RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/04/tocquevilles-lessons-in-a-time-of-pandemic/

As the crisis continues, and in the aftermath, the activity of the citizens that Alexis de Tocqueville described so well in his book must always include assessing how well their local and state governments have prepared for ordinary and extraordinary events.

The immediate challenge of COVID-19 has been cast as an examination of how individual Americans will fare should they be exposed to the virus. The effort to arrest the spread of the virus has brought unprecedented changes in the daily routines of all Americans. The limitation of activity is apparent when one walks outside. There is a marked silence, regardless of the time of day, almost eerie, that gives one pause.

The check on movement is accompanied by images of field hospitals and graphs showing curves and spreads displayed across news sites. While many are changing their daily routines to comply with the requirements of staying at home and practicing social distancing, a broader concern is the effect on our American democratic foundation.

Alexis de Tocqueville devotes a chapter of his great work, Democracy in America, to discussing the advantages of American democracy. Each of the five parts in the chapter “What Are the Real Advantages That American Society Gains from the Government of Democracy?” encourages thoughtful reflection. The last part, “Activity That Reigns in All Parts of the Political Body in the United States; Influence That It Exercises on Society,” prompts us to think about both the negative and positive effects that the country is facing with respect to halting the exchange between people and their movement.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/04/what-a-year-the-coronavirus-crisis-in-retrospect/

December 31, 2020. What a roller-coaster of a year it has been.

In January, congressional Democrats were busy trying to impeach the president of the United States. That same month, news of a new, highly contagious virus leaked out of China and began to circulate in the West. The stock market stumbled, then recovered and went on to new heights, flirting with the magic number 30,000. Unemployment was at historic lows.

Then more worrying news about the virus emerged from China. It was difficult to wrest the facts from the secretive Communist Party. At the end of January, President Trump suspended all flights from China, a decision for which he was roundly condemned as “racist” and “xenophobic.”

It was not until March that the narrative shifted. In January, Trump had overreacted. By mid-March, he was accused of under-reacting. For weeks on end, there was only one subject: coronavirus, the “Wuhan virus,” the CCP flu.

It seems long ago now, but the dual onslaught of the new coronavirus and the resulting economic meltdown turned the world upside down.

For a brief period, hysteria reigned. The stock market plunged by thousands of points, erasing trillions of dollars of wealth. Whole states went into virtual lockdown. People started parading about—to the extent that they went out at all—in latex gloves and medical masks. All businesses deemed “non-essential” were shuttered for weeks. Many schools and colleges closed, first for weeks, then for the rest of the semester.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/covid19_has_seen_america_develop_a_dangerous_expertocracy.html

People are beginning to realize that the experts have been wrong about a lot of things when it comes to COVID-19. This is due in part to the ever-changing knowledge we’re acquiring about the disease. It’s a good thing that the experts can adjust their ideas as they acquire new evidence. The problem, though, is that we are allowing medicine and science experts to make vast, unquestioned policy decisions, and that’s a perilous thing to do.

Ever since the early Progressives, back at the turn of the 20th century, Americans, especially Democrats, have had a reverence for expertise. Woodrow Wilson, who was the leader of American Progressivism, was already dreaming of rule by experts when he was still a Bryn Mawr College professor.

In 1887, Wilson wrote a far-reaching paper dismissing the Constitution as defective (too much power for the people) and, instead, called for a bureaucracy of experts to run the country. America’s rising middle-class fell in love with the idea and has been in love with it ever since. Nowadays, we look to experts in everything, including raising our own children — and we do this despite the conflicting information they give and the daily proof that, the more theoretical the subject, the more often they are wrong (and wrong in ways that run profoundly contrary to common sense).

https://www.breitbart.com/border/2020/04/04/common-anti-parasite-drug-may-kill-coronavirus-in-under-48-hours-say-researchers/

Researchers in Australia report that Ivermectin, an FDA-approved drug commonly used to treat parasites, appears to be effective in treating the SARS-COV-2 coronavirus (COVID-19). The drug is widely available and can be “repurposed” for this application, doctors said.

The ScienceDirect journal, Antiviral Research, published an article by a group of Australian researchers from Monash University in Melbourne reporting that Ivermectin appears to be effective at inhibiting the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

The article states:

Ivermectin is an inhibitor of the COVID-19 causative virus (SARS-CoV-2) in vitro.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Perhaps it is because with age has come cynicism regarding our political class and the press. I am not sure. What I do know is that I am confident in the innate ability of Americans to adapt to trying situations and, if left free, to change conditions for the better for themselves and their fellow man, be that through government or industry. But I am less enamored of our political leaders in Washington and the media.

The United States is the richest large country in the world. We have a healthcare system that attracts the world’s wealthiest individuals. While we may lag some Asian and European nations, we are more literate and better educated than most of the world. We value personal freedom more than any other people, having inherited a unique form of government from our forebearers. Yet, we have a history of gullibility. We believed the editors of Newsweek and Time when they ran articles in the 1970s titled, respectively, “The Cooling World” and “A New Ice Age?” We failed to understand the difference in time to a geologist and opportunistic reporters. We were frightened by Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s prophecy of doom in their 1968 book, The Population Bomb: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death, in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” We were shocked by stories of disasters related to Y2K and of those about asteroids. More recently, entire industries have been built around scaring people about the alleged anthropomorphic causes of global warming: Teslas to wind farms to solar panels – all of which require government assistance to survive.   

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/dont_count_on_the_model_prediction_for_coronavirus_deaths.html

For the first time in decades, Americans who hear the word “model” are more likely to visualize a graph than a woman on a runway.  Now, in the era of the coronavirus, we all are morbidly fixated on the projections that the experts are making regarding the number of people who will contract the virus and the number of them who can be expected to die.

On March 31 at the daily White House briefing, we heard from Drs. Fauci and Birx that the most credible model anticipates a final outcome of 100,000–200,000 American deaths due to the virus.  Subsequent discussion repeatedly stressed that the actual number might be much higher or much lower depending on whether the social distancing guidelines are followed.  The more these two highly respected scientists discussed the matter, the more evident it became that the model cannot be relied on to provide assurance about how the pandemic will play out.  This is not a failure on the part of these two credible scientists; it is a failure of the model.

When one does not know the current level of infection in the population, when little information is available about how quickly the virus can be transmitted from one person to the next, when we remain unsure of whether asymptomatic corona carriers are as contagious as those with symptoms, when nobody seems to know how long the average asymptomatic carrier remains in that state, when we are unable to determine the actual mortality rate among the afflicted — when basic pieces of the puzzle such as these have yet to be inserted into the bigger picture, it is unreasonable to expect this particular model to predict accurately.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/president-trump-is-magnificently-right-about-infrastructure/

President Trump’s proposal to spend $2 trillion to rebuild American infrastructure was as gutsy as it gets, coming on the heels of another $2 trillion in emergency economic aid. The president tweeted, “With interest rates for the United States being at ZERO, this is the time to do our decades long awaited Infrastructure Bill. It should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars, and be focused solely on jobs and rebuilding the once great infrastructure of our Country!”

We can’t afford it, but we can’t afford not to do it. That’s just what I proposed in my last PJ column, “Fix Your Roof While It’s Raining.” The critical decisions will be about what we call “infrastructure.” The president said, “We’re not going to do the Green New Deal and spend 40% of the money on things that people just have fun with.”

What are the top priorities? Roads, bridges and tunnels are obvious. Rail is also important. America’s oil production surge strained our transport system, rail as well as pipelines, and drastically raised freight costs. Overall, the U.S. producer price index is barely changed over the past ten years, but rail transport costs are up 30%.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/2/gertrude-himmelfarb-the-enlightenment

The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism—relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity. And since then, generations of intelligent students under the guidance of their enlightened professors have looked into the abyss, have contemplated those beasts, and have said, “How interesting, how exciting.”
                  —Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 1994

When Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote about the abyss consuming the intellectual and moral traditions of her own time, she was one of the first to recognise how seductive was its appeal and how depraved its outcome. In her book On Looking into the Abyss, she attributed the original insight to the critic Lionel Trilling, who detected it in the early 1960s in the underbelly of the modernist movement that had dominated literature and the arts since the early twentieth century. Himmelfarb, however, came to her own recognition from another direction entirely, partly from her study of the history of ideas in Britain’s Victorian era but also from the apparently unlikely field of the history of social policy that led the Victorians to define poverty as a social problem. In the process, up to her death on December 30 last year, aged ninety-seven, those who knew her work came to regard her as not only one of the great American historians of her time but one of her nation’s most compelling moral critics. In American political circles she was best known as Bea Kristol, wife and mother, respectively, of the neoconservative authors and editors Irving Kristol and William Kristol.

Modernists, from their earliest public manifestations in London’s Bloomsbury, had regarded the Christian morality of the English-speaking world as the greatest obstacle to the bohemianism of “free thought” and “free love” they craved.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/490745-a-strong-us-5g-sector-p

On Dec. 12, 1901, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated the very first transatlantic radio-wave transmission and ushered in a new age of wireless communications. More than a century later, wireless technology still is one of our primary sources of communication. But as our radio-wave highways become increasingly congested, each new generation of wireless technology is forced to ascend into higher and higher frequencies. The fifth generation of wireless technology, known as “5G,” will expand into spectrum bands Marconi could never have foreseen.

Because it will allow data to be transmitted more quickly and efficiently than ever before, 5G technology has the potential to improve everything from search and rescue missions and medical care to transportation, real-time language translation and precision farming. It could allow firefighters to use thermal imaging to see through smoke and locate victims more easily. It could help specialists perform remote robotic surgery on patients who are far away. And it could help American soldiers on the battlefield, giving them real-time information about their adversaries while monitoring their status and location. Such developments could revolutionize the technological landscape and pump trillions of dollars into our global economy. Perhaps most important, 5G could create millions of new U.S. jobs and become integral to our competitiveness in the global marketplace.

But like any new technology, 5G is not without risks. Currently, the only global company that is competitively producing all of the equipment necessary to fully implement 5G is China-based Huawei. While Huawei calls itself “employee-owned,” Chinese laws require companies to assist in national intelligence work unbeknownst to their customers — potentially rendering the equipment unsecure. This presents a major challenge for 5G implementation in the United States, since American companies either have to invent their own equipment or utilize Huawei’s — knowing that it could be accessed by the Chinese government.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/490694-just-say-no-to-typical-washington-m

NBC News reports that preliminary discussions have begun on Capitol Hill regarding the establishment of a 9/11 Commission-type inquiry about the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. The discussions are said predominantly to involve Democrats and to be focused on the Trump administration’s performance. As outlined, the exercise would smack of the worst aspects of the 9/11 Commission: the partisan blame-game, which eventually petered into the look-like-we’re-doing-something creation of bloated and ludicrously expensive new bureaucracy.

The 9/11 Commission was a brainchild of the political class, which is why Washington remembers it fondly. To be fair, the report it generated was well written, as these extravaganzas go. It was remarkably gimlet-eyed about radical Islamic ideology (what would be more accurately described as sharia supremacism) as the instigator of jihadist terrorism — indeed, much more willing to confront this challenge than the progressive political class’s typical approach of reimagining Islam into a relentlessly “peaceful” creed to which terrorism is anathematic “anti-Muslim activity.”

That said, the 9/11 Commission was primarily an exercise in partisan politics. That is why, in the actual formation of substantive counterterrorism policy, the commission was ignored once Washington’s virtue-signally objectives were achieved. Quite contrary to the commission’s conclusions, it became de rigueur in the Obama years to shift our national security approach to opposing “violent extremism,” on the premise that fundamentalist Islam is no more likely to spur terrorism than movements derived from other religions or political agendas (e.g., limited-government conservatism, Second Amendment advocacy).