RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2020/05/05/scotus-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-hospitalized-with-infection-n388463

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is reportedly hospitalized with a gall bladder infection. ABC News reported,

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hospitalized Tuesday afternoon for “a benign gallbladder condition” that had caused an infection, according to Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg.Ginsburg is expected to remain at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for a day or two but still participate in the telephonic oral arguments Wednesday when the court will hear oral arguments in a case involving the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate.

Ginsburg, 87, had participated in the oral arguments that the SCOTUS held via teleconference on Monday and Tuesday on a live stream due to the Chinese virus lockdown precautions. The famous judge has had a string of health scares over the last year. Unlike leftist Twitter that jumped on a chance to kick a conservative when he is down, like Rush Limbaugh when he announced his cancer diagnosis, conservative Twitter is wishing the far-left radical judge well.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-5-4-will-the-rogue-fbiciadoj-operat

It has been obvious now for multiple years that the whole Trump/Russia “collusion” narrative was a total hoax from the start, concocted by high-ranking but rogue members of the intelligence community in the latter days of the Obama administration. This misuse of the powers of the government by the intelligence community to attempt to influence the 2016 election, and then to undermine President Trump after his election, has been described by many as the greatest scandal in American political history. The perpetrators of the scandal range from CIA head John Brennan, to FBI head James Comey, to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, to senior FBI agent Peter Strzok, and many others too numerous to mention.

All of the people named have lost their previous jobs, but beyond that none have thus far faced any consequences, particularly any criminal prosecution. They have books on sale or cable news gigs or both. We know that a federal criminal prosecutor, John Durham, has been named by Attorney General Barr to look into the matter, but after many months, we hear nothing. Several commenters have asked for my thoughts on whether criminal consequences are likely for any of these miscreants, and, if so, on what basis.

My bottom line: As egregious as the conduct of these people was, I still think it’s only about 50/50 that any of them get charged and convicted of any criminal offense. There are two major issues: (1) What is the crime? and (2) How do you prove the case?

What is the crime?

https://spectator.us/covid-statistics-politics-other-means/

Statistics is the continuation of politics by other means, to misquote Clausewitz. One hundred and fifty years after the crushing of the revolutionary Paris Commune, historians still clash aggressively about the death toll. Was it as high as 40,000 or as low as 10,000?

It matters because the Paris Commune is a shibboleth, a great left-wing site of memory and martyrdom, made famous by Karl Marx’s pamphlet The Civil War in France. He presented the Paris Commune as the first great experiment in communist government. Its crushing by the army of the conservative Adolphe Thiers is depicted in left-wing folk memory as the ‘reactionary, repressive forces of capitalism’ ending an idyllic experiment in socialism. So for martyrdom’s sake it is better to put the number ‘slaughtered’ at 40,000 rather than 10,000. And historians go to great lengths to adduce statistical evidence in one direction or another.

In the 1960s demographers revealed that the Soviet government stopped publishing its statistics on life expectancy because they were not progressing as fast as in the West. Today Chinese GDP growth statistics are widely viewed as manipulated. COVID-19 pandemic statistics have inevitably become political too. As the Cambridge statistician Prof David Spiegelhalter wrote in the Guardian on April 30, ‘people are not so interested in the numbers themselves — they want to say why they are so high, and ascribe blame.’ And why do they want to ascribe blame? Because other political agendas have not been laid to rest.

And so COVID statistics are the continuation of politics by other means. The relish with which certain international media highlight the death toll in the US, for example, is a rather transparent attack on Donald Trump, especially when they fail to adjust deaths to 100,000 population.

The otherwise authoritative left-of-center French daily Le Monde for example refers to the United States ‘as the most affected [country] as much in number of deaths (67,682) as in cases (1.15 million)’ but fails to account for population, which puts the US around 10th in the world.