RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/the-arts-of-government-criminality/

Destroying or altering evidence, lying under oath, leaking classified info … but no pre-dawn televised raid for any of the wrongdoers.

In the entire 2016–19 efforts to derail the Trump campaign, transition, and presidency, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steele, and the FBI, Department of Justice, CIA, and other government bureaus have consistently sought to distort reality. Some of our best and brightest have destroyed evidence, altered documents, lied, leaked, and pled amnesia when questioned about their reprehensible conduct. At each stage, they were aided and abetted by a compliant media.

The dissimulation over the past four years has fallen into four rough categories. Here are a few examples of each.

Deletion of Evidence

Christopher Steele, who bragged for years of his meticulous research and whose work has been quoted chapter and verse as proof of Trump wrongdoing, recently testified under oath to a British court that he now has no records of his supposed conversations with “sub source” Russian informants. His lawyers previously had insisted that his sources were “meticulously documented and recorded.” Now Steele sheepishly admits that such an assertion was a lie, given that he can produce no evidence at all for his meticulous allegations. He admits that his emails and documents were wiped clean from his devices by January 2017.

FBI operatives working with the Mueller investigation team admitted that thousands of undisclosed text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page simply disappeared. In addition, the phones of Strzok and Page apparently were wiped clean after Strzok was dismissed from the Mueller team. Most of these mysterious losses, according to the Mueller investigation, were supposedly a result of a software glitch or other computer malfunctions.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-pandemic-ok-to-acknowledge-good-news/

Among progressives and journalists, there’s a widespread sense that no one should say things have gotten better . . . or people are going to die.

It’s not March anymore.

The coronavirus has taken a heartbreaking toll on Americans, but the course of the virus is not the same as it was a few months ago. We are on the other side of the curve. There are encouraging signs all over the country, and no early indications of a reopening debacle.

The question now is whether the media and political system can absorb good news on the virus, which is often ignored or buried under misleading storylines.

The press has a natural affinity for catastrophes, which make compelling viewing and good copy. The pandemic is indeed a once-in-a-generation story. So, the media are naturally loath to shift gears and acknowledge that the coronavirus has begun to loosen its grip.

Meanwhile, progressives and many journalists have developed a near-theological commitment to the lockdowns, such that any information that undermines them is considered unwelcome, even threatening. This accounts for the widespread sense that no one should say things have gotten better . . . or people are going to die.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/coronavirus-facebook-youtube-control-information-alex-berenson

As coronavirus lockdowns enter their third month, social media giants are tightening censorship against people who protest lockdowns and raise evidence the virus may be less risky than initially thought.

YouTube has pulled videos from scientists and physicians, even those with top-tier credentials. Meanwhile, Facebook has blocked efforts to organize protests against lockdowns.

Facebook’s stance is particularly problematic because as the largest social media network, it may gain from lockdowns, which force friends or community groups to rely on virtual gatherings instead of real-life meetings.

Investors certainly seem to believe the lockdowns have not hurt Facebook. Its stock rose 5 percent to an all-time high on Wednesday. Shares in Google’s parent company, which also owns YouTube, also are near an all-time high.

Twitter, the third major social media company, is taking a more open and pro-free speech stance. Twitter allows debate about whether the societal risks of lockdowns might be worse than the dangers of coronavirus. (My own Twitter following @alexberenson has grown 15-fold since March, and Twitter does not appear to be censoring me.)

As private corporations, social media outlets are not bound by the First Amendment and can remove speech that violates their guidelines. However, given their reach and the growing political battle over lockdowns amid questions about their efficacy, their censorship actions leave them at risk of backlash.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/22/miscalculating_risk_confusing_scary_with_dangerous.html

The coronavirus kills, everyone knows it. But this isn’t the first deadly virus the world has seen, so what happened? Why did we react the way we did? One answer is that this is the first social media pandemic. News and narratives travel in real-time right into our hands.

This spreads fear in a way we have never experienced. Drastic and historically unprecedented lockdowns of the economy happened and seemed to be accepted with little question.

We think the world is confusing “scary” with “dangerous.” They are not the same thing. It seems many have accepted as fact that coronavirus is one of the scariest things the human race has ever dealt with. But is it the most dangerous? Or even close?

There are four ways to categorize any given reality. It can be scary but not dangerous, scary and dangerous, dangerous but not scary, or not dangerous and not scary.

Clearly, COVID-19 ranks high on the scary scale. A Google news search on the virus brings up over 1.5 billion news results. To date, the virus has tragically killed nearly 100,000 people in the United States, and more lives will be lost. But on a scale of harmless to extremely dangerous, it would still fall into the category of slightly to mildly dangerous for most people, excluding the elderly and those with preexisting medical conditions.

https://babylonbee.com/news/stacey-abrams-says-she-would-step-down-from-governorship-if-asked-to-run-for-vp

Sitting at the governor’s desk at the Georgia state capitol, Stacey Abrams told reporters she would step down from her governorship if asked to run for vice president.

“If Biden asks me to run, I’ll need to focus on that full-time,” she said. “As much as I love running this great state, if the country needs me, I’ll be there.”

A security guard patrolling the capitol building then entered the governor’s office. “Come on, Stacey. Time to go. How many times do we have to have this talk?”

https://babylonbee.com/news/cdc-admits-theyve-been-looking-through-microscope-upside-down-this-whole-time

Oops! The CDC has revealed that its chief researchers have been looking through their microscopes upside down this entire pandemic.

“Oh man! I wonder if this will change our projections,” said one scientist as a visiting scientist from the private sector showed him the proper way to look through the device. “Hey, you can see the sample a whole lot clearer this way. Neato! Hoo boy, were we way off on everything!”

“No wonder our predictions were completely opposite of what happened! No wonder we keep having to revise our guidelines! Silly us! Oh well — hope we didn’t destroy the entire economy based on those faulty models from back when we were looking through the microscopes upside down.”

Those rascally scientists! What goofballs!

At publishing time, NASA had admitted the earth was only 6,000 years old after realizing they had been looking through their telescopes backward all this time.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-politics-of-fear

In the political response to the Covid-19 pandemic, everything is proceeding just as economist Robert Higgs has foreseen. But that doesn’t make it any easier for him to watch it. “I have an overwhelming feeling that I am reliving a bad experience I’ve lived through several times before, only this time it’s worse,” Higgs says. “I have no doubt that even if the current situation plays out in the best imaginable way, it will leave an abundance of legacies for the worse so far as people’s freedom is concerned.”

Higgs sees government, as usual, vastly expanding during the crisis, and he’s sure that it will not shrink back to its former scale once the crisis is over. It never does, as he famously documented in his 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, and in later works exploring this “ratchet effect.”

By surveying the effect of wars, financial panics, and other crises over the course of a century, Higgs showed that most government growth occurs in sporadic bursts during emergencies, when politicians enact “temporary” programs and regulations that never get fully abolished. New Deal bureaucracies and subsidies persisted long after the Great Depression, for example, and the U.S. military didn’t revert to its prewar size after either of the world wars.

Besides charting the growth of government, Higgs identified the fundamental psychological cause. He recognized the political significance of the negativity effect, also called the negativity bias—the universal tendency of negative events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones.

In our recent book on this bias, The Power of Bad, social psychologist Roy Baumeister and I drew on Higgs’s work to argue that the greatest problem in politics is what we call the Crisis Crisis—the never-ending series of crises, real or imagined, that are hyped by the media and lead to cures too often worse than the disease. It’s a perpetual problem because it’s so deeply rooted in human psychology, as Higgs explained in a 2005 essay, “The Political Economy of Fear.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/three-blows-new-world-order-bruce-thornton/

“We will see in the coming months whether the crisis will make us all rethink our unexamined assumptions about technocratic globalism, the transnational institutions of the “rules-based international order,” the one-world delusions about bringing democracy and freedom to cultures inhospitable to the principles and virtues necessary for those goods, and the outsized authority and power we reflexively grant to government “experts” to solve all our problems, even those that lie beyond the ken of science, and depend on our own common sense, practical wisdom, morals, and virtues.”

Nearly 30 years ago the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Communism, the last challenge to the Western paradigm of liberal democracy and free trade, disappeared, defeated by the same free-world alliance that had vanquished earlier totalitarian foes like fascism and Nazism. History understood not as events but as a tournament of conflicting socio-politico-economic orders had ended. A “new world order,” over a century in the making, finally had won.

That heady optimism was expressed by George H.W. Bush in his 1991 State of the Union address. The disintegration of the Soviet Union seemingly confirmed the triumph of democracy, free markets, and transnational institutions, or as Bush said, “a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind––peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.”

The Nineties saw several developments that seemingly confirmed Bush’s optimism about the future: The swift defeat of the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, and the ending of revanchist violence in the Balkans by multinational coalitions; the expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia; the creation of the European Union by the Maastricht Treaty, and the welcoming of communist China into the World Trade Organization. All were signs of history’s “end.” At the same time, the tech revolution was relentlessly shrinking the world further, facilitating global trade and global communication through the World Wide Web, more powerful computers, email, and social media.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/prager-u-video-doctor-treat-coronavirus-early-prager-university/

Is hydroxychloroquine a safe and effective treatment for COVID-19 or not? In the latest must-watch short video from Prager University, Will Witt gets Dr. Vladimir Zelenko’s take on the controversial drug. Check it out below:

https://nypost.com/2020/05/20/end-new-york-citys-lockdown-now/

DPS NOTE:

It is about to get “interesting” and some time soon it will matter less and less what the justifications are for making people watch their and others’ lives crumble. It will surely happen differently in different parts of the country where wealth, ethnicities, cultures and tolerance for perceived unjustified suppression will vary dramatically. But America may still be different from other countries. Different enough to have a citizenry which will always at some point question – and perhaps defy – governmental authority. In some places it may simply be going back to work when told you can’t. In others there might actually be civil “unrest.”
So that’s why I am circulating this. Not as an endorsement of the headlines, but to raise the questions my Note has posed. Or, as we would have said in the Brooklyn in which I grew up, “Hey, you wanna know what you can do with your model?”

…….”Sometimes, a good rant is all a writer can offer. Bear with me.

Last Friday morning, some 3,500 New Yorkers lined up at a Catholic church in Queens to receive free food hours before it even opened, ­according to the New York Police Department. Catholic Charities has reported a 200 percent increase in demand over the past month and a half.

By prolonging the coronavirus shutdown long after its core mission was accomplished, Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio have plunged tens of thousands of New Yorkers into poverty.

It needs to end. Now.

In mid-March, we were told we have to endure a lockdown to ensure that hospitals didn’t get overrun. We did. The hospitals were not overwhelmed. We turned the Javits Center into a hospital. We didn’t need it. We brought in a giant Navy ship to treat New Yorkers. We didn’t need it.