RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/remembering-who-is-keeping-us-alive/

I tried an experiment yesterday. I went to four large supermarkets in Fresno County, the nation’s largest and most diverse food-producing county, and looked at both checkouts and shelf space. The two big sellers seemed to be cleansers of all sorts (bleach wipes were all sold out, for example) and staples such as canned soup, pasta, and canned fish and preserved meat.

Then I drove in about a 50-mile circumference to look at local farms — vineyards, orchards, row crops, dairy, etc. — and packinghouses and processors. There seemed absolutely no interruption at all. Farmers and workers were on tractors, packing houses were bringing in late citrus for cold storage, and lots of people were harvesting winter vegetables in the field. Machines were fertilizing, spraying, and cultivating.

The point is that in our age of necessary shutdowns and staying home, one thing we must do is eat — and eat well to stay healthy. And that means lots of people have to go to work and produce food and transport it to the major cities, and not always in isolation on the south 40.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/13/the-coming-american-autumn/

After years of tolerating insurgent radicals and promoting them in their ranks, the Democrats have pumped the brakes hard on the left-wing of their party by uniting to stop Bernie Sanders. It won’t be enough to avoid the violent reaction of his most radical supporters.

Much to my chagrin, a relative of mine in 2017 took her young children to her local Women’s March and proudly proclaimed “This is what democracy looks like!” as legions of feminists and others protested the inauguration of Donald Trump.

After three years of similar protests, special counsel investigations, government shutdowns and impeachment she hasn’t budged from her belief that Trump represents everything wrong with America. This primary season she supported the candidate that she thought best matched up against the president. Unfortunately, that candidate turned out to be former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who dropped out the weekend before her state’s primary.

The consolidation of the Democratic field after the South Carolina primary and the resulting Super Tuesday wave for Joe Biden were rapidly, if reluctantly, accepted as the necessary move by establishment media spooked by the possibility of Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders being their candidate. It also has revealed again that the party that claims to be the heir of Thomas Jefferson doesn’t particularly resemble what “democracy looks like.”

Much of the momentum that Biden received in the Palmetto State came by virtue of the late endorsement of Representative James Clyburn, a machine politician with reliable pull among black residents as shown with his efforts in 2016. The carnage of that week, which appears to have wrecked Sanders’ chances of winning the nomination, has led to comical outbursts of anger from his supporters.

The division between the progressive and corporate wings of the Democratic Party cannot be bridged, and the deceptive primary process is likely to lead to a backlash that will not be limited to wearing pussy hats and vagina costumes on the National Mall.

America could see a reboot of an often forgotten era of urban radicalism buried in the 1970s. Time will tell whether it will be as violent. It will depend on whether the believers in armed resistance are willing to make the choice actively to pursue it, but it would not be unprecedented and the social climate is ripe for an encore.

Revolution After Clearing the Rubble

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/13/the-open-border-fetish-is-turning-into-a-symbol-of-death/

For open-border offenders to talk-up open borders during a pandemic is scandalous—as scandalous as it would have been for Harvey Weinstein to be talking up rough sex during his sentencing for sexual assault.

Taking its cues from the American Left, the Israeli Left is all for national and individual self-immolation. But nobody who matters in that country has been listening to the Left babble on about “racism” and “Sinophobia.”

Against the advice of its liberal think tanks—and to protect its nationals from the Wuhan virus pandemic—the Israel had, early on, closed its doors to “more and more of eastern Asia, starting with China, continuing to Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Thailand, South Korea and Japan.”

China is Israel’s second-largest trading partner.

To follow were tough travel restrictions and a quarantine regimen on territories in Europe, in line with unfolding coronavirus contingencies. Israel has since extended the quarantine to all arrivals. Consequently, of the 9 million Israelis, 100 cases of COVID-19 have been recorded so far, but no deaths.

What is proving more difficult for Israel is adding “New York and the states of Washington and California to its restricted list.” Israeli public health officials recommend it, but Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is being muscled by Vice President Mike Pence to keep his country open to those COVID-19 hot zones.

Following transmission of the coronavirus from Wuhan to Washington State, I wondered, in a mild tweet, posted with links to the Israeli policy, why Americans didn’t deserve this kind of diligence from their government.

Came the strident reply, also on Twitter: “Because, unlike Israel, the U.S. is not a postage-stamp-sized garrison state. The U.S. needs to tailor its response to the disease to its role as global economic power.”

Stalin apologist Walter Duranty summed up this Jacobin perspective perfectly. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Breaking a few old eggs, in an old-age home, in King County, Washington State, is what it apparently takes to make that great global omelet.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/and_omar_gets_married_again.html

This is the week that began when we lost an hour as we sprang forward to save daylight and continued with a full spring moon, so close and large, enough to give many of us something to admire … while in self-isolation from coronavirus.  Sigh.

And so, in that spirit, Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Somalia in Minnesota) temporarily suspended her professional hate of America to announce, via Instagram:

No, this lucky third husband isn’t her brother as was husband #2 — or was he #1?  He is her married-to-someone else campaign aide and fundraiser who conveniently “earned” several hundred thousand dollars from her campaign when they worked together. But as Omar herself said, they weren’t having an affair, despite that lawsuit from that angry ex-wife who said there was. And now, he is married to Omar.  So she is praising her god for this rather gamy turn of events.  

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-hating Israel in the safety of Michigan) temporarily suspended her eliminate-Israel-and-promote-an-imaginary Palestine campaign  to offer thousands of congratulations.  

The Democrats in Congress aren’t complaining.  They call it ‘diversity.’  

And tomorrow is Friday the thirteenth.  What else will this week bring?  

http://theconversation.com/whats-the-difference-between-pandemic-epidemic-and-outbreak-133048

The coronavirus is on everyone’s minds. As an epidemiologist, I find it interesting to hear people using technical terms – like quarantine or super spreader or reproductive number – that my colleagues and I use in our work every day.

But I’m also hearing newscasters and neighbors alike mixing up three important words: outbreak, epidemic and pandemic.

Simply put, the difference between these three scenarios of disease spread is a matter of scale.

Outbreak

Small, but unusual.

By tracking diseases over time and geography, epidemiologists learn to predict how many cases of an illness should normally happen within a defined period of time, place and population. An outbreak is a noticeable, often small, increase over the expected number of cases.

Imagine an unusual spike in the number of children with diarrhea at a daycare. One or two sick kids might be normal in a typical week, but if 15 children in a daycare come down with diarrhea all at once, that is an outbreak.

When a new disease emerges, outbreaks are more noticeable since the anticipated number of illnesses caused by that disease was zero. An example is the cluster of pneumonia cases that sprung up unexpectedly among market-goers in Wuhan, China. Public health officials now know the spike in pneumonia cases there constituted an outbreak of a new type of coronavirus, now named SARS-CoV-2.

As soon as local health authorities detect an outbreak, they start an investigation to determine exactly who is affected and how many have the disease. They use that information to figure out how best to contain the outbreak and prevent additional illness.

Epidemic

Bigger and spreading.

An epidemic is an outbreak over a larger geographic area. When people in places outside of Wuhan began testing positive for infection with SARS-CoV-2 (which causes the disease known as COVID-19), epidemiologists knew the outbreak was spreading, a likely sign that containment efforts were insufficient or came too late. This was not unexpected, given that no treatment or vaccine is yet available. But widespread cases of COVID-19 across China meant that the Wuhan outbreak had grown to an epidemic.

COVID-19 was first noticed in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 but quickly spread across the globe. This map shows all countries with confirmed cases on March 5, 2020. CDC

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/03/09/health_care_is_a_right_only_if_doctors_surrender_theirs_142591.html

Bernie Sanders is convinced that promising Americans guaranteed health care is the modern equivalent of “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” but he is not alone. In some form or another, health care consistently tops every poll that gauges what makes Democrats tick.

So now that the race has narrowed to “Biden vs. Bernie,” it is time to ask what we the American people will be getting if the No. 1 issue on the Democrats’ agenda is actually implemented.

First of all, we should recognize that there is no realistic difference between any two Democrats on this topic, though some pretend they don’t want to bankrupt the economy by fully funding guaranteed health care for all. In fact, they all agree with Sanders that “health care is a right,” and that means they will ultimately try to buy health care for everyone, no matter how expensive it is.

But when you ask them how or why health care is a right in the same way that life and liberty are human rights, you get circular answers or misleading ones. It is a right because it is important, we are told. Or it is a right because it is unfair for some people to get better treatment than others merely because they have more money. By that reckoning, there is a right to fly first class.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/do-university-closures-make-sense/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=fourth

If young people are relatively safe from coronavirus but can infect others who are less safe, then doesn’t it make sense to keep them together at colleges rather than sending them home, where they are more likely to infect their parents and grandparents? Maybe there’s a good rationale for these moves. Or maybe we’re having trouble getting our heads around an illness that requires us to protect old people from young people, and fear of litigation isn’t helping us think it through better.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/07/the-finger-of-trump-on-a-new-plague/

EXCERPT

A week ago, I wrote about the president’s masterly press conference about the coronavirus. As Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) observed, the president’s decision to suspend flights between the United States and China early on in the epidemic was “the single most consequential and valuable thing” done to slow the course of the malady. 

That’s not how his political opponents spun it, of course. The president was denounced as “racist,” “xenophobic,” etc. by the Left, but that talk dried up as panic began to take over. In that earlier column, I mentioned Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He was writing about Tulipomania in 17th-century Holland—when a single tulip bulb might go for more than the price of your house—financial bubbles, and the like. But we seem to be seeing a medical version of that now. 

As I have noted, we do not know how rapidly or how widely the virus will spread, nor do we know how deadly it will be. People over 65 seem to suffer more serious illnesses than younger people, especially if they have underlying health problems. As is the case with other maladies, the older and frailer you are, the more likely it is that you will die from the coronavirus.

That said, it is worth maintaining some perspective on the disease. In early February, the CDC estimated that at least 12,000 people had died from the flu from October 1, 2019 through February 1. That number might be as high as 30,000. So far, CDC estimates, some 31 million Americans have caught the flu this season. Somewhere between 200,000 and 370,000 of those have been hospitalized because of the virus. 

As for deaths, the CDC estimates that it will probably equal or surpass the 2018-2019 season when there were 34,000 flu-related deaths in America. (The 2017-2018 season saw 61,000 deaths.) Writ large, the World Health Organization estimates that the flu kills between 290,000 and 650,000 annually.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/07/socialism-extinguishes-the-american-and-biblical-ideal/

Those today pitching democratic socialism as a safe and benign form of socialism are hiding the truth about it. By nature, socialism disregards any aspect of democratic will when it is in conflict with its fixed social agenda and goal of economic leveling. Thus, democratic socialism is an oxymoron, a seductive syntax and play on words.

Socialist candidates running for office do not do so to offer greater liberty, income, opportunity, or greater speech rights, but to institute heavy social engineering aimed toward conformity and sameness. History shows how in the name of “fairness” socialist rulers and bureaucrats disregarded democracy, as well as citizens who do not accept the deprivations needed to bring about the “ideal state.”

Too many among our young assume that socialism will provide the same level of prosperity and easy consumption they currently enjoy, with an added feel-good patina. They see no downside. But current and past real examples prove that prosperity, abundance, and ease of purchase and opportunity, including free speech, dramatically decline with the advent of any form of socialism. Political and religious freedom is inexorably tied to economic freedom. There is no “right” type of socialism or a right time for it or even a right person to oversee it.

Today’s fashionable cultural Marxism puts in jeopardy even more freedoms than that of the economic Marxism of years ago. It attacks and severely diminishes freedom of speech, assembly, and religious freedoms. The intent of indicting “America as racist from top to bottom,” as do many on the Left, is to provide political license to tear down and rebuild America according to socialism’s leveling and confiscatory blueprint.

The Lie of American Socialists

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/07/anyone-notice-that-trumps-economy-keeps-beating-expectations/

February’s jobs report “smashed expectations.” That’s how one news site described the latest monthly employment numbers out of the Commerce Department, which showed the economy created 273,000 jobs last month. Smashing expectations has become a regular feature of the Trump economy. Anyone care to guess why?

Based on the consensus forecast of economists, the first two months of this year should have seen a total of 335,000 jobs created. The actual number was 63% higher: 546,000.

For the past four months, job growth has averaged 248,000, after the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised several previous months’ gains sharply upward. In the best year under President Barack Obama, job growth averaged 250,000 a month.

The current job growth is even more impressive given that it’s coming more than 10 years after the last recession ended, and long after the experts told us we were already at full employment.

There’s more. To get a full picture of how much better than expected the Trump economy is performing, take a look at the forecast put out by the Congressional Budget Office just as Trump was taking office in January 2017.

According to the CBO, which based its forecast on the assumption that the economic policies of the Obama administration remained in place, the economy should have created only 2 million new jobs by this point.

The actual number: 6.9 million.