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March 2020

Trump called it the ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ for a legal — and commonsensical — reason By Andrew C. McCarthy,

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/487931-trump-called-it-the-wuhan-coronavirus-for-a-legal-and-commonsensical

Amid the truly weighty concerns attendant to the COVID-19 pandemic, the silly season, of course, broke out in Washington: A debate over whether the infectious disease in question should be referred to as the “Wuhan coronavirus” or whether doing so is, as the anti-Trump left and its media megaphone allege, emblematic of racism.

The manufactured controversy is as transparently political as it is ill-conceived. The question of the pathogen’s source is being framed to imply Trumpist xenophobia. To the contrary, it is a relevant consideration in the federal government’s legal authority to respond.

Early this year, as the outbreak became manifest in China and began its relentless march through Southeast Asia and into Europe, the American press itself alluded incessantly to the Wuhan coronavirus. The sudden case of talking-head amnesia over this is being greeted in conservative media by hilarious video montages featuring the same scolds, who now decry the term, matter-of-factly invoking it back then. 

Sensibly, it could not have been otherwise. Wuhan province was the epicenter of the outbreak. The major story at the start involved suppression by the authoritarian communist regime in Beijing of news and vital information about it. 

No need to fear Shin Bet technology for curbing corona Anyone who is terrified that tracking cell phones for health reasons is a slippery slope to an Orwellian dystopia should get a grip. The sole purpose of enlisting the aid of the Shin Bet is to keep the virus at bay. Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/no-need-to-fear-shin-bet-technology-for-curbing-corona/

During the wee hours of Tuesday morning, the Israeli government unanimously approved an additional emergency measure to track and trace the steps of citizens infected with COVID-19.

The decision to use the Shin Bet internal security agency’s digital technology as a weapon in the war on the coronavirus did not come as a surprise. Indeed, in one of his many press conferences to update the public on the global pandemic in general and on specific directives to prevent its spread in Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that discussions were underway on how best to implement the controversial move without egregiously violating civil and human rights.

Netanyahu acknowledged the problematic nature of employing methods normally reserved for surveilling terrorists to monitor everybody. This, he said, was why he was in consultations with legal and security experts to come up with a formula that safeguards public health and provides guarantees of minimal privacy invasion.

Falsely calling the move “clandestine”—because the decision on its immediate implementation was taken in the middle of the night—critics are going wild, attacking it and Netanyahu from every direction. Although the technology in question tracks cell phones, the argument about individual liberty has been upstaged by coalition politics and legalese. The 23d Knesset was only sworn in on Monday, for example, and the next government has yet to be formed.

“The COVID-19 Pandemic – Random Thoughts” Sydney Williams

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Sensible advice has been offered by many: Scrub your hands, socially distant yourself; isolate yourself if sick. Nevertheless, manifestations of fear and panic are all around us. Restaurants, bars and casinos have closed in the part of the Country where I live. Colleges have sent students home. Schools have been closed, while grocery stores cannot keep up with demand for toilet paper, hand-wipes, latex gloves, disinfectants and many other household and food products. ‘Social distancing’ is nowhere to be seen when it comes to filling one’s larder or closet. Yet, with the exception of products directly related to coronavirus, like hand-wipes and latex gloves, final demand for items like toilet paper and frozen foods will grow in terms of population expansion, or about 0.5 percent. (In Connecticut, population growth will probably decline about 0.2 percent, as it did in 2019.) Understocked shelves will become overstocked.

“Any man’s death diminishes me,” John Donne wrote, and all deaths are, indeed, to be regretted. But perspective should be maintained. The question we all struggle with: Is the fear we exhibit rational? We don’t know, but containment and mitigation seem to be working, at least in China and South Korea. According to their numbers, since last November China has had 190,000 individuals infected with COVID-19 (out of a population of 1.39 billion). Just under 7,500 have died, implying a mortality rate of 3.9 percent. Keep in mind, numbers from China are suspect and between 30,000 and 40,000 people die every day in their Country. South Korea’s statistics are likely more accurate. Their first case was noted on January 20. As of March 16, two hundred and twenty thousand people had been tested in South Korea, out of a population of 51.4 million, 8,320 cases had been confirmed and 81 had died, or just under one percent. Health officials in Seoul claimed on March 9 that their Country had passed the peak of the contagion. They credit their “trace, test and treat” system, where an individual can drive to a testing site and have samples taken from the back of one’s throat and nose. A few hours later, the individual will get a call if the test is positive or a text if it is negative.

The world was slow to take note of the seriousness of the crisis. China, a Communist dictatorship, delayed informing the outside world for a month and a half. More than three weeks after China did, and with the contagion already having infected half a dozen countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared, on January 23, that the coronavirus did not constitute a public emergency of international concern. (It would be March 11 before they declared it a pandemic.) Early on, the President was ahead of the curve. He formed a White House task force for coronavirus on January 29, led by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alexander Azar, and he shut down flights from China on January 31. On February 27, he placed Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the Task Force. Contrary to some reports, the White House did not “gut” the National Security Council’s counter pandemic effort. But he was slow in promoting tests for the virus and urging the search for a vaccine. He was not alone. The press was more interested in impeachment than in informing their readers and viewers of the virus China had exported, which was beginning to contaminate the world.

The Prisoner Dilemma in the Age of Coronavirus by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15753/coronavirus-prisoners

In the event of an outbreak, guards and other staff are likely to refuse to come to work, thus raising the risk of violence among prisoners.

The time to act, in order to prevent these bad outcomes, is before there are outbreaks. A prison sentence, or the denial of bail, are not supposed to be sentences of death or disease. Steps should be taken now to reduce the risks not only to prisoners but to those who come in contact with them in prison or upon release.

Among these preventive steps should be the following: allowing elderly non-violent prisoners who are near the end of their sentences to be sent home; those who still have considerable time to serve should be temporarily furloughed to home confinement, subject to increased punishment if they violate the strict conditions of the furlough…

The US has more prisoners than any Western democracy. Because of our overly long sentences — even for non-violent first offenders — many are old and infirm. We also have many presumptively innocent defendants in jail awaiting trial, and many others awaiting appeal.

It is inevitable that there will be outbreaks of coronavirus in prisons and jails, as, in the past, there have been outbreaks of other contagious illnesses such as Legionnaires disease. Other institutions of confinement, such as nursing homes, have also experienced quickly spreading contagions.

China’s War on Religion Ensnares American-based Pastor John Cao by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15743/china-war-on-religion

China’s totalitarian system seems to perceive any movement that permits citizens to feel allegiance to any entity other than the state as a threat.

Communist cadres, evidently not content with coercing the external conformity and behavior of their citizens, appear to want to control their people’s thoughts as well. Beijing is now re-writing Christian scripture and printing other tracts to render religious beliefs politically aligned with state policies.

The American Center for Law and Justice, chaired by the attorney Jay Sekulow, through its “Be Heard Project,” urges all people concerned about freedom of conscience to sign petitions and otherwise pressure the Chinese government to release Pastor Cao, allowing him to return to his family in North Carolina. “China Aid” director Bob Fu, who monitors human rights violations in Communist China, calls upon citizens to write letters to Pastor Cao to keep his spirits up – address below. The sheer volume of mail would also let Beijing know that Cao’s persecution remains a serious concern to the “Free World.”In addition to trying to pin the blame for the coronavirus pandemic on the United States, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Party Chairman Xi Jinping is executing an anti-Christian campaign, the intensity of which has not been seen since Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s.

Persecution against Christians was reignited in earnest after the 19th CCP Congress in 2017. The state’s drive against Christian symbols, churches, and clerics seems to have become justified under the CCP’s “Sinicization of China’s Religions” initiative. The CCP appears determined to secularize religious thought, suborning it to serve state interests. Its anti-Christian project seems designed primarily to sever all international links that religious people have, whether those ties are Christian or Muslim.

Beijing is deploying the assets of the CCP’s security agencies against Christianity, in part, by establishing a regime of punitive measures, such as mandatory and intimidating facial ID screenings, restrictions on dissemination of religious tracts on the internet, and loss of “social credit” points that can result in the expulsion of the children of Christian parents from schools. Communist secret police have also been apprehending Christian preachers whom they apparently regard as effective, such as the Protestant Evangelical Pastor John Cao.

Pastor Cao, a permanent resident of the U.S., was arrested on March 5, 2017 after he crossed the border from Myanmar (Burma) to China’s Yunnan Province. Cao and his assistant, Jing Ruxia, were charged with allegedly organizing the illegal crossing of national borders, despite decades of similar movement from parish schools in Wa State, Myanmar to the Christian faithful in China. Cao, initially detained in a local jail near his arrest site, was later transferred to the regional jail in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. Pastor Cao has served three of his seven-year sentence and is in declining health. Appeals for his release have been rejected by Chinese authorities.

Coronavirus Comes for Europe by Guy Millière

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15752/coronavirus-comes-for-europe

The Italian health system is in appallingly bad condition. There are not enough intensive care units and, as everywhere, the possibility of a major crisis simply was not anticipated. In Italy there are 2.62 acute-care hospital beds per 1,000 residents (by comparison, the number in Germany is 6.06 per 1,000 residents). The Italian health system is entirely governed by the government…. Public hospitals must manage shortages, and when an exceptional situation occurs, rationing care leads to horrific choices.

The Italian government was hoping for help from the European Union, but neither the other member states nor the European Union itself has given any at all…. The dismissive attitude of the EU and the other members states seems to have been dictated by the fear of sliding into a situation as calamitous as that of Italy.

No country in the European Union has taken a clear, hard look at the danger Europe is facing.

Italy’s healthcare system is in a state of almost total collapse. As of today, 31,506 people in Italy have been infected with the coronavirus; of which 2,503 people have died. The numbers continue to grow. Hospitals are overwhelmed. Doctors have to choose which sick person to save and which sick person not to save.

The country has almost completely shut down. Many businesses are running in slow motion or have stopped. Prisoners are staging uprisings. Millions of people have been ordered to stay home and are allowed out only briefly to buy food. Most shops are shut. All public gatherings are prohibited, even funerals. Big cities look like ghost towns.

No other Western country has been so severely affected by the pandemic as Italy. Why?

China Boomeranging By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-china-response-will-weaken-it-on-world-stage/

Its bad behavior in the wake of COVID-19 will leave it in its weakest global position in memory. And the U.S. will emerge stronger.

S ometime in late November the Chinese Communist Party apparat was aware that the ingredients of some sort of an epidemic were brewing in Wuhan. Soon after, it was also clear to them that a new type of coronavirus was on the loose, a threat they might have taken more seriously given the similar Chinese origins of the prior toxic SARS coronavirus and the resources of a Level 4 virology lab nearby.

Yet the government initially hid all that knowledge from its own people in particular and in general from the world at large. Translated into American terms, that disingenuousness ensured that over 10,000 Chinese nationals and foreigners living in China flew every day on direct flights into the United States (Washington and California especially) from late November to the beginning of February, until the Trump travel ban of January 31.

All this laxity was also known to the Communist apparat in Beijing, which must have been amused when Trump was roundly damned by his liberal critics as a xenophobe and racist for finally daring to stop the influx on January 31 — the first major leader to enact such a total ban.

Yet, no thanks to the Chinese, America, so far, has been comparatively lucky — despite the grave risks of damaging a multi-trillion-dollar economy with the strictest quarantining, isolation policies, and social distancing in its history. Half the country lives in the interior away from ports of entry on the coasts. Medical care, sanitation, hygiene, and meat markets operate on different premises than in China, the supposed fated global hegemon. Transparency in a consensual society together with a free-market economy is encouraging tens of millions of citizens to work in tandem and independently to figure out creative ways to ameliorate the epidemic, politically, medically, socially, and economically. The result is that as of mid-March, the U.S., the world’s foremost immigration destination and among the most visited of nations, had suffered fewer virus fatalities than some European countries a fifth or sixth of its population size.

Covid Closures Expose Insidious Effects of Michelle Obama’s School Lunch Program Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/16/covid-closures-expose-insidious-effects-of-michelle-obamas-school-lunch-program/

Reexamining the community eligibility program, which has created a middle-class entitlement program while teaching kids all the wrong lessons, should be the administration’s to-do list. Its deep reach is just one more flawed government approach now exposed by the current public health threat.

As schools shut down across the nation over fears of the COVID-19 illness, it appears that administrators are less concerned about how to educate children and more worried about how to feed them. A basic parental task—making sure your child has breakfast and lunch during the day—like so many aspects of family life, has been relegated to government bureaucrats thanks in large part to Michelle Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

Signed into law by Barack Obama in 2010, the bill initiated a massive overhaul of the nation’s school lunch program. The first lady’s pet project imposed restrictions on salt, sugar, and saturated fat content in an effort to slim down America’s youth. Nonfat dairy like skim milk replaced whole milk; whole grains replaced white flour. Some schools reported rations on pickles for sandwiches while students were caught smuggling in salt packets to make unappetizing meals more edible. Nearly a decade later, there is no evidence the costly and burdensome effort had any impact on childhood obesity rates.

But one part of the bill has met, even exceeded, its intended outcome: The expansion of taxpayer-subsidized meals to millions of American children and teenagers.

The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), enacted nationwide in 2014, allows entire districts rather than individual families to apply for “free” or reduced-price meals based on low-income rates in the area. If at least 40 percent of the students in a district qualify, every student in the district is then entitled to a free breakfast, lunch, and snack.

Jeepers Veepers! As Joe Biden emerges the Democrats’ likely nominee, the focus inevitably will shift to who will be his running mate and heir apparent. But why on earth should it be Kamala Harris? By Ray McCoy

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/15/jeepers-veepers/

Prior to gaining national notoriety as California’s junior U.S. senator, Kamala Harris was widely considered a rising star in the Democratic Party. She spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2012 as her state’s attorney general, entering to the tune of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin.’”

Just as Barack Obama had been eight years earlier, Harris was being groomed for bigger things beyond her state’s borders. She was featured by McClatchy in a profile of the new Gen Xer politicians along with Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)

It was thought that the spotlight would do for her what it did for Obama, transforming her from a local prospect into a major league slugger for the party. In September 2017, only eight months after taking office as a freshman senator, Newsweek asked if she was the favorite to take on Donald Trump in 2020. CNN’s Chris Cillizza dubbed her the frontrunner immediately after the 2018 midterm elections.

At a certain point, however, reality kicked in. Kamala Harris—try as she might—does not have the charismatic cadence Obama had, nor does she have his smooth mannerisms.

Unlike Obama in his 2008 campaign, Harris has never made any overtures toward middle America on any issue. Last May, she declared she would require states and municipalities to obtain federal approval before enacting laws that restrict abortion. She also proposed far-reaching executive orders that would impose mandatory background checks and allow for prosecution of gun manufacturers. These are two areas where Harris, apparently, is claiming as president she would reprise the role that she currently plays as a legislator—something that Obama ended up doing but never bragged about before his election.

Coronavirus: Europe’s ‘Open Borders’ System Faces Collapse by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15751/coronavirus-europe-open-borders

“Merkel knows that the instruction to close the border, in general to take consistent national measures to protect her own citizens, would be tantamount to her own declaration of political bankruptcy.” — Ferdinand Knauss, commentator on the German blog Tichys Einblick, March 16, 2020.

“Merkel is now fighting. But as always in her chancellorship, she is not fighting for her country and its citizens, for which she is responsible. She is fighting for her power, for her legacy. When the citizens come to understand this, the corona crisis will have been Merkel’s last fight in the political arena.” — Ferdinand Knauss, March 16, 2020.

In a March 13 press conference, the president of Italy’s hard-hit Veneto region, Luca Zaia, said that Europe’s borderless zone was “disappearing as we speak.” He noted that the stringent border controls imposed by Austria shows that Schengen “no longer exists and will be remembered in the history books.”

As a growing number of countries close their borders to fight the coronavirus pandemic, the European system of open internal borders — a cornerstone of European integration — is on the brink of collapse.

The so-called Schengen Area, which comprises 26 European countries, entered into effect in 1995 and abolishes the need for passports and other types of control at mutual borders. It is a key practical and symbolic achievement of European integration and is now falling apart.

In a move packed with political significance, Germany, the largest and most powerful country in the European Union, on March 16 introduced controls on its borders with Austria, Denmark, France, Luxembourg and Switzerland after it registered 1,000 new cases of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in just one day.