RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-5-6-why-are-government-employees-supposedly-immune-to-layoffs

It’s the time of the coronavirus, and as we all know, that means that it is the moral responsibility of all governors and state health officials to issue “lockdown” commands, compelling all “non-essential” businesses to close until further notice. Although the sweep and severity of these “lockdown” commands has varied from state to state, at this point the governors of most states have ordered the closure of nearly all restaurants, bars, hotels, gyms, hair salons, and thousands of similar businesses. Obviously, the immediate result of these orders was going to be that the employees of the businesses would get furloughed or laid off. Some 26 million new unemployment claims had been filed by late April, with more undoubtedly to be revealed in the next weekly report.

Of course, with thousands of businesses shuttering, and their revenues disappearing, state and local tax revenues are also falling off a cliff. So if the same rules apply to these governmental entities as to private businesses, they would be about to make massive layoffs as well.

And yet, if you look at discussion about how state and local governments should deal with their own financial issues, somehow the whole idea that government workers might get laid off is beyond the purview of polite discussion. The same people who have effectively ordered the layoff of close to 30 million people in the private sector at the same time think that every single job of a civil service bureaucrat is somehow sacrosanct.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/justice-department-drops-case-against-michael-flynn/

The Justice Department has moved to withdraw its case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, citing “newly discovered and disclosed information,” according to a new court filing.

The move, first reported by The Associated Press, comes less than an hour after the top prosecutor on the case, Brandon Van Grack, submitted his withdrawal from the case. The decision said that the White House interview Flynn gave to the FBI, which ultimately led to his guilty plea, was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/neil-fergusons-error-of-judgment/

A tale of death, sex, and lousy leadership.

Yesterday, the news that the U.K. now has the worst coronavirus death toll in Europe coincided with the Telegraph’s revelation that Neil Ferguson, the lead epidemiologist at Imperial College and key adviser to the British government, had been caught with his pants down, breaking his own social-distancing rules.

Ferguson, you may recall — sometimes nicknamed “Professor Lockdown” — was the chap who warned the government that there could be up to 500,000 deaths if it didn’t immediately change course, maneuvering from a mitigation to a suppression strategy against COVID-19. Such was his influence that, almost overnight, the government abandoned its pursuit of herd immunity, rolling out the biggest restrictions of healthy and law-abiding people’s civil liberties that the country has ever seen. Ferguson strongly believed that his advice would save countless lives, and perhaps it has. But why, then, didn’t he follow it himself?

All while lecturing the public on the importance of cooperating with nationwide house imprisonment, Ferguson was conducting an affair with his married lover, who travelled across London on multiple occasions to “visit” him. The timeline provided by The Telegraph, who broke the story, leaves little room for excuses. It shows that while Ferguson briefed the country to stay put, his lover, superbly cast as the 38-year-old Antonia Staats (get it?), a left-wing activist, was traveling to and fro between her husband, their kids, and her $2 million home for her quarantine rendezvous with her favorite government scientist. As if this story couldn’t get any more bourgeois, the husband apparently wasn’t bothered by this, because the couple have an “open marriage.” It is the kind of story the British press love. Hypocrisy, stupidity, and a brilliant distraction from more pressing (and depressing) matters.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/05/san-fran-health-dept-delivering-drugs-and-booze-daniel-greenfield/

I’m sorry.

We make fun of the absolute horrid socialist insanity in Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, but parts of our own country are positively making them look sane. It’s no secret that lefties have used the pandemic to push their own policy agendas.

Public officials in San Francisco have decided to use the pandemic to justify housing homeless in hotels and delivering booze and drugs to them. 

If you ever wanted a reason to never visit San Francisco or try one of its overpriced hotels again, here you go.

San Francisco’s health department confirmed Wednesday that the city was administering alcohol, tobacco, medical cannabis and other substances in an effort to prevent a handful of people quarantined or isolating in city-leased hotels from going outside to get the substances themselves.

Administering. People. Isolating.

Compared to the San Fran Chronicle, the Ministry of Information in 1984 was the soul of clarity and meaning.

What the Chronicle means is that junkies are getting deliveries of drugs, ciggies, and booze while staying in hotels. They’re not being “administered” to them unless there’s a doctor or a nurse carefully dosing booze into a cup for them.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/big_tech_is_strangling_us.html

How ironic that the 1984 iconic advertisement that Apple used to introduce the Macintosh computer “played on imagery from George Orwell’s 1984 novella [sic] presenting Apple as rebels fighting a technocratic elite.  The spot certainly was a lot gloomier than the company’s previous commercials, that used Apple celebrity spokesman Dick Cavett.” In truth, “there was nothing cuddly about the new Macintosh ad, which was firmly rooted in the burgeoning dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic.”

Ostensibly the advertisement’s intention was “to remove people’s fears of technology [.]” In fact, Apple claimed that they “wanted to democratize technology, telling people that the power was now literally in their hands.”

How things have changed as the tech giants have morphed into near-totalitarian giants controlling far too much of our lives.  Like serfs, we bend to their will or are punished. Thus, Candace Owens is suspended from Twitter for challenging Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer while  Facebook flags the Declaration of Independence as ‘”hate speech.”

In 2016, Aaron Renn reported that both conservative and leftwing groups are pulled down at Twitter. In 2019 “YouTube blocked some British history teachers from its service for uploading archive material related to Adolf Hitler, saying they [were] breaching new guidelines banning the promotion of hate speech. The video-sharing website announced that it would remove material glorifying the Nazis from its platform in an attempt to stop people being radicalised. In the process however, it also deleted videos uploaded to help educate future generations about the risks of fascism.” 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/05/06/did-we-forge

“Former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tom Frieden avoided jail time on Tuesday after pleading guilty to groping a longtime family friend in New York.Frieden, who is also the former New York City health comissioner, turned himself in to police in August 2018 after the woman reported that he had grabbed her butt without her permission inside his Brooklyn apartment, court documents said.By pleading guilty, Frieden wasn’t required to explain what happened during the October 2017 incident to Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge Edwin Novillo. Frieden was facing up to a year in jail for misdemeanor forcible touching, third-degree sexual abuse and second-degree harassment charges, prosecutors said.”

Well, today is where House Democrats are probably going to hammer the Trump administration for having a response to this Wuhan coronavirus outbreak that is just as bad or worse than China’s handling of the pandemic that they caused. It will be political theater. It will be grounded in nonsensical partisanship. And yes, President Trump should yank his top coronavirus taskforce officials from these circus acts. The president made his disdain for House Democrats known and as the reason for why Dr. Anthony Fauci was yanked from today’s hearing (via the Hill):

House Democrats are growing frustrated in their efforts to oversee the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, as President Trump said Tuesday that he’s blocking officials from testifying in the lower chamber because he doesn’t want them taking questions from “a bunch of Trump haters.” 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2020/05/06/cuomo-condemned-nearly-2000-to-die-of-the-coronavirus-n388582

New York state reported 1,700 more deaths from coronavirus that had not been included in counts before.

They were all in nursing homes and eldercare facilities. The numbers themselves are questionable, given the incentive to count more deaths as COVID-19 deaths to obtain federal funding. That perverse incentive is probably skewing the tallies up and rendering them unreliable.

Nevertheless.

ALBANY, N.Y. — New York state reported more than 1,700 previously undisclosed deaths at nursing homes and adult care facilities in a tally that included for the first time people believed to have been killed by the coronavirus before their diagnoses could be confirmed.

The tally, released late Monday, emerged as state officials faced scrutiny over how they have protected vulnerable residents from the coronavirus.

What scrutiny? The mainstream media keep treating him like a hero and downplaying his failures. Other than the New York Post, who in the state’s media is putting the screws to Cuomo?

True scrutiny would connect this new deaths number with an order Gov. Cuomo gave just a couple of weeks ago.

Gov. Cuomo doubled down Sunday on the state’s controversial directive ordering nursing homes to admit COVID-19 patients.

This is a great, common sense interview with a seasoned Cedars physician who discusses the impact of the lockdown on medical care.  Well worth the 18 minutes!

https://youtu.be/uGXxPRayzJU

P.S.  I just had the misfortune of spending two days in the hospital for an infection from a freak abscess.  The hospital – a major L.A. medical facility – was running at less than 20% capacity with massive numbers of furloughed staff.

After multiple courses of IV antibiotics, I’m home and fine but extremely worried about the profound effect of the lockdown on our medical system.

It will be quite a while before our healthcare system will be restored.  Many medical or medical-related businesses have been destroyed and may never come back online.

The number of associated deaths for lack of treatment or reticence to seek treatment is probably incalculable.  Panic can be a deadly emotion!  – J.L.