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Lockdown Diary, Budapest By John O’Sullivan

Posted By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-life-in-budapest-hungary-under-lockdown/#slide-1

Ghost trains,’ Hungary’s emergency law, face masks and social distancing, restaurants’ pivot to takeout and delivery.

‘Ghost trains” and ghost buses are the most visible and oddly comforting expression of Budapest’s lockdown. Because “essential workers” still have to get to and from work, and the other city-dwellers may have good reasons to move around the city, the regular train and subway services are running as before, and even keeping to their regular schedules. In the case of the Number Two train, which runs alongside the Danube past such city sights as the “Whale” gallery and cultural center and Hungary’s magnificent 19th-century Parliament building, this means that between six and eight trains pass by every hour. At the same time, because Hungarians have been faithfully observing the lockdown rules, which firmly instruct social distancing, almost no one travels on them.

Many trains have no passengers at all; few have more than six or seven. They arrive at a train stop, halt, pause while their doors open for passengers to alight and board them, ring a warning bell before the doors close, and then depart again. On most occasions during this routine, no one gets on and no one gets off. And when essential workers do board them, they punctiliously take seats as far away from each other as they can manage.

Mark Higgie, a former Australian ambassador to Hungary who has stayed on to live in Budapest, has spent the lockdown walking around the city and posting photographs of its old and beautifully restored buildings on Twitter. He’s also been waging an Internet campaign against the decision of Mayor Sadiq Khan and London transport authorities to reduce the number of train services in the U.K. capital.

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Stop Dancing on the Graves of Trump Supporters Who Die of the Virus By Dan McLaughlin

Posted By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-media-stop-dancing-on-the-graves-of-trump-supporters-who-die-of-the-virus/

‘They had it coming’ is a shameful sentiment to broadcast. That doesn’t stop the New York Times.

The latest installment in the ghoulish ongoing effort to use coronavirus deaths as a tribal red-vs.-blue bludgeon can be found in a column by Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times, and in the reaction to that column on the left.

The column is framed around the death of Joe Joyce, a bar owner from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Joyce was a Trump supporter; his son, a friend of Bellafante’s, “was at odds with his father politically.” Bellafante admits that Joyce was not the pro-Trump monster of media caricature: “He was not going to make the Syrian immigrant who came in to play darts feel as if he belonged anywhere else. . . . In his bar Joe Joyce had set the tone for what evolved into an incongruously progressive place. From the beginning there had been a quiet gay presence.” But his death is too politically useful, it seems, to resist. And with Joyce gone, his Ivy League–educated kids get the last word. Bellafante writes:

On March 1, Joe Joyce and his wife, Jane, set sail for Spain on a cruise, flying first to Florida. His adult children — Kevin, Eddie and Kristen Mider — suggested that the impending doom of the coronavirus made this a bad idea. Joe Joyce was 74, a nonsmoker, healthy. . . . He didn’t see the problem. “He watched Fox, and believed it was under control,’’ Kristen told me. Early in March Sean Hannity went on air proclaiming that he didn’t like the way that the American people were getting scared “unnecessarily.’’ He saw it all, he said, “as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.”

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OH BOO WHO…BILL GATES RAILS AGAINST CUTTING OFF FUNDS FOR WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION

Posted By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/15/bill-gates-oh-boo-hoo-rails-trump-pulling-who-fund/

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder who recently cut his board of directors ties to his company so that he could focus in part on curing the world of disease — such as through the Decade of Vaccines his foundation helped pioneer to develop and administer vaccines around the world — just called out President Donald Trump’s decision to pull U.S. funding from the World Health Organization as abysmal, “dangerous” and deadly.

Hmm. There’s an entirely unexpected and shocking reaction — not.

His condemnation isn’t rooted so much in a “watching out for America” kind of view as it is in a “protecting self and self-interests” panic.

Yes, even billionaire philanthropists can have agendas.

Fact is, Gates is a huge funder of WHO.

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A Tiny Virus Further Sickens the Fevered Media Mob . By Frank Miele

Posted By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/20/a_tiny_virus_further_sickens_the_fevered_media_mob_142976.html

In his 1898 novel, “The War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells imagined a world changed forever by something like our dread coronavirus. In that familiar story, Martian invaders were close to total domination of the Earth when they were unexpectedly vanquished by the “germs of disease,” famously called by Wells “the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, had put upon this earth.”

In the novel, mankind is saved by germs, but in modern Hollywood science fiction viruses are usually employed to devastate human society, or change it forever. The extent to which COVID-19 will leave a permanent mark on us is yet unknown, but it is safe to declare that generations of future doctoral students will study its impact on everything from handshakes to food supply chains.

Within the sphere of politics, we have already seen short-term impacts to elections and how legislative bodies do their work, but the question of how the psychology of crisis will translate into permanent changes in the relationship between the governed and the government can only be answered with informed guesses. Is the rebellion in Michigan against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stringent stay-at-home orders the first shot in a war against the nanny state or the last gasp of “consent of the governed”? Will the electorate become enamored of receiving “paychecks” from the government for not working, or will it chafe at adding untold trillions to the national debt and demand new austerity measures? Can the political media continue to play the role of a Greek chorus, pretending to speak for the general population and assuming a posture of omniscience despite being mainly aligned with one political party – and being so wrong so often?

It is that last question that consumes me today as I watch yet again the White House press corps savage President Trump. It’s become a daily ritual, and one that I enjoy not because the president is being attacked, but because he so deftly fends off the swarming journalistic pests like Gulliver shaking loose from a dozen Lilliputians who mistakenly thought they had the giant pinned.

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It’s Time to Build We were unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s what we need to do about it. Marc Andreessen

Posted By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/its-time-build-frontpagemagcom/

Editors’ note: We are proud to publish the following article by Marc Andreessen  on the long-term crisis facing our nation, and what can be done to create a better future. Marc is co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and a member of Facebook’s board of directors. In 1994, he was one of six inductees to the World Wide Web Hall of Fame.

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation. Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.

We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!

We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses. Our scientists will hopefully invent therapies and a vaccine, but then we may not have the manufacturing factories required to scale their production. And even then, we’ll see if we can deploy therapies or a vaccine fast enough to matter — it took scientists 5 years to get regulatory testing approval for the new Ebola vaccine after that scourge’s 2014 outbreak, at the cost of many lives. In the U.S., we don’t even have the ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it. Tens of millions of laid off workers and their families, and many millions of small businesses, are in serious trouble *right now*, and we have no direct method to transfer them money without potentially disastrous delays. A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most.

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Suppression of Expression Obscures the Truth About the Virus Victor David Hanson

Posted By on April 20th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/19/suppression-of-expression-obscures-the-truth-about-the-virus/

What explained the paradox of near paranoia to some inquiries but magnanimous tolerance of other absurdities? Usually, one of three explanations suffice—and often all three together.

Americans are acquainted with predictable but ultimately failed progressive efforts to suppress free expression by preemptive invective and politically correct finger-pointing.

To believe that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers revealed too many contradictions, too many lacunae, too many episodes of timely amnesia, and too many unsubstantiated accusations in their testimonies was chauvinistically to attack/smear/silence all women’s voices—at least until the same sort of memory-repressed accusations focused on handsy Joe Biden.

To express skepticism that current global temperatures are uniformly rising almost entirely due to human carbon emissions, that this state of affairs poses catastrophic dangers that may end civilization as we know it, and that this emergency can only be addressed by the radical restructuring of global economies is to be rendered a denialist, a crank, a fool.

But these parameters of censorship have a logic and predictability, given their race/class/gender/environmental orthodoxy.

Shifting Pandemic Orthodoxy

What explains the current taboo on topics regarding the coronavirus?

It is now a truism that almost every influential model that has been advanced about the spread of the coronavirus was flawed. They almost all erred on the side of exaggerated morbidity. But to suggest that in public is deemed heresy.

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‘Let us work’ protests spread all across the US this weekend; demonstrators labeled as ‘far-right’ | Vivek Saxena

Posted By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/04/19/let-us-work-protests-spread-all-across-the-us-this-weekend-demonstrators-labeled-as-far-right-910354

As protests against coronavirus-based lockdowns continue spreading across the country (and globe), authorities are growing increasingly despotic and arguably fascist in their enforcement of “stay-at-home” orders, with police in one community arresting a woman for simply planning a protest.

That woman, Kim Pagan of New Jersey, reportedly faces charges for “organizing a prohibited event” that involved protesters gathering in order “to demonstrate against” Gov. Phil Murphy‘s potentially unconstitutional coronavirus restrictions.

“Pagan has to answer to the charge in Muncipal Court. Violations of emergency orders constitute a disorderly persons offense carrying a potential sentence of up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine,” Fox News reported.

On Friday, New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal posted a tweet in which he seemed to mock Pagan and other locals who’ve been charged for violating the governor’s authoritarian decrees:

But try as he and other officials might to infringe on the American people’s constitutionally guaranteed right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” protests continue to blossom throughout the country, from Nevada to Idaho, Texas and even California.

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WaPo comes to the defense of WHO By Allan J. Favish

Posted By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/wapo_comes_to_the_defense_of_who.html

The Washington Post’s so-called “Fact-Checker” omitted critical facts from his article criticizing President Donald Trump’s condemnation of the World Health Organization. On April 17, 2020, Glenn Kessler’s “Analysis Trump’s false claim that the WHO said the coronavirus was ‘not communicable’” gave President Trump three out of four “Pinocchios” for the allegedly deceptive statement that the WHO “publicly endorsed the idea that there was not human-to-human transmission happening” and that the WHO said it was “not communicable.”       

Kessler quotes a January 13, 2020 WHO news release which states: “To date, there has been no suggestion of human to human transmission of this new coronavirus.”  Kessler does not make any comment specifically about this sentence. Moreover, Kessler cites a document that proves that there was such a “suggestion” before January 13, 2020 but does not quote from that part of the document.  Kessler states:

Dec. 31, 2019:  The WHO was alerted to a potentially new virus in China.

That same day, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control said it sent an email to the WHO regarding rumors of at least “seven cases of atypical pneumonia,” which it said is code in China for “a disease transmitted between humans caused by coronavirus.”

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How the Media Completely Blew the Trump Ventilator Story By Rich Lowry

Posted By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-response-ventilators-trump-administration-handled-potential-shortage-deftly/

The administration handled the potential shortage deftly. 

At a coronavirus-task-force briefing at the beginning of April, White House adviser Jared Kushner explained the approach that would — as events proved — get the country through its ventilator crisis.

He was relentlessly pilloried, mocked, and distorted in the press for it.

After nearly four years of unrelieved Trump hysteria in the media, it’s hard to rank the worst journalistic outrages, but how Kushner’s remarks were misreported and misinterpreted belongs high on the list.

Much of the press coverage and subsequent commentary focused on one sentence at that April 2 briefing: “The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

Cue the outrage. As CNBC put it, correctly, in a headline, “Jared Kushner slammed for saying the federal medical supply stockpile isn’t meant for states.”

The blue-checkmarks on Twitter descended in force. Representative Ted Lieu tweeted, “Dear Jared Kushner of the @realDonaldTrump: We are the UNITED STATES of America. The federal stockpile is reserved for all Americans living in our states not just federal employees. Get it?”

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Propaganda masquerading as fact checking By Eugene Veklerov

Posted By on April 20th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/propaganda_masquerading_as_fact_checking.html

Fact checking was devised to be a trusted way to separate fact from fiction. In reality, many journalists use the label “fact checking” as a cover for promoting their own biases. A case in point is an Associated Press (AP) piece headlined AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s inaccurate boasts on China travel ban, which was published on March 26, 2020, and carried by many news outlets.

So let us check this fact-checker.

The lead of the AP article reads as follows:

Defending early missteps in the U.S. response to the coronavirus, President Donald Trump has repeatedly boasted of travel restrictions on China that he suggests he decided on his own over the objections of health experts and saved “thousands” of lives.

The verdict of the AP piece:

His claims aren’t substantiated.

To support its verdict, the AP piece presents several arguments, all of which begin with the words “THE FACTS” (in all caps). Let us address these arguments. For the sake of clarity, THE FACTS presented by the AP piece are italicized. My responses begin with the words “THE REBUTTAL.”

THE FACTS: His [President Trump’s] decision was far from solo nor was it made over opposition from health experts, as the White House coronavirus task force makes clear. His decision followed a consensus by his public health advisers that the restrictions should take place.