RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/25/post-hoc-vs-propter-hoc/

Curves are flattening worldwide thanks to stringent lockdown efforts.” That bulletin from one of my favorite magazines made me sit up. “Really?” I thought, “Is it because of the stringent lockdown that the ‘curves’ are flattening?”

For that is what “thanks to” means here, right? Because, “propter” in Latin.

No one needs to ask what sort of curves we are talking about here. There is only one subject that is being discussed now towards the end of April 2020: coronavirus, the insidious cold bug brought to the world by the Chinese Communist Party.

After several weeks of rising numbers of cases and deaths, the bell curves have crested and are beginning to decline almost everywhere. Hurrah! Let’s pat the American people on their collective back. It takes a lot of hard work to destroy the entire economy of a complex first-world nation like the United States in just a few weeks.

But we may have done just that. We forced most businesses to close. We forced people to stay at home. We imperiled countless hospitals by making them treat only one thing: patients sick from the coronavirus. We put more than 26 million people out of work. We shaved trillions of dollars of wealth off the market. Whew! I think of the Caledonian Calgacus who (according to Tacitus) observed that the Romans solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant: “they make a wasteland and call it peace.” 

Unless you are a public health official, for whom even one case of illness from coronavirus is unacceptable, most people feel that our work here is done, or nearly. You can tell that because everywhere people are talking about, and embarking upon, an effort to restart the engines of everyday life.

Well, not only public health officials. They are joined by many Democratic politicians who, like the Marxists of yore, believe that “the worse, the better,” that is, the worse things get, they better they are for “the revolution.” The more people suffer, they think, the more likely they are to turn the bad orange man out of office come November.

Nothing Like a Little Human Sacrifice to Save Lives

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/trump_and_the_50_governors.html

There are times where there are “no do-overs,” instances when one must get it right the first time, or perhaps be consigned to a lifetime of regret.  Caretaking for an elder presents one such example. Leading a national response to an incurable new disease is another. While President Trump could make a no do over situation a national debate to the end, he has now rightfully and artfully, turned the script over to the fifty governors to decide the fate of those whose lives are in their hands.  Now, they are the caretakers. Some reluctantly, some dictatorially, some draconically, and some eagerly embracing their path to reopening

It is easy for the conspiracy theorists to rule the day. Still, truth is not only illusive and transitory, but mind numbingly difficult to discern.  “The numbers are inflated, the numbers are undercounted, Dr. Fauci is an expert, Dr. Fauci dances with the devils at the Wuhan Lab, mitigation has flattened the curve and saved the hospitals from crashing, mitigation harmed us by halting herd immunity, a second wave is  coming, a second wave isn’t coming, hydroxyquinoline is a cure, hydroxyquinoline kills” – and so, each uncertain day unfolds. 

All of them, and all of us, are flying into the unknown. While many Americans have, albeit with varying degrees of reluctance, supported the shutdowns, there is a vocal minority that pushes for the immediate reopening of our economy.  And, while most “experts” have our best interests at heart, surely there are those in their midst with ulterior motives:  pecuniary, enhanced status, protecting one’s reputation, fame, seeking higher office, balancing accumulated state debt, yearning for the demise of capitalism and the rise of socialism, and/or obsessed with power.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-restrictions-government-bears-burden-of-proof-before-denying-freedoms/#slide-1

Expert opinion is helpful, sometimes invaluable, but it’s no substitute for truth

There is never a good time for a pandemic, but an election year in a deeply divided country is an especially bad time. Everything is politicized. I would add that even science is politicized, but that would suggest that this was something new. Sadly, we’re inured to the politicization of science, thanks to climate change and to the centrality of government funding to academic endeavors. Research resources are diverted toward our political conflicts, rather than being freely allocated where they could better advance the search for truth.

The politicization of science has ingrained in our political life something about which we ought to be highly skeptical: The argument from authority. It is doing extraordinary damage to the republic, through governmental responses — federal, state and municipal — to the coronavirus.

And it will keep doing damage unless and until we restore the burden of proof.

There is no doubt that governments have a compelling interest in public safety, which includes preventing the spread of a potentially deadly infectious disease. It is nevertheless the foundational conceit of the American republic that governments are created to secure the fundamental rights of a nation’s citizens — our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Moreover, the legitimacy of government is dependent on the consent of the governed.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15932/america-responses-to-tyranny

America has handed China hundreds of billions of dollars every year to buy cheap goods, watched American firms ship their jobs and factories to China, and provided the Chinese with the means to create technology that threatens to eclipse our future. In the meantime, the money we sent there is allowing the Chinese to grow their nuclear arsenal and strengthen their military. In return, China has shipped us Covid-19.

But the people of the United States are beginning to catch on to the Chinese ploy of using our money to buy their global dominance.

We need to suspend imports from Civilization Abusers and all enemies of democracy. We need to become and remain self- sufficient – from technology to medical supplies — so that we are never again dependent on nations that would seek to destroy us.

The United States needs to stop playing the chump.

For generations America has fattened up the very nations that would seek to destroy us.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Self-examination is important. It is healthy to try to understand why we believe this or that, why we like this person but not another. Since my support for the President is controversial, even among those who agree with me in other matters, I thought a public self-examination would be welcome.

Ado Annie Cairns would never have fallen for Donald Trump. He doesn’t talk “purty.” He is the antithesis of me, of the way I was brought up, the way I live my life. His clothes are too fancy, and I don’t like the way he dyes his hair. He loves money and power and does not seem interested in history or philosophy. He butchers the English language when he speaks. I doubt he reads Trollope. He is boastful in a way I hope I am not. I would have no interest in living the life he has lived. Nor would he want to live mine.

So, why do I like and support him? Why do I feel he was what the Country needed in 2016 and again in 2020? He has an intuitive sense, I believe, of what troubles America. I doubt he has read much American history or is familiar with our Constitution. I am sure he has never read the Federalist Papers. But he has an instinctual understanding of people.

All societies create ruling classes. I was a beneficiary of that, in that my family were prominent in the last half of the 19th Century and into the early years of the 20th. It was a time when the Country was governed by white, Anglo Saxon Protestants, WASPs as they are lovingly called. That era began to decline slowly in the years after World War II and a new class took the reins – technocrats, bureaucrats, educators, scientists, and businesspeople, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. They came from all walks of life, represented all races, religions and sexes. They helped lift up the Country after fifteen years of depression and war. They built highways and put man on the moon. They desegregated schools and offered equal opportunities to women. They won the Cold War without firing a shot.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=500c3266cd

Back on April 2, when the $2+ trillion “CARES” Act had just cleared Congress, I issued a warning to “make no mistake — this is a perilous moment.” The country had reached seemingly unanimous consensus that all previous budget constraints no longer apply to federal government spending. After all, we are in a crisis. Therefore we must spend “whatever it takes” — a term with no definition and no limits. With all sensible judgment now thrown to the winds, this would be the perfect time for the well-connected and the corrupt to swoop in to grab the extra tens of billions they have long lusted after.

And of course, this is exactly what has happened. Every thoroughly corrupt left-wing priority — from wind power subsidies to teachers union contracts — has its lobbyists there in Washington trying to get in on the next handout (aka “stimulus”) gravy train. As a Manhattan Contrarian public service, I thought I would look around to find a candidate for the very most completely corrupt and unsupportable demand for a bailout among the hundreds of such demands currently swirling around the Washington firmament.

Although it’s a crowded field, I have a candidate that will be difficult to top. On April 14, a guy named Don Harmon — Democrat and member of the Illinois State Senate, and recently elevated to the position of President of the that body — wrote a letter to Dick Durbin — Illinois federal Senator and member of the Democratic leadership of that body — laying out what the state of Illinois is seeking in the next round of federal “stimulus.” This letter is the very definition of the term “brazen.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/covid19_death_rates_among_blacks_make_new_fodder_for_racial_politics.html

As reported by ABC News, black American coronavirus patients in Michigan died of the disease at more than eight times the rate of white people despite making up only 14% of the state’s population.  Similar death disparities occurred in other U.S. cities with large black populations, thus creating an opening for racial politics to be injected into the debate over COVID-19 death rates in the black community.

At the Coronavirus Task Force press briefing on April 7, Dr. Anthony Fauci correctly observed that black Americans are disproportionately affected by illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, and asthma, all of which are known to increase the risk of fatal coronavirus complications.  The widely respected epidemiologist went on to note that such disparities have “long been prevalent in the African-American community.”  With higher coronavirus death rates among black Americans an established medical fact, progressive media outlets are raising the specter that racism is to blame.

The suggestion that the medical profession is rife with racist doctors and nurses is an unfortunate extension of the modern Democratic Party’s identity politics election strategy, which is predicated on the fallacious narrative that even after all the years of racial progress, the America of today is an incurably oppressive place infested with racists who roam the land, including in hospitals and medical facilities that care for all Americans, regardless of the color of their skin. 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/23/white-house-should-shift-to-economic-recovery-briefings/

Most Americans don’t want more government hand-outs or debt-inducing programs. We want to protect the vulnerable, strengthen our health care capacity, and move on before the damage is too great to repair.

The so-called Murray model on COVID-19 issued yet another update on Wednesday, its 11th iteration in less than a month

Even though his apocalyptic projections about massive shortages of hospital beds, intensive care units, and ventilators failed to materialize this month, Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, keeps upping the ante. It was Murray’s collection of scary graphs that Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx presented to the president at the end of March to support their push to extend the “social distancing” guidance until April 30. President Trump acquiesced; that decision effectively shut down the U.S. economy, has confined most Americans to house arrest, and is fueling fear and panic across the land.

After being so wrong, any professional with a sliver of integrity would crawl away in shame. Murray should be offering an apology to the nation for warning of widespread death and misery which, outside of New York City, cannot be found on anything like the scale he predicted. The president should be hauling Murray and his abettors into the White House to demand answers.

But being a scientific modeler means never having to say you’re sorry—see climate science for a lengthy list of examples—so Murray is not only unrepentant, he’s spinning out more imaginary charts.

Republican governors who either never enacted draconian social distancing decrees or are planning to end those measures are on Murray’s latest hit list. Florida and Arizona, whose Republican governors want to liberate their states gradually in a few weeks, should not be permitted to lift social distancing measures until the middle or end of June, Murray says.

The residents of North Dakota will have to wait until after July 4 to celebrate their freedom. Governor Doug Burgum, a Republican, never instituted a stay-at-home order and is preparing plans for businesses to open on May 1 so Murray has pushed back North Dakota’s safe date to July 19. (The state has had 17 COVID-19 fatalities.)

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

“This pandemic is an affront [Zumutung] to democracy because it restricts our existential rights and needs,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Germany’s parliament April 23. That poignant formulation comes from the chief executive of a country whose response to Covid-19 was among the world’s most successful, with only 64 deaths per million of population compared to 148 in the United States, 423 in Italy and 335 in France. Dr. Merkel, who holds a PhD in quantum chemistry, added that the world is not at the end of the pandemic but just at the beginning: “We shall have to live with this virus for a long time.” Although the infection rate has fallen, “this interim result is fragile. We are treading on thin ice – on the thinnest of ice,” Merkel said.

The affront to which the German Chancellor referred is the restriction of movement and public gatherings, but a far greater affront to democracy is in the offing, namely universal mandatory testing for Covid-19, and tracking of individual disease carriers, the equivalent of a search of one’s person and premises. This conjures visions of totalitarian dystopias, although democratic South Korea has been among the most aggressive practitioners of tracking via smartphone location.

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. Merkel has been advised by her medical crisis team that herd immunity never may be achieved, or if it is, only after a long period of time, because it is impossible to determine whether human antibodies provide much protection against infection. For the same reason, it is simply not known whether a vaccine will be found, let alone whether any vaccine will be effective.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/who-un-lloyd-billingsley/

President Trump is cutting off funding for the World Health Organization, headed by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as a Reuters report notes, “the first director-general in the WHO’s 72-year history not to be a medical doctor” but a favorite of China with a radical leftist past. This is not the first time a Communist regime installed their mouthpiece and deployed an international body for their own purposes.  

The WHO is part of the United Nations, which dates from the waning days of World War II. Stalin’s foreign minister Andrei Gromyko suggested U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss, a Stalinist spy, as the first Secretary General, the first and only time a Soviet leader suggested an American for an international post. Hiss was duly appointed acting Secretary General, so the Communists got the man they wanted.

U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, who had been under the wing of Hiss and Harry Hopkins, delivered a speech to the opening UN conference in San Francisco in May-June of 1945. The speech had been written by Stalinist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, brought to the conference by Alger Hiss. Stettinius was so pleased with Trumbo’s speech that he requested an autographed picture of the screenwriter,  but Stettinius later denied he ever knew Trumbo.