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May 2020

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Over 4,300 virus patients sent to NY nursing homes, AP counts

By on May 23rd, 2020

https://www.foxnews.com/us/ap-count-over-4300-virus-patients-sent-to-ny-nursing-homes

More than 4,300 recovering coronavirus patients were sent to New York’s already vulnerable nursing homes under a controversial state directive that was ultimately scrapped amid criticisms it was accelerating the nation’s deadliest outbreaks, according to a count by The Associated Press.

AP compiled its own tally to find out how many COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals to nursing homes under the March 25 directive after New York’s Health Department declined to release its internal survey conducted two weeks ago. It says it is still verifying data that was incomplete.

Whatever the full number, nursing home administrators, residents’ advocates and relatives say it has added up to a big and indefensible problem for facilities that even Gov. Andrew Cuomo — the main proponent of the policy — called “the optimum feeding ground for this virus.”

“It was the single dumbest decision anyone could make if they wanted to kill people,” Daniel Arbeeny said of the directive, which prompted him to pull his 88-year-old father out of a Brooklyn nursing home where more than 50 people have died. His father later died of COVID-19 at home.

“This isn’t rocket science,” Arbeeny said. “We knew the most vulnerable — the elderly and compromised — are in nursing homes and rehab centers.”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Biden’s offensive statement about blacks wasn’t the worst thing he said By Andrea Widburg

By on May 23rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/bidens_offensive_statement_about_blacks_wasnt_the_worst_thing_he_said.html

Joe Biden took a lot of flak on Friday for saying on The Breakfast Club, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” However, bad as that line was, Biden said a lot of other things that were just as bad as his condescending, tone-deaf attempt at a “no true Scotsman” joke.

The Breakfast Club is a popular progressive morning show that is carried on 45 affiliate stations, while the YouTube channel boasts 4.41 million subscribers. To date, just the YouTube version of Biden’s May 22 interview with “Charlamagne tha God” has had over 700,000 views. This is a show with reach, and it allowed Biden to talk directly to a young black audience.

What Biden was pitching to the audience is that he’s been a black advocate since practically the day he stepped out of law school in the late 1960s. To that end, he used the Wuhan Virus to play the race card against Trump and then settled into his shtick about how he’s always acted in the best interests of American blacks. Little that he said supports this claim.

Biden began by boasting, “I’m ahead in all the national polls,” only to have Charlamagne point out the 2016 polling failures. Biden’s non sequitur response was that 2016 was “totally different” because “you had somebody who didn’t, they didn’t know” Trump, meaning that Trump “had no serious opposition that turned out to materialize.” I mention this short Biden argument as a reminder that even though Biden talks a lot, he often doesn’t say anything.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

If Only 1199 SEIU Union Members Really Knew By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on May 23rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/if_only_1199_seiu_union_members_really_knew.html

George Gresham, president of the New York-based 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, a position he has held since 2007, recently penned a piece titled “Donald Trump is Destroying Our Planet.” According to Gresham, Trump has “destroyed the global health security and biodefense directorate that the Obama administration put in place. ” Furthermore, Gresham asserts that “the Trump administration’s complete failure in face of the greatest public health crisis in modern history is only the most glaring example of how dangerous his presidency has been.” According to Gresham “[w]e have all seen the outright corruption — not only his personal corruption in looting our tax dollars to make millions from his hotels and golf courses — but his corruption of the government itself.” Moreover, Trump “has waged war . . . against immigrant workers from Latin America and the Caribbean as well as Muslims, Asians and Africans in our communities.”

These are certainly serious charges and as Ayn Rand wrote in her essay “How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society, they “require the most precise, the most exacting, the most ruthlessly objective and rational process of thought” in order to refute them.

The first clue to his ideology is the non sequitur he makes about “looting tax dollars” and Trump’s ventures in construction. Then, Gresham completely ignores the fact that Trump sent 4,000 respirators and 4,400 ventilators as well as a naval ship to assist New York health workers fighting the pandemic. Also Gresham sidesteps the unconscionable actions of Governor Cuomo who absolutely put health workers and patients in perilous situations when he insisted that nursing homes take back corona virus residents.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Media Cowardice and the Collusion Hoax What happens when the press becomes an interest group whose interest isn’t the truth? by Holman Jenkins Jr. *****

By on May 23rd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-cowardice-and-the-collusion-hoax-11590186850?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

To many hack commentators, “conspiracy theory” has become a term used to make certain kinds of implicit and explicit cooperation unacknowledgeable.

With evidence newly in hand last week, we see that the resources poured into promoting the Steele dossier before the 2016 election were nothing next to those mobilized by Clinton campaign chief John Podesta after the inauguration. Transcripts two years old show various Obama officials denying under oath that they possessed evidence of Trump-Russia collusion while they implied the opposite on TV.

Even the outside firm that the FBI relied on for its claim that Democratic emails were hacked by the Russians admitted under oath to finding no evidence that emails had been actually removed from Democratic servers.

Newsies in the aftermath of the Russia hoax now insist they were merely reporting on official actions. They carefully avert their eyes from the fact that the leaks they received and possibly even the official acts they reported were manufactured deliberately to put lies into the news.

If they had any grit, many of our senior reporters would be hopping mad now to learn they had been manipulated into reporting untruths to the public.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

California’s College Testing Mistake The state university system puts racial politics above merit.

By on May 23rd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-college-testing-mistake-11590189601?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Thursday’s decision by the University of California regents to eliminate the SAT and ACT in admissions is a historic blow to excellence in higher education. Applicants to the largest university system in the U.S. will now be judged entirely on how well they can flatter admissions bureaucracies with coached personal statements, as well as high school grade-point averages whose meanings are obscured by grade inflation.

The UC started using the SAT in the 1960s to find talented students from modest backgrounds. As an exhaustive faculty senate report—ignored by university leadership—put it this year, “This original intent is clearly being realized at UC.” Yet diversity bean-counting has displaced the philosophy of merit and excellence that made the UC the envy of the world in the last century. The claim that math and reading tests discriminate against minorities (except Asians) easily won the day, never mind the evidence.

California’s political class is desperate to create a different racial makeup at the UC, and it sees testing as an obstacle. The SAT shines a light on failures and inequalities in California’s public K-12 school system. Black and Hispanic students are more likely to attend low-quality schools which because of unions are nearly impossible to reform. For California’s political class the convenient solution is to ban tests—concealing the achievement gap while congratulating themselves on a commitment to equity and inclusion.

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HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Germs That Transformed History For eons, epidemics have caused mass deaths and social upheaval, with far-reaching effects on politics, trade, migration, colonization and conquest By Jared Diamond

By on May 23rd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-germs-that-transformed-history-11590159271?mod=hp_featst_pos2

Mr. Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of “Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis,” “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” and “Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Covid-19 pandemic is an almost unique phenomenon in world history. The only precedent for its rapid spread to every continent, killing people everywhere and devastating both local economies and world trade, was the flu pandemic of 1918-19.

In both cases, the germs behind the pandemic weren’t especially lethal. Covid-19 and the flu both fall within the normal range of mild infectious diseases. Compared with smallpox and Ebola, they kill only a small percentage of their victims, and their person-to-person transmissibility isn’t unusual. What sets them apart—what has made them world-wide pandemics—is modern transportation: fast steamships for the flu, and now jet airplanes for Covid-19.

Of course, there have been a great many “mere” epidemics in human history, diseases that have spread more slowly over large areas, but their effects have been profound. Over the course of recorded history and now in the archaeological record, examples abound of germs producing high death tolls and social and political upheaval, with far-reaching effects on local economies, trade, migration, colonization and conquest.

Will Covid-19 transform our own era, too? Are we entering an age of pandemics? It is far too early to say, but the long history of germs as agents of historical change can provide needed perspective—and perhaps a window into how Covid-19 and its likely successors may shape our destiny, for good and ill.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Arts of Government Criminality By Victor Davis Hanson

By on May 23rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/the-arts-of-government-criminality/

Destroying or altering evidence, lying under oath, leaking classified info … but no pre-dawn televised raid for any of the wrongdoers.

In the entire 2016–19 efforts to derail the Trump campaign, transition, and presidency, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steele, and the FBI, Department of Justice, CIA, and other government bureaus have consistently sought to distort reality. Some of our best and brightest have destroyed evidence, altered documents, lied, leaked, and pled amnesia when questioned about their reprehensible conduct. At each stage, they were aided and abetted by a compliant media.

The dissimulation over the past four years has fallen into four rough categories. Here are a few examples of each.

Deletion of Evidence

Christopher Steele, who bragged for years of his meticulous research and whose work has been quoted chapter and verse as proof of Trump wrongdoing, recently testified under oath to a British court that he now has no records of his supposed conversations with “sub source” Russian informants. His lawyers previously had insisted that his sources were “meticulously documented and recorded.” Now Steele sheepishly admits that such an assertion was a lie, given that he can produce no evidence at all for his meticulous allegations. He admits that his emails and documents were wiped clean from his devices by January 2017.

FBI operatives working with the Mueller investigation team admitted that thousands of undisclosed text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page simply disappeared. In addition, the phones of Strzok and Page apparently were wiped clean after Strzok was dismissed from the Mueller team. Most of these mysterious losses, according to the Mueller investigation, were supposedly a result of a software glitch or other computer malfunctions.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Beijing Moves to Control Hong Kong By Michael Auslin

By on May 23rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/china-moves-to-control-hong-kong-beijing-geopolitical-hardball-could-reshape-asia/#slide-1

The PRC’s geopolitical hardball could reshape Asia.

Under cover of the global coronavirus crisis, China is moving to rewrite Asia’s geopolitical map. Beijing has announced it will essentially take control of Hong Kong by directly imposing a sweeping national-security law, bypassing the territory’s elected Legislative Council. Despite repeated assurances by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that it would abide by the 1984 agreement with Great Britain to allow Hong Kong to maintain a loose independence under the so-called “one-country, two-systems” framework for 50 years after the 1997 turnover, the past decade has seen a steady erosion of Hong Kong’s freedoms, culminating in the massive million-person-plus demonstrations throughout 2019. Now, those last freedoms face extinction.

The new national-security law will criminalize “foreign interference,” secession activities, and subversion of state power. Moreover, the CCP appears ready to alter Hong Kong’s Basic Law, essentially its constitution. Moreover, China’s security services will be able to operate openly in Hong Kong, further reducing Hong Kong’s sovereignty.

Only 23 years have passed since Great Britain handed over the colony to Beijing, and in that time, Hong Kong’s importance as a financial hub has lessened as Shanghai and other mainland financial centers developed. Yet Hong Kong always remained a symbol of relative freedom within China’s Communist system, and as the CCP has steadily clawed back power inside China since the accession to power of General Secretary Xi Jinping, Hong Kong’s status increasingly became irreconcilable with trends on the mainland. The CCP pushed electoral reforms by Hong Kong’s Legislative Council that ensured the election of pro-Beijing candidates, interfered with the courts and press, and steadily increased the mainland’s influence over society.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hong Kong, All Alone

By on May 23rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/china-hong-kong-western-world-needs-to-pay-attention/

China is currently transgressing the terms of its 1997 treaty over Hong Kong, which promised a “one country, two systems” settlement that preserved Hong Kong’s somewhat autonomous democratic institutions. These institutions guarantee rights to Hong Kongers and guard its common-law inheritance.

China’s legislature in Beijing is preparing a new national-security law aimed at Hong Kong to prohibit and punish terrorism, foreign influence, and secession. By that, they mean demonstration, free speech, and a functioning democratic system with rights guaranteed to citizens. Meanwhile, Beijing’s loyalists installed in Hong Kong’s legislative council have been making open attempts at a putsch against the pro-democracy majority.

China’s move against Hong Kong is likely dictated by propitious circumstances. Democracy protesters in Hong Kong may be fatigued. And while the rest of the world deals with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, there is little appetite to expend the diplomatic energy or engage in the trade actions that could protect Hong Kong.

At the time of the treaty, little Hong Kong accounted for nearly 20 percent of China’s overall economy, and it was a crucial engine of China’s economic growth. Companies that wanted to do business in a liberalizing China headquartered in Hong Kong. Financial markets still prefer it. Why? Because it has inherited a property-rights regime and a judicial system from the Anglo tradition. One could make a case in a Hong Kong court and expect a fair hearing, rather than a political judgment dictated by a party boss.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The CDC Just Gave Us the Biggest Reason to End the Coronavirus Lockdowns By Matt Margolis

By on May 22nd, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/05/22/the-cdc-just-gave-us-the-biggest-reason-to-end-the-coronavirus-lockdowns-n417178

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) nows estimates that 35 percent of coronavirus infections are asymptomatic.

But that’s not even the most important part of their latest estimates. It’s the CDC’s new “best estimate” for the case fatality rate amongst symptomatic patients.

But, before I got to that, I should note that back in March, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a 3.4 percent fatality rate and Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was about 2 percent.

President Trump was skeptical of both those numbers, particularly the WHO’s estimate: “Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number,” Trump told Sean Hannity. “Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor. I think that that number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent.”

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