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Ruth King

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Haredi statistics show that social distancing works They have served unwittingly as a control group in the experiment to combat the pandemic. Ruthie Blum

By on March 31st, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/haredi-statistics-show-that-social-distancing-works/

The carry-on about the dangerous spread of COVID-19 within the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community in Israel is understandable. While the rest of us are cooped up at home, with increasingly severe limitations on our freedom of movement, certain ultra-Orthodox towns and neighborhoods have been conducting business as usual.

Indeed, the contrast between Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood and the city of Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv with the shuttered shops and empty playgrounds of cities from Metula to Eilat naturally causes rage on the part of a populace forced to comply with regulations aimed at flattening the curve of the coronavirus. Video footage from a funeral in Bnei Brak this past Saturday night—attended by masses of members of an extreme haredi sect all huddled together, yet not arrested by police for ignoring the two-meter-apart rule—elicited furious reactions from secular and religious Israelis alike.

For the past month, health officials have bemoaned the situation in the nation’s hospitals and warned that the exponential rise in infection, due to the incredibly contagious nature of the virus, would result in disaster. More specifically, it would lead to a situation in which the number of patients requiring ventilation outweighed the equipment. At such a point, doctors would face dilemmas about which people to put on respirators. It is imperative—the authorities tell us ad nauseam—for everyone to comply. No exceptions.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Law and Liberty in an Emergency By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on March 31st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-response-law-liberty-in-emergency/

Restrictions should be no more extensive than the threat reasonably demands.

Pandemic in the land is putting strain on our self-image as a free people for whom the rule of law is our ne plus ultra.

Alas, when it gets down to brass tacks, even those two beacons, liberty and law, are as much in tension as in mutual need. It is by law that society restricts our freedom. On the other hand, as Burke observed, without the order that a just legal system ensures, there can be no liberty worth having. We would descend into anarchy, into the law of the jungle.

Times of true security crises — war, natural catastrophes, or the sudden spread of a potentially deadly disease — have a remorseless way of reminding us about some brute realities.

It is all well and good for libertarians to say that the Constitution is not suspended in emergencies, and that are our rights are never more essential than when government’s tyrannical tendencies rear their head. But then real emergencies happen. Inevitably, unavoidably, our rights get restricted — sometimes dramatically.

This is not because government tends to tyranny, though it does if unchecked. It is because people crave security and community. They are willing to sacrifice their individual liberties, at least to a degree and for a time, to preserve them. This does not make them craven. It makes them rational.

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ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Senator Who Saw the Coronavirus Coming By John McCormack

By on March 31st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/the-senator-who-saw-the-coronavirus-coming/

Tom Cotton was both the first and the loudest voice in Congress to sound the alarm about the looming pandemic.

While others slept, Tom Cotton was warning anyone who would listen that the coronavirus was coming for America.

On January 22, one day before the Chinese government began a quarantine of Wuhan to contain the spread of the virus, the Arkansas senator sent a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar encouraging the Trump administration to consider banning travel between China and the United States and warning that the Communist regime could be covering up how dangerous the disease really was. That same day, he amplified his warnings on Twitter and in an appearance on the radio program of Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade.

At the time, the Senate impeachment trial was dominating the news cycle. The trial, which lasted from January 16 to February 5, had even blotted out coverage of the Democratic presidential primary in the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses. When the first classified briefing on the virus was held in the Senate on January 24, only 14 senators reportedly showed up.

Cotton’s public and private warnings became more urgent that last week of January. In a January 28 letter to the secretaries of state, health and human services, and homeland security, he noted that “no amount of screening [at airports] will identify a contagious-but-asymptomatic person afflicted with the coronavirus” and called for an immediate evacuation of Americans in China and a ban on all commercial flights between China and the United States.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump shows new rapid coronavirus test kit in Rose Garden, as HHS says 1 million Americans tested Andrew O’Reilly

By on March 31st, 2020

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-shows-off-new-rapid-coronavirus-test-kit-in-rose-garden-as-hhs-says-1-million-americans-tested/ar-BB11VVeG

President Trump announced on Monday that the United States has tested over 1 million people for the coronavirus as he unveiled a new rapid test kit for the contagion that is supposed to give results within five minutes.

Speaking from the White House’s Rose Garden, Trump said that reaching 1 million tests is “a milestone in our war against the coronavirus.”

Trump’s announcement on the new rapid test kit from Abbott Laboratories comes just days after the company said that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had given them emergency clearance to produce its cartridge-based test. The company says that its test delivers a negative result in 13 minutes when the virus is not detected.

Also during the press conference, Trump also announced that Ford is repurposing an auto parts factory west of Detroit to start building simple ventilators to treat coronavirus patients.

The automaker says that starting the week of April 20, it expects to produce 50,000 ventilators in 100 days. The plant in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, would have the ability to build 30,000 per month after that. Ford also is working with GE Healthcare to quickly double production of a more sophisticated ventilator at a factory in Madison, Wisconsin.

Trump reiterated the need to practice socially distancing on Monday as experts warned that the peak number deaths from the virus is likely to occur sometime next month.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Reemergence of the State in the Time of COVID-19 By Russell A. Berman

By on March 31st, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/31/the-reemergence-of-the-state-in-the-time-of-covid-19/

State sovereignty is the best chance we have to fend off adversaries. We defend our freedom by exercising power through the state, not through global illusions or cozy provincialism.

Once upon a time, there was an illusion that the state would disappear. It was the fiction Marxists told each other at bedtime, and it was the lie of the Communists, once they had seized state power. For even as they built up their police apparatus and their archipelago of gulags, they kept promising that one day the state would eventually disappear. 

Of course, in a sense, they were right because Communism ended and so did the Communist states in Russia and Eastern Europe. Yet the death of those regimes is in no way an argument for the death of statehood itself.

The state is the expression of sovereignty, and sovereignty is the ability of national communities to decide their own fates. Such independence is far from obsolete, and certainly not for the countries on the eastern flank of the European Union. After years of Russian occupation, they have regained their state sovereignty. They will continue to insist on it, and rightly so.

Capitalists, too, have indulged in the fantasy of the end of the state, especially in the neoliberal version of an economy free of political constraints. This peculiar fiction grew pronounced in the millenarian hallucination of an “end of history,” which preached that the epochal change of 1989 had ushered in a Kantian era of perpetual peace. Global capitalism was supposed to erase borders, replacing national solidarities with abstract universalism. 

Genuine conflicts were predicted to dissolve into rules-based competition, while existential threats would dissipate in a thoroughly benign cosmos. After all, with the fall of Communism, all enemies had disappeared, which made states obsolete. 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

US COVID-19 Deaths Soar Past 3,000 As New York Issues Appeal For Medical Volunteers By Katabella Roberts

By on March 31st, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-covid-19-deaths-soar-past-3000-as-new-york-issues-appeal-for-medical-volunteers_3291978.html

More than 3,000 people have died from the CCP virus in the United States while over 164,539 cases have been confirmed, according to the latest data collated by Johns Hopkins University, which is tracking the global pandemic.

As of March 30, a reported 3,164 have died from the COVID-19 disease, with 914 of those deaths occurring in New York City, which has become the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States.

On Monday, New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an urgent nationwide appeal for medical volunteers to join what he called the “front lines” as he and health officials warned that the crisis unfolding in the state is just a preview of what other U.S. communities could soon face, adding that the virus “doesn’t discriminate” and that no American is immune to the disease.

“We need to recruit more healthcare workers,” he told a briefing at a makeshift hospital at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. “We need to share healthcare professionals within this state and within this country. As governor of New York, I am asking healthcare professionals across the country, if you don’t have a healthcare crisis in your community, please come help us in New York now.”

“I don’t care if you live in Kansas. I don’t care if you live in Texas. There is no American that is immune … what is happening to New York is not an anomaly. There is nothing about a New Yorker’s immune system that is any different from any other American’s immune system. So in many ways, New York is just a canary in a coal mine.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Some Much-Needed Coronavirus Perspective *****

By on March 31st, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/31/some-much-needed-coronavirus-perspective/

WHAT DO ALL THESE NUMBERS MEAN?

Like just about everyone else in the country, we are sitting in our homes under orders from our state governments, with little to do but follow coronavirus statistics. And they look fearsome.

There are almost 140,000 active cases of COVID-19 in the United States. Nearly 20,000 new cases were reported on Sunday alone. The death toll in the U.S. is now close to 3,000 — with more than 2,000 of them occurring in just the past week.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday that the death toll could reach 200,000. Another model says 82,000 will likely die, with daily deaths peaking in mid-April at more than 2,000. By comparison, the last pandemic — the so-called swine flu — claimed 18,000 lives.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump said he’s extending the federal government’s “social distancing” guidelines through April. In Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam announced a “stay at home” order through June 10. School systems are starting to consider whether they will even be able to open in the fall.

It’s unprecedented, to be sure. But the problem with all the numbers being bandied about is that they lack any context.

On its own, 3,000 fatalities might seem like a tremendously large number. But that’s before you learn that an average of 7,700 people die in the U.S. every single day. Which means that over the past week, when the coronavirus took 2,000 lives, nearly 54,000 people died from other causes.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Dems Need a Coronavirus Hero/Victim and It Isn’t Biden Daniel Greenfield

By on March 31st, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/03/dems-need-coronavirus-herovictim-and-it-isnt-biden-daniel-greenfield/

While Biden is lurking in the Bidenbunker, emerging occasionally to spot his shadow, spout some forgettable talking points, and then vanish back into the bunker, the Democrats need someone who is an actual elected official to pit against President Trump.

That’s occasionally been Governor Andrew Cuomo, unfortunately he’s a white male, and then there’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who at least isn’t a man. 

As the coronavirus spreads, the Democrats might have a few more options, but they are basically stuck with a governor (and if things get desperate, mayor or two) to use as a counterweight against Trump. 

Cuomo and Whitmer, despite being headline acts in the media circus, are not exactly leading the war effort. Cuomo’s big gimmick thus far was claiming to be making hand sanitizer. The provenance of the hand sanitizer continues to be up for debate. 

Mainly, Cuomo has managed to build up his brand with combative press conference that don’t actually accomplish anything.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Denmark’s Race to the Bottom The prospect of an Islamic takeover of Denmark becomes a real possibility. Lars Hedegaard

By on March 31st, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/denmarks-race-bottom-lars-hedegaard/

During a discussion in May 2004, Amir Taheri noted that Islam is incompatible with democracy for the simple reason that democracy is based on one fundamental principle, namely equality. This is unacceptable to Islam, according to which a non-believer cannot be the equal of a believer. To be sure, Jews and Christians, labeled “people of the Book”, are accorded human status and some protection by their Muslim masters (at least in principle) provided they agree to submit to a form of apartheid known as dhimmitude, which has been exhaustibly chronicled by writers such as Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom.

The very concept of democracy is anathema in Islam, according to which power belongs only to God. The man exercising that authority on Earth is known as the khalif and holds all religious, political and military power.

In Islam the people cannot have any say over legislation because Allah revealed his eternal law to his prophet 1400 years ago, wherefore it would be blasphemous for men to change a single word.

Almost all Muslim states have man-made laws, but the true believers regard these laws as an affront to their religion and the regimes upholding them as illegitimate imposters. Which goes a long way towards explaining the constant instability and occasional bloodshed throughout the Muslim world.

But surely, such medieval ideas cannot long survive a confrontation with the enlightened West? Regrettably they can.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

British Stasi Rising New laws for coronavirus usher in the brave new world. Katie Hopkins

By on March 31st, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/british-stasi-rising-katie-hopkins/

Neighbors spying on neighbors, people encouraged to report each other, curtains twitching as you walk by. Sound familiar?

The tactics used by the Stasi in East Germany in 1950, creating a secret police organization through a vast network of informants, are now being encouraged by British police in the UK in 2020. And the Chinese Virus was all it took for people to willingly comply.

Humberside Police (in the east midlands of England) has created an online portal where people can report those they suspect of not following social distancing rules, such as exercising only once a day or leaving the house only to buy food or for medical emergencies.

They say:

‘Reports will be assessed based on the information provided and we would ask people to please consider the circumstance before making their report.’

Another force – Derbyshire Police (central midlands) – sent drones to a remote walking spot in the Peak District, an area known for its beautiful views, and captured actual footage of … dog walkers. There is something very disconcerting about police filming innocent people without their permission.

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