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Five Ways Out of the COVID Crisis By Robert VerBruggen

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-five-ways-we-might-defeat-it/?itm_campaign=headline-testingDon’t be complacent. But do have hope.

R ight now there are plenty of reasons to worry deeply about the toll COVID-19 will take on America. Cases and deaths are spiraling upward. Our main tools for addressing the crisis involve simply locking society down, leading to shocking economic harms. And even if these tools prove effective, the virus may simply begin to spread again when they are lifted, or perhaps rebound in the fall and winter when the weather cools down again. Perhaps most troublingly, there are some reports of people being “reinfected,” raising the possibility that even those who survive COVID-19 are not always immune to it going forward. A worst-case scenario would force us to decide between a year or two of repeated lockdowns while we wait for a vaccine on the one hand, and millions of deaths on the other.

I am not going to tell you this is all a hoax. I am not going to tell you to ignore the restrictions lawmakers have placed on your movements or the advice of public-health authorities. But I am a big believer in capitalism and human ingenuity, so I’d like to provide a quick overview of some routes out of this mess people are working on. I have immense hope that at least a couple of them will pan out, and in that event I also hope the folks behind them become unbelievably rich.

1) Find a drug that fights the virus or treats the symptoms. Vaccines take a long time to develop and test, because each must be tailored to a specific virus, but there are already lots of drugs around that might work to treat or prevent COVID-19. We need to figure out which ones immediately. The World Health Organization has launched a “global megatrial” of four possibilities: remdesivir, a drug developed to treat Ebola that, alas, did not work for that purpose; chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, which are used to treat maladies including lupus and malaria; ritonavir/lopinavir, an HIV drug; and ritonavir/lopinavir combined with interferon-beta, which shows some signs of fighting MERS. If they work against COVID-19, these drugs could reduce the disease’s death toll, lessen pressure on intensive-care units, and change the tradeoffs inherent in reopening the economy. Thank God for Big Pharma!

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The coronavirus pandemic versus the climate change emergency By Rupert Darwall

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/490001-the-coronavirus-pandemic-versus-the-climate-change-emergency

Protecting public health was a core function of governments long before the expansion of the state in the 20th century. “Great fears of the sickenesses here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up,” Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary on April 16, 1665. “God preserve us all.” Londoners trying to flee the plague had to obtain a certificate of good health signed by the lord mayor, who also enforced a curfew and a lockdown of plague households. A generation after the Great Plague, Massachusetts was passing laws for the quarantining of smallpox patients.

Nineteenth century urban Britain experienced a huge rise in deaths from infectious diseases. In 1849, more than 50,000 people died from a cholera epidemic that swept London. The previous year, Parliament passed the landmark Public Health Act. According to historians of the act, “public health was not a party matter, nor was the need for comprehensive sanitary legislation controversial.” That year, the physician John Snow made the first great epidemiological breakthrough with his discovery that fecal contamination causes cholera.

A framework of public health law and improved medical knowledge led to the construction of vast networks of clean piped water, high-velocity sewers and recycling of waste. The Victorian sanitation revolution occurred during the zenith of classical liberalism, when public health was understood to mean measures that have to be applied to whole communities and not preventive activity, such as the campaign against the so-called epidemic of childhood obesity. A genuine pandemic, spreading geometrically across the globe in a matter of weeks, shows the phoniness of that “epidemic.” 

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What Is Wrong With Biden–Jill Biden ? By Joan Swirsky

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

https://newswithviews.com/what-is-wrong-with-biden-jill-biden-that-is/

Millions of times a day not only across the United States but the entire world––women taking care of their husbands, doing everything possible to protect them from harm or hurt.

No doubt, that was Jill Biden’s intention when she married the senator from Delaware in 1977, and raised not only the daughter they had together, but his young sons, Beau and Hunter, after the senator’s first wife and baby daughter were killed in a horrific car accident in 1972.

As the years elapsed, Senator Biden became Vice President Biden––for eight years––and the power couple Jill and Joe gained worldwide fame and huge wealth.

But before that, Jill juggled raising their three children with earning a doctoral degree in education and then teaching for years in a psychiatric hospital where her students were emotionally disturbed children and adolescents.

Surely, in both her education and clinical work, she was aware of, sensitive to, knowledgeable about––and protective of––the students whose limitations rendered them incapable of higher function.Surely she became capable of detecting, even diagnosing, thought and speech disorders, dissociative thinking, and incoherent ramblings.

The following examples are sad to witness and once again raise the very serious question: What is wrong with Jill Biden?

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President TrumprbMay Finally Have Control Over the Fed and Jerome Powell’s Insane Economic Policies  by Jim Hoft 

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

 https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/good-news-president-trump-may-finally-have-control-over-the-fed-and-jerome-powells-insane-economic-policies/

It’s reported over the weekend that the US Treasury and the Fed have joined forces in an effort to save the economy.  This action may provide President Trump the ability to manage the economy as he would have liked these past few years while Jerome Powell from the Fed did all he could to hurt the US economy.
We reported on March 16th that just when President Trump saved the US economy, crooked Jerome Powell and the Fed shocked the markets by lowering rates to zero on a Sunday.
President Trump gave an impressive presentation from the White House about the economy and the markets rose 2,000 points.  After the President’s calming press conference on that Friday the markets ended the day with the largest one day increase in history. The DOW was up almost 2,000 points.
But over the weekend, on a Sunday, Powell lowered the rates as much as he could to nearly zero.  This was unprecedented – lowering rates on a Sunday – to rock bottom.  The markets responded by crashing on the following Monday.
Had the Fed held off and lowered rates in small amounts during normal business hours the impact and response would have been positive.  It was as if again, Powell was trying to damage the US economy.
The Fed and its Head – Jerome Powell – have mandates to”promote stable prices” and “maximum employment” and to ensure a “healthy economy”. However, the Fed’s actions over and over these past three years of Trump’s Presidency have been the opposite.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

The Cost of Lies and Political Folly Christopher Gage

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/26/the-cost-of-lies-and-political-folly/

Well, at least we all now know that eating bats is not the delightful culinary jamboree we had assumed.

What about you? Not even remotely curious to clench your teeth into a little pangolin? The poor creature might resemble a poodle wrapped in tree bark, but its scales possess “healing powers,” if you believe that kind of thing.

Not at all tempted? Me neither.

Yet, such a delicacy is wildly popular among Chinese elites. So is telling lies.

Chy-nuh, as President Trump enunciates, is home to the Wuhan virus. That deadly virus locking one billion people indoors, freezing their livelihoods, and killing thousands.

Of course, the president is under tiresome fire for pointing this out. To call it the Wuhan or Chinese virus is “xenophobic.” Take a guess how Ebola got its name.

Perhaps in a time of global crisis, a little honesty wouldn’t go amiss. After all, lies, fabrications, and cover-ups exported Wuhan virus around the globe.

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MY SAY: A CAMPAIGN SPEECH IN NEW YORK

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

Lately I have admired Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic in New York. He has serious flaws personally and as governor, but his predecessors Eliot Spitzer and George Pataki were no better.

The Dems are desperate for a candidate that is coherent and Governor Cuomo is clearly positioning himself.

Yesterday, in a cool and moderate and soothing tone he gave his first campaign speech. He was calm, sober and reassuring about New York’s grim statistics.  Then he wandered off into a homey “I am just like you” speechlet invoking his Italian Sunday meals- you know- spaghetti with meatballs and sausages in a redolent sauce.

He’s got the White House on his radar while Biden sputters and mutters inanities….rsk

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Viral Prerequisites and Nationalist Lessons in Time of Plague Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/29/viral-prerequisites-and-nationalist-lessons-in-time-of-plague/

Trump’s prior initiatives eased the implementation of many of his most effective orders during this crisis.

President Donald Trump has courted endless controversies for promoting nonconventional policies and entertaining contrarian views. From the outset, he oddly seemed to have believed that having navigated the jungles of the Manhattan real estate market—crooked politicians, mercurial unions, neighborhood social activists, the green lobby, leery banks, cutthroat rivals—better prepared him for the job than did a 30-year tenure in the U.S. Senate.

Certainly, candidate and then President Trump’s strident distrust of China was annoying to the American establishment. The Left saw China in rosy terms as the “Other” that just did things like airports, high-speed rail, and solar panels better than did America’s establishment of geriatric white male has-beens. Many on the Right saw China as a cash cow that was going to take over anyway, so why not milk it before the deluge?

In sum, conventional Washington wisdom assumed that appeasing the commercial banditry of an ascendant China, at best might ensure that its new riches led to Westernized political liberalization, and at worst might at least earn them a pat on the head from China as it insidiously assumed its fated role as global hegemon.

Trump once enraged liberal sensibilities by issuing travel bans against countries in the Middle East, Iran, Nigeria, and North Korea as they could not be trusted to audit their own departing citizens. His notion that nations have clearly defined and enforced borders was antithetical to the new norms that open borders and sanctuary cities were part of the global village of the 21st century.

Trump certainly distrusted globalization. He has waged a veritable multifront war against the overreach of transnational organizations, whether that be the European Union or the various agencies of the United Nations. Even relatively uncontroversial steps, such as greenlighting experimental drugs and off-label uses of old medicines for terminal patients drew the ire of federal bureaucrats and medical schools as potentially dangerous or irrelevant in cost-benefit analyses.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Biden Accused of Sexual Assault And the eerie – and expected – silence of #MeToo. Joseph Klein

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/biden-accused-sexual-assault-joseph-klein/

Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted back in December 2018 that “I am a gaffe machine.” That’s a gross understatement, to say the least. The Democrat establishment and the mainstream media continue to treat Biden’s endless stream of gaffes as just harmless patter from good old Uncle Joe. His supporters make excuses for Biden’s obvious mental decline and lash out at anyone who expresses concerns about his fitness to take on the rigors of the presidency. Now, however, they are circling the wagons after a story recently emerged that Joe Biden allegedly committed sexual assault against a former staffer, Tara Reade, when Biden was a vigorous 50 year-old senator. The Biden campaign has denied the allegation, claiming “these accusations are false.” Other women had come forward previously to report inappropriate touching by Biden. But Ms. Reade’s allegation shines a much harsher light on Biden’s possible predatory sexual behavior against one or more females on his staff.

Joe Biden is a self-professed champion of women who has supported the #MeToo movement’s presumption of guilt against the accused. “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally,” Biden said during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing, “you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time.” Now Biden himself stands accused of sexually assaulting Tara Reade in 1993. “He said ‘come on man, I heard you liked me,'” Ms. Reade told an interviewer. “I couldn’t believe it was happening. It was surreal.” According to Ms. Reade, Biden kissed her without her consent, proceeded to push her up against a wall, and used his fingers to penetrate her. Afterwards, Ms. Reade said, “He took his finger. He just like pointed at me and said you’re nothing to me.” There presumably were no witnesses to the alleged assault, although Ms. Reade’s brother and friend recall her contemporaneous account of the incident.

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Trump Tweets That U.S. Won’t Pay for Meghan and Harry’s Security

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

https://time.com/5812365/trump-meghan-prince-harry-security/

U.S. President Donald Trump has offered his opinion on the future of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, insisting the United States government won’t pay for the couple’s security if they live in the United States.

Responding to reports that the couple has moved to California, Trump tweeted on Sunday: “I am a great friend and admirer of the Queen & the United Kingdom. It was reported that Harry and Meghan, who left the Kingdom, would reside permanently in Canada. Now they have left Canada for the U.S. however, the U.S. will not pay for their security protection. They must pay!”

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Dr. Fauci and Dr. Greenspan By Jeff Lipkes

Posted By on March 30th, 2020

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

It’s not the job of the Director of Infectious Diseases at the NIH to be opaque.  If a truly persuasive study convinced Fauci that we would exceed 100,000 deaths, that’s an announcement that should be made in a press conference, with references to the sources, not dropped casually into the middle of an interview — where the point he seemed to be making was that there’s no such thing as a reliable model.

Four and a half minutes into an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN Sunday morning, in the middle of a mini-lecture on the perils of modeling, Dr. Anthony Fauci tossed off an estimate of the death toll in the U.S. from Covid-19:  100,000 to 200,000. 

He said “cases,” then corrected himself, and added “I don’t want to be held to that… We really don’t need to make a projection because it’s such a moving target, and we could so easily be wrong, and mislead people.”  The mentioning of a figure seemed to be entirely at cross purposes from the point Fauci was trying to make.  “To be honest with you, Jake, we don’t have any firm idea,” he replied, when first prodded to provide a number.  “There are things called models, and when someone creates a model they put in various assumptions, and the model is only as good or accurate as your assumptions.”  Why didn’t he leave it at that?