Displaying the most recent of 91900 posts written by

Ruth King

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.

Continue reading →
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.

Continue reading →
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.

Continue reading →
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.

Continue reading →
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

Continue reading →
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.

Continue reading →
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.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A way to earlier economic recovery By Steve Bigler

By on April 11th, 2020

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

…or at least partial economic recovery.   As a physician, it has long been my humble opinion that a reasonable response to COVID-19 would be for our government to strongly urge anyone over 65 with medical co-morbidities to strictly stay at home, self-quarantine, and become compulsive hand-hygiene and disinfection Nazis!  And then I’d allow everyone else — with some relatively few exceptions noted below — to pretty much go about their daily lives, while continuing to voluntarily observe the commonsense protective measures we’re all very familiar with by now.

At this point in time, we have a pretty solid way to test the efficacy and safety of such an approach.  We already have a study group readily available.  For the last two-plus months, a substantial number of Americans have indeed continued to go about their daily business while observing commonsense protective measures.  An off-the-cuff list would include such people as clerical and administrative health care workers, bank workers, supermarket employees, gas station and convenience store employees, tire and auto repair shop employees, delivery service employees, truck-drivers, and utility workers — and a large number of local, state, and federal government employees.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Heed Jimmy Carter on the Danger of Mail-In Voting ‘Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.’ By John R. Lott Jr.

By on April 11th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/heed-jimmy-carter-on-the-danger-of-mail-in-voting-11586557667?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

‘Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” That quote isn’t from President Trump, who criticized mail-in voting this week after Wisconsin Democrats tried and failed to change an election at the last minute into an exclusively mail-in affair. It’s the conclusion of the bipartisan 2005 report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III.

Concerns about vote-buying have a long history in the U.S. They helped drive the move to the secret ballot, which U.S. states adopted between 1888 and 1950. Secret ballots made it harder for vote buyers to monitor which candidates sellers actually voted for. Vote-buying had been pervasive; my research with Larry Kenny at the University of Florida has found that voter turnout fell by about 8% to 12% after states adopted the secret ballot.

You wouldn’t know any of this listening to the media outcry over Mr. Trump’s remarks. “There is a lot of dishonesty going on with mail-in voting,” the president said Tuesday. In response, a CNN “fact check” declares that Mr. Trump “opened a new front in his campaign of lies about voter fraud.” A New York Times headline asserts: “Trump Is Pushing a False Argument on Vote-by-Mail Fraud.” Both claim that voter fraud is essentially nonexistent. The Carter-Baker report found otherwise.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

They Developed Their Coronavirus Vaccine in Salk’s Shadow Two Pittsburgh scientists have come up with a possible inoculation that you’d apply like a Band-Aid. By Salena Zito

By on April 11th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/they-developed-their-coronavirus-vaccine-in-salks-shadow-11586557454?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Pittsburgh

Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine at a University of Pittsburgh lab. The deadly disease that crippled infants disappeared almost overnight, and Salk became a hero. He wasn’t Steel City’s only history-making physician. Thomas Starzl, who performed the first liver transplant in 1963, joined the Pitt faculty in 1981.

As the world faces another terrifying disease, Pitt medical scientists are again at work on a potentially revolutionary vaccine. Louis Falo and Andrea Gambotto, respectively a dermatologist and a surgeon, have developed a Covid-19 inoculation that rapidly produces large numbers of coronavirus antibodies when injected in mice. A peer-reviewed paper describing their work appeared in the journal EBioMedicine, which is published by The Lancet. They await approval from the Food and Drug Administration to conduct human trials on their vaccine candidate, which is delivered via a unique skin patch containing 400 tiny needles.

“This is a collision of two stories,” Dr. Falo says. “We’ve been developing the delivery technologies for this for the past several years and working with Dr. Gambotto in trying to use the skin as the ideal target for vaccine delivery. While we were doing that, Dr. Gambotto has been working on SARS and MERS.” The two physicians’ labs are next door to each other.

Continue reading →