Category Archives: China

Travel Ban: The One Thing Trump Could Have Done To Perfection, BUT Didn’t

China, Donald Trump, Globalism, Healthcare, IMMIGRATION

In “The Open-Border Fetish Is Turning Into A Symbol Of Death,” a March 14 COVID column, published first by American Greatness, I had already preempted Axios in assembling the sources that allowed me to deduce that the Trump travel ban was well, quite pitiful.

The first U.S. “Proclamation on Suspension of Entry, as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants, of Persons who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus” was signed into law on Jan. 30. It went into effect only on February 2.

Reports from our nation’s airports, however, told of chaotic attempts to reroute passengers to 11 designated U.S. airports, for the purpose of screening that was as “enhanced” as temperature checks and a reliance on the “honest” say-so of the arrivals.

At the time, no restrictions had been placed by the United States on arrivals from other COVID-19 hot zones. Passenger screening from source countries like Italy was slack, to put it mildly.

The government’s latest travel ban on Europe is welcome. Via the National Pulse:

“[S]ubject to conditions on the ground … travel from Europe to the United States will be suspended for 30 days. These restrictions will not apply to the United Kingdom.”

Alas, while it is true that the UK “is not part of the EU’s open-borders zone,” it has however—and as reports on terra firma suggest—been allowing any and all to enter from Europe practically unchecked.

Put it this way: An officer “briefly pointing a thermometer gun at your forehead or watching as you go by for signs of a cough or difficulty breathing” does little to stop the virus from spreading. In fact, as a correspondent for Science magazine avers, “It’s exceedingly rare for screeners to detect infected passengers.”

Belatedly, the United Kingdom was added to America’s iffy travel ban, but the meaningless screening protocol was the same.

From the fact that the Democrats would have done nothing to stop the flood of visitors carrying WuFlu from China—it doesn’t follow that the Trump administration did a good job. It didn’t. Better than nothing is not something the American people should be thankful for.

As to the numbers that flooded in under the much-hyped travel ban on China:  “There were 1,300 direct flights to 17 cities before President Trump’s travel restrictions. Since then, nearly 40,000 Americans and other ‘authorized’ travelers have made the trip, some this past week [April 4] and many with spotty screening.”

Confirmation (and better article accessibility) came, April 5, 2020, from Reuters   (although, minus the astounding numbers, I had reported this on March 14, well before the malfunctioning media, after following the facts back then):

… the administration took a month from the time it learned of the outbreak in late December to impose the initial travel restrictions amid furious infighting.

During that time, the National Security Council staff, the state department and other federal agencies argued about everything from how best to screen for sick travelers to the economic impact of any restrictions, according to two government officials familiar with the deliberations.

The NSC staff ultimately proposed aggressive travel restrictions to high-level administration officials – but it took at least a week more for the president to adopt them, one of the government officials said.

In meetings, Matthew Pottinger, deputy national security adviser and a China expert, met opposition from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow, said two former NSC officials and one of the government officials involved in the deliberations. The two top aides were concerned about economic fallout from barring travelers from China, the sources said.

Each day that the administration debated the travel measures, roughly 14,000 travelers arrived in the United States from China, according to figures cited by the Trump administration. Among them was a traveler who came from Wuhan to Seattle in mid-January, who turned out to be the first confirmed case in the United States.

Early, too, was I to expose, on March 13, the tragedy of the Index Patient. “From Wuhan to Washington State With ‘Love’” followed the nerdy writings of the RNA sequencers. RNA doesn’t lie:

Writes Trevor Bedford, a sequencing scientist at the Fred Hutch Research Center: “The first case in the USA was … from a traveler directly returning from Wuhan to Snohomish County on Jan. 15.” But there was another traveler whose virus was related to that of Patient Zero, and who had,

“exposed someone else to the virus in the period between Jan. 15 and Jan. 19, before they were isolated. If this second case was mild or asymptomatic, contact tracing efforts by public health would have had difficulty detecting it. After this point, community spread occurred and was undetected due to the CDC’s narrow case definition that required direct travel to China or direct contact with a known case to even be considered for testing. This lack of testing was a critical error and allowed an outbreak in Snohomish County and the surroundings to grow to a sizable problem before it was even detected.” [Emphasis added.]

Colleagues confirm that the “genetic diversity of the Washington State outbreak … suggests a scenario in which an individual infected [from] Washington State travelled to California, and, in particular, to the Grand Princess cruiser, instigating a chain of transmission there. The viral strain from a patient infected on the cruise ship off the coast of California is similar to the cluster circulating in Washington state.”

If only travel from China had been stopped earlier, the poor old people from the Life Care home might be alive, and the coronavirus would not be multiplying exponentially among us.

The New England Journal of Medicine had written extensively about the Index Patient here:

“First Case of 2019 Novel Coronavirus in the United States.”

UPDATED (4/7): How Does Lara Trump Intend To Close China’s Wet-Markets For Good?

Asia, China, Communism, Conservatism, Culture, Donald Trump, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Natural Law

Lara Trump is organizing a “broad coalition” to “close China’s bat, cat, and dog meat markets.”

How will she accomplish this? Regulations? How would she possibly orchestrate those? Perhaps the China-owned World Health Organization will mediate? Talks? Making nice? Getting her father-in-law to make nice, then pretending she’s achieved what she hasn’t?

Unless you punish people for their barbarity, you have little chance of changing behavior. And you know that if the Chinese state begins putting people in jail for wet-market activity, American conservatives will holler about the communist party proceeding unjustly against its wonderful people.

A good punishment is to buy American. Boycott everything to do with the vile Asian cultures whose people wallow in the blood of innocent creatures, captured from the wild, tortured alive and bled on the spot for the pleasure of their barbaric consumers.

The issue has always been finding product that isn’t made in China. However, free-market America is a magical agora. If the demand is there; it’ll deliver. Just quit purchasing cheap Chinese crap. (I often buy cheap mittens from Rite Aid. They cost about $2, and last 2 months. No more.)

And quit the crazy talk. WuFlu comes straight from the Wuhan’s wet markets. RNA doesn’t lie. As I wrote, first in a Townhall.com, Mar 13, 2020 column:

As for the country’s professional racism spotters, they wish only to uncouple coronavirus from Wuhan, a city in the Hubei Province of China, where it originated.

Naturally, the ossified CDC has been scathing about the intellectually nimble sleuth work done by scientists not its own, in the course of the viral RNA sequencing mentioned. But epidemiology obligates this creaky bureaucracy to trace the origins of the virus.

And so it has. Writes the CDC:

“Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in people and many different species of animals, including camels, cattle, cats, and bats. Rarely, animal coronaviruses can infect people and then spread between people such as with … with this new virus (named SARS-CoV-2).
The SARS-CoV-2 virus [has its] origins in bats. The sequences from U.S. patients are similar to the one that China initially posted, suggesting a likely single, recent emergence of this virus from an animal reservoir.
Early on, many of the patients at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, had some link to a large seafood and live animal market, suggesting animal-to-person spread. Later, a growing number of patients reportedly did not have exposure to animal markets, indicating person-to-person spread. Person-to-person spread was subsequently reported outside Hubei and in countries outside China, including in the United States.”

Writes Mark Sunwall on Facebook:

As a libertarian my idea of pan-human legal obligations is rather minimal, but can’t we at least advocate and seek the enforcement of the seven Noachide laws? In this case, the one which prohibits the torment of animals.

Why The Chinese Are A Strong, Authentic, Unafraid NATION

China, IMMIGRATION, Nationalism, Nationhood, Race, Racism, The West

Several [Chinese] “women vow to leap off the Great Wall rather than marry a foreigner,” reports the Economist with consternation.

The Chinese have no qualms about expressing Han racial superiority. And we should admire them for guarding their nation, all as the West embraces a multicultural mess of pottage that is now killing us. Stupidity is not a virtue.

“[T]here are hardly any immigrants in China” and the people, for the most, don’t want it.

Talk in political circles about increasing skilled immigration into China elicits “racial and sexual panic, with men vowing to defend Chinese women from immigrants, notably from Africa. Several young women vowed to leap from the Great Wall rather than marry a foreigner.”

Unlike stupid westerner, who’ve bought the dumb talk from pundits about “demography being destiny,” the Chinese will have none of it. They “distrust of technocrats who defend migration as an economic necessity.”

In 2016 China issued just 1,576 permanent-residency permits. In the same year America granted permanent residency to over 1m foreigners—roughly equivalent to China’s entire foreign-born population. Unlike American green cards, China’s residence permits are not considered a pathway to citizenship.

China must not become multicultural, social-media users wrote. Accused of taking foreign nationality, a film actress, Ning Jing, assured fans that she had never swayed “for even half a second” and remained a “child of the Flame Emperor and the Yellow Emperor”. That slogan, claiming descent from two mythological founders of China, is telling, for it draws on claims of Chinese racial purity peddled by nationalists for well over a century.

More than 90% of modern Chinese hail from the Han nationality. Han chauvinism helped topple the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, whose emperors were called impure outsiders on account of their Manchurian origins. With the Qing safely gone, nationalists reversed course and claimed the nations making up their new republic—Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Muslim Hui and Tibetan—as branches of one Chinese bloodline.

…President Xi Jinping calls China’s recorded history unique for its continuous transmission over 3,000 years by yellow-skinned, black-haired “descendants of the dragon”. ..

…  arguments about racial superiority are not taboo in China; the Chinese do not like black people and are not afraid to say so.

where schools drum into students that their country is a victim of racist, imperialist bullying, and a benefactor to the developing world. As one netizen wrote during this immigration row, when the Chinese express dislike of Africans that cannot be racism, because “China never oppressed black people.”

MORE: “When nationalism bites back.”

* Chinese In Black Face

Living With One Foot In Wuhan, The Other In The West

Ann Coulter, China, Conservatism, Globalism, IMMIGRATION, Labor, libertarianism, Nationalism

Writes Michelle Malkin:

Just learned that OpenBordersInc tool Charles Sauer is not only a DACA amnesty promoter, but also wants more EB-5 visas for wealthy Chinese, which Lindsey Graham and Jared Kushner are trying to expand as part of a coronovirus rescue package. Expose AMERICALAST and OpenBordersInc.

Ms. Malkin is referring to “Don’t let populism push people out of the country” by Charles Sauer, a very dull piece full of old bromides and shibboleths, such as that the cessation of immigration is synonymous with stagnation.

As I am beginning to see it, America First and more immigration from WuFlu China are mutually exclusive!

Expanded immigration from China means very many more people living with one foot in Wuhan, the other in Washington State and beyond.

Ann Coulter put it succinctly in “Cheap TVs, Expensive FLU”:

Thanks to “globalism” — i.e., cheap goods from China — we’ve gotten many wondrous things, for example:

— Toothpaste on American shelves made with a poison found in antifreeze.

— Toxic Chinese drywall installed in about 100,000 U.S. homes, emitting noxious fumes that destroyed electrical wiring and metal fixtures and sickened homeowners. Replacement of the drywall, pipes and wiring cost Americans billions of dollars.

— Hundreds, possibly thousands, of American dogs killed by melamine-laced Chinese dog food in 2007.

— The loss of about 200,000 beautiful maple trees lining the streets of small New England towns, eaten by Asian long-horned beetles that arrived on Chinese cargo ships in 1996. The U.S. taxpayer spends hundreds of millions of dollars to eradicate the repeated outbreaks that continue to this day, despite promises from the Chinese to do better.

— Viral pandemics — H1N1 (from China), bird flu (from China), SARS (from China) and now the Wuhan virus (from China).

Is it really worth paying $3 for a T-shirt at Walmart, rather than $9? The precise reason Chinese goods are so cheap is that they skip the crucial quality-control step.