RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/barack-obama-on-michael-flynn-11589148648?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Barack Obama is a lawyer, so it was stunning to read that he ventured into the Michael Flynn case in a way that misstated the supposed crime and ignored the history of his own Administration in targeting Mr. Flynn. Since the former President chose to offer his legal views when he didn’t need to, we wonder what he’s really worried about.

“There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free,” Mr. Obama said in the Friday call to about 3,000 members of the Obama Alumni Association. The comments were leaked to Yahoo News and confirmed by Mr. Obama’s spokeswoman to the Washington Post and other outlets. Mr. Obama added: “That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic—not just institutional norms—but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”

Even discounting for Mr. Obama’s partisan audience, this gets the case willfully wrong. Mr. Flynn was never charged with perjury, which is lying under oath in a legal proceeding. Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI in a meeting at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017 that he was led to believe was a friendly chat among colleagues.

As for “scot-free,” that better applies to former President Bill Clinton who lied under oath in a civil case and was impeached for perjury but was acquitted by the Senate. We understand why Mr. Obama wouldn’t bring that up.

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York says that it’s “shocking” to discover that 66 percent of new hospitalizations appear to have been among people “largely sheltering at home.” 

“We thought maybe they were taking public transportation,” he said, “but actually no, because these people were literally at home.”

“Much of this comes down to what you do to protect yourself,” he continues.  “Everything closed down, government has done everything it could, society has done everything it could.”

It’s your fault, he says to the hospitalized New Yorkers who loyally complied with his government directive.  But here’s an interesting alternative theory as to why, mostly, old people who are staying at home are being hospitalized.  What if the government directive to close everything down and mandate “social distancing” actually made the problem worse?

Dr. David Katz predicted precisely this outcome on March 20, in an article that is proving every bit as correct in its predictions and sober policy recommendations as Dr. Anthony Fauci has been proven incorrect — which is another way of saying that the article has proven flawless, so far. 

https://spectator.us/ten-reasons-end-lockdown-now/

Writing in this magazine a month ago, I applauded the British government’s stated aim of trying to follow the science in dealing with COVID. Such promises are easier made than kept. Following science means understanding science. It means engaging with rival interpretations of the limited data in order to tease out what is most important in what we don’t know. Instead, the government in the UK (and many other places) seems uninterested in alternative viewpoints. The chosen narrative — that lockdown has saved countless lives — has been doggedly followed by all spokespeople. No doubt is allowed. We have been seeing the groupthink response to a perceived external threat that Jonathan Haidt describes so lucidly in his excellent book on human moral thinking, The Righteous Mind.

It has now become a matter of faith that lockdown is vital. Not only is it believed to be causally responsible for ‘flattening the curve’, but it is feared that releasing it too soon may cause a second spike in cases and ‘economic disaster’ (presumably due to further huge numbers of deaths). On what evidence is this made?

Even if you could understand why lockdown was imposed, it very rapidly became apparent that it had not been thought through. Not in terms of the wider effects on society (which have yet to be counted) and not even in terms of the ways that the virus itself might behave. But at the start, there was hardly any evidence. Everyone was guessing. Now we have a world of evidence, from around the globe, and the case for starting to reverse lockdown is compelling. Here are 10 reasons why I believe that it is wrong to continue with lockdown and why we should start to reverse it immediately and rapidly.

1. You cannot understand the significance of this virus simply by looking at the raw death figures

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/09/the-new-normal-ridiculous/

Crises, even if they are manufactured ones, are great producers of linguistic mutation. Thucydides noticed this. In one of the most famous bits of his History of the Peloponnesian War, the great historian wrote that in a time of civil war certain words changed their usual meanings and took on new ones. For example, “reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question inaptness to act on any.”

It’s not only civil war that produces such linguistic deformations. Any crisis will do.

Our part of Connecticut was badly damaged by Hurricane (or, for the weather pedants among you, “Superstorm”) Sandy in 2012. Like many families, we had to move out of our house for months and were subjected to seemingly endless meetings with various local and FEMA officials who eagerly seized the chance to tell us huddled masses what we could and couldn’t do with our property. Just as every public official and talking head now is an amateur epidemiologist, so back in 2012 they were all expert meteorologists.

I remember one meeting in particular when it was explained to us that storms like Hurricane Sandy were “the new normal.”

“The new normal.” Is there a more nauseating flake of smug linguistic presumption? I think that the imperative “stay safe,” born of our coronavirus panic, comes close. But “the new normal” is worse because it pretends to knowledge not just solicitude. That wretched town official who was telling us serfs what we could and could not do with our homes did so on the hollow authority of knowing, or pretending to know, what the future would bring.

So it is now. At one of President Trump’s near-daily coronavirus press rallies last month, a media mouth began a question by noting the “new normal in which, you know, there’s [sic] smaller crowds in restaurants and bars and—” The president cut him off.

“Oh, that’s not going to be normal,” he said.

There’s not going to be a new normal where somebody has been having for 25 years 158 seats in a restaurant and now he’s got 30 or he’s got 60 because that wouldn’t work. That’s not normal. No, normal will be if he has the 158 or 68 seats, and that’s going to happen and it’s going to happen relatively quickly, we hope. . . . Our normal is if you have 100,000 people in an Alabama football game or 110,000 . . . we want 110,000 people. We want every seat occupied. Normal is not going to be where you have a game with 50,000 people.

Is the president right? Will we quickly revert to the status quo ante? No one knows.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

On November 19, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to help consecrate a portion of that battlefield as a new cemetery. He spoke of the government, conceived in liberty, that had been formed eighty-seven years prior, a government in which people are the ultimate power – a government comprised of the people’s elected representatives and the appointees those representatives make; he spoke of the laws and regulations that are made by those elected representatives, and he emphasized that this government is for the people, to ensure the protection of their rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Such a government, Lincoln understood, is rare. It relies on trust that those who labor within it work for the people, not for a party, a cabal or an individual. Once that trust is gone, the fragile edifice that comprises democracy crumbles. The Michael Flynn story is one of government servants subverting their role. No matter one’s political affiliation, the story of what happened to General Michael Flynn should frighten any lover of freedom and democracy.

This story has been ably told by Andrew McCarthy in National Review, Kimberly Strassel in The Wall Street Journal and others, but its consequences are worth considering again, as it unravels. On May 1, Ms. Strassel wrote: “…evidence of law enforcement’s abuse keeps emerging in dribs and drabs. To grasp the outrageous conduct fully, the Flynn documents need to be added to what we already know.” Establishment Washington could not believe that the people had elected Mr. Trump – this allegedly insensitive deal maker, a man who speaks frankly and crudely to and about his political opponents. He was demonized as authoritarian. He was an outsider. He had never served in government, nor in the military. He was a television star, famous for saying, “You’re fired!” In a country where leadership had too often descended into elitism, arrogance and hypocrisy, the mercurial Mr. Trump arrived as a disruptor.

To Washington’s establishment, Mr. Trump was naive. He is smart and shrewd, but the intelligence community is a different milieu, as Senator Schumer observed to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. “He was not,” as Andrew McCarthy wrote on May 2, “supported by the Republican foreign-policy and national-security clerisy, which he had gone out of his way to antagonize during the campaign.”

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler/

Protesters demand an end to the statewide ’stay at home advisory’ and the new law enforcing everyone to wear a mask in public, outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston on May 4, 2020. Photo: AFP

Life is returning to normal in South Korea, Israel, and urban China, thanks to the combination of massive public health measures and digital tracking. The United States remains locked down for the most part, although a number of states are gambling on re-opening without sufficient data to predict the outcome. Without comprehensive testing for Covid-19, government and academic models of viral infection are throwing out estimates that differ by hundreds of percentage points. A leaked Homeland Security report projects 200,000 dead this year, while the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington has doubled its estimate of deaths through August to 135,000.

In an April 24 commentary I quoted German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s statement that Covid-19 “is an affront to democracy,” adding, “There probably is no way to prevent the spread of Covid-19 except by locating and isolating every single individual carrier. Perhaps 40% of all cases are asymptomatic but nonetheless contagious, we know from Iceland and a handful of cities where the entire population was tested. That makes conventional tracking methods useless.” The checks and balances of the US Constitution, I argued, offered the best way to prevent government abuse of personal information obtained in an emergency.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/democrats-desperation-is-growing-about-tara-reade-so-is-their-hypocrisy/

Sufficient evidence that Joe Biden somehow mistreated Tara Reade has emerged for the double standard to become obvious.

There aren’t a ton of synonyms for the word “hypocrisy.” I’ve become aware of this problem ever since I began writing about the Tara Reade–Joe Biden situation. I keep gravitating towards phrases such as “despicable hypocrisy,” or “partisan hypocrisy,” or “unconscionable hypocrisy,” but you can only go to the well so often. Really, though, I’m not sure how else to describe the actions of someone like Senator Dianne Feinstein.

You might recall that it was Feinstein, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, who withheld Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh from the Senate so that it could not be properly vetted, in a last-ditch effort to sink the nomination.

Feinstein knew that Ford’s credibility was brittle — the alleged victim could not tell us where or when the attack occurred, hadn’t mentioned Kavanugh’s name to anyone for over 30 years, and offered nothing approaching a contemporaneous witness.

At first, Feinstein did not want to provide Ford’s name, or a place or time of the alleged attack, or allow the accused to see any evidence against him, denying him the ability to answer the charges.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-trump-has-in-common-with-napoleon-11588784608?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Russia is the country that, more than any other, has haunted Donald Trump’s presidency. It began when allegations of Russian collusion first appeared during the 2016 campaign and continues as a glut of Russian crude drives U.S. frackers into bankruptcy.

There was another world leader over whose career Russia loomed like a specter: Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon burst onto the European scene like a meteor. He broke all the rules first of French politics, then of European warfare. His unconventional tactics, relentless ambition and brilliant strategic intuition allowed him to establish the greatest empire Europe had seen since Rome.

Then he invaded Russia.

The question for Trump watchers today is whether the coronavirus will do to his presidency what the 1812 Russian invasion did to Napoleon’s empire. Has Mr. Trump found an enemy that he can’t defeat, and will it enable his opponents to bring him down at last?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/enough-already-with-the-ihme-covid-19-model/

After repeated failures, it has now been completely revamped. It can’t be trusted at such a critical time in the coronavirus pandemic.

 I have precisely zero envy for anyone trying to predict where the COVID-19 pandemic is headed. There’s a ton we don’t know about how quickly the virus spreads under different conditions, what new treatments will appear, how policy will change in the future, and how well the public will practice social distancing during the summer regardless of policy. Even the world’s top epidemiologists cannot be expected to give us more than educated guesses that are based on reasonable, clearly explained assumptions — and that improve as new information comes in.

Some of those guesses can be quite valuable even as they’re quite uncertain. Given the massive funding behind it and the faith placed in it by the now-moribund White House Coronavirus Task Force, I once hoped that the COVID-19 model from the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) would prove to be one such valuable tool. But those hopes have been dashed: The model simply doesn’t work, and the folks behind it are still futzing with its fundamental workings as the pandemic enters its least predictable phase.

During this crucial period when the country is reopening, we can have no faith in the model’s output. It shouldn’t be used to inform policymaking decisions at all. This isn’t to slight the scientists who took on such a difficult task; it’s just a realistic assessment of how the project turned out.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

What happened to Flynn is quite simply an atrocity. Everyone responsible should lose their jobs, if Flynn’s lawyers betrayed their client they should be disbarred, and the whole crew of plotters should be hauled off to jail. And Michael Flynn deserves his job back.

Michael Flynn was vindicated last week. While conservatives tend to be pro-law enforcement, here they are reminded of how the government’s criminal justice apparatus can be abused. The Russian collusion hoax weaponized our intelligence agencies and the FBI to spy on a political campaign and ruin the lives of numerous patriots, including decorated American general, Michael Flynn. 

Worse, documents obtained by Flynn’s new defense team show the absence of a crime—he apparently forgot some details in an interview with FBI agents, which to their minds became “obstruction” and “perjury”—but also show that the FBI knew there was no crime and still planned to entrap him through an ambush interview in the early days of the Trump administration. 

The Logan Act offense that justified his interview was a pretext; that law has been sitting on a shelf since 1799 and was dusted off to trap Flynn. Every journalist and lobbyist in Washington, D.C. is probably guilty of a violation. The real goal was to get him to talk to the FBI without counsel present, a situation that inevitably leads to some mix-ups and forgetfulness, so that he could be fired.