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The Swedish “Model” for Battling the Coronavirus by Judith Bergman

Posted By on May 9th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15984/coronavirus-swedish-model

“For a long time, Sörmlands Media has tried to get information from all the county’s municipalities on how the spread of infection in elderly care looks, how extensive it is and where it is located. The municipalities have replied that they lack knowledge about the extent of the spread of infection and have said that it is also not possible to find out. — Maria Lapenkova, Svt nyheter, May 2, 2020.

Sörmland Media’s review, however, shows that the information is not correct and that the municipalities actively concealed the information… Some municipalities have also failed to report the number of infected persons to the National Board of Health and Welfare’s national reporting tool for orders for protective clothing. — Svt nyheter, May 2, 2020.

As of May 6, Sweden, which has a population of 10.18 million people, had 2,854 deaths, which corresponds to 280.27 deaths per million people. In comparison, the other countries of the Nordic region, Denmark, Norway and Finland, which all went on lockdown, had 503, 215 and 246 deaths respectively, corresponding to 86.76, 40.46 and 44.58 deaths per 1 million people, respectively.

“I think it’s a risky business and we don’t know anything about herd immunity. The only thing we know is that a lot of people have died. These are human beings, not just figures. And if we would have chosen another approach, this number would have been much smaller…You cannot take risks with people’s lives if you don’t know what risks you are taking”. — Dr. Stefan Hanson, a Swedish infectious disease expert, The Globe and Mail, Canada, April 30-May 1, 2020.

WHO — and the media — might wish to reconsider using Sweden as a model.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently described Sweden as a “model” for battling the coronavirus. “I think if we are to reach a new normal, I think in many ways Sweden represents a future model of — if we wish to get back to a society in which we don’t have lockdowns,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Emergencies Program, said. “They’ve been doing the testing, they’ve ramped up their capacity to do intensive care quite significantly,” he added.

“And their health system has always remained within its capacity to respond to the number of cases that they’ve been experiencing… Sweden has put in place a very strong public policy around social distancing, around caring and protecting for people in long term care facilities and many other things,”.

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Mexican Nightmare: Coronavirus Deaths Far Higher Than Government Admitted By Rick Moran

Posted By on May 9th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/05/08/mexican-nightmare-coronavirus-deaths-far-higher-than-government-admitted-n389313

If any Americans want to see a “failed response” to the coronavirus pandemic, they don’t have far to look.

Health officials in Mexico City have been begging the government for weeks to reveal the true toll the coronavirus is taking on the city. But government officials refuse to acknowledge the massive extent of the crisis, as the “Mexican Dr. Fauci” — the “public face” of the crisis — assures the people that everything is fine. “We have flattened the curve,” said Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the health ministry official used as a frontman by the government. He’s apparently become something of a celebrity on TV.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on the true nature of the nightmare that is gripping the country.

Only 0.4 of every 1,000 people in Mexico are tested for the virus — by far the lowest of the dozens of nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which average about 23 tests for every 1,000 people.

The government says Mexico has been faring better than many of the world’s largest countries, and on Monday its COVID-19 czar estimated that the final death toll would be around 6,000 people.

With so few tests being done, it’s impossible to get a handle on the scope of the problem.

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Blinded by Doomsday Predictions Masquerading as Science By Andrew Gilbertson

Posted By on May 9th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/blinded_by_doomsday_predictions_masquerading_as_science.html

Conservatives?  Anti-science?  No way!  Science created fuel-burning engines, harnessed electricity, and ushered in an industrial revolution that transformed the world.  Science found cures for malaria, tuberculosis, and polio; expanded the world’s food supply many times over; significantly lengthened life expectancy; and put men on the moon.  And then, just when it seemed nothing more was even possible, science — specifically computer technology — transformed the world yet again.  Cyber-wonders emerge on an almost daily basis, enhancing our lives in ways we could only have imagined a generation ago.

No, folks, we have no quarrel with science.  But we have a serious problem with something masquerading as science: the manipulation of facts and data to create fearful predictive models.  These “scientific” statistical models often tend to cast the freedom we enjoy in a negative light, and they almost always end up being wrong.  Let us amble down the Memory Lane of five decades and revisit some of the terrifying events the learned practitioners of this branch of science once assured us would occur.  No doubt, you will recall many of them:

By 1980, city-dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution.

By 1985, air pollution will block 50% of the sunlight reaching Earth, causing global cooling.

By 1989, the population explosion and resulting food shortages will result in mass starvation (“The Great Die-Off”), in which 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, will perish.

By 1990, all lead, zinc, tin, silver, and gold reserves will be gone.

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Reconsidering Decades of Western Outreach to China By Howard Husock

Posted By on May 9th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/reconsidering-decades-of-western-outreach-to-china/

Western institutions have long assumed that cross-cultural exposure would loosen the Chinese regime’s grip. But the risks of such exposure are just as great.

Twenty years ago, as a lowly adjunct professor, I taught crisis management for Harvard in China. My memories, and some qualms about doing so, have flooded back as the world ponders whether China’s political system enabled the virus’s spread by discouraging local officials from reporting bad news. During those “executive education” programs at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I hoped that my colleagues and I might help nudge the Chinese system toward greater openness. But even back then — at a time when China was “ascending” to the WTO and optimism reigned among us globalists — our experiences of the country left me with doubts.

How to handle crisis was part of the curriculum when the Harvard Kennedy School struck a deal with the Beijing government to provide public-management education for local officials from across China. I have no idea whether the mayor of Wuhan was in the group I helped teach, but it’s quite possible. Our goal was to expose local and regional officials to Kennedy School-style techniques, which combine technocratic policy analysis with political leadership. It didn’t take long to see that the school’s dedication to fostering “freer” societies was going to be tested in the weeks a group of faculty spent at Tsinghua, thanks to what I understood to be the cooperation of the opaquely named Organization Department of the Central Committee.

It was above my pay grade to question whether the school should have entered into such a relationship in the first place. As I reflect, it’s possible that we planted some seeds for a freer society — but it’s just as likely that we helped provide legitimacy for a totalitarian government.

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Latinx — The Latest Leftist Educational Maneuver By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on May 9th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/latinx__the_latest_leftist_educational_maneuver.html

Rutgers University founded in 1766 is one of only nine colonial colleges established before the American Revolution.  The alumni boast many who were predominant in the revolutionary founding. Inclusion and access began in 1867 when Kusakabe Taro was the first Japanese student to enroll in a U.S. college.  In 1892 James Dickson Carr was the first African-American to graduate from Rutgers and in 1918 the New Jersey College for Women was founded on the campus.

Currently, at the Rutgers Department of Education Graduate Studies a move is afoot to “advance narratives of achievement and success in higher education among Latinx/a/o students.  So according to Dr. Nichole Garcia, “a Mexican and Puerto Rican woman of color”

we need to understand the differences in the distinct groups that make up the Latinx/a/o community.  Once we do, we will be better positioned to meet the diverse needs of these different groups by creating programming to ensure the success of all students and allocating funds [emphasis mine].

Garcia wants to investigate “why Latinx/a/o are the largest ethnic population, but experience some of the lowest college completion rates.”

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Bad State Decisions about Nursing Homes Are Heavily Driving the Coronavirus Outbreak By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on May 9th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bad-state-decisions-about-nursing-homes-are-heavily-driving-the-coronavirus-outbreak/

Coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes have been particularly deadly in California, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.

You could make a strong argument that the country’s deadly coronavirus problem is largely a nursing home problem, dangerous everywhere but far more prevalent in a half-dozen or so of the country’s more heavily and densely populated states. What’s more, many of these states enacted coronavirus response policies that likely put nursing and assisted-living home residents at higher risk for infection.

Notice the California policy described by the San Jose Mercury News:

Even as senior care centers have been particularly hard hit by the coronavirus — with patient and staff deaths accounting for nearly 40 percent of all COVID-19 deaths across California — the state is calling on assisted living facilities to house infected patients in exchange for money.

A letter from the state Department of Social Services sent to licensees of senior and adult care residential facilities on Friday urged them to temporarily take in patients who have tested positive for the virus — for up to $1,000 a day — to make room in hospitals for people who become critically ill and require acute care.

But health experts and advocates say the plan risks introducing the virus into facilities that have been spared or those already dealing with their own outbreaks.

That need continues to grow. As of May 3, nearly 10,000 patients and staff in long-term care facilities in the state of California have tested positive for the virus, and 926 of them have died, according to figures released by DSS, which oversees assisted living, and the California Department of Public Health.

Notice the complaints described by Health News Illinois: “The Illinois Health Care Association and the Health Care Council of Illinois, the state’s two largest nursing home associations, say they have been asking for more testing for weeks. And that personal protective equipment has been hit or miss across facilities, with some operating on a day-to-day supply.”

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Five Quick Things: Consent of the Governed Scott McKay

Posted By on May 8th, 2020

https://spectator.org/five-quick-things-consent-of-the-governed/

With apologies to Mandy Patinkin, let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

1. They’re poking the bear. It isn’t wise to poke the bear.

In his 1937 book A History of Political Theory, George Sabine collected the views of many political theorists on consent of the governed. Within those pages, Sabine quoted from an earlier work by French theologian Theodore Beza, Vindiciae contra tyrannos, which held that “The people lay down the conditions which the king is bound to fulfill. Hence they are bound to obedience only conditionally, namely, upon receiving the protection of just and lawful government … the power of the ruler is delegated by the people and continues only with their consent.,”

In short, abuse your power and you won’t like what happens.

We’re starting to see the ground shake a little bit under the feet of the wannabe dictators in charge of too many state and local governments. That’s only going to continue.

There’s the Shelley Luther case in Dallas, in which a local tin-pot clown of a judge named Eric Moyé, who has an immaculate academic resume to go with a history of personal violence and a virulently partisan Democrat bias, demanded that an owner of a hair salon not only close her business but bend the knee and apologize to the politicians she had defied in keeping it open. Luther politely but forcefully told Moyé that he was the one who could get bent, and he promptly slapped her with a contempt of court citation, a $7,000 fine, and a week’s jail sentence.

All hell broke loose in Texas over the Luther case, and a day later the state Supreme Court had sprung Luther after Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott had separate conniption fits over Moyé’s judicial dipsomania. A GoFundMe installed for Luther’s legal fees and other needs topped the half-million dollar mark by Thursday as an outraged public voted with their PayPal accounts.

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Obama, Biden Oval Office Meeting On January 5 Was Key To Entire Anti-Trump Operation Mollie Hemingway By Mollie Hemingway

Posted By on May 8th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/08/obama-biden-oval-office-meeting-on-january-5-was-key-to-entire-anti-trump-operation/

Susan Rice’s bizarre Inauguration Day email about that meeting helps explain the campaign of leaks, lies, and obstruction that followed.

Information released in the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the case it brought against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn confirms the significance of a January 5, 2017, meeting at the Obama White House. It was at this meeting that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration.

“President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia,” National Security Advisor Susan Rice wrote in an unusual email to herself about the meeting that was also attended by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, FBI Director James Comey, and Vice President Joe Biden.

A clearer picture is emerging of the drastic steps that were taken to accomplish Obama’s goal in the following weeks and months. Shortly thereafter, high-level operatives began intensely leaking selective information supporting a supposed Russia-Trump conspiracy theory, the incoming National Security Advisor was ambushed, and the incoming Attorney General was forced to recuse himself from oversight of investigations of President Trump. At each major point in the operation, explosive media leaks were a key strategy in the operation to take down Trump.

Not only was information on Russia not fully shared with the incoming Trump team, as Obama directs, the leaks and ambushes made the transition chaotic, scared quality individuals away from working in the administration, made effective governance almost impossible, and materially damaged national security. When Comey was finally fired on May 9, in part for his duplicitousness regarding his handling of the Russia collusion theory, he orchestrated the launch of a Special Counsel probe that continued his efforts for another two years. That probe ended with Mueller finding no evidence of any American colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election, much less Trump or anyone connected to him.

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SYDNEY WILLIAMS: MICHAEL FLYNN AND THE F.B.I.

Posted By on May 8th, 2020

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

On November 19, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to help consecrate a portion of that battlefield as a new cemetery. He spoke of the government, conceived in liberty, that had been formed eighty-seven years prior, a government in which people are the ultimate power – a government comprised of the people’s elected representatives and the appointees those representatives make; he spoke of the laws and regulations that are made by those elected representatives, and he emphasized that this government is for the people, to ensure the protection of their rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Such a government, Lincoln understood, is rare. It relies on trust that those who labor within it work for the people, not for a party, a cabal or an individual. Once that trust is gone, the fragile edifice that comprises democracy crumbles. The Michael Flynn story is one of government servants subverting their role. No matter one’s political affiliation, the story of what happened to General Michael Flynn should frighten any lover of freedom and democracy.

This story has been ably told by Andrew McCarthy in National Review, Kimberly Strassel in The Wall Street Journal and others, but its consequences are worth considering again, as it unravels. On May 1, Ms. Strassel wrote: “…evidence of law enforcement’s abuse keeps emerging in dribs and drabs. To grasp the outrageous conduct fully, the Flynn documents need to be added to what we already know.” Establishment Washington could not believe that the people had elected Mr. Trump – this allegedly insensitive deal maker, a man who speaks frankly and crudely to and about his political opponents. He was demonized as authoritarian. He was an outsider. He had never served in government, nor in the military. He was a television star, famous for saying, “You’re fired!” In a country where leadership had too often descended into elitism, arrogance and hypocrisy, the mercurial Mr. Trump arrived as a disruptor.

To Washington’s establishment, Mr. Trump was naive. He is smart and shrewd, but the intelligence community is a different milieu, as Senator Schumer observed to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. “He was not,” as Andrew McCarthy wrote on May 2, “supported by the Republican foreign-policy and national-security clerisy, which he had gone out of his way to antagonize during the campaign.”

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Privacy & pandemics – time for constitutional test The US needs a Supreme Court ruling on the limits to privacy and the protection of individuals’ data. David Goldman

Posted By on May 8th, 2020

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler/

Protesters demand an end to the statewide ’stay at home advisory’ and the new law enforcing everyone to wear a mask in public, outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston on May 4, 2020. Photo: AFP

Life is returning to normal in South Korea, Israel, and urban China, thanks to the combination of massive public health measures and digital tracking. The United States remains locked down for the most part, although a number of states are gambling on re-opening without sufficient data to predict the outcome. Without comprehensive testing for Covid-19, government and academic models of viral infection are throwing out estimates that differ by hundreds of percentage points. A leaked Homeland Security report projects 200,000 dead this year, while the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington has doubled its estimate of deaths through August to 135,000.

In an April 24 commentary I quoted German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s statement that Covid-19 “is an affront to democracy,” adding, “There probably is no way to prevent the spread of Covid-19 except by locating and isolating every single individual carrier. Perhaps 40% of all cases are asymptomatic but nonetheless contagious, we know from Iceland and a handful of cities where the entire population was tested. That makes conventional tracking methods useless.” The checks and balances of the US Constitution, I argued, offered the best way to prevent government abuse of personal information obtained in an emergency.