RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.us/consider-costs-coronavirus/

Less than 24 hours after California governor Gavin Newsom closed ‘non-essential’ businesses and ordered Californians to stay inside to avoid spreading the coronavirus, New York governor Andrew Cuomo followed suit. ‘This is about saving lives,’ Cuomo said during a press conference on Friday. ‘If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.’

Cuomo’s assertion that saving ‘just one life’ justifies an economic shutdown raises questions that have not been acknowledged, much less answered, as public officials across the country compete to impose ever more draconian anti-virus measures:

Is there any limit to the damage we are willing inflict on the world economy to mitigate the infection?
What are the benefits of each new commerce-killing measure and how do they compare to the costs?
What are the criteria for declaring success in the coronavirus fight and who decides whether they have been met?

To ask about the costs and benefits of the spreading economic shutdowns guarantees an accusation of heartlessness. But the issue is not human compassion versus alleged greed. The issue is balancing one target of compassion against another. The millions of people whose lives depend on a functioning economy also deserve compassion. Many of the businesses that are now being shuttered by decree will never come back. They do not have the reserves to survive weeks or months without customers. In New York City, many streets were already blighted by rows of empty storefronts. The virus shutdown could knock out the remaining enterprises, as customers acclimate themselves further to ordering on-line. Layoffs are piling up in restaurants, hotels, and malls; on Tuesday, unemployment claims in California were 40 times above the daily average, an increase greater than any coronavirus surge.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thomas-allen-coburn-11585429731?mod=hp_opin_pos_3

The doctor and Senator was the model of a citizen legislator.

Politics is a lifetime career for most in American government, and then there are exceptions like Thomas Coburn. The Oklahoma obstetrician who became a Senator and then returned to a productive private life died Saturday of prostate cancer at age 72. He was what America’s Founders imagined in self-governing citizen legislators, and that mentality made him far more consequential than the usual congressional seat-fillers.

Coburn worked in his family’s optical-lens firm before going to medical school and setting up an ob/gyn practice. He ran for the House in 1994 in part to oppose the Clinton effort for government health care, served three terms and retired before running for Senate in 2004 for what he said would be no more than two terms. He continued to see patients on weekends and Mondays in Oklahoma until the Senate declared it a (preposterous) conflict-of-interest.

“I don’t think Washington can fix Washington,” Coburn told our colleague Joe Rago in 2014 after announcing his retirement two years early when his cancer recurred. “You’re always going to have this built-in conflict of getting re-elected. Parochial interests will trump the best interests of the nation, and the actors will do what’s expedient to be popular. It doesn’t have to be that way. There’s hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who could do these jobs well. All it requires is common sense and courage.” (The full interview is nearby.)

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/oxford-and-imperial/

My dear old statistics teacher used to say that relying on any model, however good but founded on past data, was like driving by looking at the rearview mirror; fine as long as the future looked like the past. As governments struggle with their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the $64 trillion question is “which past does the future look like?”

Science writes how models have become supremely important:

Entire cities and countries have been locked down based on hastily done forecasts that often haven’t been peer reviewed.  … The Netherlands … Prime Minister Mark Rutte rejected “working endlessly to contain the virus” and “shutting down the country completely.” Instead, he opted for “controlled spread” of the virus while making sure the health system isn’t swamped with COVID-19 patients.

Other governments have chosen different models and in place of “controlled spread,” bet on total lockdown.

Just how influential those models are became apparent over the past 2 weeks in the United Kingdom. … a group at Imperial College London [recommended an approach] not unlike the strategy the Netherlands is pursuing. … But on 16 March, the Imperial College group published a dramatically revised model that concluded—based on fresh data from the United Kingdom and Italy—that even a reduced peak would fill twice as many intensive care beds as estimated previously, overwhelming capacity. The only choice, they concluded, was to go all out on control measures.

But as new data becomes available the “fog of war” is slowly lifting and rekindling the debate between the models.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_first_casualty_of_war_even_war_against_a_virus_is_truth.html

A few comments about how the leftists’ fanatic hatred for President Trump is erasing truth, facts, and debatable ideas.

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” – John Adams

The media has a fetish that Trump lies. According to the Washington Post (no link, because it’s behind a paywall), Trump has uttered more than 16,000 lies.

Drilling down, though, one discovers that, while Trump has lied (what politician hasn’t?), the WaPo’s humorless and biased habit of taking seriously puffery, exaggeration, and jokes turns everything into a lie. What reasonable people understand is that Trump exaggerates or jokes about things that don’t matter, but sticks with the truth about things that do.

Leftists do something even more serious, which is to classify as a lie anything with which they disagree. In other words, they set themselves up as the arbiters of absolute truth. From this pedestal, they shout down or completely censor statements they dislike – even if the statement is subjective or reasonably debatable – on the ground that the statement is a “lie.”

To support this tactic, leftists have to resort to blatant lies themselves. For example, when Trump expressed hope that chloroquine would help fight coronavirus, leftists immediately transformed the drug from a longtime, reputable standby into something evil. That’s how we got the “Trump made stupid American people eat fish tank cleaner” lie. And the “Trump made stupid Nigerian people eat fish tank cleaner” lie.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/03/28/blood-serum-coronavirus-cure/

A preliminary study released Friday found that blood serum from people who recovered from coronavirus was effective at treating critically ill patients, raising hope that the technique will curtail a pandemic that has already killed more than 30,000 people around the globe.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at only five patients, and the authors of the report acknowledged the need for more extensive research. But it showed promising results, and health officials have already expressed optimism that blood transfers can be used to fight the new coronavirus strain.

“That’s one of our top priorities,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top expert on infectious disease, said in a March 20 interview regarding clinical trials for convalescent serum.

Fauci expressed confidence in the technique because it has proved effective during other pandemics, including the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918 and the SARS outbreak in 2003.

All five patients in the study, conducted in Shenzhen, China, have dramatically improved since receiving injections of blood plasma from recovered patients.

The patients, who ranged in age from 36 to 65, were all on ventilators suffering from acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) when the were provided plasma treatments.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/490022-cdc-issues-travel-advisory-for-ny-tristate-area-after-Trump-says-quarantine-not-necessary

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a travel advisory late Saturday night for the New York tri-state area after President Trump said he requested the measure in an effort to stem the spread of the coronavirus. 

“On the recommendation of the White House CoronaVirus Task Force, and upon consultation with the Governor’s of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, I have asked the @CDCgov to issue a strong Travel Advisory, to be administered by the Governors, in consultation with the Federal Government. A quarantine will not be necessary,” Trump tweeted. 

The CDC finalized the notice late Saturday night. 

The advisory discourages people living in those three states from traveling domestically. It does not apply to those employed by critical infrastructure industries, as defined by the Department of Homeland Security, who often commute between the three states.  “Due to extensive community transmission of COVID-19 in the area, CDC urges residents of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to refrain from non-essential domestic travel for 14 days effective immediately,” the CDC said in an email to reporters.

https://www.creators.com/read/michelle-malkin

When I think of “essential” workers in America, the smear merchants of the Anti-Defamation League are at the bottom of the barrel. For decades, they’ve demonized conservatives and Christians as agents of “hate” and treated our very existence as incitements to violence. The ADL’s manufactured outrage machine has broadened its target list to anyone remotely critical of Israel for any reason, President Donald Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, “America First” college students, innocuous hand gestures, cartoon frogs and anyone who dares to think or write that “It’s OK to be white.”

Now, in the wake of the “Chinese flu” pandemic, ADL is lining up with all the other federal bailout vultures clamoring for free money. This week, the group issued a statement calling on Congress to include “relief for charities” in any COVID-19 legislation. “In times of crisis,” ADL self-righteously urged, “nonprofits are on the front lines, ready to respond and serve communities across the nation — but funds are needed to continue doing so.” The “relief package” pushed by ADL and several hundred other groups demands $60 billion in “emergency stimulus funding to support our work… during this time of crisis and need.”

What a crock. The primary “front lines” ADL occupies are on the battlefields against American sovereignty and free speech. By my count, the open borders zealots of ADL have filed 17 amicus briefs in our courts supporting obstruction of Trump’s immigration enforcement and national security measures. The group is particularly proud of its brief in Trump v. Hawaii, in which it “led a coalition of six Jewish organizations using our unique moral voice to passionately argue against the so-called Muslim ban, citing three historical examples when our nation later recognized that we were wrong to turn our back, including denying refuge to Jews fleeing the Nazis.” The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the travel restrictions and affirmed the broad plenary powers of the executive branch over immigration.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/weve_been_had_and_trump_knows_it.html

While President Trump closed the U.S. border against entry from China at the end of January, his overall instinct was right.  The CCP virus was nasty, but no worse than a supercharged flu.

Health professionals overwhelmed Trump and his inner circle with doomsday scenarios, bullied by panic-obsessed virologists and epidemiologists — begging for attention and copying the alarmist playbook from the climate/global warming extremists, allied with the MSM Trump-haters.

And now the government has completely suffocated economic demand, creating a depression, an unnecessary calamity that is destroying lives, livelihoods, families, and fortunes for a generation.  It is becoming apparent that the end-of-the-world predictions, computer models warning of an apocalyptic black plague worldwide, are all wrong.

Those paying attention were warned that the worse-case scenarios were hysterical, by the likes of Stanford epidemiologist John P.A. Ioannidis.

In dramatic fashion, U.K. Imperial College scientist Neil Ferguson published a doomsday scenario on March 16.  Now, just ten days later, he has reversed his outlook, essentially settling on a prediction no worse than a bad flu season.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-law-enforcement-in-a-time-of-crisis/

There are systemic complexities that addle the administration of justice regardless of whether a catastrophic event is caused by criminal conduct.

The Justice Department wants the power to detain suspects indefinitely without trial. That was the storyline last week. DOJ, you were to believe, was exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to carry out a Constitution-shredding gambit, completely in line with two intertwined media caricatures: Donald Trump’s authoritarian streak and Bill Barr’s long held affinity for executive branch imperialism. If you listened to enough of the commentary around the initial reports, you were pretty sure Trump and Barr were about to lock up Joe Biden, the prime-time hosts at MSNBC, and maybe even the New York Times editorial board.

It should by now go without saying that the distorted story was remote from reality.

The Justice Department made some proposals . . . but it did so at the urging of Congress, not unilaterally. The upshot was to empower the courts, not the executive. In fact, “empower” is an overstatement. The idea was to give judges latitude to deal with due process deadlines that necessarily become problematic when some catastrophic event undermines the capacity of courts to function.

The profound challenge that the COVID-19 pandemic poses to our health-care system, potentially in all U.S. states and territories, is the predominant news story of 2020. Less obvious but all too real nonetheless is the challenge it poses for the criminal-justice system.