RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.yahoo.com/news/lockdown-critics-may-valid-points-152936053.html

Three months after the first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed in the U.S., has the time come to start paying more attention to the critics? 

I’m referring to people like John Ioannidis, the Stanford University School of Medicine scientist who argued early on that the coronavirus was far less deadly than the models were predicting. Or the Swedish epidemiologist John Giesecke, who says that protecting the elderly and frail — and allowing the rest of society to go about its business — makes far more sense than lockdowns, whose efficacy, he believes, remains unproved. And yes, I’m even referring to Alex Berenson, the pugnacious former journalist who has become a national villain (except at Fox News) for poking holes in the conventional wisdom about how to mitigate the virus and pointing out the various harms that have resulted from measures like lockdowns.

As the online publication UnHerd put it recently, “The debate about lockdown is not a contest between good and evil.” In that spirit, I would like to offer four contrarian arguments that, at the very least, ought to be taken more seriously.

We’re still acting as if the original models were correct. In mid-March, a team at Imperial College in London estimated that 500,000 British citizens and 2.2 million Americans would die from an uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus. That estimate caused the governments of both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump to begin stressing self-isolation measures, according to the New York Times. In the U.S., state after state shut down their economies while a mad scramble took place to create hospital space for Covid-19 patients.

Since then, the major models have been revised downward significantly. According to data compiled by the Reich Lab at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, models now estimate 67,000 to 120,000 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. Yet strict measures like lockdowns, which were put in place based on the original modeling, remain in place, while hospitals around the country, many of which are largely empty, continued to be reserved for nonexistent Covid-19 patients.

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/495405-michael-flynn-case-should-be-dismissed-to-preserve-justice

Previously undisclosed documents in the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn offer us a chilling blueprint on how top FBI officials not only sought to entrap the former White House aide but sought to do so on such blatantly unconstitutional and manufactured grounds.

These new documents further undermine the view of both the legitimacy and motivations of those investigations under former FBI director James Comey. For all of those who have long seen a concerted effort within the Justice Department to target the Trump administration, the fragments will read like a Dead Sea Scrolls version of a “deep state” conspiracy.

One note reflects discussions within the FBI shortly after the 2016 election on how to entrap Flynn in an interview concerning his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. According to Fox News, the note was written by the former FBI head of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap, after a meeting with Comey and his deputy director, Andrew McCabe.

The note states, “What is our goal? Truth and admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” This may have expressed an honest question over the motivation behind this targeting of Flynn, a decision for which Comey later publicly took credit when he had told an audience that he decided he could “get away” with sending “a couple guys over” to the White House to set up Flynn and make the case.

The new documents also explore how the Justice Department could get Flynn to admit breaking the Logan Act, a law that dates back to from 1799 which makes it a crime for a citizen to intervene in disputes between the United States and foreign governments. It has never been used to convict a citizen and is widely viewed as flagrantly unconstitutional.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/495366-something-seems-rotten-in-flynns-case-

The prosecution of Michael Flynn was rocked last Friday by the disclosure of new exculpatory information, leading to speculation that the exoneration of President Trump’s first national security adviser could be imminent. That would be an amazing reversal, since Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to FBI agents and, later, declined a federal judge’s invitation to withdraw that plea — reaffirming his admission of guilt. (Flynn has since sought to vacate the plea; the court has not yet ruled.)

The Department of Justice’s letter to Sidney Powell, Flynn’s current lawyer who has persisted for months to pry exculpatory evidence from DOJ, indicates that further revelations may be forthcoming. For now, the disclosure has two salient aspects. 

The first involves the factual basis for the Obama-era FBI’s investigation of Flynn — or, rather, the lack of a basis. Under federal law, a false statement made to investigators is actionable only if it is material to the matter under investigation. If there was no basis to believe Flynn had committed a crime, his counsel could have argued that any false statements allegedly made by Flynn when he was questioned in January 2017 were immaterial. Ergo, Ms. Powell contends that the withholding of this information violated the government’s duty to disclose exculpatory evidence.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/04/7-high-risk-sex-offenders-freed-protect-them-daniel-greenfield/

The coronavirus jailbreak continues. While Americans are locked up, the pro-crime lobby is freeing criminals at a record rate. This pro-crime policy is allegedly being carried out to protect the criminals, but who’s going to protect their victims?

Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer on Tuesday issued a warning to residents after seven registered sex offenders who he said were “high-risk” were recently released from custody early, amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Spitzer said the convicted men spent “just days” in jail instead of the six months required by law for those registered as sex offenders.

The men apparently had also been charged with cutting off their GPS monitors or tampering with their tracking devices.

I’m sure that wonderful folks like these, who already tampered with their monitors, won’t do anything untoward.

Luis Joel Ramirez, 27. Ramirez was last known to have lived in Costa Mesa. According to the DA’s office, his criminal history includes sexual battery, assault with a deadly weapon, resisting a peace officer, burglary and possessing of a leaded cane, a deadly weapon. He was released on April 7 after serving 20 days on a parole violation for cutting off his GPS, then released again on April 24 after serving 16 days on a parole violation for failing to report, the DA’s office said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-bill-de-blasio-new-york-city-mayor/

De Blasio launched a broadside against “the Jewish community” after a large crowd turned out for a rabbi’s funeral in Williamsburg as though the event corporately implicated the more than 1 million Jews living in New York City, drawing criticism from the city’s ADL and other local Jewish leaders.

In the middle of March, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio was among those not entirely sold on social distancing as a prophylactic measure against the coronavirus epidemic. “If you love your neighborhood bar, go there now,” he famously said. A few days later, he was threatening to padlock the city’s synagogues — permanently — if social-distancing protocols went unheeded.

We sympathize with those New Yorkers driven to drink or inspired to prayer by Mayor de Blasio’s incompetence, vanity, and stupidity, which have been highlighted by but are by no means limited to his response to COVID-19. For the time being, they must suffer in their households rather than in congregation.

In all likelihood, the coronavirus has been spreading in New York since February. The city’s jam-packed subway system, carrying five million riders a day, should have counseled particular vigilance. But even with the examples of California’s and Washington’s cities before him, the mayor was slow to move. He dragged his staff along to a crowded YMCA for a workout even as he was ordering gyms closed around the city. The city schools remained open until March 15, and it was left to New York governor Andrew Cuomo to negotiate their closure while teachers were threatening a wildcat strike. De Blasio delayed against the advice of his own aides and health experts. A 36-year-old principal subsequently died of COVID-19. The city’s refusal to disclose infections in the schools “kept families in the dark and left more lives at risk,” as one city councilman put it.

De Blasio was warned in early March that the city needed to take more aggressive action against the epidemic, but he wrote off advice from health commissioner Oxiris Barbot and others, worried that a lockdown would hurt the city’s economy. Extended deliberations controlled by political concerns rather than medical ones wasted precious time. “He has long distrusted the top brass of the health department,” Politico reports, “feeling they do not understand politics and public relations.” That may be the case, but their job is not public relations — it is public health.

Ignoring the advice and recommendations of the relevant experts in order to tend to his political concerns, Mayor de Blasio effectively became a member of that class of villain most hated by his progressive allies: a denier. His refusal to concede the facts and his desire to subordinate good policy to political expediency were compounded by his general executive incompetence, for instance in leaving city agencies without necessary guidance for implementing work-from-home policies. He insisted that the city’s hospitals were well prepared for the crisis; the actual situation in the city’s public hospitals was shortly thereafter described as “apocalyptic” by one physician.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/breaking-fbi-notes-detail-effort-catch-flynn-lie-get-him

A senior FBI official’s handwritten notes from the earliest days of the Trump administration expressed concern that the bureau might be “playing games” with a counterintelligence interview of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to get him to lie so “we could prosecute him or get him fired.”

The notes and other emails were provided to Flynn’s lawyers under seal last week and released Wednesday night by court order, providing the most damning evidence to date of potential politicalization and misconduct inside the FBI during the Russia probe.

The notes show FBI officials discussed not providing Flynn a Miranda-like warning before his January 2017 interview —  a practice normally followed in such interviews — so that he could be charged with a crime if he misled the agents, the officials said.

“What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?,” the handwritten notes of the senior official say. The notes express further concern the FBI might be “playing games.”

Multiple officials confirmed to Just the News that the author of the notes is William Priestap, the now-retired FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence and the ultimate supervisor for fired agent Peter Strzok, who led the Russia probe.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/04/29/bill-gates-says-china-did-a-lot-of-things-right-on-coronavirus-slams-u-s-response-n386613

In an interview on Tuesday, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates dismissed calls to hold China’s Communist Party accountable for lying to the rest of the world and enabling the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Gates said China “did a lot of things right,” while slamming America’s response. He insisted that any move to hold China accountable would be a “distraction.”

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria noted that many in Washington, D.C. want to hold China accountable. “Far from cooperating with the second-largest economy in the world, it is China that is to blame for this virus,” Zakaria explained. “How would you respond to the charge that the Chinese covered this up, they essentially deceived the rest of the world, and as a result, they should be held in some way responsible for this?”

“Well, I don’t think that’s a timely thing because it doesn’t affect how we act today,” Gates said. “China did a lot of things right at the beginning. Like any country where a virus first shows up, they can look back and say, well, they missed some things. Some countries did respond very quickly and get their testing in place and they avoided the incredible economic pain, and it’s sad that even the U.S. — that you would have expected to do this well — did it particularly poorly.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/04/28/to-prepare-for-covid-19-vaccine-lets-ensure-manufacturing-capacity-will-meet-demand/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=to-prepare-for-covid-19-vaccine-lets-ensure-manufacturing-capacity-will-meet-demand?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWXprd1l6azRaalV5T1RSayIsInQiOiJMUitrRE9ySFlCczlwQlcra0pERXd5WE9NNTU5aEJcL0llbWVmQUhvU2dMSnpVVEF6dWg5R0ppZVZBaG82aHpkZG5FWkdqY1Ntc1BnR29kRkhGdkMxbmY5emJLZDllY1l5dFZJMXVcL0VnU2xRZ2ZHU3pTSTdFSmJaNmRLVlVsRlwvWSJ9

Pharmaceutical and biotech companies, in collaboration with scientists in academia and government, are working flat-out to develop drugs and vaccines to treat or prevent COVID-19.

Although a vaccine is still months away, policymakers and the public should ask now: If and when their efforts succeed, will there be sufficient manufacturing capacity to meet the likely enormous demand?  

Fortunately, thanks to legislation passed by Congress back in 2004, President Donald Trump and his administration already have the authority they need to support and incentivize private companies with the relevant expertise and skills to build out manufacturing capacity as quickly as humanly possible.

Private industry faces significant risks in building manufacturing capacity at this stage. Given the national interest in making a vaccine available, the president should task his administration with acting now to prepare this capacity. 

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

How It Works

The Project BioShield Act of 2004 gave the Department of Homeland Security authority to determine if a chemical, biological, or radiological agent presents “a material threat against the United States population sufficient to affect national security.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/joe-bidens-dr-death/

Ezekiel Emanuel has some unsettling beliefs.

Does Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel believe Joe Biden would be better off dead?

That would be a peculiar position for Biden’s chief adviser on medical issues and a member of the candidate’s Public Health Advisory Committee to take. But if we accept the reasoning behind Emanuel’s infamous 2014 essay, Biden is nothing more than a resource-sucking shell of himself who should stop trying to prolong his life.

I suspect that if one of Trump’s advisers on coronavirus had once taken to the august pages of The Atlantic to reason that men who reach the age of 75 are useless to society, the press would be vigorously exploring and amplifying his position. Reporters have rarely bothered to bring it up with Emanuel, who is constantly on TV — or with Biden, who is now “sheltered in place” and trying to prolong his life.

It’s quite simple: Does Emanuel believe that Biden, aged 78 on Inauguration Day, is faltering or declining, or in a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived? Does Emanuel consider Biden to have been robbed of his ability to contribute to work, society, and the world? Does he believe that Biden will now be remembered as feeble, ineffectual, and even pathetic? Is Biden’s creativity, originality, and productivity pretty much gone? Surely a younger person, according to Emanuel’s own societal prescription, would be better prepared for the job.

While some of us believe age is catching up to Biden — time waits for no one, etc. — we still believe his life is more than political aspirations. Does Emanuel?