RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/05/prepare-for-an-orgy-of-back-patting/

Has there ever been a more ill-informed, recklessly destructive example of public policy in the history of mankind than the Great Lockdown? Well, of course there has. Mao’s Great Leap Forward cost tens of millions of lives. Stalin’s Great Purge cost a million lives or thereabouts. So, there it is, Morrison, Trump and Johnson et al can take comfort in not wreaking as much harm as have past despots. Consolation indeed! As David Richards and Konstantin Boudnik  put it in The Telegraph

Imperial College’s modelling of non-pharmaceutical interventions for COVID-19 which helped persuade the UK and other countries to bring in draconian lockdowns … could go down in history as the most devastating software mistake of all time, in terms of economic costs and lives lost.

Public health experts can rest easy. Sure, their bodgie, overblown predictions caused governments to rain down devastation on pliable populations. but they will never be brought to account. Governments have a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that countless deaths were saved by following their experts’ advice.

Trump often cites a figure of 2.2 million Americans dead but for the lockdown. This number, a completely made-up fiction, comes from Neil Ferguson and his Imperial College (IC) team. Ferguson has a reputation for epidemiological alarmism burnished now with a reputation for eschewing social distancing in the cause of fornication.

Quite aside from any flaws in the innards of epidemiological models, the problem with predictions about new contagious diseases is that data is inevitably wanting. Data is wanting precisely because the disease is new. How contagious is the disease? How is it transmitted from one person to another? How deadly is it? How many are susceptible to being infected versus those not susceptible? What profile does the disease have among different population groups – by age, by ethnicity, by sex, by the range and severity of pre-existing illnesses? How many who contract the disease are asymptomatic or suffer only mild symptoms? How long had the disease been circulating prior to it being recognised?

Governor Newsom Orders Ballots To Be Sent To Every Cemetery In State

SACRAMENTO, CA—To prepare for the upcoming November election, Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered ballots to be sent to every cemetery in the state.

The governor of California said that ballot boxes would be sent to cemeteries across the state to ensure everyone had the right to vote, dead or alive.

“We need every single Californian to vote, living or dead,” Newsom said, wagging his finger. “Without everyone doing their part, no matter their undocumented living status, we can’t beat the Republicans this time around. It’s science!” When he said the word “science,” he lifted a test tube into the air to lend some credence to his claims. 

Newsom said that people who don’t want the dead to vote are discriminating against the “mortally challenged.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-does-reopening-polarize-us-11589842995?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Daniel Reed Crenshaw is an American politician and former United States Navy SEAL officer.He is, like all Congressmen, running for re-election. Please visit:

https://crenshawforcongress.com/

to know more about this great American legislator….rsk

The debate over reopening the economy has a peculiar characteristic: It breaks down almost entirely along political lines. Liberals emphasize the dangers of an open society, shaming those who want to go back to work. Conservatives argue the opposite. Red states are steadily reopening, while most blue states lag. House Democrats believe it isn’t safe for lawmakers to go back to work, while the Republican-controlled Senate is back in session.

It isn’t obvious that such a debate should be partisan, yet it is. Why? One popular explanation is that all roads lead to President Trump. Whatever he says, the left will say the opposite.

Geographic distribution has also been proposed as a factor. Liberals tend to pack into crowded cities, where the virus spreads more easily, while conservatives populate the more rural, safer regions. This explanation is neat but fails to explain the divide within cities, where Republicans support reopening more than their Democratic neighbors.

Another factor is that the economic fallout has harmed working-class, high-school-educated Americans far worse than the liberal-leaning college-educated. It is easy to “prioritize public health” when you work comfortably from home.

Finally, the far left is treating the lockdowns and the consequent economic devastation as an opportunity to “restructure” America into a socialist utopia. So they’re in no rush.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/17/how-president-trump-can-retake-the-initiative-and-rebuild-a-more-resilient-economy/

Republicans take note: voters across the political spectrum have woken up to the dangers of relying on foreign supply chains for critical products.

There’s trouble brewing for President Trump in Florida. Earlier this year the state seemed out of reach for Democrats. But the must-win state which he carried in 2016, is home to Mar-A-Lago, and which elected Republican Ron DeSantis governor in 2018 may now be vulnerable.

According to publicly available data, registered Republicans in Florida have requested at least 320,000 fewer absentee ballots than in 2016. President Trump doesn’t have that much margin for error in a state he won by only 103,000 votes—especially in a year when older voters may be reluctant to go to the polls for fear of contracting COVID-19.

There are also warning signs coming out of bellwether Arizona, another must-win state. A poll conducted between May 9-11 shows President Trump trailing Joe Biden by 7 points (50-43 percent). Trump won Arizona by 3.5 percent in 2016. It’s worse for Senator Martha McSally, who trails first-time candidate Mark Kelly by 13 points.

So how can President Trump—or any Republican—win? The same poll offers an answer. It asked likely voters if they would be more or less likely to vote for a candidate who had a plan “to make the United States more self-sufficient and to make sure more of the food, energy, and medicine” is produced in America. The results were remarkable. Seventy-five percent said yes, including 88 percent of Republicans, 71 percent of independents, and 64 percent of Democrats. And the issue polls slightly better with women than men (77 percent vs. 73 percent) making it an opportunity for Republicans to close the gender gap.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1261728144018542592.html

” Thus, at this point if you are not both outraged and increasingly puzzled/disturbed by the path we are on and the way most big media outlets are presenting this, you aren’t paying attention. Reality will win. But only if we fight for it. ”

About two months ago we panicked and locked down the US and much of the world in a matter of days, mainly on the basis of computer simulations that proved completely inaccurate within weeks and – in theory – to reduce the strain on hospitals…
2/ It is now clear that outside New York City, US hospitals are not and were never in danger of collapse (and even in New York they were strained but most excess capacity was unused). Thus the rationale for the lockdowns has changed…
3/ To some vague theory that we need to reduce #SARSCoV2 infections and deaths to ~zero – a benchmark we have never even considered for influenza or TB or other respiratory illnesses – using a mix of massive testing (even though people aren’t using the testing now available)…
4/ Mask wearing (though masks probably do very little if anything to reduce spread), population-level tracking, and possible forcible removal of infected people from their families (not a conspiracy theory – this has been openly discussed)…
5/ While at the same time imposing broad population-level lockdowns that do extraordinary damage to our economy, educational system, children, and society…
6/ Even though the best estimates for #SARSCoV2 are now that if NOTHING were done to halt its spread, each American would lose 2 to 5 days of life on average. You read that right. Not years, DAYS. And that’s with no efforts to protect the vulnerable…
7/ That’s a comparable loss to two years of traffic accidents or one of overdoses. Meanwhile, the same people in the media who were screaming about the apocalypse two months ago continue to try to virtue shame those of us who point out these inconvenient facts…
8/ Thus, at this point if you are not both outraged and increasingly puzzled/disturbed by the path we are on and the way most big media outlets are presenting this, you aren’t paying attention. Reality will win. But only if we fight for it.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-5-16-everything-important-in-life-involves-tradeoffs

One of the fallacies of progressivism that I frequently mock at this blog is the proposition that the government can operate without having to make meaningful tradeoffs of one goal or value versus another.

This fallacy appears, for example, in the illusion of infinite resources in the hands of the government. As individuals we all know that we face constrained budgets and limits on what we can do. Eat out too much, and you need to postpone getting the new TV or new car. Decide to become a lawyer, and you will need to forego becoming a doctor. Your money and your time only go so far. But somehow it can appear that the government is so huge and has such vast resources at its command that there are no practical limits, and no need for tradeoffs. And thus we get monstrosities like the Bernie Sanders (and Joe Biden?) program for a federal government that eliminates all downsides of human life by passing out the infinite free money. Or see the latest “Heroes Act” out of the House of Representatives — $3 trillion to take care of everyone’s pain from the coronavirus response; Medicare for All, Free College, and Batteries not included (yet).

Another aspect of the no-tradeoffs-necessary fallacy is the idea that the right thing for political leaders to do in a crisis is to rely on the “experts.” One problem with that is that so-called “experts” are as likely as not to have no idea what they are talking about.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/democrats-have-abandoned-civil-liberties

Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more, appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”

Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the #Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment of Judge John Gleeson as “brilliant.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe Sullivan a “debt of gratitude.”

One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.”

Sullivan’s reaction was amplified by a group letter calling for Barr’s resignation signed by 2000 former Justice Department officials (the melodramatic group email somberly reported as momentous news is one of many tired media tropes in the Trump era) and the preposterous “leak” of news that the dropped case made Barack Obama sad. The former president “privately” told “members of his administration” (who instantly told Yahoo! News) that there was no precedent for the dropping of perjury charges, and that the “rule of law” itself was at stake.

Whatever one’s opinion of Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/06/01/the-code-and-the-key/

Lessons from human nature about writing, politics, and Donald Trump

I  worked one summer as a kitchen boy in a Wisconsin summer camp. It was one of those jobs from which you fall down at night near too tired to sleep. A previous occupant of my bunk had left behind a copy of Atlas Shrugged. So I spent the summer, between work and sleep, reading the perfect companion for my teenage summer.

I don’t care for short stories. I prefer the heft of the doorstop book, reassuring me that I can immerse myself in the fantasy for a good long time. “Yes, yes,” I think. “Thank you. Take me. Anywhere but here . . . ”

My companion for the lockdown is The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet, written by David Kahn in 1967 and updated by him in 1996. One thousand pages so interesting that my mind will not reject them even though they are informative.

My new novel, not yet released, is Forty Years at Anstett, a fictional account of one man’s life at a New England prep school. In it, a young man returns from imprisonment in Japan during the Russo–Japanese War. The fellow applies for the job of instructor of languages. He has no academic credentials, but a very practical one: He was forced, in prison, to learn Japanese, Russian, Chinese, and, more important, how to learn languages. He challenges the Head (my protagonist) to point out the dullest lad in the school, to name a language, to leave the applicant alone with the boy for an afternoon, and then to assess his progress in the new tongue.

“Well,” the Head says, “Latin or Greek. I’d say Latin; it’s simpler as it shares our alphabet.” “No,” the applicant says, “it’s simpler to teach Greek. A new alphabet is a code. What twelve-year-old boy has ever been able to resist a code?”

Not I, certainly. It seems I’ve spent my professional life fashioning them and solving them, and have found the process commutative, which is to say, the study of one is the study of the other—it works in both directions.

Here’s what I mean. Raymond Chandler wrote, in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (1939), that it is near impossible to craft a good murder mystery, as it requires two otherwise unconnected skills: the ability to write beautifully and the ability to fashion a code.

He is near right in his observation. The two skills—while not mutually exclusive per se—are unlikely to be found fully developed in any practitioner, because to achieve excellence, he or she would have to devote all energy to one or the other. I know of no great contemporary instrumentalist who is also a great composer.

This week’s newsletter is full outsize  Israeli solutions to global problems.
–

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Detecting heart problems in coronavirus patients. Israel’s DiA Imaging Analysis (reported here previously) uses its AI image analysis of ultrasound scans to detect cardiac problems.  DiA has received a NIS 2.5 million grant from the Israel Innovation Authority to roll out its system to hospitals treating coronavirus patients.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3822032,00.html
 
Recovered. The 22-year-old critical coronavirus patient (see here) who woke from a 3-week coma in April has now begun rehabilitation at Sheba hospital.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-virus-sees-few-new-cases-a-once-critically-ill-22-year-old-recovers/
 
US approves Covid-19 imaging tech detection. The US FDA has allowed the use of previously cleared technology developed by Israel’s Aidoc Medical.to detect lung anomalies in CT-scans that are associated with coronavirus (Covid-19). It provides early detection of infected patients who show no coronavirus symptoms.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3820032,00.html
 
How MDA prevented an even larger disaster. (TY Stuart Palmer) Emergency service Magen David Adom and its 24,000 volunteers were critical to Israel’s pandemic strategy. Its trained volunteer call center handled over 100,000 calls a day and it minimized hospitalizations by testing 240,000 patients away from hospitals.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/how-israel-prevented-an-even-larger-covid-19-disaster-627486
 
New crisis ICU for Sheba hospital. (TY Hazel) Israel’s Sheba Medical Center has inaugurated a new intensive care unit with hundreds of beds to provide crisis response in future national emergencies. A significant donation for the unit was received from philanthropist Roman Abramovich, a long-time donor of Sheba Medical Center.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/in-wake-of-corona-crisis-sheba-inaugurates-new-icu-627274
 
Good news for bone-marrow transplants. Israeli biotech Gamida Cell (see here) published positive results in its Phase 3, 50-center trial of NiCord (now called Omidubicel) that aims to increase the success of bone marrow transplants in blood cancer patients. The stem cells were established much quicker than alternatives.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/cell-therapy-firm-boosts-odds-for-blood-cancer-patients-as-key-trial-succeeds/
 
Surgeons save Arab with rod through his head. (TY IsraPundit) Kamel Abdel Rahman fell from the second floor of the apartment he is building. He landed on a metal rod that penetrated his head from left cheek to right ear. Surgeons at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital extracted the rod in two nail-biting operations.
https://www.jpost.com/health-science/medical-miracle-in-jerusalem-surgeries-save-man-with-rod-in-his-head-627525
 
2-year-old Palestinian Arab boy saved. Surgeons at Israel’s Save a Child’s Heart performed open heart surgery on two-year-old Hamza Ali Mohammed, who was born with life-threatening congenital heart disease. He has been hospitalized during the coronavirus pandemic but has now returned to his family in Ramallah.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/israeli-doctors-save-life-of-2-year-old-palestinian-miracle-boy-send-him-home/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzZiqtsQFio