Christmas in Wuhan

What we thought was a world already moving at the fastest possible speed has just shifted into an even higher gear.  The other day, President Trump announced a ban on flights from Europe - how fortunate that the Supreme Court has already decided he can do that!  Today, the President is addressing the nation on the "national emergency" of a couple of dozen deaths, which has all but shut down the entire country.  Tomorrow - will the "all but" be removed, and everyone locked in place as has already occurred in New Rochelle, NY?

As is expected in these cases, the President called for Americans to put politics aside.  As has become the norm when the President is Republican, that didn't even get the response of a sneer - it was ignored entirely, as the media deluged Americans with insane claims that Trump wants us all to die, etc.  Has the world gone entirely mad?

There are probably areas where the government's response should be criticized, but how could we ever know, when everything reported is spun into a political attack?  Mr. Trump doesn't hire CDC researchers or doctors; he doesn't approve medical tests; he doesn't order stocks of facemasks and gloves.  That's all done by card-carrying members of the Deep State, and the New York Times has documented some of their bureaucratic delays.

They explained how Dr. Helen Chu and her colleagues at the University of Washington faced many regulatory delays when they tried to launch the Seattle Flu Study. The CDC insisted that their labs be certified for clinical work, which would take weeks.  With lives on the line, Chu and her colleagues began coronavirus testing in an attempt to figure out how and where the disease was spreading without government approval. The horror!

While some of these Deep State minions might suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome enough to intentionally sabotage anti-disease work to make Mr. Trump look bad, it's unlikely that very many are competent or foresighted enough to do so effectively.  Operating at their normal pace during an emergency harms society nearly as much as if they'd planned it.

When Muslim murderers killed thousands of Americans in the name of Islam on 9-11, our political leaders were unable to properly name and blame the evil ideology that drove 19 barbarians to do their deeds.  In spite of that, for a few weeks or months, Americans from all political sides stopped blaming each other - the cries of "Bushitler!" came later, once most of the smoke had cleared from Ground Zero.  This time, there wasn't even a momentary hiccup.

If you're looking for a sign of the times, look no further than the nomenclature used.

A Rose By Any Other Name?

In 1973, reporting on the Roe v. Wade decision generally referred to the issue of "abortion," which that court case had decreed to be a previously-unknown Constitutional right.  That was the medical and legal term for disposing of an unwanted unborn child, so at that time, "abortion" was a fairly neutral choice of terminology.

It didn't take long for both sides to try to change the discussion in their favor.  The pro-abortion side decided to emphasize the importance of a woman's supposed "right to choose" (to murder her own child), hence the term "pro-choice."  Living in the Land of the Free, shouldn't we all be pro-choice?

By the same token, the other side wanted to emphasize the inalienable human right being robbed from the child, namely the right to life, hence the term "pro-life."

Neither side uses the other's term - Planned Parenthood talks about "anti-abortion-rights extremists" and, while the pro-life side doesn't often talk about "baby-killers" these days, they avoid the term "pro-choice" also.  The media usually splits the difference, using "pro-choice" and "pro-life" for the respective sides.

Something similar happened with the millennia-old celebration of Christmas.  There are, in fact, quite a few holidays around that time of year, so wishing someone "Happy Holidays" should not be inherently offensive.  It is also true that Christmas is by far the most famous and widely celebrated late December holiday, so a "Merry Christmas" should be equally appropriate.

Somehow, those two perfectly inoffensive, normal, traditional, time-honored expressions of goodwill have become dueling clubs to beat the other side with, as well as tribal identifiers as to which side you align with.  Today the media, Democrats, and most of corporate American never say "Merry Christmas," whereas churchgoers and Republicans avoid "Happy Holidays" like they once shunned four-letter words.  This time, observe, the media chose a side - when was the last time you heard a newscaster sign off with "Merry Christmas"?

Language to Make You Ill

Enter the coronavirus.  When first reported, the disease was identified as being a new type of a certain scientific category of viruses that had already acquired the label "corona," hence, calling it a coronavirus was technically accurate.

It wasn't specific enough, though, because there are many corona viruses.  We are personally acquainted with someone in the hospital right now with a coronavirus - but, not the coronavirus everyone's scared of.  A more particular name was needed.

Traditionally, modern diseases in popular culture get their names from something they're associated with, such as the first major place they're reported.  Coxsackie in New York state, Marburg in Germany and Hendra in Australia all have viruses named after them, and Lyme disease was first identified in Lyme, Connecticut.

History records the "Spanish flu" epidemic of 1918-1919.  In actual fact, it had nothing in particular to do with Spain.  It was global - some claim that it started on a Kansas farm in 1917 - and was already an epidemic in many countries before Spain reported it.

Due to WW I, though, most countries had tight clamps on the media and wouldn't allow bad news to be reported.  Spain was merely the first place that was modern enough to have a mass media, important enough to be noticed, and didn't have military censorship preventing the news from getting out.

Because the Spanish flu was so widespread, nobody really though it was caused by Spanish people in particular.  Just to be sure, Spaniards called it "the French flu", but that didn't really take.

In contrast, the bird flu, or avian flu, led to the deaths of large numbers of innocent Chinese birds - as well as any number of infected ones, when frightened officials culled what was thought to be a disease source.

Nobody much cares about birds, but these days you aren't allowed to say anything unpleasant about any people, even with good cause.  It's been thoroughly forgotten today, but what we now know as AIDS was originally called GRID, for "gay-related immune deficiency" - which, in fact, it was, and largely is to this very day.

While it is certainly possible for anyone to get AIDS, homosexuals are enormously more prone to it than even rampant heterosexuals, and of course, the chaste or faithful are wildly less likely to suffer from this particular problem once blood banks learned to test for infected blood.

Back in the 80s, a disease that nearly always struck homosexuals wasn't going to get the kind of massive research funding its victims wanted.  So they pushed for a name change, and news reports that gave the statistically-false but technically-true impression that anyone could catch it anytime.  This deliberate effort at "fake news" resulted in AIDS research gaining grossly disproportionate investment as these graphs show.  Sure enough, AIDS is now a treatable condition, and nobody in the First World dies from it anymore.

Coronavirus is not quite the same story: anyone can catch it, and indeed, some experts are saying that most of the planet eventually will.  For most people, though, it won't be any worse than a bad flu.  People can spread the disease for weeks before showing symptoms, and unlike many flu-like diseases, it seems even less potent in children.

For weeks now, the media have been talking about the coronavirus outbreak in connection with the Chinese city of Wuhan where it was first observed and may have originated.  Following traditional practice, calling it "the Wuhan virus" would make perfect sense - indeed, many Democrat politicians and many news reports called it exactly that.

But when Mr. Trump called it that - oh, my!  Suddenly, that name was racist!  Mr. Trump was even criticized for referring to a "foreign virus" - which it unquestionably was - even though several CNN anchors and reporters referred to it as the "Wuhan coronavirus" and "China's coronavirus" for weeks leading up to Mr. Trump's use of the term.

This is a pure example of Trump Derangement Syndrome - here's a list of 17 viruses and other diseases which were named after specific places without woketivists losing any sleep.  If it weren't for double standards, liberals would have no standards at all.

What's more, even plagues within living memory that affected far more people have been shoved down the memory hole.  The ever-resourceful Rush Limbaugh reminds us:

I went back and looked at the stats and I was stunned. Are you ready for this? The swine flu outbreak in this country in 2009 and 2010, 60 million Americans were infected. Do you remember that? Sixty million were infected. Dr. Siegel, one of the Fox doctors was on TV explaining this last night. He was not my primary source for it, but he ended up confirming it. Sixty million people were infected.

Do you know how many people were hospitalized in 2009-2010 with the swine flu? Three hundred thousand were hospitalized. So 60 million people infected, 300,000 hospitalized. And nobody even remembers it. And why? Well, because we had a different president. We had a Democrat president by the name of Barack Obama, and the news then was how wonderfully well Obama was handling it, how expertly well Obama was dealing with it.

There wasn’t any media panic. The Republican Party did not politicize it at all. They made not one single effort that anybody can find or remember to try to make political hay out of it. It was treated as a health issue from top to bottom. Sixty million Americans infected, 300,000 hospitalized. I don’t know what the death toll was. The numbers with the coronavirus are not even close. They are barely a fraction of a percentage compared to the swine flu.

There's a reason we talk about the Evil Party and the Stupid Party.  When a true crisis comes, the Stupid Party supports whoever is in charge, to benefit all Americans.  The Evil Party... well, the evidence lies before you.

Renaming took years with abortion and with AIDS, which were vastly more deadly concerns, but took mere days with the coronavirus.  The conservative and traditional name is "Wuhan virus."  Meanwhile, the media is rapidly switching over to the more politically-correct "COVID-19," which we are reminded, is now the "official" name designated by card-carrying members of the Deep State who vote Democrat to a (wo)man.

Who cares?  What difference does it make?  We all know they mean the same thing - it's just another way to identify with our tribe while beating our enemies over the head.  And its focus on the elderly means that the chop-suey flu continues to mostly kill people who were, with all appropriate respect, already at the end of their natural lifespans, and in nearly every case, already suffering from terminal illness.  Meanwhile we burn down our economies around ourselves.

Do you ever stop to wonder whether we're just too stupid to survive?