Now this is some funny shit: Which Pathogen Wore It Better?

On days like today you have but to open an old copy of Private Eye.

As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases continues to multiply, many Americans are emptying store shelves of hand sanitizer, bleach, and canned goods. But there’s an acute fear among Asian-Americans that the virus’s origins in China will spark a violent xenophobic backlash. Along the West Coast, where the worst outbreaks of coronavirus in the United States have occurred, those fears seem to be spurring a surge in gun sales.

“People are panicking because they don’t feel secure,” said David Liu, who is Chinese-American and owns Arcadia Firearm and Safety, just east of Los Angeles. “They worry about a riot or maybe that people will start to target the Chinese.”...

...As The Los Angeles Times has reported, since the first novel coronavirus outbreaks in the United States, Asian-Americans have experienced intensifying venom, including bullying, racist comments, and harassment. And, on February 24, a man of East Asian descent was assaulted in central London. One of the assailants reportedly said, “I don’t want your coronavirus in my country.”

“The main thing I’m hearing is that they don’t want to get jumped because of their race,” said Cole Gaughran, the internet sales manager at Wade’s Eastside Guns in Bellevue, Washington. Gaughran said his store has seen a sixfold increase in sales in the same two weeks. His new customers, most of them first-time gun owners, were almost entirely of Asian descent, he said. Bellevue is just a 15 minute drive from Kirkland, where 11 people have died from the virus...

The Hameau de la Reine (French pronunciation: ​[amo də la ʁɛn], The Queen's Hamlet) is a rustic retreat in the park of the Château de Versailles built for Marie Antoinette in 1783 near the Petit Trianon in Yvelines, France. It served as a private meeting place for the Queen and her closest friends, a place of leisure. Designed by the Queen's favoured architect, Richard Mique with the help of the painter Hubert Robert, it contained a meadowland with lakes and streams, a classical Temple of Love on an island with fragrant shrubs and flowers, an octagonal Belvédère, with a neighbouring grotto and cascade. There are also various buildings in a rustic or vernacular style, inspired by Norman or Flemish design, situated around an irregular pond fed by a stream that turned a mill wheel. The building scheme included a farmhouse, (the farm was to produce milk and eggs for the queen), a dairy, a dovecote, a boudoir, a barn that burned down during the French Revolution, a mill and a tower in the form of a lighthouse. Each building is decorated with a garden, an orchard or a flower garden. The largest and most famous of these houses is the "Queen's House", connected to the Billiard house by a wooden gallery, at the center of the village. A working farm was close to the idyllic, fantasy-like setting of the Queen's Hamlet.

The hameau is the best-known of a series of rustic garden constructions built at the time, notably the Prince of Condé's Hameau de Chantilly (1774–1775) which was the inspiration for the Versailles hamlet Such model farms, operating under principles espoused by the Physiocrats, were fashionable among the French aristocracy at the time. One primary purpose of the hameau was to add to the ambiance of the Petit Trianon, giving the illusion that it was deep in the countryside rather than within the confines of Versailles. The rooms at the hameau allowed for more intimacy than the grand salons at Versailles or at the Petit Trianon...

Formed in 2016, Guns Down America is actively building a future with fewer guns by financially draining the gun industry and its lobby and building political support for policies that will keep us all safe from gun violence...

Igor Volsky, Co-Founder and Executive Director

Igor Volsky is co-founder and the Director of Guns Down America. Igor has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, Fox Business, Fox News, and CNBC television, and he has been a guest on many radio shows. His work on gun violence prevention has appeared in USA Today, U.S. News and World Report and the Orlando Sentinel, among others. In 2011, Forbes named Igor one of their top “30 under 30” in Law & Policy. At Guns Down, he sets the overall strategy and leads our outreach efforts.

1/ Gun makers are softening their image to “put a better face in front of people" & "ramp up its appeal to women, children and members of minority groups"

That's right: gun makers are increasingly advertising to WOMEN, CHILDREN & MINORITY COMMUNITIES"


2/ Firearm industry realizes that to survive into the future it must "broaden its reach beyond the aging white men who have been its core customers" -- and so they're now trying to sell their products to other demographics.

This is incredibly dangerous.

Freshly made pasta is drying on the wooden bannisters lining the hall of a beautiful home in Denver, Colorado. Fox-hunting photos decorate the walls in a room full of books. A fire is burning. And downstairs, a group of liberal white women have gathered around a long wooden table to admit how racist they are.

“Recently, I have been driving around, seeing a black person, and having an assumption that they are up to no good,” says Alison Gubser. “Immediately after I am like, that’s no good! This is a human, just doing their thing. Why do I think that?”

This is Race to Dinner. A white woman volunteers to host a dinner in her home for seven other white women – often strangers, perhaps acquaintances. (Each dinner costs $2,500, which can be covered by a generous host or divided among guests.) A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious. “If you did this in a conference room, they’d leave,” Rao says. “But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.”

Rao and Jackson believe white, liberal women are the most receptive audience because they are open to changing their behavior. They don’t bother with the 53% of white women who voted for Trump. White men, they feel, are similarly a lost cause. “White men are never going to change anything. If they were, they would have done it by now,” Jackson says.