RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/us/tennessee-truck-stop-stabbing.html
Law enforcement officials investigated a multivictim stabbing at a Pilot truck stop near Knoxville, Tenn., on Tuesday.Credit…Calvin Mattheis/Knoxville News Sentinel, via Associated Press

A truck driver went on a stabbing spree Tuesday morning at a highway truck stop in eastern Tennessee, killing three employees and wounding a customer before he was fatally shot by a law enforcement officer, the authorities said.

The attack happened just before 7 a.m. at a Pilot Travel Center off Interstate 40 in Knox County, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which did not immediately offer a motive for the stabbings.

The suspect, Idris Abdus-Salaam, 33, of Durham, N.C., was holding a knife and refused to drop it when law enforcement officers confronted him in the truck stop’s parking lot, the bureau said. One of the officers fired several shots at Mr. Abdus-Salaam, who died at the scene, according to the bureau. It did not say how many rounds hit Mr. Abdus-Salaam.

The three truck stop employees who were killed were Joyce Whaley, 57; Patricia Denise Nibbe, 51; and Nettie R. Spencer, 41, investigators said. All three women died at the scene. The condition of the fourth victim, who the authorities said was hospitalized and was a customer, was not released.

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

In January, impeachment-mad Democrats weren’t paying much attention to events in Wuhan, China. The Chinese government said everything was under control, and the World Health Organization told the world “it is not yet a global health emergency.” When Trump reacted to events in China, he was called a xenophobe.

Since then, no matter what Trump has done, Democrats claim he’s in the wrong. The accusations have run the gamut from xenophobia, to stupidity, to trying to profit from the disease. Now, though, the hardcore Trump haters have a new insult: He’s committing genocide against African-Americans.

The first hint that genocide was in the air came with the deluded claim from the Palmer Report that Trump was intentionally killing blue state voters. That line of thinking garnered 19,200 likes, even though the governors of two of the states hardest hit, Gavin Newsom of California and Andrew Cuomo of New York, expressed gratitude for Trump’s help.

The standby for leftists, though, is always that Trump is a racist. The genesis for this round of racism claims is the sad statistical truth that African-Americans are more likely to succumb to COVID-19 than other races. One of the first attacks, of course, came from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who claimed that black coronavirus deaths should be a springboard for reparations:

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

Amid this week’s dire predictions of a Chinese Flu bloodbath, Julie Kelly at American Greatness details her skepticism about the accuracy of reported deaths to date:  “[T]here is little information available as to what qualifies as a coronavirus fatality for official counts. And there is good reason to approach such tallies with skepticism since reporting from states like New York is suspiciously vague.”  She explains that deaths in patients with co-morbidities “are always attributed to coronavirus as the main cause of death instead of just noting it as a contributing factor.”

My father had a catastrophic fall when he was 86, as well as a cornucopia of additional medical conditions including dementia.  The fall most certainly precipitated his decline, but was it the fall or his body’s inability to deal with the fall that caused it to shut down?  Would he have died at that time but for the fall?  Did it simply hasten his inevitable demise from something else going amiss in his body?  Do people with an interest in dementia research throw his death into the tally of “elders dying from dementia” even though it is more likely the dementia did not cause his death and was probably only a contributing factor?    

That said, and in deference to doctors and medical examiners, the cause of death is not always crystal clear.  Moreover, except in limited cases, Jews generally do not perform autopsies and, frankly, I don’t believe autopsies are generally performed unless there is a reason for it or the family demands it. Thus,  how many autopsies are actually being performed on suspected COVID-19 victims that confirm it as the cause of death, let alone tests that confirm the infection?  Determining a cause of death with absolute certitude is not always the no-brainer we have come to expect from television shows, and could be further muddled by an absence of autopsies and inconsistencies in administering tests.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-hydroxychloroquine-patients-should-be-able-to-try-any-potential-cure/

We still have a lot to learn about hydroxychloroquine, but we know that restrictions on personal liberty are unwise.

There’s a raging debate over the use of hydroxychloroquine to fight the novel coronavirus. Amid the controversy, it may seem like there is absolutely nothing we can agree on.

To be fair, the fact that there has been debate on this issue isn’t surprising, nor is it unhealthy. Although the Food and Drug Administration has granted an emergency-use authorization for hydroxychloroquine (and I believe rightly so; more on that later) as a coronavirus treatment, we still know quite little about its efficacy for this usage.

What is unhealthy, though, is the kind of debate we’ve been having. As my colleague Jim Geraghty pointed out on Monday, most of the conversation about the drug has been two politically motivated sides shouting at each other, framing their arguments as if any of this is a clear-cut, black-and-white issue. President Trump and his supporters tout it as a sort of medical marvel, while his detractors cry that it’s dangerous quackery. This, Geraghty explains, is the wrong approach — there are “many factors” at play when it comes to determining how a drug will or will not work. The results will vary from person to person; “nuance” is necessary. Partisan politics already play an outsized role in our conversation. When it comes to matters of life versus death, it is especially disgusting.