RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/26/discipline-determination-and-data-will-get-us-through-the-pandemic/

While discussing many pandemic-related issues with friends and colleagues, we were reminded of the quip of journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

As we battle the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the illness it causes, COVID-19, the “fog of war” continues on both the medical and epidemiological fronts. On the public health side, different studies, especially those that involve modeling, seem to reach conflicting, or at least ambiguous, conclusions. And politicians and pundits have jumped in to make the fog denser, with many policy prescriptions contaminated by misinformation, ideological spin, and partisan politics.

                                                       Obtaining clarity about many aspects of COVID-19 has been elusive. Dr. Anthony Fauci has emphasized the virus’s unique “protean manifestations”: “I have never seen a virus in which you have 20 percent to 40 percent of individuals who could have no symptoms at all, to individuals who get mild illness and do not need to go to a hospital, to people confined to their beds at home for weeks with multiple post-viral syndromes,” he said. 

SARS-CoV-2 is also unusual in being able to infect a broad spectrum of body tissues beyond the respiratory tract, including the digestive tract, neurons that mediate smell and taste, kidneys, and most critically, the heart and lining of blood vessels. 

Infection often leads to widespread inflammation and tiny clots, which cause secondary deleterious effects. Moreover, an Italian research study found that upwards of 85 percent of patients who had been hospitalized have persistent, sometimes serious aftereffects that can drag on for an indeterminate amount of time, and possibly permanently. (The virus is too recent to know conclusively.)

The clear lesson is that efforts to prevent infection are critical. But, absent a vaccine, which is still likely far off, that’s complicated and involves difficult cost-benefit calculations.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16421/alan-dershowitz-pursue-justice

Now, at 82, I am demanding justice for myself. I have been falsely accused by a woman I never met of having sex with her…. Indeed, the best evidence of my innocence is in her own words: a series of emails and manuscript that she tried to suppress in which she essentially admits that she never met me. Her lawyers own words — she is “wrong… simply wrong” in accusing you — constitutes an admission attributable to her.

Another of her lawyers has acknowledged that she lied about other prominent men. She told her best friend and her best friend’s husband that she was pressured by her lawyer to falsely accuse me.

The words in Hebrew are “Lo takir panim,” which means do not base your decision on the faces or identities of the litigants. Base it instead on the facts and the evidence. I wish people today would abide by that 3,000-year-old wisdom.

I also wish judges and prosecutors paid more heed to another command of my Bible portion: “The judges shall inquire diligently; and behold if the witness be a false witness and has testified falsely against his brother, then shall ye do unto him as he had proposed to do unto his brother…” I have invited prosecutors and judges to “inquire diligently” into my accuser and me. If they do, they will conclude that she has “testified falsely” and should be punished under the law of perjury.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/26/jacob-blakes-mother-thanks-trump-for-phone-call-expresses-disgust-with-kenosha-rioters/

Jacob Blake’s mother on Tuesday denounced the violent rioting that has rocked Kenosha since her son was shot, and said that she and her husband were praying for police officers.

Blake’s mother Julia Jackson also apologized to President Trump for missing a presidential phone call that was made following her heartfelt remarks at a news conference earlier Tuesday.

In an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, Jackson expressed disgust with the rioting, calling it “not acceptable.”

“My family and I are very hurt. And quite frankly disgusted,” she told Lemon. “And as his mother, please don’t burn up property and cause havoc and tear your own homes down in my son’s name. You shouldn’t do it, people shouldn’t do it anyway, but to use my child or any other mother or father’s child—our tragedy—to react in that manner, it’s just not acceptable,” she said.

Jackson, who was accompanied by the family’s attorney Benjamin Crump on the Skype call, pointed out that the ongoing violence was not helping her son or anyone else who has suffered from alleged police brutality.

When asked by Lemon whether she had a message for any politicians, including Trump, Jackson took the opportunity to apologize to “our President Trump” on behalf of a family member who had said something that was “not kind.”

“She is hurting, and I do apologize for that,” she said. “That does not reflect our behavior.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/ongoing-riots-prove-again-dangers-appeasement-bruce-thornton/

The riots and protests that began in late May have been like wildfires of the sort currently blazing in California. Just as riots have lessened in intensity in some cities, in others they have flared up to new levels of destruction. In Kenosha Wisconsin, the arson has spread more widely, and fatal gun-battles have erupted between the “peaceful protestor” thugs and armed citizens defending their lives and property.

Also like the wildfires, the continuing violence is the consequence of unforced errors made by civic leaders in thrall to dubious ideologies. California is burning because of government environmental policies that encourage mismanagement such as not thinning its huge tracts of forest, resulting in lethal loads of dead and dying trees that provide abundant the fuel for the fires.

In the cities most afflicted with violent protests, mayors who embrace the progressive demonization of law enforcement and the racial melodrama about “systemic racism” have not acted quickly and vigorously enough to stop the violence before it escalated. Police have been ordered to stand down, restricted in their tactics and weapons, and left on their own without moral and material support from their civic bosses.

The ancient lesson has once again been proven: Failure to act preemptively and forcefully to violent disorder, and the appeasement of aggressors with concessions, lead to ever escalating levels of violence and mayhem.

America’s historically most destructive riot provides an object lesson. In July of 1863, New York erupted in widespread rioting over a recently passed federal law instituting a draft-lottery. Working class New Yorkers went on a rampage, attacking buildings and free blacks, who were not subject to the lottery. Five days of rioting left over 100 dead, including 11 black men who were lynched, 3000 blacks left homeless, 2000 blacks and whites wounded, and millions of dollars in property damage.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/president-sending-troops-law-enforcement-to-kenosha/
The violence has to end, or it has to be ended.

President Trump tweeted early this afternoon (here and here) that, after consultation between administration and Wisconsin officials, Governor Evers has agreed to accept federal security and law-enforcement assistance. Thus, the president says he will forthwith be dispatching National Guard troops as well as federal law-enforcement — I presume (though he does not say) agents from the various Justice Department components that, in the main, are carrying out Operation Legend.

Let me just quickly repeat a few things I’ve been saying since late May, when the rioting began.

The prerequisite for enforcing the rule of law is the establishment of order. Law enforcement agencies — federal, state, and local — are capable of maintaining law and order, but not of establishing it. They simply do not have the resources to impose order if it has been lost due to insurrectionist violence. And trying to conduct law-enforcement operations when order has been lost is like the concept we used to ridicule in connection efforts to treat jihadist war as if it were a problem fit for courtroom adjudication — you can’t turn battlefields into crime scenes.

In our system, the president has not only the authority but the obligation to protect the people of states in which order has broken down and widespread violence, beyond the capacity of law enforcement to quell, has taken hold.

https://nypost.com/2020/08/25/we-could-beat-covid-19-before-a-vaccine-is-ready/

Is a vaccine the only way to return to normal after ­COVID-19? New research into the virus suggests not — that the infection rate may drop to tiny levels before then.

Since the spring, scientists have known the virus’s infection fatality rate — how many people it kills compared to the number it infects — is under 1 percent, perhaps as low as 0.2 percent. That lower figure translates into one death for every 500 people infected.

We have also known that deaths are seriously skewed by age. The media says older people are at “more” risk from the novel coronavirus than younger people. That’s true, but it understates the reality. Most people do not realize that the risks to people over 80 are hundreds or thousands of times higher than those younger people face.

The fatality rate for children, meanwhile, is very small. In July, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said it’s about one in a million infected.

Of course, most of the media simply ignored Redfield’s comment — maybe because it would have made parents less afraid to send their kids to school.

But the fatality rate is only half the puzzle when scientists try to figure out what the final death toll from the coronavirus might be. And even with a small rate, the numbers are staggering. If the entire nation was infected, it would mean potentially 500,000 or more Americans dead.

https://www.city-journal.org/minneapolis-2040-plan

In the months before the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a small group was doing its best to spread the message that the city was deeply racist. They were not protesters or looters, or the organized African-American community of the city’s soon-to-be-burned North Side, but rather the mayor and city council. Their focus was what might have seemed an obscure and technical topic: zoning. They were led by one-time San Francisco city planner Lisa Bender, president of the city council, a position considered almost as powerful as that of the mayor.

“We’ve inherited a system that both for decades has privileged those with the most and forgotten the people that we really have left behind,” Bender said. “And housing is inextricably linked with income, with all these other systems that are failing, especially in Minnesota, people of color.” She put forth a plan to relax single-family zoning and to permit more multifamily home construction in a city that was—at least pre-George Floyd—attracting millennials and increasing its population, anomalously for the Upper Midwest. Mayor Jacob Frey shared Bender’s view. The city, he told Politico, was perpetuating “racist policies implicitly through our zoning code.”

What might have been both an effective consensus reform and a change that could inspire other cities and suburbs to follow suit backfired, thanks to being tied—unnecessarily and unjustifiably—to alleged racism. The plan did not originate in the city’s black community, and black leaders in Minneapolis have not even mentioned it as part of what the city must do to expunge racism in the wake of Floyd’s death. It was driven by the city’s white progressive leadership.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c

In cities across the country, it has been a summer of continuous protests, many of which have escalated to riots, arson, and looting. The protesters chant to defund the police, but as many of the protests have turned violent, police departments in affected cities have been overwhelmed with calls for assistance.  

So should protesters’ demands to “defund the police” be taken literally?  I spent some time looking into what proposals to “defund the police” actually entail, though I often wonder if protesters themselves know what their goals are. There definitely seems to be a divide between media and think tank commenters on the one hand, and the protesters in cities on the other.  

Consider a June 19 report from Brookings Institute. According to this Report, “defund the police” technically just means “reallocating or redirecting funding away from the police department to other government agencies funded by the local municipality. That’s it. It’s that simple.” Similarly, for The Cut, Amanda Arnold writes:

“Defunding the police does not necessarily mean getting rid of the police altogether. Rather, it would mean reducing police budgets and reallocating those funds to crucial and oft-neglected areas like education, public health, housing, and youth services.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/26/the-democrats-public-shaming-is-now-coming-for-you/

In June of 2018, a spate of incidents occurred in which Trump administration officials were heckled at or asked to leave restaurants. This happened to then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen who was heckled at a DC eatery and then-Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders who was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant by its owner. A debate grew about whether such public shaming was an acceptable form of political speech. Many on the left argued it was.
One Democrat, Rep. Maxine Waters had no doubt about the just nature of this tactic, she said at the time, “Lets make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Other Democrats pushed back, albeit gently, against Waters’ rather extreme remarks but now it appears Waters’ approach is gaining momentum, not in regard to members of Trump’s Cabinet, but rather against any person that refuses to obey the orders of Black Lives Matters activists. This week a viral video emerged of a woman being harangued by a large, mostly white, BLM crowd, screamed at, with people right in her face because she refused to raise her fist in the air in a sign of solidarity.
To call this shift from shaming politicians to shaming regular citizens predictable is a vast understatement. It was always the logical end of the road Waters was laying out. After all, if political disagreement is enough justification for screaming at a person in power, why not a person you suspect of help putting them there? In the case this week, which was one of many, the young woman was actually supportive of BLM, but her refusal to raise her fist was sufficient to make her a target.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/kevin-clinesmith-guilty-plea-russia-probe-ly

He went to great lengths to lie to a federal court and, when caught, lied by saying he didn’t really intend to lie.

Author’s Note: This is the last of a three-part series (see Part 1 and Part 2).

To recap, in June 2017, as the FBI was preparing to submit a fourth sworn application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to surveil former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page, FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith came up with a story to conceal Page’s history as a CIA informant.

On June 15, a CIA liaison had told Clinesmith that Page had been a witting informant who reported information to the agency, a status denoted by a classified digraph (a two-letter symbol). Clinesmith, however, disingenuously claimed to have been told that Page was never a CIA informant; rather, he was purportedly an American who unwittingly passed information to the CIA by communicating with an unidentified third person who was an actual CIA informant. This was a distortion of what the CIA liaison had told Clinesmith.

He concocted the story, nonetheless, by fixing on the liaison’s use of the word encrypt. In its intelligence reports, the FBI routinely conceals (i.e., encrypts) the identities of Americans whose information is incidentally captured because they communicate with third parties who are FBI informants or surveillance targets. Clinesmith purported to construe the digraph as signifying that the CIA had concealed Page’s identity for a similar reason — i.e., he was not source, but he had dealt with someone who was a source.

Clinesmith studiously declined the CIA liaison’s offer to discuss the matter further, for that would have made it impossible to feign confusion. But he still had to get his fictional version of Page’s status past two officials.