RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.