RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1271135876379299848.htmlTop of Form

1/ This panic is likely to prove even more embarrassing than previous panics. Here’s why: the media is both confused and conflating several different data points in an effort to stir hysteria. (Stop me if you’ve heard this before.)

What do I mean?

2/ So: you’ve heard positive tests are up in several states. True. The media refers to these as “cases,” as if positive tests have clinical significance by themselves. They do not. The vast majority of people with positive tests do not become ill enough to need hospitalization…

3/ Much less intensive care or ventilator support. For people under 50, this is true in the extreme. But the daily age distribution of positive tests is rarely if ever supported…

4/ Second: you’ve heard overall hospitalizations are up in some states. This is also true. THIS IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG. Overall hospitalizations are rising because people are returning to hospitals for elective (and in some cases very necessary) surgeries that were postponed…

5/ Now, in some of these states COVID-related hospitalizations have also risen (though they make up a tiny fraction of overall hospitalizations). Scary, right?

No. When people go to the hospital for elective surgeries they are now routinely tested for COVID…

6/ Whether or not they are symptomatic. Hospitals have financial and legal as well as medical incentives to do this. IF THEY ARE POSITIVE, hospitals will report them as COVID patients (since, technically, they are), EVEN IF THEY HAVE NO COVID SYMPTOMS.

7/ This fact accounts for the bizarre disconnect between the fact the number of people going to emergency rooms with influenza-like or COVID-like symptoms is NOT rising (and remains in the low single digits) even in states reporting more hospitalizations…

8/ As well as the fact that fewer hospitalized cases are now progressing to ventilators (I can’t swear to this in every state, but it appears to be a trend)…

9/ And the fact that deaths no longer seem to have any relationship to case counts in many states (true even accounting for the fact that deaths lag).

The question you should be asking yourself: why aren’t Europe and Asia seeing post-lockdown spikes if this trend is real?

10/ And don’t say masks. Masks are not routine in Europe. So either COVID is somehow different post-lockdown in Europe (and different in different states, too)… or this is just one last gasp of panic porn.

https://twitter.com/SpeechUnion/status/1269314030663012352

The Free Speech Union on Twitter: “1/ An alarming number of people are losing their jobs at the moment – or being suspended from them, pending investigations – because they’ve criticised some aspect of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/12/riots-in-defense-of-the-narrative-are-n

It’s widely known that our betters say it’s OK to protest in massive groups despite the risk of coronavirus transmission, but small gatherings not in support of Black Lives Matter are still unacceptable. Now we’re told that it’s also fine for protests to turn violent as long as it happens for the “right” reason. Imagine, though, the howling that would have pierced our ears had there been a whiff of violence started by the protesters whose only demand was to be set free of the pandemic lockdowns.

Watching these developments, including the conquest of a chunk of Seattle by a band of louts, we are reminded of David Bowie singing “this is not America” 35 years ago. We’re losing what we were and becoming something much less than that. The evidence is in the following statement.

“Non-violence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence,” Wellesley College professor Kellie Carter Jackson recently said in a Slate interview.

Before dismissing that outrageous assertion as a lone and therefore meaningless opinion, consider that the acts of thousands are often cued by a single person. Then take a look at the effort to normalize that sort of thinking:

Democratic Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey described the unrest as “a once in a lifetime opportunity,” adding, “yes, America is burning, but that’s how forests grow.”
According to California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, “young people, they have a whole new definition for ‘looting.’”
New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who directed the utterly mendacious 1619 Project, which might be the most racist screed published in the mainstream in this century, said “destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.”
Essence magazine, which is by no means an underground publication, and surely holds some influence over its readership, recently posted an op-ed headlined “Burn It All Down.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/sports-woke-utopia-joseph-hippolito/

As riots roiled the nation following George Floyd’s death, the “progressive” quest for totalitarian dominance inflicted two casualties on the NFL.

Denver Broncos’ head coach Vic Fangio and New Orleans Saints’ quarterback Drew Brees had to apologize one day after stating opinions that contradicted the Leftist narrative of the United States as systemically racist.

“I think our problems in the NFL along those lines are minimal,” Fangio said June 2. “We’re a league of meritocracy. You earn what you get, you get what you earn. I don’t see racism at all in the NFL, I don’t see discrimination in the NFL. We live in a great atmosphere, like I alluded to earlier. We’re lucky. We all live together, joined as one, for one common goal, and we all intermingle and mix tremendously. If society reflected an NFL team, we’d all be great.”

Beforehand, Fangio said Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis policeman who killed Floyd, “should be punished to the full extent of the law of the crimes he was charged with” and failed “to uphold the badge and uniform he was entrusted with.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/free-citizens-do-not-kneel-bruce-thornton/

In the last couple of weeks we have witnessed people, most of them white, kneeling before black protestors and activists as a supposed gesture of repentance for their crimes of “white privilege” and tolerating “systemic racism.” The kneeling penitents include not just ordinary people, but police officers, National Guardsmen, and, in a shocking self-debasement of the world’s greatest democratic republic, a gaggle of House Representatives adorned with “culturally appropriated” African kente cloth scarves.

White progressive racial masochism is nothing new; Tom Wolfe skewered it brilliantly nearly a half century ago in essays like “Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers.” But the current manifestation is more significant and dangerous. It has taken place amidst violent widespread rioting and looting and assaults, and so these acts of kneeling are a form of tribute exacted by the sheer power of destruction wrought by the rioters and their “peaceful” abettors. As such, they undermine the very foundation of citizen self-rule and political freedom: Government by laws, offices, and free deliberation rather than by the whims and failings of one man; and by accountability to the sovereign people and their laws, instead of submission to violent coercion.

Kneeling specifically appears in Greek literature as an emblem of political slavery that follows an absence of rule by law and accountability. In the Histories, Herodotus’s narrative of the Persian wars continually contrasts the free, self-ruling Greek with the slavish, unfree Persians. One cultural practice in particular epitomized for the Greeks the political enslavement of the Persians who were ruled by the quasi-divine Great King Xerxes bestowed with absolute power over the lives and property of his subjects. Hence the law that anytime someone came into the presence of the King, he had to kneel before him, then bend over and kiss the ground as an act of submission. The Greek word for this was proskunesis, an act of “obeisance” suitable only for acknowledging the gods.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/11/police_and_race_hard_problems_and_hard_truths_143422.html

In the midst of head-spinning talk about defunding police or abolishing them entirely, it’s important to step back and take a sober look at the debate. The racial dimension of policing is vexing because the racial dimension of American life is vexing. It is the deepest scar in our history. We treated it indecisively in forming our new nation and finally confronted it, at gruesome cost, in a great Civil War. We confronted it again a century later, after the failure of Reconstruction and decades of Jim Crow laws, during the Civil Rights Movement.

Despite those efforts and significant progress over the past half century, we never eliminated racism completely. We are facing it again today. The laws of the mid-1960s ensured de jure equality. Since then, the struggle has been to create a more equal society in practice. It’s difficult to even agree on the meaning of that term, much less achieve it. For some, equality refers to outcomes; for others, opportunities. Whatever the meaning, it must mean equal treatment by police. There’s no disagreement about that fundamental point.

For those who experienced the racial upheavals of the 1960s, it should be obvious that racism is far less prevalent in all aspects of American life today. That includes policing. It may not seem that way, though, because our time horizons are too short. Most Americans alive today didn’t live through that era, so they haven’t witnessed the gradual but unmistakable improvement. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/06/11/should-non-profit-us-food-bank-executives-earn-up-to-11-million-per-year/#3d83ace1d5ba

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a record 44 million Americans lost their jobs and filed for unemployment. Many turned to their local non-profit, charitable food banks for hunger relief.

Based in Chicago, Feeding America is the largest food bank in the country with revenues of $2.9 billion (2019). Primarily a pass-through organization, it makes grants and donations to local food banks across the country.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reviewed Feeding America’s payroll disclosures and found Diana Aviv, CEO, made $1.1 million (2019). This amount included $347,209 from a previous employer and rolled into a new 457B plan which was distributed to her when she left the organization that year.

In the previous year, Feeding America paid Aviv compensation of $860,909.

In 2019, other executives at the organization also made a lot of money: President Matthew Knott ($561,842, up $89,224), Treasurer Paul Henrys ($412,105, up $15,162), and Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Catherine Davis ($344,166, up $17,161). Chief Supply Chain Officer William Thomas made nearly $600,000 between 2018 and 2019 before leaving the organization.