RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/16/panic-never-helped-any-pandemic-and-wont-start-now/

CNN Business calls it “a pandemic unprecedented in modern times.” That would probably include the so-called “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918-19 that killed more than 500,000 Americans, and perhaps 20 million to 50 million worldwide. Coronavirus so far has killed fewer than 75 Americans, fewer than 7,000 people worldwide, and its growth internationally already is clearly slowing. But economic growth is another matter: We’re now in a bear market, with worldwide recession a serious possibility. For hysteria has now become the “conventional wisdom.”

Invoking the “Black Death,” which probably wiped out a third of Europe, both CNN and the Washington Post have reported that Iran is digging (per the Post) “Coronavirus Burial Pits So Vast They’re Visible From Space.” Never mind that Google can read your license plate from space, nor that on average more than 12,000 Iranians die daily and the country has reported less than 80 COVID-19 deaths since virus was detected there a month ago. For those without enough fingers, that’s a 0.02% increase in deaths per day. The cemeteries can handle it.

Then there’s that Peggy Noonan op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that unabashedly declared: “‘Don’t Panic’ Is Bad Advice.”

Ahem. Don’t panic.

Another Epidemic Of Hysteria

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/no-the-trump-administration-didnt-weaken-us-biodefenses

Befitting their absurd deference to China’s lies about the coronavirus (yes, they are lies), too many in the media are lapping up the Democratic Party talking point that the Trump administration gutted the National Security Council counter-pandemics effort.

It did not.

While the Trump administration has rightly reorganized the NSC away from the bureaucratic behemoth it became under the Obama administration, NSC bio-defense efforts have continued. And as pointed out by the former NSC lead on the issue, Tim Morrison, these efforts were wide-ranging.

The key here is that the NSC’s bureaucratic reorganization is being presented as a gutting of the nation’s bio-defenses. And that’s plainly unfair.

The NSC is supposed to exist as a filtering house for government national security efforts in service of the president’s needs and policy priorities. Unfortunately, under the Obama administration, the NSC became a place where Ben Rhodes used bureaucracy to centralize power away from the Pentagon, State Department, and Intelligence Community, and slow down the policy process. Why the interest in lethargy?

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/15/the-real-threats-from-coronavirus/

Social distancing is nothing compared to a crisis that leads to mass casualties, economic collapse, and a legacy of bad policies that leaves the country weaker than ever before.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday that Americans must prepare to “hunker down” to avoid a worst-case scenario with the rapid spread of the Chinese coronavirus. Nevertheless, plenty of skeptics are asking if coronavirus is “something” or if it is “nothing.” That’s the wrong question to ask. And asking the wrong question leads you to the wrong answers.

Of course it is something, but what is it? That’s the question we need to answer.

I know that people reading this will fall broadly into two groups. The first group, which is strongly represented among political conservatives, maintains that coronavirus is nothing or, if not precisely nothing, then it is asymptotically approaching nothing. For them, it is as real as the Fusion GPS dossier on President Trump.

Then there is the other group. These are people who are concerned that an outbreak in one or more American cities that goes undetected and thus uncontained for too long could cause a repeat of the Wuhan or Northern Italy scenario. Those scenarios followed roughly the same pattern: the virus went largely undetected due to a lack of testing capacity and soon became widespread before public health officials could act.

This led to a surge in hospitalizations that overloaded existing resources and spiked the number of fatalities as well as the fatality rate. That’s why the delay in increasing testing capacity in the United States until the past few days has been a cause for concern. The Wuhan virus should not have a high mortality rate, but when left unnoticed and thus unchecked it can spread and lead to deaths of people who would be able to recover if they’d had proper treatment.

The scenes from Italy have been horrible. By Sunday, Italy had nearly 25,000 confirmed cases, more than 1,800 deaths—and 368 of those deaths came in the prior 24 hours. That single-day death toll exceeds the worst day China ever reported.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/wont_you_be_my_helpful_not_hurtful_neighbor.html

Big Tech’s threat to our continued freedom of expression is extensive, pervasive, and personal

The suppression of conservative opinions and venues by social media giants — Google/YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Instagram — has been an issue for years.  Those attempting to present “non-progressive” points of view have battled in court to keep alive the constitutional right of freedom of speech.  But this dangerous suppression of viewpoints exists even at the micro-level, as I recently discovered after sharing a link to a video on a community forum app.  Suddenly, I became the target of vitriolic posts and was even chastised by the app censors, all of which demonstrates how extensive, pervasive, and personal is the threat to our continued freedom of expression.

I saw that threat played out in the realm of political opinion and followed the battles against it.  In 2017, PragerU filed a lawsuit against YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, for unlawfully censoring over 200 videos and curtailing its right to free speech.  Founded in 2009, within six years, the site had attracted over 1 billion viewers to its videos.

But access to those videos was soon limited by social media, with restrictions placed on viewing such titles as “Israel’s Legal Founding” by Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz; “The Ten Commandments: Do Not Murder” by Torah scholar Dennis Prager; and “Why Did Americans Fight the Korean War?” by Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and recipient of a National Humanities Medal.  The damage to PragerU resulting from YouTube’s censorship has been substantial, as YouTube is the largest forum for video viewership in the world.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/interfaith-dialogue-icon-omar-suleiman-sharia-andrew-g-bostom/

Imam Omar Suleiman gave a U.S. Congressional invocation May 9, 2019, and just participated in a high profile “inter-faith dialogue” event Thursday March 5, 2020, at North Carolina State University, with J.D. Greear of  the Southern Baptist Convention. Both the Democrats who invited him to “prayerfully” address Congress, and Mr. Greear, were willfully blind to the good Imam Suleiman’s open espousal of Sharia supremacism, and traditionalist Islamic Jew-hatred.

Suleiman has defended Sharia’s hadd punishments for adultery [stoning] and theft [amputation], advocated for both “societal Sharia” and a Caliphate, so that Sharia could “be applied in totality,” and even defended Muslim concubinage and sex-slavery (and see this compilation of video clips, embedded below).  He is also a virulent Muslim Jew-hater, who proudly lauds Islam’s Antisemitic canon, in particular, the Koranic epithet (Koran 5:60) for Jews as “apes and pigs.”

Suleiman’s intense canonical Islamic Jew-hatred was elaborated at length during a 5-part, nearly 6-hour 2012 lecture series, “Lost Chronicles of Bani Israel,” still available online (video extracts embedded below).

In prelude to his discussion of Allah’s “very dramatic action” against a particular group of Jews—transforming them into apes and pigs [Koran 7:166, and 5:60]—Suleiman elucidates what characterizes most Jews—past as prologue—with Koranic indelibility:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/cdc-was-fighting-racism-and-obesity-instead-daniel-greenfield/

The Centers for Disease Control has a $6.6 billion budget and one job which it messes up every time.

The last time the CDC had a serious workout was six years ago during the Ebola crisis. Back then CDC guidelines allowed medical personnel infected with Ebola to avoid a quarantine and interact with Americans until they showed undeniable symptoms of the disease. There were no protocols in place for treating the potentially infected resulting in the further spread of the disease inside the United States.

At the height of the crisis, confidence in the CDC fell to 37%. Meanwhile, CDC personnel had managed to mishandle Ebola virus samples, accidentally sending samples of the live virus to CDC labs. And the heads of the health bureaucracy blamed the lack of funding for their failure to have an Ebola vaccine.

The self-quarantine measures adopted in response to the coronavirus outbreak are partially a response to the lessons of the Ebola disaster.

But during the Ebola crisis, Democrats tried to shift responsibility from the Obama administration by blaming Republicans for cutting the CDC’s budget from $6.5 billion to $5.9 billion. Sound familiar? Where do those billions for the CDC actually go? Among other things, pushing gun control. The terrible budget deal from December allocated $25 million to the CDC and NIH to study gun violence.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/487625-fauci-possibly-a-few-months-until-life-gets-back-to-normal?rnd=1584276483

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday that it is possible it will take “a few months” before life goes “back to normal” amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“Can you try to help us understand, when will life get back to normal?” ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Fauci on “This Week.”

“It’s going to be a matter of several weeks to a few months, for sure,” Fauci responded.

“If you look at the dynamics of how outbreak curves go, you just need to take a look at China and take a look at South Korea right now,” the health official added. “With China, they went to their peak, and they’re coming down right now. There were, just a day or so ago, 11 new cases in China, which is miniscule compared to where it was.”

South Korea, meanwhile, is “starting to flatten,” Fauci said, adding that the change in the trend occurred over about a month and a half in both countries.