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Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World’s Herd Immunity Is the Only Realistic Option—the Question Is How to Get There Safely By Nils Karlson, Charlotta Stern, and Daniel B. Klein

Posted By on May 14th, 2020

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/sweden/2020-05-12/swedens-coronavirus-strategy-will-soon-be-worlds

China placed 50 million people under quarantine in Wuhan Province in January. Since then, many liberal democracies have taken aggressive authoritarian measures of their own to fight the novel coronavirus. By mid-March, almost all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries had implemented some combination of school, university, workplace, and public transportation closures; restrictions on public events; and limits on domestic and international travel. One country, however, stands out as an exception in the West.

Rather than declare a lockdown or a state of emergency, Sweden asked its citizens to practice social distancing on a mostly voluntary basis. Swedish authorities imposed some restrictions designed to flatten the curve: no public gatherings of more than 50 people, no bar service, distance learning in high schools and universities, and so on. But they eschewed harsh controls, fines, and policing. Swedes have changed their behavior, but not as profoundly as the citizens of other Western democracies. Many restaurants remain open, although they are lightly trafficked; young children are still in school. And in contrast to neighboring Norway (and some Asian countries), Sweden has not introduced location-tracing technologies or apps, thus avoiding threats to privacy and personal autonomy.

Swedish authorities have not officially declared a goal of reaching herd immunity, which most scientists believe is achieved when more than 60 percent of the population has had the virus. But augmenting immunity is no doubt part of the government’s broader strategy—or at least a likely consequence of keeping schools, restaurants, and most businesses open. Anders Tegnell, the chief epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency, has projected that the city of Stockholm could reach herd immunity as early as this month. Based on updated behavioral assumptions (social-distancing norms are changing how Swedes behave), the Stockholm University mathematician Tom Britton has calculated that 40 percent immunity in the capital could be enough to stop the virus’s spread there and that this could happen by mid-June.

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Declassified List Of Obama Officials Who Unmasked Michael Flynn Includes James Clapper, John Brennan, And Joe Biden By Sean Davis

Posted By on May 14th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/13/declassified-list-of-obama-officials-who-unmasked-michael-flynn-includes-james-clapper-john-brennan-and-joe-biden/

Eight different Obama administration officials sought to unmask Michael Flynn’s identity from National Security Agency intercepts between December 29 and January 12.

A list of Obama administration officials who sought to unmask intercepted communications involving former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was declassified and released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on Wednesday. The list of officials who asked the National Security Agency to unmask Flynn’s name from certain intercepted communications included former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan, former DNI James Clapper, former White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, and former Vice President Joe Biden. The full list was first disclosed online by CBS reporter Catherine Herridge.

“On 8 May 2020 I declassified the enclosed document, which I am providing to you for your situational awareness,” Acting DNI Ric Grenell wrote to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc.

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Judges Are Umpires, Not Ringmasters Sullivan invites outsiders to weigh in on the Flynn case—an unconstitutional judicial power grab. By Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on May 14th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/judges-are-umpires-not-ringmasters-11589387368?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The Constitution limits the jurisdiction of federal judges to actual cases and controversies. They may not offer advisory opinions or intrude on executive or legislative powers, except when the other branches have exercised them in an unconstitutional manner. Federal judges are umpires deciding matters about which litigants disagree. If the litigants come to an agreement, there is no controversy. The case is over.

Many judges disapprove of this limitation on their power. Not happy being umpires, they want to be commissioner of baseball. Thus courts have arrogated to themselves powers the Constitution explicitly denies them. They have invented exceptions to give themselves jurisdiction over cases in which there is no longer any controversy between the litigants.

It is against this constitutional background that we should evaluate Judge Emmet Sullivan’s Tuesday order inviting friend-of-the-court briefs advising him whether to accept the prosecution’s motion to dismiss the case against Mike Flynn—a motion to which the defense consents.

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The Michael Flynn Debauchery The people who administer the American system lost trust in that system and debased our institutions. Daniel Henninger

Posted By on May 14th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-michael-flynn-debauchery-11589410340

Barack Obama is turning into the reverse Oracle of Delphi. He sometimes gets it right for the wrong reasons.

Sensing the populist mood in 2008, he intoned about people “who get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.” Missed in translation was that these “people” thought elites like him were the ones who had separated culturally and politically from mainstream Americans.

Now he says the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against Mike Flynn because of multiple prosecutorial violations of rules protecting defendants’ rights means “the rule of law is at risk.” Right subject, wrong lecture.

Herewith a tutorial. Back in the 1980s, writers for the Journal’s editorial page coined the phrase “inside the Beltway” to describe the moatlike highway around the nation’s capital, whose inhabitants had become politically and psychologically isolated from the rest of the country.

Many Americans then came to believe presidential elections were the one way they could send the Beltway a message. In 2016, we had an Earth-to-Beltway election, whose message was about more than Donald Trump.

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Germany’s Constitutional Court Accelerates the Euro Zone’s Slide toward Crisis By Andrew Stuttaford

Posted By on May 13th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/germany-constitutional-court-accelerates-euro-zones-slide-toward-crisis/

The existential questions that the European Project’s stakeholders have spent decades avoiding can’t be ignored much longer.

 O ne of the reasons that the euro zone has survived for as long as it has is the impressive ability of its leaders to postpone dealing with a series of questions that are as fundamental as they are inconvenient. Is it possible to sustain a monetary union without a fiscal union? (Probably not.) Is it possible to establish a fiscal union without genuine democratic consent? (We may yet find out.) And suddenly pressing: What is the relationship between the EU’s law and Germany’s?

For half a century the conflict hinted at by this last question could mostly be treated as theoretical. Then, last week, the German constitutional court (BVG) challenged the legality of the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP), the $2 trillion-and-counting quantitative-easing scheme first launched by the European Central Bank (the ECB) in 2015 to prop up the euro zone’s faltering economies, and restarted in 2019. The BVG’s ruling does not concern the ECB’s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program (PEPP), a new, smaller quantitative-easing regimen under which the ECB will buy up to €750 billion in bonds to help stave off the effects of the mess that COVID-19 has left in its wake. But it may affect how the PEPP is run: Already widely considered inadequate for the task that lies ahead, the program may be hobbled by restrictions flowing from the BVG’s judgment, and that’s before another wave of German litigation tries to bring it down.

To the EU, the BVG’s intervention was both unwelcome and insolent. So far as the EU’s jurisprudence is concerned, EU law is supreme in every member state in a manner approximately analogous to the relationship between federal and state law in the U.S. In an English case from 1974, one of that country’s most distinguished — and quirkily eloquent — judges, Lord Denning, explained that the EEC Treaty (the EEC was a precursor of the EU) was “like an incoming tide. It flows into the estuaries and up the rivers. It cannot be held back.” The treaty, he wrote, was “equal in force to any statute,” and the European Court of Justice (the ECJ) was “the ultimate authority” when it came to interpreting EEC law; even England’s highest court had “to bow down to it.”

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CNN Pandemic Panel Features Obama Officials And Greta Thunberg By Chrissy Clark

Posted By on May 13th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/13/cnn-pandemic-panel-features-obama-officials-greta-thunberg/

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg is among the so-called experts joining CNN’s Anderson Cooper for a CNN Town Hall on coronavirus.

The panel is called “Coronavirus – Facts and Fears” and will feature former acting Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Richard Besser, former Obama Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Seblius, climate activist Thunberg, and CNN’s medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Thunberg has been a champion of socialist overhauls such as the Green New Deal and earned her place in the national spotlight for her apocalyptic rhetoric on climate change. It’s unclear how a 17-year-old high school drop out is somehow an infectious disease expert qualified for CNN’s “expert” panel.

Thus far, Thunberg’s only contribution to the coronavirus pandemic was her generous donation of $100,000 to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). After winning a $100,000 prize for her global activism, Thunberg donated the money to children in need. Yes, it’s generous, but it doesn’t qualify her to speak on a panel of experts about coronavirus.

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‘Obamagate’ Isn’t A Conspiracy Theory, It’s The Biggest Political Scandal Of Our Time And the media know it.By John Daniel Davidson

Posted By on May 13th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/13/obamagate-isnt-a-conspiracy-theory-its-the-biggest-political-scandal-of-our-time/

When former president Barack Obama told supporters last week that the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against former White House National Security Adviser Mike Flynn is a “threat to the rule of law,” he was relying wholly on the fiction, willingly propagated for years by a pliant media, that the Russia-Trump collusion probe launched by his administration was lawful and legitimate.

But of course it wasn’t. A string of recently released documents have confirmed that the entire Russia-Trump investigation, which eventually entrapped Flynn and forced then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself, was an unprecedented abuse of power that amounted to organized effort by the Obama administration to nullify the results of the 2016 presidential election. It was in effect an attempted coup.

If you haven’t picked that up from the news media, it’s not your fault. Instead of grappling with the implications of newly released details about what Obama officials were doing to undermine the incoming Trump administration during the transition, the mainstream media have fixated on Trump’s use of the term “Obamagate,” dismissing it as a conspiracy theory.

A Brief History of the Flynn Case

This is to be expected. For years now the media have done everything they can to push the Trump-Russia collusion hoax—even after a years-long special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller turned up nothing—using the complexity of the scheme to hide the greatest political scandal of our time in plain sight.

A key aspect of that scheme was—and is—to make the case against Flynn appear legitimate. Flynn faced trumped-up charges that he mislead FBI agents about conversations he had with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration. (As the incoming national security advisor, Flynn was doubtless having conversations with numerous heads of state and ambassadors during this time, so there was nothing unusual about him talking to the Russian ambassador.)

The Obama administration already knew about the conversations with Kislyak because it had recordings of them thanks to a series of investigations it spun out of the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign. Crossfire Hurricane, launched in the summer of 2016, was itself a bogus investigation based on the Steele dossier—an entirely fraudulent document riddled with Russian disinformation and paid for by the Democratic Party.

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Wuhan’s Other Epidemic Most know that the Chinese city is the source of the coronavirus—but not that it also fuels America’s deadly fentanyl epidemic. Christopher F. Rufo

Posted By on May 13th, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/wuhan-fuels-americas-fentanyl-epidemic?utm_source=Ci

The coronavirus has turned America upside-down. In less than three months, the virus has killed 70,000 Americans and destroyed more than 30 million jobs. According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “enormous evidence” shows that the virus emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China—not in that city’s infamous “wet markets.” But while few question that the virus originates in Wuhan, many don’t know that Wuhan is also the source of another deadly epidemic: America’s fentanyl overdoses.

Fentanyl, a form of synthetic opioid, has quickly become America’s most dangerous drug. In 2018, fentanyl killed 31,897 people in the United States—more than twice the number of any other narcotic. The chemical compound is so lethal, in fact, that just two milligrams—enough to cover Lincoln’s beard on a penny—can prove fatal. In the past five years, fentanyl has devastated hundreds of American communities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, where overdose death rates have skyrocketed.

“Most of the fentanyl and novel synthetic opioids in U.S. street markets—as well as their precursor chemicals—originate in China, where the regulatory system does not effectively police the country’s expansive pharmaceutical and chemical industries,” a recent RAND analysis concludes. Chinese manufacturers export the drug in two ways. First, they send shipments directly to American criminal organizations via the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx, using the “dark web” to process orders. Second, they ship fentanyl and precursor chemicals to drug cartels in Mexico, which then smuggle the final product into American markets.

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Coronavirus offers another excuse for the New York Times to bash Britain The Gray Lady’s anti-British animus is worth highlighting Douglas Murray

Posted By on May 13th, 2020

https://spectator.us/coronavirus-another-excuse-new-york-times-bash-britain/

Of course most people don’t read the New York Times. But the paper retains a certain cache in America, and undoubtedly directs a lot of public thinking in that country, if not further afield. Which is why the Gray Lady’s anti-British animus (which has been noted here before) is worth highlighting.

The trend has been going on since 2016, when the NYT seemed to have decided that the Brexit vote led the way for the election of Donald Trump. Since then the paper’s desire to attack Britain has appeared insatiable; a fact that leads their readers to be woefully ill-informed about the country. I for one have been fairly regularly struck by the number of otherwise intelligent and subtle Americans I know who seem to think that Boris Johnson is (at best) President Trump’s evil twin and (at worst) a demagogic populist on a par with the great dictators. Invariably the cause is the NYT.

In the last month, there have been some especially fine examples for those of us who retain a morbid interest in the paper’s anti-British obsession. Especially its desire to draft in anyone at all (even if they are wholly obscure) just so long as the hired help does the necessary hit job on the UK.

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A generation unmasked The furor over the maskless VE celebration highlights the forces driving this moment of national fear and submission Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on May 13th, 2020

https://spectator.us/generation-unmasked-trump-world-war-two-mask/

President Trump invited World War Two veterans to Washington to commemorate the Allied victory in Europe last week — and the media and public health establishments threw a fit. ‘Ninety-three-year old veterans will be traveling to visit the White House — they should not be traveling!’ groused MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace on May 7, the day before VE (Victory in Europe) Day. ‘People should not be doing non-essential travel,’ fretted one of the channel’s health experts. ‘Don’t leave home!’

Trump compounded his public health heresies by not wearing a mask during the ceremony. The day after the commemoration, the New York Times complained: ‘The president hosted a wreath-laying ceremony at the World War Two Memorial in Washington on Friday to mark the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany by inviting several veterans aged 95 and over, even though they were in the most vulnerable age group.’The photo of the ceremony in the print edition was captioned: ‘President Trump did not wear a mask Friday during a wreath-laying ceremony that was attended by World War Two veterans, who are in the 90s and highly vulnerable.’

The mask scolds were silent about the fact that the medal-bedecked veterans, standing yards behind the president and saluting the flag, were also unmasked.

The furor over the maskless VE celebration highlights the forces driving this moment of national fear and submission. At stake is whether there are any values more important than maximal safety and protection from risk.

The first thing to be said about the VE Day episode is that the criticism of Trump for not donning a mask outside is based on no science at all. Outdoor transmission of viruses in a wide-open space is virtually unknown. Infection occurs overwhelmingly indoors, and requires close and prolonged contact. People are less likely to get infected by the coronavirus outside than they are to die inside from falling, poisoning themselves, or choking, as Vanity Fair writer T.A. Frank has pointed out.