RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/no-the-trump-administration-didnt-weaken-us-biodefenses

Befitting their absurd deference to China’s lies about the coronavirus (yes, they are lies), too many in the media are lapping up the Democratic Party talking point that the Trump administration gutted the National Security Council counter-pandemics effort.

It did not.

While the Trump administration has rightly reorganized the NSC away from the bureaucratic behemoth it became under the Obama administration, NSC bio-defense efforts have continued. And as pointed out by the former NSC lead on the issue, Tim Morrison, these efforts were wide-ranging.

The key here is that the NSC’s bureaucratic reorganization is being presented as a gutting of the nation’s bio-defenses. And that’s plainly unfair.

The NSC is supposed to exist as a filtering house for government national security efforts in service of the president’s needs and policy priorities. Unfortunately, under the Obama administration, the NSC became a place where Ben Rhodes used bureaucracy to centralize power away from the Pentagon, State Department, and Intelligence Community, and slow down the policy process. Why the interest in lethargy?

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/15/the-real-threats-from-coronavirus/

Social distancing is nothing compared to a crisis that leads to mass casualties, economic collapse, and a legacy of bad policies that leaves the country weaker than ever before.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday that Americans must prepare to “hunker down” to avoid a worst-case scenario with the rapid spread of the Chinese coronavirus. Nevertheless, plenty of skeptics are asking if coronavirus is “something” or if it is “nothing.” That’s the wrong question to ask. And asking the wrong question leads you to the wrong answers.

Of course it is something, but what is it? That’s the question we need to answer.

I know that people reading this will fall broadly into two groups. The first group, which is strongly represented among political conservatives, maintains that coronavirus is nothing or, if not precisely nothing, then it is asymptotically approaching nothing. For them, it is as real as the Fusion GPS dossier on President Trump.

Then there is the other group. These are people who are concerned that an outbreak in one or more American cities that goes undetected and thus uncontained for too long could cause a repeat of the Wuhan or Northern Italy scenario. Those scenarios followed roughly the same pattern: the virus went largely undetected due to a lack of testing capacity and soon became widespread before public health officials could act.

This led to a surge in hospitalizations that overloaded existing resources and spiked the number of fatalities as well as the fatality rate. That’s why the delay in increasing testing capacity in the United States until the past few days has been a cause for concern. The Wuhan virus should not have a high mortality rate, but when left unnoticed and thus unchecked it can spread and lead to deaths of people who would be able to recover if they’d had proper treatment.

The scenes from Italy have been horrible. By Sunday, Italy had nearly 25,000 confirmed cases, more than 1,800 deaths—and 368 of those deaths came in the prior 24 hours. That single-day death toll exceeds the worst day China ever reported.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/wont_you_be_my_helpful_not_hurtful_neighbor.html

Big Tech’s threat to our continued freedom of expression is extensive, pervasive, and personal

The suppression of conservative opinions and venues by social media giants — Google/YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Instagram — has been an issue for years.  Those attempting to present “non-progressive” points of view have battled in court to keep alive the constitutional right of freedom of speech.  But this dangerous suppression of viewpoints exists even at the micro-level, as I recently discovered after sharing a link to a video on a community forum app.  Suddenly, I became the target of vitriolic posts and was even chastised by the app censors, all of which demonstrates how extensive, pervasive, and personal is the threat to our continued freedom of expression.

I saw that threat played out in the realm of political opinion and followed the battles against it.  In 2017, PragerU filed a lawsuit against YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, for unlawfully censoring over 200 videos and curtailing its right to free speech.  Founded in 2009, within six years, the site had attracted over 1 billion viewers to its videos.

But access to those videos was soon limited by social media, with restrictions placed on viewing such titles as “Israel’s Legal Founding” by Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz; “The Ten Commandments: Do Not Murder” by Torah scholar Dennis Prager; and “Why Did Americans Fight the Korean War?” by Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and recipient of a National Humanities Medal.  The damage to PragerU resulting from YouTube’s censorship has been substantial, as YouTube is the largest forum for video viewership in the world.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/interfaith-dialogue-icon-omar-suleiman-sharia-andrew-g-bostom/

Imam Omar Suleiman gave a U.S. Congressional invocation May 9, 2019, and just participated in a high profile “inter-faith dialogue” event Thursday March 5, 2020, at North Carolina State University, with J.D. Greear of  the Southern Baptist Convention. Both the Democrats who invited him to “prayerfully” address Congress, and Mr. Greear, were willfully blind to the good Imam Suleiman’s open espousal of Sharia supremacism, and traditionalist Islamic Jew-hatred.

Suleiman has defended Sharia’s hadd punishments for adultery [stoning] and theft [amputation], advocated for both “societal Sharia” and a Caliphate, so that Sharia could “be applied in totality,” and even defended Muslim concubinage and sex-slavery (and see this compilation of video clips, embedded below).  He is also a virulent Muslim Jew-hater, who proudly lauds Islam’s Antisemitic canon, in particular, the Koranic epithet (Koran 5:60) for Jews as “apes and pigs.”

Suleiman’s intense canonical Islamic Jew-hatred was elaborated at length during a 5-part, nearly 6-hour 2012 lecture series, “Lost Chronicles of Bani Israel,” still available online (video extracts embedded below).

In prelude to his discussion of Allah’s “very dramatic action” against a particular group of Jews—transforming them into apes and pigs [Koran 7:166, and 5:60]—Suleiman elucidates what characterizes most Jews—past as prologue—with Koranic indelibility:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/cdc-was-fighting-racism-and-obesity-instead-daniel-greenfield/

The Centers for Disease Control has a $6.6 billion budget and one job which it messes up every time.

The last time the CDC had a serious workout was six years ago during the Ebola crisis. Back then CDC guidelines allowed medical personnel infected with Ebola to avoid a quarantine and interact with Americans until they showed undeniable symptoms of the disease. There were no protocols in place for treating the potentially infected resulting in the further spread of the disease inside the United States.

At the height of the crisis, confidence in the CDC fell to 37%. Meanwhile, CDC personnel had managed to mishandle Ebola virus samples, accidentally sending samples of the live virus to CDC labs. And the heads of the health bureaucracy blamed the lack of funding for their failure to have an Ebola vaccine.

The self-quarantine measures adopted in response to the coronavirus outbreak are partially a response to the lessons of the Ebola disaster.

But during the Ebola crisis, Democrats tried to shift responsibility from the Obama administration by blaming Republicans for cutting the CDC’s budget from $6.5 billion to $5.9 billion. Sound familiar? Where do those billions for the CDC actually go? Among other things, pushing gun control. The terrible budget deal from December allocated $25 million to the CDC and NIH to study gun violence.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/487625-fauci-possibly-a-few-months-until-life-gets-back-to-normal?rnd=1584276483

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday that it is possible it will take “a few months” before life goes “back to normal” amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“Can you try to help us understand, when will life get back to normal?” ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Fauci on “This Week.”

“It’s going to be a matter of several weeks to a few months, for sure,” Fauci responded.

“If you look at the dynamics of how outbreak curves go, you just need to take a look at China and take a look at South Korea right now,” the health official added. “With China, they went to their peak, and they’re coming down right now. There were, just a day or so ago, 11 new cases in China, which is miniscule compared to where it was.”

South Korea, meanwhile, is “starting to flatten,” Fauci said, adding that the change in the trend occurred over about a month and a half in both countries.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/14/this-is-an-emergency/

Panics are a species of moral intoxication. Like the physical kind, they are typically followed by a hangover. Not an upset stomach or headache, but a feeling of chagrin and resentment about one’s own gullibility, which quickly translates into irritation and resentment directed at the people who fueled the panic in the first place. ”

At a time of national crisis, it is important that we do everything possible to make sure that the important people without whom our society could not function are safe. I refer, of course, to our politicians, especially our distinguished members of Congress. Where would we be without their wisdom? How could we stagger on without their selfless dedication to the commonweal? Now that the Wuhan virus is cutting a wide swathe through our country, something must be done to protect these great men and women, many of whom are so dedicated to our welfare that they have stayed in Congress for decades—decades, just for us.

As I write, the news has just come in that a total of 50 people—50!—have died from the scourge of the Wuhan virus. No wonder people feel like the procession of flagellants in “The Seventh Seal.” This really is a pandemic akin to the Black Death.

Do you realize that in this country you have a 0.000000155963303 chance of contracting and dying from this dread disease? Especially if you are over 80 and in poor health. We must take action, and we must take action now, to preserve the lives of all those who govern us, who set our taxes, who impose all those rules and regulations that make everyday business such a joy to conduct.

https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/compared-to-what

Compared to what? That should be the question that every fear-mongering news story on the coronavirus has to start with. So far, the United States has seen forty-one deaths from the infection. Twenty-two of those deaths occurred in one poorly run nursing home outside of Seattle, the Life Care Center. Another nine deaths occurred in the rest of Washington state, leaving ten deaths (four in California, two in Florida, and one in each of Georgia, Kansas, New Jersey, and South Dakota) spread throughout the rest of the approximately 329 million residents of the United States. This represents roughly .000012 percent of the U.S. population.

Much has been made of the “exponential” rate of infection in European and Asian countries—as if the spread of all transmittable diseases did not develop along geometric, as opposed to arithmetic, growth patterns. What actually matters is whether or not the growing “pandemic” overwhelms our ability to ensure the well-being of U.S. residents with efficiency and precision. But fear of the disease, and not the disease itself, has already spoiled that for us. Even if my odds of dying from coronavirus should suddenly jump ten-thousand-fold, from the current rate of .000012 percent across the U.S. population all the way up to .12 percent, I’d happily take those odds over the destruction being wrought on the U.S. and global economy from this unbridled panic.

By comparison, there were 38,800 traffic fatalities in the United States in 2019, the National Safety Council estimates. That represents an average of over one hundred traffic deaths every day; if the press catalogued these in as much painstaking detail as they have deaths from coronavirus, highways nationwide would be as empty as New York subways are now. Even assuming that coronavirus deaths in the United States increase by a factor of one thousand over the year, the resulting deaths would only outnumber annual traffic deaths by 2,200. Shutting down highways would have a much more positive effect on the U.S. mortality rate than shutting down the U.S. economy to try to prevent the spread of the virus.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/f-d-a-approves-new-coronavirus-test-under-emergency-use-authorization/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the use of a Wuhan coronavirus diagnostic that will be able to test patients faster than any diagnostic currently available in the U.S.

Roche Holding AG, a Switzerland-based healthcare company, received “emergency use authorization” to roll out the test. The test can be run on two models of Roche’s diagnostic systems, with one model able to complete 1,440 tests per day and the second model 4,128 tests per day.

“We are increasing the speed definitely by a factor of 10,” said Thomas Schinecker, head of Roche’s diagnostics unit, in comments to Bloomberg News. “We definitely extended the capacity of the testing significantly throughout the U.S.”

The Roche test is just the third diagnostic given emergency approval by the FDA since the start of the outbreak. The other two tests approved were developed by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the New York State Department of Health, and the FDA has given separate approvals to hundreds of hospital laboratories to develop tests.