RUTHFULLY YOURS

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Most decisions we make involve some measure of risk. Generally, the consideration is fleeting. Do I take the stairs and risk falling, or the elevator and risk it breaking down? At times, the choice is more absolute: Do I take the double-black diamond with moguls, or do I go around on the bunny trail? Sometimes the odds are important: Is my need to cross the street against traffic so great that the attempt should be made despite oncoming traffic? Risk is ubiquitous.

It is embedded in the friends we make, where we go to college, what job we take and in our choice of a marriage partner – a risk my wife and I took fifty-six years ago today. A wise friend used to say that he was never upset with mistakes he had made but was troubled by risks he never took. Risks vary depending on what we do. To a soldier in combat, risks have different consequences than the ones we encounter daily. In his 1916 collection of poems, Mountain Interval, Robert Frost included “The Road Not Taken.” At a fork in the road a traveler pauses, knowing he cannot walk down both paths, so chooses “the one less traveled by…”  The reader never knows whether the choice was a good one or not, only that it “has made all the difference.” As well, progress is impossible without risk. A baserunner cannot steal second without taking his foot off first. Neither can we avoid risk. “Security,” as Helen Keller once wrote, “is mostly a superstition.”

Risk is defined as the interaction with uncertainty, a measure of the probability of danger or loss, against safety or profit. In our daily lives, we try to mitigate risk. We are encouraged to look before we leap. Insurance companies employ actuaries to assess risk and calculate premiums. Investors use algorithms to quantify the risk of loss against the potential for gain. While these calculations are never perfect, they are Darwinian in that those who are best at measuring risk tend to be the most successful, what Joseph Schumpeter termed creative destruction in industries as they adapt to change.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/10/time-to-sideline-the-false-prophets-of-doom/

Fauci, Birx, and Adams have sent too many mixed messages from the start. While at first diminishing the threat of COVID-19, they now are sowing fear and panic across the country.

The warning from the nation’s top public health official was terrifying.

“This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized,” U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said on Fox News last Sunday, referring to coming deaths due to the novel coronavirus. “It’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.”

Holy Week, Adams further cautioned, would be the “hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives.”

President Trump echoed Adams’ dire prediction. “We are coming up onto a time that’s going to be very horrendous, probably a time like we haven’t seen in this country,” Trump said from the White House on April 4. Instead of celebrating Easter and Passover this week, the president soberly admonished, Americans would instead see “some very bad numbers” about people succumbing to COVID-19.

Those alarming forecasts were based on a model produced by the University of Washington late last month. Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, assembled a set of graphs to show how COVID-19 would overwhelm the country’s health care system, causing a shortage of hospital beds, intensive care units and ventilators.

Murray also originally calculated that 2,271 people would die on April 15, which would be the peak “death day” in the United States. But that wasn’t the only scary news. Sick people would by dying in the streets and entryways outside of hospitals across the country because no beds would be available.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/manipulation-through-racial-hoaxes-walter-williams/

We black people are so convenient and useful to America’s leftists. Whenever there’s a bit of silencing to be done, just accuse a detractor or critic of racism. A recent, particularly stupid, example is CNN’s Brandon Tensley’s complaint that the “Coronavirus task force is another example of Trump administration’s lack of diversity.” Tensley said the virus experts are “largely the same sorts of white men (and a couple women on the sidelines) who’ve dominated the Trump administration from the very beginning.” I’d like for Tensley to tell us just what racial or sex diversity contribute to finding a cure or treatment for the coronavirus.

Jesse Watters was criticized as a racist for claiming that the coronavirus outbreak was caused by Chinese people “eating raw bats and snakes.” He added that “They are a very hungry people. The Chinese communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate. This food is uncooked, it is unsafe and that is why scientists believe that’s where it originated from.” Watter’s statement can be settled by a bit of empiricism. Just find out whether Chinese people eat bats and snakes and whether that has anything to do with the spread of the coronavirus.

It may be perplexing to some, but I believe that our nation has made great progress in matters of race, so much so that imaginary racism and racial hoaxes must be found. Left-wingers on college campuses and elsewhere have a difficult time finding the racism that they say permeates everything. So they’re brazenly inventing it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/08/how_the_wuhan_virus_will_change_the_world_order_142886.html

The horrific spread of COVID-19 has filled hospitals and graveyards, shut down the global economy, and exposed deep fissures among nations. The international problems, such China’s rising threat and reliance on foreign sources for critical supplies, are not new. But the contagion puts them in sharp relief and will surely affect relationships going forward.

Most changes won’t come until the crisis passes. Right now, policymakers are preoccupied with life-and-death decisions. They don’t want to challenge Beijing while they need its medical supplies and data. They also want to see if it will fulfill its promises in the Phase I trade deal or cheat, again. But make no mistake, changes are coming.

The biggest will involve China. The pandemic not only originated there, it spread because of how China is governed. The Chinese Communist Party, like all dictatorships, maintains tight control over information. It gives out only what helps the regime, hides whatever hurts it, spews propaganda, and cracks down on anyone who speaks out of turn. The Wuhan doctors who first sounded the alarm bells were immediately silenced. Science labs, which decoded the viral structure, were shut down and their data destroyed. China still won’t share vital information about how the virus works and how it affects different populations. Reporters, both professional and amateur, who mentioned the pandemic were suppressed. Some international reporters were expelled. Some locals have not been seen again.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/coming-war-between-generations-bruce-thornton/

Short-term thinking has been the bane of democracies since ancient Athens. Regularly scheduled elections and term-limits make it politically expedient, if not mandatory, for politicians to gratify the people’s desires, or assuage their present fears, even if the action or policy creates greater risks later. As Tocqueville wrote, “A clear perception of the future founded on judgment and experience” is “frequently wanting in democracies.” The dangers and discomforts of the present will trump the greater ones of the future.

The current pandemic crisis illustrates this perennial flaw, which hasn’t been mitigated by our greater knowledge of diseases and remedies for them. In the case of the Wuhan virus, we don’t have the requisite data to establish its mortality rate among the infected, or even the number of infected. The various models that project a mortality rate have exaggerated the toll: At this point the number of dead is a few hundred more than the 7400 of Americans who die every day, and much less than the 24,000 to 64,000 who died of the flu this season. Yet most states, seconded by the president’s recommendations, have imposed a radical social-distancing policy, which the president has extended to the end of April.

As a consequence, our economy has taken a historic hit, with 10 million employees laid off and thousands of businesses both big and small (the latter comprise nearly half the private workforce) shuttered. Goldman-Sachs projects GDP to shrink 35% this summer, and others estimate unemployment may reach the 25% recorded during the Great Depression. A booming economy has been stalled as a matter of policy, with consequences such as a significant recession or even a depression, the malign effects of which––depression, divorce, addiction, suicide–– will continue to seriously damage the lives of millions for the foreseeable future.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/medicines-mitigation-and-money/

This is a “viral” post in three parts: Treatment, mitigation and the economic aftermath. First to treatments for the virus – not a vaccine, which will take too long (if it is ever produced).

Treatment: While other anti-viral treatments are being tested, there is increasing anecdotal evidence from epidemiologists and doctors treating patients that hydroxychloroquine (the safe anti-malaria drug) is effective both as a prophylactic and, combined with the antibiotic azithromycin, as a treatment for those with the disease. Many doctors in numbers of countries are apparently using it on themselves and for treating their patients. Among the states in America, I understand that only New York State has been restricting its use to tackle the virus to within hospitals.

Clinical trials are underway, but as Dr Fauci — one of the two principal public-health officials advising Trump — said, they would take months to complete. Months is too long if people are unnecessarily suffering and dying. In the meantime, the economy goes on tanking. As is commonly said, you have to go to war with what you have not with what you would like to have.

No, I am not a medical doctor. All I am saying is that if I were to catch a serious dose of the disease, I will be asking for the above treatment ahead of Dr Fauci’s clinical trials. And loudly, if I am able.

https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/04/62065/

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.

Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a sociologist and physician who conducts research in the areas of social networks and biosocial science. He directs the Human Nature Lab.

This is a fundamental human experience that we’re having. Plagues have been described for a very long time. It’s just that we ourselves are not used to having it. I would happily stay at home for three months if it meant that my neighbors are not going to die. 

This interview is adapted from the Webinar conversation “Pandemic! What Do and Don’t We Know? Robert P. George in Conversation with Nicholas A. Christakis.”

Robert George: Could you begin by giving us a summary of what we know from the past about pandemics?

Nicholas Christakis: We’re experiencing something that’s very unusual in the history and life of our species: the introduction of a new pathogen that has entered our species and will circulate widely among us. As near as we can tell, this coronavirus bears a strong similarity to viruses that had been circulating in bats. It’s a bit odd that bat viruses so often cause us problems. There’s been some speculation that their immune system is very similar to ours. The virus first adapted to being transmissible in bats, and by some time in November in the Wuhan region of China was pre-adapted to the human immune system. By December, there were many people getting sick and dying in Wuhan by means we still don’t fully understand.

https://worldisraelnews.com/us-group-offers-the-unapologetic-zionists-haggadah/

“Our fervent hope is that through this unique compilation readers will be provided a respite from worries about coronavirus,” said the group’s director.

By World Israel News Staff

Herut, a leading American Zionist organization, is offering “The Unapologetic Zionist’s Haggadah” for Passover. The new anthology includes classic, hard-to-find essays by founding fathers of Zionism, including Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Dr. Israel Eldad.

“This Passover booklet is titled M’Avdut L’Herut, From Slavery to Freedom and we created it at this time because Jabotinsky’s brand of Zionist optimism is needed precisely in these dark days of pandemic,” said Karma Feinstein Cohen, the Executive Director of Herut North America.

“Our fervent hope is that through this unique compilation readers will be provided a respite from worries about coronavirus by the Passover thoughts we have included from the world of Revisionist Zionism, old and new.”

The 20-page PDF booklet also contains recent articles that are included with the intention of increasing understanding of the Seder and the overall holiday.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/06/trump-campaign-donates-meals-to-hospitals/

The Trump campaign has been anonymously donating thousands of meals to hospitals to thank frontline staff during the coronavirus outbreak, according to Fox News. 

Since last week, the president’s reelection campaign “has been calling local restaurants and ordering large amounts of food to be sent to hospitals across the country, including in the pandemic hot spots of New York, New Jersey, Washington state, and Michigan.” The campaign has been placing these orders anonymously, Fox News learned.

“They’re doing it as a donor who cares,” one source told Fox News. “So nothing politically is tied to it. … We’re just trying to, you know, show a thank you.”

Another source said, “They’re trying to send things that are like, local restaurants that may need support [and] cool restaurant icons of the area that may need the business.”

The source told Fox News that the campaign has spent tens of thousands of dollars and they plan to expand in the coming days and weeks.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/04/tocquevilles-lessons-in-a-time-of-pandemic/

As the crisis continues, and in the aftermath, the activity of the citizens that Alexis de Tocqueville described so well in his book must always include assessing how well their local and state governments have prepared for ordinary and extraordinary events.

The immediate challenge of COVID-19 has been cast as an examination of how individual Americans will fare should they be exposed to the virus. The effort to arrest the spread of the virus has brought unprecedented changes in the daily routines of all Americans. The limitation of activity is apparent when one walks outside. There is a marked silence, regardless of the time of day, almost eerie, that gives one pause.

The check on movement is accompanied by images of field hospitals and graphs showing curves and spreads displayed across news sites. While many are changing their daily routines to comply with the requirements of staying at home and practicing social distancing, a broader concern is the effect on our American democratic foundation.

Alexis de Tocqueville devotes a chapter of his great work, Democracy in America, to discussing the advantages of American democracy. Each of the five parts in the chapter “What Are the Real Advantages That American Society Gains from the Government of Democracy?” encourages thoughtful reflection. The last part, “Activity That Reigns in All Parts of the Political Body in the United States; Influence That It Exercises on Society,” prompts us to think about both the negative and positive effects that the country is facing with respect to halting the exchange between people and their movement.