Oxford plans to pull off teaching classics without, um, teaching any classical literature–but maybe, so as to close those “attainment gaps” for female students, the dons can devote a few units to Helen of Troy’s body-positivity issues

 

 

A Warning to America — Socialist Tyrant Maduro Sends the Military to the Streets With Tanks and Army Vehicles to Intimidate the People Into Silence

Intimidation causes fear in people.  It makes them pliable and makes them obedient.

On Saturday Caracas woke up to tanks, military vehicles and regime officials on the streets of Caracas.  Socialist Tyrant Maduro ordered the military exercises in his latest attempt to intimidate his citizens.

The President interim Juan Guaidó made this statement in response to these intimidation tactics,  “The rights of the people are not negotiated.  They are demanded and defended.”

So far more than 180 people were killed bythe DGCIM, the military counterintelligence agency in Venezuela. Guaidó’s uncle is being held captive by these people.

In addition, the EU spokesperson Morgan Ortagus comdemned the arbitrary detention of Juan José Marquez (Guaido’s uncle) in a desperate act by the regime. The absurd charges against Marquez are typical of Maduro and his corrupt socialist associates. Marquez is one of hundreds of political prisoners in Venezuela.

While Michael McCaul Lead Republican of @houseforeigngop posted: The arbitrary detention of Juan Guaido’s uncle is the latest in a long list of disturbing human rights abuses perpetrated by the illegitimate Maduro regime. I call for the immediate release of Juan Jose Marquez and all political prisoners.

Billions of locusts swarm through Kenya

…and there shall be famines and troubles…

Huge locust swarms in east Africa are the result of extreme weather swings and could prove catastrophic for a region still reeling from drought and deadly floods. Dense clouds of the ravenous insects have spread from Ethiopia and Somalia into Kenya, in the region’s worse infestation in decades

The Only Solution to the Palestinian-Israeli Struggle is Another War

“Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace, but there is no peace. The war is actually begun!” — Patrick Henry

The Editors of The Washington Post are stuck on an ideal of a Middle East peace plan that has not brought any success over the last 52 years.

Trump and Netanyahu have made Mideast peace an even more distant prospect

By Editorial Board | January 28, 2020 | 7:45 p.m. EST

The Mideast peace plan that President Trump unveiled at the White House Tuesday amounts, as a practical matter, to another one-sided gift to the right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Trump promised U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and all of the settlements Israel has constructed in the West Bank — a radical shift in a half-century-old American policy.

Mr. Netanyahu, who gleefully pledged to immediately “apply Israeli law to all areas the plan recognizes,” reciprocated by calling Mr. Trump “the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.” Mr. Trump can be expected to flog that endorsement as he seeks reelection this year. Mr. Netanyahu, in turn, will present himself to Israeli voters in a March election as the leader who extracted once-unimaginable concessions from Washington. Both leaders can hope to distract from ongoing scandals: Mr. Trump from his impeachment trial and Mr. Netanyahu from his indictment Tuesday on corruption charges.

U.S. sanctions for the annexation of settlements will meanwhile deliver a devastating blow to the prospects for a two-state resolution between Israelis and Palestinians. Those who actually favor that, as we do, will have to hope that the remainder of the plan is soon forgotten. Otherwise, it may provide a new set of benchmarks that will make peace impossible and from which future Israeli and U.S. governments will find it hard to retreat.

The supposed outlines of a split-the-differences Arab-Israeli peace deal have been known since 1967. At the end of his term, President Clinton got then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to agree to a plan, but Palestinian ‘President’ Yassir Arafat threw them back in his face. Mr Clinton told Mr Arafat that it was the best deal he could ever hope to have gotten, but it wan’t good enough for him. Former President Jimmy Carter supposedly said that had Mr Arafat accepted the deal, he would have been assassinated by his own people, which is probably true.

The Post’s editorial position stems from one thing: the Western belief that good people can settle any dispute peaceably, if they’ll just try hard enough. Such an attitude led Neville Chamberlain to believe that he could make a deal with Adolf Hitler. But the notion fails the test in the Middle East on two points:

The notion that both parties are accept Western ideas and genuinely want peace; and The notion that there are good people on both sides.
The first problem is that, for far too many of the Palestinians, the only peace that they want is the peace achieved from victory, a peace which would accrue from their oft-stated desire to push all of the Jews out of the Middle East. They do not want peace with Israel; they want to conquer Israel, to destroy Israel as a Jewish nation.

In World War II, the last war we actually won, it was won but the wholesale slaughter of German and Japanese troops, by virtually destroying those two nations through massive bombing campaigns, by killing civilians, men, women, children and the elderly until Hell wouldn’t have it any more, and by not only killing the soldiers in combat, but much of the next group of boys who would soon reach fighting age. There simply weren’t many adolescent boys in Germany and Japan who were itching for their turn in uniform, to reverse and avenge their countries’ defeats.

That isn’t what has happened in the Middle East. The Israelis have fought four major wars with the Arabs, but when the Arabs sued for peace when bloodied but hardly destroyed, the Israelis agreed. That left the adolescent boys to grow up, thinking that they could have won, and would win the next skirmishes, the next war. The Israelis left hope, hope of victory, alive in the Palestinians.

And the Israelis left the Palestinians in place. If Israel had wanted to keep the lands it conquered in 1967, it should have expelled all of the Arabs living in the conquered territory. It would have been inhumane and brutal, but had it been done, Israel today would have shortened, more defensible borders. By leaving the Arabs in place, the Israelis allowed a captive and restive population to live under their rule, always resentful, always plotting, always seeking to reverse their fortunes. The Israelis of 1967-68 left their successors in an untenable and unsustainable position.

The second problem is that they really are not good people on both sides. The Palestinians are in a position unique in history, having the ability to win their war of independence, if a two-state solution is really what they want, by not fighting, by stopping the low-level terrorist attacks. If they would just quit fighting, it wouldn’t take many years before the Israelis, tired of the incessant, low-level war, would force their government to grant the Palestinians their state.

But as long as the Palestinians keep fighting, the easier it becomes for Israel to plant more and more settlements in Judea and Samaria. There probably are some good people among the Arabs, but there are enough not good people, in Hamas, in Hezbollah, in al Fatah, who are far less interested in peace than they are in fighting. Until the Palestinians suppress, rather than supporting, the fighters, there will be no peace.

There is an obvious truth, one from which Western minds recoil: the only solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute is another war, an all-out war in which one side is so thoroughly defeated that surrender and evacuation is the only alternative to death. It is jarring to our Western minds and morés and ideals to think about that, but it makes it no less true.

Powerful 7.7 Caribbean earthquake, shakes Miami buildings

Seems something tectonic is going on in the Caribbean.

A 7.7 magnitude earthquake has been reported in the Caribbean Sea between Jamaica and Cuba, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

A 7.7 magnitude earthquake has been reported in the Caribbean Sea between Jamaica and Cuba, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The center of the quake was located about 73 miles northwest of Lucea, Jamaica. It was about 6 miles deep.

It’s not immediately clear if there is any damage or injuries. However, the earthquake caused very strong to severe shaking in portions of far western Jamaica, capable of moderate to heavy damage, the USGS said.

It also said moderate shaking was felt on Grand Cayman Island, while light shaking was reported on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

The quake was also felt as far away as south Florida, according to posts on social media. Buildings were being evacuated in Miami due to the quake.

14 January Patch Was the Last for Windows 7. Also Microsoft: Actually… Wallpaper-Stripping Bug Will be Fixed

Microsoft has quietly admitted that it will be fixing the final Windows 7 patch that left some stretched wallpapers borked.

It was to be the last hurrah for Windows 7: After the 14 January patch there would be no more freebies from Microsoft as extended support was turned off in favour of its paid-for Extended Security Update (ESU) program.

The up to three years of extra patches is being punted to enterprises or badly organised Germans, but out of reach for most ordinary users.

Those ordinary users, however, could be forgiven for feeling a little hard done by after an image of a favourite kitten or corporate logo was replaced, just by the act of applying the final patch — something more representative of the black heart of the Microsoft of yesteryear.

Microsoft updated its support page for the patch, suggesting those afflicted by the curse of KB4534310 should stop using the Stretch option wallpaper, or go for something that matched the desktop resolution.

Puerto Rico hit by a 5.0 quake amid ongoing seismic activity.

Well, that is a diverse place.

A 5.0 magnitude earthquake hit southern Puerto Rico on Saturday at a shallow depth, raising concerns about unstable infrastructure in a region that has been hit by quakes every day for nearly a month.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake occurred at a depth of eight miles (13 kilometers) around the southern coastal town of Guayanilla, located close to the epicenters of most of the recent earthquakes. At least one small landslide was reported.

China says Taiwan policy intact despite election results

Yeah, and that heavily armed F16 is telling the PRC where they can go.

BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese official said Wednesday that Beijing will not change its policy of annexing Taiwan through its “one country, two systems” framework, despite the heavy turnout in favor of pro-independence candidates in last weekend’s presidential and legislative elections.

Ma Xiaoguang, spokesman for the Cabinet’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said China would continue to insist on the so-called “’92 Consensus” that acknowledges both the self-governing island and the mainland as part of a single Chinese nation.

“We do not insert ourselves into or critique Taiwan’s elections. This round of Taiwan’s local elections cannot change the status of Taiwan as a part of China,” Ma said.

Ma did not overtly repeat communist-ruled China’s threat to bring Taiwan under its control by force, but said Taiwan’s government needs to “think deeply,” asserting calls for such moves have been growing among the Chinese public.

Microsoft is replacing Edge with its new Chromium browser
Users will be automatically transitioned

Heads Up!

Microsoft is replacing its Edge browser with the updated, Chromium-based version

We already knew this was coming because Microsoft announced the new Edge’s launch date last month, but it wasn’t clear that users would be pushed to the new version. Thankfully it will look mostly the same as the existing Edge browser, with all the same proprietary Microsoft features, except for a slightly more Chrome-esque look.

THE BENEFITS OF SWITCHING TO CHROMIUM — Since the new Chromium Edge will be based off the same browser as Google Chrome, Edge will now support all the same extensions. Last month developers were invited to port their Chrome extensions over to the Microsoft Store, with the company saying that most extensions could be transferred over without any additional work. Edge is the default browser for all 900 million Windows 10 users, so there’s obviously an incentive there to port extensions.

Being based off Chromium also means that any site optimized for Chrome will look the same in Edge, because they share the same rendering engine, and web developers won’t have to design their sites with Edge in mind. That’s important because Chrome is by far the most popular internet browser with a 70 percent market share.

MICROSOFT HAS TAKEN STEPS TO MAKE IN UN-GOOGLE — Some might be displeased about the change due to opposition over Google’s business model. By developing on the open-source Chromium project, Microsoft is helping to improve Google’s browser, which it uses to collect data for advertising purposes. There was a brief uproar last month when world spread that Apple might rebuild Safari on Chromium, a rumor that was quickly killed to the relief of anti-Google, Apple loyalists. Microsoft has actually taken pains to introduce privacy features into its flavor of Chromium that will make it less permissive of the fingerprinting and other tracking methods that Chrome supports.

Microsoft says that enterprise customers won’t see their browser actually upgraded, but will rather have the choice to stick with the “traditional” Edge or the Chromium flavor.