It comes on the one-year anniversary of CVD, and how symbolic is the discarded mask, 'eh?
One might also see $upremaci$t raci$m in the treatment of another one-year anniversary with it's placement on page B2; however, I will leave that up to the reader to determine editorial intent given that flipping below the fold will find you a couple of local heroes who have made and will make Boston what it is and will be and not what it is not. There will be no parade, of course, and you can't blame him (what's with the Masonic hand-signaling to open?) for taking the vaccine like Hank Aaron, but you can watch March Madne$$ ba$ketball because in the end, the check from the television rights will be cashed. That's why big-time college $ports and the pros have been allowed to play under cover of the fraudemic.
Of course, $port$ is no longer the oasis it used to be and holds no interest for me anymore.
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"COVID? What COVID? Taiwan thrives as a bubble of normality" by Amy Qin and Amy Chang Chien New York Times, March 13, 2021
TAIPEI, Taiwan — As the coronavirus has upended lives and economies around the world, Taiwan has been an oasis.
Every day, droplets fly with abandon in packed restaurants, bars and cafes. Office buildings hum, and schools resound with the shrieks and laughter of maskless children. In October, a Pride parade drew an estimated 130,000 people to the streets of this capital city. Rainbow masks were abundant; social distancing, not so much.
Taiwan, an island of 24 million that has seen just 10 COVID-19 deaths and fewer than 1,000 cases, has used its success to sell something in short supply: living without fear of the coronavirus. The relatively few people who are allowed to enter Taiwan have been coming in droves, and they’ve helped to fuel an economic boom.
Of course, that is a human rights issue as the pandemic is receding in the worst hotspots like Greece and migrants are smuggled through Texas and powered to destinations unknown for a “mind-blowing amount of money.”
Taiwan’s borders have been mostly closed to foreign visitors since spring, but highly skilled non-Taiwanese workers have been allowed in under a “gold card” employment program, which the government has aggressively promoted during the pandemic. Since Jan. 31, 2020, more than 1,600 gold cards have been issued, more than four times as many as in 2019.
The influx of people helped make Taiwan one of last year’s fastest-growing economies — indeed, one of the few to expand at all. There was a brief slowdown at the start of the pandemic, but the economy grew more than 5% in the fourth quarter compared with the same period in 2019. The government expects 4.6% growth in 2021, which would be the fastest pace in seven years.
According to the Wa$hington Compo$t, China’s economy is growing faster now than before pandemic and completely open, such as it is in that ba$tion of totalitarian communi$m (more on that below).
Steve Chen, 42, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur who co-founded YouTube, was the first to sign up for the gold card program. He moved to the island from San Francisco with his wife and two children in 2019. Then, after the pandemic hit, many of his friends in Silicon Valley, particularly those with Taiwanese heritage, began to join him — a reverse brain drain, of sorts.
He and colleagues such as Kevin Lin, a co-founder of Twitch, and Kai Huang, a co-creator of Guitar Hero, have traded coffee meetups at the Ferry Building in San Francisco for badminton matches and poker nights in Taipei. Taiwan’s leaders say the infusion of foreign talent has given a shot of energy to its tech industry, which is better known for manufacturing prowess than for entrepreneurial culture.
“That whole chain that you have in the Silicon Valley — the entrepreneurs who are willing to take a risk, the investors that are willing to write an early check — all of those folks have actually come back and are in Taiwan now,” said Chen, lounging on a couch at his office in a government-backed coworking space in Taipei.
“I feel like it’s a golden era for tech,” he said, “and it’s dawning on the government that they should really take advantage of this time now.”
They have been working hand-in-glove for decades, especially after 9/11.
Not all of Taiwan’s industries have been flourishing. Those that depend on robust international travel, including airlines, hotels and tour companies, have taken big hits, but exports have been on the rise for eight straight months, fueled by shipments of electronics and surging demand for Taiwan’s most important product: semiconductor chips.
Domestic tourism is also booming.
I'm also told commercial air travel appears to be on the rise, which is contrary to the garbage served up yesterday, as air travel quarantines get longer and lonelier with authorities tightening the screws to stop COVID-19 mutations slipping through quarantine models designed to contain a less aggressive virus while authorities in Melbourne are sketching out plans for custom-built isolation facilities outside the city while Hong Kong has one of the most extreme policies: a 21-day hotel lockup awaits residents arriving from outside China, but governments have decided it’s a price worth paying to keep out fast-moving COVID-19 variants from places such as South Africa, which was linked to a 16-fold increase in cases in neighboring Zambia within a month and mutations have also been tied to Brazil and the UK -- except the “problem is at this point we have very little information about these variants” as they literally pick your nose (and he was supposed to be one of the good ones. One wonders if he hasn't been surreptitiously replaced with a body double at this point. I put nothing past the evil behind the agenda from which their is no sanctuary.
[As an aside regarding the Globe ad services, it sure looks like something is going on when Joy's Hoetique(?) is offering this kind of shirt while hiking up the skirt and showing you some leg as they walk along the beach]
For many, coming back has meant a chance to reconnect with Taiwan.
Many are wondering how long Taiwan’s status as a COVID-19 outlier can last, especially as vaccine rollouts surge forward elsewhere. So far, officials have been slow to procure and distribute vaccines, in part because there has been so little need for them. The government announced just this month that it had received its first batch, to be given to medical workers.
Don't take the shot, don't get CVD.
It's that simple, and they are a smart people (unlike the South Koreans and Samsung).
Some people, including Tai Ling Sun, 72, are already making plans to leave the bubble.
In January, Sun and her husband came from California to the city of Kaohsiung, where she grew up, at the urging of friends and family in Taiwan. They were concerned about her safety in Orange County, where coronavirus cases had been on the rise.
After two weeks in quarantine, Sun stepped out into a Taiwan that — aside from the masks — looked and felt almost exactly as it had on previous visits. She has since been making the most of her stay with a series of routine medical checkups, something that many in the United States have been delaying since the pandemic started, but a virus-free paradise doesn’t provide immunity to all ailments. Sun said she had begun to feel homesick. She longed to see her five children and breathe pristine suburban air, and, she added, she wanted a vaccine.
“It’s been great to be here,” Sun said, “but it’s time to go home.”
Didn't someone tell her you can never really go home again?
Related:
"Orchid Island, a small, coral-ringed island off Taiwan’s east coast, had so many visitors last summer that hotel operators started a campaign encouraging them to take 2 pounds of trash with them when they left. Some aspects of pandemic life have permeated Taiwan’s borders. Temperature checks and hand sanitizing are common, and masks are required in many public places (though not schools), but for the most part, the virus has been out of sight and out of mind, thanks to rigorous contact tracing and strict quarantines for incoming travelers....."
Now we have COVID migrants and that is how Taiwan plans to stay (mostly) COVID-free.
This is how China intends to do it:
"Hong Kong abruptly locked down four buildings in the heart of a popular expatriate residential area, taking one of its most dramatic steps yet to contain a super-spreading event that began in a gym and put many of the city’s elite and their families on edge. Authorities cordoned off two towers each at the Robinson Place and Blessings Garden residential complexes in the exclusive Mid-Levels neighborhood, according to a government statement Saturday. All residents will be required to be tested at mobile testing stations before 2 a.m. Sunday and the lockdown will likely be lifted by 9 a.m., it said. Police vans and officers arrived earlier in the evening to seal off the area around the buildings with red tape and metal barricades. Nearly a dozen makeshift tents lined the sidewalk as government workers in protective gear began setting up specimen collection stations. The move marks an escalation of a days-old campaign that’s already resulted in hundreds of people being sent to quarantine camps, dozens of offices being ordered to conduct mandatory employee testing and several of Hong Kong’s most expensive schools to halt in-person classes. While the city’s had bigger flareups before, no outbreak has hit so close to home for many of the city’s expats since the pandemic began. The number of confirmed cases linked to the outbreak ballooned to 99 after the first case was reported on Wednesday."
How long until that happens here, America?
There will be no asylum anywhere as the power of the state crushes COVID-19 so workers can return to the factories, students to the classroom, and lines at restaurant as in many ways, normal life has resumed in China, the country where COVID-19 first appeared one year ago.
It was the vaccines that filled the gap, but there are questions whether they will be effective or not; however, the lawyer who asked them was sentenced to 4 years hard labor after trying to flee Hong Kong after claiming the Wuhan cases were 10 times higher than reported by the government.
No one was immune, not even Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai, or Apple. That's why the EU signed a long-awaited investment deal after folding like a cheap cardboard box that allowed China to attack and invade Western Europe and plunder its riches while revolutionizing the way the biotech/pharma industry does business. Not even the Dalai Lama can help (proving what a tool and fraud he really is).
"A city in northern China is building a 3,000-unit quarantine facility to deal with an anticipated overflow of patients as COVID-19 cases rise ahead of the annual Lunar New Year travel rush. State media on Friday showed crews leveling earth, pouring concrete and assembling prefabricated rooms in farmland in an outlying part of Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital of Hebei province, which has seen the bulk of the new cases. That recalled scenes from early last year, when China rapidly built field hospitals and turned gymnasiums into isolation centers to cope with a then-spiraling outbreak in Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019....."
If only the plan would come aground the way the Nazi's did:
"The wreck site is surrounded by a mesh barrier intended to contain debris for cleanup once the big sections get removed. Boats equipped with skimmers and absorbent booms stay on standby to mop up any leaking oil or other pollutants. Still, bumpers, tires and other car parts falling from the ship have been found on beaches. Birds have been found coated in oil, and though most fuel has been drained from the ship's tanks, there's concern that an estimated 44,000 gallons remaining could come gushing out once the cutting chain severs the ship's fuel line. By the time demolition of the Golden Ray began in November, the project had already delayed for several months because of a busy hurricane season and handful of coronavirus infections among salvage team members. Ironically, wreck site commanders insisted on removing the ship in large chunks because it was supposed to be faster....."
Reminds one of Obama's Gulf gusher that has disappeared from history:
"A village erased" by Russell Goldman New York Times, March 13, 2021
KESEN, Japan — When a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami struck coastal Japan on March 11, 2011, more than 200 residents of the village, Kesen, in Iwate prefecture, were killed. All but two of 550 homes were destroyed.
After the waters receded, nearly everyone who survived fled. They left behind their destroyed possessions, the tombs of their ancestors and the land their forefathers had farmed for generations, but 15 residents refused to abandon Kesen and vowed to rebuild. Twice a year since 2011, Hiroko Masuike, a photographer for The New York Times, has visited the village to document the survivors’ all-but-doomed mission of remaking their hometown.
Many of those who remained, including Sato, lived for months without power or running water. For a year, Sato camped in the fetid wreckage of his home. For a decade, he has dreamed of Kesen’s rebirth.
I don't mean to be throwing a lump of coal at you, but life could soon be like that here.
Sato’s wife and daughter-in-law realized the futility of his plan and left him behind. Slowly, over the past decade, a grim reality has settled over this place: There is no going back. Kesen will never be restored. This emptiness will last forever.
That can get complicated.
Sato is resigned that his mission may have been for naught. “I am very sad,” he said. He blames the government. “Right now, given the coronavirus pandemic, I’m lucky to live here,” Sato said. To make sure his wry joke was understood, he added, “The air is clean, and there are not too many people.”
He must be a Trump supporter.
So that's where his oasis of exile awaits, 'eh?
On the high ground, a handful of newly constructed houses have sprung up around Kongoji Temple. Like the mythic Ship of Theseus, whose component parts over time were all replaced, Kongoji is both the same temple that has been in the community for 1,200 years and an entirely new one built in 2017.
For centuries, the temple has served as a community calendar, marking time with 33 events a year. Those rites have effectively come to a halt, but on Thursday, Nobuo Kobayashi, Kongoji’s chief monk, will welcome the scattered members of the community to Kesen for a memorial service.
Kobayashi has worked tirelessly to make sure the families have a place to mourn their loved ones, but he is realistic about the temple ever again echoing with sounds other than lamentations of grief.....
They failed the test I guess, which is why the government made this the last memorial.
Erased in more ways than one:
"In 2011, in the wake of Japan’s earthquake and tsunami and mounting nuclear crisis, President Barack Obama said that he had offered the Japanese government any assistance the United States could provide."
Which was absolutely nothing!
Last I saw he was in a monastery in Kosovo sleeping off a bender after cuddling up with a Panda cub while Myanmar forces killed 7 as the regime change operation continues and families begin burying their dead.
Related:
The syringe is firmly pointed at China as India starts the world’s largest COVID-19 vaccination drive -- much to the woe of their former masters.
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What's good for the goose.....
"Different states have had different approaches to the pandemic, yet similar tolls. The question remains: why?" by David A. Lieb The Associated Press, March 13, 2021
Nearly a year after California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the nation’s first statewide shutdown because of the coronavirus, masks remain mandated, indoor dining and other activities are significantly limited, and Disneyland remains closed.
By contrast, Florida has no statewide restrictions. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has prohibited municipalities from fining people who refuse to wear masks, and Disney World has been open since July.
Despite their differing approaches, California and Florida have experienced almost identical outcomes in COVID-19 case rates.
How have two states that took such divergent tacks arrived at similar points?
“This is going to be an important question that we have to ask ourselves: What public health measures actually were the most impactful, and which ones had negligible effect or backfired by driving behavior underground?” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Though research has found that mask mandates and limits on group activities such as indoor dining can help slow the spread of the coronavirus, states with greater government-imposed restrictions have not always fared better than those without them.
Sorry, but Florida is not all its cracked up to be:
"Police in Miami Beach kicked off what was expected to be a busy spring break weekend by shooting pepper balls in order to disperse a crowd that had gathered around officers who were making an arrest. The Miami Beach Police Department tweeted Friday night that two officers were injured and had to be taken to a hospital. They were released early Saturday but remained off-duty because of their injuries, the police department said in an emailed statement. James Harrison, 19, of Brooklyn, was arrested on charges of battery on a police officer, resisting an officer with violence, inciting a riot and disorderly conduct. Harrison shouted obscenities at police officers when they tried to break up a crowd of more than 200 people that was blocking traffic, smoking cannabis and carrying around open containers, according to a police report released Saturday. Harrison then pushed an officer and the crowd surrounded officers who were outnumbered at the intersection in the heart of Miami Beach’s famous nightclub and restaurant district, the police report said. Two officers fired pepper balls “due to the large, aggressive, unruly crowd and the immediate posing threats to officer safety,” the police report said. An officer body-slammed Harrison after Harrison grabbed the front collar of the officer’s police vest collar as the officer was trying to place the suspect in handcuffs, authorities said. The move was an attempt to release Harrison’s grip, the report said. Once on the ground, Harrison started kicking and bracing his body to avoid being put in handcuffs, and an officer hit Harrison in the chest while another officer kneed him in the shoulder, the report said. “It should be noted that defendant Harrison’s actions made the crowd extremely aggressive towards officers, posing a clear threat to their safety, due to the large number of unruly subjects present,” the police report said. Harrison was taken to jail. It couldn’t be determined through online court records Saturday if Harrison had an attorney. South Beach resident Kevin Green told the Miami Herald that said the confrontation began after a large crowd of at least 200 people gathered at an intersection to party. “People were just having fun in that general area,” Green said. “It looked like people were doing Snapchat videos.”
Then why did the BLM-$upporting pre$$ lean so heavily on the increasingly-discredited police report?
That region of the country will literally twist you in knots -- according to my pre$$ at least.
Connecticut and South Dakota are another example. Both rank among the 10 worst states for COVID-19 death rates, yet Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, imposed numerous statewide restrictions over the past year after an early surge in deaths, while South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, issued no mandates as virus deaths soared in the fall.
While Lamont ordered quarantines for certain out-of-state visitors, Noem launched a $5 million tourism advertising campaign and welcomed people to a massive motorcycle rally, which some health experts said spread the coronavirus throughout the Midwest.
Both contend their approach is the best.
“Even in a pandemic, public health policy needs to take into account people’s economic and social well-being,” Noem said during a recent conservative convention.
Lamont recently announced that he is lifting capacity limits at retail stores, restaurants and other facilities, effective March 19, but bars that don't serve food will remain closed and a mask mandate will continue.
“This is not Texas. This is not Mississippi. This is Connecticut,” Lamont said, referencing other states that recently lifted mask mandates.
“We’re finding what works is wearing the mask, social distancing and vaccinations,” he said.
As if "science" would care what location!
As for LaMont -- the guy who took on Joe Lieberman and was robbed -- turned out to be a real tyrant as well as an a$$hole and can't hold a candle to Noem.
As new COVID-19 cases decrease nationally, governors in more than half the states have taken actions during past two weeks to end or ease coronavirus restrictions, according to an Associated Press tally. Some capacity limits ended Friday in Maryland and Oklahoma. Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Wyoming are relaxing restrictions in the coming week.
In almost all cases, governors have lauded their approach to the pandemic, while critics have accused them of being too stringent or too lax.
Public health experts said individual choices could help explain the similar outcomes among some states with loose or strict orders from the governor.
Some people voluntarily were “being more vigilant in states where the guidelines are more relaxed," said Thomas Tsai, an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, yet in states with more government mandates, “people generally in public were wearing masks and following the guidelines, but in private they were letting down their guard and less vigilant,” he said.
Imposing strict measures, like forbidding families from visiting grandparents and friends from gathering, is like taking an abstinence-only approach to combating drug use and sexually transmitted disease, said Adalja, of Johns Hopkins University. Some will comply, but other “people are going to do those activities, anyway," he said.....
Interesting change in attitude, donchathink?
Speaking of the devil, it's literally right next door:
"In Maine, addiction crisis deepened by the pandemic; The pandemic cut many people off from counseling and group meetings when they needed them most" by Brian MacQuarrie Globe Staff, March 13, 2021
PORTLAND, Maine — Maine, like most states, is beginning to reopen as COVID-19 cases decline, but the collateral damage already done to people struggling with drugs and alcohol — through anxiety, relapse, and death — has been a heavy blow for the state and its recovery community.
“You feel alone already, and then you throw in the fact that you’re stuck at home, and you can’t do anything, and you can’t see anybody,” said Ashley Reny, executive director of Journey House Recovery, which operates five group residences in Maine. “So, you go find an alternative, and when you’re in that state of mind, you’ll do whatever you have to do to get what you want,” she added in a phone interview.
The trend also is reflected in national statistics. In December, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 81,000 drug fatalities from June 2019 through May 2020, the largest number ever recorded for a 12-month period. In Massachusetts, the mortality increase was more modest, a 2.2 percent rise over the first nine months of 2020.
When the arrival of COVID shut down the country last March, it also shut down many of the tools for recovery. In Maine, group meetings were canceled, and counseling was curtailed, and Zoom sessions, some based in faraway states, could not match the in-person support provided by a sponsor and other familiar faces.
“Imagine you’re in recovery and you want to engage. Imagine the challenge of doing that virtually,” said Dr. Ron Springel, program manager for the Maine Association of Recovery Residences.
Eric Skillings, a Sanford man who relapsed in 2019, said the pandemic compounded the dangers facing his fiancee, who once managed the Sanford women’s residence for Journey House. “She was scared to go out. She got very depressed from de-socializing, and then the drug use just got worse and worse. My bottom is usually jail or prison. Her bottom was ultimately death, because she wasn’t able to get the help she needed,” he recalled.
Waugh’s death was the latest tragedy for the Journey House community. Jesse Harvey, a founder, died of an overdose Sept. 7 at the age of 28, but as COVID cases fall, group meetings and in-person counseling are reappearing.....
Always good to leave the meeting on a positive note!
Despite the tremendous Globe reporting, they have enabled the massive fraud that the CVD $cam has brought about while promoting the same pharmaceuticals behind the crisis that preceded CVD.
I believe the appropriate term is crocodile tears.
What is strange is Florida is considered to be in an “active outbreak,” along with Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and South Carolina, according to the data-tracking website CovidActNow, and yet Rhode Island is one of a handful of states that is allegedly being considered for a full reopen because of the way they have allegedly handled the fraud and gained herd immunity -- just as Raimondo is on the loose in D.C.
Related:
"The Rhode Island Foundation awarded a record $87 million in grants in 2020, about 25 percent of which was raised and distributed in direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the foundation said Wednesday. The grants went to more than 2,200 nonprofit organizations across the state. The foundation raised more than $68 million last year, the third best fund-raising year in the organization’s 105-year history. The foundation ended 2020 with total assets of $1.2 billion and its total investment return for the year was just over 12 percent. In addition, the foundation in 2020 launched a three-year $8.5 million plan to expand its commitment to promoting racial equity and inclusion. The Rhode Island Foundation is the largest funder of nonprofit organizations in the state (AP)."
Time to check the reporter's notebook:
That's one way to make him relent and accept the Greater Agenda after the outspoken billionaire had been a COVID-19 skeptic.
He then hopped on his motorcycle and motored out of sight like I will for the day.
"A 19-year-old woman was fatally injured and her estranged boyfriend suffered slashing wounds inside a Falmouth motel on Monday in a case which is now being investigated as a possible domestic violence incident, Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe said Tuesday. The woman was identified by O’Keefe as Danielle Taylor of Mashpee and the prosecutor said a cause of death was pending an autopsy by the state medical examiner’s office. He declined to identify the man, who is under guard at a Rhode Island hospital but is not currently facing any criminal charges. Taylor and the man were romantically involved, but the relationship was recently brought to an end, he said. Taylor and the injured man were found at what has been used as employee housing for the Capewind Waterfront Resort on Maravista Extension in Falmouth Monday evening, O’Keefe said. The investigation is continuing....."
He's already been released due to COVID risks despite being a suspect in a second murder, and did you know hundreds of Massachusetts residents lost a total of $8 million last year in romance scams targeting people on dating websites, apps, and other electronic forums?
They must have taken the wrong advice and believed in abstinence and the fantasy of a storybook ending.
