RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://asiatimes.com/author/david-p-goldman/

Investors had no place to hide as stock and bond markets tanked simultaneously for the first time since the 1980s, when markets offered no hedges against collapsing values. In 2008, bond prices rose sharply as stock markets crashed. Now bonds offer no refuge against collapsing stock prices. The difference is that total US public debt outstanding has risen from about $9 trillion at the beginning of 2008 to $23.5 trillion today. 

With equities down nearly 6% in Europe and US markets poised to open with similar losses, European bond yields soared and US bond yields rose, as governments prepared trillions of dollars of new debt financing to support economic stimulus and market bailout programs. Between March 9 and this morning, so-called real yields, that is, the yield on inflation-protected US government securities, had risen from a trough of negative 1% to positive 0.4%, the fastest yield spike in market history.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center. A nurse holds swabs and a test tube to test people for Covid-19 at a drive-through station set up in the parking lot of the […]

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/sorry-history-socialism-bruce-hendry/

Below is Part 8 of a new essay written by Bruce Hendry: Democrats, Progressives and Socialists. Stay tuned for the ensuing chapters. [See links to previous chapters below this article].

19. Economic Fundamentals.

One of the dangers to our democracy is the total lack of understanding of basic economics. Most K-12 teachers can’t teach economics because they don’t know it. Yet every organization from a children’s lemonade stand to the largest company, and of course to a country, is subject to immutable and unseen laws of economics. How can you possibly understand the implications of your political decisions if you don’t have any understanding of their economic impact?

Economics is simply the quantification of human behaviors and decisions. Economic conservatives believe in making decisions based upon facts, logic and the idea of a free market system. Democrats believe in making decisions based upon wishful thinking, emotions and socialism. Both groups say that they are for equality for all citizens and are against discrimination in their societies, but they have different views of what is meant by “equality.” The free market conservative group thinks that everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed, while the socialist Democratic group believes in equal outcomes, enforced by the power of the government.

Understanding beginning economic theory is foundational to understanding what actually works in a society. This understanding is necessary in order to dispel the wishful thinking, denial, and community-held mythologies that result in electing officials that codify things that don’t work or are actually hurtful to those that the laws are supposed to help. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/left-exploits-covid-19-pandemic-joseph-klein/

Americans are trying to cope as best they can with the devastating coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on their everyday lives. Some have turned to prayer. Last week, President Trump declared Sunday March 15th a “National Day of Prayer for All Americans Affected by the Coronavirus Pandemic and for our National Response Efforts.” What was Islamist Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s response? She retweeted anti-gun activist David Hogg’s disgusting rant, which said in part: “F**k a National day of prayer.” Then she tried to walk back what she had done with this lame explanation: “My retweet was not to be an attack on prayer. It was to bring attention to the need for meaningful action to combat this public health crisis.” Evidently, in Tlaib’s warped mind, cursing a National Day of Prayer for Americans of all faiths is an effective way of bringing attention to a crisis that all Americans and their elected leaders are facing with all hands on deck.

For leftists, the coronavirus crisis provides them with the perfect opportunity to infect America with their own viruses of radicalization and hate. Denver city councilwoman Candi CdeBaca, a self-professed democratic socialist, went so far as to tweet her “solidarity” with another leftist Trump-hater’s twisted post, which said, “For the record, if I do get the coronavirus I’m attending every MAGA rally I can.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/03/soros-funded-group-spen

#Patriotism.

Sure, that money could help actual affected people, but during an economic crisis and a pandemic, the Democrats will use big donor money to smear President Trump and undermine the administration. How patriotic of them.

A Democratic super PAC said Tuesday it would spend $5 million on digital advertising flaying President Trump for his response to the novel coronavirus, one of several groups that planned to devote resources to this type of messaging.

The campaign from Pacronym — a political action committee affiliated with the nonprofit group Acronym — represents the first major pivot to coronavirus-related advertising fewer than 250 days from the election.

“This is a public health issue and a national security issue, but it’s also a public policy issue and thus a political one,” said Tara McGowan, the founder and chief executive of Acronym, whose board includes veteran Democratic operatives like David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 bid.

And mostly it’s an opportunity. 

Already the group has run a handful of ads about the lack of tests for the novel virus.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/17/from-wuhan-to-washington-state-with-love/

U.S. travel restrictions came too late for the poor residents of the Life Care home in King County, Washington State.

Patient Zero, who very likely infected Washington State and beyond, arrived in my state, from Wuhan, China, on Jan. 15.

Thanks to the patient’s own diligence, he was tested on January 20 and diagnosed with COVID-19. However, CDC contact tracing fell woefully short. As is done in South Korea and Israel, the man’s whereabouts—not his identity—ought to have been made public. In this way, anyone who had come in contact with the Man from Wuhan could have been quarantined and taken the necessary precautions to prevent further transmission.

Genetic sequencing of virus extracted from infected patients allows scientists to pinpoint the virus’ origins and the timing of the “seeding event.” That the virus that continues to kill elderly people in homes for the aged and the infirm in King County came from Wuhan is indisputable.

Writes Trevor Bedford, a sequencing scientist at the Fred Hutch Research Center: “The first case in the USA was . . . from a traveler directly returning from Wuhan to Snohomish County on Jan. 15.” But there was another traveler whose virus was related to that of Patient Zero, and who had,

exposed someone else to the virus in the period between Jan. 15 and Jan. 19, before they were isolated. If this second case was mild or asymptomatic, contact tracing efforts by public health would have had difficulty detecting it. After this point, community spread occurred and was undetected due to the CDC’s narrow case definition that required direct travel to China or direct contact with a known case to even be considered for testing. This lack of testing was a critical error and allowed an outbreak in Snohomish County and the surroundings to grow to a sizable problem before it was even detected. [Emphasis added.]

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/487931-trump-called-it-the-wuhan-coronavirus-for-a-legal-and-commonsensical

Amid the truly weighty concerns attendant to the COVID-19 pandemic, the silly season, of course, broke out in Washington: A debate over whether the infectious disease in question should be referred to as the “Wuhan coronavirus” or whether doing so is, as the anti-Trump left and its media megaphone allege, emblematic of racism.

The manufactured controversy is as transparently political as it is ill-conceived. The question of the pathogen’s source is being framed to imply Trumpist xenophobia. To the contrary, it is a relevant consideration in the federal government’s legal authority to respond.

Early this year, as the outbreak became manifest in China and began its relentless march through Southeast Asia and into Europe, the American press itself alluded incessantly to the Wuhan coronavirus. The sudden case of talking-head amnesia over this is being greeted in conservative media by hilarious video montages featuring the same scolds, who now decry the term, matter-of-factly invoking it back then. 

Sensibly, it could not have been otherwise. Wuhan province was the epicenter of the outbreak. The major story at the start involved suppression by the authoritarian communist regime in Beijing of news and vital information about it. 

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Sensible advice has been offered by many: Scrub your hands, socially distant yourself; isolate yourself if sick. Nevertheless, manifestations of fear and panic are all around us. Restaurants, bars and casinos have closed in the part of the Country where I live. Colleges have sent students home. Schools have been closed, while grocery stores cannot keep up with demand for toilet paper, hand-wipes, latex gloves, disinfectants and many other household and food products. ‘Social distancing’ is nowhere to be seen when it comes to filling one’s larder or closet. Yet, with the exception of products directly related to coronavirus, like hand-wipes and latex gloves, final demand for items like toilet paper and frozen foods will grow in terms of population expansion, or about 0.5 percent. (In Connecticut, population growth will probably decline about 0.2 percent, as it did in 2019.) Understocked shelves will become overstocked.

“Any man’s death diminishes me,” John Donne wrote, and all deaths are, indeed, to be regretted. But perspective should be maintained. The question we all struggle with: Is the fear we exhibit rational? We don’t know, but containment and mitigation seem to be working, at least in China and South Korea. According to their numbers, since last November China has had 190,000 individuals infected with COVID-19 (out of a population of 1.39 billion). Just under 7,500 have died, implying a mortality rate of 3.9 percent. Keep in mind, numbers from China are suspect and between 30,000 and 40,000 people die every day in their Country. South Korea’s statistics are likely more accurate. Their first case was noted on January 20. As of March 16, two hundred and twenty thousand people had been tested in South Korea, out of a population of 51.4 million, 8,320 cases had been confirmed and 81 had died, or just under one percent. Health officials in Seoul claimed on March 9 that their Country had passed the peak of the contagion. They credit their “trace, test and treat” system, where an individual can drive to a testing site and have samples taken from the back of one’s throat and nose. A few hours later, the individual will get a call if the test is positive or a text if it is negative.

The world was slow to take note of the seriousness of the crisis. China, a Communist dictatorship, delayed informing the outside world for a month and a half. More than three weeks after China did, and with the contagion already having infected half a dozen countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared, on January 23, that the coronavirus did not constitute a public emergency of international concern. (It would be March 11 before they declared it a pandemic.) Early on, the President was ahead of the curve. He formed a White House task force for coronavirus on January 29, led by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alexander Azar, and he shut down flights from China on January 31. On February 27, he placed Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the Task Force. Contrary to some reports, the White House did not “gut” the National Security Council’s counter pandemic effort. But he was slow in promoting tests for the virus and urging the search for a vaccine. He was not alone. The press was more interested in impeachment than in informing their readers and viewers of the virus China had exported, which was beginning to contaminate the world.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15753/coronavirus-prisoners

In the event of an outbreak, guards and other staff are likely to refuse to come to work, thus raising the risk of violence among prisoners.

The time to act, in order to prevent these bad outcomes, is before there are outbreaks. A prison sentence, or the denial of bail, are not supposed to be sentences of death or disease. Steps should be taken now to reduce the risks not only to prisoners but to those who come in contact with them in prison or upon release.

Among these preventive steps should be the following: allowing elderly non-violent prisoners who are near the end of their sentences to be sent home; those who still have considerable time to serve should be temporarily furloughed to home confinement, subject to increased punishment if they violate the strict conditions of the furlough…

The US has more prisoners than any Western democracy. Because of our overly long sentences — even for non-violent first offenders — many are old and infirm. We also have many presumptively innocent defendants in jail awaiting trial, and many others awaiting appeal.

It is inevitable that there will be outbreaks of coronavirus in prisons and jails, as, in the past, there have been outbreaks of other contagious illnesses such as Legionnaires disease. Other institutions of confinement, such as nursing homes, have also experienced quickly spreading contagions.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/16/panic-never-helped-any-pandemic-and-wont-start-now/

CNN Business calls it “a pandemic unprecedented in modern times.” That would probably include the so-called “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918-19 that killed more than 500,000 Americans, and perhaps 20 million to 50 million worldwide. Coronavirus so far has killed fewer than 75 Americans, fewer than 7,000 people worldwide, and its growth internationally already is clearly slowing. But economic growth is another matter: We’re now in a bear market, with worldwide recession a serious possibility. For hysteria has now become the “conventional wisdom.”

Invoking the “Black Death,” which probably wiped out a third of Europe, both CNN and the Washington Post have reported that Iran is digging (per the Post) “Coronavirus Burial Pits So Vast They’re Visible From Space.” Never mind that Google can read your license plate from space, nor that on average more than 12,000 Iranians die daily and the country has reported less than 80 COVID-19 deaths since virus was detected there a month ago. For those without enough fingers, that’s a 0.02% increase in deaths per day. The cemeteries can handle it.

Then there’s that Peggy Noonan op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that unabashedly declared: “‘Don’t Panic’ Is Bad Advice.”

Ahem. Don’t panic.

Another Epidemic Of Hysteria