RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Self-examination is important. It is healthy to try to understand why we believe this or that, why we like this person but not another. Since my support for the President is controversial, even among those who agree with me in other matters, I thought a public self-examination would be welcome.

Ado Annie Cairns would never have fallen for Donald Trump. He doesn’t talk “purty.” He is the antithesis of me, of the way I was brought up, the way I live my life. His clothes are too fancy, and I don’t like the way he dyes his hair. He loves money and power and does not seem interested in history or philosophy. He butchers the English language when he speaks. I doubt he reads Trollope. He is boastful in a way I hope I am not. I would have no interest in living the life he has lived. Nor would he want to live mine.

So, why do I like and support him? Why do I feel he was what the Country needed in 2016 and again in 2020? He has an intuitive sense, I believe, of what troubles America. I doubt he has read much American history or is familiar with our Constitution. I am sure he has never read the Federalist Papers. But he has an instinctual understanding of people.

All societies create ruling classes. I was a beneficiary of that, in that my family were prominent in the last half of the 19th Century and into the early years of the 20th. It was a time when the Country was governed by white, Anglo Saxon Protestants, WASPs as they are lovingly called. That era began to decline slowly in the years after World War II and a new class took the reins – technocrats, bureaucrats, educators, scientists, and businesspeople, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. They came from all walks of life, represented all races, religions and sexes. They helped lift up the Country after fifteen years of depression and war. They built highways and put man on the moon. They desegregated schools and offered equal opportunities to women. They won the Cold War without firing a shot.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=500c3266cd

Back on April 2, when the $2+ trillion “CARES” Act had just cleared Congress, I issued a warning to “make no mistake — this is a perilous moment.” The country had reached seemingly unanimous consensus that all previous budget constraints no longer apply to federal government spending. After all, we are in a crisis. Therefore we must spend “whatever it takes” — a term with no definition and no limits. With all sensible judgment now thrown to the winds, this would be the perfect time for the well-connected and the corrupt to swoop in to grab the extra tens of billions they have long lusted after.

And of course, this is exactly what has happened. Every thoroughly corrupt left-wing priority — from wind power subsidies to teachers union contracts — has its lobbyists there in Washington trying to get in on the next handout (aka “stimulus”) gravy train. As a Manhattan Contrarian public service, I thought I would look around to find a candidate for the very most completely corrupt and unsupportable demand for a bailout among the hundreds of such demands currently swirling around the Washington firmament.

Although it’s a crowded field, I have a candidate that will be difficult to top. On April 14, a guy named Don Harmon — Democrat and member of the Illinois State Senate, and recently elevated to the position of President of the that body — wrote a letter to Dick Durbin — Illinois federal Senator and member of the Democratic leadership of that body — laying out what the state of Illinois is seeking in the next round of federal “stimulus.” This letter is the very definition of the term “brazen.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/covid19_death_rates_among_blacks_make_new_fodder_for_racial_politics.html

As reported by ABC News, black American coronavirus patients in Michigan died of the disease at more than eight times the rate of white people despite making up only 14% of the state’s population.  Similar death disparities occurred in other U.S. cities with large black populations, thus creating an opening for racial politics to be injected into the debate over COVID-19 death rates in the black community.

At the Coronavirus Task Force press briefing on April 7, Dr. Anthony Fauci correctly observed that black Americans are disproportionately affected by illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, and asthma, all of which are known to increase the risk of fatal coronavirus complications.  The widely respected epidemiologist went on to note that such disparities have “long been prevalent in the African-American community.”  With higher coronavirus death rates among black Americans an established medical fact, progressive media outlets are raising the specter that racism is to blame.

The suggestion that the medical profession is rife with racist doctors and nurses is an unfortunate extension of the modern Democratic Party’s identity politics election strategy, which is predicated on the fallacious narrative that even after all the years of racial progress, the America of today is an incurably oppressive place infested with racists who roam the land, including in hospitals and medical facilities that care for all Americans, regardless of the color of their skin. 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/23/white-house-should-shift-to-economic-recovery-briefings/

Most Americans don’t want more government hand-outs or debt-inducing programs. We want to protect the vulnerable, strengthen our health care capacity, and move on before the damage is too great to repair.

The so-called Murray model on COVID-19 issued yet another update on Wednesday, its 11th iteration in less than a month

Even though his apocalyptic projections about massive shortages of hospital beds, intensive care units, and ventilators failed to materialize this month, Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, keeps upping the ante. It was Murray’s collection of scary graphs that Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx presented to the president at the end of March to support their push to extend the “social distancing” guidance until April 30. President Trump acquiesced; that decision effectively shut down the U.S. economy, has confined most Americans to house arrest, and is fueling fear and panic across the land.

After being so wrong, any professional with a sliver of integrity would crawl away in shame. Murray should be offering an apology to the nation for warning of widespread death and misery which, outside of New York City, cannot be found on anything like the scale he predicted. The president should be hauling Murray and his abettors into the White House to demand answers.

But being a scientific modeler means never having to say you’re sorry—see climate science for a lengthy list of examples—so Murray is not only unrepentant, he’s spinning out more imaginary charts.

Republican governors who either never enacted draconian social distancing decrees or are planning to end those measures are on Murray’s latest hit list. Florida and Arizona, whose Republican governors want to liberate their states gradually in a few weeks, should not be permitted to lift social distancing measures until the middle or end of June, Murray says.

The residents of North Dakota will have to wait until after July 4 to celebrate their freedom. Governor Doug Burgum, a Republican, never instituted a stay-at-home order and is preparing plans for businesses to open on May 1 so Murray has pushed back North Dakota’s safe date to July 19. (The state has had 17 COVID-19 fatalities.)

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler/

“This pandemic is an affront [Zumutung] to democracy because it restricts our existential rights and needs,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Germany’s parliament April 23. That poignant formulation comes from the chief executive of a country whose response to Covid-19 was among the world’s most successful, with only 64 deaths per million of population compared to 148 in the United States, 423 in Italy and 335 in France. Dr. Merkel, who holds a PhD in quantum chemistry, added that the world is not at the end of the pandemic but just at the beginning: “We shall have to live with this virus for a long time.” Although the infection rate has fallen, “this interim result is fragile. We are treading on thin ice – on the thinnest of ice,” Merkel said.

The affront to which the German Chancellor referred is the restriction of movement and public gatherings, but a far greater affront to democracy is in the offing, namely universal mandatory testing for Covid-19, and tracking of individual disease carriers, the equivalent of a search of one’s person and premises. This conjures visions of totalitarian dystopias, although democratic South Korea has been among the most aggressive practitioners of tracking via smartphone location.

There probably is no way to prevent the spread of Covid-19 except by locating and isolating every single individual carrier. Perhaps 40% of all cases are asymptomatic but nonetheless contagious, we know from Iceland and a handful of cities where the entire population was tested. That makes conventional tracking methods useless. Merkel has been advised by her medical crisis team that herd immunity never may be achieved, or if it is, only after a long period of time, because it is impossible to determine whether human antibodies provide much protection against infection. For the same reason, it is simply not known whether a vaccine will be found, let alone whether any vaccine will be effective.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/who-un-lloyd-billingsley/

President Trump is cutting off funding for the World Health Organization, headed by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as a Reuters report notes, “the first director-general in the WHO’s 72-year history not to be a medical doctor” but a favorite of China with a radical leftist past. This is not the first time a Communist regime installed their mouthpiece and deployed an international body for their own purposes.  

The WHO is part of the United Nations, which dates from the waning days of World War II. Stalin’s foreign minister Andrei Gromyko suggested U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss, a Stalinist spy, as the first Secretary General, the first and only time a Soviet leader suggested an American for an international post. Hiss was duly appointed acting Secretary General, so the Communists got the man they wanted.

U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, who had been under the wing of Hiss and Harry Hopkins, delivered a speech to the opening UN conference in San Francisco in May-June of 1945. The speech had been written by Stalinist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, brought to the conference by Alger Hiss. Stettinius was so pleased with Trumbo’s speech that he requested an autographed picture of the screenwriter,  but Stettinius later denied he ever knew Trumbo.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/more-media-misdirection-on-trump-russia/

The most useless committee on Capitol Hill has answered a question no one was asking.

The headline is an attention-grabber, particularly the subhead. The New York Times breathlessly reports that a Republican-led Senate panel has issued a report that “undercuts claims by President Trump and his allies that Obama-era officials sought to undermine his candidacy by investigating Russia’s 2016 election meddling.”

Naturally, you’re thinking: “That’s it. All Trump’s diatribes about a ‘hoax’ have been the usual claptrap. Even the GOP admits that the Obama administration had good reasons to investigate whether Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia.”

Except . . . that’s not what the Times story actually says. Carefully parsed, it’s not even what the headline says.

In truth, the story is a nothing-burger. We learn that one of the most useless committees on Capitol Hill, the Senate Intelligence Committee, has issued a 158-page report — festooned with the usual “there are things we can’t tell you” redactions — as a capper to its three-year investigation into a question no one is asking: Did the intelligence community competently conclude that Russia interfered in the 2016 campaign?

No one is asking that question because, for the vast majority of people closely following the collusion caper, that would be like asking whether the Chiefs won the Super Bowl.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-in-stop-the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation

The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.

Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.

Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.

The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies.  

In New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic with more than one-third of all U.S. deaths, the rate of death for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01 percent, or 11 per 100,000 in the population. On the other hand, people aged 75 and over have a death rate 80 times that. For people under 18 years old, the rate of death is zero per 100,000. 

Of all fatal cases in New York state, two-thirds were in patients over 70 years of age; more than 95 percent were over 50 years of age; and about 90 percent of all fatal cases had an underlying illness. Of 6,570 confirmed COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 6,520, or 99.2 percent, had an underlying illness. If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Our reaction to COVID-19 has shown the best of us, but also the worst. Protection of the vulnerable – the elderly and those defenseless because of preconditions, ranging from obesity to diabetes – has been admirable. Healthcare workers willingly expose themselves to a novel virus, despite conflicting and changing reports as to its cause, properties, transmission and morbidity rates. Until recently, most of us have complied without complaint, acting with ovine-like acquiescence to draconian measures that have led to a “lockdown” of the economy and the loss of millions of jobs.

We obey common-sensical rules about social-distancing, wearing face masks, scrubbing our hands, not touching our face, sneezing into a Kleenex, and using gloves and disinfectants. Anything to slow the rate of infection of a highly contagious virus. But the lockdown of two thirds of the economy (as measured by those who do not have the option to work from home) has been pre-empted from debate. As well, some political leaders have taken lockdowns of the economy to an extreme – banning yard work, home construction projects or preventing citizens from using parks or playing golf. Some governors have used the pandemic as an excuse to get the federal government to help bailout their states’ finances. Others have talked of using Drones to monitor people’s behavior. Debate, as to the cause of COVID-19, is discouraged, as is seen in the disparagements of President Trump for calling the virus a Chinese or Wuhan virus, despite indisputable evidence that that was its origin. Those who raise questions about COVID-19 are called “anti-science,” in spite of the fact that the science regarding the virus, its characteristics, transmission and morbidity rates keep changing. We cannot forget we are in an election year. Republicans, who would like to keep the Presidency and the Senate and re-gain the House, would like to get the economy re-started as soon as possible, but without initiating a second surge of the virus. Democrats recognize that the economy has been Republicans’ strongest suit, so have an interest in the economic downturn lasting longer.