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Ruth King

3 Killed and 1 Wounded in Tennessee Truck Stop Stabbing Spree

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.

MY SAY: THE FIFTH AND SIXTH QUESTION

Tonight is the first night of Passover and unlike all previous years my family is celebrating it with high tech. I hate it. I miss the hugs, the arms around my shoulder, the political bickering and the faces of my kids and grand kids in vivo.

However, life has its twists and turns. For decades the youngest of my grand-children has always asked the traditional four questions regarding the history and mandates of Passover. In breaking with that tradition, I, the oldest member of our family has a fifth and sixth very serious question:

How is it that on this day in history which commemorates freedom and justice the world is rife with hypocritical and virulent anti-Semitism, sometimes in overt attacks and more often disguised as academic and media hatred of Israel?

How is it that the Democrat party whose past leaders and staunch convention resolutions of support for Israel and the rights of the Jewish people to live in peace, which gave me confidence as a Jewish American, now tolerates and even promotes this ancient hatred in the corridors of power?

To all who observe, my best wishes for a happy and sweet Passover.  rsk

Rumors of the Death of Hungarian Democracy Are Vastly Overstated Zoltán Szalai and Miklós SzánthóBy Zoltán Szalai and Miklós Szánthó

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/08/rumors-of-the-death-of-hungarian-democracy-are-vastly-overstated/

Since COVID-19 affects the entire globe, from China through the Ivory Coast to Argentina, governments all over the world have implemented emergency rules to save as many lives as possible. No one, not even members of parliaments, governments, royal families, football teams, or celebrities are immune to the spread of the Chinese coronavirus. News about new infections and quarantining public figures pop up frequently on the internet. This is the first pandemic for a considerable period of time and it is certainly the cause of the biggest change in our way of life our generation can recall. 

The coronavirus crisis an enormous challenge—physically, mentally, emotionally, and economically. Fortunately, constitutions include clauses for such crises—and it should no surprise that those clauses should be invoked.

The United States, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom—and several other EU member states—just to mention a few democratic countries, all passed emergency decrees and legislation. Hungary followed in line with a number of these measures: or, to be clear, Hungary was one of the few countries that introduced countermeasures at the right time, fast and effective enough to slow down the spread of the virus.

In Great Britain, legislation will see parliament close for four weeks this month. It also guarantees extraordinary competences to the British government’s cabinet ministers, bypassing parliament, deviating from normal procedure. The government has never passed such measures during peacetime before, and they could be in effect for up to two years.

The leftist fever swamps are accusing Trump of killing African-Americans By Andrea Widburg

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:

Coronavirus and elderly death rates By Sally Zelikovsky

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.

Ilhan’s ‘Hijabi Slip’ Confessions of deep longings for Sharia. Darrell Pack

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/congresswoman-ilhan-omars-hijabi-slip-darrell-pack/

A Freudian slip is embarrassing because for an instant something we hide is revealed to others. Maybe it’s suppressing bigoted and prejudiced feelings that we know are unacceptable in the wider society, but in a moment of stress and thoughtlessness, this dark side of who we are pops out.

Recently, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (MN-D) had her own Freudian slip. I’m calling it her “Hijabi Slip,” because it relates to her confessions of deep Islamic religious piety. The slip appeared on her Twitter feed reacting to one from a Retawa Agnihotri, who quoted from the Qur’an.

Agnihotri tweeted, “Nor come nigh to fornication/adultery: for it is a shameful (deed) and an evil, opening the road (to other evils).” (Quran 17: 32)

She was apparently alluding to accusations of marital and sexual improprieties against Congresswoman Omar that she had denied.  This is the history. In October, 2019, Omar filed for divorce from Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her three children. They had been separated since 2008. While separated, she married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, but got a divorce later through their Islamic traditions. There were allegations that Omar married Elmi, “her brother,” in order to grant him an immigration status.

The Coming War Between the Generations When dangers and discomforts of the present trump the greater ones of the future. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/coming-war-between-generations-bruce-thornton/

Short-term thinking has been the bane of democracies since ancient Athens. Regularly scheduled elections and term-limits make it politically expedient, if not mandatory, for politicians to gratify the people’s desires, or assuage their present fears, even if the action or policy creates greater risks later. As Tocqueville wrote, “A clear perception of the future founded on judgment and experience” is “frequently wanting in democracies.” The dangers and discomforts of the present will trump the greater ones of the future.

The current pandemic crisis illustrates this perennial flaw, which hasn’t been mitigated by our greater knowledge of diseases and remedies for them. In the case of the Wuhan virus, we don’t have the requisite data to establish its mortality rate among the infected, or even the number of infected. The various models that project a mortality rate have exaggerated the toll: At this point the number of dead is a few hundred more than the 7400 of Americans who die every day, and much less than the 24,000 to 64,000 who died of the flu this season. Yet most states, seconded by the president’s recommendations, have imposed a radical social-distancing policy, which the president has extended to the end of April.

As a consequence, our economy has taken a historic hit, with 10 million employees laid off and thousands of businesses both big and small (the latter comprise nearly half the private workforce) shuttered. Goldman-Sachs projects GDP to shrink 35% this summer, and others estimate unemployment may reach the 25% recorded during the Great Depression. A booming economy has been stalled as a matter of policy, with consequences such as a significant recession or even a depression, the malign effects of which––depression, divorce, addiction, suicide–– will continue to seriously damage the lives of millions for the foreseeable future.

Coronavirus Patients Should Be Able to Try Any Potential Cure By Katherine Timpf

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.

The Left’s Ugly Reaction to Hydroxychloroquine By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/the-lefts-ugly-reaction-to-hydroxychloroquine/

The idea that he is promoting the drug to boost the price of a mutual fund in which he owns shares is perhaps the most ludicrous conspiracy theory yet.

A  widely shared, four-person-bylined, “wow”-provoking New York Times story today informs us that Donald Trump is personally benefiting from his “aggressive advocacy” of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine because he owns stock in one of the companies that manufacture the drug.

The story might be one of the most ridiculous articles published by mainstream media in the Trump era — though, admittedly, the field is highly competitive. But while knee-jerk anti-Trumpism is expected, the angry obsession over the president’s championing of hydroxychloroquine is uniquely ugly.

For one thing, and I realize this might be difficult for some people to comprehend, it’s plausible, even likely, that Trump advocates for chloroquine because he is legitimately optimistic that a therapeutic answer might help Americans. Even if you feel he’s being reckless when speaking about the drug, you can accept that his intentions are good.

It’s also possible that Trump is hopeful about hydroxychloroquine because he thinks it will help his reelection. Desiring an outcome that benefits the vast majority of Americans, but also benefits you, is a perfectly sound moral position. Hoping for negative outcomes to strengthen your partisan position, on the other hand, is pretty nefarious.

WHO Failed

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-world-health-organization-failed/

Since its inception 112 years ago almost to the day, the World Health Organization (WHO)  has been credited with the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of other devastating illnesses, including leprosy and river blindness.

This record of success makes the current corruption of the organization all the more shameful.

On December 30, Chinese doctor Li Wenliang warned colleagues about the outbreak of an illness resembling severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which sparked a pandemic in 2003. Public-health officials rely on the acuity of doctors like Li, whose early warnings prevent the spread of deadly diseases. But Chinese authorities didn’t reward Li; they summoned him to the Public Security Bureau in Wuhan on accusations that he had made false statements and disrupted the public order.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) followed up with numerous other arrests, and publicly warned that it would punish anyone spreading “rumors” on social media. By mid January, Chinese doctors knew that COVID-19 was spreading between humans, but on January 14, the WHO stated that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus.” Two weeks later, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus flew to Beijing for a meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, who so impressed Tedros that he lauded Chinese authorities for “setting a new standard for outbreak control,” praising their “openness for sharing information.”