RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/more-media-misdirection-on-trump-russia/

The most useless committee on Capitol Hill has answered a question no one was asking.

The headline is an attention-grabber, particularly the subhead. The New York Times breathlessly reports that a Republican-led Senate panel has issued a report that “undercuts claims by President Trump and his allies that Obama-era officials sought to undermine his candidacy by investigating Russia’s 2016 election meddling.”

Naturally, you’re thinking: “That’s it. All Trump’s diatribes about a ‘hoax’ have been the usual claptrap. Even the GOP admits that the Obama administration had good reasons to investigate whether Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia.”

Except . . . that’s not what the Times story actually says. Carefully parsed, it’s not even what the headline says.

In truth, the story is a nothing-burger. We learn that one of the most useless committees on Capitol Hill, the Senate Intelligence Committee, has issued a 158-page report — festooned with the usual “there are things we can’t tell you” redactions — as a capper to its three-year investigation into a question no one is asking: Did the intelligence community competently conclude that Russia interfered in the 2016 campaign?

No one is asking that question because, for the vast majority of people closely following the collusion caper, that would be like asking whether the Chiefs won the Super Bowl.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-in-stop-the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation

The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.

Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.

Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.

The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies.  

In New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic with more than one-third of all U.S. deaths, the rate of death for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01 percent, or 11 per 100,000 in the population. On the other hand, people aged 75 and over have a death rate 80 times that. For people under 18 years old, the rate of death is zero per 100,000. 

Of all fatal cases in New York state, two-thirds were in patients over 70 years of age; more than 95 percent were over 50 years of age; and about 90 percent of all fatal cases had an underlying illness. Of 6,570 confirmed COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 6,520, or 99.2 percent, had an underlying illness. If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Our reaction to COVID-19 has shown the best of us, but also the worst. Protection of the vulnerable – the elderly and those defenseless because of preconditions, ranging from obesity to diabetes – has been admirable. Healthcare workers willingly expose themselves to a novel virus, despite conflicting and changing reports as to its cause, properties, transmission and morbidity rates. Until recently, most of us have complied without complaint, acting with ovine-like acquiescence to draconian measures that have led to a “lockdown” of the economy and the loss of millions of jobs.

We obey common-sensical rules about social-distancing, wearing face masks, scrubbing our hands, not touching our face, sneezing into a Kleenex, and using gloves and disinfectants. Anything to slow the rate of infection of a highly contagious virus. But the lockdown of two thirds of the economy (as measured by those who do not have the option to work from home) has been pre-empted from debate. As well, some political leaders have taken lockdowns of the economy to an extreme – banning yard work, home construction projects or preventing citizens from using parks or playing golf. Some governors have used the pandemic as an excuse to get the federal government to help bailout their states’ finances. Others have talked of using Drones to monitor people’s behavior. Debate, as to the cause of COVID-19, is discouraged, as is seen in the disparagements of President Trump for calling the virus a Chinese or Wuhan virus, despite indisputable evidence that that was its origin. Those who raise questions about COVID-19 are called “anti-science,” in spite of the fact that the science regarding the virus, its characteristics, transmission and morbidity rates keep changing. We cannot forget we are in an election year. Republicans, who would like to keep the Presidency and the Senate and re-gain the House, would like to get the economy re-started as soon as possible, but without initiating a second surge of the virus. Democrats recognize that the economy has been Republicans’ strongest suit, so have an interest in the economic downturn lasting longer.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/21/can-we-please-mckinsey-proof-america/

The “experts” Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to hire to help New York reopen have a history of doing little more than helping failing institutions fail in style while growing rich in the process.

Andrew Cuomo has a plan for a “Trump-proof” reopening of New York. Or actually, he has a plan to hire some people to develop a plan. According to CNBC, “Cuomo has hired high-powered consultants to develop a science-based plan for the safe economic reopening of the region.” Wow, a science-based plan from high-powered consultants!

The report goes on to say that these consultants will be “producing models on testing, infections, and other key data points that will underpin decisions . . . .”

Expert models have been pretty spot-on this year, so this sounds really amazing. Remember how last month, a model by an expert predicted 2.2 million Americans would die from COVID-19? Or how about the professionals (and nonprofessionals!) who just a few weeks ago were telling us that masks don’t work and that ordinary people lack the proper training and competence to wear one right anyway? Now, they’re mandatory.

So who are these consultants who will advise America’s loudest governor? The answer, of course, is McKinsey & Company. Some people—not me, you understand—have been known to describe McKinsey’s business model thus: “You give them your watch so they can tell you what time it is.”

No, I wouldn’t say that. It’s too generous.

One of Cuomo’s top advisers said, “we are reaching out to top experts and other professionals to come up with a bullet-proof plan.” Bullet-proof. So far Cuomo’s track-record on planning for the future is pretty dismal. But then again, the “top experts” he’s hired have pretty dismal records, too.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/progressive-governors-indulge-their-inner-despot-bruce-thornton/

Poet Sylvia Plath’s slur against women, that they “adore a fascist, the boot in the face, the brute,” is more true about progressives, with one big difference: they want to be the ones wear the boot. Behind their façade of therapeutic concern for the “people” and the “oppressed” lies something that Vladimir Lenin was honest enough to express in 1906: the lust for “power, which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.”

Thankfully, those impulses so far have been checked by our Constitutional order, which was created to inhibit the concentration and excesses of power that threatens citizen freedom. But as we have seen over the last century, at times of crisis the technocratic progressives have chipped away at those Constitutional guardrails and serially encroached on our freedoms. The current virus crisis is the latest opportunity for the Dems to indulge their inner despots.

We’ve all seen the catalogue of overweening unilateral diktats enforced by police power coming down from Democrat governors. Under the guise of enforcing social distancing in order to slow the spread of the disease, governors have quickly violated the Bill of Rights: closing gun stores at the same time they release felons from prison; shutting down church services while leaving liquor stores open; criminalizing the right to peaceful assembly; arbitrarily deeming some economic activities as “essential,” like abortion clinics and pot dispensaries, while proscribing others like buying paint or vegetable seeds. Even our freedom of movement that doesn’t endanger others, such as surfing alone or playing with our children in a deserted park, has been interdicted by overzealous police.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/we_made_a_terrible_mistake.html?utm_source=vuukle&utm_medium=newsfeed

We’re told that social distancing is working because we’re flattening the curve.  How do we know that those two things are related?  There isn’t that all-important-for-good-science control group.  For all we know, the result would have been similar if we hadn’t put such draconian measures in place.

In addition, for all our medical experts’ talk of their high standards, they ignored those standards when they embraced the Imperial College model that, according to world-renowned epidemiologist Johan Giesecke, was an internal document that was unpublished and had not been peer-reviewed.  Giesecke had never seen a document of this type garner so much attention as to shape major public policy decisions.

He also described the strict lockdown measures embraced by many countries as non-evidence-based.  (What?!  You mean our experts who uphold the highest of double-blind standards have been shooting in the dark?!)

And speaking of lockdowns, according to some reports, the U.K. hit its peak before it put strict social distancing measures in place (here, here, here at the 6:40 mark).

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/the-foolish-gop-proposal-to-open-china-to-american-lawsuits-over-covid-19/

The bill introduced by Senators Marsha Blackburn and Martha McSally, however well-intentioned, would have disastrous consequences.

Some terrible ideas never go away, especially ideas that help politicians to disguise weakness as strength. One such scheme in the Beltway bag of tricks is the proposal to “punish” a hostile foreign power by allowing it to be sued in court.

Senators Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) and Martha McSally (R., Ariz.) are the latest to try this tactic, proposing a bill that would allow Americans harmed by the coronavirus — or their estates if they have died from it — to sue China for damages. To pave the way, Senators Blackburn and McSally would strip of sovereign immunity any foreign state (i.e., China) that even accidentally discharges a biological agent upon the world.

Sounds ferocious, right? Except no American victim would actually get compensation, because Beijing would, of course, ignore the lawsuits . . . except to exploit them as a (further) excuse not to cooperate with American and foreign investigations; as a further basis not to honor its treaty obligations; as a reason to step up its aggression in the Far East; and as a rationale for retaliating by encouraging other countries to strip sovereign immunity from the United States, so that our nation and officials may be sued and indicted for harms real and imagined abroad.

This is foolish on so many levels it is tough to know where to begin.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-bill-of-rights-protects-freedoms/

Thank God for the Bill of Rights.

I n this current crisis, the longest if not the first complete shutdown in U.S. history, the freedoms of American democracy are being tested in ways we scarcely ever imagined. Out of nowhere little Napoleonic governors arise to enact decrees prohibiting gardening or strolling on an empty beach — decrees that seem to have little purpose other than to reflect that they can do so. Snitches volunteer to out felonious social deviants who are seen cooking in the backyard with a neighbor. A little horned-devil virus seems to be trying to do what those Russkies never could.

Experts with all sorts of Ph.D.s, M.D.s, and J.D.s after their names lecture from authority about what we must right now do — or else! — on the principle that they have a scientific or technocratic prerogative to impress critics of their modeling or their demand that we shut down a $22-trillion economy for “18 months,” if need be.

A supposedly disinterested media — found by media watchdogs to be 93 percent negative in its presidential reportage before the virus crisis — envision their coverage of the Trump demon as an endless zero-sum game in which any morsel of good news for him is instantly bad for them.

In short, if American democracy were to fail to sustain itself under myriad pressures, then this would be the moment. For some, the Sixties can at last be made manifest — especially given that its aging children just impeached an American president on articles nowhere found in the Constitution, after weaponizing the FBI, CIA, and DOJ in an attempt to abort a presidential campaign and then presidency.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/20/america-is-paying-the-price-for-the-nyc-superspreader/

To bring some much-needed context to the nation’s coronavirus crisis, let’s remove the states of New York and New Jersey from the current totals for a moment. Here, for the sake of argument, are what the numbers would show:

Since early March, roughly 18,700 people have died from COVID-19. That’s about 2,700 deaths per week in the United States since testing began. Some of the most populous states—Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, California—suffered between 1,000 to 2,500 fatalities over the seven-week period. Florida, which is home to a highly vulnerable population and was a destination for thousands of domestic and international travelers before the pandemic began, reports fewer than 1,000 deaths.

Nineteen states and Washington, D.C. each report fewer than 100 deaths.

Tests show about 434,000 Americans have contracted the disease so far. Only a few states indicate COVID-19 symptomatic activity; most of the country now is quiet.

Would those facts frighten you into government-ordered submission? If the United States had a population of 300 million and 48 states, would the fact that 18,000 people—sadly, mostly elderly and already sick patients—succumbed to the virus over a period of nearly two months warrant an ongoing lockdown that is destroying the economy, overwhelming unemployment rolls and food bank lines, shutting down schools and colleges for five months, and bankrupting small businesses?

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/21/the-disintegration-of-america-its-economy-and-its-constitution/

“Is it Donald Trump that the media, the Socialist Democrats and the Woke progressives hate? Or do they hate America itself and the millions of “deplorables” who voted for Trump and who are the last stalwart vestiges of American Exceptionalism?”

We – the people in geographic America – are now so diverse in character, culture and competence, so riven by racial, regional, religious, ethnic, gender, economic and social jealousies and dislikes and so afraid of one another that we may no longer be “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  

A 2011 book by journalist Colin Woodard asserts that geographic America never has been one nation, but rather has always been several separate ones. Compare, for example, the characteristics of a native of Woodard’s “Greater Appalachia” nation with those of a typical inhabitant of his “Yankeedom” nation or his “Left Coast” nation.  

F. H. Buckley, Professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law, powerfully asserts in his 2020 book, “American Secession,” that both geographic America and constitutional America are “divisible” and ripe for a breakup.

The old ties that held together the disparate parts and peoples of America are now frayed or broken.  Some have been viciously cut.  

Patriotism and rallying around the flag no longer unify.  The population of geographic America is now so diverse in its origins and cultural DNA that the person standing next to you may hate the American flag you are saluting.   

Christianity has been banned from schools and the public square, undermined in the popular culture by Hollywood and the media – and is no longer the unifying force that it once was.  Far from it.

Even the secular form of the Judeo-Christian tradition that Samuel Huntington called the American Creed is being “canceled” and replaced by Woke prescriptions that substitute hate for Christianity’s agape love and divide Americans into many warring identity-group tribes.