RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/499394-the-covid-19-shutdown-will-cost-americans-millions-of-years-of-life

Our governmental COVID-19 mitigation policy of broad societal lockdown focuses on containing the spread of the disease at all costs, instead of “flattening the curve” and preventing hospital overcrowding. Although well-intentioned, the lockdown was imposed without consideration of its consequences beyond those directly from the pandemic. 

The policies have created the greatest global economic disruption in history, with trillions of dollars of lost economic output. These financial losses have been falsely portrayed as purely economic. To the contrary, using numerous National Institutes of Health Public Access publications, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and various actuarial tables, we calculate that these policies will cause devastating non-economic consequences that will total millions of accumulated years of life lost in the United States, far beyond what the virus itself has caused.

Pandemics have afflicted humankind throughout history. They devastated the Roman and Byzantine empires, Medieval Europe, China and India, and they continue to the present day despite medical progress. 

The past century has witnessed three pandemics with at least 100,000 U.S. fatalities: The “Spanish Flu,” 1918-1919, with between 20 million and 50 million fatalities worldwide, including 675,000 in the U.S.; the “Asian Flu,” 1957-1958, with about 1.1 million deaths worldwide, 116,000 of those in the U.S.; and the “Hong Kong Flu,” 1968-1972,  with about 1 million people worldwide, including 100,000 in the U.S. So far, the current pandemic has produced almost 100,000 U.S. deaths, but the reaction of a near-complete economic shutdown is unprecedented.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-china-max-baucus-shilling-for-beijing-propaganda-machine/

Max Baucus has compared President Trump to Joseph McCarthy and Adolf Hitler on Chinese state television.

  S ince the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, former U.S. ambassador to China Max Baucus has given a series of interviews to Chinese state media outlets in which he criticized the American response to the crisis in a rather provocative manner. Notably, he cast the Trump administration’s insistence on assigning blame to Beijing for the coronavirus pandemic as the rhetorical equivalent of Nazism in the 1930s and the “Red Scare” of the 1950s.

Baucus, a Democrat who also served as a U.S. senator from Montana from 1978 to 2014, first compared Trump’s attacks on Beijing to the rhetoric used by Joseph McCarthy and Adolf Hitler in a May 6 appearance on CNN. Subsequently, he became very popular with Beijing’s propagandists and has since repeated the accusation in at least four interviews with Chinese state media.

“Joe McCarthy [and] Adolf Hitler were making statements based on nationalism . . . riling people up, making people believe things that were really not true,” Baucus told the state mouthpiece Chinese Global Television Network on May 12, initially reported by the Washington Free Beacon. “The White House and some in Congress are making statements against China that are so over the top and so hypercritical, they are based not on the fact, or if they are based on fact, sheer demagoguery, and that’s what McCarthy did in the 1950s.”

The U.S. is entering “a kind of an era which is similar to Joe McCarthy” and “a little bit like Hitler in the ’30s,” Baucus told China’s state run Global Times from his home in Montana a few days earlier. “Today, people kind of like to see China get criticized, which is unfortunate, because I think, basically, the American people like the Chinese people, just like Chinese people . . . like American people.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/susan-rices-mysterious-email-11590103327?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

“The larger truth here is now undeniable: The Obama Administration spied on the political competition, it continued that spying even after Mr. Trump was elected, and then it tried to cover up what it had done. If Mr. Trump had done anything remotely similar, folks would be calling to bring back the guillotine.”

‘I know nothing about this.” That’s how Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser, responded when asked on PBS’s NewsHour in March 2017 “whether Trump transition officials, including the President, may have been swept up in surveillance of foreigners at the end of the Obama administration?”

Now we know that denial wasn’t true. The evidence comes from her own hand. In her last minutes in government, on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, she sent herself an email to memorialize an Oval Office meeting two weeks earlier. Its attendees included Barack Obama, Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and herself. A newly declassified paragraph from that email quotes Mr. Comey talking about the monitoring of Trump adviser Michael Flynn’s conversations with then Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

The timing of that meeting is illuminating. The day before, Jan. 4, 2017, internal FBI documents show the bureau was planning to close its investigation into Mr. Flynn’s ties to Russia because agents had found no evidence of wrongdoing.

The day after, on Jan. 6, Mr. Comey gave his now notorious briefing to President-elect Trump. He mentioned the lurid claims from the Steele dossier. But, incredibly, Mr. Comey did not tell the incoming President the concerns he had expressed the day before to President Obama about the danger of Mr. Flynn’s passing classified information to the Russians. No doubt that is because he wanted to keep from Mr. Trump that the FBI was investigating his team.

DELIVERED AT ARLINGTON CEMETERY

My fellow Americans:

Memorial Day is a day of ceremonies and speeches. Throughout America today, we honor the dead of our wars. We recall their valor and their sacrifices. We remember they gave their lives so that others might live.

We’re also gathered here for a special event — the national funeral for an unknown soldier who will today join the heroes of three other wars.

When he spoke at a ceremony at Gettysburg in 1863, President Lincoln reminded us that through their deeds, the dead had spoken more eloquently for themselves than any of the living ever could, and that we living could only honor them by rededicating ourselves to the cause for which they so willingly gave a last full measure of devotion.

Well, this is especially so today, for in our minds and hearts is the memory of Vietnam and all that that conflict meant for those who sacrificed on the field of battle and for their loved ones who suffered here at home.

Not long ago, when a memorial was dedicated here in Washington to our Vietnam veterans, the events surrounding that dedication were a stirring reminder of America’s resilience, of how our nation could learn and grow and transcend the tragedies of the past.

During the dedication ceremonies, the rolls of those who died and are still missing were read for 3 days in a candlelight ceremony at the National Cathedral. And the veterans of Vietnam who were never welcomed home with speeches and bands, but who were never defeated in battle and were heroes as surely as any who have ever fought in a noble cause, staged their own parade on Constitution Avenue. As America watched them — some in wheelchairs, all of them proud — there was a feeling that this nation — that as a nation we were coming together again and that we had, at long last, welcomed the boys home.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/23/following-up-on-fauciism/

In an earlier article, I introduced the term “Fauciism.” But there is quite a bit more to the story, more than I could get into a single short essay. 

I happened to catch Anthony Fauci’s first appearance in front of the cameras with President Trump at the beginning of the Wuhan virus panic. Before Fauci spoke, I turned to my wife and said, “We are in big trouble now.” 

I remembered Fauci from a previous time. Back in the 1980s, Fauci was responsible for a different nationwide panic that turned out to be based on predictions that were  proven false by subsequent events.

I was alarmed and saddened to see Fauci on the dais with the president. Alarmed because of my concern that he was about to set off another panic; saddened that he had not been fired from his government sinecure on account of his earlier bumbling efforts.

In the early 1980s, Americans were told that everyone was at risk of getting AIDS. Fantastic numbers were bandied about. The claim was that millions of ordinary Americans were at risk. Oprah Winfrey had at least one show dedicated to perpetuating that belief. I remember the panic her show caused. When Oprah embraced that frightening vision of what was coming to America, it became a fact beyond dispute in the minds of many.

Many Americans who were swept up in this belief about AIDS have forgotten that panic, no doubt because we now know better. Events canceled that belief about AIDS, and it largely has been forgotten. I remember because I had to tell many, many panicked people that it was not true, and explain to them why it was not true. 

I knew then it was not true based on information that was readily available and fairly easy to obtain. I believed then and I believe now the man behind the panic also knew it was not true, though of course I might be mistaken about that.

That man was Anthony Fauci. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/judge_sullivan_does_the_equivalent_of_pasting_im_guilty_on_his_forehead.html

From the beginning of the Michael Flynn case, Judge Sullivan has been hostile to Flynn. By December 2018, based upon a misreading of the facts, Sullivan accused Flynn of conduct amounting to treason and said that he felt “disdain” and “disgust” for what he believed Flynn had done.

Sullivan’s behavior, however, went from hostile to bizarre when the Department of Justice, having uncovered massive wrongdoing the FBI’s and DOJ’s handling of the Flynn matter, moved to dismiss the case. On Saturday, though, Judge Sullivan managed to escalate from bizarre to . . . well, maybe paranoid is the correct word.

A Motion to Dismiss a criminal case is a routine procedure when the government realizes, for whatever reason, that there is no further reason to prosecute a defendant. Because the Constitution gives the prosecutor sole discretion about whether to bring a case and then, having brought it, whether to miss it, the judge has a limited role – and that role is to protect the defendant.

Thus, it is the judge’s responsibility to make sure that the government isn’t toying with the defendant by dismissing a losing case while intending to refile in the hopes of drawing a more amenable judge or jury. Absent that problem, the judge’s only job is to rubber-stamp the dismissal.

Judge Sullivan refused to use that rubber stamp. He also declined to act as Flynn’s last defense against an overreaching prosecution.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/crossfire_hurricanes_origin_document_shows_that_the_fbi_is_a_disgrace.html

Judicial Watch, the dogged organization that forces the government to produce documents it would rather hide, believes that it may finally have gotten hold of the FBI memo that started the Obama administration’s spying, first on the Trump campaign and then, when Trump won, on the Trump presidency. If the email Judicial Watch received is indeed the charging memo, it is a document so careless and ephemeral that it shouldn’t have been used to investigate a ham sandwich, let alone a presidential candidate and incoming president.

The “electronic communication” the government produced is heavily redacted. Nevertheless, there’s enough information in it, especially when combined with what we’ve already learned about Crossfire Hurricane, to show that there was no legal or practical justification for the investigation. (You can see the document here, and the full text is at the bottom of this post.)

The first thing one notices is that Peter Strzok’s name is all over it. He’s a one-man FBI. The document is cc’d to Strzok, he’s listed as a Counterintelligence contact, he approved the document, and he drafted the document.

To refresh your recollection about the smirking Strzok, in his emails to his paramour, Lisa Page, he referred to Trump as a “loathsome human being,” “an idiot,” “a f**king idiot,” and “awful.” Strzok devoutly wished for a Hillary victory. Disturbingly, he believed that it was up to him to “protect our country” from Trump. The Crossfire Hurrican opening document may reflect that delusional sense of self-importance.

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/horowitz-cdc-confirms-remarkably-low-coronavirus-death-rate-media/

Most people are more likely to wind up six feet under because of almost anything else under the sun other than COVID-19.

The CDC just came out with a report that should be earth-shattering to the narrative of the political class, yet it will go into the thick pile of vital data and information about the virus that is not getting out to the public. For the first time, the CDC has attempted to offer a real estimate of the overall death rate for COVID-19, and under its most likely scenario, the number is 0.26%. Officials estimate a 0.4% fatality rate among those who are symptomatic and project a 35% rate of asymptomatic cases among those infected, which drops the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) to just 0.26% — almost exactly where Stanford researchers pegged it a month ago.

Until now, we have been ridiculed for thinking the death rate was that low, as opposed to the 3.4% estimate of the World Health Organization, which helped drive the panic and the lockdowns. Now the CDC is agreeing to the lower rate in plain ink.

Plus, ultimately we might find out that the IFR is even lower because numerous studies and hard counts of confined populations have shown a much higher percentage of asymptomatic cases. Simply adjusting for a 50% asymptomatic rate would drop their fatality rate to 0.2% – exactly the rate of fatality Dr. John Ionnidis of Stanford University projected.

More importantly, as I mentioned before, the overall death rate is meaningless because the numbers are so lopsided. Given that at least half of the deaths were in nursing homes, a back-of-the-envelope estimate would show that the infection fatality rate for non-nursing home residents would only be 0.1% or 1 in 1,000. And that includes people of all ages and all health statuses outside of nursing homes. Since nearly all of the deaths are those with comorbidities.