RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-it-safe-to-reopen-schools-europe-is-about-to-find-out-11589278169?mod=world_major_1_pos6

Governments in the U.S. and across the world are trying to figure out how to reopen schools during a coronavirus pandemic. In Europe, millions of children are returning to classrooms, turning the continent into a giant lab for what works and what doesn’t.

Here is what we know and don’t know about children and Covid-19, what measures schools in Europe are taking, and what we might find out.

What does science tell us about how children can become infected?

Anyone with children knows that the younger they are, the more likely they are to catch whatever pathogen they come into contact with. But the new coronavirus is different. Most doctors agree that children who catch Covid-19 rarely become seriously ill. How broadly they can spread the virus—and whether they are less susceptible to infections than adults—are still contested issues among scientists.

The World Health Organization has said early research suggests children don’t appear to be spreading the new coronavirus as often as adults, perhaps because younger patients rarely display severe symptoms and so tend to cough and sneeze less than older ones.

French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer told The Wall Street Journal that the latest studies indicate that children below 10 are less contagious than those who are older.

However, Christian Drosten, head of the virology department at Berlin’s Charité clinic, last week warned about reopening schools after finding that a sample of infected children treated at his hospital carried the same viral load as adults.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/05/14/the-european-union-is-having-a-bad-

Editor’s note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. For our coronavirus tracker and more coverage, see our hub

Seventy years ago this month Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, proposed a European “coal and steel community”. With that humble agreement governing two commodities, six war-ravaged countries created a common market that evolved into the European Union.

The journey towards integration since then has been bumpy, but it has had a sense of direction. National leaders came and went, the Berlin Wall rose and fell, economic hurricanes struck and blew themselves out. Somehow, the eu muddled through. It deepened, building the world’s largest single market, letting its people move freely across borders and creating a common currency. It broadened, as 22 states joined the original six, including 11 that had suffered for decades under communism. It cemented peace and spread prosperity. Today, Europe is a beacon of liberal values and an exemplar of a gentler type of capitalism.

Yet the eu has also lost its way. The pandemic in Europe is not just an economic crisis, as elsewhere in the world, but is fast becoming a political and constitutional crisis, too. This is solvable in principle, but the eu’s members cannot agree on what is needed to make their union more resilient, nor on how to bring about reform. Now of all times, when America and China are at loggerheads, that is a tragic missed opportunity.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15972/china-coronavirus-dissidents-arrests

These intrepid dissidents showed how fragile, vacuous and dangerous is the edifice of the Chinese regime.
The Chinese Communist Party “is the biggest and most serious virus of all… It is time to recognize the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to all humanity. The CCP represses and manipulates information to strengthen its hold on power.” — Chen Guangcheng, blind Chinese dissident, now a refugee in the US. Asianews.it, April 27, 2020.
Today…if we know something about China we owe it to China’s vanished heroes. We have, horribly, chosen to abandon them. Very few in the very free West call out the Chinese authorities and ask these great men and women to be released.
The Australian University of Queensland, with close links to China is actually trying to take disciplinary action, including possible expulsion, against a student, Drew Pavlou, known for his criticism of Beijing. We are playing Beijing’s game of repression of dissent.
Bloomberg News is said to censor articles that might anger China and expose Xi’s personal wealth. And the European Union just softened criticism of China in a report on disinformation about the pandemic… It looks as though free thought is more valued among China’s daring dissidents than in many corners of the West.
To paraphrase Leon Trotsky: You may not be interested in China, but China is interested in you.

Three Chinese internet activists have disappeared and are believed to have been detained by police. They have reportedly been charged with preserving articles that were removed by China’s online censors. Chen Mei, Cai Wei and Cai’s girlfriend went missing on April 19.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16030/iran-missiles

That leaves the third angle, missiles, to thrive. Missiles are the weapon of the poor, especially when copied from foreign models courtesy of North Korea, China and, to a lesser extent, Russia.

One more problem is Iran’s continued dependence on North Korean and Chinese partners for spare parts, technology, maintenance and training-for-use of virtually all its missiles. There is no guarantee that either Beijing or Pyongyang would want to be dragged into a war that the Islamic Republic might trigger to prolong its existence as an exporter of revolution.

More importantly, perhaps, there is no evidence that as many Iranians today would be “volunteers for martyrdom” as the time the ayatollah developed his nightmarish dream.

Last Monday’s tragedy in the Gulf of Oman in which 19 Iranian naval officers were killed and 15 others injured in a “friendly fire” incident has focused attention on the Islamic Republic’s failure to develop a realistic defense doctrine that reflects Iran’s interests as a nation rather than as a vehicle for an ideology.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15930/victimhood-culture-uk-rape

“Almost 19,000 children have been sexually groomed in England in the past year, according to official figures that have prompted warnings of an ‘epidemic’. Campaigners say the true figure is far higher….” — The Independent, December 2019.

“The government’s repeated failure to acknowledge the role of racism and religious bigotry in grooming gang crime has led to inadequate investigation, protection and prosecution,” one survivor, who wanted to remain anonymous, told The Independent in December 2019.

In the era of “victimhood culture”, in which so many groups vie for the top spot of “most victimized”, being an actual victim of sexual abuse apparently has little currency among the social justice elites. Where, for example, are the feminists in all this? Where is the “me too” movement?

As the government is too squeamish publicly to debate the findings of the review, it is bound to be even more terrified of being seen as specifically targeting ethnic rape gangs to stop their crimes — yet that is what victims such as Ella are asking them to do. Not to mention that basic democratic principles of the public’s right to information are being completely disregarded.

In July 2018, Britain’s then Home Secretary Sajid Javid ordered a review into the characteristics of child sexual grooming gangs. “The scandal of child grooming gangs is one of the most shocking state failures that I can remember,” he said.

“I will not let cultural or political sensitivities get in the way of understanding the problem and doing something about it. It is a statement of fact… that most of the men in recent high profile gang convictions have had Pakistani heritage… I’ve instructed my officials to look into this unflinchingly.”

The review was long overdue, to say the least. In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron told the BBC that the rape and sexual abuse of underage girls had been “on an industrial scale”: “Young girls… being abused over and over again on an industrial scale, being raped, being passed from one bunch of perpetrators to another bunch of perpetrators”. According to The Independent:

“The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal saw gangs undertake the organised sexual abuse of children from the late 1980s until the 2010s and the failure of local authorities to act. Rotherham Council finally commissioned an independent inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay, which found in August 2014 that some 1,400 children, most of them white girls, were abused by predominantly British-Pakistani men”.

Girls as young as 11 were raped by “large numbers of male perpetrators”.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/05/the-unelected-cant-wash-their-hands/

“The true measure of all that has been inflicted upon the Australian people will emanate from the above narrow infections/death parameters well after the hysteria around this virus has dissipated. Australians thrown on the scrap heap will not forget. There will be constant reminders of the damage that has been wrought and the misery inflicted, and continuing to be inflicted, upon millions. Public health authorities will not be able to hide behind their corrupted models and their ‘saving lives’ mantras when exactly the opposite is both true and obvious. The attempts now by Australian public health authorities to decouple the ruinous effects of their heavy-handed response from the social and economic fallout will not go unchallenged.”

As the back-slapping of state and commonwealth public health authorities and their politician overlords echoes through the mainstream media the real costs of their misguided approach to managing COVID-19 are starting to emerge. While our politicians and CMO’s daily pronounce their efforts in “flattening the curve” and “saving lives”, they focus as the measure of their self-determined success on two numbers alone — confirmed cases of COVID-19 and associated deaths as the only measures of their success.

The World Health Organisation now concedes the virus is likely to become yet another endemic coronavirus that is here to stay. Antibody prevalence studies from Spain to New York indicate that prevalence of the virus is ten- to twentyfold greater than officially confirmed cases. In Spain this means there are 2.5 million cases, rather than 220,000. To add to the implausibility of containment as a strategy, a whopping 26 per cent of Spanish cases were entirely asymptomatic. The containment strategies have failed and the horse has bolted. Extrapolated globally, this would indicate 50–100 million cases, and that is probably wildly conservative as the virus runs unchecked in many Third World nations. Yet the impact on lives, health and wellbeing through the asphyxiation of the real economy has rippled throughout the whole of Australian society, resulting in an outcome that is profoundly and incalculably negative. The obsession with infections and deaths in assessing the impact of this response is as scientifically absurd as the models that informed it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/europes-anti-lockdown-moment/

The reopening sentiment is spreading, and it’s not all right-wingers who are doing the protesting.

America’s worship of civil liberties was on display as anti-lockdown protests swept from Lansing, Mich., to San Diego, and from Madison, Wis., to Boston’s Beacon Hill. From London to Seine-Saint Denis, from Munich to Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, a similar defiance of state intrusion is now arising in parts of Europe. As in the United States, the question is still open: Will these protests channel the growing lockdown fatigue into a cogent, constructive case for reopening, or will they descend into paranoia?

A recent hotspot of anti-lockdown fuss has been Germany, where both media and the government have raised the alarm about the far right’s sway in driving people to break the quarantine and social-distancing rules. This past weekend saw radical groups co-opt protests in Dortmund and Munich, where a reporter was attacked and police had to disperse 25 vandals, respectively. A reporting crew from the center-left late-night satirical heute-show was similarly assaulted in Berlin the previous weekend, claiming the popular Moroccan-German comedian Abdelkarim as a victim. Germany’s crippling memory of extremism (so-called Vergangenheitsbewältigung) has a way of penalizing political deviance on the right to this day, and these acts of violence surely didn’t help give the protests a good name in the public eye, either.

Resistance to lockdowns has gotten a bad name in France, too, after a young local from Villeneuve-la-Garenne was thrown off his motorbike and sent to the hospital with a broken leg by a police-car door flung open. The incident sparked a wave of riots across the northern Paris suburbs reminiscent of the three-week-long émeutes in 2005 that saw 8,000 cars set ablaze by restless youths protesting police abuse. The quarantine has brought long-simmering tensions in these largely low-income, immigrant, and poorly housed suburbs to a boiling point, with locals decrying heavy-handed policing, spending cuts in public services, and the unequal impact of school closures that leave low-income kids lacking Internet access with little means to keep up with schoolwork.

https://spectator.us/lives-vs-lives-global-cost-lockdown/

‘There have been as many plagues in history as there have been wars,’ wrote Albert Camus in The Plague, ‘yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.’ So it was this time. The arrival of a new coronavirus blindsided governments of most advanced nations as they reached for a tool that few had ever really considered before: lockdown. It all happened too fast for a proper discussion about the implications. The biggest question — the extent to which lockdown will claim lives as well as save them — is one you can ask at a global level.

We know the national costs. In the United States, there is joblessness on a scale not seen since the Great Depression, with more than 33 million unemployed. The Bank of England forecasts the UK economy will fall by 14 percent this year — the steepest decline since 1706. Similar trends can be found across the industrial world. The global economy is veering toward an economic depression not seen for generations.

Yet this argument, to many, seems crass. How consequential is an economic loss in balance when lives at risk from COVID-19 are at stake? Understandably, few find such calculations compelling — and tend to side with those who advocate for prolonged lockdowns lasting for months or more. If this were about lives vs money, it would be easy to understand. But look deeper, and this is about lives vs lives — on a scale that has not, so far, been very much discussed. Lockdown will, on a global level, hit the poorest hardest.