Identity Politics Lied. New Yorkers Died

Posted by Daniel Greenfield Sunday, April 05, 2020 3 Comments @ Sultan Knish Blog 

Last year, New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot was warning that “even brief contact with the police or indirect exposure is associated with lasting harm to people’s physical and mental health”.

“We as a public health department have really been trying to frame criminal justice system involvement as an exposure,” Barbot’s epidemiologist, Kimberly Zweig, claimed.

Zweig had a degree in epidemiology, but her focus was entirely on PTSD and stress. Not on disease.

Why was New York City so badly unprepared for the arrival of the coronavirus? The answer was radical politics. And Barbot and Zweig embodied the public health mismanagement of a radical administration.

Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, the disgraced figure at the center of the city’s coronavirus meltdown, had graduated from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in 1991. She had worked as a pediatrician, before being selected as the Medical Director for the Office of School Health in New York in 2003. Her qualification for the job was unclear and her bio doesn’t list any administrative degrees.

In 2010, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake chose Barbot as Baltimore's health commissioner. Blake would later become infamous for announcing that she had given the city's race rioters "space to destroy".

The city's murder rate has continued hitting new highs since.

A few years later, Barbot came back to New York City and began working her way up through the Department of Health. When she was named Health Commissioner last year, the big news was that the city had its “first Latina commissioner” who had come out the Bronx housing projects.

Barbot succeeded Mary T. Bassett: a 17-year veteran of the University of Zimbabwe. Bassett had launched the Center for Health Equity and spent her time warning of the public health threat from racism in talks, "Why Your Doctor Should Care About Social Justice", articles, “How Does Racism Affect Your Health”, and research papers, “Uprooting Institutionalized Racism as Public Health Practice.”

As Health Commissioner, Barbot's bio boasted that "she uses a racial equity lens" and credited her with "spearheading the creation of the Center for Health Equity which operationalizes the Department’s commitment to racial justice."

As the coronavirus bore down on New York City, Barbot and the Health Department were busy operationalizing social justice while remaining oblivious to the scientific realities of the pandemic. The department’s focus on health equity required it to discourage recent arrivals from Wuhan from going into self-quarantine or avoiding large public gatherings like the Lunar New Year celebrations.

“We are very clear: We wish New Yorkers a Happy Lunar New Year and we encourage people to spend time with their families and go about their celebration,” Barbot insisted.

A week later, Barbot appeared at a press event promoting Lunar New Year celebrations in Chinatown.

"As we gear up to celebrate the #LunarNewYear in NYC, I want to assure New Yorkers that there is no reason for anyone to change their holiday plans, avoid the subway, or certain parts of the city because of #coronavirus," she insisted.

By then there had already been over 17,000 cases of the Wuhan Virus in China with nearly 3,000 new cases in one day. For the first time, someone outside Mainland China had died of the disease.

Manhattan’s Chinatown, where Barbot had appeared, is one of the densest parts of the city. The old core community where the Lunar New Year celebration is based is a maze of cramped tenements, narrow streets, tiny stores whose counters extend far into the street, and other unsafe conditions

Barbot went on urging people to participate in the parade while spreading misinformation about the risk. “You won’t get it merely from riding the subways – you get it from secretions,” she even claimed.

The commissioner went on with the happy talk in March.

After the first coronavirus case in the city, she claimed that "disease detectives" would prevent the spread of the coronavirus and that New Yorkers were "at low risk".

"As we confront this emerging outbreak, we need to separate facts from fear, and guard against stigma and panic," Commissioner Barbot signed off: warning that the real enemy was prejudice.

“There’s no indication that being in a car, being in the subways with someone who’s potentially sick is a risk factor,” she told New Yorkers.

Four days later, she finally admitted, “It’s not just prolonged household contact as we initially thought. We have evidence that there are other types of interactions that can occur that can transmit the virus.”

Barbot and her boss, Mayor Bill de Blasio, had been spreading dangerous nonsense with no scientific basis. When asked about some of her claims at a press conference, she said, “This is a novel virus that we’re still learning a lot about.”

That was better than Bill de Blasio who, when asked how Barbot's Department of Health had decided that the virus dies quickly in the air, rambled, "All information is valuable, but the information that we’re gleaning from our own direct experience is the most valuable to us.”

Had New York City’s health authorities lost their minds? Not exactly. They had enveloped their medical decisions in a fog of identity politics pseudoscience which had redefined medicine around equity.

That was Barbot’s real job. The obsession with equity in everything had been the signature of the entire De Blasio administration. Just as Marxists had used class as the master theory explaining all the problems of human history, radicals in this country had redefined racism as the explanation for all ills.

To Barbot and De Blasio, the coronavirus wasn’t the real threat, racism was. Their job was to suppress overreaction to the coronavirus by persuading New Yorkers that there was no real risk of contagion.

The actual science, objective research, was irrelevant compared to the city’s own truths about racism.

In the midst of the pandemic, this may seem inconceivable, but all that happened was that New York City’s leaders applied the same approach to the coronavirus that they had used for crime and terrorism.

When it came to terrorism and crime, the policy had been to minimize the risk, cover up actual cases and to warn against prejudice toward communities likely to engage in crime or terrorism. This approach had failed miserably in preventing crime or terrorism, but the actual scale of the damage had not been so devastating as to actually make a major dent in daily life in New York City.

New York City’s Health Department had already medicalized this approach with HIV. Last year, the Health Department was back to running ads encouraging sex with HIV positive people.

"This new U = U campaign underscores the fact that people living with HIV have more choices than ever before,” Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot boasted. “With a sexual health plan that includes taking HIV medication, regular medical care, and using condoms, New Yorkers with HIV can live long, fulfilling, and healthy lives with the options they have now.”

“People living with HIV are lovable, touchable, and should feel confident that, with effective treatment, they can live free of the concern of transmitting the virus," Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, Deputy Commissioner for the Health Department’s Division of Disease Control added.

The difference with coronavirus was how quickly the risk of a disease outbreak turned into the reality.

New York City’s politicized government had inhabited its own bubble in which filling the streets with criminals, protecting terrorists and illegal aliens, or encouraging unsafe sex, was ideologically correct. And the casualties of this ideological destruction, whether bicycling tourists in Manhattan, young gay men, or young women in Central Park, were easy enough to bury in press releases full of Newspeak.

But the coronavirus crisis did not work that way. And Barbot and De Blasio were behind the curve. The radicals running the city were not only out of step with science, but with the rest of the country.

By the time reality, in the form of angry editorials, state action, local protests, intruded, it was too late.

The coronavirus outbreak has exploded in New York City. And everyone has gone all in on the cover-up. The inept De Blasio administration, which didn’t bother ordering protective equipment until March, when it was still assuring New Yorkers that there was nothing to worry about, has been blaming Trump.

But that’s a mistake.

The coronavirus pandemic contains important lessons. Trying to suppress those lessons will carry an even heavier price. The price can be postponed, but the interest rate on it will be even higher.

New York City’s dense grid, its cramped public transportation, and large foreign population put it at risk, but it was an ideological contempt for objective science by identity politics radicals that left it naked.

The Chinese Communist leadership had refused to believe that a virus could take off in their perfect system. Ideology blinded them to the outbreak the same way it did their leftist counterparts in New York City who were obsessed with making sure that the Lunar New Year celebrations went forward in their perfect utopia to prove that science doesn’t matter and that the only real virus is racism.

Mayor Bill de Blasio had dismantled the city’s Department of Health, replacing its personnel with unqualified hacks whose job was to medicalize social justice, and warn of the public health threats of the police, or hair discrimination, while assuring city residents that they had nothing to fear from COVID-19.

New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot warned New Yorkers that brief contact with the police was dangerous, but that brief contact with people infected with the coronavirus wasn’t.

Identity politics lied. New Yorkers died.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thanks for reading.

A Howard Zinn Pandemic

How the Zinn Education Project is exploiting this crisis and inserting their left-wing propaganda into the education and curricula of even more young American students.

By Mary Grabar April 4, 2020 18 Comments | @ American Greatness

In the midst of a global pandemic, left-wing pundits and politicians spin the blame to comport with the propaganda coming from Communist China, the regime responsible for the virus’s spread in the first place.

And as students are forced to take classes remotely, companies such as National Public Radio, Newsela, and the Zinn Education Project—with the assistance of U.S. taxpayers—are ensuring they get the left-wing version of current events along with their history lessons.

Consider a March 27 email from the Zinn Education Project, the propaganda arm for the late Howard Zinn and his Marxist A People’s History of the United States. It began: “It feels impossible to start any email during this strange and scary time without first acknowledging our shared circumstances: a pandemic, an inept, untrustworthy, racist demagogue in the White House; and the disruption to almost every tiny square of our personal and professional lives.” This, by the way, one day after a two-day campaign that offered free e-books of A Young People’s History of the United States.

The Zinn project’s Soviet-style rhetoric serves to introduce new products for teachers and parents educating children at home. Offered were two lessons on pandemics that made connections between the coronavirus and climate change, and another was “The 1918 Flu: How Information Policing and Nationalist Propaganda Worsened a Pandemic a Century Ago.”
 

The Zinn Education Project also announced online mini-classes led by “people’s historians.” The first one, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” was conducted by Jeanne Theoharis, a Brooklyn College professor who specializes in “civil rights and Black Power movements and the politics of race and education,” and by Jesse Hagopian, who teaches ethnic studies at Garfield High School in Seattle, where he also serves as co-advisor to the Black Student Union and an editor for Rethinking Schools, the nonprofit that produces and distributes materials for the Zinn Education Project.

 

 

The Zinn project also recommends a number of podcasts as “teaching tools”: The 1619 Project, “Democracy Now!” (a show to the left of MSNBC), Code Switch (which “explores overlapping themes of race, ethnicity, and culture”), Justice in America (on mass incarceration), Reveal (“in-depth stories,” such as on the coronavirus and the environment), Scene on Radio (podcasts calling “into question the United States’ claim to democracy”), School Colors (about “Ocean-Brownsville in Brooklyn where Black and Puerto Rican parents tried to exercise power over their schools”), This Land (how a murder case “opened an investigation into half the land in Oklahoma and the treaty rights of five tribes. . . . the Trump administration’s involvement, the larger right-wing attack on tribal sovereignty. . . .”), and Uncivil (profiles of “everyday people whose current circumstances are inextricably tied to the Civil War and its memory” like “Pa Shed, who escaped slavery, joined the Union Army, [and] led a daring and successful raid with Harriet Tubman”). In the line-up were also two products from publicly funded National Public Radio: Story Corps and Throughline.

 

NPR is not Big Bird, as proponents for funding, even during a national emergency, claim. NPR, through these two programs, is partnering with the Zinn Education Project. It seems to be a well-suited match: StoryCorps “interviews highlight people’s memories of movements and events in U.S. history, like the Stonewall riot, voter suppression, Japanese American internment, racial profiling, immigration, and more.”

 

Thoroughline is a weekly series that “explores the history of stories in the headlines today,” with recent episodes covering “the history of vaccinations in the United States, the biography and legacy of [Iranian terrorist] Qasseim Soleimani, LGBTQ activism before Stonewall, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment and more."

 

The Zinn Education Project is also one of 100 partners of Newsela, a news gathering source that adapts articles to grade level and offers teachers labor-saving “assignment planning,” “writing prompts,” and “built-in assessments”—with multiple choice quiz questions devised and graded by Newsela staff.

 

On March 13, Newsela, which is already reaching “90 percent of all schools in the U.S.” (more than “20 million students and 1.8 million teachers”), offered “complimentary access” to help teachers “embrace distance learning” during school closures. As one headline brags, this “content repository” is “replac[ing] traditional textbooks.” And that content, ostensibly created to be “relevant” and to inspire “empathy,” is produced with the help of a “partner,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, which groups discussions around “identity, diversity, justice, and action.” Recently, Newsela added social-emotional learning (SEL) to their list of products and in their March 31 newsletter advertised “SEL content,” along with Distance Learning Collections and Student Reading Clubs, “to help your students adapt, one day at a time, to at-home learning.”

 

Newsela was founded by Matthew Gross, who today is CEO. Gross, a former Teach for America music teacher, claims he was inspired to found the company when he tried to find content to engage students, and help his son, a struggling reader. But Gross also had some connections: he was “Executive Director of the Regents Research Fund, a privately funded affiliate of the New York State Board of Regents and Education Department that helped lead the implementation of Race to the Top-driven education reforms.”

 

Recall that Race to the Top was the Obama-era stimulus program that dangled prize money before states in 2009 and 2010 in exchange for accepting the yet-to-be-written Common Core standards. This young music teacher, amazingly, “played a leadership role in the development of the Regents Research Fellows, a team of nationally recognized thought leaders.” These “thought leaders” helped lead “the implementation of the Common Core,” and next-generation assessments. The name Newsela combines “news” and “ELA” (English Language Arts). Under Common Core, ELA standards replaced much of the literary reading with nonfiction, and emphasized listening and discussion skills.

 

Last year, Newsela raised $50 million, some of it from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Newsela has more than 100 employees, and the highest paid executive makes $490,000; average executive pay elsewhere is around $215,000.

 

Newsela recently adapted six of the Zinn Education Project’s high school-level lessons for four reading levels—between the third and ninth grades. These are “Columbus Discovered the Taino People, Then Tried to Erase Them,” “Explaining the Summer of 1919” (i.e., the race riots), “What We Don’t Learn About the Black Panther Party—but Should,” “The Other ’68: Black Power During Reconstruction,” “Life in an Internment Camp Drove Yuri Kochiyama’s Commitment to Social Justice,” and “Education Project Aims to Set the Record Straight on Historical Myths,” the last a Washington Post column from 2017 that repeats Zinn talking points (which I have debunked) and describes how local students have used Zinn Education Project lessons for activism.

 

As examples, SEED Public Charter School students “joined hundreds of other students from throughout the Washington area in a show of support” for a protest against the Dakota access pipeline (#NativeNationsRise march to the White House). They also began a campaign to change the name of the Washington Redskins football team.

At Capital City Charter, students began a petition drive to rename Columbus Day “Indigenous Peoples Day” and asked the Washington D.C. city council to hold hearings (as the Zinn Education Project “Abolish Columbus Day” campaign kit instructs). As it turned out, the council and mayor agreed to change the name to Indigenous Peoples Day for 2019 (a vote by Congress is needed to make it permanent). Thanks to Newsela, third-graders can learn about the wonderful things the Zinn Education Project does!

Other Newsela partners include the Smithsonian (which hosted two ZEP teacher “teach-in” workshops last fall), The Undefeated (“premier platform for exploring the intersections of race, sports and culture”), and news outlets (who no doubt are happy to provide content to future consumers), like the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Aljazeera, WGBH (Boston public broadcasting), PRI (Public Radio International), The American Prospect, and various local news gathering organizations. Only two—the Council of Economic Education and the Bill of Rights Institute—present non-social justice materials, but their positions rarely find their way into classroom materials. There are no right-leaning news outlets among Newsela’s more than 100 “partners.”

Newsela is no doubt hoping teachers and administrators get so hooked on their product that once schools are back in session, they will keep their subscriptions (paid by tuition and taxpayers, of course). Newsela will offer yet one more means by which the leftist disinformation that is called “A People’s History” can spread, like a contagion, among America’s youth.

Why is the Media Exempt from Coronavirus Business Shutdowns?

By Daniel Greenfield 2 Comments Thursday, April 02, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog

"You're actually sitting too close," President Trump remarked at a press briefing. "Really, we should probably get rid of about 75, 80 percent of you.”

Trump was only partly joking.

The White House Correspondents Association had asked its members to sit one seat apart at press briefings, but at a time when most businesses have been shut down even when they offer far more space to customers and employees, the sight of crowded press briefings is still surreally hypocritical.

Governor Jared Polis delivered his press briefing on social distancing surrounded by a huddle of other Colorado officials, including a sign language translator, and tightly packed reporters facing him. That’s not unusual. Governors and mayors have announced the shutdown of countless businesses for the sake of social distancing in the same format that is the opposite of social distancing.

The exemption for the media from coronavirus rules extends beyond these strange scenes.

When Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an order effectively shutting down most New York non-essential businesses, the list of essential organizations exempted from the order included hospitals, power plants, pharmacies, farms, banks, supermarkets, and the media. One of these items is not like the others.

The essential businesses provide necessary services that allow people to function. That’s not the media.

The question of what is an “essential business” is the difference between employment or unemployment, staying in business or going bankrupt, for millions of Americans. It’s a weighty financial and moral question that the media has entirely evaded by cutting in line and relying on its privilege.

A generation ago it might have been argued that the media provides important updates, but in the age of Twitter and handheld access to any website, the idea that the public is dependent on the media to stay informed about coronavirus health and safety information, or any other emergency issue, is silly.

If the authorities really need to alert the percentage of the population that uses radio and television, but not the internet, there’s always the Emergency Broadcasting System.

Forget the press conferences: those are bad enough and ought to go the way of phrenology and the buggy whip. But much of what the media does is either whip up panic from its offices or dispatch reporters to interview people. None of that accords with the requirements of social distancing.

When movie and television productions have been shut down because they’re an unsafe environment, why is crowding talking heads behind a desk and twenty times their number of crew into a studio okay?

Why is dispatching reporters to stick microphones in front of senior citizens at a Trader Joe’s or the emergency room of a hospital considered healthy or safe, rather than a public health hazard?

The media should be properly classified as entertainment and deemed non-essential. Aside from exploitative coronavirus coverage, much of what the media does is entertain, albeit badly, with celebrity gossip, scandals, shaming, cooking tips, viral videos, crossword puzzles, and anything that keeps it afloat.

None of that is essential.

And yet the Colorado Press Association dispatched a letter to Governor Polis demanding "assurances that the news reporting operations will continue to be an essential part of emergency personnel."

Firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and reporters. Pick one that doesn’t belong in that category.

No one who drives a car off a snowy embankment into freezing waters looks upward hoping to see a camera and microphone, instead of a red jumpsuit or a blue uniform with a silver badge. If you’re not saving lives, you’re not emergency personnel. Smearing your political opponents is not an emergency.

The Florida Press Association wrote to Governor DeSantis pleading with him to exempt the media from "business shutdowns or shelter-in-place programs within Florida" because the media is "'essential' to public health and welfare."

A gym does far more for public health than every single media outlet combined. And we’re closing the gyms.

The FPA claimed that "media organizations are essential businesses to remain open during the COVID-19 crisis in order to continue to inform the public about their health, safety and welfare and convey accurate, reliable and critical information at a time of great need."

The media is many things: a source of accurate and reliable information isn’t one of them.

Any business that simply posts CDC advisories on its premises can do it better. Every platform is already embedding the same coronavirus advisories about social distancing and washing your hands.

But, mostly, the media has gotten its way.

Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania claimed that he was closing all “non-life sustaining” businesses and designated the media a "life-sustaining" business.

Whose life does the media sustain except, vampirically, its own?

Los Angeles County's order treats "newspapers, magazines, television, radio, podcasts" as being on a par with truckers, dentists, and police officers. (And since this is California, "cannabis dispensaries".) As did San Francisco, though beyond the media, it also took care to designate bicycle repair shops and cannabis dispensaries as essential businesses. This has been the template across California.

But who decided that the media is an essential business and why?

It’s not a First Amendment issue. Not when churches and synagogues have been shuttered. San Jose ordered a firearms store to shut down, deeming it a non-essential business. A firearms dealer is in the business of enabling the Second Amendment rights of people on a much broader scale than a newspaper is in the business of enabling the First Amendment rights of anyone except its employees.

San Jose’s definition of essential, which encompasses marijuana and media, but not guns, shows that the issue is not an objective one of need, but of values. And values are based on tribal feelings.

The CDC had warned that smoking and using marijuana increases coronavirus risks for younger people. Health advisories had warned drug users against sharing drug paraphernalia because it can spread the coronavirus. But San Jose chose to protect marijuana stores because it likes pot and hates guns.

California and New York’s governments really like the media even though it poses a health risk.

As the rolling shutdowns continue, the ultimate debate over the privileges of the media may be weighed by the White House. And the lobbying campaign is underway.

The Chamber of Commerce listed the media on its proposed roll of essential services in its letter to President Trump. The letter asks him to include the media on the list of federal exemptions.

Such decisions often end up being made by advisors and bureaucrats. This should not be one of them.

The media should not benefit from an exemption that it has done nothing to earn. Instead of serving a constructive function, it has whipped up panic, spread fear and doubt, sought out scapegoats, and behaved irresponsibly at every turn because it served its financial and ideological agendas. The last thing America needs is for hardworking people to be forced out of a job while the media gets a free pass.

It’s unjust and unfair for small businesses to have to shut their doors, while CNN goes on with business as usual. It’s wrong for the average American to be told he’s non-essential, but that Jim Acosta is.

President Trump should trash the media’s demand for an exemption from shutdown rules. And people should begin asking some tough questions about why they’re out of a job while the media swarms press briefings, sticks microphones in front of health care workers and children, and isn’t held accountable.

 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Attaboy Girl!

By Rich Kozlovich

Recently there's been a lot of talk about Ruth Bader Ginsburg going to the gym with a trainer present, as outlined in this article by Kristinn Taylor, In Midst of DC's Coronavirus Shutdown, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Meets Trainer for Workouts at Supreme Court Gym, posted on April 1st.  Ruth Bader Ginsberg works out?  You’re kidding me, right?  Is this an April Fool's joke?  Apparently not, and it was followed with hundreds of comments, some of them very unpleasant, which I would expect regarding RBG. 

As I've said in the past, I've been privileged to be part of an e-mail group that's educated, intelligent, and polite, even when we disagree, which is regularly since some are very liberal and others are very conservative, yet the discussions remains respectful.  That's why I feel privileged to be a part of this group, and what I admire about our group the most.

Having said that, our group has ventured in on this business with BRG having the nerve to go out of her house, and worse yet, going to a gym with a trainer, declaring she's a bad example and represents a danger to the public as a result.  My initial comment was she was doing this because she wasn't any more taken in by all this pandemic hysteria than I am, and I said something I never in my life thought I could possibly utter - I gave her an Attaboy Girl.

Well, this didn't go away, and led to more discussion over the whole surrounding subject of this China flu and what's happening. 

There are pandemics every year, we just don’t call them pandemics because they’ve become a part of our lives.  The World Health Organization, which declares these things, isn’t a true health organization.  It’s like the IPCC, which isn’t a true science group, they’re both part of the UN, and they’re both UN political cat’s paws masquerading as science and health organizations. 

So, declaring what’s a pandemic apparently has nothing to do with numbers, otherwise they would declare flu pandemics each and every year based on the numbers of people infected and die.   Yet they don’t!  I say they're all pandemics, others say they're merely epidemics, but this question remains: Have we ever shut down the nation over pandemics or epidemics in the past?  The answer is no!

In days gone by most people went to work unless they were really sick.  That’s been an American societal paradigm for all of my life.  I ran a bread route many years ago, and at times sick as a dog.  Breadmen have to give notice if they’re going to die, and preferably at least three days’ notice so they can get the bread out without interruption.  I’m being factious of course, but that was, and is, the mentality in the bread business. 

Prudence versus panic is a matter of definition.  I call what’s going on panic fueled by hyperbolic hysterical politicians and writers with an anti-American and anti-Trump agenda.  Let's put this in perspective. Why in the world are we treating this "pandemic" differently than all the other infectious diseases that were declared as “pandemics” that has stuck this nation over the years? 

Is it going to be worse than seasonal flu cases?  Maybe, but so far there no indication it will be that much more, and even then, by how much worse where we decide to shut down the nation, and destroy the world’s economy.  What's the break point for that decision?  Who makes it?  The Constitution doesn't give the President or the Congress the right to do that, and as far as I've been able to tell, there's no State Constitution that gives Governors, or their legislatures, the right to do that. 

I've seen figures that state the death toll for seasonal flu is between 20,000 and 36,000 and one writer claimed as many as 60,000.  Whatever the actual numbers are, that’s a lot of darn people dying every year, and we have to ask: Is this any worse?  If so by how much? 

And comparing numbers from America and other countries is apparently meaningless because whenever these things strike, they effect different populations differently.  In the past we just sucked it up and went on with our lives.  If we were sick, we stayed home, that is if we were really sick.  Otherwise most were expected to go to work, and they did. 

Take these things seriously but we need to stop being panicked by a lunatic media, and a political element that so desires to destroy Trump they actually love this pandemic, in order to once again blame him, and attack him with lies and ridiculous charges.  This flu virus should be taken seriously, but we need to suck it up and recognize this is all being promoted with hyperbole, lies, and politics.  And taking something seriously is different than becoming hysterical.

This was in 2014, and is a good example of the double standard
set by the media and the Democrat party

Name one of these pandemics where the media attacked the sitting President as they’re doing now. Name one of these lunatic leftist politicians who are attacking Trump that did anything similar when Obama was President. Obama said to suck it up when Swine flu struck and no one said a thing.

I went to the bank last week and they know me and that I write about this kind of thing.  We had some discussion, and of course I said this was all insanity.  They were polite, but I could tell they didn't want to dispute this with a customer.  We could only go in one at a time.  When the guy before me was leaving, I was allowed to go in.  Remember, he passed right beside me, right beside the manager, touched two door handles, going in and going out, and handed the teller paper work.  And this goes on all day long, six days a week. 

I forgot to sign the back of my check so the teller handed my check back and a pen to sign it.  After I handed both back to her I snarkerly, with a bit of dramatic air said, Oooooh, I touched the pen, thinking she would see the humor in that statement.   Wrong – she actually had a bit of a shock to her expression.  I’ve known this teller for years, and she’s no wall flower, but it was clear she’s intimidated by all this hyperbole. 

We have lost our minds!!!!!!!!

We need to start seeing this clearly.  Flu viruses - yearly – are a part of our lives.  It’s been that way year after year, going back into the 1800’s and probably more, and the only one that was truly a pandemic disaster was the Spanish Influence, killing over 20 million people.   This isn’t the Spanish Influenza – oops is that racist? – and when it’s all said and done, we’re going to look around at the devastation this hysteria caused and ask – it that all there was? 

There are probably a lot of asymptomatic people in my area, but I also think that’s true everywhere.  But I believe it always has been so, but we never thought shutting of down the nation, destroying businesses, putting millions out of work, bankrupting millions, ultimately causing untold numbers of foreclosures as time goes by, promoting crime – burglaries have skyrocketed – and when it’s over, what about those disrupted lives, when we say:  Sorry about that, that's all there was, but we had to destroy your lives to save you. 

As I said, I never in my life thought I would say this about RBG, especially since saying this almost gives me hives – Ruth Bader Ginsburg:  Attaboy Girl!

The Dissident - Sundance's Hottest Documentary is Turkish Government Propaganda

By Daniel Greenfield  Wednesday, April 01, 2020 2 Comments @ Sultan Knish Blog

“If you haven’t seen The Dissident, I hope you will," Hillary Clinton told the folks at the Sundance Film Festival. The Dissident is Sundance's hottest documentary. It's also Turkish government propaganda.

Hillary's comments at Sundance exposed a chunk of the fake news problem surrounding The Dissident.

"We just learned about the pacing of malware on Jeff Bezos' phone, ironically technology created in Israel and sold to the Saudi government," she falsely claimed.

Despite these false claims made by the Washington Post, a paper owned by Bezos, which has spread conspiracy theories trying to blame the exposure of his affair on entire countries, the actual report when reviewed by cybersecurity experts found no actual malware of any kind on the billionaire’s phone.

The hack of the billionaire’s phone that wasn’t is an example of the fake news vortex surrounding the death of Jamal Khashoggi. Bezos cronies have alleged that the Amazon boss had his affair exposed by the Saudis in retaliation for the Post’s decision to run Qatari Islamist propaganda by Khashoggi.

The Dissident is the latest effort at mythologizing Khashoggi, a former Saudi stooge, terror propagandist, bigot, and friend of Osama bin Laden, by Islamist interests operating out of Qatar and Turkey. Jamal Khashoggi was not a journalist: he was producing pro-Islamist and anti-Saudi propaganda for the Qatar Foundation, a pro-terror organization, which helped draft his articles and dictated their content.

There are actual dissidents and actual journalists in prison in Islamist tyrannies like Turkey. But instead of telling their stories, The Dissident and its director, Bryan Fogel, turned to Turkey’s Islamist regime.

Bryan Fogel claims to care deeply about human rights. He cares so deeply that he ignored the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Turkey, journalists, judges, professors, and Kurds, to lobby the regime to help him make a propaganda flick about Khashoggi. Nor is Fogel at all ashamed of toadying to Turkey.

Articles about The Dissident boast of how Fogel received “unprecedented access” to material from the Turkish government and its intelligence apparatus. Any filmmaker gushing about getting exclusive access to CIA materials while making a completely uncritical documentary about its role would face a torrent of criticism. Yet The Dissident has met with equally uncritical praise even as it boasts of its access and parrots propaganda from a despotic regime which is engaged in ethnic cleansing at home and abroad.

"I was building a relationship with the Turkish government who at the end of the day saw the power they could have in this story if they allowed me to tell it, rather than it coming out through Turkish media," Bryan Fogel admitted.

What Fogel was offering Erdogan and his cronies was a credible whitewashing of their propaganda.

The false narrative of Khashoggi as a political dissident, rather than an Islamist bigot, would be more effective if it came from a seemingly independent filmmaker rather than the Turkish state which, after Erdogan’s Reichstag coup, had destroyed the country’s last vestiges of an independent press.

Asked about Erdogan's human rights abuses, Fogel shrugged them off.

"You have to know when to pick your battles depending on that story you’re telling… This was not the film to focus on other political matters and in this case Turkey has been a superhero. I felt very strongly that this wasn’t the film to go down political rabbit holes," he insisted.

Turkey’s lack of an independent press, its ethnic cleansing of Kurds, and its 48,924 political prisoners would be one of those “political rabbit holes” that Fogel didn’t want to explore. The Leni Riefenstahl of Sundance was telling a story about the regime’s political martyr, its Horst Wessel, and noting that Hitler and Goebbels aren’t very nice people would be a political rabbit hole that would ruin the whole tale.

You either care about human rights or you don’t. If Fogel cared about human rights, then the UN special rapporteur’s report documenting the Erdogan regime’s torture of professors, journalists, officers, and many others would have made a much better and more important documentary than The Dissident. It’s a story that has never been told, and, unlike Khashoggi’s myth, never will be told at any major level.

Fogel pawning out his camera to Erdogan’s regime while refusing to discuss its abuses is an indictment.

Orwell Productions, Fogel’s company, mistakes 1984 for a guide, rather than a warning. The Dissident is Orwellian, political propaganda, the same discredited lies, dressed up with special effects and a human interest angle, on behalf of a dictator who has eliminated actual dissidents in his own country.

"I needed the world to see and fall in love with Jamal and understand this man was not Muslim Brotherhood or an al-Qaeda sympathiser or all these things being presented by Saudi Arabia or being written about by the alt press in the United States," Fogel tells an interviewer.

The plain facts of the matter are that Khashoggi was both of these things which The Dissident is denying.

Fogel, the director of Jewtopia, may be in love with Khashoggi, but the Islamist would have loathed him.

Jamal Khashoggi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had allied with Nazi Germany and continues to celebrate Hitler, promoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and defended Holocaust denial. He tweeted, “everything can be ended by the rule of Assad and the rule of the Jews.”

All this vile stuff could be found on Khashoggi’s own Twitter account, not the “alt press”.

The Dissident is yet another exercise in historical revisionism by a powerful industry built on repeating the same lies: in Fogel’s Riefenstahlesque case with digital special effects and Turkish propaganda.

Khashoggi's journalistic career began when he followed his old friend Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan on behalf of a man listed by the Treasury Department as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers”. There he churned out Jihadi propaganda like, “Arab Mujahadeen in Afghanistan II: Exemplifies the Unity of Islamic Ummah”. Afterward he became a stooge for the Saudi state for the likes of Prince Turki bin Faisal, who was linked to Al Qaeda, and blamed 9/11 on American support for Israel.

Jamal Khashoggi became a dissident, not because he wanted a freer Saudi Arabia, but because Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had turned on Islamists like Khashoggi and his Muslim Brotherhood pals.

“Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should get rid of his complex against the Muslim Brotherhood and stop treating them as the enemy or a threat to Saudi Arabia,” Khashoggi had complained, and urged a confrontation with Israel instead.

After the Saudis were no longer interested in funding Islamist dreams of world conquest, Khashoggi went to work for the regimes in Qatar and Turkey who were more than happy to step in. He was a dissident in the same way that former Communists in Russia or old Nazis in Argentina are dissidents.

Saudi Arabia under MBS has become more liberal for the average person while Turkey under Erdogan has become more tyrannical. In Saudi Arabia, women have become more able to vote and drive. Meanwhile the number of women being murdered in Turkey for their gender is continuing to rise. And the perpetrators under Erdogan’s Islamist regime often receive little more than a slap on the wrist.

The Dissident and Fogel weigh in on the side of dragging Saudi Arabia back while tossing away the reforms that Islamists loathe, all the while falsely depicting this as a struggle between autocracy and democracy. This same Islamist lie led to the Arab Spring and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the rise of ISIS, the rape of little girls, and the use of chemical weapons against civilians.

But the liars can’t get enough of that lie.

The Dissident is not a courageous defense of human rights. It’s another echo in an echo chamber run by Qatar and Turkey. Instead of telling the stories of the protesters who battled Erdogan’s thugs in the streets, professors tortured in gymnasiums, and journalists jailed for reporting on the regime’s corruption, Bryan Fogel chose the profitable route of amplifying the narratives of Erdogan’s regime.

In interviews, Bryan Fogel had the chutzpah to suggest that his life is at risk for making The Dissident.

"So far I’m OK,” the self-promoting hack claimed. "I have this strange nightmare that Putin calls Mohammed bin Salman and goes, ‘Hey buddy, this American filmmaker, he’s causing us lots of problems. You know, look, maybe we do something.’"

There will be no assassins coming to the Orwell Productions offices in Santa Monica near the beach. The praise from figures like Hillary Clinton will keep rolling in as the echo chamber pressures Netflix to distribute The Dissident as part of a larger campaign of informational warfare against a reformist Saudi government. If it wins, a new Saudi government will be more likely to support terrorism against Americans, Europeans, and Israelis. Like Horst Wessel, Jamal Khashoggi is an Islamist martyr whose death is being used as the engine to overthrow a government and kill hundreds of thousands of people.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

NYT's Eric Lipton Defends Anti-Vaxxers as Measles Ravages Europe

By Alex Berezow, PhD — August 29, 2019 @ American Council on Science and Health

What should we make of New York Times reporter Eric Lipton? Here is a man whose words are constrained neither by facts nor basic decency.

He fell onto our radar screen a few years ago after he he wrote hit pieces targeting two high-profile scientists, Kevin Folta and Nancy Beck. Because he is a philosophy major with no expertise in science, he did the only thing a thoroughly unqualified person can do when attempting to criticize a scientist: he launched a smear campaign, liberally using "guilt by association" (industry, bad!) and other innuendos to undermine the credibility of two reputable scientists.

Dr. Folta rightly sued Lipton for libel. But in this country, libel lawsuits are basically impossible to win. After his inevitable victory, Lipton then bragged about it on Twitter. To say that this is behavior unbecoming of a journalist at one of the most powerful institutions in the country is putting it mildly.

NYT's Eric Lipton Defends Anti-Vaxxers as Measles Ravages Europe

Well, Lipton is back. Science writer Stephan Neidenbach reported that he is defending Moms Across America, a virulently anti-vaccine organization. Let's be honest. Scaring parents away from vaccinating their kids is tantamount to promoting child abuse. Yet, here is a tweet that Lipton posted on August 28:

Monsanto is clearly guilty of potty language and planning a metaphorical beating. Nobody is being literally beaten, as Mr. Neidenbach points out. Thus, Lipton's disdain for Monsanto -- in addition to his fallacious belief that any interaction with the biotech industry is inherently nefarious -- has led him not only to twist the meaning of a cherry-picked email but to defend a group, Moms Across America (MAAM), that is utterly indefensible.

MAAM claims that vaccines contain glyphosate and cause autism. There is no good reason to believe the former statement is true, and the latter has been disproven over and over again. The website also peddles all sorts of phony medicine, such as hemp oil (the benefits and risks of which medical science basically knows nothing) and magical detox potion (for the bargain price of $35.99!) that absurdly claims to "eliminate brain fog, improve memory, and... [d]etox from heavy metals and chemicals." (Hey FDA, where are you?)

If anyone deserves a metaphorical beating, it's the scam artists at MAAM who are a clear and present danger to global public health. Yet, NYT reporter Eric Lipton defends them. Because Monsanto.
Meanwhile, measles -- a vaccine preventable illness -- is ravaging Europe. The World Health Organization just reported that there have been nearly 90,000 cases of measles in Europe so far this year alone, which is up from 84,462 cases in 2018 and 5,273 in 2016. In other words, because of malevolent forces like MAAM, measles has surged well over 1600% in 3 years in Europe.

Eric Lipton Is a Scourge on Public Health

Eric Lipton's defense of the indefensible is a scourge on public health. The New York Times recently demoted Jonathan Weisman, a deputy editor based in Washington, DC, for displaying poor judgment. If there is any justice in the universe, Lipton should face the same fate.
 

Tags: anti-vaxxers, anti-vaccine, Eric Lipton, New York Times

Our Super Smart Elite Shines During This Pandemic!

Kurt Schlichter Apr 02, 2020

We Americans are truly blessed by having a mainstream media full of brilliant renaissance men, women, and gender non-specific entities who are masters of so many varied and intermittently useful skills and who are eager to share their knowledge with us benighted souls. The pandemic has revealed that every urban Twitter blue check scribbler, MSNBCNN panelist, NYT/WaPo doofus, and barely legal “senior editor” of a website you never heard of, is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, a master logistician, and a diversity consultant too boot................

It’s awesome to see people with zero life experience in any relevant field weighing in as if we shouldn’t just laugh in their pimply faces. Here’s the typical resume of one of these hacks: 

• Went to high school, and never went to parties
• Went to college, majored in journalism, and never went to parties
• Went to journalism grad school, and never went to parties
• Works in the media, and goes to Manhattan/Georgetown cocktail parties

This apparently qualifies them to explain to people like us who have actually done something in our lives how stuff is supposed to work...............Our media is garbage, full of clowns and dilettantes with no experience and less common sense. The media is now complaining that the pandemic is hurting its industry badly and that some of the media may go under because of the Woking Pneumonia. Well, I guess you can’t paint anything all black............To Read More....

Petty Dictators! They’re Coming Out a Dime a Dozen Across America

By George McClellan, Historian, Political Observer | March 25th

When reliable sources like The Economist, say that governments are getting tougher over this China Virus business, and when we see growing media fueled hysteria and panic as the driving forces of government imposed involvement (petty dictatorships), I become a little concerned about America’s future at the grass roots level. The People seem to have lost control of their Constitutional powers and have become instead, the slaves to the servants we voted into office, who now think, as servants, they are actually our masters. We’ve got to change that thinking.

Can it be true? Are we to become slaves to a class of all omnipotent petty dictators at the city, state and local levels who require us to do their bidding simply because we voted for ’em once, and they now sense some ominous danger occurring about which they can do nothing except to interfere in daily life by issuing orders for everyone to “shelter in place” and give up?  

It can’t be true! From where do governors and mayors derive this singular power to quarantine their entire States and communities; order certain stores to close and otherwise squeeze the life blood out of their domestic products? It’s a damn lie!

They don’t have this plenitpoaentiary power so why do we believe ’em? The enemy of the truth is not the deliberate and contrived lie, that’s dishonest, like Hillary Clinton is and we recognize it, but to perpetuate the myth of their omnipotence is to fool us, not once, but over and over again. We acquiesce in bewildered hopelessness...........To Read More.....

America Voluntarily Commits Economic Suicide To Save Lives

By Brooke Says, Cultural Communications Analyst April 1st, 2020

President Trump was riding high just a month ago, free from the hassles of an unjustified and unsuccessful impeachment attempt by the Democrats, presiding over a country that was at long last energy independent and with the best economy in half a century, maybe ever. People who had previously been immune to hope now had some and were looking at unprecedented opportunities. My how things can change on a dime.

Now instead the President is presiding over daily Wuhan Virus Task Force meetings, which now discuss just how many Americans are estimated to die from a virus apparently originating in the disgusting China ‘wet markets’. Markets which now have reopened even as the world still reels from their devastating repercussions. And watching his amazing economy grind to a halt under several complete state shutdowns. In order to ‘save the people’, he’s forced to kill his own economy..............

It’s an unenviable position to be in, but not surprisingly, he’s handled it amazingly well, once again showing that he’s not only the right person at the right time to handle something like this, but that he’s made stronger when not only fate works against him, but the incessantly petulant and destructive media as well. With their idiotic gotcha questions which serve only to create soundbites, they expose what Trump has always said about them, which is that they’re fake news..................

So how do we stop this thing then and get back to work and normal? I’ll be honest, I don’t trust the imbed bureaucrats in the government, so even when it’s ‘credible’ sources, I question it, such as with the suggestion to not wear face masks................

According to the website Foreign Policy article ‘Fear of China Made Taiwan a Coronavirus Success Story’, as of March 16th, ‘Taiwan has 10 million masks a day, widespread tracking, and just 1 death despite being close to the outbreak. Taiwan has only 67 cases (currently 325/5), which is admirable in itself, especially when compared to its larger East Asian neighbors.’ But our ‘experts’ have denounced the idea that masks will help stop the spread, and in fact that they are perhaps more dangerous. Seriously?

Back to the economy though. As we consider all of the events leading up to the current situation, which is that this country, as are others, is being seriously affected by actual cases and fatalities, to what extent do we completely close the country and likely destroy our economy in order to ‘save lives’?.........As of today, after 3 months of the virus being known about in America, we have 189,441 known cases and 4,074 deaths attributed to it. At the daily Task Force briefing yesterday, both Fauci and Birx suggested we could have between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths from it. We have a population of 320 million plus people. Among deaths from other illnesses, we have 24,000 – 60,000 flu deaths each year, 47,143 suicides each year and 69,029 drug overdoses. We don’t shut down our economy over either of those though, and the latter two examples will likely exponentially increase as the economy is shut down over coronavirus.............. 

 At some point we need to have a grown up conversation about the reality of risk and life. All of life is a risk. Driving a car is a risk, being on a ladder is a risk, having a gas stove is a risk, and people die from those every year, in fact 38,800 in 2019 from fatal car crashes alone.

And no, I’m not being trite, I’m being truthful.

Do I want to get the virus and or die from it? Of course not. But I also don’t want millions of my fellow Americans to lose their jobs, go into poverty, become victims of desperate criminal predators or become desperate criminals themselves.  .............To Read More....

The coronavirus and character

April 1, 2020 By Alex Kouskolekas

The old adage is that "tough times build character."  The old adage is wrong. The reality is that tough times reveal character, and a stunning number of people come up woefully lacking in this department:

• A businessman who retooled his operation to make a wholly unrelated product because that product is needed in dealing with this virus is dismissed as "the pillow guy" by a media establishment whose malpractice is almost a punch line.
• Members of Congress think it totes wonderful for people in certain delivery services to go on strike.  Because it's apparently better to have more people crowding into stores, not to mention the loss of income for the strikers.  But hey — eggs and omelets.
• CBS used footage from Italy in a story about an NYC hospital and called that a "mistake."  Just as ABC some months back mistook a Kentucky firing range for a Turkish attack on Syrian Kurds.

It's a remarkably enlightening time in our history, not because of things being learned, but because of people being exposed for who and what they really are. There have been multiple stories documenting serial failure across all levels of government to restock certain supplies, a failure that predates Trump. Yet the talking point that the Trump administration responded so poorly continues being repeated.

 Poorly compared to whom?..............A virus originates in China, which hides information and lies; the infected fly around the world to include the U.S.; taxis and shuttles move them into communities, facilitating the spread; hotspots emerge; and now people try to flee cities like N.Y., making the interstate system a mode of further spread. And somehow, it's the fault of one Donald Trump.

 This isn't just losing the ability to debate; it's losing the ability to reason at all...........To Read More....

Reflecting on Crisis and Leviathan in the age of the pandemic

April 1, 2020 By Nicholas J. Kaster

Not very long ago, President Trump tweeted, "We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself."  He was pilloried for daring to suggest that government action with respect to the coronavirus pandemic has both benefits and costs.  Now he appears to be "all-in" on the national lockdown and more in sync with "expert" opinion and the big blue-state governors.

Given that we don't possess the luxury of hindsight, we don't know if this is the correct move or not.  But what's indisputable is that this approach to a pandemic is unprecedented in America.

Recently, Manhattan's City Journal published the reflections of Clark Whelton, a former speechwriter for New York City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, who remembered living through the pandemic of 1957, known at the time by the politically incorrect label "the Asian Flu."  The virus was responsible for the deaths of over a million people worldwide and 116,000 in the United States (which at the time had about half the current population).  And, yet, as Whelton recalls:

[T]o the best of my knowledge, governors did not call out the National Guard, and political panic-mongers did not blame it all on President Eisenhower. College sports events were not cancelled, planes and trains continued to run, and Americans did not regard one another with fear and suspicion, touching elbows instead of hands. We took the Asian flu in stride. We said our prayers and took our chances.

One can speculate as to why two different eras produced such differences in reaction.  There was no internet then, no 24-hour cable news networks, and no social media.  And you had an adult population for whom the Great Depression was a clear and vivid memory........To Read More....

 

 

Obama refused to shut down US-Mexico border after CDC and WHO issued H1N1 pandemic alert

April 1, 2020 By M. Catharine Evans

Once again, Barack Obama has opened the door to reviewing his 2009 response to what the CDC then called the "first global flu pandemic in 40 years." 

In a tweet accusing President Trump of being in denial about the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, the former president cited an L.A. Times article on the administration's new policy to roll back Obama's 2012 environmentally friendly fuel efficiency standards.

We've seen all too terribly the consequences of those who denied warnings of a pandemic. We can't afford any more consequences of climate denial. All of us, especially young people, have to demand better of our government at every level and vote this fall.

This is rich coming from a president whose denial of the H1N1 pandemic early on may have led to tens of millions more infections and thousands more deaths than otherwise would have happened.

 During his two terms as president, Obama left our borders wide open to all kinds of infectious diseases the United States had rid itself of almost a century ago.  So looking back to April 29, 2009, a day after the CDC issued Interim Guidance on Closing Schools and Childcare Facilities, recommending a seven-day dismissal in affected schools and childcare facilities with laboratory-confirmed cases of the swine flu, it's no surprise Obama told a White House reporter, on the advice of his hourly discussions with his public health officials, that closing our southern border would be "akin to closing the barn door after the horses were out.........

The same person accusing President Trump of being in denial regarding the coronavirus continued his open border policy with Mexico throughout the year-long swine flu pandemic. The virus ended up claiming nearly 13,000 lives, including 317 children, and infecting over 60 million.

In contrast to President Trump's early travel bans to contain the virus, Barack Obama, by his own admission, refused to "close the barn door."

Chuck Todd and Nancy Pelosi have their presidents mixed up. It is 44 who has "blood on his hands" and who "fiddled" as people died ...........To Read More.....

Nancy Pelosi: Cancer on the body politic

April 1, 2020 By Patricia McCarthy

"Nancy Pelosi is a cancer on the body politic."

Those are the words of Mark Levin, and he is profoundly correct. It is actually an understatement. This woman has dedicated her entire recent term to impeaching President Trump over a phone call. She stupidly bought into Adam Schiff's lunacy that they had the evidence that the president had threatened the president of Ukraine with a quid pro quo -- either investigate the Clinton campaign's meddling in the 2016 election or else. None of that was true, any more than the Russia collusion hoax, but Pelosi still gambled that she could take out Trump with that phony ploy. It was Biden who threatened Ukraine with an actual quid pro quo -- either fire the man investigating my son or lose a billions dollars in U.S. aid.

Then came the Wuhan virus. Oh my, were the Democrats thrilled. This would be the crisis they could use, manipulate to their desired end. This is how utterly stupid these Democrats are! This is how malicious they are; they are ready and willing to destroy the United States economy to take down a president they abhor. Why do they loathe him so? Because he is effective and successful. The American people, those not members of the political/academic class, love this man. They love him for a myriad of good reasons. Chief among them is that he recognizes and respects them, unlike the partisans of the left who view most Americans as nothing more than flotsam and jetsam, inconveniences they must tolerate. So superior to the worth of most citizens do the likes of those who inhabit Pelosi's circle of pals see themselves, they suffer no unease over dismissing us as invalid. That so many of us love and revere President Trump makes us all the more worthy of their dripping disdain............To Read More....

How a Police State is Born

By Steve McCann April 1, 2020

The United States and much of the western world, by utilizing the most draconian of tactics, is plunging many nations into potential economic and societal chaos as they attempt to stem the tide of the Chinese Coronavirus.  Relying on dubious and error-prone projections, politicians and bureaucrats constitutionally or statutorily limited in their power, are now exercising near-dictatorial authority in their edicts, which are effectively suspending or terminating numerous freedoms under the guise of protecting their respective nations.

All Americans, not be just those with first-hand experience dealing with World War II and its aftermath or living in Eastern Europe under iron boot of the Soviet Union or escaping the Communist/socialist hellholes of Cuba, Southeast Asia or Venezuela, should view these actions with considerable trepidation.

When societies lose their freedom, it is not ordinarily because autocrats or tyrants have forcibly taken it away.  It is usually the result of the population willingly surrendering their freedom in return for protection against an external threat.  While the threat is oftentimes real, it is invariably exaggerated.

This is what we in the United States are experiencing.  The general public has been stampeded by the fearmongering in the media into demanding action from the politicians at both the state and federal level.  The politicians respond and do not pause to ask whether these actions will work -- just do something!  They do not ask if the financial and societal cost to the nation is worth the unknown and perhaps nebulous return.

Any student of history and human nature would recognize that these are the classic symptoms of collective hysteria.  Hysteria is contagious.  This nation is turning itself inside out as we, thanks to the media, are exaggerating the threat and not stopping to ask if the cure is worse than the disease.

In times like these, it is to be expected that the citizenry will look to the government for guidance and assistance.  When that happens in an environment of mass hysteria, then it is unsurprising that the state will take on or assume new power, as that is what has been demanded of it.  This historically has been the process which leads to the rise of authoritarianism.

Over the past four weeks and with little or no legal basis, one state governor has outbid another in their dramatic responses to the Coronavirus outbreak.  Invariably their actions revolve around the curtailing of individual freedom.

Arrest warrants are being issued for holding funeral services, fines are being levied for not maintaining proper distance, people are being arrested for holding gatherings of over ten people, fines and arrests are the order of the day for re-opening a business the state deems to be nonessential, and the national guard has been called out to enforce state borders and lockdowns.    Pastors have been arrested for holding worship services, and in New York City the mayor has threatened to permanently close any church, synagogue or mosque that violates his lockdown order. The Second Amendment is under assault as 12 states either have ordered or are contemplating ordering all gun stores and retailers closed, thus depriving millions of their right buy a gun.  Neighbors and ordinary citizens, in the best tradition of the Soviet Union and Communist China, are being encouraged to inform the authorities if anyone they know is not adhering to state lockdown rules. Stores, deemed essential by the state, are being told what in their inventory they can and cannot sell............ ............To Read More.....

 

Coronavirus: The Unmaking of the Global Economy

Visit the archives to re-read and share
 

By Peter Zeihan on April 1, 2020

(Editor's Note:  There are things in this article in which he and I diverge, but his conclusions regarding the "World Order" are in my opinion, valid. RK)

Here is the accumulated data of all known cases of coronavirus in the United States, courtesy of The COVID Tracking Project. As you can see the situation is getting both worse and better.

Worse in that deaths are starting to rise significantly, and that is far worse than it looks. At present about 40% of deaths are in New York state, with nearly all of those in the New York City area – the first American metropolitan region to suffer a full epidemic. Nor is NYC done. Today’s figures indicate the city has at least another week, likely two, before deaths peak. New York’s experience will soon be echoed in other areas with New Orleans, Seattle, Detroit and Chicago looking particularly worrisome. Not linear, logarithmic.

Better in that the United States is finally testing about 100,000 people a day. Without decent epidemiological data any public health policy with an eye on containment or mitigation is simply a shot in the dark. Unfortunately, materials, equipment and lab bottlenecks have made testing numbers plateau at this level. Multi-day delays in receiving test results are widespread. Until the United States can increase testing volumes to at least 1,000,000 a day and reduce testing times to a few hours, the only method the country will have for containing the epidemic is complete economic lockdown..

 

The United States will be the country that has suffered the greatest recorded deaths from coronavirus within two weeks, and the death toll certainly will not peak within a week of that dire landmark. But as difficult and tragic as it is to imagine, coronavirus will burn a much harsher swathe through other countries in the months to come.

Join Peter Zeihan for an exploration of the pandemic to come. He will discuss how and where coronavirus will impact the major countries of the developed world, and how and where it will remake regional and the global economies both this year and far into the future.

REGISTER HERE

 

Long after the epidemic peaks in the United States and Europe it will rage through the developed world, inflicting far deeper damage to populations and economies. The United States has HVAC systems and indoor plumbing and so has the option of social distancing. Much of the world’s population does not. And while the American economy is largely sequestered from the rest of humanity, that of the developing world is not. Damage there will reverberate through the global system, region by region, sector by sector, in ways that will break the global Order’s very foundation. Please click "Register here" above for more details. INQUIRE ABOUT CONSULTING SERVICES

Masks, Masks, Where Are the Masks?

By Daniel Greenfield  Monday, March 30, 2020 11 Comments @ Sultan Knish Blog

The media is full of stories of mask rationing and shortages. Health care professionals are reusing masks, slathering them with sanitizer, or substituting scarves in place of surgical masks. Democrats demand that President Trump make more masks immediately using the Wartime Production Act.

But why aren’t there any masks?

Surgical masks, like anything in the medical field, are tightly regulated. You can’t just make a mask. Some masks have to be certified by the FDA and others by the CDC. Some are certified by both the FDA and the CDC.

Until recently, the public had no problem buying N95 respirators for use in construction. These masks are certified by the CDC. Why is the CDC in the business of certifying industrial masks, you may wonder? Because, as discussed previously, the CDC does every possible thing except what people think it does. The component of the CDC that does this is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

NIOSH is not to be confused with OSHA, even though they were created at the same time, through the same law, and serve a very similar function: making this another skein in the infinitely tangled web of the federal bureaucracy.

The Open PPE Project launched an effort to quickly create N95 masks only to be told by NIOSH that approving a new mask production facility would take between 45 and 90 days.

Meanwhile there are reports of large stockpiles of masks sitting around waiting for an FDA inspector.

The United States government has a stockpile of 12 million NIOSH approved masks and 5 million that are expired, and are therefore not approved by NIOSH. Except it may approve some conditionally for use.

The FDA and CDC bureaucracy are not up to speed with the current crisis. There aren’t enough inspectors and the Wuhan Virus won’t wait on inspectors from the FDA or NIOSH to do their job.

Instead of streamlining its approvals and inspection process, the CDC lowered its mask protection recommendation for health care workers on the front lines.

The CDC is willing to tell health care professionals to use scarves, rather than accelerate approvals.

Meanwhile N95 mask manufacturers feared being sued if masks meant for industry were used in surgical settings, which meant that they wouldn’t sell those masks to health care providers. At least not until a law protecting them against lawsuits was passed. All this, of course, took even more time.

Smaller manufacturers have tried to get in the game, only to discover the regulatory challenges of it. Fashion businesses that tried to jump in have settled for trying to make surgical masks that they hope will be FDA certified. Meanwhile the big manufacturers were making masks in the People’s Republic of China. And those masks are not leaving ChiCom territory except by the express will of its government.

Worse still, as the crisis grew, the People’s Republic of China bought up the world’s supply of masks, at one point importing 20 million masks in 24 hours. American companies even eagerly donated masks.

But why was the United States so unprepared for a run on masks before the pandemic arrived?

After Katrina, the Bush administration had set a goal of billions of masks in case of a major disaster. But that goal was never met. When the H1N1 swine flu outbreak arrived, we were badly unprepared.

The last run on masks took place during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak under Obama. Hospitals and health care providers began running low on masks and the Strategic National Stockpile released 85 million N95 masks. The stockpile was never replenished and today there are only 12 million N95s.

There were warnings back then that "maskmaking operations have moved outside the U.S., and 90% of masks sold in the U.S. now come from Mexico or China" and that "Mexico and China would be unlikely to export their supplies before making sure their own populations were fully protected."

While the Obama administration threw billions at assorted solar and wind boondoggles, it failed to invest the money that would have set up reliable mask production in the United States of America. All the experts who claimed that “science” predicted the imminent demise of the planet had been too busy trying to control the weather through higher taxes to spend money on anything as crude as masks.

The secret warehouses where the strategic mask reserve was supposed to be kept are a mess and millions of the masks are expired. New York City asked for millions of masks and got 78,000 expired masks. Oklahoma got 500,000 expired masks. This is the situation, not just at the federal level, but state mask stockpiles, where they exist, also often consisted of storehouses of expired N95 masks.

Had the Bush administration’s National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza been followed, there would be no mask shortage. And had the Obama administration at replaced the masks that it withdrew from the Strategic National Stockpile, we might have had 100 million or so masks in the stockpile.

And had we brought mask manufacturing back to America, we would have a pipeline for making more.

Instead the Wuhan Virus brought a perfect storm, cutting us off from our manufacturing sources in the People’s Republic of China, after the Obama administration had depleted our mask reserve, while regulatory barriers make it difficult for companies quickly get in the game and produce more masks.

President Trump has done his best to cope with a sudden disaster that was decades in the making.

The mask shortage was not a disaster that could have been remedied in January. We were never going to produce a billion masks in two months. The same nation that could turn out armies and fleets in a year would have, but that nation had its manufacturing at home and fewer regulatory barriers.

Big clothing companies like Hanes have tried to step up. As have smaller manufacturers. But the federal bureaucracy has slowed down the process for both distributing existing masks and making new ones. There are plenty of companies eager to make masks, without any Wartime Production Act pressure. They just need a streamlined process that will clear as many of the barriers and delays out of the way.

Meanwhile making new N95 masks requires melt-blown fabric and there’s a global shortage of the machines that produce it because, once again, China has monopolized the marketplace.

Ordering companies to make them by using the Wartime Production Act won’t bring them into being.

All the posturing by Senate Minority Leader Schumer, House Speaker Pelosi, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and the rest of the circus about the Wartime Production Act is just fantasy socialist wargaming.

Outsourcing our industrial base to the People’s Republic of China came with a price. Reconstructing that base won’t just happen overnight. Not when it often has to be done all the way from the ground up.

President Trump had warned us of the danger of our dependency on China’s Communist regime. The Democrats who denied that reality now act as if waving around a piece of legislative paper can make products spring forth out of thin air as long as the right orders are given and enough money is spent.

Real life doesn’t work that way.

The Democrats had many years in which they could have financed American factories making protective gear or at the very least replenished the mask supplies from the swine flu outbreak in 2009. They did none of those things and now want to blame President Trump because he couldn’t snap his fingers and create a billion masks in two months. Meanwhile they failed to restore 85 million masks in 7 years.

If we’re going to learn anything from this crisis, we have to tell the truth and hold them accountable.