RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/criminalizing-politics-the-investigation-of-general-flynn/

The Obama administration detested Flynn and targeted him with trumped-up charges that are falling apart under scrutiny.

Author’s Note: What follows is an excerpt from my book Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig and Election and Destroy a Presidency, published in August 2019. The endnotes have been omitted, though I have included supporting links to several relevant reports that are cited in the endnotes. The excerpt contends that that there was no basis in fact or law for the investigation of General Michael Flynn, an argument I began making when reports about the investigation first emerged in early 2017. As further explained in my column today on the NR homepage, last Friday evening, the Justice Department belatedly disclosed exculpatory information indicating, reportedly, that there was no valid law-enforcement reason for the FBI to interview Flynn in January 2017, and that he later pled guilty under the threat that if he did not do so, prosecutors would charge his son with a crime — an understanding that was withheld from the court at the time of the guilty plea. In making the disclosure, the Justice Department signaled that more disclosures about the case are forthcoming.

Could anything have made the Obama administration giddier than the prospect of making a criminal case on Michael Flynn?

Flynn is a retired Army lieutenant general, who made his mark on modern insurgent warfare by helping revolutionize the rapid dissemination of battlefield intelligence. He was promoted by President Obama to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency. He is also a headstrong man who got himself on Obama’s bad side by questioning counterterrorism strategy, particularly the administration’s weakness on Iran. He was detested by Obama political and national-security officials for calling them out on politicizing intelligence. The FBI was not a fan, least of all Deputy Director Andy McCabe, because Flynn had supported an agent who claimed the Bureau had subjected her to sex discrimination.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/explosive-revelations-in-the-flynn-case/

New documents suggest that Flynn ‘was set up by corrupt agents’ who threatened Flynn’s son and made a secret deal with Flynn’s attorneys.

‘Why was the FBI investigating General Flynn?” That is a question I posed more than three years ago, in the days immediately after President Trump fired Michael Flynn — fleetingly, his first national-security adviser — in February 2017.

There was never a good answer to that question. That has always been a big problem for the current and former government officials whose actions in the blatantly politicized probes of the Trump campaign and its surrogates are currently under investigation by the Justice Department.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/26/wait-how-long-are-we-supposed-to-stay-in-lockdown/

What are we waiting for? The question can be posed in either a wild, irresponsible way — or a sane, measured way. In New York, our “pause” will continue until at least May 15, and New Yorkers are asking, in a measured, sane way: What exactly are we waiting for?

In the beginning, we had a goal: to flatten the curve. We were warned that COVID-19 would overtake our hospitals and cause a health-system collapse. We were to stay home to give our medical heroes a fighting chance.

So we did, and thanks to the strength of our system, it worked. The Javits Center never filled up; the USS Comfort is sailing away. Three weeks ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was vowing to seize ventilators from upstate hospitals and send them to Gotham. Last week, we were dispatching our ventilators out to other states.

We did our part; we flattened the curve. So why is there no move to loosen regulations?

In February and March, expert and elite opinion seemed to understand that ­patience with lockdowns would at some point wear thin. But not anymore. Last week, Cuomo used a graphic in his daily presentation that listed the lengths of various wars and previous pandemics. The 1910 cholera outbreak lasted a year. World War II lasted six years. And so on.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/andrew_cuomo_is_in_for_a_reckoning_for_placing_covid19_patients_into_vulnerable_ny_nursing_homes.html

Remember when the New York City official, Scott Stringer, declared that President Trump had “blood on his hands” over his coronavirus response?

He ought to have been directing his remarks to the vaunted Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, instead.  His policies are precisely why New York has the worst coronavirus record of any U.S. city, and he’s going to have to start answering questions.

Here’s how bad it was, from the Daily Wire:

On March 25, New York’s Health Department issued a mandate that state nursing homes could not refuse COVID-19-positive patients who were “medically stable,” meaning facilities that housed the most vulnerable populations were forced to introduce the virus into their midst.

A nursing home in Queens received two coronavirus patients who had been discharged from a hospital (but were still contagious and in need of care) – along with a box containing body bags, The New York Post reported. An executive at the facility told the Post it had been free of the coronavirus prior to accepting those two patients. The executive also said that along with the two patients arrived a shipment of personal protective equipment and the body bags.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/27/china-style-internet-control-is-one-of-the-worst-ideas-for-solving-coronavirus/

Including the line ‘China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong’ discredits any piece of writing that discusses civil liberties and the rule of law.

My former law professor Jack Goldsmith, now at Harvard Law School, and Andrew Keane Woods of the University of Arizona Law School, have a remarkable article in The Atlantic that defends technology companies’ surveillance and speech controls regarding coronavirus information. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet,” they write, “and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”

I’m a constitutional lawyer, not a tech-regulation expert, so I’ll defer on the relevant policy issues to Goldsmith, who co-authored the insightful “Who Controls the Internet?” back in 2006, and Woods, a Cambridge Ph.D. who focuses on this area in his teaching and writing. But what I found stunning about their article wasn’t policy prescriptions—of which there are few—but the blaming of American constitutional culture for preventing the sort of government interventions that might help us during the current pandemic.

Here’s the nut graf: “The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply.”

In other words, people would have better coronavirus-related news, and public-health officials would have better contact-tracing programs, if it weren’t for our Constitution’s pesky protections for speech and privacy. “In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”

Now, even if it’s true that the U.S. government could more effectively target criminal activity, let alone “fake news”—whichever ideological side gets to define it—if it could elide constitutional rights, is that something we’re seriously willing to consider doing? Including the line “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong” discredits any discussion of civil liberties and the rule of law.

And that’s before we even weigh the trade-offs. My Cato colleagues who work on technology policy say that the digital contact-tracing programs being proposed—those for which Goldsmith and Woods want a more flexible constitutional structure—wouldn’t even achieve the goals of traditional contact-tracing, which seeks to identify and isolate disease carriers.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/27/why-no-covid-19-models-have-been-accurate-and-how-to-fix-that/

The decisions that are being made during this crisis are far too important and complex to be based on such imprecise data and with such unreliable results.

There’s been a lot of armchair analysis about various models being used to predict outcomes of COVID-19. For those of us who have built spatial and statistical models, all of this discussion brings to mind George Box’s dictum, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”—or useless, as the case may be.

The problem with data-driven models, especially when data is lacking, can be easily explained. First of all, in terms of helping decision makers make quality decisions, statistical hypothesis testing and data analysis is just one tool in a large tool box.

It’s based on what we generally call reductionist theory. In short, the tool examines parts of a system (usually by estimating an average or mean) and then makes inferences to the whole system. The tool is usually quite good at testing hypotheses under carefully controlled experimental conditions.

For example, the success of the pharmaceutical industry is, in part, due to the fact that they can design and implement controlled experiments in a laboratory. However, even under controlled experimental procedures, the tool has limitations and is subject to sampling error. In reality, the true mean (the true number or answer we are seeking) is unknowable because we cannot possibly measure everything or everybody, and model estimates always have a certain amount of error.

These Models Are Unreliable

Simple confidence intervals can provide good insight into the precision and reliability, or usefulness, of the part estimated by reductionist models. With the COVID-19 models, the so-called “news” appears to be using either the confidence interval from one model or actual estimated values (i.e., means) from different models as a way of reporting a range of the “predicted” number of people who may contract or die from the disease (e.g., 60,000 to 2 million).