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Michigan residents take to the streets for a massive protest By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 16th, 2020

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

The experts assured Americans that, unless they addressed aggressively, the pandemic wave about to sweep over the country would kill millions of people, while breaking the healthcare system and, by extension, destroying America itself. The only way to make a dent in this apocalyptic scenario was for America to come to a complete halt. People had to isolate themselves within their homes, venturing forth for only the most essential errands.

Michigan was one of the states that took these prescriptions more seriously than others, shutting down virtually every aspect of life in Michigan, including earning any type of living. On Wednesday, several thousand Michigan citizens, as well as citizens from surrounding states. got fed up and took to the streets.

First-term Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a rising star in the Democrat party who gave the rebuttal to the President’s State of the Union Address, made national headlines when she banned hydroxychloroquine in her state. She seemed motivated more by animus to President Trump, who had expressed his hope that the medicine would be a “game changer,” than by any risks the medicine posed. Whitmer reversed that order only when more reports emerged that hydroxychloroquine, combined with azithromycin and zinc, seemed effective at short-circuiting the virus in its early stages.

Aside from her abortive attempt to ban hydroxychloroquine, Whitmer still has a long list of edicts she insists are necessary to protect her citizens. Some are the same ones we see in other lockdown states, such as proscribing in-person public meetings, requiring that medical and dental facilities postpone all “non-essential procedures” (if you’re not dying, giving birth, or in agony, it’s not essential); preventing evictions; and authorizing early criminal releases.

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Iranian and US Ships Come Dangerously Close as Disputes Continue in Persian Gulf By Isabel van Brugen

Posted By on April 16th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/iranian-and-us-ships-come-dangerously-close-as-disputes-continue-in-persian-gulf_3314174.html

Nearly a dozen Iranian naval vessels made “dangerous and harassing” maneuvers near U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships in the Persian Gulf, also known as the Arabian Gulf, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command said on Wednesday.

In a statement, the Navy said that 11 vessels from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) came dangerously close to six U.S. vessels, repeatedly crossing their bows and sterns while they were conducting integration operations with U.S. Army Apache attack helicopters to support maritime security outside of Iran’s territorial waters.

Iranian naval vessels came as close as 10 yards of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Maui, and within 50 yards of the USS Lewis B. Puller, a ship that serves as an afloat landing base, according to the statement. Other vessels among the U.S. ships included the USS Paul Hamilton, a Navy destroyer, and the USS Firebolt.

The U.S. ships attempted to issue multiple warnings, through bridge-to-bridge radio, long-range acoustic noise maker devices, and five blasts from the ships’ horns, but U.S. crews received no response from the IRGCN.

The IRGCN vessels responded after roughly one hour by radio and moved away from the U.S. ships.

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World Health Organisation ‘Not Immune to Criticism’: Australian PM By Victoria Kelly-Clark

Posted By on April 16th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/world-health-organisation-not-immune-to-criticism-australian-pm_3314192.html#

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia will continue to support the World Health Organisation (WHO) but he said they’re not immune from criticism and should do things better.

This is because had Australia relied on WHO advice back in January, “Then I suspect we would have been suffering the same fate that many other countries currently are,” said Morrison.

“I mean, [Australia] called [the pandemic] weeks before the WHO did,” he said.

At the time, on Jan. 14, the WHO advised countries that there was no human-to-human transmission of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus.

However, we now know that this was wrong and that by at least mid-December, the CCP was aware that human-to-human transmission was occurring in mainland China, making the virus ripe for spreading. Yet the CCP did not admit this until Jan. 20, after over 5 million people had left Wuhan.

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Presidential Power Is Limited but Vast Trump can’t fully reopen the economy on his own authority. But he can go a long way in that direction. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

Posted By on April 16th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/presidential-power-is-limited-but-vast-11586988414?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

President Trump has come under attack this week for saying he has “absolute authority” to reopen the economy. He doesn’t—his authority is limited. But while the president can’t simply order the entire economy to reopen on his own signature, neither is the matter entirely up to states and their governors. The two sides of this debate are mostly talking past each other.

The federal government’s powers are limited and enumerated and don’t include a “general police power” to regulate community health and welfare. That authority rests principally with the states and includes the power to impose coercive measures such as mandatory vaccination, as the Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). Nor may the federal government commandeer state personnel and resources to achieve its ends or otherwise coerce the states into a particular course of conduct. There is no dispute about these respective state and federal powers.

In most federal-state disputes, the question is what happens when authorities at both levels exercise their legitimate constitutional powers at cross-purposes. Here, the president has the edge. The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause requires that when the federal government acts within its proper sphere of constitutional authority, state law and state officials must give way to the extent that federal requirements conflict with their own. Federal power encompasses a broad power to regulate the national economy. Thus although the president lacks plenary power to “restart” the economy, he has formidable authority to eliminate restraints states have imposed on certain types of critical commercial activity.

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Racial Disparities and the Pandemic: Looking Past the Rhetoric of ‘Racism’ By Robert Cherry

Posted By on April 16th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-racial-disparities-rhetoric-of-racism/

The virus has affected different groups at different rates, but the reasons are more complicated than the media are letting on.

I t’s hard not to notice the effort to place racism against black Americans at the center of the coronavirus story. In pursuit of its 1619 Project thesis, the New York Times has featured much coverage on the subject. In a front-page April 8 article titled, “Black Americans Bear the Brunt as Deaths Climb,” it highlighted black deaths in a number of cities. On an MSNBC telecast, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project’s coordinator, claimed, “It’s not surprising that black Americans are bearing the brunt of coronavirus.”

While it is unquestionable that black Americans have been disproportionately adversely affected, it is uncalled for to claim that they bear the brunt. Outside of urban central cities, white Americans account for an overwhelming share of deaths. For example, 30 percent of New York State deaths are outside of New York City. Among these, 60 percent have been white, while 17 percent have been black. In New York City, blacks make up 28 percent of coronavirus deaths, but all those over 65 years old compose over 70 percent. Indeed, nationally, senior citizens continue to bear the brunt of deaths.

Nor are black Americans the most affected by the economic effects of coronavirus. Immigrant communities bear much more of the economic impact of the lockdown. Latinos own 2.5 times as many businesses with paid employees as black Americans. Though only one-third of the black population, Asians own nearly five times as many businesses. And yet the national media has followed the Times’ lead. 60 Minutes and then Forbes highlighted the plight of the black owner of the Harlem restaurant Melba’s. Obviously this business and its pain are real, but using its singular struggles to try to make a broader point is misleading.

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Australian Strategy and the Gathering Storm in Asia Michael Evans

Posted By on April 15th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/04/australian-strategy-and-the-gathering-storm-in-asia/

The US world order is a suit that no longer fits.
               —Fu Ying, Chair, Chinese National People’s Congress, Foreign Affairs Committee, 2016

Over the next decade two challenges face Australia which, in combination, seem likely to transform our strategic fortunes for the worse. The first challenge is the need to confront the reality that the great project of Western liberal globalism conceived in the 1990s is slipping into the pages of history. The second challenge is the return of great power competition, most particularly in the form of the rise of a revisionist China that is determined to assume global superpower status and to become the hegemon of Asia. China’s geopolitical ambitions mean that the 2020s and beyond will be marked by a Sino-American struggle for mastery of Asia in which Australia will be directly and fatefully involved.

Outside of expert circles, few Australians seem to grasp the implications of these major strategic changes. It is the purpose of this article to explain the dynamics of a gathering storm in Asia and to make the case for a national rejuvenation in thinking about defence and national security strategy.

 

The end of liberal globalism

For the past quarter of a century, Australia has been a major beneficiary of the West’s global triumph in the Cold War. This era coincides with the most dramatic growth in Australian prosperity since the boom of the second half of the nineteenth century. The Australian economy tripled in size, and per capita GDP grew by 182 per cent, between the early 1990s and the second decade of the new millennium. Yet, as we enter the 2020s, the age of liberal globalism is disappearing—as documented by a group of Anglo-American scholars and commentators as politically diverse as John J. Mearsheimer, Bill Emmott, Steven D. King, Patrick Deneen and Michael Burleigh. The reasons are not hard to detect. Put simply, the liberal global order is ebbing away because of a self-induced crisis of legitimacy. Liberal globalism has become a system that privileges transnational elites over national voters; seeks to preference the rules of international institutions over domestic democratic legislation; promotes universalism over patriotism; and has pursued open borders rather than controlled immigration, so creating new forms of populist nationalism. As Patrick Deneen writes in Why Liberalism Failed (2018), the global liberal project has promoted a form of elitist progressive politics that has accelerated economic inequality and fragmented the civic and spiritual bonds that underpin cultural life in democratic nations. There has been a backlash from ordinary voters and the Western public has discovered a fundamental truth: it is easier to change elites than it is for the elites to change the public.

Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union and Donald Trump’s America First policy are merely the early results of an emerging array of new democratic political forces driven by a renewed sense of nationalism and cultural conservatism. By the early 2030s it is possible that the rump of liberal globalism may still operate with its assorted transnational elites meeting annually in a glare of electronic publicity at Davos. Yet such gatherings will increasingly resemble the irrelevant universalism of the late Holy Roman Empire and be confined to symbolic gestures on climate change, arms control and economic inequality.

The real drama in world affairs will emanate from the strategic competition developing between the United States and China.

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The Seventh Seal on the Hudson Roger Kimball

Posted By on April 15th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/roger-kimball-coronavirus-new-york/

This is supposed to be a New York letter, but since New York is closed for business, I am “sheltering in place” in a semi-secure undisclosed location wondering how long this nationwide wave of hysteria will last. As I write, Australia has but 61 deaths attributed to the new coronavirus that China bequeathed to the world, courtesy of a biological research laboratory in Wuhan. The United States has had about 20,000, nearly half in and around New York City.

That may seem like a lot, but let’s put that number in perspective. In the first place, the annual fatality rate in the US for the seasonal flu is anywhere from 25,000 to 80,000. Second, it is by no
means clear whether those 20,000 fatalities really count people who died from the effects the new virus (pneumonia, mostly) or merely people who, already serious ill with something else, died having also been infected by the virus. Fully 99 per cent of those who died in Italy had serious co-morbidities. Nearly 50 had multiple co-morbidities. Moreover most of those who become seriously ill are over 80. Many are over 90. It puts me in mind of the list Muriel Spark includes in her novel Memento Mori minuting the cause of death of various characters. “Lettie Colston . . . comminuted fractures of the skull; Godfrey Colston, hypostatic pneumonia; Charmian Colston, uremia; Jean Taylor, myocardial degeneration; Tempest Sidebottome, carcinoma of the cervix;” etc., etc.

This whole charade got going in earnest around Ash Wednesday, whose central ritual comes with the admonition that “Memento, homo, quiapulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.” Nevertheless, about a month ago the country began shutting down. Restaurants and bars were forced to close. So were schools and colleges. All “non-essential” businesses were shuttered. After a couple of weeks 3.6 million people had filed for unemployment benefits. Another week, and another 6 million had filed. As I write, the number is 16 million. In a month. Sixteen million people suddenly discovered that whatever their livelihoods were, they were deemed “non-essential” by other people whose putatively “essential” job is determining what is essential and what is not. Why is it, one wonders, that the bureaucrats who get to say what is and what isn’t essential
never seem to find their own endeavors declared “non-essential”?

People who know about radar and sonar often speak about the difference between “noise” and “signal.” You are trying to track that missile, plane, submarine, or whatever, and you need to be able to distinguish clearly between the signal the object of interest is sending back to you and the noise that accompanies that signal. Sometimes, some of the noise is deliberate, generated by people interested in keeping secret the location and movement of the object.

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Senator Josh Hawley ( R- Missouri)Says It’s ‘Vitally Important’ To Open The Country ‘As Soon As We Possibly Can’By Christopher Bedford

Posted By on April 15th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/15/exclusive-josh-hawley-says-its-vitally-important-to-open-the-country-as-soon-as-we-possibly-can/

Remaining on lockdown for year to get a vaccine ‘is just not going to work, we can’t do that, it will end up being a humanitarian crisis and nobody wants to do that.’

The United States needs to push hard to open back up, with states taking the lead, Sen. Josh Hawley told The Federalist in a Tuesday interview, saying, “It probably will be a decision the states make state by state because states are going to vary, and what’s good for New York is not what we’re going to need in Springfield, Missouri, for instance, so you’ve got to let the data be the guide there.”

America, he added, has to take a long hard look at our global economy and its vulnerabilities: “We’d be nuts to have suffered through this crisis, suffered through the vulnerabilities in our medical supply chain and our broader economy that this has exposed, and do nothing about it.”

“It’s vitally important that we get the whole country open back up as soon as we possibly can,” Hawley said, “And I can just say here in Missouri people want to do their part, they are doing their part, the streets are empty ,the schools are closed, the shops are closed, but nobody likes this. Americans don’t like not working, they don’t like not going to school… They want to go back to work. Over and over and over people ask me when they can get back to work, when are we going to be able to get back to school … We have got to be pushing hard toward breaking the back of the epidemic and getting to a sustainable place where we can open back up, not only for peoples’ psychologies, not just to support family life, though those things are hugely vital, but also we’re seeing incidents of hunger.”

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Trump Fights Back The Leftist State Media melts down. by Jeffrey Lord

Posted By on April 15th, 2020

https://spectator.org/trump-fights-back/

It was May 2014.

I was interviewing then-private citizen Donald Trump for The American Spectator in his Trump Tower office. The subject in general was his view on issues of the day, along with a possible presidential run in 2016. But I had one question in particular that I wanted to ask.

The question: There were a lot of Republicans who felt their presidential nominees, the perpetual targets of the media, never fought back when attacked. Were he to run, not to mention were he elected, would he fight back? And note: the mention of Donald Sterling, the then-owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA franchise, revolved around a just-released secret recording of racist remarks made by Sterling to his mistress, who had recorded him and released the tape to the media. It was, for a moment, the news story of the day, and as such Trump was asked to comment in an appearance on Fox and Friends. His response to me as follows, verbatim:

Well, I see firsthand the dishonesty of the press, because probably nobody gets more press than I do. As an example, last week I was on a Fox program, and I very much lambasted Donald Sterling. And then at the very end I said, “On top of which, he has the girlfriend from hell.” And the haters and the very dishonest reporters who have their own agenda, they didn’t cover what I said about Donald Sterling. They only took the girlfriend from hell and they said, “Oh he’s not blaming Donald Sterling. He’s defending Donald Sterling. He’s blaming the girlfriend.”

The press is extremely dishonest. Much of it. Some of it I have great respect for, and they’re great people and honorable people. But there’s a large segment of the press that’s more dishonest than anybody I’ve seen in business or anywhere else. And the one thing you have to do is you have to inform the public. The public has to know about the dishonesty of the press because they are really bad people and they don’t tell the truth and have no intention of telling the truth. And I know who they are and I would expose them 100 percent. And I will be doing that. I mean, as I go down the line, I enjoy exposing people for being frauds and, you know, I would be definitely doing that. I think it’s important to know. Because a lot of the public, they think, oh, they read it in the newspaper, and therefore it must be true. Well many of the things you read in the newspaper are absolutely false and really disgustingly false.

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Coronavirus Lessons: Fact and Reason vs. Paranoia and Fear . By William J. Bennett & Seth Leibsohn

Posted By on April 15th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/15/coronavirus_lessons_fact_and_reason_vs_paranoia_and_fear_.html

Given the most recent mortality rates and modeling, it appears that the death toll in America from coronavirus will end up looking a lot like the annual fatality numbers from the flu. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington state is now projecting 68,841 potential deaths in America. It is also estimating lower ranges than that. The flu season of 2017-2018 took 61,099 American lives. For this we have scared the hell out of the American people, shut down the economy, ended over 17 million jobs, taken trillions of dollars out of the economy, closed places of worship, and massively disrupted civic life as we know it. Some of our major public officials tell us, still, that there will be no returning to a status quo, that we will have to get used to a new normal. We strongly disagree with that mindset.

A panic and hysteria over a pandemic that does not look to be what so many frightened us into thinking has radically degraded this country. What should be the major lessons learned here? How did we go from an ethos of “Let’s Roll!” when America was hit by a major attack from outside forces two decades ago to “Let’s roll up in a ball”? 

First, New York City is where the epidemic has struck the hardest. The media is centered in New York City. Although sensationalism is not new, something in the 21st century media landscape is: Reporting the news has been replaced with raising alarms, heightening political tensions, and funneling information through a strictly partisan lens. Lost is the notion that if something is too bad to be true — or too good to be true — it probably is not true. Conspiracy theories and extreme rhetoric have replaced fact and reason, as well as reasonableness. These dark impulses have been aided and abetted by a series of left-wing notions that have come to dominate our politics, giving us a new “paranoid style in American politics.”