Buy ’em butchered on the spot. Yum yum.

Medicinal too:

Wet markets have long been criticized for being unhygienic and cruel to animals. Animals such as bats, lizards, and toads are sold as medicine to treat common ailments. Cats and dogs are sold and butchered on the streets.

Not in Andersonville, where they are brought up in luxury.

Scientists have yet to pinpoint what started the coronavirus, but some speculate these markets played a role due to their unsanitary conditions.

Hence the “Chinese virus,” of course.

“You’ve got live animals, so there’s feces everywhere. There’s blood because of people chopping them up,” Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which works to protect wildlife and public health from emerging diseases, told the Associated Press last month.

It happened in Wuhan. Happening, that is.

via Chinese ‘wet markets’ reportedly open back up for business, ready to sell bats and dogs for human consumption

As Chicago Daily News theater critic Dick Christensen used to say after reading early editions of the Tribune for its reviews, these sources don’t tell us nothin’!

One of the most pernicious parts of the COVID-19 crisis is how uncertain everything is.

Researchers and officials cite statistical models that estimate infection rates, death counts and when things will go back to normal, but those estimates are changing rapidly.

And as the forecasts bounce around, so do the rest of us living through the crisis. How can one feel settled when the future feels so volatile?

We can’t.

via  FiveThirtyEight

If, as he says below, “any estimate could easily turn out to be wrong,” why is he taking seriously the estimates he reports?

He called worst-case scenario projections of more than a million U.S. deaths “very, very unlikely” and said any estimate could easily turn out to be wrong. He said he was certain that the number of confirmed infections would continue to rise much higher.

He’s probably a good man in his field — compared to whom? we must always ask — but is he a bit long on the commentary? Is it dangerous to get between him and a camera or microphone?

via WSJ

What’s wrong with this opening statement about ChiCom honesty and openness?

Etc.

Read all about ChiCom perfidy — with its sidebar, unnecessary, taken for granted, about U.S. mediums all agog about how BAD we are at containing the virus —  here, at Hot Air.

Nothing much, a veteran Vaticanista says:

Pope Francis has always warned about the risk of the Church turning into a merciful NGO. However, the lack of an intellectual push within the pontificate leads everything to be reduced to charitable actions or Pope Francis’ gestures.

He doesn’t have the wherewithal for this “intellectual push.” So he simply urges people to do good things, and prelates to “set an example.” That’s about it.

All of this is important and necessary. The pontificate lacks, however, an intellectual push. Since nobody leads the debate, the debate is biased by a series of forces that have always tried to bend the discussion, and hence the Catholic Church, to their will.

His “world view is above all that of an Argentinian, then a Latin American, and then a Jesuit.” Which is not enough, the analyst implies.

Paradoxically, a pontificate born during the Year of Faith with the wish of being missionary leaves a political legacy instead of a spiritual one. Pope Francis thought is indeed political and pragmatic, while his spirituality is mostly popular piety.

Sounds about right.

The writer sees “a fossilization” of Francis’ pontificate.

What will Pope Francis’ legacy be? What will be its impact on the history of the Church? It has been often emphasized that Pope Francis is a “parish-priest Pope,” who celebrates daily mass in Santa Marta and makes great gestures. But what will Pope Francis be remembered for?

At the moment, his legacy cannot be assessed. He fought to break careerism, but he mostly raised the stakes on institutionality. He worked to reform the Curia, but this reform seems to be a never-ending discussion. He flirted with progressive intellectuals, but he then made traditional choices. He spoke about synodality, but he has always been a man alone at the helm.

Pretty fair comments:

The hermeneutic of incoherence, perhaps?

via MondayVatican where ANDREA GAGLIARDUCCI  is the proprietor.

Something’s gotta give.

A blanket lockdown can’t go on. Keeping every business closed and every worker at home until a vaccine is available won’t work. Replacing the private economy with borrowed federal money for months on end won’t work.

If this were the plague, with 50% of the infected dying, it might be a different story. But people won’t put up with losing many trillions of dollars to flatten the curve of this virus.

Gung-ho mayors, mayoresses, and governors, please. Moderate yourselves.

More more more here: WSJ