RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/covid19_has_seen_america_develop_a_dangerous_expertocracy.html

People are beginning to realize that the experts have been wrong about a lot of things when it comes to COVID-19. This is due in part to the ever-changing knowledge we’re acquiring about the disease. It’s a good thing that the experts can adjust their ideas as they acquire new evidence. The problem, though, is that we are allowing medicine and science experts to make vast, unquestioned policy decisions, and that’s a perilous thing to do.

Ever since the early Progressives, back at the turn of the 20th century, Americans, especially Democrats, have had a reverence for expertise. Woodrow Wilson, who was the leader of American Progressivism, was already dreaming of rule by experts when he was still a Bryn Mawr College professor.

In 1887, Wilson wrote a far-reaching paper dismissing the Constitution as defective (too much power for the people) and, instead, called for a bureaucracy of experts to run the country. America’s rising middle-class fell in love with the idea and has been in love with it ever since. Nowadays, we look to experts in everything, including raising our own children — and we do this despite the conflicting information they give and the daily proof that, the more theoretical the subject, the more often they are wrong (and wrong in ways that run profoundly contrary to common sense).

https://www.breitbart.com/border/2020/04/04/common-anti-parasite-drug-may-kill-coronavirus-in-under-48-hours-say-researchers/

Researchers in Australia report that Ivermectin, an FDA-approved drug commonly used to treat parasites, appears to be effective in treating the SARS-COV-2 coronavirus (COVID-19). The drug is widely available and can be “repurposed” for this application, doctors said.

The ScienceDirect journal, Antiviral Research, published an article by a group of Australian researchers from Monash University in Melbourne reporting that Ivermectin appears to be effective at inhibiting the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

The article states:

Ivermectin is an inhibitor of the COVID-19 causative virus (SARS-CoV-2) in vitro.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Perhaps it is because with age has come cynicism regarding our political class and the press. I am not sure. What I do know is that I am confident in the innate ability of Americans to adapt to trying situations and, if left free, to change conditions for the better for themselves and their fellow man, be that through government or industry. But I am less enamored of our political leaders in Washington and the media.

The United States is the richest large country in the world. We have a healthcare system that attracts the world’s wealthiest individuals. While we may lag some Asian and European nations, we are more literate and better educated than most of the world. We value personal freedom more than any other people, having inherited a unique form of government from our forebearers. Yet, we have a history of gullibility. We believed the editors of Newsweek and Time when they ran articles in the 1970s titled, respectively, “The Cooling World” and “A New Ice Age?” We failed to understand the difference in time to a geologist and opportunistic reporters. We were frightened by Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s prophecy of doom in their 1968 book, The Population Bomb: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death, in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” We were shocked by stories of disasters related to Y2K and of those about asteroids. More recently, entire industries have been built around scaring people about the alleged anthropomorphic causes of global warming: Teslas to wind farms to solar panels – all of which require government assistance to survive.   

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

For the first time in decades, Americans who hear the word “model” are more likely to visualize a graph than a woman on a runway.  Now, in the era of the coronavirus, we all are morbidly fixated on the projections that the experts are making regarding the number of people who will contract the virus and the number of them who can be expected to die.

On March 31 at the daily White House briefing, we heard from Drs. Fauci and Birx that the most credible model anticipates a final outcome of 100,000–200,000 American deaths due to the virus.  Subsequent discussion repeatedly stressed that the actual number might be much higher or much lower depending on whether the social distancing guidelines are followed.  The more these two highly respected scientists discussed the matter, the more evident it became that the model cannot be relied on to provide assurance about how the pandemic will play out.  This is not a failure on the part of these two credible scientists; it is a failure of the model.

When one does not know the current level of infection in the population, when little information is available about how quickly the virus can be transmitted from one person to the next, when we remain unsure of whether asymptomatic corona carriers are as contagious as those with symptoms, when nobody seems to know how long the average asymptomatic carrier remains in that state, when we are unable to determine the actual mortality rate among the afflicted — when basic pieces of the puzzle such as these have yet to be inserted into the bigger picture, it is unreasonable to expect this particular model to predict accurately.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/president-trump-is-magnificently-right-about-infrastructure/

President Trump’s proposal to spend $2 trillion to rebuild American infrastructure was as gutsy as it gets, coming on the heels of another $2 trillion in emergency economic aid. The president tweeted, “With interest rates for the United States being at ZERO, this is the time to do our decades long awaited Infrastructure Bill. It should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars, and be focused solely on jobs and rebuilding the once great infrastructure of our Country!”

We can’t afford it, but we can’t afford not to do it. That’s just what I proposed in my last PJ column, “Fix Your Roof While It’s Raining.” The critical decisions will be about what we call “infrastructure.” The president said, “We’re not going to do the Green New Deal and spend 40% of the money on things that people just have fun with.”

What are the top priorities? Roads, bridges and tunnels are obvious. Rail is also important. America’s oil production surge strained our transport system, rail as well as pipelines, and drastically raised freight costs. Overall, the U.S. producer price index is barely changed over the past ten years, but rail transport costs are up 30%.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/2/gertrude-himmelfarb-the-enlightenment

The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism—relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity. And since then, generations of intelligent students under the guidance of their enlightened professors have looked into the abyss, have contemplated those beasts, and have said, “How interesting, how exciting.”
                  —Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 1994

When Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote about the abyss consuming the intellectual and moral traditions of her own time, she was one of the first to recognise how seductive was its appeal and how depraved its outcome. In her book On Looking into the Abyss, she attributed the original insight to the critic Lionel Trilling, who detected it in the early 1960s in the underbelly of the modernist movement that had dominated literature and the arts since the early twentieth century. Himmelfarb, however, came to her own recognition from another direction entirely, partly from her study of the history of ideas in Britain’s Victorian era but also from the apparently unlikely field of the history of social policy that led the Victorians to define poverty as a social problem. In the process, up to her death on December 30 last year, aged ninety-seven, those who knew her work came to regard her as not only one of the great American historians of her time but one of her nation’s most compelling moral critics. In American political circles she was best known as Bea Kristol, wife and mother, respectively, of the neoconservative authors and editors Irving Kristol and William Kristol.

Modernists, from their earliest public manifestations in London’s Bloomsbury, had regarded the Christian morality of the English-speaking world as the greatest obstacle to the bohemianism of “free thought” and “free love” they craved.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/490745-a-strong-us-5g-sector-p

On Dec. 12, 1901, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated the very first transatlantic radio-wave transmission and ushered in a new age of wireless communications. More than a century later, wireless technology still is one of our primary sources of communication. But as our radio-wave highways become increasingly congested, each new generation of wireless technology is forced to ascend into higher and higher frequencies. The fifth generation of wireless technology, known as “5G,” will expand into spectrum bands Marconi could never have foreseen.

Because it will allow data to be transmitted more quickly and efficiently than ever before, 5G technology has the potential to improve everything from search and rescue missions and medical care to transportation, real-time language translation and precision farming. It could allow firefighters to use thermal imaging to see through smoke and locate victims more easily. It could help specialists perform remote robotic surgery on patients who are far away. And it could help American soldiers on the battlefield, giving them real-time information about their adversaries while monitoring their status and location. Such developments could revolutionize the technological landscape and pump trillions of dollars into our global economy. Perhaps most important, 5G could create millions of new U.S. jobs and become integral to our competitiveness in the global marketplace.

But like any new technology, 5G is not without risks. Currently, the only global company that is competitively producing all of the equipment necessary to fully implement 5G is China-based Huawei. While Huawei calls itself “employee-owned,” Chinese laws require companies to assist in national intelligence work unbeknownst to their customers — potentially rendering the equipment unsecure. This presents a major challenge for 5G implementation in the United States, since American companies either have to invent their own equipment or utilize Huawei’s — knowing that it could be accessed by the Chinese government.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/490694-just-say-no-to-typical-washington-m

NBC News reports that preliminary discussions have begun on Capitol Hill regarding the establishment of a 9/11 Commission-type inquiry about the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. The discussions are said predominantly to involve Democrats and to be focused on the Trump administration’s performance. As outlined, the exercise would smack of the worst aspects of the 9/11 Commission: the partisan blame-game, which eventually petered into the look-like-we’re-doing-something creation of bloated and ludicrously expensive new bureaucracy.

The 9/11 Commission was a brainchild of the political class, which is why Washington remembers it fondly. To be fair, the report it generated was well written, as these extravaganzas go. It was remarkably gimlet-eyed about radical Islamic ideology (what would be more accurately described as sharia supremacism) as the instigator of jihadist terrorism — indeed, much more willing to confront this challenge than the progressive political class’s typical approach of reimagining Islam into a relentlessly “peaceful” creed to which terrorism is anathematic “anti-Muslim activity.”

That said, the 9/11 Commission was primarily an exercise in partisan politics. That is why, in the actual formation of substantive counterterrorism policy, the commission was ignored once Washington’s virtue-signally objectives were achieved. Quite contrary to the commission’s conclusions, it became de rigueur in the Obama years to shift our national security approach to opposing “violent extremism,” on the premise that fundamentalist Islam is no more likely to spur terrorism than movements derived from other religions or political agendas (e.g., limited-government conservatism, Second Amendment advocacy).

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/01/morning-greatness-time-to-cancel-the-world-health-organization/

The pernicious World Health Organization: It’s time to cancel the clowns over at the WHO. They are in no way a simple outfit, monitoring and coordinating world health situations. They are a China proxy who lied to the world about the deadly China virus, praised China’s handling of the virus (which included forcibly kidnapping people to imprison them with those infected and soldering them inside their houses and of course, lying)  and continue to defend China, who is responsible for releasing a plague on the world.

World Health Organization Spends Twice As Much On Travel As On Medical Supplies
Tucker Carlson blasts WHO leadership as ‘lapdogs’ for the Chinese government
Rick Scott calls for congressional inquiry into WHO’s coronavirus response

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/did_china_unleash_covid19_malevolently_or_accidentally.html

The big takeaway is that there’s no evidence that the Chinese intended to weaponize COVID-19. Therefore, at a guess, the disease’s genesis was a research laboratory that didn’t have good safety protocols.

Tucker Carlson did a segment discussing COVID-19’s origins. While saying that the virus probably started in a laboratory, he was careful not to accuse China of deliberately creating or releasing the virus. China’s long history of shoddy products and disregard for human life makes it’s a good bet that China didn’t weaponize the virus. Instead, COVID-19 is probably just another shoddy Chinese product.

Back in the 1960s, Japan was synonymous with cheap, but not shoddy products. By the 1980s, though, Japanese people’s meticulous habits meant that, if it came from Japan, it was well-made and worth the price.

When China started selling cheap products in the West, most people assumed it would follow the same trajectory that Japan did. That never happened because China is not Japan (nor is it Korea, which also makes meticulous products). Unlike Japan or Korea, it’s neither clean nor orderly. From chaos comes garbage.