‘Let us work’ protests spread all across the US this weekend; demonstrators labeled as ‘far-right’ | Vivek Saxena

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/04/19/let-us-work-protests-spread-all-across-the-us-this-weekend-demonstrators-labeled-as-far-right-910354

As protests against coronavirus-based lockdowns continue spreading across the country (and globe), authorities are growing increasingly despotic and arguably fascist in their enforcement of “stay-at-home” orders, with police in one community arresting a woman for simply planning a protest.

That woman, Kim Pagan of New Jersey, reportedly faces charges for “organizing a prohibited event” that involved protesters gathering in order “to demonstrate against” Gov. Phil Murphy‘s potentially unconstitutional coronavirus restrictions.

“Pagan has to answer to the charge in Muncipal Court. Violations of emergency orders constitute a disorderly persons offense carrying a potential sentence of up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine,” Fox News reported.

On Friday, New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal posted a tweet in which he seemed to mock Pagan and other locals who’ve been charged for violating the governor’s authoritarian decrees:

But try as he and other officials might to infringe on the American people’s constitutionally guaranteed right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” protests continue to blossom throughout the country, from Nevada to Idaho, Texas and even California.

WaPo comes to the defense of WHO By Allan J. Favish

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/wapo_comes_to_the_defense_of_who.html

The Washington Post’s so-called “Fact-Checker” omitted critical facts from his article criticizing President Donald Trump’s condemnation of the World Health Organization. On April 17, 2020, Glenn Kessler’s “Analysis Trump’s false claim that the WHO said the coronavirus was ‘not communicable’” gave President Trump three out of four “Pinocchios” for the allegedly deceptive statement that the WHO “publicly endorsed the idea that there was not human-to-human transmission happening” and that the WHO said it was “not communicable.”       

Kessler quotes a January 13, 2020 WHO news release which states: “To date, there has been no suggestion of human to human transmission of this new coronavirus.”  Kessler does not make any comment specifically about this sentence. Moreover, Kessler cites a document that proves that there was such a “suggestion” before January 13, 2020 but does not quote from that part of the document.  Kessler states:

Dec. 31, 2019:  The WHO was alerted to a potentially new virus in China.

That same day, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control said it sent an email to the WHO regarding rumors of at least “seven cases of atypical pneumonia,” which it said is code in China for “a disease transmitted between humans caused by coronavirus.”

How the Media Completely Blew the Trump Ventilator Story By Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-response-ventilators-trump-administration-handled-potential-shortage-deftly/

The administration handled the potential shortage deftly. 

At a coronavirus-task-force briefing at the beginning of April, White House adviser Jared Kushner explained the approach that would — as events proved — get the country through its ventilator crisis.

He was relentlessly pilloried, mocked, and distorted in the press for it.

After nearly four years of unrelieved Trump hysteria in the media, it’s hard to rank the worst journalistic outrages, but how Kushner’s remarks were misreported and misinterpreted belongs high on the list.

Much of the press coverage and subsequent commentary focused on one sentence at that April 2 briefing: “The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

Cue the outrage. As CNBC put it, correctly, in a headline, “Jared Kushner slammed for saying the federal medical supply stockpile isn’t meant for states.”

The blue-checkmarks on Twitter descended in force. Representative Ted Lieu tweeted, “Dear Jared Kushner of the @realDonaldTrump: We are the UNITED STATES of America. The federal stockpile is reserved for all Americans living in our states not just federal employees. Get it?”

Propaganda masquerading as fact checking By Eugene Veklerov

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/propaganda_masquerading_as_fact_checking.html

Fact checking was devised to be a trusted way to separate fact from fiction. In reality, many journalists use the label “fact checking” as a cover for promoting their own biases. A case in point is an Associated Press (AP) piece headlined AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s inaccurate boasts on China travel ban, which was published on March 26, 2020, and carried by many news outlets.

So let us check this fact-checker.

The lead of the AP article reads as follows:

Defending early missteps in the U.S. response to the coronavirus, President Donald Trump has repeatedly boasted of travel restrictions on China that he suggests he decided on his own over the objections of health experts and saved “thousands” of lives.

The verdict of the AP piece:

His claims aren’t substantiated.

To support its verdict, the AP piece presents several arguments, all of which begin with the words “THE FACTS” (in all caps). Let us address these arguments. For the sake of clarity, THE FACTS presented by the AP piece are italicized. My responses begin with the words “THE REBUTTAL.”

THE FACTS: His [President Trump’s] decision was far from solo nor was it made over opposition from health experts, as the White House coronavirus task force makes clear. His decision followed a consensus by his public health advisers that the restrictions should take place.

Adam Schiff’s Dirty Impeachment Tactics Coming to Light By Robyn Dolgin

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/adam_schiffs_dirty_impeachment_tactics_coming_to_light.html

Rep. Adam Schiff spent months launching secret impeachment hearings, never thinking his conduct would be called into question.

He is now caught in the crosshairs of a formidable government agent, Mr. Brendan Carr, Federal Communication Commissioner. The impeachment may be over, but Mr. Carr is formally investigating Rep. Schiff for violating privacy laws — more like obliterating ethical boundaries — by setting up his own surveillance state to target the president’s allies.

Carr is currently uncovering the diabolical nature of the congressman’s “surveillance state.” At the time, Schiff resorted to such desperate measures because he didn’t have much of an impeachment case: Therefore, he issued secret subpoenas to phone carriers hoping to mine the private data of his political opponents, or in effect ransacking their private lives.

The objective was to obtain and publish the calls of Trump’s allies.

Gunman Kills 16 in Rampage, Deadliest in Canadian History

https://www.theepochtimes.com/gunman-in-canadas-deadliest-mass-shooting-identified-16-dead_3318461.html

TORONTO—A man disguised as a police officer went on a shooting rampage in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, killing 16 people Sunday, in the deadliest such attack in the country’s history. Officials said the suspected shooter was also dead.

A police officer was among those killed. Several bodies were found inside and outside one home in the small, rural town of Portapique, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) north of Halifax—what police called the first scene. Bodies were also found at other locations.

Overnight, police began advising residents of the town—already on lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic—to lock their doors and stay in their basements. Several homes in the area were set on fire as well.

Police identified the man believed to be the shooter as Gabriel Wortman, 51, who was thought to live part-time in Portapique. Authorities said he wore a police uniform at one point and made his car look like a Royal Canadian Mounted Police cruiser. Authorities believe he may have targeted his first victims but then began attacking randomly.

Police first announced that they had arrested Wortman at a gas station in Enfield, outside Halifax, but later said he had died. It was not clear how, and they did not explain further.

“This is one of the most senseless acts of violence in our province’s history,” said Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil.

A Visit to Europe’s Front With Russia Ukraine has held the line with separatists for six years. By Bernard-Henri Lévy

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-visit-to-europes-front-with-russia-11587166080?mod=opinion_major_pos4

Mariupol, Ukraine

The huge troop-transport helicopter dates from the Soviet era. It flies just above the tree line, nose down, to avoid Russian radar. After two hours of flying over smooth ground, frozen lakes and ruined villages in the dark winter night, we arrive here at the headquarters of the Navy Guard, where we meet the officers who for six years have led the fight against pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region.

I didn’t wait for the briefing. The nearly deserted fish market in the center of town told the story. So did the empty shops on Lenin Avenue and the enormous blast furnaces of the Azovstal factory, running at half power and emitting thin clouds of dirty black smoke. This shutdown of a key industrial city wasn’t caused by a pandemic. The separatists, unable to take control of the city, imposed a blockade.

In Shyrokyne, a seaside resort half an hour’s drive east, all that remains of its 2,000 residents are a couple, Maxime and Tatiana, former innkeepers who’ve come in under the protection of a national guard unit to lay flowers at his father’s grave. The elegant houses that lined Shapotika and Pushkin streets are reduced to piles of rubble. Lt. Martha Shturma, our interpreter, says this was an ordinary resort with no strategic importance. Its remains to tell a story of gratuitous destruction: the church with the collapsed roof; the clinic reduced to concrete pillars and mined; the school pulverized by heavy artillery, where we find a section of blackboard, half-burned notebooks and a backpack, miraculously spared.

Why I’m Running Against AOC The virus hit Queens hard. Those Amazon jobs could’ve helped. By Michelle Caruso-Cabrera

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-running-against-aoc-11587317103?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Queens, N.Y.

The Covid-19 crisis is especially dire in this New York City borough. Our neighborhoods, many of them in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district, are called “the epicenter of the epicenter,” and our hospitals “hot zones.”

Dense neighborhoods with several generations living under the same roof suffered a rapid spread of the disease, producing 38,733 cases as of Sunday, the highest of the five boroughs.

The economy has also been devastated. Tens of thousands are out of work because their jobs can’t be done from home. Before the pandemic, roughly 120,000 residents in the 14th Congressional District—which covers northwest Queens and part of the Bronx—worked in food service, hotels, arts and entertainment, retail or construction. Now, most of them are out of work. That’s over one-third of the district’s working population of 350,000.

Restaurants and hotels had to shut down, but one massive employer has held on to staff and even is hiring tens of thousands more around the country: Amazon.

Covid19 Lethality: Unhysterical Data Are Emerging Andrew Bostom

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2020/04/covid19-lethality-unhysterical-data-are-emerging/

Multi-billionaire software savant, Bill Gates—hardly the infectious (or any other) disease expert he fancies himself—commented with acid hysteria, several weeks ago (3/24/20), on the mere prospect of lifting draconian “covid19”, Wuhan coronavirus-related shutdowns, to reduce the economic havoc they have wrought:

“It’s very tough to say to people, ‘Hey, keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner. We want you to keep spending because there’s maybe a politician who thinks [gross domestic product] GDP growth is what really counts.”

Mr. Gates’ self-righteous fulmination, notwithstanding, his morbid, grotesque exaggeration, captures a widely prevalent, critical ignorance of the actual SARS-Cov2  (Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 of the genus Betacoronavirus, which causes Covid19 disease) virus’ lethality embodied in what is known as the infection, or case-fatality ratio (CFR). 

Simply and accurately defined, the CFR is the ratio of the number dying from a severe infectious illness, the “numerator,” to the total number infected, the “denominator.” Clear evidence of infection, no matter how severe or mild (even unnoticed by the infected person), is determined, typically, by “immunoassay”, ablood “seroprevalence” test that measures the presence of so-called “antibodies” to an infectious agent such as SARS-Cov2. It is understandable, during the early throes of an outbreak like covid19 disease, that rapid tests which detect (ostensibly) “live virus antigen” (i.e., specific fragments of its genetic code “RNA”), in readily accessible body fluids (eg., from the throat, or mouth), among the most ill, are prioritized, often to the exclusion of blood seroprevalence antibody testing.

However, this viral antigen methodology, and testing scheme, overrepresenting the severe cases, introduces profound biases which may vastly underestimate the “denominator” of total cases, especially the mildest, required for determining an actual CFR. Accordingly, as of 4:30pm, Saturday, 4/18/20, accepting at face value the gross over-counting of covid19 fatalities, absent appropriate validation by Centers For Disease Control(CDC), and individual state (glaringly, out of hospital deaths in New York, and Massachusetts) “guidelines”, the widely referenced Johns Hopkins Corona Virus Resource Center (JHCRC) tallied 37,938 deaths. Applying the concurrent JHCRC enumeration of covid19 cases relying solely on selective “live virus” testing, i.e., 4,690,482, yielded 37,938 deaths/ 4,690,482 cases, a CFR of 1.03%.

Falling into the Iranian Regime’s Coronavirus Trap by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15908/iran-coronavirus-trap

How on earth it is in the US “national interest” to allow a regime that is kidnapping and killing Americans and their allies, and planning to attack US diplomatic facilities, to receive billions of dollars in aid?

An additional problem, based on a pattern for which Iran has only itself to blame, is that there is no evidence that Iran has the slightest intention of using these funds to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic or to help Iran’s people. The Trump administration already offered to send medical help to Iran, but Iran has continued to turn it down. “Possibly,” Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei said, “your medicine is a way to spread the virus more.”

Moreover, there have also been suggestions that a secret Iranian fund of reportedly $200 billion, controlled by Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei, could perfectly well help Iran to fund its crisis.

While the Iranian regime has been killing Americans during the coronavirus crisis and planning to kill more, a group of American politicians are urging US President Donald J. Trump to loosen sanctions on Tehran regime and refrain from blocking the mullahs’ request for $5 billion in aid.

The former vice president and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, for instance, recently called on the Trump administration to loosen sanctions on Iran.

He pointed out that it is “bad enough that the Trump administration abandoned the Iran nuclear deal in favor of a strategy of ‘maximum pressure;” he added that “it makes no sense, in a global health crisis, to compound that failure with cruelty by inhibiting access to needed humanitarian assistance. Whatever our profound differences with the Iranian government, we should support the Iranian people.”