https://video.foxnews.com/v/6150391167001#sp=show-clips
FoxNews
Mark Levin interviews health experts — Dr. David Katz and Dr. John Ioannidis — on coronavirus mitigation
VIDEO: Mark Levin interviews health experts on coronavirus mitigation
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8239261/North-Korean-leader-Kim-Jong-grave-danger-heart-surgery.html?ito=push-notification&ci=13500&si=6335533
Fears were growing for Kim Jong-un’s health today after a US official said the dictator could be in ‘grave danger’ after heart surgery – although South Korea has played down the reports.
Washington is monitoring intelligence that Kim is in a critical condition after his operation, CNN quoted an unnamed US official as saying.
Kim, 36, was last seen at a government meeting on April 11, and was mysteriously absent from the celebration of his late grandfather Kim Il-Sung’s birthday on April 15.
Daily NK, an outlet run mostly by North Korean defectors, said Kim had undergone a cardiovascular procedure and was recovering at a villa in North Phyongan province.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/18/china-might-try-to-take-taiwan/
Even though it was the source of the novel coronavirus pandemic, China appears to be the only country benefiting geopolitically from its knock-on effects. China’s No. 1 strategic goal has been to reclaim Taiwan, an island it has long considered merely to be a “breakaway province.” It seems poised to accomplish this task.
Many analysts, such as Ian Easton of Project 2049, have argued that China would try to reclaim Taiwan at some point in the next decade. Yet, reality often presents opportunities. And the pandemic is the strategic opportunity of a lifetime.
The warning indicators are flashing—or they should be in Washington. Not only has the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) been conducting ongoing, aggressive flights into Taiwanese airspace, but last Thursday, the PLAAF performed a detailed reconnaissance mission over southern Taiwan.
Then, on Saturday evening, China’s only aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, sailed from China through the Japanese-controlled Strait of Miyako, escorted by two guided-missile destroyers and two additional guided-missile frigates. That move prompted Taiwan to scramble its navy. The Liaoning and its escorts sailed beyond Okinawa, turned south, and kept going—its ultimate destination unknown to all except Beijing.
Of course, we can guess where the carrier is headed. In all likelihood, the carrier is sailing south of Taiwan. It is following a pattern that the Chinese military employed last year during what was, at that time, China’s largest wargame since the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/rep_dan_crenshaw_politely_destroys_bill_mahers_blame_game_against_trump.html
We all know that decisions are based on best guesses about future events. We don’t get to make prospective decisions with the benefit of hindsight. Some decisions when made are manifestly stupid (no smart decision ever began with the phrase “hold my beer”), and even some thoughtful ones reflect bad reasoning (“I have returned from Germany with peace for our time”).
However, when dealing in real time with an unknown disease playing out in countries with different population demographics, different health care systems, and different record-keeping (and, in China’s case, lots of lies), it’s unlikely that there will ever be a perfect response. Nevertheless, the newest Democrat position is that, because Trump’s response failed to block the Wuhan flu from landing on our shores, he is a blundering, blustering incompetent who is ready for another impeachment.
When someone comes flying at you with that kind of broad accusation, one grounded in emotion and historical rewrites, it’s hard to marshal the appropriate facts and make a sensible argument. Or maybe it’s hard only if you’re not a former Navy SEAL like Dan Crenshaw, a House representative from Texas. While most of us have been tested solely in the crucible of mean words and dirty arguments, he was tested under fire, and, as his debonair eye patch shows, he paid a high price during that test.
On the same show during which Bill Maher earned deserved kudos for attacking mainstream media’s execrable, emotion-laden, dishonest coverage of the Wuhan virus, he made the mistake of trying to debate Rep. Dan Crenshaw about whether Trump’s response to the Wuhan virus was timely. If we could all learn to debate as Crenshaw does, the world would be a better, more logical, well ordered, and well run place.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/20/dont-let-washington-post-get-away-with-memory-holing-its-anti-kavanaugh-campaign/
Ruth Marcus and others at the Washington Post who led the effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s life based on unsubstantiated allegations know that what they did was evil.
The Washington Post has a problem. The newspaper led the massive effort against the nomination of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by publishing and relentlessly hyping a completely unsubstantiated allegation of sexual assault against him.
Now, the paper is leading Democrats’ efforts to bury a similar, if stronger, allegation of sexual assault against Joe Biden. To accomplish this dramatic turnabout, the paper is collectively trying to rewrite history, pretending the allegation against Kavanaugh had more basis than it did while also pretending that the allegation against Biden has less basis than it does.
The Post’s anti-Kavanaugh operation had powerful divisions in both the news and opinion departments. It’s worth looking at both.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-life-in-budapest-hungary-under-lockdown/#slide-1
Ghost trains,’ Hungary’s emergency law, face masks and social distancing, restaurants’ pivot to takeout and delivery.
‘Ghost trains” and ghost buses are the most visible and oddly comforting expression of Budapest’s lockdown. Because “essential workers” still have to get to and from work, and the other city-dwellers may have good reasons to move around the city, the regular train and subway services are running as before, and even keeping to their regular schedules. In the case of the Number Two train, which runs alongside the Danube past such city sights as the “Whale” gallery and cultural center and Hungary’s magnificent 19th-century Parliament building, this means that between six and eight trains pass by every hour. At the same time, because Hungarians have been faithfully observing the lockdown rules, which firmly instruct social distancing, almost no one travels on them.
Many trains have no passengers at all; few have more than six or seven. They arrive at a train stop, halt, pause while their doors open for passengers to alight and board them, ring a warning bell before the doors close, and then depart again. On most occasions during this routine, no one gets on and no one gets off. And when essential workers do board them, they punctiliously take seats as far away from each other as they can manage.
Mark Higgie, a former Australian ambassador to Hungary who has stayed on to live in Budapest, has spent the lockdown walking around the city and posting photographs of its old and beautifully restored buildings on Twitter. He’s also been waging an Internet campaign against the decision of Mayor Sadiq Khan and London transport authorities to reduce the number of train services in the U.K. capital.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-media-stop-dancing-on-the-graves-of-trump-supporters-who-die-of-the-virus/
‘They had it coming’ is a shameful sentiment to broadcast. That doesn’t stop the New York Times.
The latest installment in the ghoulish ongoing effort to use coronavirus deaths as a tribal red-vs.-blue bludgeon can be found in a column by Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times, and in the reaction to that column on the left.
The column is framed around the death of Joe Joyce, a bar owner from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Joyce was a Trump supporter; his son, a friend of Bellafante’s, “was at odds with his father politically.” Bellafante admits that Joyce was not the pro-Trump monster of media caricature: “He was not going to make the Syrian immigrant who came in to play darts feel as if he belonged anywhere else. . . . In his bar Joe Joyce had set the tone for what evolved into an incongruously progressive place. From the beginning there had been a quiet gay presence.” But his death is too politically useful, it seems, to resist. And with Joyce gone, his Ivy League–educated kids get the last word. Bellafante writes:
On March 1, Joe Joyce and his wife, Jane, set sail for Spain on a cruise, flying first to Florida. His adult children — Kevin, Eddie and Kristen Mider — suggested that the impending doom of the coronavirus made this a bad idea. Joe Joyce was 74, a nonsmoker, healthy. . . . He didn’t see the problem. “He watched Fox, and believed it was under control,’’ Kristen told me. Early in March Sean Hannity went on air proclaiming that he didn’t like the way that the American people were getting scared “unnecessarily.’’ He saw it all, he said, “as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/15/bill-gates-oh-boo-hoo-rails-trump-pulling-who-fund/
Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder who recently cut his board of directors ties to his company so that he could focus in part on curing the world of disease — such as through the Decade of Vaccines his foundation helped pioneer to develop and administer vaccines around the world — just called out President Donald Trump’s decision to pull U.S. funding from the World Health Organization as abysmal, “dangerous” and deadly.
Hmm. There’s an entirely unexpected and shocking reaction — not.
His condemnation isn’t rooted so much in a “watching out for America” kind of view as it is in a “protecting self and self-interests” panic.
Yes, even billionaire philanthropists can have agendas.
Fact is, Gates is a huge funder of WHO.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/20/a_tiny_virus_further_sickens_the_fevered_media_mob_142976.html
In his 1898 novel, “The War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells imagined a world changed forever by something like our dread coronavirus. In that familiar story, Martian invaders were close to total domination of the Earth when they were unexpectedly vanquished by the “germs of disease,” famously called by Wells “the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, had put upon this earth.”
In the novel, mankind is saved by germs, but in modern Hollywood science fiction viruses are usually employed to devastate human society, or change it forever. The extent to which COVID-19 will leave a permanent mark on us is yet unknown, but it is safe to declare that generations of future doctoral students will study its impact on everything from handshakes to food supply chains.
Within the sphere of politics, we have already seen short-term impacts to elections and how legislative bodies do their work, but the question of how the psychology of crisis will translate into permanent changes in the relationship between the governed and the government can only be answered with informed guesses. Is the rebellion in Michigan against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stringent stay-at-home orders the first shot in a war against the nanny state or the last gasp of “consent of the governed”? Will the electorate become enamored of receiving “paychecks” from the government for not working, or will it chafe at adding untold trillions to the national debt and demand new austerity measures? Can the political media continue to play the role of a Greek chorus, pretending to speak for the general population and assuming a posture of omniscience despite being mainly aligned with one political party – and being so wrong so often?
It is that last question that consumes me today as I watch yet again the White House press corps savage President Trump. It’s become a daily ritual, and one that I enjoy not because the president is being attacked, but because he so deftly fends off the swarming journalistic pests like Gulliver shaking loose from a dozen Lilliputians who mistakenly thought they had the giant pinned.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/its-time-build-frontpagemagcom/
Editors’ note: We are proud to publish the following article by Marc Andreessen on the long-term crisis facing our nation, and what can be done to create a better future. Marc is co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and a member of Facebook’s board of directors. In 1994, he was one of six inductees to the World Wide Web Hall of Fame.
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.
Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation. Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.
We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!
We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses. Our scientists will hopefully invent therapies and a vaccine, but then we may not have the manufacturing factories required to scale their production. And even then, we’ll see if we can deploy therapies or a vaccine fast enough to matter — it took scientists 5 years to get regulatory testing approval for the new Ebola vaccine after that scourge’s 2014 outbreak, at the cost of many lives. In the U.S., we don’t even have the ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it. Tens of millions of laid off workers and their families, and many millions of small businesses, are in serious trouble *right now*, and we have no direct method to transfer them money without potentially disastrous delays. A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most.
