RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/05/experts-damned-by-their-own-research/

“The lockdowns in the UK and US were largely inspired by the ‘expert’ projections and recommendations of two men, Neil Ferguson and Anthony Fauci, who not only share a sorry history of dud predictions but also admit they are ‘not at all certain’ where the pandemic is going, how best to stop it or if yesterday’s advice will be the same as tomorrow’s.”

Our conclusions, to a degree, are encouraging for ongoing pandemic planning efforts in the US that emphasize the potentially key role that might be played in a future pandemic by exactly the sort of public health measures used in 1918′ (emphasis mine).
                                                                         –Neil Ferguson

These closing remarks aren’t exactly beaming with confidence. Yet this is the conclusion of Neil Ferguson’s 2007 publication on the public health interventions during the 1918 pandemic, the same leading expert whose advice and epidemiological models has greatly shaped and influenced the pandemic responses of both the U.S. and U.K.

Ferguson and co-author Martin C.J. Bootsma compared data from 16 cities during the 1918 influenza outbreak and cautiously argued there is correlative evidence that the mortality rate can be reduced by up to 25 per cent through non-pharmaceutical interventions.  One might imagine that such a study could recommend what specific public health measures might play a “key role”, such as closing schools or banning public gatherings, except that the authors openly admit their research offers no insight into any specific measures but only  “overall reductions in transmission caused by the whole range of control measures used.”

Moreover, the authors acknowledge serious limitations to their research:

Extrapolating from 1918 to the present day requires great caution; the U.S. of 1918 was a very different place from today” and that, “we cannot exclude the possibility that there may have been some other factor that varied among cities, and that might have been partly responsible for the observed variation in overall mortality.

https://cms.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/05/new-york-nursing-home-deaths-appro

The numbers are going to keep getting worse.

Last month, in 1 in 5 Coronavirus Deaths Could Have Been Prevented by Securing Nursing Homes, I documented some of the scale of the malfeasance in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Virginia, and other parts of the country by Team Lockdown.

In neighboring New York, nearly 1 in 4 coronavirus deaths emerged from nursing homes. Those 3,060 deaths are only part of the story and represent an extremely incomplete picture. The Health Department had battled against releasing the information, claiming that it was protecting the privacy of residents. Even when the people pleading for the release of the information were their own loved ones.

In one facility, 17% of the residents have died. In 5 others, more than 10% are dead.

Governor Cuomo’s Department of Health had issued an order that, “no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19” and also prohibited requiring testing of returning patients. Sending hospitalized patients with coronavirus to the same mismanaged nursing homes was a death sentence for countless seniors in those facilities.

The Cuomo death toll is now much worse.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-5-6-why-are-government-employees-supposedly-immune-to-layoffs

It’s the time of the coronavirus, and as we all know, that means that it is the moral responsibility of all governors and state health officials to issue “lockdown” commands, compelling all “non-essential” businesses to close until further notice. Although the sweep and severity of these “lockdown” commands has varied from state to state, at this point the governors of most states have ordered the closure of nearly all restaurants, bars, hotels, gyms, hair salons, and thousands of similar businesses. Obviously, the immediate result of these orders was going to be that the employees of the businesses would get furloughed or laid off. Some 26 million new unemployment claims had been filed by late April, with more undoubtedly to be revealed in the next weekly report.

Of course, with thousands of businesses shuttering, and their revenues disappearing, state and local tax revenues are also falling off a cliff. So if the same rules apply to these governmental entities as to private businesses, they would be about to make massive layoffs as well.

And yet, if you look at discussion about how state and local governments should deal with their own financial issues, somehow the whole idea that government workers might get laid off is beyond the purview of polite discussion. The same people who have effectively ordered the layoff of close to 30 million people in the private sector at the same time think that every single job of a civil service bureaucrat is somehow sacrosanct.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/justice-department-drops-case-against-michael-flynn/

The Justice Department has moved to withdraw its case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, citing “newly discovered and disclosed information,” according to a new court filing.

The move, first reported by The Associated Press, comes less than an hour after the top prosecutor on the case, Brandon Van Grack, submitted his withdrawal from the case. The decision said that the White House interview Flynn gave to the FBI, which ultimately led to his guilty plea, was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/neil-fergusons-error-of-judgment/

A tale of death, sex, and lousy leadership.

Yesterday, the news that the U.K. now has the worst coronavirus death toll in Europe coincided with the Telegraph’s revelation that Neil Ferguson, the lead epidemiologist at Imperial College and key adviser to the British government, had been caught with his pants down, breaking his own social-distancing rules.

Ferguson, you may recall — sometimes nicknamed “Professor Lockdown” — was the chap who warned the government that there could be up to 500,000 deaths if it didn’t immediately change course, maneuvering from a mitigation to a suppression strategy against COVID-19. Such was his influence that, almost overnight, the government abandoned its pursuit of herd immunity, rolling out the biggest restrictions of healthy and law-abiding people’s civil liberties that the country has ever seen. Ferguson strongly believed that his advice would save countless lives, and perhaps it has. But why, then, didn’t he follow it himself?

All while lecturing the public on the importance of cooperating with nationwide house imprisonment, Ferguson was conducting an affair with his married lover, who travelled across London on multiple occasions to “visit” him. The timeline provided by The Telegraph, who broke the story, leaves little room for excuses. It shows that while Ferguson briefed the country to stay put, his lover, superbly cast as the 38-year-old Antonia Staats (get it?), a left-wing activist, was traveling to and fro between her husband, their kids, and her $2 million home for her quarantine rendezvous with her favorite government scientist. As if this story couldn’t get any more bourgeois, the husband apparently wasn’t bothered by this, because the couple have an “open marriage.” It is the kind of story the British press love. Hypocrisy, stupidity, and a brilliant distraction from more pressing (and depressing) matters.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/05/san-fran-health-dept-delivering-drugs-and-booze-daniel-greenfield/

I’m sorry.

We make fun of the absolute horrid socialist insanity in Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, but parts of our own country are positively making them look sane. It’s no secret that lefties have used the pandemic to push their own policy agendas.

Public officials in San Francisco have decided to use the pandemic to justify housing homeless in hotels and delivering booze and drugs to them. 

If you ever wanted a reason to never visit San Francisco or try one of its overpriced hotels again, here you go.

San Francisco’s health department confirmed Wednesday that the city was administering alcohol, tobacco, medical cannabis and other substances in an effort to prevent a handful of people quarantined or isolating in city-leased hotels from going outside to get the substances themselves.

Administering. People. Isolating.

Compared to the San Fran Chronicle, the Ministry of Information in 1984 was the soul of clarity and meaning.

What the Chronicle means is that junkies are getting deliveries of drugs, ciggies, and booze while staying in hotels. They’re not being “administered” to them unless there’s a doctor or a nurse carefully dosing booze into a cup for them.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/big_tech_is_strangling_us.html

How ironic that the 1984 iconic advertisement that Apple used to introduce the Macintosh computer “played on imagery from George Orwell’s 1984 novella [sic] presenting Apple as rebels fighting a technocratic elite.  The spot certainly was a lot gloomier than the company’s previous commercials, that used Apple celebrity spokesman Dick Cavett.” In truth, “there was nothing cuddly about the new Macintosh ad, which was firmly rooted in the burgeoning dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic.”

Ostensibly the advertisement’s intention was “to remove people’s fears of technology [.]” In fact, Apple claimed that they “wanted to democratize technology, telling people that the power was now literally in their hands.”

How things have changed as the tech giants have morphed into near-totalitarian giants controlling far too much of our lives.  Like serfs, we bend to their will or are punished. Thus, Candace Owens is suspended from Twitter for challenging Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer while  Facebook flags the Declaration of Independence as ‘”hate speech.”

In 2016, Aaron Renn reported that both conservative and leftwing groups are pulled down at Twitter. In 2019 “YouTube blocked some British history teachers from its service for uploading archive material related to Adolf Hitler, saying they [were] breaching new guidelines banning the promotion of hate speech. The video-sharing website announced that it would remove material glorifying the Nazis from its platform in an attempt to stop people being radicalised. In the process however, it also deleted videos uploaded to help educate future generations about the risks of fascism.” 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/05/06/did-we-forge

“Former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tom Frieden avoided jail time on Tuesday after pleading guilty to groping a longtime family friend in New York.Frieden, who is also the former New York City health comissioner, turned himself in to police in August 2018 after the woman reported that he had grabbed her butt without her permission inside his Brooklyn apartment, court documents said.By pleading guilty, Frieden wasn’t required to explain what happened during the October 2017 incident to Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge Edwin Novillo. Frieden was facing up to a year in jail for misdemeanor forcible touching, third-degree sexual abuse and second-degree harassment charges, prosecutors said.”

Well, today is where House Democrats are probably going to hammer the Trump administration for having a response to this Wuhan coronavirus outbreak that is just as bad or worse than China’s handling of the pandemic that they caused. It will be political theater. It will be grounded in nonsensical partisanship. And yes, President Trump should yank his top coronavirus taskforce officials from these circus acts. The president made his disdain for House Democrats known and as the reason for why Dr. Anthony Fauci was yanked from today’s hearing (via the Hill):

House Democrats are growing frustrated in their efforts to oversee the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, as President Trump said Tuesday that he’s blocking officials from testifying in the lower chamber because he doesn’t want them taking questions from “a bunch of Trump haters.”