Trump temporarily suspends immigration
Some of the details are coming out during his press conference, occurring right now.
I’ve been watching for about fifteen minutes. Trump seems very sharp, and the MSM grandstanding seems somewhat reduced compared to a while back.
In addition, a deal seems to have been reached on small business relief.
There’s so much news happening each day that I can only begin to scratch the surface. But you can talk about whatever you want in the comments here.
In fairness to the media, the grandstanding looks more common than it is because there’s just a few who do it all the damn time. They all do it from time to time and do it more often with Trump but most of the White House press corps seem to at least grasp that you should have a vaguely plausible justification for it. They’re not all like Acosta.
Mike
The lawfare artists will find a Hawaiian judge to rule that controlling the border is unconstitutional and try to tie this up for months.
Interestingly, Trump said that there will be plenty of migrant farm workers coming in. I am sure the last thing the Whitehouse wants to see is the food chain getting mucked up. Still, I wonder how they are maintaining or increasing one type of immigration while clamping down on the other.
Small business relief. Oh boy. The more news one hears, the messier it sounds. A large restaurant chain, Shake Shack, got $10M in PPP cash and then returned it. Other businesses need it more they said. Trump said Harvard got PPP cash?? I must have heard that incorrectly, or did I? I heard that hedge funds are getting PPP cash. Most have fewer than a few hundred employees making them small businesses.
Handing out loans and free cash is never as easy as it sounds.
Art Deco,
If Trump finds a cure for Coronavirus a judge in Hawaii will rule that it cannot be administered.
TommyJay,
There is never a government program that is not instantly exploited from every angle possible.
FWIW the talk now here in Illinois is that the lockdown will be extended to June 1. I”ll be leaving the state before then, at least for a break. We’ve been in the house since March 10th now. So June 1 is not happening.
Beyond that, the local economy will absolutely tank beyond recovery. One-quarter of the year without income will pretty much force 30+% of the population on the dole and destroy their baseline employment. So, it’s possible that Illinois will look to some kind of extended public assistance. At the end of it all, that will be over half the people in Cook County. The ramifications of that are … considerable.
What’s missing locally is ANY talk of economic consequences. You would have to hear more discussion of business realities to expect any stop to the craziness before May 1st. I expect the announcement then. What we’re hearing now is “preparation.” Downstate is too weak in Illinois and has no voice in the media. Chicago = Illinois and the COVID count here is still climbing. The largest number of cases is in Black/Minority neighborhoods and media conversation is often framed in racial terms. So, I don’t see any way around it for now.
Apparently the Fed has committed to purchasing some $500B in state bonds as part of the recovery process, and my guess is that our IL pols figured they’d be able to collect some of this largess and kick their debt can down the road a bit further.
Thucydides trap…
We are entering a potential situation that can only be understood by understanding the paranoid nature of communist states, and so, the thinking that is unthinkable by other states and seen as too paranoid to be real, becomes all to possible.
While you are all paying attention at this stuff. your missing whats happening to our forces and the interactions of other forces with them currently…
given i am ignored in terms of discussion on this point, that’s all..
besides, its more fun when its a surprise, right?
Russian jet flies within 25 feet of U.S. spy plane in “unsafe” high-speed maneuver, Navy says [video available]
Chinese Aircraft Fly Within 50 Feet of U.S. Plane Over South China Sea, Pentagon Says
China Sends Aircraft Carrier near Japan, Taiwan as US Navy Struggles with Coronavirus
Prepare for War or Fight Coronavirus? U.S. Military Battles Competing Instincts
Trump finds oxygen necessary for life..
Democrats hold their breath to prove him wrong
Artfldgr on April 21, 2020 at 9:48 pm said:
Trump finds oxygen necessary for life..
Democrats hold their breath to prove him wrong
* * *
…Blue staters for real.
I think there are a number of these …
Trump cures cancer
CNN headline: Trump puts thousands of medical researchers out of work
Trump walks on water
CNN headline: Trump doesn’t know how to swim
“Democrats hold their breath to prove him wrong”
We can dream, can’t we?
The Swedish experiment looks like it’s paying off
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-swedish-experiment-looks-like-it-s-paying-off
Money quote:
A recent test at Karolinska suggested that 11 per cent of people in Stockholm had developed antibodies against the virus. Professor Jan Albert, who has led these tests, says the rate is most likely higher – perhaps substantially higher. So far they have only tested a small sample of blood donors and they can only donate if they are healthy and free of symptoms. Albert thinks the actual situation isn’t far away from the ballpark suggested by professor Tom Britton in a study (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066050v1) that was released this weekend: that between 25 and 40 per cent of the Stockholm population have had the virus and that the region will reach herd immunity in late May.
====
So it’s like rational heads have been saying… the economy is being tanked for no benefit.
}}} They’re not all like Acosta. — Mike
Yeah, Mike, but their editors are. I don’t pay a lot of attention to the direct feed, but I can’t avoid all the headlines. And the number of idiots who parrot the most ridiculous anti-Trump claims is absurd.
“Yeah, Mike, but their editors are.”
That reminds me of a recent thought about the alleged meritocracy of America’s elite, especially the media. To get a job as a reporter at The New York Times, you’ve generally needed to prove you were a good-to-great journalist. But how do you get to be an editor at The New York Times?
It’s NOT by proving you are a good-to-great editor because…well, how exactly do you do that? You can evaluate a reporter by obvious things like the number of big scoops they get or the popularity of their stories with readers. The job of editor doesn’t really come with such easy benchmarks.
For example, check out the Wiki entry for Dean Baquet, the executive editor at the NYT. Dude was apparently a great reporter, winning a Pulitzer and being a finalist for another, but his performance as an editor is a lot more dubious.
It’s sort of a corollary to the Peter Principle: The farther a job is removed from specific and concrete results, the harder it is to evaluate the competence of those doing it. Which would explain how anyone could ever think Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Michelle Obama could be good Presidents.
Mike
Which would explain how anyone could ever think Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Michelle Obama could be good Presidents.
Not seeing your analogy. None of these have been subject to supervisory evaluation or peer review. Our single best guess is that Democratic publics responds to them as if they were branded consumer products, like Perdue chicken or Johnson paste wax. That’s how you got Obama, a man quite bereft of distinct accomplishments above and beyond passing the bar exam. The interest in his wife is bizarre. She’s made it plain she has no interest in further excursions in public life and she was never a woman with a genuine techne. In her interests and tastes, she’s a good deal closer to Nancy Reagan than to Hellary. There has to be an alternate timeline where BO makes the major money selling insurance and Mooch makes the fun money with an interior design business she runs out of her study at home.
(If we had something akin to peer review among politicians, you might get Biden, but you wouldn’t get the other two, because neither has paid their dues. built relationships with other politicians, or performed according to criteria politicians set for themselves. Over the last 50 years, the ones who have, roughly speaking, would be Messrs. Kasich, Rubio (?), Gingrich (?), Bush the Younger, Gore (?), Bradley, Dole (!), B Clinton, Kerrey of Nebraska (?), Brown (?), Bush the Elder, Simon, Dukakis (?), Gephardt (!), Mondale, Kennedy (!), Reagan (?), Ford (!), H. Jackson, Udall (!), Church (?), Muskie, Humphrey).
I suspect the way nomination contests are structured (compared to what was the case 60 years ago) reduces the quality of the line-up.
MBunge – the Peter Principle should be engraved on the walls of every Human Resources Department in the nation.
Of course, most HR directors are examples…..
Random thought on random COVID-19 testing.
Since YouGov, Rasmussen, IPSOS, HarrisX etc. can conduct random polls to determine political popularity …
isn’t there some way to conduct random testing to determine the APPROXIMATE percentage of Wuhan Virus infections in the US?
The polls always give a ‘margin of error’ so it would not be absolutely correct … but wouldn’t it give us some idea of the spread of the virus?
Tuvea:
That was addressed in the Uncommon Knowledge interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. of Stanford Univ. and it was one of his recommendations.
He was the lead in the Santa Clara CA antibody testing study that was the first to show the high rates of infection (asymptomatic) and consequently much lower fatality rate 0.0015 (a bit worse than a bad flu year).
Anyway cited by Powerlineblog.com
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/04/an-update-from-dr-b.php
The video of the Uncommon Knowledge interview is
https://youtu.be/k7v2F3usNVA
The Uncommon Knowledge interview is a free download available here:
https://www.podbean.com/site/EpisodeDownload/PBD98DF5P5G8U
Tuvea and om,
Dr. Birx said something about that issue a day or two ago that I found curious. She posed a hypothetical where 1% of the entire population had been infected sometime in the past or currently; and the officials randomly sampled them with an antibody test that is 99% accurate. She said you might end up with a result where 50% of the “tested positive” group were actually false positives.
So her preference is to do random sampling of frontline healthcare workers, where you know the “tested positive” group will be much larger than 1% of the test group.
______
I guess I can accept that the hypothetical could actually happen. I’d counter that even if the end result is incorrect by a factor of 2, at least it would not be off by a factor of ten. We don’t even know the correct order of magnitude now (power of ten). And if she wants to test frontline healthcare workers, then the result will pertain only to them, and yield no information on the population at large.
Also, I would think that since the “tested positive” group is a very much smaller group compared to the original test group, they could be re-tested with a more definitive test.
om and TommyJay,
Thanks!
I must have run across that idea surfing the web earlier.
MBunge,
Why would readership not be a valid KPI for a newspaper editor?
Neo, here is a really good article quite understandable even for people with zero knowledge or taste for mathematics: https://peterattiamd.com/covid-19-whats-wrong-with-the-models/
Sergei,
100% on that link! Thanks so much.
Tuvea: “Random thought on random COVID-19 testing.”
I heard in an interview, probably with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, that there is a proposed plan to do the antibody testing in cooperation with the NFL.
As I understand it, they would not test the players but instead office and stadium staff. This would give a quick view into the antibody situation for that many US cities. There would even be an element of apples-to-apples comparison. The participants would not be selected as in a rigorous scientific study but there is some value in having people who are doing the same jobs but in different metro areas.
Sergey – that was a really fantastic explanation at your link.
I was particularly impressed with this observation:
And I loved the squirrel-counting analogy!