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Ruth King

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Power of Media Ignorance By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 11th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-power-of-medcoronavirus-pandemic-power-media-ignoranceia-ignorance/

Almost two weeks ago I offered at NRO a few synopses of various theories about why California — which, for a variety of reasons, had seemed so ripe for a New York–style epidemic — had nonetheless strangely been exempt at least for a while from the virus’s spread. I included the pedestrian possibility of some previously acquired “herd immunity,” given the state’s singular exposure from November to January 31 to direct flights from China, including those from Wuhan, and initial CDC and media reports last year of an unusually early and severe assumed flu hitting the state.

Within a few days, I was hit by media inquiries and private calls asking about my ongoing “coronavirus antibody testing studies.”

Despite ad nauseam corrections that I had never claimed in the NRO article or elsewhere to be a doctor, much less an epidemiologist or a conductor of any such study, and that the Hoover Institution is not a medical school, the fake news still spread.

I got dozens more calls and emails were from private citizens who thought they had the virus and wanted confirmation of that supposed fact, in order to venture out and help others with antibodies. Some said they wanted “in” immediately.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

“Risks and COVID-19” Sydney Williams

By on April 11th, 2020

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Most decisions we make involve some measure of risk. Generally, the consideration is fleeting. Do I take the stairs and risk falling, or the elevator and risk it breaking down? At times, the choice is more absolute: Do I take the double-black diamond with moguls, or do I go around on the bunny trail? Sometimes the odds are important: Is my need to cross the street against traffic so great that the attempt should be made despite oncoming traffic? Risk is ubiquitous.

It is embedded in the friends we make, where we go to college, what job we take and in our choice of a marriage partner – a risk my wife and I took fifty-six years ago today. A wise friend used to say that he was never upset with mistakes he had made but was troubled by risks he never took. Risks vary depending on what we do. To a soldier in combat, risks have different consequences than the ones we encounter daily. In his 1916 collection of poems, Mountain Interval, Robert Frost included “The Road Not Taken.” At a fork in the road a traveler pauses, knowing he cannot walk down both paths, so chooses “the one less traveled by…”  The reader never knows whether the choice was a good one or not, only that it “has made all the difference.” As well, progress is impossible without risk. A baserunner cannot steal second without taking his foot off first. Neither can we avoid risk. “Security,” as Helen Keller once wrote, “is mostly a superstition.”

Risk is defined as the interaction with uncertainty, a measure of the probability of danger or loss, against safety or profit. In our daily lives, we try to mitigate risk. We are encouraged to look before we leap. Insurance companies employ actuaries to assess risk and calculate premiums. Investors use algorithms to quantify the risk of loss against the potential for gain. While these calculations are never perfect, they are Darwinian in that those who are best at measuring risk tend to be the most successful, what Joseph Schumpeter termed creative destruction in industries as they adapt to change.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Authoritarian Overreach Is Unnecessary to Fight the Pandemic By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on April 11th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-consent-governed-authoritarian-overreach-unnecessary/

There are worse things that can happen than a pandemic.

‘An overreach by our police officers.” Yeah, I’ll say.

“Overreach” was the concession that the police department in Brighton, Colo., grudgingly offered regarding their arrest of Matt Mooney, a 33-year-old former state trooper. Mooney was handcuffed in front of his six-year-old daughter. His “crime”? Playing tee-ball with her on an empty field. Cops on the scene capriciously decided that this transgressed the state’s social-distancing restrictions.

The incident would be madness under any circumstances. But it wasn’t even true as alleged. Under the rules — which are executive edicts, not criminal laws enacted by the people’s legislative representatives — the fine print said the park was not closed to groups of fewer than five. Mooney, his wife, and their toddler were social distancing. Indeed, they were farther apart on the empty softball field than at home. It was the police who sloughed off social-distancing: physically handling him, cuffing him without wearing protective gear as unworn masks dangled from their belts, sticking this insolent criminal in the back of a squad car as they sought guidance from headquarters — because what cop wouldn’t need guidance on this one, right?

The dragnet was called off and Mooney was released after a few minutes. The state is really sorry. And its officials would love to tell us more but, you see, an internal investigation is underway so they can’t be expected to comment — just to shelter in place, hoping this lunacy slides down the memory hole but quick.

And who’s to say it won’t?

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Racial warrior offended when the surgeon general tells minorities that behavior affects virus risks By Andrea Widburg

By on April 11th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/racial_warrior_offended_when_the_surgeon_general_tells_minorities_that_behavior_affects_virus_risks.html

✔ @tedcruz

Imagine: you’re a professional NPR reporter, you have an opportunity to ask the US Surgeon General a Q—in the midst of a global pandemic w/ over 100k fatalities—and you ask “‘many people’ are offended by what you call your grandmother.” Seriously, what the hell is wrong w/ MSM?!?

PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor has distinguished herself as one of the media figures most engaged in the “gotcha” game at COVID-19 press conferences, especially when she can work race into the issue.  On Friday, after the surgeon general made a direct plea to minorities about behaviors that can protect them, she went on the attack.

U.S. surgeon general Dr. Jerome Adams spent five minutes during Friday’s press conference talking about the fact that COVID-19 is hitting minority communities especially hard.  His densely packed presentation began with his addressing minorities’ predisposition to diseases that increase the risk from COVID-19, such as asthma, heart disease, and diabetes.

From there, Adams moved to lifestyle factors that increase the risk.  These included the fact that minorities tend to live in more densely packed, urban communities; have multi-generational houses; and are employed in jobs that cannot be done via telecommuting.

Adams then talked about dangerous COVID-19 myths that circulate in minority communities.  He said he and Vice President Pence have spoken to thousands of minorities, including hundreds of community leaders, to discuss minorities’ unique vulnerability to COVID-19.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Call It a Ponzi Scheme Even during the Covid-19 crisis, colleges abuse their economic and reputational privileges. Heather Mac Donald

By on April 11th, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/higher-ed-diversity-bureaucracy

As American unemployment mounted by the millions in March and April, the dance of the college diversity deans kept up its usual brisk pace. On April 1, Harvard University announced that its acting associate dean for inclusion and belonging was moving on to Denison University. But the Harvard associate deanship will not be vacant for long. On May 1, the current head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus will step into the Harvard position, to direct the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion team within the Dean of Students Office; the Office of BGLTQ Student Life; the Office of Diversity Education and Support; the College’s Title IX Office; the Women’s Center; and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations.

Elsewhere, campus diversocrats enjoyed similarly enviable mobility while the rest of the country was shutting down. The vice president for inclusion and diversity at George Mason University will become chief diversity officer at the University of South Carolina at Columbia on June 15. The former occupant of the South Carolina position decamped to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on March 15 to serve as its community and equity officer. On March 1, a former associate vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Iowa became associate vice president for inclusive excellence at Georgia Southern University. The first diversity, equity, and inclusion librarian at the University of Florida assumed her position in February.

Many college presidents are terrified that the coronavirus pandemic will devastate their schools’ finances and enrollment. Anyone who cares about a revival of serious learning can only hope that they are right.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A World Turned Upside Down Christopher Carr

By on April 11th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/a-world-turned-upside-down/

Commenting on the course of history, former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is famously quoted as saying, “Events, dear boy, events.” The historian, H.A.L. Fisher, described history as “one damn thing after another”.

The historical record is replete with the unexpected. You might call them black swan events, as has Quadrant contributor Mark Powell. It might be argued that, but for the sudden impact of the coronavirus, the future be completely different. Yet, as in relation to past events, a retrospective on 2020 might conclude that the Western world in particular was on the cusp of a seismic economic, social and cultural shift, and the Wuhan virus provided the catalyst.

Superficially, totalitarian and authoritarian states — China, in particular, the ultimate source and cause of this pandemic — will seek to pretend that they have the pandemic under control and proclaim business as usual. After all, the Beijing regime’s legitimacy rests in part on its ability to hide the human cost of its ideologically driven denial of the coronavirus during those first critical weeks.

Up until now, we have witnessed the curious paradox of a totalitarian state being able to take advantage of an economically borderless world. The self-proclaimed economic purists were so sold on the notion of free trade that they failed to notice the fraud at its core. Donald Trump intuitively recognized what the established paradigm utterly failed to see. At the very least, China may no longer be able to take advantage of a borderless world. Perhaps China, feeling itself increasingly cornered, will become more overtly aggressive. The world, and in particular, our region may become more unstable. Defence preparedness will assume a renewed urgency.

Among all nations, nation-state borders have become the crucial line of defence against COVID-19.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Coronavirus: Elderly Europeans Denied Treatment by Soeren Kern

By on April 11th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15870/coronavirus-elderly-abandoned

In addition to the ethical questions raised by the rationing of healthcare according to age, the denial of medical attention to the elderly, many of whom have paid into the social welfare system all their lives, also casts a spotlight on the shortcomings of socialized medicine in Southern Europe, where austerity measures imposed by the European Central Bank have resulted in massive budget cuts for public healthcare.

In documents leaked to several Spanish media, the Catalan Emergency Medical Service (Servicio de Emergencias Médicas) instructed doctors, nurses and ambulance personnel to inform the families of older patients suffering from coronavirus that “death at home is the best option.” … The protocol also advised medical personnel to avoid referring to the lack of hospital beds in Catalonia.

“My father started working at the age of 14 until he was 65. He never asked for anything. On March 18, he needed a respirator to avoid dying and was denied…. This is the Spain we have. My father’s generation built this country, its reservoirs, roads, agriculture, working 14 hours a day, coming out of a postwar period. And they are being left to die.” — Óscar Haro, YouTube video, March 20, 2020.

In November 2019, two months before the coronavirus first appeared in Spain, the Spanish government revealed that nearly 700,000 patients were on a waiting list for surgeries. Nationwide, patients had to wait on average 115 days to receive surgery; in Catalonia, patients had to wait nearly six months; in Madrid patients had to wait for six weeks.

The severity of the coronavirus crisis in Italy and Spain, where elderly patients are being allowed to die for the benefit of the young, is due in large measure to the austerity measures associated with their membership in the eurozone. The large numbers of dead, especially among the elderly, appears to be the price that Italians and Spaniards are paying to be part of a monetary union which they never should have joined.

With well over a half-million confirmed cases of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Europe, a growing number of regional medical authorities have begun issuing guidelines and protocols that call for hospitals to prioritize younger patients over those who are older.

In Italy and Spain, the two countries most affected by the coronavirus pandemic in Europe, doctors in overwhelmed intensive care units have for weeks been making life or death decisions about who receives emergency treatment. The new protocols, however, amount to government directives that instruct medical personnel effectively to abandon elderly patients to their fate.

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MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: THE DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY

By on April 11th, 2020

President Trump is right. Something weird in the party planning for the election in November. There has been not a whiff of support for Joe Biden from former President Obama and Bernie Sanders is holding on to his delegates.

Bernie smells a set-up. I think he is right. Biden grows more silly (kinder than incoherent) by the day and the desperate Dems are floating the idea of a draft Cuomo scenario.

Bernie would reject that and garner his loyal troops and delegates for a challenge. He came in second and therefore correctly feels that should Biden step down, he should be the nominee.

Stay tuned!……rsk

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Netflix and Learn: The Woman Who Should be on the $20 Bill By David W. Almasi

By on April 11th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/10/netflix-and-learn-the-woman-who-should-be-on-the-20-bill/

The story of Madam C.J. Walker is inspiring, motivating and definitely binge-worthy. And, for older kids currently out of school, it’s a great history lesson they likely wouldn’t ever hear in a classroom.

Coronavirus binge-watching these days doesn’t need to be limited to guilty pleasures like “The Mandalorian” and “Tiger King.”

On Netflix, the new miniseries “Self Made” tells the compelling, true-life story of Madam C. J. Walker, who should have been the hands-down favorite to be the first woman whose portrait would grace American paper money. Unfortunately, she was overlooked altogether.

Walker was the first American woman to become a self-made millionaire. Born to recently freed slaves, the ambitious Walker rose from humble beginnings of picking cotton and washing clothes for pennies to founding and running her own factory, salons, beauty school, and hair care business.

Motivated by her own pattern baldness, and utilizing her experience as a traveling saleswoman for another hair care entrepreneur, Walker developed her own hair treatment for black women and marketed it around the South as the “Walker Method.” She expanded her business with “Walker Agents”—giving well-paid, much-needed and empowering jobs to the same black women who were her customers.

Walker, who died a millionaire in her early 50s, became a prominent philanthropist. She supported the musicians, writers, and artists who led the Harlem Renaissance. She was an early and generous donor to the NAACP and efforts to combat lynching. She was also instrumental in preserving the home of abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Time to Sideline the False Prophets of Doom Julie Kelly

By on April 11th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/10/time-to-sideline-the-false-prophets-of-doom/

Fauci, Birx, and Adams have sent too many mixed messages from the start. While at first diminishing the threat of COVID-19, they now are sowing fear and panic across the country.

The warning from the nation’s top public health official was terrifying.

“This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized,” U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said on Fox News last Sunday, referring to coming deaths due to the novel coronavirus. “It’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.”

Holy Week, Adams further cautioned, would be the “hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives.”

President Trump echoed Adams’ dire prediction. “We are coming up onto a time that’s going to be very horrendous, probably a time like we haven’t seen in this country,” Trump said from the White House on April 4. Instead of celebrating Easter and Passover this week, the president soberly admonished, Americans would instead see “some very bad numbers” about people succumbing to COVID-19.

Those alarming forecasts were based on a model produced by the University of Washington late last month. Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, assembled a set of graphs to show how COVID-19 would overwhelm the country’s health care system, causing a shortage of hospital beds, intensive care units and ventilators.

Murray also originally calculated that 2,271 people would die on April 15, which would be the peak “death day” in the United States. But that wasn’t the only scary news. Sick people would by dying in the streets and entryways outside of hospitals across the country because no beds would be available.

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