https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=408&v=xfLVxx_lBLU&feature=emb_logo
https://www.jns.org/opinion/this-yom-hazikaron-remembering-what-we-have-lost/
It is our task in the Diaspora to bridge the miles and other differences, and mourn along with our fellow Jews in Israel.
Israelis and Zionists around the world will mark Yom Hazikaron this year starting on the evening of April 27. Yom Hazikaron LeHalalei Ma’arakhot Israel ul’Nifge’ei Pe’ulot HaEivah, literally: Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel and Victims of Terrorism is Israel’s Memorial Day, and it is not celebrated with barbecues but with tears of ultimate grief. And as so many Israelis mourn for their precious fallen fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, and friends and comrades, it is not the same for Jews outside of Israel.
We may all mourn together on Tisha B’Av and during Yizkor on Yom Kippur, but tragically, it is not the same observing Yom Hazikaron inside the Jewish state as it is anywhere else.
It is our task in the Diaspora to bridge the miles and other differences, and mourn along with our fellow Jews in Israel.
One book to read that may assist you to feel the depth of the loss that so many Israelis feel on Yom Hazikaron is Letters to Talia.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/israeli-micro-needles-ready-to-deliver-corona-treatments/?
This new Israeli nanotech device could drastically reduce the time it takes to inoculate the world when a coronavirus vaccine is ready.
On Tuesday, the developers of cutting-edge Israeli nanotechnology devices announced that their “micro-needles” provide the same results for inoculations, yet use far less vaccine.
The company, NanoPass, is sharing its technology to contribute to the fight against COVID-19 and the search for a coronavirus cure.
The super-thin injection needles made by NanoPass “target immune cells of the skin by harnessing the skin’s potent immune system to improve vaccines,” a company spokesman said. The result is that the vaccine can work more efficiently while dramatically reducing the dose needed to achieve the same immunity.
With teams around the world racing to develop a cure or means to prevent the spread of COVID-19, billions of doses of a new vaccine will be needed. However, producing that much vaccine and administering it could take years, creating a lag during which more people would succumb to the pandemic.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-should-drop-out-or-take-a-lie-detector-test_3327515.html
As I type this, #DropOutBiden and #TaraReade are the No. 1 and No. 2 hashtags, respectively, on Twitter, with over 53,000 tweets for No. 1, moving up rapidly with entries from the right and left. Bernie supporters are particularly outraged.
(By the time you read this, no telling how high it will be, because Kim Jong Un’s life or death may be sneaking into the lead.)
Twitter, for all its pluses and minuses, can be seen as a leading factor in politics the way the stock market is for the economy—so the Democrats and their media minions (who have been notably silent on the Reade matter, almost to the point of mafia-style omertà) should be afraid, very afraid.
The reason for this sudden uproar? The surfacing of Tara Reade’s mother’s alarmed call-in to Larry King’s cable TV show that was contemporaneous with her daughter’s claim of a sexual assault by then-Sen. Joe Biden—an accusation, it should be noted, that is by multiples greater than anything that arose during the highly contentious Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1253711249084383232.html?refreshed=yes
Wrong both ways, for several reasons.
1/ The flu case fatality rate is calculated off a huge base – 60 million Americans in 2017/18 – and flu deaths may be undercounted for the same reason coronavirus deaths are supposedly undercounted – they mainly occur in old, sick people.
2/ We have a VACCINE for the flu. It is not perfect, but it can sharply reduce infections in some years, and it is generally widely distributed, especially to the people most at risk. That suppresses both the CFR and IFR for the flu.
3/ The 21% NYC antibody figure is likely low, both because it doesn’t foot with plausible figures from other places (generally lower, but in places where deaths have been far lower), and because it takes time for people to develop antibodies, so the figure usually rises anyway.
4/ NYC and NYS seem to have made counterproductive decisions, including heavy ventilator use and sending elderly COVID patients to nursing homes (!). Also, some NYC hospitals faced serious strain in late March (unlike almost anywhere else in the US). Hospital strain is dangerous.
5/ Add all this up, and the COVID death rate will likely settle into the 0.25%-0.4% range (1 in 250 people infected to 1 in 400). Far from 20 times higher than flu. Meanwhile, the median age of death is 78-80. And unlike the flu, #SARSCoV2 is basically not dangerous to children.
6/ As long as supposedly serious people are saying things like coronavirus is 20+ times as deadly as the flu, we’re going to have a hard time getting out of this mess.
Alex Berenson@AlexBerenson
As long as supposedly serious people are saying things like coronavirus is 20+ times as deadly as the flu, we’re going to have a hard time getting out of this mess.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/opinion/coronavirus-lockdown.html
In 1976, the artist Saul Steinberg drew a cover for The New Yorker — “View of the World from Ninth Avenue” — that became an instant classic. You know the one: Manhattan heavily in the foreground, the Hudson River, a brownish strip called “Jersey,” the rest of the America vaguely in the distance.
It could almost be a map of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States.
Even now, it is stunning to contemplate the extent to which the country’s Covid-19 crisis is a New York crisis — by which I mean the city itself along with its wider metropolitan area.
As of Friday, there have been more Covid-19 fatalities on Long Island’s Nassau County (population 1.4 million) than in all of California (population 40 million). There have been more fatalities in Westchester County (989) than in Texas (611). The number of Covid deaths per 100,000 residents in New York City (132) is more than 16 times what it is in America’s next largest city, Los Angeles (8). If New York City proper were a state, it would have suffered more fatalities than 41 other states combined.
It isn’t hard to guess why. New York has, by far, the highest population density in the U.S. among cities of 100,000 or more. Commuters crowd trains, office workers crowd elevators, diners crowd restaurants. No other American city has the same kind of jammed pedestrian life as New York — Times Square alone gets 40 million visitors a year — or as many residents packed into high-rises. The city even has a neighborhood called Corona, which, it turns out, has among the highest rates of coronavirus infections.
Consider a thought experiment in which metropolitan New York weren’t just its own state, but its own country. What would the crisis for what remained of America look like, then? In this slightly smaller nation of a little more than 300 million people, the death toll would amount to about 7.5 per 100,000, slightly above Germany’s levels.
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/5/the-scab-the-wound-beneath
EXCERPTS:
An overriding theme of the historian Thucydides’ monumental history of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) is the fragility of civilization. In extremis, when both the elites and masses lose their thin veneer of culture, society can turn feral quickly. During a horrific war, plague, or revolution, even a wealthy and sophisticated civilization such as that of the classical Greek city-states regresses in a second to its innate state. And what follows from these natural and man-made disasters is not pretty. Still, these calamities can be tragically instructional. Hypocrisies arise. Pretexts vanish. Fundamental but forgotten truths, easily masked in times of calm, reemerge. From Thucydides’ warnings, we can glean that even suburban elites in Range Rovers can in a day be reduced to tugging over toilet paper rolls at Whole Foods.
Of course, in historical terms, covid-19may prove a rookie virus in comparison to the still mysterious infection—typhus, smallpox, or typhoid?—that wiped out one quarter of the Athenian population along with its iconic sexagenarian leader Pericles. He was the architect of the very wartime strategy of forced withdrawal inside the walls of Athens that birthed the plague in the first place and took his life.
Thucydides’ accounts of the plague, the savage factionalism at Corcyra, the mass executions at Mytilene and Melos, and the disaster at Syracuse all remind us that what is considered normal in calm can be rendered absurd instantly in the cauldron of panic and death. Last month I saw what seemed to be a stylishly dressed woman in a Lexus buying toilet paper from her car window in the parking lot of a local Walmart from someone who appeared homeless, a social interaction rare in healthier times.
The pernicious coronavirus tore off an American scab and revealed suppurating wounds beneath. Take the central actor of this plague, China. For much of the twenty-first century, the American establishment’s foreign policy toward China, to the degree it was even formalized, was ethically and logically bankrupt. Yet the status quo remained unquestioned, given it rested on a rare alignment of both progressive and commercial self-interests.
Of course, Americans in general have had a long romance with China. They were never colonialists in China, at least in the manner of the Europeans. Over fifteen million Chinese, our erstwhile allies, were killed in World War II, many brutally slaughtered by our enemies, the Japanese.
More recently, Mao Zedong, arguably the most lethal mass murderer of the twentieth century—perhaps a greater killer than Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot combined—held an attraction for the New Left of the 1960s. His cherubic smile, worker’s cap, peasant dress, cool aphorisms, and hatred of running-dog capitalists once captivated student protestors. Even Barack Obama’s acting White House communications director, Anita Dunn, in 2009 still swooned that Mao was one of her two favorite political “philosophers”:
And then the third lesson and tip actually come from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa—not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you’re going to make choices. You’re going to challenge.
https://townhall.com/columnists/wayneallynroot/2020/04/26/are-you-enjoying-your-first-test-drive-of-socialist-america-n256761
Are you enjoying your first taste of socialism? Life in America today is a sneak preview of life in Cuba or Venezuela. Democrats love it. This is the future they plan for you. The current economic catastrophe is exactly what America will look like if we institute the Green New Deal.
The goal is to defeat climate change by killing your job, taking away your car, closing your business and turning America into Cuba or Venezuela.
It’s a progressive Democrat’s rainy dream.
And isn’t it great? You don’t need to go to work. Money magically appears in your bank account. Hopefully, you can live on $1,200 every six weeks for the rest of your life.
You get to spend long days watching daytime talk shows and movies on Netflix — you know, the things Democrats call a “typical day” for their voters.
And think of the money you can save on gas by not going anywhere. Soon all those nasty, polluting, carbon-emitting vehicles will be just a memory of the past. How wonderful will it be to have time to “just think” as you wait hours for those new energy-efficient buses and subways?
And, with all those nasty “nonessential” businesses closed, you’ll have plenty of time to converse with your neighbors as you wait in line to see if anything is available for you to buy. It’s socialist nirvana.
https://www.city-journal.org/snapshots-from-shadow-of-covid-19
The pandemically correct line out of Trader Joe’s—everyone in the masked queue standing six feet apart—stretches down Spring Street from the food-market entrance and turns the corner on Sixth Avenue. I brake to a stop and tell Diane that the store is too crowded. We should just go home.
“We need a few things,” she says, and gets out.
I take my pick of a dozen parking spaces. The weather’s nice, but I do not put the window down, distancing myself from the air of my own hometown. Judging by that line, Diane will need at least an hour to buy essentials, and here I am sheltering in place in the Honda. I glance at my reflection in the rearview mirror. Have I turned into the legendary mafia guy, who, fearful of his friends, sends his wife out to start his car?
This is my first time outside in four days, and I’m surprised to find myself struggling against a crushing sense of bereavement that somehow alternates between anxiety and rage. Nearby, a woman sits on a bench, her mask lowered, her face raised to the antiseptic sun. A well-dressed but unmasked young man walks by and speaks to her, pointing toward the strange spectacle of a traffic-free avenue. Apparently, he’s standing too close, because the woman raises her mask and walks away. The young man wanders back and forth aimlessly, either stoned or in shock, or both. I recognize the look. I just saw it in the mirror.
Deep breaths. Coronavirus is not the Black Death. It’s not the epidemic that took down Marcus Aurelius or the cruel plague that devastated seventeenth-century London. It may turn out to be less dangerous than the Asian flu pandemic of 1957, which killed 116,000 Americans. That remains to be seen. The disease’s core public symptom is panic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZaOQVbHsmw&feature=youtu.be
Dr. Roth is author of an excellent book which rebuts venal media libels about his stability and fitness to serve.
