A strategy of deliberate overfishing of the more distant grounds first?

Chinese fleet fishing near Galapagos protected waters, allegedly falsifying GPS location

Amazing anyone would cross the Pacific in some of those boats.

I wouldn't trust them on Lake Erie.

China and the virus

Discussing the Houston consulate closure, a talking head on Fox today repeated without contradiction or check the unfounded claim that China deliberately released the virus upon the world.

Did that claim originate with Bozo, Alex Jones, or QAnon?

China threatens retaliation after US orders closure of Houston consulate

Rubio: Chinese consulate in Houston was 'massive spy center'

Pompeo attacks Tik Tok

Fox News.

The app sends the data on your phone to China.

The US company president, an American, says it's bullshit, the Trumpists made it all up.

Hong Kong is over. So is the democracy movement.

Who didn't know China would laugh off the terms of their agreement with the Brits for them leaving the colony?

Neither the Brits nor anyone else will stop this.

China is way too powerful, both militarily and economically.

Hong Kong security law: Pro-democracy books pulled from libraries

Outbreak in Beijing, market implicated

China's new coronavirus outbreak sees Beijing adopt 'wartime' measures as capital races to contain spread

Beijing is reintroducing strict lockdown measures and rolling out mass testing after a fresh cluster of novel coronavirus cases emerged from the city's largest wholesale food market, sparking fears of a resurgence of the deadly outbreak.

The Chinese capital reported 36 new Covid-19 cases on Monday, bringing the total number to 79 since a locally transmitted infection was reported on June 12 for the first time in nearly two months, according to the National Health Commission.

The cases are linked to Xinfadi market in the southwest of the city, which supplies most of the capital's fresh fruit and vegetables. 

The market, which also sells meat and seafood, has been shut down since Saturday.

The outbreak has already spread to the provinces of Liaoning and Hebei, where a total of five new cases were found to be close contacts of patients in Beijing.

. . . .

Beijing authorities are still trying to trace the source of the latest outbreak, however, pledging to conduct "the strictest epidemiological investigations."

Zhang Yuxi, the market's chairman, told the state-run Beijing News on Friday that the virus had been detected on a chopping board used by a seller of imported salmon at the market, leading to fears of wider contamination. 

Several supermarket chains have since removed salmon from their shelves, according to Beijing Daily.

While investigations are still underway, a researcher with the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control said genome sequencing indicated the virus found in the market is similar to strains normally found in Europe.

"But it is still uncertain how the virus originated. It could have come from contaminated seafood or meat, or been transmitted by people who have come into the market via their secretions," Yang Peng, the researcher, told state broadcaster CCTV on Sunday.

Is he trying to squeeze in all the damage he can before January?

Trump announces unprecedented action against China

President Donald Trump launched a blistering attack on China Friday, naming misdeeds that range from espionage to the violation of Hong Kong's freedoms, and announced a slew of retaliatory measures that will plunge US-China relations deeper into crisis.

"They've ripped off the United States like no one has ever done before," Trump said of China, as he decried the way Beijing has "raided our factories" and "gutted" American industry, casting Beijing as a central foil he will run against in the remaining months of his re-election campaign.

Trump appeared in the Rose Garden at the end of a week when the US hit 100,000 deaths in the coronavirus pandemic and as massive protests roiled Minneapolis after the death in police custody an African American man, but mentioned neither, focusing instead on casting Beijing as an existential geopolitical threat.

Trump called out China for "espionage to steal our industrial secrets, of which there are many," announced steps to protect American investors from Chinese financial practices, accused Beijing of "unlawfully claiming territory in the Pacific Ocean" and threatening freedom of navigation.

The President also blasted Beijing for passing a national security law that fundamentally undermines Hong Kong's autonomy, announcing that going forward, the US will treat Hong Kong the way it treats the rest of China. 

Trump said the US will strip Hong Kong of the special policy measures on extradition, trade, travel and customs Washington had previously granted it.

Trump announced the US would pull out of the World Health Organization even as the global coronavirus pandemic continues to claim lives, claiming that China has "total control" over the WHO, an organization of 194 member states.

Illimois Governor Pritzker Calls President Trump a ‘Racist, Misogynist Homophobe’

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker harshly condemned President Trump's response to the protests following the controversial death of George Floyd in Minneapolis by calling the president a "racist, misognyist, homophobe."

Lightfoot to Trump: 'What I really want to say ... begins with F and it ends with U’

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Friday ripped President Donald Trump, saying he’s fomenting violence and playing to racist urges for political gain in response to the killing of a black man by a Minneapolis police officer and subsequent rioting.

Lightfoot’s comments were an apparent response to Trump tweeting a message that included “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” in response to rioting in Minneapolis and elsewhere following the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck while he was in custody. 

Lightfoot said the president cannot be allowed to divide and destabilize the country.

China takes the lead

China is offering two billion in aide for global Coronavirus efforts.

Trump threatens to cut off all funds while trying to force blame onto WHO for the virus.

Was the virus out there as early as November? Is there a deeper Chinese coverup?

New evidence in race to find France's COVID-19 'patient zero'

French doctors may have made a breakthrough in the race to establish where and when the coronavirus pandemic first hit Europe, by establishing that the virus may have been in France much earlier than anyone thought.

A team of researchers in the city of Colmar in northeastern France announced in a release last week that it had identified two X-rays, from Nov. 16 and Nov. 18, showing symptoms consistent with the novel coronavirus.

. . . .

Officials in the Chinese city of Wuhan confirmed the existence of a then-unknown illness with pneumonia-like symptoms to the World Health Organization’s China office on Dec. 31, but it wasn’t established as a new coronavirus until Jan. 7.

U.S. spy agencies have gathered intelligence hinting at a public health crisis in Wuhan in November.

A well-respected Rupublican sees Bozo

The Rest of the World Is Laughing at Trump

Anne Applebaum

Carl Bildt—a Swedish prime minister in the 1990s, a United Nations envoy during the Bosnian wars, and a foreign minister for many years after that—told me that, looking back on his 30-year career, he cannot remember a single international crisis in which the United States had no global presence at all.

“Normally, when something happens”—a war, an earthquake—“everybody waits to see what the Americans are doing, for better or for worse, and then they calibrate their own response based on that.”

This time, Americans are doing … nothing.

Or to be more specific, because plenty of American governors, mayors, doctors, scientists, and tech companies are doing things, the White House is doing nothing.

There is no presidential leadership inside the United States; there is no American leadership in the world. Members of the G7—the U.S. and its six closest allies—did meet to write a joint statement.

But even that tepid project ended in ludicrous rancor when the American secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, insisted on using the expression “Wuhan virus” and the others gave up in disgust.

Not only is the president talking nonsense, not only is America absent, but the nation’s top diplomat is a caricature of a tough guy—someone who throws around insults in the absence of any capacity to influence events.

. . . .

I wish I could say for certain that a President Joe Biden could turn this all around, but by next year it may be too late.

The memories of the prime minister at the airport, welcoming Chinese doctors, will remain.

The bleach jokes and memes will still cause the occasional chuckle. 

Whoever replaces Pompeo will have only four short years to repair the damage, and that might not be enough.

And if Trump wins a second term?

Any nation can make a mistake once, elect a bad leader once.

But if Americans choose Trump again, that will send a clear message: 

We are no longer a serious nation. 

We are as ignorant as our thoughtless, narcissistic, ignorant president.

Don’t be surprised if the rest of the world takes note of that, too.

Even Chinese lie

Well, we knew they kept it dark for a good while.

But maybe it was longer than we thought.

WHO urges countries to investigate possible early Covid-19 cases after French study

The World Health Organization has said a study by French scientists which suggests a man was infected with Covid-19 as early as 27 December was “not surprising”, and urged countries to investigate any other early suspicious cases.

Covid-19, as it was later named, was first reported by Chinese authorities to the WHO on 31 December and was not previously believed to have spread to Europe until January.

“This gives a whole new picture on everything,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told a UN briefing in Geneva.

“The findings help to better understand the potential virus circulation of Covid-19,” he added, saying other possible earlier cases could emerge after retesting samples.

French researchers led by Yves Cohen, head of resuscitation at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals, retested samples from 24 patients treated in December and January who had tested negative for flu before Covid-19 developed into a pandemic.

The results, published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, showed that one patient - a 42-year-old man born in Algeria, who had lived in France for many years and worked as a fishmonger - was infected with Covid-19 “one month before the first reported cases in our country”, they said.

Cohen told French television on Monday it was too early to know if the patient, whose last trip to Algeria had been in August 2019, was France’s “patient zero”.

The researchers said the absence of a link with China and the lack of recent travel “suggest that the disease was already spreading among the French population at the end of December 2019”.

France, where almost 25,000 people have died from Covid-19 since 1 March, confirmed its first three cases on 24 January.

Pompeo's new story

China deliberately delayed informing the world in order to buy time to import crucial PPE.

I guess somebody figures this is a lot more credible than that they dumped the virus on the world just to get rid of Bozo.

Pompeo says 'enormous evidence' virus came from Wuhan lab but produces none.

More blame for China is less for the Duce.

These thugs are increasing the risk of actual war with China to help the Idiot Crime Boss get reelected.

Fauci dismisses the theory that coronavirus originated in a lab

Pompeo's unsupported, inflammatory accusation against "the Chinese Communist Party"

Mike Pompeo says "The Chinese Communist Party had the opportunity to prevent all of the calamity that has befallen the world".

The party, he says, not the government.

A feature of the continuing Republican effort to deflect blame from the Dumbo Duce is to highlight the Chinese government's enduring subservience to the Chinese Communist Party, and even to shift blame for what the government does directly onto the party, though it is less clear than it was in former days which is the dog and which is the tail of these two.

The true boss of both and pretty much everything in China is Xi Jinping, Paramount Leader, etc., etc..

And did either one (or did he?) actually have such an opportunity?

Even allowing that Pompeo's "all the calamity that has befallen the world" refers only to the calamity of the Coronavirus, of course.

Have we seen any reason to believe that?

Given the track record, I'd say it's just another lie only a little less inflammatory, gratuitous, and stupid on its face than saying they deliberately unleashed this bug on their own people and thence the world in order to ruin Dumbo's re-election chances.

Trump's campaign of lies against China (and Joe Biden) heats up

It's all about deflecting blame from himself in a way maximally helpful to his filthy, lying campaign.

Trump administration draws up plans to punish China over coronavirus outbreak

The Duce is publicly insisting, contrary to expert and intelligence opinion (and by the way he has coerced the DNI into reversing course on this in less than a day), that the virus came from a lab in Wuhan and was released to the whole world either by accident (and hence by horrific incompetence, he says) or by intention.

He is really cranking it up even as others in the campaign and elsewhere do their best to stick China to Joe Biden's forehead with more bullshit about his kid.

Not that the government of China is great, but . . . .

This is about making as much of the China bogey as possible, and that's about the propaganda against Joe Biden.

Tom Cotton Wants To Ban Science For Chinese Students So They Can't 'Steal' COVID-19 Vaccine

Fake News! Bozo, the most well-known, unashamed, and skilled compulsive and habitual liar on the planet, scapegoats China.

Trump suggests China may be ‘knowingly responsible’ for virus

“Our relationship with China was good until they did this,” Mr. Trump said Saturday. 

“The question was asked, ‘Would you be angry at China?’ Well, the answer might very well be a very resounding yes, but it depends: Was it a mistake that got out of control, or was it done deliberately?”

“There’s a big difference between those two,” he said.

The current scientific, intelligence, and public health consensus is that the cause of the outbreak was neither an accident nor a choice.

The outbreak was not from a lab and the virus is not a human creation.

It's a natural virus that jumped from some animal or other, probably from bats to humans, and probably at a wet market in Wuhan.

As so often, Trump is just shoveling bullshit, as are his lying Republican supporters, and the usual fools believe him but even more liars pretend to believe him.

When his intelligence agencies unanimously said Russia interfered extensively in the 2016 elections he lied he didn't believe them and Russia was innocent.

When everybody with an ounce of relevant expertise including his intelligence agencies says it's a natural virus that got to humans neither in a lab accident nor in a deliberate poisoning of humanity he again lies he doesn't believe them and China screwed up or deliberately poisoned the world.

But look at this about 77% of Americans blaming China for the virus and more than half agreeing China should be forced to pay some sort of reparations for its impact.

He and the GOP are taking advantage of this for campaign purposes and to avoid their own fair share of blame.

From conspiracy theory to respectability?

The conspiracy theory, a complete fabrication of the right, has been that the Coronavirus is an escaped bioweapon developed in a lab in Wuhan.

A more respectable version is being floated that there was no bioweapon, but the lab was doing some sort of non-weapon virus research and, yes, the virus escaped.

But the idea remains baseless and those floating it are just doing propaganda.

Especially including the Duce.

The consensus, still tentative and subject to correction, is that the virus came from a wet market in Wuhan.

Trump fans flames of Chinese lab coronavirus theory during daily briefing

Donald Trump has fuelled a media theory that the coronavirus pandemic began when the pathogen accidentally escaped a Chinese laboratory, teasing that “more and more we’re hearing the story”.

The US president’s TV network of choice, Fox News, has reported that “multiple sources” in the American government believe initial transmission of the virus was bat-to-human in a virology lab in Wuhan. 

Due to weak safety protocols, an infected lab worker then went to a wet market where the virus spread.

Former Obama foreign affairs official tells Andrea Mitchell Trump is right about WHO and China

Wrong to cut off the funds but right in that WHO delayed declaring emergency and calling a recognized pandemic officially a pandemic owing to Chinese government influence.

Another way to put that: the delay was a price the WHO had to pay for as much belated cooperation and transparency as it was able to get, including this critical piece: China shared the virus, samples and genome, with researchers of the world.

Did that delay cost lives?

Sure it did.

A price China made us all pay, and this is not the only way they made us pay it.

Start, only start, with their wet markets.

PS.

American rightists talking about this stuff, including the conspiracy theorists who say the virus originated in Chinese bioweapons research, delight always in referring to "Communist China" and "the Chinese Communist government" and sometimes, even in civilized society, use the early Cold War expression "Chicom".

But we're a long way from Mao, and these reds are to the real thing what RINOs are to true-blue and ideologically serious Republicans.

CINOs, you might say, though on second thought they are actually more distant than that from the reds of mid-20th century.

Considerably more.

A Republican senator who floated a conspiracy theory which said the Chinese government created Covid-19 in a weapons lab claimed on Saturday that since he first learned of the outbreak, in mid-January, “common sense has been my guide”.

On Saturday, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a foreign policy hardliner, wrote on Twitter: “Since I first learned of the Wuhan coronavirus in mid-January, common sense has been my guide.

“Not Chinese communist lies. Not ‘the models’. Not so-called ‘public-health experts’. Just common sense. Many elected leaders have also been guided by common sense. Others haven’t.”

The virus is believed to have originated in a market in Wuhan in which wild animals were sold. 

But in an appearance on Fox News in February, Cotton floated a conspiracy theory which suggests the virus was manufactured in a Chinese bioweapons facility.

Coronavirus discrepancies and misinformation

Repeated reports have said there have been and continue to be more male than female deaths from Coronavirus and more black than white deaths.

These discrepancies could trace in part to differing infection rates and in part to physical/medical differences.

The latter is also doubtless in part a reflection of the differing economic/class circumstances of the races in America.

But here and there we have seen mention of another factor, widespread misinformation among American blacks encouraging riskier behavior that blacks were immune, that it was harder for blacks to get this disease, or that it would generally be milder among blacks than whites.

So, did all of this misinformation come from black nitwits and frauds analogous to the white nitwits and frauds of the right who have sown denial and other forms of Coronavirus stupidity among the population in general?

Or were there foreign sources like Russia and China?

Or perhaps foreign and domestic white racist sources?

Who did this?

The apple doesn't fall far . . . .

Bolsonaro’s son blames China for coronavirus crisis

Beijing’s ambassador to Brazil has launched a stinging attack on the son of its far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, after he claimed the Chinese Communist party was to blame for the coronavirus crisis sweeping the world.

On Wednesday, Bolsonaro’s influential politician son Eduardo – who many regard as Brazil’s de facto foreign minister and has close ties to Steve Bannon – enraged Beijing with an incendiary tweet about its role in the pandemic.

“It’s China’s fault,” Bolsonaro claimed on Twitter, retweeting a message that said: “The blame for the global coronavirus pandemic has a name and surname: the Chinese Communist party.”

That remark drew a ferocious rebuke from senior Chinese diplomats, who have become increasingly combative since Xi Jinping – an authoritarian leader regarded as China’s most powerful since Mao Zedong – took power in 2012.

Yang Wanming, Beijing’s top diplomat in Brazil, demanded an immediate retraction and apology for the “evil insult”, while his embassy accused Eduardo Bolsonaro of contracting “a mental virus” during a recent trip to the United States.

“Your words are extremely irresponsible,” the embassy in Brasília tweeted.

“Regrettably, you’re someone lacking both international vision and common sense, knowing neither China nor the world,” the Chinese embassy added.

“We would advise you not to be in such a hurry to be the US’ spokesperson in Brazil – you’ll fall flat on your face.”

According to reports in the Brazilian media Yang also retweeted a message that read: “The Bolsonaro family is the great poison of this country.”

The row coincides with a deepening diplomatic row over the disease between Beijing and Washington, which was exacerbated by Donald Trump’s insistence on referring to the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus”.

How long to declare the virus beaten?

Wuhan reports no new cases for the day

A first since the outbreak began.

In all of China, no new domestic transmissions

All new cases were new arrivals from outside the country.

China, where the outbreak began, reported no new domestic transmissions of the virus for the first time on Wednesday. 

There were 34 new cases in the country, but all were recent arrivals from overseas. 

As other nations struggle to respond to the pandemic, writes Lily Kuo, Beijing is positioning itself as a global benefactor, sending them testing kits, ventilators, masks and medics.

How many days does an area have to go with no (known) new cases for that area to be virus free?

How long does it take for the people in that area who actually are already infected to die or get over it?

It varies with the severity of the case from two weeks to quite a bit longer.

So, maybe that long plus a couple of weeks?

And then how long will it take for economies to recover?