RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_first_casualty_of_war_even_war_against_a_virus_is_truth.html

A few comments about how the leftists’ fanatic hatred for President Trump is erasing truth, facts, and debatable ideas.

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” – John Adams

The media has a fetish that Trump lies. According to the Washington Post (no link, because it’s behind a paywall), Trump has uttered more than 16,000 lies.

Drilling down, though, one discovers that, while Trump has lied (what politician hasn’t?), the WaPo’s humorless and biased habit of taking seriously puffery, exaggeration, and jokes turns everything into a lie. What reasonable people understand is that Trump exaggerates or jokes about things that don’t matter, but sticks with the truth about things that do.

Leftists do something even more serious, which is to classify as a lie anything with which they disagree. In other words, they set themselves up as the arbiters of absolute truth. From this pedestal, they shout down or completely censor statements they dislike – even if the statement is subjective or reasonably debatable – on the ground that the statement is a “lie.”

To support this tactic, leftists have to resort to blatant lies themselves. For example, when Trump expressed hope that chloroquine would help fight coronavirus, leftists immediately transformed the drug from a longtime, reputable standby into something evil. That’s how we got the “Trump made stupid American people eat fish tank cleaner” lie. And the “Trump made stupid Nigerian people eat fish tank cleaner” lie.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/03/28/blood-serum-coronavirus-cure/

A preliminary study released Friday found that blood serum from people who recovered from coronavirus was effective at treating critically ill patients, raising hope that the technique will curtail a pandemic that has already killed more than 30,000 people around the globe.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at only five patients, and the authors of the report acknowledged the need for more extensive research. But it showed promising results, and health officials have already expressed optimism that blood transfers can be used to fight the new coronavirus strain.

“That’s one of our top priorities,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top expert on infectious disease, said in a March 20 interview regarding clinical trials for convalescent serum.

Fauci expressed confidence in the technique because it has proved effective during other pandemics, including the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918 and the SARS outbreak in 2003.

All five patients in the study, conducted in Shenzhen, China, have dramatically improved since receiving injections of blood plasma from recovered patients.

The patients, who ranged in age from 36 to 65, were all on ventilators suffering from acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) when the were provided plasma treatments.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/490022-cdc-issues-travel-advisory-for-ny-tristate-area-after-Trump-says-quarantine-not-necessary

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a travel advisory late Saturday night for the New York tri-state area after President Trump said he requested the measure in an effort to stem the spread of the coronavirus. 

“On the recommendation of the White House CoronaVirus Task Force, and upon consultation with the Governor’s of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, I have asked the @CDCgov to issue a strong Travel Advisory, to be administered by the Governors, in consultation with the Federal Government. A quarantine will not be necessary,” Trump tweeted. 

The CDC finalized the notice late Saturday night. 

The advisory discourages people living in those three states from traveling domestically. It does not apply to those employed by critical infrastructure industries, as defined by the Department of Homeland Security, who often commute between the three states.  “Due to extensive community transmission of COVID-19 in the area, CDC urges residents of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to refrain from non-essential domestic travel for 14 days effective immediately,” the CDC said in an email to reporters.

https://www.creators.com/read/michelle-malkin

When I think of “essential” workers in America, the smear merchants of the Anti-Defamation League are at the bottom of the barrel. For decades, they’ve demonized conservatives and Christians as agents of “hate” and treated our very existence as incitements to violence. The ADL’s manufactured outrage machine has broadened its target list to anyone remotely critical of Israel for any reason, President Donald Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, “America First” college students, innocuous hand gestures, cartoon frogs and anyone who dares to think or write that “It’s OK to be white.”

Now, in the wake of the “Chinese flu” pandemic, ADL is lining up with all the other federal bailout vultures clamoring for free money. This week, the group issued a statement calling on Congress to include “relief for charities” in any COVID-19 legislation. “In times of crisis,” ADL self-righteously urged, “nonprofits are on the front lines, ready to respond and serve communities across the nation — but funds are needed to continue doing so.” The “relief package” pushed by ADL and several hundred other groups demands $60 billion in “emergency stimulus funding to support our work… during this time of crisis and need.”

What a crock. The primary “front lines” ADL occupies are on the battlefields against American sovereignty and free speech. By my count, the open borders zealots of ADL have filed 17 amicus briefs in our courts supporting obstruction of Trump’s immigration enforcement and national security measures. The group is particularly proud of its brief in Trump v. Hawaii, in which it “led a coalition of six Jewish organizations using our unique moral voice to passionately argue against the so-called Muslim ban, citing three historical examples when our nation later recognized that we were wrong to turn our back, including denying refuge to Jews fleeing the Nazis.” The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the travel restrictions and affirmed the broad plenary powers of the executive branch over immigration.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/weve_been_had_and_trump_knows_it.html

While President Trump closed the U.S. border against entry from China at the end of January, his overall instinct was right.  The CCP virus was nasty, but no worse than a supercharged flu.

Health professionals overwhelmed Trump and his inner circle with doomsday scenarios, bullied by panic-obsessed virologists and epidemiologists — begging for attention and copying the alarmist playbook from the climate/global warming extremists, allied with the MSM Trump-haters.

And now the government has completely suffocated economic demand, creating a depression, an unnecessary calamity that is destroying lives, livelihoods, families, and fortunes for a generation.  It is becoming apparent that the end-of-the-world predictions, computer models warning of an apocalyptic black plague worldwide, are all wrong.

Those paying attention were warned that the worse-case scenarios were hysterical, by the likes of Stanford epidemiologist John P.A. Ioannidis.

In dramatic fashion, U.K. Imperial College scientist Neil Ferguson published a doomsday scenario on March 16.  Now, just ten days later, he has reversed his outlook, essentially settling on a prediction no worse than a bad flu season.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-law-enforcement-in-a-time-of-crisis/

There are systemic complexities that addle the administration of justice regardless of whether a catastrophic event is caused by criminal conduct.

The Justice Department wants the power to detain suspects indefinitely without trial. That was the storyline last week. DOJ, you were to believe, was exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to carry out a Constitution-shredding gambit, completely in line with two intertwined media caricatures: Donald Trump’s authoritarian streak and Bill Barr’s long held affinity for executive branch imperialism. If you listened to enough of the commentary around the initial reports, you were pretty sure Trump and Barr were about to lock up Joe Biden, the prime-time hosts at MSNBC, and maybe even the New York Times editorial board.

It should by now go without saying that the distorted story was remote from reality.

The Justice Department made some proposals . . . but it did so at the urging of Congress, not unilaterally. The upshot was to empower the courts, not the executive. In fact, “empower” is an overstatement. The idea was to give judges latitude to deal with due process deadlines that necessarily become problematic when some catastrophic event undermines the capacity of courts to function.

The profound challenge that the COVID-19 pandemic poses to our health-care system, potentially in all U.S. states and territories, is the predominant news story of 2020. Less obvious but all too real nonetheless is the challenge it poses for the criminal-justice system.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-week-of-coronavirus-pain-and-progress-51585245116?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

As the number of Americans infected with the coronavirus surges, and hospitals are besieged, it can appear that America is losing the pandemic war. But in important ways the U.S. is better off at the end of March than it was a week ago, and it’s worth tracking the progress as well as the pain.

The most important good news this week is the ebbing panic in financial markets. The Federal Reserve unveiled new facilities to provide liquidity to corners of the market where anxiety had shut down trades or threatened a run. Think money-market and municipal-bond funds. The Senate bill that the House passed Friday adds $454 billion for Treasury that can backstop further Fed actions if they’re needed.

Our market sources say trading has calmed down and most sellers can find buyers for assets to raise cash when they need it. If you think this doesn’t matter to the real economy, imagine a cascade of defaults that become bankruptcies that become a banking panic. At least for now the panic toward a deflationary spiral has stopped. The Fed and the Senate legislation sparked this week’s modest rally in equities.

“I’m going to say something that is a little bit complicated but do it in a way we can understand it together. In the model, either you have to have a large group of people who a-asymptomatic, who never presented for any test to have the kind of numbers predicted. To get to 60 million people infected, you have to have a large group of a-symptomatics. We have not seen an attack rate over 1 in 1,000. So either we are measuring the iceberg and underneath it, are a large group of people. So we are working hard to get the antibody test and figure out who these people are and do they exist. Or we have the transmission completely wrong.

So these are the things we are looking at, because the predictions of the model don’t match the reality on the ground in China, South Korea or Italy. We are five times the size of Italy. If we were Italy and did all those divisions, Italy should have close to 400,000 deaths. They are not close to achieving that.

Models are models. We are — there is enough data of the real experience with the coronavirus on the ground to really make these predictions much more sound. So when people start talking about 20% of a population getting infected, it’s very scary, but we don’t have data that matches that based on our experience.”