RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/it-s-time-for-an-alternative-to-lockdown

As France and Germany lock down again – and as Britain considers whether to follow suit – many people will be wondering: can’t we think of a better way to handle this pandemic? No one is in any doubt about the threat posed by the Coronavirus. But nor should there be any doubt about the harm posed by lockdown: the mental health, the economic destitution, the deep damage inflicted on families, communities and societies. Perhaps the worst of it is the idea that, when lockdown ends, the virus resumes – and you are back where you started. Where is the exit strategy? And where is the assessment of the costs?

We should, in moments of crisis, be open to ideas about how best to handle it. The previous strategy – lockdown – cannot claim to have been a great success. Which is why it’s strange to see such hostility in so many quarters to the idea of even debating a better way out of this mess. The Great Barrington Declaration calls for another way. The focused protection ideas discussed in the Declaration would minimise the harms that would befall those at high and low risk of mortality from Covid should they become infected. The plan would protect higher-risk people (mainly older people over 70) by devoting overwhelming resources and ingenuity to the cause of preventing exposure to infected Covid patients. It would protect lower risk people who face a much greater medical and psychological harm from lockdowns than they do from Covid (an infection fatality rate of five deaths per 10,000) by permitting them to resume their normal lives.

Despite the evident common sense of these ideas – they represent a return to the successful way we have dealt with similar epidemics over the last century – the release of the Declaration has led to a fierce counter-attack by lockdown proponents. These attacks have routinely resorted to propaganda, inaccurately characterising the approach as a ‘herd immunity strategy’ in places like the New York Times. This despite the fact that population immunity is the inevitable endpoint of the epidemic, no matter what policy we adopt. Though a few stalwarts may pine for zero Covid, we would destroy civilisation worldwide in the quixotic bid to achieve it. All viable options – including the lockdown-until-vaccine and the focused protection strategy share herd immunity as an end state. The only open question is how best to minimise death and human despair from both Covid and non-Covid sources in the process of getting there. And the answer is focused protection.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/29/ny-gov-cuomo-goes-on-self-congratulatory-book-tour-as-doj-probes-covid-nursing-home-deaths/

As New York Governor Andrew Cuomo embarked on a self-congratulatory book tour this week, the U.S. Department of Justice requested additional data from his administration on coronavirus deaths linked to nursing homes.

According to the New York Post, the DOJ’s inquiry could reveal if the state significantly undercounted the number of COVID-19 fatalities among the residents of more than 1,000 private nursing homes.

New York records provided in response to an August Justice Department inquiry indicated that a quarter of deaths in the state’s roughly two dozen public nursing homes weren’t disclosed to federal health officials, administration sources said.

New York indicated that about 400 residents of the state’s public facilities died from COVID-19, according to federal sources, who said that state facilities had only disclosed about 300 deaths to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In total, the New York Health Department publicly reports about 6,720 deaths from the serious respiratory bug in nursing homes and adult-care facilities. But the true scope of New York’s tragic toll in nursing homes is expected to be much higher.

According to the AP, the state only counted residents who passed away on the nursing home premises but not those who were sent to the hospital. An AP analysis in August estimated that the state was likely undercounting such deaths by thousands.

With over 33,000 fatalities, New York leads by far all of the other states in the number of deaths by the coronavirus, while it is number four on the list of total COVID-19 cases in the United States.

The Democrat governor has denied accusations that his administration’s now infamous directive mandating that nursing homes accept patients diagnosed with the coronavirus contributed significantly to NY’s disproportionately large number of deaths.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/covid-19-pcr-testing-worthless-jack-kerwick/

While some of us who value thinking and science above politics have long known it, it seems that even the New York Times (and, by implication, all who equate its pronouncements with the Gospel) are beginning to realize that the much vaunted PCR test is essentially worthless.  

At the very least—and this is putting it undoubtedly too generously—it is anything but “the gold standard” of COVID-19 determiners that we have been led to believe it is.  In fact, it’s not even “the divining rod” that my martial arts instructor and USMC Lieutenant-Colonel Al Ridenhour, who has some experience working with deadly nuclear, biological, and chemical agents, once referred to it in a conversation with me.   

While some self-styled “fact-checkers”—who are invariably leftist partisans who are only interested in “fact-checking” the claims of those who dare to challenge their agenda—are accusing conservatives who repeat its assertion that the PCR test has a 90% false positive rate of “misinterpreting” the Times piece, there wasn’t any misinterpretation at all.

One American News Network (OANN), The Blaze, Red State, and Townhall Media are among the sites that have come under fire for having allegedly misread The Times.  The Health Feedback “fact-checker” states:

“The claim that the U.S. has an inflated COVID-19 case count due to the sensitivity of the diagnostic PCR test for the virus that causes COVID-19…is a misinterpretation of a New York Times news report…[which questions whether] PCR test results for the virus that causes COVID-19 are a practical way of informing an infected person what steps they should take after their diagnosis [.]”

https://www.city-journal.org/html/liberals-versus-political-speech-14330.html

Once upon a time, liberals pushed free speech at every opportunity. They lauded Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis for protecting unpopular views via the First Amendment early in the last century, for instance. During the 1960s, Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement demanded the right to demonstrate politically on campus—and liberals championed the cause. Similar progressive cheers rang out when the Supreme Court extended the First Amendment to protect inarticulate expression, like nude dancing and flag burning.

But now liberals want to empower the government to put people behind bars for advancing political ideas, come election time. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has declared one litmus test for a Supreme Court justice: a commitment to overrule Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, the 2010 Supreme Court opinion upholding Americans’ First Amendment right to use a corporate form to criticize or praise politicians running for office. (The politician criticized in that case was none other than Hillary Clinton.) Worse still, Democratic senators have introduced a constitutional amendment that goes beyond reversing Citizens United and gives Congress substantial discretion to regulate how electoral debates are conducted.

This dramatic shift suggests that liberals have lost faith in their arguments—above all, at the ballot box. If you hold sway over the media and the academy and yet still fail to convince a majority of voters with your views, suppressing speech that counters those views can start to seem like a constitutional imperative.

And make no mistake: beyond the rough-and-tumble of political campaigns, left-liberals continue to dominate the institutions that set the nation’s political agenda.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/rolling-the-dice-on-chaos-the-supreme-cou

T here’s one thing we’ve forgotten to mention about political intimidation of the Supreme Court. It works.

On the right, and among those who respect history, tradition, and stability, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Court-packing gambit is remembered as a welcome rejection of radicalism: At the pinnacle of his influence, the most powerful president of the 20th century could not prevail on his scheme to expand the Court and fill it with like-minded, politically willful progressives, even though his party controlled both houses of Congress by decisive margins.

Yet, on the left, and especially among Alinskyites schooled in the extortionate leveraging of power, the Court-packing threat is remembered as a triumph. It provoked the famous “switch in time that saved nine”: Fearful that FDR would follow through and destroy the Court’s standing as a rule-of-law institution, the Court — led by Justice Owen Roberts — dramatically shifted, upholding the New Deal it had been stalling, and ushering in the foundations of progressive governance.

Credible Court-packing threats by the Left intimidate moderate, politically minded justices, exactly as they are meant to do.

Duly cowed by today’s Court-packing threats, Chief Justice John Roberts has steered the Court into a possible disaster that has been foreseeable (and foreseen) for weeks. Last night, the justices made clear that they will not resolve state voting-law disputes prior to next Tuesday’s election. They will roll the dice on chaos, and all its potentially ruinous ramifications — not just for the country but for the Court.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16704/russian-disinformation

One must also consider the “arguments” about the “evidence” of Russian disinformation. First off, we have unending “investigations” by various bodies and persons who are not qualified to investigate a price check at Wal-Mart. Here, I speak of persons like Adam Schiff or the members and staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Second, we have the “tv experts.” These folks are usually the former heads of the agencies and departments that are actually guilty of the subversion and sedition that got us to this point. Think of John Brennan giving his expert opinion on the innocence and honor of James Comey. When any of these characters (and paid CNN contributors) invokes Russian disinformation (usually quoting each other), you know they are lying. Period.

Of course, anyone who asks questions about any of the logical disconnects and fallacies of any alleged Russian disinformation campaign must be on Putin’s payroll. Ask a question? Sure “comrade,” go ahead!

It is terribly important to be reminded of all these things just a few days before the election. You should go to your polling place in-person and “vote angry.” You’ve been lied to – savagely – for nearly four years. Go ahead and take your electoral revenge.

We have been subjected to four years of large parts of the US government shrieking about Russia and the threats posed by that country to the safety of our republic. How did so many miss their own serial treasons, in concert with the Soviet and Russian governments, dating back to 1917? Let us refresh our recollections of how so many Americans reframed history and disinformation. Some of the following may be “lost history” to you, but that is okay, because we definitely need some reminders before election day.

FDR himself personally schmoozed Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov in the White House and acknowledged the USSR diplomatically for no US advantage whatsoever in November of 1933. When Litvinov returned to his embassy from the White House, he openly mocked FDR’s naïveté and gullibility to his staff.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/masks-are-a-distraction-from-the-pandemic-reality-11603927026?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Dr. Ladapo is an associate professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

A hallmark of Covid-19 pandemic policy has been the failure of political leaders and health officials to anticipate the unintended consequences of their actions. This tendency has haunted many decisions, from lockdowns that triggered enormous unemployment and increased alcohol and drug abuse, to school closures that are widening educational disparities between rich and poor families. Mask mandates may also have unintended consequences that outweigh the benefits.

First, consider how the debate has evolved and the underlying scientific evidence. Several randomized trials of community or household masking have been completed. Most have shown that wearing a mask has little or no effect on respiratory virus transmission, according to a review published earlier this year in Emerging Infectious Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s journal. In March, when Anthony Fauci said, “wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better” but “it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think it is,” his statement reflected scientific consensus, and was consistent with the World Health Organization’s guidance.

Almost overnight, the recommendations flipped. The reason? The risk of asymptomatic transmission. Health officials said mask mandates were now not only reasonable but critical. This is a weak rationale, given that presymptomatic spread of respiratory viruses isn’t a novel phenomenon in public health. Asymptomatic cases of influenza occur in up to a third of patients, according to a 2016 report in Emerging Infectious Diseases, and even more patients had mild cases that are never diagnosed. Asymptomatic or mild cases appear to contribute more to Covid-19 transmission, but this happens in flu cases, too, though no one has called for mask mandates during flu season.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/sarah-hoyt/2020/10/27/how-the-left-is-using-americans-empathy-and-decency-to-destroy-us-n1097734

A lot of people are upset and worried about how easy it was for the various state governments to perform illegal takings on the population by preventing businesses from operating or from operating normally for months on end, in the absence of an immediate and pressing emergency.

Yes, I know COVID-19 was presented as an immediate and pressing emergency. But presenting it as such doesn’t make it so.

Yes, it is dangerous, mostly to the very elderly and severely immune-compromised. Yes, it behooves a civilized society to protect those people.

Which we didn’t do. Instead, we treated the virus as though it were uniformly dangerous and just as likely to kill the family’s four-year-old as grandma. We closed schools (and re-opened a number of them as daycare centers), selectively closed stores (because apparently, the virus is far less dangerous in pot dispensaries than in bookstores, say), mandated ridiculously low occupancy for restaurants (anyone who has dined out in both NYC and anywhere out West knows that in the West our tables are already “distanced”) and generally set our hair on fire and ran around screaming that it hurts.

Which it very well should, because stupidity should hurt. Most Democrat-controlled states in fact seem to have gone out of their way to “make it hurt,” including Governor Newsom’s insistence that Californians not celebrate Thanksgiving.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/10/no-sanity-no-kumbaya-no-quarter/

“Perhaps once there was a possibility of civil intercourse with those on the Left but no longer, not with the crazies in full command of what laughably sees itself as the ‘progressive’ side of politics. Gender-confused men competing against women, renewables rorters as prophets of green salvation, foes of free speech — there can be no common ground with that lot.”

I briefly caught the Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey being interviewed on Fox News the other day. Heard him say that whoever won the election he hoped Americans would come together. He seemed from the brief bit I saw to be much less radically progressive than his peers. But he’s obviously a dreamer. There is no coming together. There is no possible rapprochement between the loonies that now occupy the political Left and sensible people. As a sensible person myself, or so I like to think, let me make my position crystal clear by way of illustrations.

Last week on the Alan Jones Show, Mark Latham revealed instructional videos teaching teachers in NSW how to corrupt the minds of schoolchildren by teaching them that their sexual identity is a “social construct.” Hey, your willies or vaginas are just in your minds, don’t you know? Moreover, disgustingly, teachers are being advised to keep any expressed gender confusion among little Bills and Jills — and why wouldn’t they be confused attending school these days — under wraps from their parents, lest those old fogies don’t understand.

I have nothing in common with people who perpetrate or support this kind of child abuse and I have no intention of ever giving them the time of day. Where to go now? There are so many examples. Let’s go to the really inane, to rich American footballer Colin Kaepernick and his latest delusional call for the abolition of police forces and prisons: “Another world is possible, a world grounded in love, justice, and accountability, a world grounded in safety and good health, a world grounded in meeting the needs of people. Abolition now.”

It is hard to know where to start in commenting on this utopian tripe. Luckily, I don’t have to, the wonderfully sensible and articulate Heather Mac Donald did it on the Tucker Carlson Show. I will pick out just a few phrases but you should, let me reiterate should, watch the whole 4½ minute clip. She is wonderfully direct and uncompromising. Male conservative commentators could learn a thing or two.