RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/three-blows-new-world-order-bruce-thornton/

“We will see in the coming months whether the crisis will make us all rethink our unexamined assumptions about technocratic globalism, the transnational institutions of the “rules-based international order,” the one-world delusions about bringing democracy and freedom to cultures inhospitable to the principles and virtues necessary for those goods, and the outsized authority and power we reflexively grant to government “experts” to solve all our problems, even those that lie beyond the ken of science, and depend on our own common sense, practical wisdom, morals, and virtues.”

Nearly 30 years ago the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Communism, the last challenge to the Western paradigm of liberal democracy and free trade, disappeared, defeated by the same free-world alliance that had vanquished earlier totalitarian foes like fascism and Nazism. History understood not as events but as a tournament of conflicting socio-politico-economic orders had ended. A “new world order,” over a century in the making, finally had won.

That heady optimism was expressed by George H.W. Bush in his 1991 State of the Union address. The disintegration of the Soviet Union seemingly confirmed the triumph of democracy, free markets, and transnational institutions, or as Bush said, “a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind––peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.”

The Nineties saw several developments that seemingly confirmed Bush’s optimism about the future: The swift defeat of the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, and the ending of revanchist violence in the Balkans by multinational coalitions; the expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia; the creation of the European Union by the Maastricht Treaty, and the welcoming of communist China into the World Trade Organization. All were signs of history’s “end.” At the same time, the tech revolution was relentlessly shrinking the world further, facilitating global trade and global communication through the World Wide Web, more powerful computers, email, and social media.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/prager-u-video-doctor-treat-coronavirus-early-prager-university/

Is hydroxychloroquine a safe and effective treatment for COVID-19 or not? In the latest must-watch short video from Prager University, Will Witt gets Dr. Vladimir Zelenko’s take on the controversial drug. Check it out below:

https://nypost.com/2020/05/20/end-new-york-citys-lockdown-now/

DPS NOTE:

It is about to get “interesting” and some time soon it will matter less and less what the justifications are for making people watch their and others’ lives crumble. It will surely happen differently in different parts of the country where wealth, ethnicities, cultures and tolerance for perceived unjustified suppression will vary dramatically. But America may still be different from other countries. Different enough to have a citizenry which will always at some point question – and perhaps defy – governmental authority. In some places it may simply be going back to work when told you can’t. In others there might actually be civil “unrest.”
So that’s why I am circulating this. Not as an endorsement of the headlines, but to raise the questions my Note has posed. Or, as we would have said in the Brooklyn in which I grew up, “Hey, you wanna know what you can do with your model?”

…….”Sometimes, a good rant is all a writer can offer. Bear with me.

Last Friday morning, some 3,500 New Yorkers lined up at a Catholic church in Queens to receive free food hours before it even opened, ­according to the New York Police Department. Catholic Charities has reported a 200 percent increase in demand over the past month and a half.

By prolonging the coronavirus shutdown long after its core mission was accomplished, Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio have plunged tens of thousands of New Yorkers into poverty.

It needs to end. Now.

In mid-March, we were told we have to endure a lockdown to ensure that hospitals didn’t get overrun. We did. The hospitals were not overwhelmed. We turned the Javits Center into a hospital. We didn’t need it. We brought in a giant Navy ship to treat New Yorkers. We didn’t need it.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/05/prepare-for-an-orgy-of-back-patting/

Has there ever been a more ill-informed, recklessly destructive example of public policy in the history of mankind than the Great Lockdown? Well, of course there has. Mao’s Great Leap Forward cost tens of millions of lives. Stalin’s Great Purge cost a million lives or thereabouts. So, there it is, Morrison, Trump and Johnson et al can take comfort in not wreaking as much harm as have past despots. Consolation indeed! As David Richards and Konstantin Boudnik  put it in The Telegraph

Imperial College’s modelling of non-pharmaceutical interventions for COVID-19 which helped persuade the UK and other countries to bring in draconian lockdowns … could go down in history as the most devastating software mistake of all time, in terms of economic costs and lives lost.

Public health experts can rest easy. Sure, their bodgie, overblown predictions caused governments to rain down devastation on pliable populations. but they will never be brought to account. Governments have a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that countless deaths were saved by following their experts’ advice.

Trump often cites a figure of 2.2 million Americans dead but for the lockdown. This number, a completely made-up fiction, comes from Neil Ferguson and his Imperial College (IC) team. Ferguson has a reputation for epidemiological alarmism burnished now with a reputation for eschewing social distancing in the cause of fornication.

Quite aside from any flaws in the innards of epidemiological models, the problem with predictions about new contagious diseases is that data is inevitably wanting. Data is wanting precisely because the disease is new. How contagious is the disease? How is it transmitted from one person to another? How deadly is it? How many are susceptible to being infected versus those not susceptible? What profile does the disease have among different population groups – by age, by ethnicity, by sex, by the range and severity of pre-existing illnesses? How many who contract the disease are asymptomatic or suffer only mild symptoms? How long had the disease been circulating prior to it being recognised?

Governor Newsom Orders Ballots To Be Sent To Every Cemetery In State

SACRAMENTO, CA—To prepare for the upcoming November election, Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered ballots to be sent to every cemetery in the state.

The governor of California said that ballot boxes would be sent to cemeteries across the state to ensure everyone had the right to vote, dead or alive.

“We need every single Californian to vote, living or dead,” Newsom said, wagging his finger. “Without everyone doing their part, no matter their undocumented living status, we can’t beat the Republicans this time around. It’s science!” When he said the word “science,” he lifted a test tube into the air to lend some credence to his claims. 

Newsom said that people who don’t want the dead to vote are discriminating against the “mortally challenged.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-does-reopening-polarize-us-11589842995?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Daniel Reed Crenshaw is an American politician and former United States Navy SEAL officer.He is, like all Congressmen, running for re-election. Please visit:

https://crenshawforcongress.com/

to know more about this great American legislator….rsk

The debate over reopening the economy has a peculiar characteristic: It breaks down almost entirely along political lines. Liberals emphasize the dangers of an open society, shaming those who want to go back to work. Conservatives argue the opposite. Red states are steadily reopening, while most blue states lag. House Democrats believe it isn’t safe for lawmakers to go back to work, while the Republican-controlled Senate is back in session.

It isn’t obvious that such a debate should be partisan, yet it is. Why? One popular explanation is that all roads lead to President Trump. Whatever he says, the left will say the opposite.

Geographic distribution has also been proposed as a factor. Liberals tend to pack into crowded cities, where the virus spreads more easily, while conservatives populate the more rural, safer regions. This explanation is neat but fails to explain the divide within cities, where Republicans support reopening more than their Democratic neighbors.

Another factor is that the economic fallout has harmed working-class, high-school-educated Americans far worse than the liberal-leaning college-educated. It is easy to “prioritize public health” when you work comfortably from home.

Finally, the far left is treating the lockdowns and the consequent economic devastation as an opportunity to “restructure” America into a socialist utopia. So they’re in no rush.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/17/how-president-trump-can-retake-the-initiative-and-rebuild-a-more-resilient-economy/

Republicans take note: voters across the political spectrum have woken up to the dangers of relying on foreign supply chains for critical products.

There’s trouble brewing for President Trump in Florida. Earlier this year the state seemed out of reach for Democrats. But the must-win state which he carried in 2016, is home to Mar-A-Lago, and which elected Republican Ron DeSantis governor in 2018 may now be vulnerable.

According to publicly available data, registered Republicans in Florida have requested at least 320,000 fewer absentee ballots than in 2016. President Trump doesn’t have that much margin for error in a state he won by only 103,000 votes—especially in a year when older voters may be reluctant to go to the polls for fear of contracting COVID-19.

There are also warning signs coming out of bellwether Arizona, another must-win state. A poll conducted between May 9-11 shows President Trump trailing Joe Biden by 7 points (50-43 percent). Trump won Arizona by 3.5 percent in 2016. It’s worse for Senator Martha McSally, who trails first-time candidate Mark Kelly by 13 points.

So how can President Trump—or any Republican—win? The same poll offers an answer. It asked likely voters if they would be more or less likely to vote for a candidate who had a plan “to make the United States more self-sufficient and to make sure more of the food, energy, and medicine” is produced in America. The results were remarkable. Seventy-five percent said yes, including 88 percent of Republicans, 71 percent of independents, and 64 percent of Democrats. And the issue polls slightly better with women than men (77 percent vs. 73 percent) making it an opportunity for Republicans to close the gender gap.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1261728144018542592.html

” Thus, at this point if you are not both outraged and increasingly puzzled/disturbed by the path we are on and the way most big media outlets are presenting this, you aren’t paying attention. Reality will win. But only if we fight for it. ”

About two months ago we panicked and locked down the US and much of the world in a matter of days, mainly on the basis of computer simulations that proved completely inaccurate within weeks and – in theory – to reduce the strain on hospitals…
2/ It is now clear that outside New York City, US hospitals are not and were never in danger of collapse (and even in New York they were strained but most excess capacity was unused). Thus the rationale for the lockdowns has changed…
3/ To some vague theory that we need to reduce #SARSCoV2 infections and deaths to ~zero – a benchmark we have never even considered for influenza or TB or other respiratory illnesses – using a mix of massive testing (even though people aren’t using the testing now available)…
4/ Mask wearing (though masks probably do very little if anything to reduce spread), population-level tracking, and possible forcible removal of infected people from their families (not a conspiracy theory – this has been openly discussed)…
5/ While at the same time imposing broad population-level lockdowns that do extraordinary damage to our economy, educational system, children, and society…
6/ Even though the best estimates for #SARSCoV2 are now that if NOTHING were done to halt its spread, each American would lose 2 to 5 days of life on average. You read that right. Not years, DAYS. And that’s with no efforts to protect the vulnerable…
7/ That’s a comparable loss to two years of traffic accidents or one of overdoses. Meanwhile, the same people in the media who were screaming about the apocalypse two months ago continue to try to virtue shame those of us who point out these inconvenient facts…
8/ Thus, at this point if you are not both outraged and increasingly puzzled/disturbed by the path we are on and the way most big media outlets are presenting this, you aren’t paying attention. Reality will win. But only if we fight for it.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-5-16-everything-important-in-life-involves-tradeoffs

One of the fallacies of progressivism that I frequently mock at this blog is the proposition that the government can operate without having to make meaningful tradeoffs of one goal or value versus another.

This fallacy appears, for example, in the illusion of infinite resources in the hands of the government. As individuals we all know that we face constrained budgets and limits on what we can do. Eat out too much, and you need to postpone getting the new TV or new car. Decide to become a lawyer, and you will need to forego becoming a doctor. Your money and your time only go so far. But somehow it can appear that the government is so huge and has such vast resources at its command that there are no practical limits, and no need for tradeoffs. And thus we get monstrosities like the Bernie Sanders (and Joe Biden?) program for a federal government that eliminates all downsides of human life by passing out the infinite free money. Or see the latest “Heroes Act” out of the House of Representatives — $3 trillion to take care of everyone’s pain from the coronavirus response; Medicare for All, Free College, and Batteries not included (yet).

Another aspect of the no-tradeoffs-necessary fallacy is the idea that the right thing for political leaders to do in a crisis is to rely on the “experts.” One problem with that is that so-called “experts” are as likely as not to have no idea what they are talking about.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/democrats-have-abandoned-civil-liberties

Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more, appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”

Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the #Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment of Judge John Gleeson as “brilliant.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe Sullivan a “debt of gratitude.”

One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.”

Sullivan’s reaction was amplified by a group letter calling for Barr’s resignation signed by 2000 former Justice Department officials (the melodramatic group email somberly reported as momentous news is one of many tired media tropes in the Trump era) and the preposterous “leak” of news that the dropped case made Barack Obama sad. The former president “privately” told “members of his administration” (who instantly told Yahoo! News) that there was no precedent for the dropping of perjury charges, and that the “rule of law” itself was at stake.

Whatever one’s opinion of Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks.