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May 2020

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Brazil Doubles Down on Reform President Jair Bolsonaro reaffirms the goal of ending crony capitalism. By Mary Anastasia O’Grady

By on May 4th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazil-doubles-down-on-reform-11588541718?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Under the strain of Covid-19, the Brazilian economy is expected to contract by 5% this year. But the outlook isn’t all grim for the world’s ninth-largest economy. Last week a political crisis swirling around President Jair Bolsonaro prompted him to reaffirm his commitment to free-market-minded Economy Minister Paulo Guedes.

Mr. Guedes is the architect of a revolutionary plan to end the decadeslong subsidization of the well-connected in Brasília, paid for by the forgotten man. Progress has been slow since Mr. Bolsonaro took office in January 2019 and now the virus has thrown the reformers a curveball. But the president’s fresh endorsement of Mr. Guedes signals an understanding that his government is built on the popular demand for faster growth and better living standards.

The wild card is whether the government can build a coalition in the National Congress willing to cooperate. That’s a thorny challenge in Brazil’s notoriously fragmented legislature. The socially conservative Mr. Bolsonaro is a former military officer who served 28 years in Congress. As a legislator, he was never prominent in shaping policy. Now swaying the coequal lawmaking body is vital to his efforts to move Brazil ahead.

Mr. Bolsonaro has been full of surprises for left-wing critics. During his presidential campaign in 2018, they labeled him a right-wing extremist and predicted that he would try to impose a military dictatorship. Yet while plenty of leaders around the region are using police-state tactics in national lockdowns to stop the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Bolsonaro is taking a federalist approach by putting the states in charge.

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Smart or Lucky? How Florida Dodged the Worst of Coronavirus Even though it’s too early to draw clear conclusions, and the virus could flare again, there are lessons from its approach By Arian Campo-Flores and Alex Leary

By on May 4th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/smart-or-lucky-how-florida-dodged-the-worst-of-coronavirus-11588531865?mod=hp_lead_pos5

MIAMI—When the coronavirus pandemic swept toward Florida, public-health professionals nationally warned of a potentially devastating wave of infections that could imperil the state’s large senior population.

But so far, the state seems to have dodged that fate, despite not following advice to impose measures such as an early, blanket lockdown to minimize spread.

With Gov. Ron DeSantis preparing to start reopening the state on Monday, epidemiologists and others are asking: What happened? Was Florida smart or lucky?

The answer may be a bit of both. Mr. DeSantis restricted visitation to nursing homes but he left early lockdown decisions to local authorities. Mayors in some hard-hit large communities shut down faster and more aggressively than the state, gaining valuable time.

Walt Disney World closed two weeks before the statewide order. Spring breakers, who packed Florida beaches and bars until mid-March, went back home. Some scientists point to Florida’s low population density, while others to its subtropical climate to explain fewer infections.

A key factor, many say, is a change in the behavior of Floridians. Though the governor didn’t impose a statewide stay-at-home order until April 3, people began hunkering down en masse in mid-March, according to firms that analyze anonymous cellphone data.

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A New York Times opinion writer says it’s time to dump Biden By Andrea Widburg

By on May 4th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/a_new_york_times_opinion_writer_says_its_time_to_dump_biden.html

On Sunday, I wrote that it’s been fun watching Democrats struggle with the Biden conundrum: Do they rally around him or, because he’s obviously mentally diminished and has significant corruption problems, do they use Tara Reade’s accusation against him as an excuse to boot him out? By Sunday night, Elizabeth Bruenig, a New York Times opinion writer, had her verdict: It’s time for Biden to go.

Bruenig is surprisingly sympathetic to Reade. She acknowledges that Reade’s story has been inconsistent and that she’s a somewhat eccentric character. However, unlike other Democrat journalists, she extends to Reade the same benefit of the doubt that Democrats routinely extend to politically correct victims:

Ms. Reade’s account is not nearly as incredible as some have argued. In the course of my reporting, I have worked closely with many survivors of sexual assault. It isn’t unusual, in my experience, for survivors to exhibit behavior that seems unstable or erratic to others. They may initially disclose to investigators or journalists only a fragment of what happened, and then reveal more over time — some even falsely recant, either because they sense the police don’t believe them, or because they fear the consequences of pressing their claims. And victims often maintain relationships with their attackers or harbor mixed feelings about them.

“It’s not at all uncommon for someone to still have positive feelings about aspects of the person who assaulted them, or to admire or respect them,” Scott Berkowitz, the founder and president of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) told me. “With people who work for politicians, there’s usually a strong measure of loyalty or respect in that relationship. So it’s not indicative that someone wasn’t telling the truth.”

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ProPublica: Millions of Vote-by-Mail Ballots Aren’t ‘Missing’ — They’re Just ‘Most Likely in Landfills’ By J. Christian Adams

By on May 4th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/j-christian-adams/2020/05/03/foundation-funded-journalists-lie-about-voter-fraud-n387767

Last week I wrote about a new constellation of leftist philanthropy trying to influence the rules of the 2020 election, including pushing vote-by-mail, paying reporters to deny that voter fraud exists, and lobbying Congress to federalize state power over elections. Less than 24 hours later, I saw these dollars in action – through a smear by the propagandists at ProPublica.

ProPublica is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) posing as a newsroom. It is the new model in a changing media landscape, where groups like George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society give ProPublica hundreds of thousands of dollars and ProPublica does what the funders ask.

It should be no surprise that ProPublica is tasked with attacking anyone who reports on voter fraud or election security vulnerabilities but sometimes it rises to the level of parody.

A few weeks ago, my organization reported that federal data published by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission revealed a terrible problem with vote-by-mail. It turns out that tens of millions of ballots went missing, were rejected, went to the wrong address, and ultimately were never counted as valid votes.

You can read the disheartening data here.

Reporting on millions of ballots that were mailed out but never counted as valid votes is too much for ProPublica’s donor masters. So this weekend, Derek Willis of ProPublica penned a ham-handed attack on the revelation.

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The Coronavirus Death Rate Is MUCH Lower Than the Estimates Justifying the Lockdowns… By Matt Margolis

By on May 4th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/05/03/at-least-five-studies-have-shown-that-the-coronavirus-fatality-rate-is-under-1-percent-n387776

Appearing on Justice with Judge Jeanine on Saturday night, Dr. Debora Birx admitted something that anyone paying attention to the coronavirus pandemic has known for some time now. “I think we underestimated very early on the number of asymptomatic cases,” Dr. Birx said. “And I think we’re really beginning to understand there are people that get infected that those symptoms are so low-grade that they don’t even know that they’re infected.”

The question, of course, is how much? Well, we have a rough idea already.

But, first, let’s go back to what experts said originally. Back in March, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a 3.4 percent fatality rate and Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was about 2 percent. “If you look at the cases that have come to the attention of the medical authorities in China, and you just do the math, the math is about 2%.”

Some of us will remember how President Trump endured a lot of criticism for saying that he had a “hunch” that the WHO’s estimate was too high and that the fatality rate of the coronavirus might actually be below 1 percent. “Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number. Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor,” Trump said. “I think that that number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

People with low vitamin D levels more likely to die from coronavirus, study finds By Natalie O’Neill

By on May 4th, 2020

https://nypost.com/2020/05/01/people-with-low-vitamin-d-levels-more-likely-to-die-from-coronavirus-study-finds/?

People with low levels of vitamin D may be more likely to die from the coronavirus, according to a preliminary study.

Researchers at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Foundation Trust and the University of East Anglia in England compared the average vitamin D levels of 20 European countries with COVID-19 mortality rates — and found “significant relationships” between vitamin D levels and the number of deaths caused by this infection.

The study, which has not been peer-reviewed, notes sun-starved “Nordic” countries are among the most at risk.

“We believe that we can advise vitamin D supplementation to protect against SARS-CoV2 infection,” the researchers wrote.

The finding falls in line with previous research that suggests healthy vitamin D levels can reduce the risk of respiratory infections.

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British Jews Are Too Eager to Embrace Starmer’s Still Dubious Labour Party by Melanie Phillips

By on May 3rd, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/05/03/british-jews-are-too-eager-to-embrace-starmers-still-dubious-labour-party/

JNS.org – In both Britain and America, the Jewish community is increasingly badly served by leaders who seem less and less able to distinguish between the friends and the enemies of the Jewish people.

In America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has been convulsed by controversy over appointing Dianne Lob as its new chairman. Lob is the former president of HIAS, an organization originally established to assist Jewish refugees, but which has morphed into a body closely associated with anti-Israel and Islamist groups.

In Britain this week, Conservative MP Robert Halfon mounted a startlingly outspoken attack on the Jewish community’s main representative body, the Board of Deputies, for having a “left of center political agenda.”

His criticism was triggered by its weekly bulletin that, he said, read like a “political broadcasting service” for the Labour Party.

The background to this fracas is the replacement of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by Sir Keir Starmer — a former human rights lawyer, Director of Public Prosecutions, and more centrist figure than his far-left predecessor.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

The Contradiction at the Heart of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light By Nicholas M. Gallagher

By on May 3rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-contradiction-at-the-heart-of-hilary-mantels-the-mirror-and-the-light/

The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt, 784 pp., $30)

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall was a high-cultural phenomenon. The novel, published in 2009, retold the story of the downfall of Sir (Saint) Thomas More and the rise of Thomas Cromwell: A Man for All Seasons, but with the good guy and bad guy reversed. In Mantel’s telling, More was a religious fanatic, an embodiment of the deliberate, persecuting medieval darkness, while Cromwell was the new man, an omni-talented, self-made son of a blacksmith whose virtues were above all else moderation and practicality. Written with a brilliant combination of arresting detail and swift movement, the novel won the Man Booker Prize (the “British Pulitzer”), as did its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies. The books spawned a Royal Shakespeare Company play and a BBC miniseries and became a worldwide sensation among the serious set.

Then — nothing. The third book in what was announced as a trilogy was supposed to come out in 2018. Then, 2017 brought rumors of delay . . . 2018 . . . 2019 . . . The literati thought they knew why. While the Wolf Hall novels are fiction, their characters are, of course, historical figures. And Thomas Cromwell, after triumphing over More and Anne Boleyn, overseeing the dissolution of the monasteries, procuring Henry VIII’s marriages to his third and fourth wives, and significantly advancing the cause of Protestantism in England, was executed by orders of that monarch on July 28, 1540. If Mantel finished her trilogy, in other words, she was going to have to kill her hero.

Now the third book, The Mirror and the Light, is here. Read page by page — that is to say, taking the measure of the book by the quality of the prose — it is another masterpiece, a worthy successor to its forebears. There are some reasons, however, to think that the rumors were right — that the death of Cromwell presented a challenge for Mantel. Of the novel’s 754 pages, there is not a hint of trouble for Cromwell until around the 600th, and the crisis leading to his death does not break until about the 700th. This would not be a problem were there some other narrative arc Mantel was intent on tracing. But there isn’t, really. The Mirror and the Light, unlike Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, does not have a central conflict. In Wolf Hall, the clash with More and the struggle to secure Henry’s divorce and remarriage gave a narrative coherence to the work. In Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell squared off in a zero-sum contest — death or absolute power — with Anne Boleyn. The Mirror and the Light begins where Bring Up the Bodies left off, just after the execution of Boleyn and her supposed lovers. Henry VIII, now a widower, is free to marry Jane Seymour, and does. Cromwell, having brought this state of affairs to pass, is master secretary (and soon lord privy seal), in fact if not in title the most powerful man in England.

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Ramadan: The public call to Muslim prayer for the sake of unity and diversity Diane Bederman

By on May 3rd, 2020

https://dianebederman.com/ramadan-the-public-call-to-muslim-prayer-for-the-sake-of-unity-and-diversity/

Easter and Passover have come and gone and millions of people were unable to be together because of Covid 19-the Chinese virus.

But Ramadan is here and for 30 days Muslims fast and pray. New rules. There is a public call to Muslim prayer. In cities and towns in America and Canada our politicians decided for the sake of unity and diversity that we should all have the opportunity to hear the Call to Prayer for Muslims. It’s about creating a sense of unity and comfort and sharing the religion with others  which requires that noise laws be relaxed. Toronto Municipal Code, city spokesperson Tammy Robbinson explained:

“Spiritual, emotional, and mental well-being is important during these difficult times.”

In Hamilton, Ontario twice daily calls to prayer, the Adhaan are allowed until May 24. Imam Sayed Tora said he was “thrilled” council was open to the request from the downtown and Mountain mosques. The Mountain mosque leader said the pandemic lockdown is particularly hard on members forced to stay apart during Ramadan, a time when local mosques are normally “buzzing beehives” of activity.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Howard Zinn’s Tendentious Mendacity William D. Rubinstein

By on May 3rd, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/04/tendentious-mendacity/

In recent decades Howard Zinn (1922–2010) became probably the best-known radical historian of American history, almost exclusively through the book he published in 1980, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present. This gained for Zinn what Mary Grabar describes in her introduction as “Icon, Rock Star” status, making him nationally known outside narrow academic confines. He is also one of the few historians who has generated a comprehensive refutation of his errors and biases, which Mary Grabar ably sets out at length in Debunking Howard Zinn.

Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America
by Mary Grabar

Since Zinn’s work is unlikely to be known to most Australian readers, something must be said about his background and historical methodology. He was born in New York in 1922 to Eastern European Jewish parents who were (literally) dirt poor, his father working as a ditch digger and window cleaner during the Depression, and later as a waiter. In his teens, Zinn attended a Communist Party rally in New York, where he was knocked unconscious by charging police, apparently a traumatic event for him. In 1940 he worked as an apprentice in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he and others lost no time in organising an Apprentice Association, already demonstrating his outsider’s propensity for radical activism. After the war (in which he was an Army Air Force bombardier, an experience which made him into a lifelong near-pacifist), Zinn attended New York University and Columbia University. He has been widely accused of being an active member of the American Communist Party (which he denied), the FBI taking him seriously enough to compile a 423-page dossier on his activities.

In 1956 Zinn landed a teaching job at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, an institution established in the late nineteenth century for black women. Unsurprisingly, Zinn fails to discuss the college’s background in his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2002), since the college is named for its chief benefactor, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, whose husband was John D. Rockefeller, in real terms the richest capitalist in American history.

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