Texas AG: Free Shelley Luther!

The New Neo Posted on by

This:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has called for the “immediate release” of a Dallas salon owner who was arrested and sent to jail for opening her business in defiance of Gov. Greg Abbott’s stay-at-home orders…

“I find it outrageous and out of touch that during this national pandemic, a judge, in a county that actually released hardened criminals for fear of contracting COVID-19, would jail a mother for operating her hair salon in an attempt to put food on her family’s table,” said Attorney General Paxton. “The trial judge did not need to lock up Shelley Luther. His order is a shameful abuse of judicial discretion, which seems like another political stunt in Dallas. He should release Ms. Luther immediately.”

I certainly can’t argue with that. The rush to lock up people like Luther (interesting name, no?) and to release actual criminals is not an accident. Texas is one of the states the Democrats hope to turn blue. The state edges closer and closer, but has so far resisted. However, it has some deeply liberal/left pockets such as Austin and other cities.

Here’s a map of Texas voting from 2016. I can’t copy it, so you’ll have to look at it at the link. But it makes the urban/rural situation quite clear, as well as the Democratic dominance in the most southern portion of the state, the section that borders Mexico.

De Blasio: NYC may still send COVID patients back to nursing homes

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s hard to believe New Yorkers not only elected, but re-elected, this man:

Mayor Bill de Blasio said some hospitalized patients who have tested positive for the coronavirus should still return to their nursing homes — even though they risk exposing other elderly residents to the deadly bug.

“If the better care in that individual case is the hospital, of course that’s a go-to option, but there’s going to be a time when a nursing home could be the better care if it’s set up that way,” de Blasio insisted on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Wednesday.

MSNBC host Willie Geist had asked de Blasio if the order issued by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to allow patients with coronavirus to leave hospitals and go back into nursing homes was a mistake, given that the death toll at nursing homes surged to 4,813 earlier this week — nearly a quarter of all fatalities in the state.

“The whole question is always where can a senior citizen get the best support, the best care, and sometimes that is of course a hospital and sometimes that is a place where they are known and where they can be supported by people who actually have a relationship with them,” de Blasio answered.

Actually no; the whole question with COVID is not “where can a senior citizen get the best support, the best care.” Another consideration is where that person can heal without putting other extremely vulnerable people at high risk. But that has been ignored by both de Blasio and Cuomo where nursing homes in their state are concerned.

It was known early on that the very elderly are at far more serious risk of dying from COVID than the rest of the population, and that is even more true of the already-debilitated elderly who are nursing home residents. This is also true, by the way, of nearly any flu or pneumonia. The toll in nursing homes can be exceptionally high.

But as time has gone on, we’ve learned that the percentage of nursing home deaths compared to total deaths from COVID is even higher than previously thought. In some states it’s over half, even well over half. And yet de Blasio, mayor of a city whose metropolitan area has had about half the COVID deaths in the entire US, seems to hardly have a clue what to do about it. It’s almost as though he’s just learned these facts that have been apparent for quite some time.

The toll in one NYC nursing home is 98 deaths so far and counting. That’s about one in every seven residents at that facility. De Blasio had this to say in response to that:

“The one thing we now know about the nursing homes is the status quo cannot continue to say the least,” de Blasio said. “Something very different has to happen.”

Oh, really? And what “very different” thing is actually going to happen? This should have been tackled long ago. It is hard to believe that a mayor of a city so hard hit would not be asking to learn the nursing home statistics on a daily basis, but his excuse is that the figures weren’t reported properly. That could also be true – there’s plenty of confusion and incompetence to go around. But we’ve all known for a long time that New York has been hard hit, and that nursing homes in general are nearly always very hard hit. Special attention should have been paid from the start, and it really appears as though that was not the case. In some ways, au contraire.

Ah, but here’s another thing de Blasio has to say about nursing homes. When in doubt, blame the kulak capitalists:

The mask of objectivity is torn off and the naked bias revealed

The New Neo Posted on by

This is stunning – not the sentiment itself, but the proud and unabashed expression of it for all to see.

At first I thought it was a hoax. Why would someone in the press – or formerly in the press – admit publicly to this way of thinking? But apparently the Times checks to make sure the person who supposedly has written the letter is in fact that person who actually wrote the letter, and in this case it’s a person they know quite well.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

A piece from the New York Times published Monday showed published letters to the editor regarding a May 2 piece from the editorial board titled “Investigate Tara Reade’s Allegations.” Reade has accused Biden of sexually assaulting her while she worked as a Senate staffer in the early 1990’s.

Martin Tolchin, a co-founder of Politico and The Hill as well as a former member of The Times’ Washington bureau, wrote in and admitted that he didn’t want an investigation into the allegation.

Here’s the content of the letter:

This is Trump Derangement Syndrome of an intense variety, and an “end justifies the means” philosophy that is popular on the left. The fact that a journalist who has been in the business for over half a century will now admit publicly to advocating this line is a symptom of how far it’s gone and how popular such a sentiment is. He is, IMHO, virtue-signaling, or at least he thinks he is. He believes most thinking and decent people share his opinion and will applaud it.

Here is Tolchin’s bio, from an article in The Hill written last December and promoting a book of his:

A veteran journalist — who counts The Hill among the news organizations he helped found — has some advice for today’s reporters: “Be courageous.”

Martin Tolchin worked his way up from a copy boy making $41.50 a week at The New York Times to a 40-year career at the Gray Lady. After founding The Hill in 1994 with Jerry Finkelstein, he helped launch Politico.

Now, at 91, he’s adding to his résumé yet again, with a new book called “Politics, Journalism and the Way Things Were: My Life at the Times, The Hill and Politico.”

In the memoir, which Tolchin says his daughter urged him to write for his 10-year-old grandson, he details his decades-long experience in journalism, how the industry has changed and laughs and memorable moments from along the way.

So the guy’s 91 years old. Perhaps age has made him somewhat dotty, like Biden. Perhaps it has lowered his usual inhibitions. Or perhaps he considers his current stance “courageous.” Also from that December interview:

President Trump, Tolchin says, has inspired some “very good reporting.”

“There’s nothing like adversity to get fearless,” Tolchin says of how reporting has changed in the Trump age, “and Trump has done that.”

It certainly has been a revealing experience.

[ADDENDUM: I want to re-emphasize the opening sentence: “This is stunning – not the sentiment itself, but the proud and unabashed expression of it for all to see.” And I want to add that the Times seems to have thought there was nothing there that shouldn’t be revealed in a former longtime and highly-respected reporter of theirs. They are not ashamed. Sometimes The Resistance/Press has to do dirty things to get Trump/Hitler.]

The greatest Pulitzer since Duranty: the 1619 Project

The New Neo Posted on by

Hey, if Arafat could get a Nobel Peace Prize, and Obama could get one for merely existing, and Walter Duranty can get a Pulitzer for dastardly lies, why not give it to the NY Times for its bogus anti-American “history” lesson known as the 1619 Project (I’ve written about the project many times before)?

Why ever not?

Here you are:

The 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary was awarded Monday to Nikole Hannah-Jones for an essay in the New York Times that falsely claimed the American Revolution was fought primarily to protect slavery…

Historians were outraged by Hannah-Jones’s false claim.

Andrew Sullivan tweets:

I don’t know the answer. I do know that the Times has never given back Duranty’s Pulitzer; they say they don’t have it, and the Pulitzer board “has twice declined to withdraw the award.”

No surprise there.

Nobel peace prizes and Pulitzer prizes increasingly have become awards not for objective accomplishments in their respective fields, but for politically correct (that is, leftist) achievements. The achievement of the 1619 Project is as leftist propaganda, which is now the most basic function of the news. The project has already become accepted as a study guide – one of its goals from the start – in
many public schools, and as such will serve to shape the views of a new generation:

From the moment Fatima Morrell read The New York Times’ 1619 Project last year, the educator embraced the 100-page magazine special issue on slavery and racism as a professional godsend. Morrell, an associate superintendent in the Buffalo, N.Y., school district, where 80% of the 31,200 students are non-white, was inspired by the project’s reframing of American history that put the struggles and contributions of black Americans “at the very center” of the nation’s self-understanding.

“I just think it really becomes a curriculum of emancipation, a pedagogy of liberation, for freeing the minds of young people,” said Morrell, who was involved in the decision to adopt the 1619 Project as part of the district’s curriculum. “Particularly for our black children, it lets them know there actually isn’t something wrong with you. We don’t need to be self-destructive, to hate ourselves. There actually was an institution of enslavement that really put us 400 years behind in terms of where we are with prosperity.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones: The lead writer on the 1619 Project says the United States’ founding ideals of equality and liberty, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, were a “lie” to the founders who birthed them, but ultimately realized by African Americans who embraced and fought for them, largely alone.

Since its publication in August, the 1619 Project has been adopted in more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states, according to the 2019 annual report of the Pulitzer Center, which has partnered with the Times on the project.

That’s the agenda, and its educational purpose was always apparent.

Note also that last sentence I quoted: “the Pulitzer Center, which has partnered with the Times on the project.” The Pulitzer Center’s website has a comprehensive study guide to the project that it actively promotes. What is the Pulitzer Center? Here’s the Wiki description, and despite the name, it’s not affiliated with the Pulitzer prizes:

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is an American news media organization established in 2006 that sponsors independent reporting on global issues that other media outlets are less willing or able to undertake on their own. The Center’s goal is to raise the standard of coverage of international systemic crises, and to do so in a way that engages both the broad public and government policy-makers. The organization is based in Washington, D.C.

The Center funds international travel costs associated with reporting projects on topics and regions of global importance.

It’s not immediately apparent – in fact, it’s not apparent at all – how the 1619 Project would fit into that description. Nevertheless, the Center is promoting this curriculum, which says a lot about its methods and its goals. The MSM and entities connected with the press are not content to write propaganda for adult readers only. They want to get the ears of children, and to do that, education is key.

COVID: What the Chinese knew, and when they knew it

The New Neo Posted on by

There has been an explosion of stories about the Chinese coverup of COVID-19. Rather than offer my own, I’m just going to link to a few.

I will add, however, that this is mostly old news to those who have been following reporting on the right since the beginning. For example, I remember reading almost from the start that there was a lab near the wet market in Wuhan, and that many people suspected the lab was the actual origin of the virus. I also remember that one of the first news items we got about the awful events occurring in Wuhan was that health workers – for example, some doctors – were frantically trying to get the word out to the world about the dangers the disease represented, and they were silenced and/or “disappeared.”

Here are the links:

What Pompeo said

The dossier.

China in violation of international health regulations.

China hoarded medical supplies.

China’s lie about the virus’ origins.

One of the things that caused me to undergo my political change was my discovery, nearly twenty years ago – and to my great surprise at the time – that news sources on the right were more reliable than news sources on the left. Not completely reliable, for sure. But so much more likely to be correct that the comparison was really almost laughable, except that it was deadly serious.

During the Trump administration, this tendency has gotten even more pronounced. But if people continue to get their news from sources on the left, they will not notice it.

As suspected, COVID had already spread outside China at least as early as December

The New Neo Posted on by

The French have made a discovery:

A French hospital which has retested old samples from pneumonia patients discovered that it treated a man who had COVID-19 as early as Dec. 27, nearly a month before the French government confirmed its first cases.

Yves Cohen, head of resuscitation at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals in the northern suburbs of Paris, told BFM TV that scientists had retested samples from 24 patients treated in December and January who tested negative for the flu.

The patient was apparently originally assumed to have had pneumonia. But he actually had COVID, way back in December, and he hadn’t recently been to China, either. Nor had anyone in his family, although his wife (who never showed symptoms and who I don’t think has yet been tested for antibodies) “worked alongside a Sushi stand, close to colleagues of Chinese origin, Cohen said. It was not clear whether those colleagues had travelled to China, and the local health authority should investigate, he said.”

The old samples from the other 23 people tested were not found to have COVID.

It is suspected that COVID may have also been present in the US in late December.

When a novel virus first appears, what causes it to come to attention? A change in patterns or a change in symptoms and patterns. COVID-19 didn’t initially represent much of a change, certainly not in this country, and perhaps not even in China, at the very outset (which is speculated to have been in November of 2019). The reason for that is that, until the numbers of cases started to accumulate, indicating a change in pattern, the symptoms of COVID are not very different from the symptoms of people who die of pneumonia and/or flu complications that are often diagnosed as pneumonia or ARDS. They are also not that different from the way people who died of H1N1 expired, and H1N1 is a variant of flu. Also, the population COVID affects most severely in terms of age and/or pre-existing conditions is very very similar to the group killed by seasonal flu and/or pneumonia and/or ARDS. Although flu and pneumonia kill more people under 5 than COVID appears to, that would not necessarily be noticed at the outset of the epidemic either, because that younger group would still be succumbing to the regular flu.

Because of Chinese obfuscation, however, it’s hard to reconstruct a good timeline and understand at what point the Chinese realized what was actually happening. Here’s a timeline that I doubt is completely correct, but it does mention that on December 31, the Chinese told WHO about “a cluster of 41 patients with a mysterious pneumonia.”

I’m going to assume that represents something like what happened. It stands to reason that it took a change of pattern, a sudden explosion of deaths in Wuhan to get the attention of Chinese health authorities and then later of the world. About a week after that, on January 7 (according to the timeline), COVID-19’s novel virus was identified, probably from samples from this cluster of 41.

Because the Chinese were actively covering up, however, instead of being open and honest, even after that there was a delay in knowledge about the virus and a delay in blocking international travel to and from China. So two things were operating. The first is that the virus probably began to spread before even the Chinese authorities were truly aware of the scope of what they were dealing with internally. The second is that once they became aware, and understood the dangers COVID presented to the world, they did all they could to keep that knowledge secret.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 got a silent toehold in many countries around the globe.

Reducing our dependence on China

The New Neo Posted on by

It can’t happen fast enough for me:

The Trump administration is “turbocharging” an initiative to remove the US from dependency on a China-based supply chain and weighing imposing new tariffs to punish the Communist Party in Beijing for its response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report on Monday…

A number of agencies, including the Commerce and State departments, are looking at how to move the supply chain and manufacturing from China using tax incentives and other measures, the report said.

They are examining which manufacturing work should be considered “essential” and how to make those goods outside of China.

“There is a whole-of-government push on this,” an official told Reuters. “The White House’s policy on China has always been caught between pro-trade advisers and China hawks, but the current situation has given the hard-liners new ammunition.”

Good.

It seems obvious that Trump is the right president to do this. And it should have bipartisan support.

I know; dream on about that last bit.

John Brennan again

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Ace.]

I’m a bit tired of starting posts with statements like, “It will come as no surprise…”

But indeed, it will come as no surprise that the report written by intelligence authorities at the request of the Obama administration was cooked to favor the Trump/Russia collusion narrative, and cooked by none other than our good friend John Brennan:

The January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), prepared at the behest of President Barack Obama, claimed that Russia interfered in the presidential election in order to help candidate Donald Trump…

A separate, classified report holed up at the office of the CIA Inspector General (IG) sheds damning light on the role then-CIA Director John Brennan played in the preparation of the report, former National Security Council Chief of Staff Fred Fleitz learned from House Intelligence Committee staff. A source familiar with the report’s fate would not deny that the report went to the office of the CIA IG.

The report states that Brennan overruled agency analysts who wanted to include strong intelligence in the assessment to show that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to win the election, Fleitz says, citing conversations with House Intelligence Committee staffers. Brennan had also rejected analysts who wanted to strike weak intelligence from the report which suggested that Russia favored Trump, Fleitz said.

“So Brennan actually slanted this analysis, choosing anti-Trump intelligence and excluding anti-Clinton intelligence,” Fleitz told The Epoch Times.

It has been reported almost from the start – on the right – that the evidence was that the Russians wanted most of all to sow discord, and if anything they preferred Clinton to Trump. It has always seemed odd to me that so many people bought the “Trump is Putin’s puppet” ridiculousness, but they certainly did. People like Brennan knew exactly what they were doing when they suppressed evidence to the contrary and pushed to the forefront the evidence they wanted the public to believe.

[NOTE: Some of my previous posts on Brennan can be found here and here.]

Dr. Birx: “We underestimated very early on the number of asymptomatic cases”

The New Neo Posted on by

Dr. Birx made this claim in an interview on Saturday:

I think we underestimated very early on the number of asymptomatic cases. And I think we’re really beginning to understand there are people that get infected that those symptoms are so low-grade that they don’t even know that they’re infected.

And we’re beginning to see that with the New York studies of their sero-antibody studies. So we’re really beginning (AUDIO GAP) and in every other country before they had the antibody test, all they could really see are the cases that showed up with serious symptoms. And so things are changing on a day-to-day basis.

Excuse me, but no. We did not just learn this.

I wrote a post on February 29, over two months ago, in which I wrote the following [emphasis added]:

There are two main issues with COVID-19, and we don’t know all that much about either yet: contagiousness and lethality. But the situation of the Diamond Princess cruise passengers offers an opportunity to learn about both under a sort of worst case scenario, which is confinement of healthy with ill passengers in a closed system, and an especially susceptible population because of a high percentage of people of advanced age. So let’s take a look…

The first thing you’ll notice is that the headline blares that the ship started with 10 passengers testing positive for the virus and ended with 700 testing positive within the two weeks of the quarantine. That’s quite a leap. The total number of people on the ship was 3,711. So the final number testing positive represented about 19% of the whole, or a little less than a fifth…

This part is especially interesting:

“More than half of the infected people (322) showed no symptoms at all, which suggests that some coronavirus carriers in China could be going undetected.”

That’s a fact that indicates less mortality – and even less serious morbidity – than has commonly been reported.

The Diamond Princess data was available early in the process of the virus’ spread to the US and the world. The ship represented a very special opportunity to study a population in which the entire group was tested. It was a population with a large number of older people, as well, and people with pre-existing conditions. I have never seen a discussion of how many of those positive-yet-asymptomatic people from the ship remained asymptomatic over the course of the next two weeks, but if it was a relatively large number, that would have been an enormous clue that the people we were seeing who were substantially sickened from COVID were the tip of a more substantial iceberg.

Did Birx and company ignore that? I can understand if they felt they needed more data and more proof. But to not have strongly suspected quite early on that there was a huge percentage of asymptomatic COVID cases would be to have ignored the obvious that was staring them in the face.

And the NY Times editors prove that they do have a keen sense of humor, after all

The New Neo Posted on by

For all those naysayers, the NY Times editors display every bit as keen a sense of humor as the Babylon Bee:

As is so often the case in such situations, it is all but impossible to be certain of the truth [concerning Tara Reade’s allegations]. But the stakes are too high to let the matter fester — or leave it to be investigated by and adjudicated in the media. Mr. Biden is seeking the nation’s highest office.

In 2018, this board advocated strongly for a vigorous inquiry into accusations of sexual misconduct raised against Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated to a seat on the Supreme Court. Mr. Biden’s pursuit of the presidency requires no less. His campaign, and his party, have a duty to assure the public that the accusations are being taken seriously. The Democratic National Committee should move to investigate the matter swiftly and thoroughly, with the full cooperation of the Biden campaign.

Har-dee ha ha ha, that’s a real kneeslapper.

Ted Cruz gets into the act at Twitter:

And the DNC, not to be outdone, declares the Times’ suggestion “absurd” – but not for the obvious reason that the DNC cannot possibly be unbiased, or because the Times didn’t call for the RNC to investigate Kavanaugh. No, it’s for exactly the reason one might think:

I cannot imagine that either the Times editors or the DNC heads think that anyone not already fully onboard the Biden choo-choo will be convinced by these arguments. Perhaps they just think that other events will end up burying Reade’s allegations against Biden for enough voters. And perhaps they’re correct.

Don’t try this at home

The New Neo Posted on by

But they did:

Whoever planned and edited that did a fabulous job.

I have to say, though, that this is not a form of dance that has ever especially appealed to me. I deeply admire the skill of those who can do it, of course. They’re phenomenal. But the dance genre doesn’t speak to me at all. The combination of the near-rigidity of the upper body and the frenetic legwork doesn’t reach me emotionally or seem beautiful or interesting to me in terms of line. I appreciate the extraordinary achievement and the effort, but not the aesthetic.

I know I’m not necessarily typical in that respect.

COVID shutdown protests: Will it be a bang or a whimper?

The New Neo Posted on by

From T. S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men:

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river…

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

At first the shutdown seemed somewhat reasonable although extreme, given the predictions from epidemiologists and the news we had seen coming from China and then Italy. “Flatten the curve” and keep the health care system from being overwhelmed seemed important goals.

They were met. And yet still we see some governors continue their little dictatorships, making seemingly arbitrary pronouncements that continue to infringe on people’s rights as the situation seems to become less and less full of peril in terms of public health.

Yes, the danger exists, and more people are going to die. That’s always true, and it may indeed be more true than usual right now. But people need to live while they’re living, and unless there is an utterly compelling reason for a restriction it needs to go.

Citizens have been fairly cooperative so far. That’s either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. It’s “good” if you think it’s necessary to comply with orders that restrict people’s rights for a while, because the danger remains overwhelmingly great. It’s “bad” if you think this is sheepish slavish nonsense, a testing of the waters for greater tyranny, and quite unnecessary as well.

But the natives are getting restless – even in California, albeit in the redder parts of that blue blue state. There has been protesting and defiance in Sacramento and Huntington Beach:

…[T]he California governor has been less than candid in sharing a timeline of reopening with Californians. And, in an obvious instance of political pique, he shut down Orange County beaches because visitors supposedly failed to follow social distancing guidelines.

Huntington Beach is one of those Orange County locations. On Friday thousands flocked to those shores to protest the needless closures.

“Large crowds opposing the state’s coronavirus stay-at-home mandate took to the streets of downtown Huntington Beach on Friday, a day after the governor closed Orange County beaches and drew frustration and criticism from some residents and city leaders.

“Protesters gathered near the Huntington Beach pier shortly before noon, with the crowd eventually swelling to some 2,500-3,000 people, according to Huntington Beach police Chief Robert Handy. The tightly packed crowd, with most people not wearing protective masks, repeatedly chanted “U.S.A.” as they waited for the demonstration to begin.”

California isn’t the only place this is happening. People want their lives back, and they are willing to assume the risk. Others, who consider themselves to be among the more at risk, can continue to stay home and isolate if they like. But normal-ish life needs to resume for those less at risk.

But how many people feel this way compared to those who want the restrictions to go on and on and on, till COVID is completely vanquished? No doubt it varies from state to state. One thing that’s clear is that a lot of people in South Dakota are happy their state was never really closed down at all:

Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem had an impromptu parade thrown in her honor on Tuesday in the capitol city of Pierre. A local construction company organized the parade to show appreciation for her handling of the coronavirus epidemic.

Noem, the state’s first female governor, was one of a handful of governors not to issue an order shuttering non-essential businesses during the ongoing epidemic.

The parade, organized by John Morris of Morris Inc. construction company, featured “literally hundreds of cars,” fire trucks and other vehicles honking their horns and sirens while Noem watched, apparently surprised, from a local park.

Of course, it helps that South Dakota has barely had any COVID at all: a total of 21 deaths. That’s in a state that with a population that’s somewhere in the 800 thousands, and a low population density as well. But still, it took courage for Governor Noem to hold back in the face of tremendous criticism. Her gamble paid off.

The COVID crisis has many elements, but one of them is that it’s a test of how important liberty is to the American people. How most Americans will answer that test is still being sorted out.

[ADDENDUM: At first I thought this article was satire. Apparently it’s not. At least, I don’t think it is.]