Toilt paper? Purell? Soap?
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HTTPS://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/
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Portrait of An American City at the dawn of a pandemic
By Salena Zito
PITTSBURGH — On Friday, James Coen is folding and unfolding, arranging and rearranging the piles of colorful St. Patrick’s Day T-shirts he has displayed on folding tables outside one of the three sports retail stores he owns. The stores are all large historic buildings with big, planked, shiny hardwood floors, all snuggled in a three-block radius between assorted assemblages of late 19th-century buildings along what is affectionately called “The Strip” or “Strip District.”
No one calls him by his given name. He is "Jimmy Yinzer," the unofficial mayor of the city and the purveyor of all things Pittsburgh. He's mostly known for having the largest inventory of Steelers, Penguins, and Pirates items you would need to wear, wave, or grill. His stores are all called Yinzers, an affectionate hat tip to the people of the city he loves, whose unique dialect includes referring to a group of people as "yinz."
(Justin Merriman for the Washington Examiner)
It is nearing 70 degrees, and there isn’t a cloud in the sky. Had it been any other March day in any other year, the nine blocks that make up the Strip District would have been so overflowing with people that cars would have a difficult time navigating Penn Avenue to get to their destination, especially just days ahead of Pittsburgh’s legendary St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
But on Friday, while the district is not barren, and at times it is bustling, the numbers are still down.
Coen is used to holding court, solving problems, and waiting on customers at an exhausting rate. On Friday, he is enjoying a rare lunch at Café Raymond across the street from his marquee store, a lunch hour he typically works through. The biggest times of the year in retail for him and the rest of the Strip are football season, Penguins postseason, Pirates Opening Day, Christmastime, and the lead-up to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
The latter was just canceled.
(Justin Merriman for the Washington Examiner)
"Last weekend, I thought we might be able to hold our own through this crisis," he explains. "By Monday of this week, we were down 50% in our business. By the time they canceled the parade Wednesday, I was down 75%."
Those St. Patrick’s Day T-shirts that help him make bank every year are now 50% off.
(Justin Merriman for the Washington Examiner)
“I have 25 employees," he says. "I looked at my bank account. I am not sure what I can do if this goes on much longer.”
Raymond Mikesell, the owner of Café Raymond, is watching his dining room from the counter in his restaurant's kitchen. The day before, there was nobody eating his legendary food. On Friday, the place was doing much better: “Thursday was the worst," he says. "Every catering job we had scheduled has been canceled all the way through until May. Today is a much-needed improvement. I had people coming in steadily and just said they wanted to support us."
Mikesell tears up. “That is who we are here. We lift each other up, and people kept telling me we are all in this together.”
(Justin Merriman for the Washington Examiner)
Think of the Strip District as Pittsburgh’s continuous tailgate party, with all of the sounds, smells, and sense of singular purpose that goes with that. There are people tossing pizza at Bella Notte, stacking mile-high sandwiches filled with French fries and coleslaw at Primanti’s, sipping the finest coffees at La Prima surrounded by more Italian-speaking patrons than not, and eating Café Raymond’s famous ricotta pancakes stuffed with oversized blueberries.
There is also live music at nearly every corner by street musicians, fiddlers, rappers, drummers, and that guy who is always singing Crosby, Stills & Nash songs a little off-key. The bars vary from charming dives to an authentic Irish pub.
You can buy trinkets, pottery, lavish handmade clothing, jewelry, and funky furniture at Hot, Haute, Hot and antiques from the finest robber barons' homes at Mahla. Or you can pick up ingredients at kosher, Chinese, Greek, Polish, and Serbian groceries and at the king of Italian epicureans, Pennsylvania Macaroni, filled with whatever you need from the "old country."
Over at La Prima, the regulars can’t help themselves. Old and young people are either standing around at the tables or outside. There sits Ciarán Wolfe, getting his afternoon coffee before he heads to his next job.
“I haven’t changed my daily routine,” says Wolfe, a regular at La Prima, owner of Wolfe Heating and Air Conditioning.
(Justin Merriman for the Washington Examiner)
For now, the coronavirus pandemichas not affected his business: “People still need their heat fixed or want air conditioning as summer heads close.”
The Belfast native, whose family still lives in Northern Ireland, says they are telling him life has been turned upside down there. “I think here, for the most part, people are being cautious and smart, but also going about their daily lives."
As he sips his coffee, families walk past with children in their strollers, walking their bikes along the sidewalk heading toward the trails along the Allegheny River, or sitting outside enjoying their own coffees.
Over at the Italian grocery, Pennsylvania Macaroni co-owner Rick Sunseri says that because everyone is rushing to the big-named grocery stores and growing weary of the long lines, they’ve been OK. “We have plenty of our specialty food, which for Italians is just food,” he says with a smile. “But we have plenty of water and necessities and no panic buying. It was slow Tuesday and Wednesday, slower than usual, but it picked up today."
(Justin Merriman for the Washington Examiner)
Pittsburgh, at the moment, is a flurry of contradictions. There are people still out and about — not at the normal clip, but not in complete withdrawal. Shelves are not empty in several CVS and dollar stores, but they're wiped out at Whole Foods and Costco. Schools were still open Friday afternoon, until Gov. Tom Wolf announced a 10-day closure, with some districts announcing longer closures.
Everyone you talk to points to Allegheny County chief executive Rich Fitzgerald for pulling the local civic, healthcare, labor, foundation, and business leaders together Thursday afternoon to offer a calm, coordinated plan going forward.
By Saturday morning, Fitzgerald confirmed the first case of the virus was reported in Allegheny County.
“That is what we do around here, our civic leaders in medicine, business, labor, and foundations all pull our expertise and abilities together, because we are all in this together, and you see that reflected in people everywhere here,” Fitzgerald says.
Fitzgerald is not wrong. Despite facing financial peril, Coen is also pulling the local businesses together in the Strip to accumulate, store, and distribute food and necessities to elderly and sheltered people in the area.
He is the quintessential American Everyman. Ordinary only to the unobservant, his common traits are generosity, pride in community, volunteerism, and knowing everyone by name.
There are thousands of different Jimmy Yinzers in thousands of different cities and towns and villages across this country. They are the ones who are going to feel the hurt the most, and they are also going to be the first to rise up and help others.
He says what happened is no one’s fault, and he admits the crisis is going to get worse before it gets better. “Whatever this looks like on the other side, we will prevail," he says. "That’s not just here, that is in most places in America.”
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This link was sent to me by a tennis buddy who hates Trump and is a sometime fellow memo reader. Whenever he finds something that is in agreement with him he send it to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ideas/archive/2020/03/peter- wehner-trump-presidency-over/ 607969/
The cost of dependency.
We once were dependent on The Middle East for energy and still would be thanks to progressive Democrats and radical Greenies.
Hayward: China Threatens to Cut Off Medicine, Throw America into ‘Mighty Sea of Coronavirus’
John Hayward
An article in China’s state-run Xinhua news service last week threatened to impose restrictions on medical exports so the United States will be “plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus.”The Xinhua piece, published on March 4 and entitled “Be Bold: The World Owes China a Thank You,” was largely composed of standard Chinese Communist Party propaganda about how the world stands in awe of China’s amazing response to the coronavirus outbreak. Naturally, it neglected to mention how the virus ran wild in the first place because of Chinese bureaucratic incompetence and cover-ups.The Chinese have become as determined to wipe the first months of the coronavirus from the pages of history as they are to keep anyone from remembering Tiananmen Square. The Xinhua article made a point of noting that China has leverage over the U.S. and Europe because it can restrict the supply of medicines that were unwisely outsourced to China in the heyday of globalism.The Chinese paper explicitly threatened to do so if Americans and Europeans continue criticizing its response to the coronavirus or act too slowly to lift travel bans and other restrictions the Chinese government dislikes, but then cushioned the threat in the Communist Party’s usual creepy way by insisting China is filled with so much “love” for the world that it would never harm the people of other countries, or even “insult” them the way China has been “insulted” during the coronavirus epidemic.One of the insults harped on by Xinhua was Walter Russell Mead’s February 3 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal entitled “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” a piece that prompted Beijing to expel Wall Street Journal reporters and begin complaining incessantly that Mead’s piece was insulting and racist. According to Xinhua’s March 4 editorial, Mead, his column, and the entire Wall Street Journal publication are now “infamous.”Although most commentary has focused on the “mighty sea of coronavirus” threat, the Xinhua piece is also interesting as an early example of the Chinese Communist propaganda crusade to portray the coronavirus as originating in the United States and claim it was brought to Wuhan by the U.S. Army. Xinhua muttered darkly on March 4 about Americans “returning from Wuhan, China” right before the outbreak exploded and complained it was therefore hypocritical and insulting for the U.S. to impose travel bans on China.The article was noticed and partially translated by Fox News on Friday in light of the Food and Drug Administration’s announcement that at least one unspecified drug useful for treating coronavirus patients is currently in short supply because the components for the drug cannot be obtained readily enough from China.“In other words, they threatened to kill us, and we’re all sort of standing back like, ‘Oh, you know it’s not a big deal.’ It’s a terrifying situation,” Tucker Carlson of Fox News said on Wednesday.Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) warned in a Fox News interview on Thursday that “about 80 percent of the active ingredients” in some vital drugs come from abroad, “and the overwhelming majority of that 80 percent are manufactured in China.”Rubio and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich elaborated on China’s leverage over the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, and other sectors of the American economy, in an op-ed for Fox:For years, China has enticed American multinational corporations with access to its markets in exchange for off-shoring and sharing intellectual property. Americans watched as Beijing captured critical portions of global supply chains, including in pharmaceutical drugs and medical equipment. Today, up to 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients in American drugs are sourced abroad.Now, in the face of a pandemic, the absence of domestic capacity in critical medical sectors has critically endangered both the U.S. public health system and our economy. The inability to quickly increase the production of key supplies, such as surgical masks, medical gowns, respirators and pharmaceutical drugs limits our ability to mitigate the worst effects of the disease in this emerging crisis and in any future pandemic.It is unacceptable that China holds this much leverage over America’s public health and economy, both essential components of our national security. For this reason, we propose that the U.S. take action to expand our production capacity while global supply chains are in flux and the global economy teeters on the edge of recession.Rubio and Gingrich suggested encouraging and incentivizing American corporations to bring manufacturing capacity back from overseas, especially from hostile areas like China, taking advantage of the current chaos in global markets to implement measures that might have seemed unacceptably risky or painful in calmer times.“America must make rebuilding our domestic supply chain a priority of its own,” they wrote, comparing their recommendations to Beijing’s deliberate strategy for capturing the biomedical industry.
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