RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/html/germs-and-city-13005.html
Germs and the City Two centuries of success against infectious disease have left us complacent—and vulnerable. Peter W. Huber

EXCERPTS:

We will bitterly regret this shift, and probably sooner rather than later. As another Victorian might have predicted—he published a book on the subject in 1859—germs have evolved to exploit our new weakness. Public authorities are ponderous and slow; the new germs are nimble and fast. Drug regulators are paralyzed by the knowledge that error is politically lethal; the new germs make genetic error—constant mutation—the key to their survival. The new germs don’t have to be smarter than our scientists, just faster than our lawyers. The demise of cholera, one could say, has been one of the great antisocial developments of modern times.

By withdrawing from the battlefield just long enough to let us drift into this state of indifference, the germs have set the stage for their own spectacular revival. Germs are never in fact defeated completely. If they retire for a while, it’s only to search, in their ingeniously stupid and methodically random way, for a bold new strategy. They’ve also contrived, of late, to get human sociopaths to add thought and order to the search. The germs will return. We won’t be ready.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/empire-lies-13006.html

The Empire of Lies The twenty-first century will not belong to China. Guy Sorman

EXCERPT:

The Western press is full of stories these days on China’s arrival as a superpower, some even heralding, or warning, that the future may belong to her. Western political and business delegations stream into Beijing, confident of China’s economy, which continues to grow rapidly. Investment pours in. Crowning China’s new status, Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympics.

But China’s success is, at least in part, a mirage. True, 200 million of her subjects, fortunate to be working for an expanding global market, increasingly enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The remaining 1 billion, however, remain among the poorest and most exploited people in the world, lacking even minimal rights and public services. Popular discontent simmers, especially in the countryside, where it often flares into violent confrontation with Communist Party authorities. China’s economic “miracle” is rotting from within.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/30/did-cdcs-focus-on-social-justice-reduce-its-readiness/

The Centers for Disease Control should spend its money and time fighting disease, not playing politics.

You had one job, CDC: to prepare America to combat infectious disease. It’s a sign of what’s happened to the government generally over the last 20 years, that CDC used its resources to advance left-leaning agendas instead of focusing on positioning itself to fight infectious disease. 

We’ve seen the headlines blaming the president for the lack of readiness in response to the outbreak. In mid-March, the Guardian reported, “Trump’s staff cuts have undermined Covid-19 containment efforts.” You can find other such headlines here, here, and here. 

Most of these accusations are either completely untrue or wild distortions of the facts. The get-Trump media are so obsessively politicized that much of the coverage of the virus has been corrupted in the same way that Russian collusion coverage was so unreliable. PJ Media, for example, published this list of the “Top 10 Lies About President Trump’s Response to the Coronavirus.” 

Lost in the debate over whether CDC had enough money to prepare for the crisis is this critical question: What was the CDC doing with the money it already had?

Why, for example, is the CDC spending resources to study transgender health? There are 2,287 search results for “transgender” within the CDC website. The CDC published the following guidance for LGBT youth: 

The tunnel extends more than 2,000 feet underground from a warehouse in Tijuana to a warehouse in the Otay Mesa area of San Diego. Authorities found an estimated $29.6 million in drugs in the tunnel, seizing 1,300 pounds of cocaine, 86 pounds of methamphetamine, 17 pounds of heroin, 3,000 pounds of marijuana and more than two pounds of fentanyl.

Investigators estimated the passageway is several months old based on “advanced construction” in parts of the tunnel, including reinforced walls, ventilation, lighting and an underground rail system. U.S. investigators worked with the Fiscalia General de la Republica and Secretaria de la Defensa Naciona to find the tunnel’s entrance on the Mexico side.

The discovery comes two months after authorities in January discovered the “longest cross-border tunnel” yet in the same area, a 4,309-foot passage running from Tijuana to San Diego.
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“Despite the current COVID-19 pandemic, DEA employees continue to work tirelessly to serve and protect the community,” DEA special agent in charge John W. Callery said in a statement.

“I hope this sends a clear message that despite the ongoing public health crisis, [Homeland Security Investigations] and our law enforcement partners will remain resilient and continue to pursue criminal organizations responsible for the cross-border smuggling of narcotics into the United States,” Homeland Security Investigations San Diego acting special agent in charge Cardell T. Morant said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-california-herd-immunity/

By now, California should be, as predicted in so many models, ground zero of infection.

T he bluest state’s public officials have been warning for weeks that California will be overwhelmed, given federal-government unpreparedness and the purported inefficacy of the local, state, and federal governments.

California governor Gavin Newsom has assured his state that over half of the population — or, in his words, 56 percent — will soon be infected. That is, more than 25 million coronavirus cases are on the horizon, which, at the virus’s current fatality rate of 1–2 percent (the ratio of deaths to known positive cases), would mean that the state should anticipate 250,000–500,000 dead Californians in the near future. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti predicted that this week Los Angeles would be short of all sorts of medical supplies as the epidemic killed many hundreds, as is the case in New York City.

It’s been well over two months since the first certified coronavirus case in the United States, so one might expect to see early symptoms of the apocalypse recently forecast by Governor Newsom. Yet a number of California’s top doctors, epidemiologists, statisticians, and biophysicists — including Stanford’s John Ioannides, Michael Levitt, Eran Bendavid, and Jay Bhattacharya — have expressed some skepticism about the bleak models predicting that we are on the verge of a statewide or even national lethal pandemic of biblical proportions.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-response-law-liberty-in-emergency/

Restrictions should be no more extensive than the threat reasonably demands.

Pandemic in the land is putting strain on our self-image as a free people for whom the rule of law is our ne plus ultra.

Alas, when it gets down to brass tacks, even those two beacons, liberty and law, are as much in tension as in mutual need. It is by law that society restricts our freedom. On the other hand, as Burke observed, without the order that a just legal system ensures, there can be no liberty worth having. We would descend into anarchy, into the law of the jungle.

Times of true security crises — war, natural catastrophes, or the sudden spread of a potentially deadly disease — have a remorseless way of reminding us about some brute realities.

It is all well and good for libertarians to say that the Constitution is not suspended in emergencies, and that are our rights are never more essential than when government’s tyrannical tendencies rear their head. But then real emergencies happen. Inevitably, unavoidably, our rights get restricted — sometimes dramatically.

This is not because government tends to tyranny, though it does if unchecked. It is because people crave security and community. They are willing to sacrifice their individual liberties, at least to a degree and for a time, to preserve them. This does not make them craven. It makes them rational.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/31/the-reemergence-of-the-state-in-the-time-of-covid-19/

State sovereignty is the best chance we have to fend off adversaries. We defend our freedom by exercising power through the state, not through global illusions or cozy provincialism.

Once upon a time, there was an illusion that the state would disappear. It was the fiction Marxists told each other at bedtime, and it was the lie of the Communists, once they had seized state power. For even as they built up their police apparatus and their archipelago of gulags, they kept promising that one day the state would eventually disappear. 

Of course, in a sense, they were right because Communism ended and so did the Communist states in Russia and Eastern Europe. Yet the death of those regimes is in no way an argument for the death of statehood itself.

The state is the expression of sovereignty, and sovereignty is the ability of national communities to decide their own fates. Such independence is far from obsolete, and certainly not for the countries on the eastern flank of the European Union. After years of Russian occupation, they have regained their state sovereignty. They will continue to insist on it, and rightly so.

Capitalists, too, have indulged in the fantasy of the end of the state, especially in the neoliberal version of an economy free of political constraints. This peculiar fiction grew pronounced in the millenarian hallucination of an “end of history,” which preached that the epochal change of 1989 had ushered in a Kantian era of perpetual peace. Global capitalism was supposed to erase borders, replacing national solidarities with abstract universalism. 

Genuine conflicts were predicted to dissolve into rules-based competition, while existential threats would dissipate in a thoroughly benign cosmos. After all, with the fall of Communism, all enemies had disappeared, which made states obsolete. 

https://abc7ny.com/health/javits-center-expected-to-open-as-field-hospital-on-monday-in-nyc/6058021/

NEW YORK CITY (WABC) — The death toll in New York City from the COVID-19 pandemic has climbed to 450 with over 26,000 testing positive.

This as the naval ship USNS Comfort is due to arrive from Virginia and a field hospital is set to open at the Javits Center on Monday.

The army corps of engineers set up the site in just a few days to help ease the burden of overrun hospitals like the one in Elmhurst, Queens.

Governor Cuomo said on Friday he would ask the White House for permission to turn Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, CUNY Staten Island and the New York Expo Center in the Bronx into additional field hospitals.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/489968-governors-should-focus-on-tackling-coronavirus-rather-than-shift-blame

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called on the federal government to take control of the medical supply market. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker demanded that President Trump take charge and said “precious months” were wasted waiting for federal action. Some critics are even more direct in demanding a federal takeover, including a national quarantine.

It is the legal version of panic shopping. Many seem to long for federal takeovers, if not martial law. Yet like all panic shopping, they are buying into far more than they need while not doing as much as they could with what they have. For decades, governors tried to retain principal authority over public emergencies, but they did very little with those powers. While many are doing impressive work now, some governors seem as eager to contain the blame as the coronavirus. Call it political distancing.

Even if Trump nationalized the crisis by deploying troops, imposing price controls, and forcing production of ventilators, the Constitution has left most police authority and public health safety to the states in our system of federalism. The Framers believed liberties and powers were safest when held closest to citizens in local and state governments. Elected officials at the local and state levels are more readily held accountable than unknown Washington bureaucrats. Of course, with authority comes responsibility, and the latter notion is not always as welcomed as the former.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/28/its-not-a-choice-between-lives-or-the-economy/

““First do no harm.” Dr. Lee is right to warn that the panicked response to this new virus has neglected that age-old medical advice. “Unless,” he notes, “we tighten criteria for recording death due only to the virus (as opposed to it being present in those who died from other conditions), the official figures may show a lot more deaths apparently caused by the virus than [are] actually the case. What then? How do we measure the health consequences of taking people’s lives, jobs, leisure and purpose away from them to protect them from an anticipated threat? Which causes the least harm?”

President Trump has shown great leadership during this manufactured crisis. Let’s hope he continues to ponder his observation that we do not want to get ourselves into a situation in which the cure is worse than the disease.

There seem to be shortages of everything these days, not least a shortage of commentary on the COVID-19 virus, also known as the Chinese virus, the Wuhan flu, known to some as the Chinese Communist Party virus, or the CCP virus for short.

Since there has been so little discussion of this disease in the news or in the blogosphere, I thought I would weigh in with a word or two.

Regular readers will know that I have already, these past few weeks, had occasion to say something about this disease, and the reaction to the disease, here and at other venues. I seem to be in a distinct minority in thinking that the best reaction to the disease was not furnished by the protagonist of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”

Let me begin, therefore, by acknowledging that this new virus can make people, especially older people, and most particularly older with other health problems very sick indeed.

COVID-19 is the big and nastier brother of SARS, another Chinese import, which made its way around the world in the early 2000s and killed nearly 800 people. “SARS” stands for “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome,” which can be the dreaded effect of COVID-19 infection and which explains why you are hearing so much about medical ventilators at the moment.

https://stanfordreview.org/stanford-coronavirus-china/?fbclid=IwAR3LZ1QHLuMN4QtYgJ2NHyTjd5E5yV80EW5mKD69rE2RLOrLouSgUdxZuxM

“Unfortunately, Stanford is in good company. The WHO, for example, seems to be completely inChina’s pocket, and helped sweep the pandemic under the rug. It credulously accepted Chinese state information at face value, such as their January 14 claim that there was ‘no evidence of human-to-human transmission.’

An odd sensitivity hovers over campus (or rather, what’s left of campus). Somehow, it is offensive to blame China for a disaster that is clearly China’s fault.

And by China, of course, I do not mean “people of Chinese descent,”, or even “Chinese citizens,” but rather the repressive Chinese Communist Party.

In February, Dean of Students Mona Hicks sent out an email warning of a “rise in xenophobia,” followed by the ASSU’s condemnation of the President’s use of the phrase “Chinese virus” as “racist and xenophobic.”