RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://townhall.com/columnists/wayneallynroot/2020/04/26/are-you-enjoying-your-first-test-drive-of-socialist-america-n256761

Are you enjoying your first taste of socialism? Life in America today is a sneak preview of life in Cuba or Venezuela. Democrats love it. This is the future they plan for you. The current economic catastrophe is exactly what America will look like if we institute the Green New Deal.

The goal is to defeat climate change by killing your job, taking away your car, closing your business and turning America into Cuba or Venezuela. 

It’s a progressive Democrat’s rainy dream. 

And isn’t it great? You don’t need to go to work. Money magically appears in your bank account. Hopefully, you can live on $1,200 every six weeks for the rest of your life.

You get to spend long days watching daytime talk shows and movies on Netflix — you know, the things Democrats call a “typical day” for their voters. 

And think of the money you can save on gas by not going anywhere. Soon all those nasty, polluting, carbon-emitting vehicles will be just a memory of the past. How wonderful will it be to have time to “just think” as you wait hours for those new energy-efficient buses and subways? 

And, with all those nasty “nonessential” businesses closed, you’ll have plenty of time to converse with your neighbors as you wait in line to see if anything is available for you to buy. It’s socialist nirvana.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/maybe-the-experts-were-right-about-covid-19-the-first-time-11587659799?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

It’s time to confront an awful possibility about the lockdowns in which many of the world’s economies now find themselves: The experts might have been right the first time.

“The first time” was not so long ago—February to mid-March—when official opinion on how best to grapple with the new coronavirus pandemic was very different. The distinguishing characteristic was modesty.

The stated goal was not to vanquish the virus but merely to try to control its spread so as not to overwhelm health-care systems. Officials also understood public patience with draconian measures would wear thin quickly and demanded politicians exercise caution when asking the public to take on burdens.

Those opinions now are widely derided, often in insulting terms. Yet subsequent events suggest they’re mainly correct. Let’s take each in turn.

• We can’t stop the virus, we can only slow it. This is the biggest fact about the pandemic that remains politically impossible to say. The trouble started in mid-March when “herd immunity,” previously the tacit or acknowledged endgame for most of the world, became a toxic phrase. Critics pointed out that allowing the virus to spread in a controlled manner would cost lives. They presented a stark alternative of total lockdown or the disaster of Italian hospitals, with no middle ground.

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/its_time_for_a_reckoning_for_china_and_its_compradors.html

The Wuhan virus has ended the game China has been playing for the past three decades to rise from Marxist-rooted poverty to the world’s biggest manufacturer.  Virtually all of the world’s advanced economies and many of the less developed countries now realize that China is not a trustworthy partner.  Donald Trump may have been the first world leader to call the Chinese out, but he now has plenty of company:

With a series of high-level summits culminating in a visit to Germany in the fall by President Xi Jinping, this was supposed to be the year of Europe-China diplomacy. Instead, Europeans are warning of a damaging rift.

Diplomats talk of mounting anger over China’s behavior during the coronavirus pandemic including claims of price gouging by Chinese suppliers of medical equipment and a blindness to how its actions are perceived. The upshot is that Beijing’s handling of the crisis has eroded trust just when it had a chance to demonstrate global leadership.

“Over these months China has lost Europe,” said Reinhard Buetikofer, a German Green party lawmaker who chairs the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with China. He cited concerns from China’s “truth management” in the early stages of the virus to an “extremely aggressive” stance by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing and “hard-line propaganda” that champions the superiority of Communist Party rule over democracy.

China’s leaders used tactics that it learned the hard way more than three centuries ago, when it tumbled from millennia-long status as the “middle kingdom,” incomparably more powerful than any rivals, to a helpless victim of more powerful foreigners, able to impose their will on and extract vast wealth from it.  Virtually all Chinese people are marinated in the history of its decline and impoverishment at the hands of the West.  The two Opium Wars led to the forcible opening of China to untrammeled trade, including the mass importation of opium, one of the few products that found a ready market there.  Britain conveniently was able to produce opium in its Indian colony and sell it to the Chinese, who sought escape from their misery.

www.aier.org/article/well-that-unraveled-fast/?fbclid=IwAR3ebwR3aOQhqmdmQKObvQ-AnnTukHghQ-bo-AI1dX2l3vbvraxkXTtJfXQ

Thinking back to February 28, 2020, and the New England Journal of Medicine. It published an article called “Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted” signed by Anthony S. Fauci (THE Fauci), Clifford Lane, and Robert R. Redfield.  

It reported an existing COVID-19 case fatality rate of 2% but further pointed out that infections show “a wide spectrum of disease severity.” “If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%” or perhaps as high as the flu seasons of 1957 and 1968, but is nowhere near “a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.” To be sure, they said, mitigating the disease could require “isolating ill persons (including voluntary isolation at home), school closures, and telecommuting where possible.”

Now, what precisely happened between February 28 and two weeks later? This will be studied for many years to find out precisely how governors and mayors, through a series of unscientific, panicked, unjustified, and morally egregious actions, crushed under foot the world’s strongest economy while the media cheered. We’ll be discussing the whys and whats for a generation. 

The point is that it is all unraveling as fast as it came. Donald Trump’s press conference on April 16, 2020, was clearly a turning point. In my ideal world, we would have officials up there telling the truth that the course we took as a nation was catastrophic in countless ways (except for all the panicked deregulation undertaken just so that the food and medicine could continue). But I’m realistic: we can hardly expect politicians to bow down and beg forgiveness. 

www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/could-anti-lockdown-protests-be-new-tea-party-movement

Growing discontent with stringent state-level restrictions imposed to mitigate the coronavirus is pouring out into the streets near state capitols in ways reminiscent of the last decade’s conservative activism.

“They have a very Tea Party feel,” said Tea Party Express co-founder Sal Russo of the demonstrations.

“The current protests are because of government overreaching and infringing on our rights,” said Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin. “The protests are an extension of what the Tea Party movement has stood for the last 11 years — constitutionally limited government, personal and economic freedom. In the time of crisis and to remain on solid ground with those whom they represent, elected officials should lean on the Constitution, not abandon it.”

President Trump lent his encouragement Friday, sending three separate tweets calling on protestors to “LIBERATE” a trio of 2020 battleground states, Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia, each with Democratic governors whose approaches to slowing the pandemic are seen in some quarters as draconian.

One of these chief executives, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, has been locked in a feud with Trump and is a co-chairman of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign. She is frequently mentioned as a possible Biden running mate. Trump also used the occasion to blast gun control policies signed into law by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, urging the state’s residents to “save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”

The protests may be an early sign of burgeoning conservative sentiment in favor of reopening businesses that have been shuttered to manage the spread of the coronavirus. While polling still shows broad public support for social distancing, some partisan fissures are beginning to appear over the massive job losses. In a recent Morning Consult poll, 51% of Republicans said the public health impact was more important than the quarantines’ economic consequences to 43% who said otherwise. The split among all voters was 64-29.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/18/after-repeated-failures-its-time-to-permanently-dump-epidemic-models/

“Assuming it’s possible to model an epidemic at all, any that the mainstream press relays will have been designed to promote panic. Take it from Fauci, who early on so eagerly employed them – they are to be ignored. Now and forever.”

The … crisis we face is unparalleled in modern times,” said the World Health Organization’s assistant director, while its director general proclaimed it “likely the greatest peacetime challenge that the United Nations and its agencies have ever faced.” This was based on a CDC computer model projection predicting as many as 1.4 million deaths from just two countries. 

So when did they say this about COVID-19? Trick question: It was actually about the Ebola virus in Liberia and Sierra Leone five years ago, and the ultimate death toll was under 8,000.

With COVID-19 having peaked (the highest date was April 4), despite the best efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to increase numbers by first saying any death with the virus could be considered a death from the virus and then again this week by saying a positive test isn’t even needed, you can see where this is going.

Since the AIDS epidemic, people have been pumping out such models with often incredible figures. For AIDS, the Public Health Service announced (without documenting) there would be 450,000 cases by the end of 1993, with 100,000 in that year alone. The media faithfully parroted it. There were 17,325 by the end of that year, with about 5,000 in 1993. SARS (2002-2003) was supposed to kill perhaps “millions,” based on analyses. It killed 744 before disappearing.