RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/05/san-fran-health-dept-delivering-drugs-and-booze-daniel-greenfield/

I’m sorry.

We make fun of the absolute horrid socialist insanity in Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, but parts of our own country are positively making them look sane. It’s no secret that lefties have used the pandemic to push their own policy agendas.

Public officials in San Francisco have decided to use the pandemic to justify housing homeless in hotels and delivering booze and drugs to them. 

If you ever wanted a reason to never visit San Francisco or try one of its overpriced hotels again, here you go.

San Francisco’s health department confirmed Wednesday that the city was administering alcohol, tobacco, medical cannabis and other substances in an effort to prevent a handful of people quarantined or isolating in city-leased hotels from going outside to get the substances themselves.

Administering. People. Isolating.

Compared to the San Fran Chronicle, the Ministry of Information in 1984 was the soul of clarity and meaning.

What the Chronicle means is that junkies are getting deliveries of drugs, ciggies, and booze while staying in hotels. They’re not being “administered” to them unless there’s a doctor or a nurse carefully dosing booze into a cup for them.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/big_tech_is_strangling_us.html

How ironic that the 1984 iconic advertisement that Apple used to introduce the Macintosh computer “played on imagery from George Orwell’s 1984 novella [sic] presenting Apple as rebels fighting a technocratic elite.  The spot certainly was a lot gloomier than the company’s previous commercials, that used Apple celebrity spokesman Dick Cavett.” In truth, “there was nothing cuddly about the new Macintosh ad, which was firmly rooted in the burgeoning dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic.”

Ostensibly the advertisement’s intention was “to remove people’s fears of technology [.]” In fact, Apple claimed that they “wanted to democratize technology, telling people that the power was now literally in their hands.”

How things have changed as the tech giants have morphed into near-totalitarian giants controlling far too much of our lives.  Like serfs, we bend to their will or are punished. Thus, Candace Owens is suspended from Twitter for challenging Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer while  Facebook flags the Declaration of Independence as ‘”hate speech.”

In 2016, Aaron Renn reported that both conservative and leftwing groups are pulled down at Twitter. In 2019 “YouTube blocked some British history teachers from its service for uploading archive material related to Adolf Hitler, saying they [were] breaching new guidelines banning the promotion of hate speech. The video-sharing website announced that it would remove material glorifying the Nazis from its platform in an attempt to stop people being radicalised. In the process however, it also deleted videos uploaded to help educate future generations about the risks of fascism.” 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/05/06/did-we-forge

“Former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tom Frieden avoided jail time on Tuesday after pleading guilty to groping a longtime family friend in New York.Frieden, who is also the former New York City health comissioner, turned himself in to police in August 2018 after the woman reported that he had grabbed her butt without her permission inside his Brooklyn apartment, court documents said.By pleading guilty, Frieden wasn’t required to explain what happened during the October 2017 incident to Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge Edwin Novillo. Frieden was facing up to a year in jail for misdemeanor forcible touching, third-degree sexual abuse and second-degree harassment charges, prosecutors said.”

Well, today is where House Democrats are probably going to hammer the Trump administration for having a response to this Wuhan coronavirus outbreak that is just as bad or worse than China’s handling of the pandemic that they caused. It will be political theater. It will be grounded in nonsensical partisanship. And yes, President Trump should yank his top coronavirus taskforce officials from these circus acts. The president made his disdain for House Democrats known and as the reason for why Dr. Anthony Fauci was yanked from today’s hearing (via the Hill):

House Democrats are growing frustrated in their efforts to oversee the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, as President Trump said Tuesday that he’s blocking officials from testifying in the lower chamber because he doesn’t want them taking questions from “a bunch of Trump haters.” 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2020/05/06/cuomo-condemned-nearly-2000-to-die-of-the-coronavirus-n388582

New York state reported 1,700 more deaths from coronavirus that had not been included in counts before.

They were all in nursing homes and eldercare facilities. The numbers themselves are questionable, given the incentive to count more deaths as COVID-19 deaths to obtain federal funding. That perverse incentive is probably skewing the tallies up and rendering them unreliable.

Nevertheless.

ALBANY, N.Y. — New York state reported more than 1,700 previously undisclosed deaths at nursing homes and adult care facilities in a tally that included for the first time people believed to have been killed by the coronavirus before their diagnoses could be confirmed.

The tally, released late Monday, emerged as state officials faced scrutiny over how they have protected vulnerable residents from the coronavirus.

What scrutiny? The mainstream media keep treating him like a hero and downplaying his failures. Other than the New York Post, who in the state’s media is putting the screws to Cuomo?

True scrutiny would connect this new deaths number with an order Gov. Cuomo gave just a couple of weeks ago.

Gov. Cuomo doubled down Sunday on the state’s controversial directive ordering nursing homes to admit COVID-19 patients.

This is a great, common sense interview with a seasoned Cedars physician who discusses the impact of the lockdown on medical care.  Well worth the 18 minutes!

https://youtu.be/uGXxPRayzJU

P.S.  I just had the misfortune of spending two days in the hospital for an infection from a freak abscess.  The hospital – a major L.A. medical facility – was running at less than 20% capacity with massive numbers of furloughed staff.

After multiple courses of IV antibiotics, I’m home and fine but extremely worried about the profound effect of the lockdown on our medical system.

It will be quite a while before our healthcare system will be restored.  Many medical or medical-related businesses have been destroyed and may never come back online.

The number of associated deaths for lack of treatment or reticence to seek treatment is probably incalculable.  Panic can be a deadly emotion!  – J.L.  

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/adam-schiff-may-be-biggest-loser-russia-probe

In a packed hearing room two months into Donald Trump’s embattled presidency, Rep. Adam Schiff played the willing protagonist by dramatically reading into the congressional record some of the most explosive claims from Christopher Steele’s dossier.

At the time, Steele’s dossier had recently burst on the scene, and the Trump White House was under siege as a far-reaching FBI investigation examined allegations — later disproven — that former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and others tried to collude with Russia to hijack the 2016 election.

“According to Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. intelligence, Russian sources tell him that Page has also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin, CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft,” Schiff declared at a March 20, 2017 House Intelligence Committee hearing.

“Sechin is reported to be a former KGB agent and close friend of Putin’s. According to Steele’s Russian sources, Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company,” the California Democrat added.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15957/coronavirus-constitution-abuse

Once freedoms were surrendered, [Chief Justice William] Rehnquist warned, they would be even easier to take away when a future crisis or greater good came calling.

The very orders that citizens across this land were protesting have been delivered wrapped in lack of transparency: forbidding only some assemblies; preferring big box stores; shutting down churches and gun stores but not liquor or cannabis stores; motor-boating prohibited but sailing is not; vacation rentals banned but not lodges; among many more disparities.

It is vital that “We the people” keep on overseeing this process to ensure that the attempted power grabs — for instance by those who would use this crisis to “restructure things to fit our vision” — continue to be judged as intolerable acts.

Shutting down America has caused many to ask who suspended the Bill of Rights. The re-opening of this country would do well to include close attention to righting wrongs that may — deliberately or inadvertently — have been inflicted on the US Constitution.

At the end of Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s life, one of his great concerns was the government’s use of crisis power at the expense of civil liberties, a concern he shared with law students during his last summer constitutional survey course in Cambridge, England.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pence-white-house-is-considering-eliminating-its-ccp-virus-task-force_3339701.html#

The White House is considering scaling back the CCP virus task force as its work could wind down by June, Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday.

In an off-camera White House briefing, Pence told reporters that the United States may be “in a very different place” by the end of this month and early June, adding that the Trump administration is eyeing the time around Memorial Day weekend as the time to have federal agencies change their responses to the pandemic, according to a transcript from his office.

“I think we’re having conversations about that and about what the proper time is for the task force to complete its work and for the ongoing efforts to take place on an agency-by-agency level,” Pence told reporters.

He added: “And as I’ve said before, as we continue to practice social distancing and states engage in safe and responsible reopening plans, I truly believe–and the trend lines support it–that we could be in a very different place. And by late May and early June–and that probably represents the timetable for our agencies.”

The move comes as many states are preparing to rescind some restrictions that were imposed to slow the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, a novel coronavirus that emerged in China late last year, and as top health experts have said there has been a decrease in hospitalizations. However, a number of new areas including Des Moines, Iowa, and Chicago have begun to see a surge in cases.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/05/media-attack-gov-kristi-noem-for-not-panicking-and-destroying-her-state/

As the Coronavirus spread from Wuhan, China, to the United States, most governors quickly acquiesced to the media’s demand that they force a governmental shutdown of their states in order to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. The media continue to be heavily invested in the shutdown model, even as the country realizes that hospitals are nowhere close to being overwhelmed and, in fact, many hospital systems are furloughing doctors and nurses due to the mandatory cessation on handling most non-COVID-19 cases.

With the predicted hospital demands being dramatically off, the media’s goalposts have shifted violently from demanding a shutdown to “flatten the curve” of exponential growth that would overwhelm hospitals to demanding a continued shutdown to lower the number of COVID-19 deaths, no matter the consequences, including long-term economic damage, serious harm to the food supply, or death from other causes. While the media generally praise “government shutdown” politicians such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who kept unsanitary subways running, forced people into deadly nursing homes, and demanded tens of thousands of ventilators he never used — they condemn politicians such as South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who has strongly encouraged social distancing measures but not used government force to accomplish public health goals. The media predicted that Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ more measured approach would result in horrific disaster. It hasn’t. Unlike Cuomo, DeSantis focused on nursing homes more than the low likelihood of transmission on big, sunny beaches.

https://twitter.com/paulinkjet/status/1257563094718582787

Fact found buried on BBC website: “The US records 1,015 virus deaths in 24 hours – the lowest one-day tally in a month.”

Alex Berenson

@AlexBerenson

Basically no outdoor transmission. Little proof that retail/office is a major vector. Weak if any proof that masks cut transmission, esp. in anyone asymptomatic. Much evidence that masks are virtue signaling and yet more government overreach. It’s time to stop pretending.