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April 2020

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It’s our right — and duty — to question those deciding America’s fate By Douglas MacKinnon

By on April 18th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/493195-its-our-right-and-duty-to-question-those-deciding-americas-fate

When in the United States of America did it become objectionable, or considered outright wrong, to question the wisdom and policies of our politicians, bureaucrats and “experts”?  If “we are all in this together,” as people have been declaring about the fight against COVID-19, then shouldn’t we all have a say in our collective fate? That should be the right of every American citizen, even those who disagree with states’ shelter-at-home and business closure orders.

When did it become wrong, or a crime punishable by arrest, for Americans to peacefully protest a governor’s stay-at-home order, as happened recently in Raleigh, N.C.? Evidently our right to peacefully protest has become a “non-essential activity” to be broken up by the police. In Lansing, Mich., protesters against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order used vehicles for their “Operation Gridlock.”

To curb the spread of COVID-19 in America, we have temporarily surrendered our lifestyles, livelihoods, life savings, mental health and even our very freedoms to the dictates of politicians, bureaucrats and public health experts. “For our own good,” they have put in place orders to control the movement and actions of most of the nation’s 330 million people.  

No one can deny that COVID-19 is a dangerous, highly-infectious virus. That said, the solutions to curb the contagion seem to be holding Americans hostage. Are we still allowed to contrast what’s happening with this pandemic to those of the past and ask logical questions?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Keeping the coronavirus death toll in perspective By Heather Mac Donald

By on April 18th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/493370-keeping-the-coronavirus-death-toll-in-perspective

As governors and mayors debate when to lift their coronavirus stay-at-home orders, public health experts predict a flood of deaths should businesses be allowed to reopen before universal testing or a vaccine for the disease is available. These are the same experts whose previous apocalyptic models of coronavirus fatalities and shortages of hospital beds and ventilators have proved wildly inaccurate. It may be useful to look at some numbers for perspective. 

As of 3 p.m. Eastern on April 16, there were 30,920 coronavirus deaths in the U.S. New York state accounted for 14,198 — or 46 percent — of those deaths. New York City accounted for 11,477 of New York state’s deaths and 37 percent of national deaths. This week, New York City started counting deaths as coronavirus fatalities if the patient had not been tested for the disease but was suspected postmortem of having it. This relaxed standard increased the U.S. death count by 17 percent. Other jurisdictions will inevitably follow suit. 

The national coronavirus deaths represent a death rate of 9.4 per 100,000 of the U.S. population. Take out the New York fatalities and the New York share of the national population, and the coronavirus death rate for the rest of the country is 5.4 per 100,000 of the U.S. population.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Coronavirus Comes to Academia: Don’t Give Them a Dime Until They Cut Their Bloated Administrations By David Randall

By on April 18th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/coronavirus-comes-to-academia-but-dont-give-them-a-dime-until-they-do-this/

America’s leading universities have begun to respond to the financial consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. Duke University will “pause” construction projects, new expenditures, and hiring, and freeze salaries (with the possibility of a bonus for employees earning less than $50,000). Princeton University will suspend faculty and staff salary increases, freezing new hiring save in exceptional circumstances, giving notice that the number of temporary, casual, and contracted positions is likely to plummet at the end of the semester, asking managers to reassign staff whose regular jobs are face-to-face to take on new tasks, and cutting all “non-essential spending.” Stanford University has frozen new hires and some of its top administrators have taken pay cuts—the provost and the president by 20% and other senior administrators by 5-10%.

These spending pauses and hiring freezes are partly a good idea. Colleges and universities need to be fiscally prudent as a depression suddenly looms. But they also freeze in place massively overgrown education bureaucracies. Ohio State University employs 88 diversity-related staff, which is 88 more than it needs. Harvard employs more than 50 Title IX coordinators, which is also surplus by 50. Sustainability, Student Success, Student Life, Residential Life, Community Engagement, First Year Experience, Multiculturalism, Equity, Inclusion—America’s universities, from the Ivies to the community colleges, possess vast bureaucracies that at best do nothing to promote education and for the most part, actively work to prevent it.

“Hiring freeze” is another way to say, “nobody gets fired.” And an awful lot of bureaucrats in higher education need firing.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Stacey Abrams on Voting Rights, COVID-19, and Being Vice President “I would be an excellent running mate.” By Melissa Harris-Perry

By on April 18th, 2020

https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a32132819/stacey-abrams-on-voting-rights-covid-19-and-being-vice-president/

Experienced politicians know there is a right way to answer questions about pursuing higher office. Be demure. Redirect. Convey vague interest while insisting never to have given it serious consideration. But Stacey Abrams does not give the expected answer when I ask if she would accept an offer from former vice president Joe Biden to serve as his 2020 running mate. “Yes. I would be honored,” Abrams says. “I would be an excellent running mate. I have the capacity to attract voters by motivating typically ignored communities. I have a strong history of executive and management experience in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. I’ve spent 25 years in independent study of foreign policy. I am ready to help advance an agenda of restoring America’s place in the world. If I am selected, I am prepared and excited to serve.”

Abrams’s direct response betrays ambition, makes verifiable claims, and establishes outcomes to which she could later be held accountable. By normal political rules, it is the wrong answer. But as Abrams and I talk in March in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, it is clear that normal political rules no longer apply. I’m asking her about an unknown political future even as the future itself is frighteningly unknowable: schools closing, businesses shuttering, and Americans sheltering against a raging virus we can barely fathom. Amid this chaotic unpredictability, Abrams’s candor is disarming and comforting.

Into the Unknown

In the March 15 televised debate, Biden committed to choosing a woman as his running mate. Less than a week later, the progressive strategy network Way to Win released survey data indicating Stacey Abrams was Biden’s strongest potential lieutenant. A graduate of Spelman College, the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin, and Yale Law School, Abrams made history as the first woman to lead a political party in Georgia’s General Assembly and the first African American to lead the Georgia House of Representatives. In 2018, she pursued history again, mounting an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to become America’s first black woman governor. Her defeat came amid election irregularities and allegations of voter suppression. Abrams refused to concede the close race to her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp. “I’m supposed to say nice things and accept my fate,” Abrams writes in the preface to her New York Times best-seller, Lead From the Outside. “I refused to be gaslighted into throwing away my power, diminishing my voice.”

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, POLITICS Comments turned off

Joe Biden says he’s assembling transition team to prepare for his administration Naomi Lim

By on April 18th, 2020

www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/joe-biden-says-hes-assembling-transition-team-to-prepare-for-his-administration

Joe Biden has begun putting together a transition team, which may decide to circulate the names of some Cabinet nominees before November’s general election.

“I don’t want to say we started thinking about it a month ago, we did, because that sounds like I was certain this was going to happen, that I would be the nominee. I don’t want it to sound like that, but it has to happen, and that’s why the transition team is already being put together,” Biden told about 150 donors during his second virtual fundraiser Thursday.

The presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee’s announcement suggests the two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator is looking past his fall fight with President Trump and making tentative preparations for governing.

While Biden declined to say who was in charge of the transition team’s selection, he indicated he was considering elevating some administration roles focused on global health security and pandemics, as well as climate change, to Cabinet-level spots.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Ventilator Shortage That Wasn’t By Kyle Smith

By on April 18th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-ventilator-shortages-have-not-come-to-pass/

The ventilator shortages of which we were all gravely warned have not yet come to pass.

In March, one of the most feared aspects of the pandemic was the widely reported coming shortage of ventilators. One well-publicized estimate, repeated by the New York Times, the New Yorker and CNN, was that the U.S. would need roughly one million ventilators, or more than five times as many as we had. Gulp. Ventilators are expensive, they’re complex machines, and they can’t be churned out in the thousands overnight.

In the state that (as of today) has one-third of the country’s confirmed COVID-19 cases, New York governor Andrew Cuomo sounded the alarm for ventilators repeatedly. On March 27, he acknowledged “I don’t have a crystal ball” but said his state desperately needed 30,000 ventilators, maybe 40,000, but had only 12,000. When President Trump noted that Cuomo’s state had thousands of unused ventilators it hadn’t even placed yet, Cuomo admitted this was true but said he still needed more: “Yes, they’re in a stockpile because that’s where they’re supposed to be because we don’t need them yet. We need them for the apex,” Cuomo said at the time. On April 2, Cuomo predicted the state would run out of ventilators in six days “at the current burn rate.” But on April 6, Cuomo noted, “We’re ok, and we have some in reserve.”

Now New York appears to have passed the apex. Deaths, a lagging indicator, crested at 799 on April 9 and hit 606 on April 16, the lowest figure since April 6. Hospitalizations are also declining, and on April 16 also hit their lowest level since April 6. Cuomo today has so many ventilators he is giving them away:

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Coronavirus: WHO Director Has a Long History of Cover-Ups by Soeren Kern

By on April 18th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15901/world-health-organization-cover-ups

“WHO officials have complained privately that Ethiopian officials are not telling the truth about these outbreaks. Testing for Vibrio cholerae bacteria, which cause cholera, is simple and takes less than two days…. United Nations officials said more aid could have been delivered to Ethiopia had the truth been told.” — The New York Times, May 13, 2017.

Tedros dismissed the accusations against him by playing the race card. He said that criticism of him stemmed from a “typical colonial mind-set aimed at… discrediting a candidate from a developing country.” — The New York Times, May 13, 2017.

“By yielding to the Khartoum’s regime’s threat, you are complicit in the failure to respond to a disease that currently threatens many hundreds of thousands of Sudanese civilians — and is currently active in twelve Sudanese states.” — Open letter to Tedros from a group of American physicians accusing him of failing to investigate outbreaks of cholera in Sudan, September 11, 2017.

A day after U.S. President Donald Trump accused the WHO of being “very China-centric,” and threatened to cut funding to WHO, Tedros responded: “Please quarantine politicizing COVID. We will have many body bags in front of us if we don’t behave.” Tedros also said that criticism of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic was motivated by racism.

The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is facing increased scrutiny over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than two million people around the world and killed at least 150,000.

Adhanom, who goes by the name Tedros, is an Ethiopian microbiologist who, with the help of China, began a five-year term as head of the WHO in July 2017. He has been accused of misrepresenting the severity and spread of the coronavirus in an attempt to pander to China.

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“Fascist Lit and Hungary’s Future” Who is József Nyírő? David Goldman

By on April 18th, 2020

The old book arrived in a white envelope with the blue stamp of a Berlin antiquariat, like a leftover from hell’s rummage sale. I half expected its acidic paper and flimsy cardboard cover to reek of brimstone; they recalled the privation of 1942, when the Berlin publishing house of Hans von Hugo published a German translation of a novel by the minor Hungarian writer József Nyírő. Originally titled, Az en népem,” or My People, the German translator rendered it as Denn niemand trägt das Leben allein, a line from the 19th-century poet Friedrich Hölderlin: “For no-one bears life alone.” Hungary was Germany’s wartime ally, and its Second Army that year had suffered 84% casualties at the Battle of Stalingrad. And because my name has come up in l’affaire Nyírő, I consider it necessary to respond, but wanted some acquaintance with the man’s writing first.

If you’re new to the controversy currently surrounding Nyírő, here’s a very short summary: Along with Ferenc Herczeg and Albert Wass, Nyírő now appears on the required reading list for Hungarian high school students. His inclusion occasioned outrage among some Jewish observers, including professor Susan Rubin Suleiman, a longtime critic of Hungarian President Viktor Órban, who argued that Nyírő’s support of the fascist Arrow Cross party during the Second World War should disqualify him from ever appearing on the state curriculum. Hungarian State Secretary Zoltán Kovács responded to professor Suleiman, citing, among other things, my 2018 report from Budapest that named Hungary “the safest country for European Jew.” Secretary Kovács is entirely correct, and I stand by my article. For a better understanding of how Órban’s decision to refuse to accept a quota of Middle Eastern immigrants made life much safer for Hungarian Jews, just read Marc Weitzmann’s reports from France and see what price the Jewish community there paid for their nation’s decision to welcome in a torrent of Muslim migrants. Unlike Paris, Budapest is a fun and sometimes inspiring city for Jews. Órban meets weekly with his nation’s Orthodox rabbis, who hold him in high esteem.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

What Is The Proof That This Covid-19 Thing Really Is A “Crisis,” Or That Economic Suppression Is The Solution? Francis Menton

By on April 18th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-4-15-what-is-the-proof-that-this-covid-19-thing-really-is-a-crisis

We are in the midst of an event that is completely unique in the history of our country, and as far as I can tell, in the history of the world: namely, the intentional suppression by governments (in the U.S., both federal and states) of a very large percentage of economic activity, in an effort to control a dangerous disease. There are estimates that the U.S. economy could decline by as much as 38% from its recent peak as a consequence of this great economic suppression. In a matter of just a few weeks, tens of millions of people, many of low to moderate income, have been suddenly thrown out of work; hundreds of thousands of businesses have closed, of which an unknown number may never be able to reopen; and trillions of dollars of value have been lost in the stock market.

Surely this kind of devastating government response would not be undertaken unless this disease represented a true crisis, and unless there was also solid evidence that the economic suppression would quickly end the crisis. But how do you distinguish what constitutes a “crisis” that warrants such a drastic response, versus something that is part of the normal and ongoing pain of human existence? And even if this is a bona fide crisis, why do we think that suppression of economic activity will improve the situation?

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

“What is a Person to Believe” Sydney Williams

By on April 18th, 2020

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

We are told we live in an era of science. Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote, “the good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.” But is that really so? Does not science change as new evidence is gathered? Statisticians use models to justify their findings. Yet models are only as good as their inputs. The epidemiologists’ models we have seen regarding COVID-19 have changed markedly over the past few weeks. In mid-March, Imperial College in London predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S., with no mitigation. By the first of April, modelers at Oxford saw that number drop to a range of 100,000 to 240,000, with some mitigation. Now the estimate is 60,000. A University of Virginia model shows COVID-19 will peak this summer, while Health Metrics Evaluation at the University of Washington suggests the virus will “peter out” in May. Models make assumptions about, among other factors, human behavior, the measurement of which is an art? What is a person to believe?

If we are to base our beliefs about COVID-19 on the basis of “evidence,” it is unsurprising that confusion abounds. We presume, with strong reason, that it came from the city of Wuhan in Hubei Province, China, but whether from a live bat sold for human consumption at a wet market or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control has never been made clear. We are told coronavirus is highly contagious. Ten days ago, the Los Alamos National Laboratory published an article in which they claimed that the transmission rate for COVID-19 is between 4.7 and 6.6. For comparison purposes, the seasonal flu, the transmission rate is 1.3. (The transmission rate is also referred to as the regeneration rate, or the R0.) At the midpoint, 5.7, over ten rounds, one person could infect 36 million people. The chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centers for Disease Control in Beijing puts the transmission rate at between 1.0 and 5.0. At the midpoint of 2.5, and after ten rounds, one individual could infect 9,538 people.  Which are we to believe?

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