RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.  

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/adam-schiff-may-be-biggest-loser-russia-probe

In a packed hearing room two months into Donald Trump’s embattled presidency, Rep. Adam Schiff played the willing protagonist by dramatically reading into the congressional record some of the most explosive claims from Christopher Steele’s dossier.

At the time, Steele’s dossier had recently burst on the scene, and the Trump White House was under siege as a far-reaching FBI investigation examined allegations — later disproven — that former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and others tried to collude with Russia to hijack the 2016 election.

“According to Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. intelligence, Russian sources tell him that Page has also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin, CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft,” Schiff declared at a March 20, 2017 House Intelligence Committee hearing.

“Sechin is reported to be a former KGB agent and close friend of Putin’s. According to Steele’s Russian sources, Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company,” the California Democrat added.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15957/coronavirus-constitution-abuse

Once freedoms were surrendered, [Chief Justice William] Rehnquist warned, they would be even easier to take away when a future crisis or greater good came calling.

The very orders that citizens across this land were protesting have been delivered wrapped in lack of transparency: forbidding only some assemblies; preferring big box stores; shutting down churches and gun stores but not liquor or cannabis stores; motor-boating prohibited but sailing is not; vacation rentals banned but not lodges; among many more disparities.

It is vital that “We the people” keep on overseeing this process to ensure that the attempted power grabs — for instance by those who would use this crisis to “restructure things to fit our vision” — continue to be judged as intolerable acts.

Shutting down America has caused many to ask who suspended the Bill of Rights. The re-opening of this country would do well to include close attention to righting wrongs that may — deliberately or inadvertently — have been inflicted on the US Constitution.

At the end of Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s life, one of his great concerns was the government’s use of crisis power at the expense of civil liberties, a concern he shared with law students during his last summer constitutional survey course in Cambridge, England.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pence-white-house-is-considering-eliminating-its-ccp-virus-task-force_3339701.html#

The White House is considering scaling back the CCP virus task force as its work could wind down by June, Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday.

In an off-camera White House briefing, Pence told reporters that the United States may be “in a very different place” by the end of this month and early June, adding that the Trump administration is eyeing the time around Memorial Day weekend as the time to have federal agencies change their responses to the pandemic, according to a transcript from his office.

“I think we’re having conversations about that and about what the proper time is for the task force to complete its work and for the ongoing efforts to take place on an agency-by-agency level,” Pence told reporters.

He added: “And as I’ve said before, as we continue to practice social distancing and states engage in safe and responsible reopening plans, I truly believe–and the trend lines support it–that we could be in a very different place. And by late May and early June–and that probably represents the timetable for our agencies.”

The move comes as many states are preparing to rescind some restrictions that were imposed to slow the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, a novel coronavirus that emerged in China late last year, and as top health experts have said there has been a decrease in hospitalizations. However, a number of new areas including Des Moines, Iowa, and Chicago have begun to see a surge in cases.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/05/media-attack-gov-kristi-noem-for-not-panicking-and-destroying-her-state/

As the Coronavirus spread from Wuhan, China, to the United States, most governors quickly acquiesced to the media’s demand that they force a governmental shutdown of their states in order to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. The media continue to be heavily invested in the shutdown model, even as the country realizes that hospitals are nowhere close to being overwhelmed and, in fact, many hospital systems are furloughing doctors and nurses due to the mandatory cessation on handling most non-COVID-19 cases.

With the predicted hospital demands being dramatically off, the media’s goalposts have shifted violently from demanding a shutdown to “flatten the curve” of exponential growth that would overwhelm hospitals to demanding a continued shutdown to lower the number of COVID-19 deaths, no matter the consequences, including long-term economic damage, serious harm to the food supply, or death from other causes. While the media generally praise “government shutdown” politicians such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who kept unsanitary subways running, forced people into deadly nursing homes, and demanded tens of thousands of ventilators he never used — they condemn politicians such as South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who has strongly encouraged social distancing measures but not used government force to accomplish public health goals. The media predicted that Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ more measured approach would result in horrific disaster. It hasn’t. Unlike Cuomo, DeSantis focused on nursing homes more than the low likelihood of transmission on big, sunny beaches.

https://twitter.com/paulinkjet/status/1257563094718582787

Fact found buried on BBC website: “The US records 1,015 virus deaths in 24 hours – the lowest one-day tally in a month.”

Alex Berenson

@AlexBerenson

Basically no outdoor transmission. Little proof that retail/office is a major vector. Weak if any proof that masks cut transmission, esp. in anyone asymptomatic. Much evidence that masks are virtue signaling and yet more government overreach. It’s time to stop pretending.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/04/the-failed-experiment-of-social-distancing/

The history of science, sadly, is littered with bad experiments gone horribly wrong. The Great Social Distancing Experiment of 2020, when it is over, will very likely be toward the top of that list.

After a two-month trial, researchers are collecting early outcomes of the Great American Social Distancing Experiment of 2020.

The results, to say the least, ain’t pretty—and the “experts” who initiated this experiment on 330 million well-meaning but unwitting test subjects are starting to admit failure.

“Wait. An experiment?” you may ask. But we have been assured by the credentialed class that keeping a distance of six feet between healthy people for weeks on end was the only tried-and-true way to prevent the deadly spread of the novel coronavirus. No way would the government shutter public schools and colleges for five months, bankrupt small businesses, send tens of millions to the unemployment line, jeopardize the nation’s food supply chain, prevent children from comforting dying parents and grandparents, and subject their fellow countrymen to soul-crushing house arrest for the first time in U.S. history if the so-called “social distancing” guidance hadn’t been carefully vetted over time, you might insist.

Certainly every variable and every side effect of social distancing has been factored into this economy-crashing “mitigation” strategy, right?

Unfortunately, and maddeningly, the answer is no.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration and a lead booster of social distancing, admitted Sunday that the draconian measures aren’t working as the experts promised.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/repeal-the-logan-act-11588629596?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Congress passed the Logan Act in 1799, and it’s long past time to repeal it. Only two people have been prosecuted under it, in 1802 and 1852, and both were acquitted. But the law invites political abuse, as we’ve seen recently in the case of Mike Flynn.

The act makes it a crime for citizens to engage in unauthorized “correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government . . . in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States.” Since the U.S. has disputes with every other country, its reach stops just short of lunar orbit.

Since the law is hardly ever enforced, why not leave it alone? Because while the law is still on the books, it can always be trotted out and used selectively, even maliciously. That’s exactly what happened to Mr. Flynn when James Comey’s Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to destroy him and undermine the president.

The Logan Act is a devilish temptation—to bad cops at the FBI, to bad lawyers at the Justice Department, and to bad policy makers in the White House. The law is so broad and vague it can be used to investigate almost any opponent at almost any time. If anybody can be threatened, enforcement is bound to be selective and discriminatory, not uniform and blind as law enforcement should be. These endemic problems mean the Logan Act would probably be found unconstitutional, if it faced such a challenge. It hasn’t, because no one has been convicted under it. So it lurks on the books, a tool for political mischief.

Regarding your editorial “Battering Norman Borlaug” (April 25): Shortly after becoming the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, I was made aware that desperate, starving people in Zambia had broken into a convoy of trucks carrying U.S.-donated sacks of food out of their country. I was dumbfounded, and found a Jesuit missionary in Zambia to speak with about this unbelievable occurrence. He said: “Yes, ambassador, that cable was correct—that food was a product of GMO (genetically modified organism) seeds, and if they allow it into Zambia the people here will want to grow it, and they would never after be able to export food to Europe.”

I couldn’t accept that food technology was being used to deny food to starving people. This led me to Dr. Borlaug. I arranged a conference and many meetings in Rome for this man to explain the wonders of new food technology and its promise to thwart the curse of starvation and malnutrition in Africa. This was in 2002 and people there were dying at the rate of 25,000 a day.

The controversy over GMO food persists today, although there is still no proof that it causes anyone ill effects. The credibility of Dr. Borlaug in Rome convinced the Holy Father to task the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on the question of GMO food. After exhaustive research, the Academy of Sciences reported to the pope that they found no harmful effects to people who ate GMO food, and that it offered great promise to end world food shortages.

One senior member of the Roman Curia, who came to know Dr. Borlaug through this experience (he came to Rome twice at my request, at his own expense), said, “This man is a saint!”

Scripture tells us that we are all sinners—even the saints. Apparently, according to PBS, Borlaug’s sin is that he saved too many lives.

May he rest in peace.

R. James Nicholson

Washington

Mr. Nicholson was ambassador to the Holy See 2001-05.

We had the pleasure of meeting Norman Borlaug and filming his receipt of the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007, which led to the production of a one-hour PBS documentary about his life and work.

Borlaug saw the famine conditions in several parts of the world as a human emergency and knew very well that his high-yield strains of wheat and accompanying farming methods were only buying time. But poor farmers all over the world were very quick to adopt his hybrid seeds and farming strategies when they saw the results, and this kind of transformation continues in Africa and many other places to this day. Before his death, Borlaug was very active in helping smallholder growers vastly improve their lives through modern seeds and growing methods. Your editorial is spot on.

Philip Courter

Crystal River, Fla.

I heard Borlaug give a speech late in his career where he addressed criticism of his work. His position was simple—he had met many, many well-meaning (and well-fed) critics over the years, but had never met any willing to starve to death for their beliefs.

Joe Bouton

Athens, Ga.