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ANTI-SEMITISM

White House Should Shift to Economic Recovery Briefings Julie Kelly

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.)

Covid-19 is ‘an affront to democracy’ How should democracies respond if risk reduction through testing or surveillance cuts into basic civil rights? David Goldman

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.

From WHO to the UN It’s high time for us to distance ourselves from the United Nations. Lloyd Billingsley

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.

Venezuela: Maduro’s Cuban Army by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15921/venezuela-maduro-cuban-army

The U.S. Department of Justice accuses Maduro of having served as the chief of a narcotics organization called “the Cartel of the Suns.” Maduro’s drug cartel is further alleged to have helped arm an extremist faction of the Colombia-based Marxist terrorist group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in its decades-long campaign to overthrow Colombia’s government. Maduro’s cartel has also allegedly worked with FARC to flood the U.S. with cocaine.

The intensity of Maduro’s attack against Trump may indicate a sense of panic at the possibility that the U.S. drug indictment might be setting the stage for some kind of military action against the socialist regime that will oust him from power.

Short of a U.S.-supported invasion by an international coalition, including free Latin American states, perhaps sometime after the U.S. election, Maduro will continue to wreck the formerly oil- rich country as its people continue to live in misery.

More than fifty countries in the Euro-Atlantic and Hispanic Free World consider the Venezuelan regime led by dictator Nicolás Maduro to be illegitimate. This view also seems to be shared by millions of Venezuelans, more than four million of whom have fled the country’s political oppression and economic depression.

The main reason for the charge of illegitimacy stems from the view that Maduro’s victory for a second six-year term as president in Venezuela’s 2018 national elections was fraudulent. Opposition protests have failed to dislodge the socialist-led regime, which has so far been sustained by Chinese loans, Russian weapons and Cuban troops. The Venezuelan people, disenfranchised and disarmed, have, in addition, been bullied into submission by pro-regime neighborhood revolutionary leftist gangs called “colectivos.”

More Media Misdirection on Trump-Russia By Andrew C. McCarthy

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.

The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation By Dr. Scott W. Atlas

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.

“COVID-19 – Dissension Not Allowed” Sydney Williams

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.

Can We Please ‘McKinsey-Proof’ America? Chris Buskirk

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/21/can-we-please-mckinsey-proof-america/

The “experts” Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to hire to help New York reopen have a history of doing little more than helping failing institutions fail in style while growing rich in the process.

Andrew Cuomo has a plan for a “Trump-proof” reopening of New York. Or actually, he has a plan to hire some people to develop a plan. According to CNBC, “Cuomo has hired high-powered consultants to develop a science-based plan for the safe economic reopening of the region.” Wow, a science-based plan from high-powered consultants!

The report goes on to say that these consultants will be “producing models on testing, infections, and other key data points that will underpin decisions . . . .”

Expert models have been pretty spot-on this year, so this sounds really amazing. Remember how last month, a model by an expert predicted 2.2 million Americans would die from COVID-19? Or how about the professionals (and nonprofessionals!) who just a few weeks ago were telling us that masks don’t work and that ordinary people lack the proper training and competence to wear one right anyway? Now, they’re mandatory.

So who are these consultants who will advise America’s loudest governor? The answer, of course, is McKinsey & Company. Some people—not me, you understand—have been known to describe McKinsey’s business model thus: “You give them your watch so they can tell you what time it is.”

No, I wouldn’t say that. It’s too generous.

One of Cuomo’s top advisers said, “we are reaching out to top experts and other professionals to come up with a bullet-proof plan.” Bullet-proof. So far Cuomo’s track-record on planning for the future is pretty dismal. But then again, the “top experts” he’s hired have pretty dismal records, too.

Progressive Governors Indulge Their Inner Despot What really lurks behind their façade of concern for the “people” and the “oppressed.” Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/progressive-governors-indulge-their-inner-despot-bruce-thornton/

Poet Sylvia Plath’s slur against women, that they “adore a fascist, the boot in the face, the brute,” is more true about progressives, with one big difference: they want to be the ones wear the boot. Behind their façade of therapeutic concern for the “people” and the “oppressed” lies something that Vladimir Lenin was honest enough to express in 1906: the lust for “power, which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.”

Thankfully, those impulses so far have been checked by our Constitutional order, which was created to inhibit the concentration and excesses of power that threatens citizen freedom. But as we have seen over the last century, at times of crisis the technocratic progressives have chipped away at those Constitutional guardrails and serially encroached on our freedoms. The current virus crisis is the latest opportunity for the Dems to indulge their inner despots.

We’ve all seen the catalogue of overweening unilateral diktats enforced by police power coming down from Democrat governors. Under the guise of enforcing social distancing in order to slow the spread of the disease, governors have quickly violated the Bill of Rights: closing gun stores at the same time they release felons from prison; shutting down church services while leaving liquor stores open; criminalizing the right to peaceful assembly; arbitrarily deeming some economic activities as “essential,” like abortion clinics and pot dispensaries, while proscribing others like buying paint or vegetable seeds. Even our freedom of movement that doesn’t endanger others, such as surfing alone or playing with our children in a deserted park, has been interdicted by overzealous police.

We made a terrible mistake By Carol Brown

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/we_made_a_terrible_mistake.html?utm_source=vuukle&utm_medium=newsfeed

We’re told that social distancing is working because we’re flattening the curve.  How do we know that those two things are related?  There isn’t that all-important-for-good-science control group.  For all we know, the result would have been similar if we hadn’t put such draconian measures in place.

In addition, for all our medical experts’ talk of their high standards, they ignored those standards when they embraced the Imperial College model that, according to world-renowned epidemiologist Johan Giesecke, was an internal document that was unpublished and had not been peer-reviewed.  Giesecke had never seen a document of this type garner so much attention as to shape major public policy decisions.

He also described the strict lockdown measures embraced by many countries as non-evidence-based.  (What?!  You mean our experts who uphold the highest of double-blind standards have been shooting in the dark?!)

And speaking of lockdowns, according to some reports, the U.K. hit its peak before it put strict social distancing measures in place (here, here, here at the 6:40 mark).