https://www.frontpagemag.com/
And
https://youtu.be/NRD-9-STnvQ
Mother truckers by Salena Zito
Click here for the full story
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The virus crisis caused by an infected bat allowed a liberals to spend a lot of vote buying pork.
Here’s a drill down on our government’s Stimulus Package, not a pretty picture....
American population: 330,483,530
Stimulus bill: $2,000,000,000,000
Dividing the cost by every person in America is $6,051.74.
The government could have given every person over $6,000, but instead will give $1,200 to each adult under a certain income.
Because of bailouts.
Wanna know where the missing 96% of your tax dollars went?
$300,000,000 for Migrant and Refugee Assistance pg. 147
$10,000 per person for student loan bailout
$100,000,000 to Nasa,
$20,000,000,000 to the USPS,
$300,000,000 to the Endowment for the Arts
$300,000,000 for the Endowment for the Humanities/ because no one even knew that was a thing
$15,000,000 for Veterans Employment Training
$435,000,000 for mental health support
$30,000,000,000 for the Department of Education stabilization fund/ because that will keep people employed
$200,000,000 to Safe Schools Emergency Response to Violence Program
$300,000,000 to Public Broadcasting / NPR
$500,000,000 to Museums and Libraries / Who the hell knows how we are going to use it
$720,000,000 to Social Security Admin / but get this only 200,000,000 is to help people. The rest is for admin costs
$25,000,000 for Cleaning supplies for the Capitol Building / I shit you not it's on page 136
$7,500,000 to the Smithsonian for additional salaries
$35,000,000 to the JFK Center for performing Arts
$25,000,000 for additional salary for House of Representatives
$3,000,000,000 upgrade to the IT department at the VA
$315,000,000 for State Department Diplomatic Programs
$95,000,000 for the Agency of International Development
$300,000,000 for International Disaster Assistance
$90,000,000 for the Peace Corp pg. 148
$13,000,000 to Howard University pg. 121
9,000,000 Misc. Senate Expenses pg. 134
$100,000,000 to Essential Air carriers pg. 162 This of note because the Airlines are going to need billions in loans to keep them afloat. $100,000,000 is chump change
$40,000,000,000 goes to the Take Responsibility to Workers and Families Act. This sounds like it's direct payments for workers. Pg. 164
$1,000,000,000 Airlines Recycle and Save Program pg. 163
$25,000,000 to the FAA for administrative costs pg. 165
$492,000,000 to National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) pg. 167
$526,000,000 Grants to Amtrak to remain available if needed through 2021 pg. 168 (what are the odds that doesn't go unused)
Hidden on page 174 the Secretary has 7 days to allocate the funds & notify Congress
$25,000,000,000 for Transit Infrastructure pg. 169
$3,000,000 Maritime Administration pg. 172
$5,000,000 Salaries and Expensive Office of the Inspector General pg. 172
$2,500,000 Public and Indian Housing pg. 175
$5,000,000 Community Planning and Development pg. 175
$2,500,000 Office of Housing
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Are you angry yet?
Mother truckers by Salena Zito
American Truckers; Our Newest First Responders
SHIPPENSBURG, Pennsylvania — Chet Eby is making sure you are going to get all of the bacon you need for breakfast, or maple-glazed ham for that now-modified family Easter dinner you are going to make, or that thinly sliced prosciutto and provolone sandwich you’ve been craving. It is a Wednesday afternoon, and the 31-year-old has his young sons, Austin and Evan, with him hauling a load of piglets from Cumberland County to Iowa, one of millions of road warriors behind the wheel of a truck traveling across the country every hour of every day making sure the food and necessities you need and enjoy are available at your local grocers.
“I am hauling baby pigs from where they're born in Pennsylvania to the farms where they fatten them out in Iowa,” he said from his starting point. He is heading out to Iowa with his truck filled with 20-pound pigs. “So on our end of it with farmers, every eight weeks a new litter of pigs is born and we have to get the little ones out of the barn, the barn needs to be empty so the next batch can come.”
“If we don’t transport freight, the country comes to a standstill,” Eby says matter-of-factly.
“If we don’t transport freight, the country comes to a standstill,” Eby says matter-of-factly.
Click here for the full story
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Steyn asks: "Are we ready to do serious cost-benefit analysis?"
The Preparedness of the 24/7 Surveillance State
By Mark Steyn
World War Two enabled the post-war social-democratization of Continental society; in Britain (and other parts of the Commonwealth) the social solidarity of Churchillian resistance enabled the social solidarity of Attlee's NHS and nationalized railways. Even in America, which continued to pay lip service to small government and individual liberty, the liberator of Europe as president did nothing to disturb FDR's expansion of federal government via the alphabet-soup agencies that metastasized across the decades and plague us to this day.
So, if three weeks, four months, a year-and-a-half of house arrest are going to change us, the question is: How?
Gavin Mortimer's report from the Fifth Republic reminds us that France's electoral demography is almost the inverse of America's: In the US, to over-generalize only slightly, the old vote Trump and GOP, the young are woke and Berniephiliac. In France, the old vote for Macron, the young for LePen. That's because, France being further down the toilet of history than America, their youth is beyond the flourishes of wokeness and has actually awoken - to the reality of the fact that their parents and grandparents have screwed them over. That divide - between young and old, between country and metropolitan, between the vast geographical swathes of LePen's electoral base and the teeming urban redoubts of Macron's - seems likely to be even wider when this thing is done.
For the rest of us, the question of how we change depends on whether the Politburo and its shills in the World Health Organization and the western media succeed in imposing their official lies. For the thousands of dead and the millions of economically ruined, the Chinese government ought to be a global pariah. Will it be? That would be expecting more backbone from western leaders than we've seen in decades: Justin Trudeau, for example, is still letting Chinese nationals enter Canada and without going into quarantine. Happily, as the first mammy singer to go totally dark, no one can ask him a thing about it. Assuming those CBC courtiers from whom he deigns to entertain a question are minded to in the first place.
Beyond China, the issue is preparedness. Actually, for almost twenty years, the issue has been preparedness. Since 9/11, freeborn citizens of advanced democratic societies have been subjected to a level of inconvenience and continuous surveillance they would never have previously entertained, from the pointless security theatre of the shoeless shuffle through LAX and O'Hare to the rubber-stamp FISA court warrants to monitor every aspect of Carter Page's life for years on end with no probable cause. And what's the upshot of all this 24/7 surveillance?
They didn't see it coming.
New York, for example, is a city that has already had a huge smoking crater blown into it - and what's the upshot? Eighteen years on, as I noted last night, after expenditures of billions on purpose-built federal, state and local bureaucracies, a city of eight million people can't cope with an extra four thousand patients in critical condition.
Why? It's not as if bio-warfare wasn't expected to be part of our future: Immediately after 9/11, you'll recall, there was the anthrax scare, and enthusiastic modeling about what would happen in the event of a suitcase nuke. And in the end hospitals are as overwhelmed as if all that money-no-object Homeland Security spending had never happened. As Kate Smyth has pointed out in our comments section, if Isis weren't already planning something like this, the ease with which you can wipe out a third of the Dow Jones Industrials will surely have some of the savvier jihad boys dusting off the old bunsen burner.
A virus is not the same as a terrorist attack - but our reaction thereto is pretty similar. Preparedness is currently being discussed in terms of a sufficiency of masks and ventilators - even though nine out of ten Covid ventilator patients wind up being carried out by the handles. So fretting about ventilators, while decent and humane, is ultimately marginal.
Whereas enforcing the borders would not have been.
It is true that China lied to us. It is also true that at the World Health Organization Beijing's Baghdad Bob signed on to China's lies. And so did his deputies, like my cowardly contemptible compatriot, the execrable Bruce Aylward, a man so thoroughly penetrated by the Chinese he shares the third-rate commissar's inability even to deflect smoothly and steer back to the party line.
But that's not why we were unprepared. At the time, for example, that Nancy Pelosi and New York's health commissioners were encouraging their citizens to attend Chinese New Year celebrations, the world's governments already knew that Beijing had lied. Nevertheless, as recently as two-and-a-half weeks ago, Bill DeBlasio was still saying pay no attention to Racist Trump's ban on flights from China, there's nothing to see here, get out and about and enjoy yourselves. And, as a direct result of that, the corpses of New Yorkers now have to be loaded by forklift onto refrigerated trucks to be disposed of under cover of darkness. This is the equivalent of the Lord Mayor of London in 1665 tweeting "I utterly deplore the rise of buboniphobia. Let's all go to the opening of Major League Bear-Baiting and hug a pustuled bawdy. #LoveTrumpsPlague!"
But back then society and its ruling class still had a survival instinct. If you object to calling it the Chinese Virus, let's call it the Globalist Virus. There is a reason the epicenter of Covid-19 moved first to Western Europe and then to America - because the west is the most afflicted by diversity unto death. Even the Mexicans have figured out that, while open borders are useful for exporting drugs and low-skilled Mexicans into America, the cost-benefit analysis changes when it comes to importing diseased Americans and death into Mexico.
Are we ready to do serious cost-benefit analysis?
The most significant change after 9/11 - "the day the world changed" - was the doubling of the rate of Muslim immigration to the west. Will we do the same now? More open borders, more flights from Shanghai and Beijing, more transfer of what's left of western manufacturing to the Chinese Communist Party, more shrieks of "Raaaaacist!" at any questioning of Beijing's official lies, never mind whether any advanced nation needs mass immigration or unscreened self-identified "refugees"...
The changes we make this time will be existential. We are suffused in death not only because of Chinese lies but because of those we tell ourselves, suppler and more beguiling as they are. "Preparedness" does not mean merely PPE and ICU, but requires also addressing borders and immigration and political correctness, and diversity unto death. In much of the western world, we are shutting down the economy and daily life, because our rulers could not bear to shut down their own virtue-signaling diversity bollocks.
Will it go the same next time? Absent serious sustained pushback, what do you think?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Returning to normalcy?
How We Get Our Lives Back
Partial reopening of the economy wouldn’t be perfect. But it’d be a huge step forward.
Main Street: Partial reopening of the economy wouldn’t be perfect. But it’d be a huge step forward. And Taiwan’s example offers some ideas. Images: AFP/Getty Composite: Mark Kelly
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke for many when he took a moment during one of his recent news conferences to go beyond the Covid-19 numbers and speak to how dispiriting it’s been for Americans to have their lives and livelihoods turned upside down with so little to show for it.
“The anxiety is what is the most oppressive here,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Not knowing. Not knowing I’m positive, if my friend is positive, if my loved one is positive. Not knowing when this is going to end. The anxiety of dealing with the isolation day after day after day. It’s like a bad ‘Groundhog [Day]’ movie.”
Epidemiologists say coronavirus won’t be defeated until either a vaccine is developed or it peters out when enough Americans are infected that the virus has difficulty finding vulnerable people to infect. Many rightly worry how long that could take and whether the economy can remain shut that long without, as the president says, making the cure worse than the disease.
But what if there were a middle way, in which we would get 90% of our lives (and economy) back? It’s not perfect. But it would be a giant step forward over what we have now.
“It’s difficult,” says Ashish K. Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “But it’s not more difficult than what America has done in the past.”
Dr. Jha says he understands the frustration of Americans cooped up at home. He attributes this mostly to the lag—about three weeks—between when substantial social distancing is imposed and when it starts showing results.
“This is a virus that tests our patience because anything we do we don’t see the benefits for a while,” says Dr. Jha.
Yet welcome signs may come sooner than we think. New York and New Jersey are the epicenter for coronavirus. According to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, in New York state the demand for resources such as hospital beds and ventilators is expected to peak on Wednesday, and the day after for daily deaths. For New Jersey, the respective dates are April 15 and 16.
If true, it means that within two weeks or so Americans could see the first evidence we’ve reached the downside of these curves in the worst-hit parts of the country. The situation would still be ugly—the number of daily deaths, for example, would remain high, and with more testing so would the number of new cases.
Even so, it would be an undeniably positive indicator. This in turn would likely boost public confidence in what our medical professionals have been recommending. It also suggests a path not just to reopening the economy, but to keeping it open.
“Seeing that a peak has been reached and that the number of daily deaths start declining could be indeed a psychological moment that could be a turning point,” says John Ioannidis, a Stanford epidemiologist who is also co-director of the university’s Meta-Research Innovation Center. “I think we have already reached that turning point in the curves for several European countries and we will see it very soon also for the USA.”
Even after New York hits its peak, things will continue to get worse in states that haven’t. Which is why it makes more sense to begin looking at reopening some parts of the country before others—and the conditions required.
Taiwan’s example offers some ideas. Though it may yet end up imposing stricter measures if a big second wave of Covid-19 infections materializes, thus far Taiwan has managed to keep most of its economy running. It has done this, moreover, while keeping its count of total cases at only 373 and total deaths to five. This despite its proximity to the belly of the Covid-19 beast, China.
Taiwan has done this with aggressive testing and tracing—along with quarantines for those arriving from outside and enforced isolation for potential carriers. The economy doesn’t go on quite as normal, but it does go on.
As for the U.S., Dr. Jha says that, at least for this year, we probably won’t be going to any Red Sox games. But he can imagine offices and schools reopening, and even bars and restaurants as long as they limit capacity and seat diners unusually far apart.
To achieve this, he says, America’s top priorities must be “testing, testing and testing”—to identify who’s infected, who’s not, who’s immune and who needs to be isolated so they don’t infect anyone else.
“My sense is that we can get 90% of our lives back if we have a really well-deployed testing infrastructure deployed and we’re testing people and are identifying people who are sick and pulling them out,” Dr. Jha says.
This isn’t perfect either. But it beats the two likeliest alternatives: keeping the economy shut down for many more months, or spending the next 18 months in a cycle of reopenings and reclosures.
The balance between personal liberty and the obligation to save lives
Complaints about expanding government power to curtail individual rights are not frivolous, but they must be superseded by the need to defend public safety.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++What do Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo have in common these days? The answer is that critics of these two very different political leaders are accusing them of overstepping their authority and infringing on individual rights while dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.In Israel, some of Netanyahu’s left-wing opponents have accused him of acting like a dictator by ordering Israel’s police to use the smartphones of those who have been exposed to the coronavirus to track their whereabouts. The purpose of the measure is to ensure that those in quarantine don’t infest others, as well as to inform those who have been exposed to a person who has contracted the disease of their obligation to ensure that no one else gets it.But those left-wingers who oppose Netanyahu’s policies on a host of other issues have seized upon this order in order to depict the prime minister as a would-be authoritarian employing the security establishment to use high-tech police state tactics.Ironically, in the United States, it’s largely been conservatives who have employed the same kind of rhetoric to describe some of the decisions made by Cuomo in New York and leaders elsewhere to enforce the lockdown of various locales as governments struggle to contain the spread of the virus.In particular, the National Rifle Association is suing Cuomo and New York for closing down shops that sell guns because they are deemed non-essential. They claim that this violates the Second Amendment rights of Americans, and that it compromises their ability to defend themselves during the pandemic. Some mega-churches elsewhere are making similar points about bans on holding public meetings which they allege violates their First Amendment rights of free assembly and freedom of religion that are not nullified by concerns about the spread of the COVID-19 virus.It’s easy to dismiss both Netanyahu’s critics and those seeking to defend the sale of firearms or holding mass prayer meetings as hopeless partisans and crackpots. Yet regardless of your feelings about Netanyahu, guns or mega-churches, in most circumstances, they’d be right.The most essential purpose of any government should be to defend the rights of the individual against forces that would deprive them of liberty. The kind of measures that are being employed to enforce lockdowns of whole cities, states and nations are the antithesis of liberty and democracy. They involve the wholesale sacrifice of individual rights. Placing that much power in the hands of any government, even ones run by advocates of democracy—true of both Netanyahu and Cuomo, whether or not you agree with them on most issues—is a very scary business.At such moments, libertarians like to quote Benjamin Franklin’s famous line that said: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”That’s a powerful argument against government over reach of any kind and would seem especially relevant when discussing government efforts that to ensure public safety at the sacrifice of so much liberty.But it’s important to point out that the actual context in which Franklin wrote goes against the usual interpretation since what he was advocating for was in favor of a legislature’s ability to tax people—in this case, the Penn family, the landlords of the entire colony of Pennsylvania in the 18th century—to provide for the common defense.Nevertheless, the calculus by which one can trade rights for security is hard to discern. In many, if not most cases, the tradeoff isn’t worth it.But there are some cases when that doesn’t really work, the current emergency being living proof of that.Suffice it to say that when the exercise of one’s right to act as you please—whether it is to buy a gun, attend a church service with a thousand other people or attend a minyan or wedding—if it can directly endangers the rights of others to life and liberty by potentially giving them the coronavirus.That means that even if you consider yourself a First Amendment purist, you have to recognize that there are limits to the right to free speech. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous admonition that “falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing panic” is not protected under the Constitution is an example of how common sense must be employed when discussing such issues.But in the case of the impact of coronavirus on our liberties, it is Jewish religious law that is the most persuasive. The principle of pikuach nefesh, literally “saving a soul,” enables the breaking of almost all Jewish laws (with a few clear exceptions, such as idol worship, unlawful sexual relations and murder) in order to save lives.This principle cannot be twisted to support permanent tyranny or abridgement of rights and liberty. But it’s clear that it places the efforts of officials like Netanyahu and Cuomo to ensure that the coronavirus pandemic doesn’t turn into a public-health catastrophe with victims overwhelming medical facilities and leading to mass death.More to the point, it obligates all of us to understand that giving up some of our liberty to congregate or to go about business as usual may well be the difference between life and death for those who are most vulnerable to the disease: the elderly and those who already managed respiratory illnesses or are immuno-compromised.Until the pandemic subsides—as sooner or later it must—we need to put our lives and some of our liberty on hold not to purchase a little illusory security, but to preserve the precious lives of our elderly and others in peril. Those who employ arguments about individual rights to justify flouting the virus restrictions are not exercising liberty, but are instead unconscionably demanding the license to take human life.
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