RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/president-trump-is-magnificently-right-about-infrastructure/

President Trump’s proposal to spend $2 trillion to rebuild American infrastructure was as gutsy as it gets, coming on the heels of another $2 trillion in emergency economic aid. The president tweeted, “With interest rates for the United States being at ZERO, this is the time to do our decades long awaited Infrastructure Bill. It should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars, and be focused solely on jobs and rebuilding the once great infrastructure of our Country!”

We can’t afford it, but we can’t afford not to do it. That’s just what I proposed in my last PJ column, “Fix Your Roof While It’s Raining.” The critical decisions will be about what we call “infrastructure.” The president said, “We’re not going to do the Green New Deal and spend 40% of the money on things that people just have fun with.”

What are the top priorities? Roads, bridges and tunnels are obvious. Rail is also important. America’s oil production surge strained our transport system, rail as well as pipelines, and drastically raised freight costs. Overall, the U.S. producer price index is barely changed over the past ten years, but rail transport costs are up 30%.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/2/gertrude-himmelfarb-the-enlightenment

The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism—relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity. And since then, generations of intelligent students under the guidance of their enlightened professors have looked into the abyss, have contemplated those beasts, and have said, “How interesting, how exciting.”
                  —Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 1994

When Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote about the abyss consuming the intellectual and moral traditions of her own time, she was one of the first to recognise how seductive was its appeal and how depraved its outcome. In her book On Looking into the Abyss, she attributed the original insight to the critic Lionel Trilling, who detected it in the early 1960s in the underbelly of the modernist movement that had dominated literature and the arts since the early twentieth century. Himmelfarb, however, came to her own recognition from another direction entirely, partly from her study of the history of ideas in Britain’s Victorian era but also from the apparently unlikely field of the history of social policy that led the Victorians to define poverty as a social problem. In the process, up to her death on December 30 last year, aged ninety-seven, those who knew her work came to regard her as not only one of the great American historians of her time but one of her nation’s most compelling moral critics. In American political circles she was best known as Bea Kristol, wife and mother, respectively, of the neoconservative authors and editors Irving Kristol and William Kristol.

Modernists, from their earliest public manifestations in London’s Bloomsbury, had regarded the Christian morality of the English-speaking world as the greatest obstacle to the bohemianism of “free thought” and “free love” they craved.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/490745-a-strong-us-5g-sector-p

On Dec. 12, 1901, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated the very first transatlantic radio-wave transmission and ushered in a new age of wireless communications. More than a century later, wireless technology still is one of our primary sources of communication. But as our radio-wave highways become increasingly congested, each new generation of wireless technology is forced to ascend into higher and higher frequencies. The fifth generation of wireless technology, known as “5G,” will expand into spectrum bands Marconi could never have foreseen.

Because it will allow data to be transmitted more quickly and efficiently than ever before, 5G technology has the potential to improve everything from search and rescue missions and medical care to transportation, real-time language translation and precision farming. It could allow firefighters to use thermal imaging to see through smoke and locate victims more easily. It could help specialists perform remote robotic surgery on patients who are far away. And it could help American soldiers on the battlefield, giving them real-time information about their adversaries while monitoring their status and location. Such developments could revolutionize the technological landscape and pump trillions of dollars into our global economy. Perhaps most important, 5G could create millions of new U.S. jobs and become integral to our competitiveness in the global marketplace.

But like any new technology, 5G is not without risks. Currently, the only global company that is competitively producing all of the equipment necessary to fully implement 5G is China-based Huawei. While Huawei calls itself “employee-owned,” Chinese laws require companies to assist in national intelligence work unbeknownst to their customers — potentially rendering the equipment unsecure. This presents a major challenge for 5G implementation in the United States, since American companies either have to invent their own equipment or utilize Huawei’s — knowing that it could be accessed by the Chinese government.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/490694-just-say-no-to-typical-washington-m

NBC News reports that preliminary discussions have begun on Capitol Hill regarding the establishment of a 9/11 Commission-type inquiry about the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. The discussions are said predominantly to involve Democrats and to be focused on the Trump administration’s performance. As outlined, the exercise would smack of the worst aspects of the 9/11 Commission: the partisan blame-game, which eventually petered into the look-like-we’re-doing-something creation of bloated and ludicrously expensive new bureaucracy.

The 9/11 Commission was a brainchild of the political class, which is why Washington remembers it fondly. To be fair, the report it generated was well written, as these extravaganzas go. It was remarkably gimlet-eyed about radical Islamic ideology (what would be more accurately described as sharia supremacism) as the instigator of jihadist terrorism — indeed, much more willing to confront this challenge than the progressive political class’s typical approach of reimagining Islam into a relentlessly “peaceful” creed to which terrorism is anathematic “anti-Muslim activity.”

That said, the 9/11 Commission was primarily an exercise in partisan politics. That is why, in the actual formation of substantive counterterrorism policy, the commission was ignored once Washington’s virtue-signally objectives were achieved. Quite contrary to the commission’s conclusions, it became de rigueur in the Obama years to shift our national security approach to opposing “violent extremism,” on the premise that fundamentalist Islam is no more likely to spur terrorism than movements derived from other religions or political agendas (e.g., limited-government conservatism, Second Amendment advocacy).

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/01/morning-greatness-time-to-cancel-the-world-health-organization/

The pernicious World Health Organization: It’s time to cancel the clowns over at the WHO. They are in no way a simple outfit, monitoring and coordinating world health situations. They are a China proxy who lied to the world about the deadly China virus, praised China’s handling of the virus (which included forcibly kidnapping people to imprison them with those infected and soldering them inside their houses and of course, lying)  and continue to defend China, who is responsible for releasing a plague on the world.

World Health Organization Spends Twice As Much On Travel As On Medical Supplies
Tucker Carlson blasts WHO leadership as ‘lapdogs’ for the Chinese government
Rick Scott calls for congressional inquiry into WHO’s coronavirus response

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/did_china_unleash_covid19_malevolently_or_accidentally.html

The big takeaway is that there’s no evidence that the Chinese intended to weaponize COVID-19. Therefore, at a guess, the disease’s genesis was a research laboratory that didn’t have good safety protocols.

Tucker Carlson did a segment discussing COVID-19’s origins. While saying that the virus probably started in a laboratory, he was careful not to accuse China of deliberately creating or releasing the virus. China’s long history of shoddy products and disregard for human life makes it’s a good bet that China didn’t weaponize the virus. Instead, COVID-19 is probably just another shoddy Chinese product.

Back in the 1960s, Japan was synonymous with cheap, but not shoddy products. By the 1980s, though, Japanese people’s meticulous habits meant that, if it came from Japan, it was well-made and worth the price.

When China started selling cheap products in the West, most people assumed it would follow the same trajectory that Japan did. That never happened because China is not Japan (nor is it Korea, which also makes meticulous products). Unlike Japan or Korea, it’s neither clean nor orderly. From chaos comes garbage.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/germs-and-city-13005.html
Germs and the City Two centuries of success against infectious disease have left us complacent—and vulnerable. Peter W. Huber

EXCERPTS:

We will bitterly regret this shift, and probably sooner rather than later. As another Victorian might have predicted—he published a book on the subject in 1859—germs have evolved to exploit our new weakness. Public authorities are ponderous and slow; the new germs are nimble and fast. Drug regulators are paralyzed by the knowledge that error is politically lethal; the new germs make genetic error—constant mutation—the key to their survival. The new germs don’t have to be smarter than our scientists, just faster than our lawyers. The demise of cholera, one could say, has been one of the great antisocial developments of modern times.

By withdrawing from the battlefield just long enough to let us drift into this state of indifference, the germs have set the stage for their own spectacular revival. Germs are never in fact defeated completely. If they retire for a while, it’s only to search, in their ingeniously stupid and methodically random way, for a bold new strategy. They’ve also contrived, of late, to get human sociopaths to add thought and order to the search. The germs will return. We won’t be ready.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/empire-lies-13006.html

The Empire of Lies The twenty-first century will not belong to China. Guy Sorman

EXCERPT:

The Western press is full of stories these days on China’s arrival as a superpower, some even heralding, or warning, that the future may belong to her. Western political and business delegations stream into Beijing, confident of China’s economy, which continues to grow rapidly. Investment pours in. Crowning China’s new status, Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympics.

But China’s success is, at least in part, a mirage. True, 200 million of her subjects, fortunate to be working for an expanding global market, increasingly enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The remaining 1 billion, however, remain among the poorest and most exploited people in the world, lacking even minimal rights and public services. Popular discontent simmers, especially in the countryside, where it often flares into violent confrontation with Communist Party authorities. China’s economic “miracle” is rotting from within.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/30/did-cdcs-focus-on-social-justice-reduce-its-readiness/

The Centers for Disease Control should spend its money and time fighting disease, not playing politics.

You had one job, CDC: to prepare America to combat infectious disease. It’s a sign of what’s happened to the government generally over the last 20 years, that CDC used its resources to advance left-leaning agendas instead of focusing on positioning itself to fight infectious disease. 

We’ve seen the headlines blaming the president for the lack of readiness in response to the outbreak. In mid-March, the Guardian reported, “Trump’s staff cuts have undermined Covid-19 containment efforts.” You can find other such headlines here, here, and here. 

Most of these accusations are either completely untrue or wild distortions of the facts. The get-Trump media are so obsessively politicized that much of the coverage of the virus has been corrupted in the same way that Russian collusion coverage was so unreliable. PJ Media, for example, published this list of the “Top 10 Lies About President Trump’s Response to the Coronavirus.” 

Lost in the debate over whether CDC had enough money to prepare for the crisis is this critical question: What was the CDC doing with the money it already had?

Why, for example, is the CDC spending resources to study transgender health? There are 2,287 search results for “transgender” within the CDC website. The CDC published the following guidance for LGBT youth: 

The tunnel extends more than 2,000 feet underground from a warehouse in Tijuana to a warehouse in the Otay Mesa area of San Diego. Authorities found an estimated $29.6 million in drugs in the tunnel, seizing 1,300 pounds of cocaine, 86 pounds of methamphetamine, 17 pounds of heroin, 3,000 pounds of marijuana and more than two pounds of fentanyl.

Investigators estimated the passageway is several months old based on “advanced construction” in parts of the tunnel, including reinforced walls, ventilation, lighting and an underground rail system. U.S. investigators worked with the Fiscalia General de la Republica and Secretaria de la Defensa Naciona to find the tunnel’s entrance on the Mexico side.

The discovery comes two months after authorities in January discovered the “longest cross-border tunnel” yet in the same area, a 4,309-foot passage running from Tijuana to San Diego.
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“Despite the current COVID-19 pandemic, DEA employees continue to work tirelessly to serve and protect the community,” DEA special agent in charge John W. Callery said in a statement.

“I hope this sends a clear message that despite the ongoing public health crisis, [Homeland Security Investigations] and our law enforcement partners will remain resilient and continue to pursue criminal organizations responsible for the cross-border smuggling of narcotics into the United States,” Homeland Security Investigations San Diego acting special agent in charge Cardell T. Morant said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-california-herd-immunity/

By now, California should be, as predicted in so many models, ground zero of infection.

T he bluest state’s public officials have been warning for weeks that California will be overwhelmed, given federal-government unpreparedness and the purported inefficacy of the local, state, and federal governments.

California governor Gavin Newsom has assured his state that over half of the population — or, in his words, 56 percent — will soon be infected. That is, more than 25 million coronavirus cases are on the horizon, which, at the virus’s current fatality rate of 1–2 percent (the ratio of deaths to known positive cases), would mean that the state should anticipate 250,000–500,000 dead Californians in the near future. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti predicted that this week Los Angeles would be short of all sorts of medical supplies as the epidemic killed many hundreds, as is the case in New York City.

It’s been well over two months since the first certified coronavirus case in the United States, so one might expect to see early symptoms of the apocalypse recently forecast by Governor Newsom. Yet a number of California’s top doctors, epidemiologists, statisticians, and biophysicists — including Stanford’s John Ioannides, Michael Levitt, Eran Bendavid, and Jay Bhattacharya — have expressed some skepticism about the bleak models predicting that we are on the verge of a statewide or even national lethal pandemic of biblical proportions.