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A virus spawned in a city nearly 7,500 miles from the penultimate station on the seven-train has managed to bully the multi-billion-dollar sport into going on hiatus for the foreseeable future. All 30 clubs in Major League Baseball were slated to take the field today. To kick off the season, at 1:10 p.m. the Nationals and Mets were to face off in New York while the Tigers and Indians were to do battle in Cleveland. Instead, Citi Field in Queens and 14 other cathedrals of the national pastime will stand empty. A virus spawned in a city nearly 7,500...

Evidence is mounting that cases of the novel coronavirus may have emerged in the central city of Wuhan, China earlier than officially acknowledged in the country. Chinese news service Pengpai reported Thursday the first known patient of COVID-19 in Wuhan was a woman shopkeeper at Huanan Seafood Market, the official ground zero of the outbreak in December. The Wuhan Municipal Health Committee did not acknowledge the outbreak began until Dec. 31, and that the disease first appeared at the market. According to Pengpai, the patient with the surname Wei who sold shrimp at the market first showed signs of fever...

About 120 million U.S. taxpayers will qualify for direct payments from the government under the historic $2.2 trillion economic relief bill to combat the impact of the coronavirus, according to a conservative advocacy group’s analysis. Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin has said checks of up to $1,200 per person and $500 per child will go out within three weeks of President Trump signing the legislation, which could come as early as Friday. The IRS will send the money by direct deposit to taxpayers who have set up that capability; otherwise checks will be mailed. Individuals with income up to $75,000...

Despite claims by the mainstream media and the Democratic Party that the United States was "ill-prepared" to handle the coronavirus pandemic and that actions by Trump administration made us vulnerable, the United States was actually ranked the best-prepared country in the world to handle a pandemic in a study by Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHCHS) published in late 2019.The United States' Global Health Security Index score was 83.5/100, the highest overall score of 195 countries. The United Kingdom came in second with a score of 77.9. Italy, which has experienced significant...

Donald Trump won the presidency by tuning in to the hearts of Americans who had been left out. Are his current public ruminations on the nature of the American people and what sort of responses America CAN make to the C-19 crisis showing the same insight into his people? How Whitmanesque is he in this democratic capacity of tuning in to a national psyche? I have contrasted the thought of Whitman and Beethooven who both died on the same day, March 26, at different ends of the nineteenth century: https://freedom-demokrasi-and-civilised-humanity.com/2020/03/26/who-we-are-beethooven-and-whitman/ Both are undeniable giants in The West, but in Whitman...

For an incredibly beautiful reflection on The Stations of the Cross from The Blessed Virgin's perspective.

Joe Biden has largely been missing in action during the mitigation phase of the coronavirus pandemic. While I don’t think that most Americans are sitting around pondering where good old Joe is, his absence from the national conversation has been noticed. That is why his presidential campaign has made a calculated decision – get Joe out there in front of the American voters now.While it is not possible to hold standard campaign rallies now because of social distancing, especially given that Biden is in the high-risk group due to his advanced age, his campaign announced Biden will be delivering...

The immigration lawyers who import H-1B visa workers for U.S. companies are urging President Donald Trump’s deputies to extend the expiring work permits for hundreds of thousands of foreign contract workers during the nation’s unprecedented economic meltdown. The pleas come after the GOP-majority Senate shut down a push by the Democrat-run House to extend the deadline for many types of expiring visas and work permits. The permits are used by employers to replace Americans in U.S. jobs with hundreds of thousands of foreign contract workers, including H-1B graduates. If Trump’s administration agrees to extend the deadlines, it would prevent Americans...

The Senate was burning the midnight oil but they finally managed to hold a vote and unanimously decide to take ten percent of the national GDP and light it on fire late last night. The final coronavirus relief package cleverly named the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) passed on a 96-0 vote. The final price tag will come in at slightly more than two trillion (with a “T”) dollars. Of course, it can’t go to the President’s desk unless Nancy Pelosi decides to hold a vote on it later this morning, but we’ll get to that...

Will this tide us over until the end of June? And will Congress have to do this all over again if not? The Senate passed a massive relief bill last night aimed at rescuing the economy from free-fall during the coronavirus pandemic, and did so on a 96-0 unanimous vote. But just how much relief does $2.2 trillion buy?Three months, said Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, although he hopes we don’t end up testing whether it’s sufficient for that much inactivity: The package is intended as relief for an economy spiraling into recession or worse and a nation facing a...

The fight is over, but it is not entirely clear who won: Hulk Hogan has finally settled a sex-tape lawsuit that has been dragging on for years. The former pro wrestler, whose real name is Terry Bollea, had been seeking $110m (£94m) from talkshow hosts at Florida-based Cox Radio, who he accused of leaking a video showing him having sex and using racist language. The case was supposed to go to a jury trial next January but a confidential settlement reached on Thursday means that will now be avoided. I don’t want to think about Hogan naked any more than...

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. It’s Andrea Mitchell. So that basically makes this just another day ending in a “Y,” but this is kind of remarkable even for her. In the middle of her show yesterday, Mitchell was talking to Jim Messina, a former Obama administration official, and expressed what’s apparently worrying her the most in the midst of a pandemic that’s killed more than one thousand Americans and sickened tens of thousands more. President Trump’s approval rating might “skyrocket” as this thing drags on and Joe Biden is almost nowhere to be seen. (MRC) During her 12:00...

An expert on South Korean politics who became a global superstar after his serious interview on the BBC was gatecrashed by his curious children and stressed-out wife has appeared on the news again today - to reveal that his son and daughter are 'climbing the walls' during their coronavirus isolation. Professor Robert Kelly's appearance on BBC News via a video link in March 2017 became an instant sensation after his daughter Marion, then four, burst into her father's office for the world to see, with her baby brother James hot on her heels in his walker. Their unflappable father, who...

Donald Trump plays a different game of chess. He thinks several moves ahead, as any chess master would, but he also plays multiple games simultaneously. He contends with a confrontational media, an insatiable Democratic House leadership, and ill prepared state government–managed health care facilities. Trump would be amazed should he get true bipartisan support in his effort to stem the coronavirus crisis. Trump chose to express his desire for a return to normal. He hoped America could reopen by Easter. The media immediately rushed to condemn him. But when his tweet Sunday evening was sent out, was he trying to...

The global coronavirus pandemic has thrown the United States (like most of the rest of the world) into a sort of quasi-organized chaos. All across the country, businesses, health care systems, governments and schools have been disrupted. In my own field of higher education, most colleges and universities have been forced to close live, in-person classes and move entirely to online instruction. As someone who teaches courses in entrepreneurship and innovation, this is a riveting phenomenon to watch, a case study unfolding in real time. Since the early 2000s, I have taught from author Clayton Christensen's seminal 1997 book, "The...

Dow Industrials are up by 3% in first half hour of trading. This begins a third day of market increases, even after record unemployment claims of 3.283 million announce prior to market open.

Coronavirus is an icky disease that takes a cruel toll on the elderly, the sick, and the unlucky. In this modern era, we can outwit many things that once routinely killed people, but the Grim Reaper is still out there and he’ll eventually get all of us. Scary headlines have hinted that coronavirus is now the Grim Reaper's preferred method. Media reports have told us that coronavirus is significantly more deadly than the flu, which annually kills 30,000 to 60,000 Americans. Based on the speed with which it killed in China, Italy, Iran, and Spain, it looked as if the...

Steve Sisolak, the leftist governor of Nevada, decided to play doctor by banning the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, two drugs that are being used elsewhere to treat COVID-19.  "While these drugs serve necessary medical purposes, this regulation protects the Nevadans who need them and prevents unnecessary hoarding," Sisolak wrote on Twitter. Unneccessary hoarding? The hoarding thing is a smokescreen, his real reason was to slap at President Trump who touted these medications as showing promise, and even mistakenly said they had been approved for use by the FDA. That's his real reason for the limit on the unproven drug, which goes against the...

UnitedHealth Group rolled out a self-swab coronavirus test in Seattle on Monday and hopes to roll it out to more states as soon as possible. Self-administered tests can spare health care workers, who normally administer such tests, from germs spread by a patient's cough or sneeze. UnitedHealth released details of its 500-patient study that found self-swab tests to be as accurate as physician-administered tests on Wednesday. "We know that broad, rapid and accurate testing is essential to addressing the COVID-19 crisis, yet the current clinician-administered process significantly limits testing capacity, puts frontline health care workers at risk of COVID-19 exposure,...

We aren’t going to get too far out over our skis on this, because after all we’re in the middle of a sell-a-thon of tickets and sponsorships for Hayride tour events that right now we’re not able to put on (see here for the skinny on that, and feel free to participate!) – but yesterday Peter Kovacs, the editor of the New Orleans Advocate, blasted out an e-mail which essentially begged the public for contributions. Here’s what that looked like… Of course, The Advocate is owned by John Georges, who as everyone in Louisiana knows by now is richer than...