Walmart hires 150,000 and $550 million on bonuses to hourly employees

The Morning Briefing: In Walmart We Trust During Troubled Times

BY STEPHEN KRUISER MARCH

As we go through all of this END TIMES apocalypse fun, it’s good to look at things that aren’t oh-so awful. Our good friends at Walmart Inc. are helping us through the storm in a couple of ways.

Walmart has long been the whipping boy of liberals, derided for both its sheer capitalist success and the fact that the company serves so many rural Americans.

In short: Walmart is an effete liberal’s nightmare.

The company that the worst people in America love to hate just did a couple of things that prove them wrong.

In this most dire of economic times, when so many Americans are worried about their jobs, Walmart announced that it would be hiring 150,000 people to handle the coronavirus panic buying.

In the same announcement, the company said it would pay out almost $550 million in bonuses to hourly employees.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-morning-briefing-in-walmart-we-trust-during-troubled-times/

Our hilarious president, look at the reporters faces, priceless

Recently, Twitter has been full of people yucking it up and eye-rolling that Trump's team members at the COVID-19 news conferences are not practicing social distancing for the length of the news conferences. So this question to Trump over Congress members' – and other governmental officials' (hint) – socially distancing from team members was intended to bring it up. It backfired spectacularly.

"Members of Congress are now being tested positive for coronavirus and we – you – have almost two dozen self quarantining. Do you have guidance for Congress…?"

As soon as Trump started answering, no doubt the reporter wanted to take it back.

"I know all of them. I don't know if they're sitting like you people are sitting [later adding that they were self quarantining]. You're actually sitting too close. We should probably get rid of about 75-80% of you. I have maybe two or three that I like in this room. I think that's a great way of doing it. I've thought of a new way of doing it. You're actually much too close. You two – you should leave."

https://pjmedia.com/trending/reporter-questions-trump-on-social-distancing-and-it-backfires-spectacularly-and-hilariously/

Kirtland Airman Found with Arsenal

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – A U.S. airman assigned to Kirtland Air Force Base is in federal custody after military investigators searching his KAFB residence found a cache of 17 firearms, two silencers, large amounts of ammunition, bomb-making instructions and photos of rifle magazines with the names of mass shooters written on them.

Investigators said in a criminal complaint that Senior Airman Charles Brent Justice, 27, could be a "threat to the general public."

Justice formally has been charged with possessing a silencer and unlawful importation of a firearm – the silencer he allegedly ordered from a Chinese company.

The photographs found on his cellphone showed the names of mass shooters written on white ink on AR-15 compatible magazines. Included among the names were Alexandre Bissonette, who shot and killed several people at a mosque in Quebec City, Canada, and Luca Traini, who targeted African migrants in Italy.

Other photographs were related to the Christchurch mosque shooting in New Zealand.

Federal law enforcement in Albuquerque have been paying close attention to gun parts coming out of China, including automatic conversion devices called auto-sears and silencers. There are several pending cases filed here in the last year charging gang members and convicted felons with possessing the parts and converting semiautomatic weapons into machine guns.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection intercepted a package addressed to Justice at the international postal station at John F. Kennedy airport in New York City. Agents opened the package because the Chinese company that sent it was known to ship silencers into the U.S. illegally.

Agents found information that Justice had placed orders with Chinese vendors of shipping firearm-related devices like the silencer in the past.

The specific silencer agents found was sold under the name of "Inline Filter" with the intent to disguise it as an automotive part.

Once they found the silencer, agents notified Air Force Office of Special Investigation agents who questioned Justice and searched his residence on the base. The search was carried out under military rules based on authority granted by Col. David Miller, Commander, 377th Air Base Wing.

Air Force investigators found a buttstock designed to be attached to a Glock pistol, making it a short-barreled rifle, and a Glock compatible auto-sear that attaches to Glock pistols allowing the pistol to function as a machine gun.

The complaint notes that possession of both the auto-sear attachment and the buttstock are illegal and that Justice received both items from Chinese vendors. No additional charges have been filed regarding those devices, but Justice also faces the possibility of additional charges in military court.

Investigators also found instructions on making "Molotov" cocktails and other explosive devices.

Investigators found that Justice did not have permission to store firearms at his on-base residence.

After Air Force investigators conducted their search, they called in agents from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who filed the federal charges.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/03/19/kirtland-airman-found-arsenal.html

Plague under a microscope. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

That Time an Al-Qaida Training Camp Was Allegedly Wiped Out by Plague

In 2009, the body of an al-Qaida militant left by a roadside in Algeria was supposedly determined to have died of bubonic plague. His body was found in Tizi Ouzou province, 90 miles from Algiers.

The discovery led authorities to believe he was from an al-Qaida training camp, one that had been working to create a biological weapon using the plague.

Using infectious diseases to attack unsuspecting populations and sow fear is nothing new. In 1985, a religious group in Oregon tried to sway a local election using salmonella. In 1993, the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo released anthrax in densely populated Tokyo.

Anthrax was also used in the days following the 9/11 attacks in an attempt to cause further panic in the United States and among its top lawmakers. This time, it was mailed via the U.S. Postal Service. The FBI determined that a researcher at the U.S. Army's Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases was responsible for mailing letters laden with anthrax. Those attacks killed at least five people and hospitalized another 17. The bureau concluded that the researcher acted alone, but no one would have been surprised if the culprit was a foreign terrorist group.

Bioweapons can be an easy way to incite mass panic and can spread very far, very quickly.

Unfortunately for terrorists, bioweapons are also notoriously hard to control – as the al-Qaida militants in Algeria allegedly discovered.

https://www.military.com/off-duty/history/terrorist-camp-destroyed-plague.html