Mollie Hemingway: Media Reaction To Yamiche Alcindor Dustup With Trump Shows Why Their Approval Ratings Are Low – “Her peers rushed to defend her, but Alcindor has a track record of partisan commentary and unnecessarily hostile and silly questions.”

“The ongoing dysfunctional codependent relationship between the political media and President Donald Trump flared up again on Sunday afternoon during a Rose Garden press conference on the government’s handling of the Wuhan virus that has swept the globe.

Trump needs the media to act the way they do so he can dunk on them and look good by comparison. The media are enjoying the short-term rush of their war with Trump, wearing his abuse as a badge of honor among their peers.
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Trump flourishes the more the White House press corps is riddled with political activists posing as journalists. But the country might fare better with more informed questions from reporters able to think through issues less politically.

Thomas Lifson: Trump-haters’ heads exploding in the wake of his masterful Rose Garden coronavirus briefing yesterday – “President Trump is redefining himself as a wartime president, boldly acting to sweep away obstacles and mobilizing government and business to fight together to get us up to speed in overcoming a threat that nobody anticipated.”

Jim Hoft: “Instead of Asking a Nasty, Snarky Question like that, You Should Ask a Real Question” – TRUMP Unloads on #FakeNews Hack Jim Acosta After Gotcha Question (VIDEO) – “The CNN hack wasted the American public’s time by asking a horrid, gotcha question at the White House presser today.”

Ace of Spades: Presser Reactions: Trump v. Acosta, Gutfeld v. Williams, and All of the Leftwing Media Versus Mike Lindell from MyPillow.com – “Trump shut him down by saying that CNN’s goal was to incite panic, whereas Trump’s goal, as President, was to avoid it.”

Eddie Scarry: Trump’s not scaring people about the coronavirus: The media are – “They have reported on this pandemic and the administration’s response to it as though it were something out of the Book of Revelations. Every single death is characterized as an avoidable tragedy — something that we should have been able to stop if not for an inept president. In fact, the experiences of many countries not led by Trump has been strikingly similar.”

“Reporters can keep people in a panic as long as they want. But their worthless nagging about the administration’s response to a health scare nobody yet completely understands is just that — worthless.

Richard Benedetto: An Epidemic of Media Partisanship – “Leafing through the first section of Sunday’s print edition of the Post, nearly every headline seemed designed to scare the bejesus out of readers already nervously confined to their homes because of the coronavirus crisis.”

“I am reminded of a course I took in graduate school that focused on the responsibility of the media. I recall the professor noting that with the American press enjoying such great freedom, it becomes even more important that it wield that freedom judiciously.

Cassandra Fairbanks: LEAKED AUDIO: Kennedy Center President Deployed Lobbyist to Secure $25 Million in Coronavirus Stimulus, But Not a Cent for Workers – “During the leaked conference call, which took place on March 26, Rutter repeatedly makes excuses for why they are laying off their employees despite knowing that they will be receiving $25 million in the stimulus package.”

Brian C. Joondeph: The Coincidental Chinese Virus – “When everything from professional sports to entertainment award shows have become political forums, it’s no surprise that an infectious disease outbreak moved from the realm of science to politics.” Many coincidences all heading along the same path tend to breed conspiracy theories …

“In politics there are few coincidences, defined as “Remarkable concurrences of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.” What to the casual observer appears random are events actually created or steered in a certain direction for political objectives. The Trump presidency provides a timeline of such examples, including the current viral pandemic, suggesting that these are not simply serendipitous events.

I & I Editorial Board: Some Much-Needed Coronavirus Perspective – “It’s unprecedented, to be sure. But the problem with all the numbers being bandied about is that they lack any context.” … “Then there are all the scary stories about hospitalizations and how the health care system will be overwhelmed. Here, too, there’s no context.” … “But in any situation, context matters. Unfortunately, that’s the one thing missing from the 24/7 coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.”

Victor Davis Hanson: Viral Prerequisites and Nationalist Lessons in Time of Plague – “Trump’s prior initiatives eased the implementation of many of his most effective orders during this crisis.”

“since the outbreak of the virus, Trump’s idiosyncratic sixth sense has come in handy. The country is united in its furor at China—even if it is giving no credit to Trump for being years ahead of where it is now.
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What made Trump a renegade Republican was his appeal to the deplorables, irredeemables, clingers, and dregs, whom the national media and elite had derided as toothless, smelly, fat, superstitious, bigoted, racist, superfluous, addicted, and toxic.
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We are learning, belatedly, that Trump was also rightly wary of transnationalism.
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At such times as these, was it smarter to trust in bureaucracies like the CDC to issue test kits or to encourage private enterprise to step forward and become creative producers? Could counties and states adapt better to the local and regional differences of the virus’s manifestations than a monolithic federal government?
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When the jails are emptying, was it then wiser to have a pro-Second Amendment president or one who wished to restrict the availability of guns and ammunition, Beto O’Rourke style?

Sundance: Federal Judge Rules Killing Babies is an “Essential Service” but protecting the 1^st and 2^nd amendments isn’t? “Strange times we live in… Earlier today in Tampa, Florida, the county sheriff let the criminal inmates out of his jail, and then went to arrest a pastor for delivering Sunday church services and put him in the same jail. …”

I & I Editorial Board: How Bad Regulation, Bureaucracy Slowed The Fight Against Deadly Wuhan Coronavirus – “our main regulatory, research and policy-making agencies at the national level are divorced from their true mission: To protect Americans. Their actions arguably contributed to the current quarantine and to the rising deaths from the Wuhan coronavirus across the country.”

Stephen Kruiser: The Morning Briefing: Bloated Bureaucracy Is Going to Have a Coronavirus Body Count – “Trump is basically in the position of an NFL quarterback who’s being blamed for two decades of management and franchise failures that preceded him.”

David Bessis: Coronavirus: the key numbers we must find out – “The model is worthless unless you get the core parameters right.” … “In just a few months, China has produced massive scientific knowledge on Covid-19 that will benefit the rest of the world. But as far as epidemiology is concerned, there is one big problem: China’s numbers just don’t add up.”

“Italy, Spain, France, the United States and all significantly impacted democracies should immediately open-source their day-to-day raw mortality metrics, in real-time, with maximum geographic and demographic granularity. They should share this data for 2020 from at least as far back as 2019, and ideally from prior years so that statistical noise can be estimated. Governments should also share any available ’cause of death’ statistics.
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The stakes are too high. The disconnect between official tallies and what people see on social networks is too obvious. Compared to China, Western democracies have underdelivered on preparedness and decisiveness. They must beat China on transparency, or they will lose credibility.
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Unless we quickly learn the most basic facts about our new reality, the only certainty is that we’ll make bad decisions that will inflict unnecessary harm on a lot of people.

John Hinderaker: An Optimistic Projection of COVID-19 Deaths [with comment by Paul] – both the yin and the yang – “Maybe there will be a silver lining to the Wuhan virus: it might focus attention on the main killers of Americans and others. According to the CDC, these are the principal causes of death in the U.S.:” Paul adds “We keep the number of annual deaths from the flu well below 81,000 through a vaccine.” The impact of social distancing on flu data is not considered. – also see neo.

neo: Conversations with friends: “Trump did nothing” – “Ever since the COVID phenomenon began, though, I’ve noticed that most of them can’t seem to resist dropping little political statements into the conversation, usually about Trump.” … “I’ve noticed that these statements seem to take one (or both) of two forms. The first one can be summed up as “Trump did nothing and that let coronavirus get a grip here.” The second is “Trump hates science.” … “It’s really quite impressive to see the coordination and scope of the effort to get the word out. And my friends have certainly received the message, loud and clear.” This anti-Trump thing goes well beyond TDS or politics and is perhaps more dangerous than any pandemic in the long term. When people avoid intellectual integrity, society suffers and one only has to look at communism in the 20^th century to see extreme examples.

Andrea Widburg: Once again, Trump was right and the media were wrong – “As always, when it comes to the media’s obsessive need to contradict Trump, the media were wrong.” … as were -are- a couple of governors.

“Indeed, the chloroquine and azithromycin treatment was so successful that Dr. Raoult refused to use a control group. He believed that doing so would be unethical insofar as it would deny people a proven life-saving treatment.

And Trump once again scores against a hostile media.

Peter Wales: The Case for a Nationwide Lockdown – “What we do know is that of tested and diagnosed cases which have run their course, more than 15 people out of 100 have died.” 15%? His cite doesn’t even support this is it’s worst cases. Then there’s the note that “it was no more than a few days’ inconvenience, as suggested by the latest figures out of Iceland, where mass testing has indicated the virus had a much wider and largely unnoticed spread in the community than “we would have assumed,” in the words of the chief tester.” Doomsday alarmism supported neither by its citations nor its observations and we are supposed to take it seriously?

Clarice Feldman: Numerators and Denominators in the Coronavirus Saga – “To ascertain how fatal a virus is, we need an accurate picture of how many people have it (the denominator) and how many have died as a result (the numerator), we have neither, but the data is improving and with it some substantial shifts away from the original model, which predicted far more deaths as a result of the Wuhan virus than we are seeing.”

“Early models also could not accurately predict how quickly the virus would spread and what tools could be brought in to limit mortality. As the data comes in, we have reason to be more optimistic that the death rate will be lower, the extreme efforts to control its spread should soon be relaxed, and that efficacious treatments are already underway. (Unfortunately, I can be far less sanguine about the end of Democratic rapaciousness in the face of national emergencies or media disingenuousness.)
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Yes, special protection must still be in place for the elderly and immune suppressed, and we must continue to practice good hygiene, and yes, all available personnel and supplies must go to those areas hardest hit, but I’m not shoving my Amazon boxes into the autoclave any longer and I firmly believe we need to get back to more normal commercial activity in most of the country as soon as possible, and no later than Easter, or the consequences to the nation’s health and well-being will be worse than that of the virus.

Hannah Smothers: Every Grocery Store Should Be Handling the Pandemic Like This Texas Chain – “Whole Foods, local grocery chains, and probably the federal government could take a page from HEB’s emergency preparedness book.” … “HEB probably had a head start because it operates solely in a state where hurricane season means nearly annual emergency situations,”

Geoffrey Luck: Flatten the Curve, Fatten the Crisis – “If war is too important to be left to the generals, epidemics are too critical to be entrusted to the doctors. That is the only conclusion to be drawn from Australia’s foolish rush to hysteria over Covid-19.” … “Unfortunately, policy still seems to derive from raw score-keeping, and health departments better at tally-keeping than analysing.”

New York Post: Media meltdown over Trump’s suicide warning shows the press can’t let its hatred go – “There’s nothing incorrect — or even controversial — in those remarks. (Though Trump, sigh, went on to be more dramatic.) But media outlets that would normally echo any concern about higher mental-health risks proceed to be outraged.”

“Back in the real world, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline has reportedly seen incoming calls triple.

Much of the media would rush to contradict Trump if he announced that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. At a time of national crisis, it’s beyond pathetic.

Robert Bryce: Why Dems are so bent on passing wind amid corona crisis – “Renewables live or die by subsidies, in fact. That was proved yet again this week”

That Congressional Democrats would push so hard for solar and wind subsidies at such a critical time for the US economy is particularly galling for two reasons. First, the wind industry already stands to collect some $33.75 billion in subsidies between now and 2029. Second, wind-energy development in some of the most-heavily Democratic states in the country — Hawaii, California, New York and Vermont — has been effectively stopped due to local opposition.
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This economic-rescue bill will likely not include Big Wind pork. But given the wind industry’s shamelessness, the nonsense is certain to return. Indeed, Politico is reporting that subsidies for solar and wind “could be pushed to a later corporate rescue package.”

Matt Margolis: What the Media Isn’t Telling You About the United States’ Coronavirus Case Numbers – “In a visual presentation titled “Where the U.S. Stands Now on Coronavirus Testing” the New York Times even used whole numbers for confirmed cases in one slide, and then in the next slide used per capita numbers for testing, in order to paint the United States in the worst light.” It’s deceit by statistics and ignorance either willful or unknowing.

Geoffrey P. Hunt: We’ve been had, and Trump knows it – “Most telling, the two U.S. public health icons, Drs Fauci and Birx, are both saying the extreme models that provoked extreme measures bear little resemblance to the actual data on the ground.” … “Perhaps Trump had no other option than to go with the flow when this crisis unfolded.” … “Trump wants America to reopen by Easter. Despite his ambition being ridiculed and criticized, he’s right to pivot from hysteria to rebound.”

Aynsley Kellow: Logic, the first casualty – “In the US Donald Trump is being excoriated for daring to consider the costs by those who consider risk management to be solely a matter for natural scientists, and to be decided without regard to cost. He is one of the few leaders (if not the only one) who is including some consideration of the human and economic costs of the responses dictated by the medical experts who have no expertise in risk management as it should be practiced.”

John Merline: COVID-19 Is Killing The Case For Socialized Medicine – “we actually have a way to compare how various countries have been dealing with the coronavirus. We can compare death rates from the virus, and deaths as a share of total population and contagion rates.” … “The mantra among socialized medicine advocates is that the U.S. spends more for health care but delivers lower quality than other industrialized nations. The experience with the coronavirus is showing that the last thing we should do is import health care systems from abroad.”

John Hinderaker: Covid-19 Deaths So Far: Where Is The Crisis? – “I have updated this chart a number of times, based on data from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control, and will continue to do so. It shows, for one thing, how far COVID-19 has to go before it equals the average seasonal flu mortality,”

Scott Johnson: Deborah Birx: About those models – “the predictions of the model don’t match the reality on the ground in China, South Korea or Italy.” Just like the climate models?

Monica Showalter: A stupid little political stunt to Get Trump goes awry in Nevada – “Steve Sisolak, the leftist governor of Nevada, decided to play doctor by banning the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine” … “It’s ironic, because Sisolak couldn’t do anything better to incentivize hoarding than to initiate bans and conditions and prohibitions.”

“It’s nothing but Democrat administrative-state mentality at work here — first, the slap at Trump, and second, the move to crush the wreckers and hoarders — all coming at a time when the private sector is stepping up production of necessary things in a pandemic, the innovators are going gangbusters with new solutions, doctors are experimenting in uncertainty as never before and the regulators in Washington are getting out of the way in a bid to hasten solutions.

What Nevada needs, he seems to be saying, is more bureaucrats, more enforcers, and more regulations, because there’s just too much freedom and in a pandemic, people are escaping “all proper control.” He’s moving against the Zeitgeist, led by President Trump. Expect a lot more self-justification and backtracking from him, he’s not making himself popular.

neo: The flexible opinions of the left – “Seems that within just a few years’ time, leftists have completely reversed their position on saving money vs. maximum preservation of the elderly’s lives.”

Two ideas came up today in various essays. One highlights the fact that social distancing has an impact on all communicable diseases and the decrease in flu cases skews Wuhan virus handling capability. Another is comparing the assault on hospital capacity of a disaster like 9/11 to the epidemic and wondering about the ability to handle disasters.

John Podhoretz: Watch out for the Chicken Littles gleefully pushing panic and doom – “For Americans especially prone to that specific fear, there is almost no piece of coronavirus news that doesn’t trigger a renewed sense of panic.” … “There is something peculiar going on in the way certain people are discussing the coronavirus — journalists, pundits and the armies of “influencers” endowed with a blue checkmark for no obvious reason. It’s almost as though they are taking a salacious pleasure in the grimmest and most haunting possibilities.”

Ryan Sasscer: Let’s not Swat the Mosquito but get Hit by the Train – “The COVID-19 pandemic is a legitimate crisis we should take seriously, but our response to this virus is putting us on course for a far worse disaster.”

Augusto Zimmermann: Dear PM, a Word to Ponder, ‘Proportion’ – “Dr Katz suggests that governments should depart from the “total war” strategy that your government and others are employing – disrupting businesses and restricting the movement of people with no regards to the variance in the risks of contracting the infection – and start adopting instead a rather more “surgical war” approach to the problem.”

Scott Johnson: Coronavirus in one state – “The order is premised on modeling performed by state and University of Minnesota public health experts” … “The implication is that we have been “doing nothing.” We have been “doing something” for the past few weeks.” … “There is reasonable ground to wonder whether the projections on which the governor has relied comport with reality.” … “Current data compiled by the Minnesota Department of Health reflect these numbers: 11,000 tests, 287 positive, one death. The data also reflect a total of 35 cases requiring hospitalization, including 26 hospitalized as of today.”

John Hinderaker: COVID-19 Fatalities So Far – “The Diamond Princess experience–virtually a laboratory experiment–suggests that around 80% of the population is naturally immune to COVID-19, that half the people who get the disease will experience no symptoms, and that in an elderly population, something like 1% of those who contract the disease will die. So far I don’t see anything in the reported U.S. or global fatality numbers to contradict the Diamond Princess experience.”

Scott Johnson citing Kevin Roche: My struggle with the Star Tribune (3) – “We need to immediately embark on a different course, before the damage we inflict on ourselves is beyond repair. … So we should call on Governor Walz, our legislators and other political leaders, to consider that they are only delaying, that is right, not preventing, only delaying, the loss of a few lives, while promulgating measures that likely will lead to, indeed have already led to, enormous job losses and financial ruin, creating widespread anxiety and emotional distress.”

Meanwhile you have Larry Hogan: We’re going to listen to our scientists on when we go back to work, not the White House and Allahpundit proclaiming “I wonder if Trump realizes how ferocious the pushback will be if he follows through on encouraging people to go back to work next week.” Both Hogan and the Pundit expose a deep TDS bias in proclaiming conclusions as assumptions without evidence to support them. Another one is Breaking: Trump says aiming to reopen America by Easter; Update: Can’t reopen until health care system is prepared, says … Liz Cheney where Ed Morrissey misses what the President said about Easter as a goal and completely avoided the problem (along with Cheney) of trying to decide what a prepared health care system might be. Why is the health care system unprepared for a respiratory disease whose numbers are in the noise when compared to the annual flu onslaught? i.e. the health care situation is fear driven, not fact driven.

Coyote: COVID-19 And Some Thoughts on Data Analysis – [caution: moral preening on display] “Frankly, I am done with the Precautionary Principle. This does not mean I am against taking precautions, even strong and expensive precautions, against bad things. But I am done with the notion that one should ignore the costs of these precautions and not make sensible tradeoffs. This is even true when trading off the risk to life on one hand with reduction of economic outcomes on the other. This is in part because reduced economic activity has real effects on human misery and has direct correlations with lifespan and well-being.” His thoughts:

“The data we have sucks, and thus any conclusions we are drawing mostly suck too. …

The media is constantly confusing changes in measurement technique and intensity with changes in the underlying progress of the virus itself. …

The data we are getting sucks worse because the media has decided, as one big group, that for our own good they are going to limit all facts about the virus to only the bad ones. …

The media is never more dangerous than when it understands a little about a scientific topic. …

Many of the computer model results I am seeing make no sense to me. I am exhausted with people talking about computer models as if they are some fact, rather than a really opaque calculation on some researcher’s set of non-transparent hypotheses. …

Mario Alexis Portella: No, Trump is not in Violation of the Emoluments Clause – “Unless we believe that the Framers intended to prohibit any presidential secondary source of income that could, even incidentally, do business with a foreign government or official, then clearly “emolument” is a term of art that covers specific types of payments and gifts.” It’s a good rundown on one of the ongoing lawfare attacks.

Monica Showalter: Journey to Surrealville: What’s really fueling Pelosi’s shutdown of America’s relief package? – “As Roger Simon noted in his excellent piece, they’re using a pandemic for political aims, suggesting they have no limits on how far they’ll go to use any crisis for political gains. They’d do the same in a nuclear attack, he points out, because they are that far gone”

“Not surprisingly, Twitter hashtags such as #PelosiHatesAmericans and #DemocratsAreDestroyingAmerica are leading trends on Twitter. It’s a sign that this is going to leave a mark on Democrats and isn’t going down well. … American workers have seen $1,200 checks dangled in front of them…and are now seeing them pulled away from them like Lucy’s football.

Not a biggie to Nancy Pelosi, who, after all, has called thousand-dollar checks to workers “crumbs.”

This brings us to the real question here, which is, what are they thinking? How could they treat lifeline aid during a massive crisis that has shut down the economy of the entire country as such a political football? How could they betray the blue-state governors whom President Trump is working so well with — California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom, New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and Washington’s Gov. Jay Inslee — three lefti-est of lefties — who have nothing but praise these days for President Trump? How could they betray Democratic moneybags financing sources such as Google and Facebook and even Walmart, which have done so much good as their part of the collective effort?

A look at Christine Pelosi’s Twitter feed offers some clues … More important, take a look at that Moscow Mitch designator — something McConnell reportedly does not like, so she uses it. There’s no bipartisan spirit there to start, not even any hope of it with this kind of talk, just a desire for political slugfesting. More important, the Moscow Mitch thing is a reference to the Democrats’ continuous hobbyhorse: finding some way to overturn the results of the 2016 election. This is pure partisanship at its most disgusting, business as usual for the rabid and embittered Democrats.
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It’s a journey into the surreal. Yet it’s valuable to know what talking points they are pushing, given the pliance of the mainstream media and groups such as JournoList which repeat talking points in unison. This is the freak show coming at us, and it’s beyond disgusting.

Scott Johnson: Dems gotta Dem, Pelosi style – “The absurdly irrelevant provisions that Dems seek to incorporate to further the progressive takeover of the United States are meant to remain a deep secret. The current crisis — it’s not meant to go to waste, in the usual reckoning of the thought leaders of the Democratic Party.”

Paul Mirengoff: Public health and economic prosperity – “On the public health side of the equation, I don’t think anyone has come up with a reliable model for forecasting the fatalities that would result from various levels of social isolation and business cessation. Similarly, on the economic side, I’m not aware of any reliable model that forecasts the amount of economic damage that would result from various levels and duration of business cessation, or that tells us how long recovery would take.”

Lubos Motl: Who was Feynman’s Mr Young and what was his rat paper? “When I watched this irrational behavior, the mindless promotion of “what must be done to fix the epidemics”, I couldn’t forget about the wonderful 1974 Richard Feynman’s Caltech commencement speech that is included as Cargo Cult Science,”

“a chapter in his popular book Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman. In that speech, Feynman mentioned some medieval superstitions and charlatans. How could people believe those gurus when it was rather clear that nothing really worked? However, Feynman continued, it’s a silly question because people are still behaving equally stupidly in the modern era.

Jack Cashill: Reflections on a Century of Junk Science – “In my 2009 book, Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, I documented a century’s worth of scientific misinformation, disinformation, half-truths, and lies disseminated almost inevitably to advance a progressive agenda.”

“The numbers stunned me. Not following the news closely, I presumed, based on the hysteria in the air, that the numbers had to be at least ten times that high both nationally and internationally.

285? According to the Centers for Disease Control 185 Americans died of drug overdoses every day in 2018. According to the CDC, 315 people died of the flu every day during the six-month 2018-2019 flu season. And if protecting life is the goal, we could save about 400 young lives every work hour by shutting down America’s abortion clinics.
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No sooner did I get home with my pizza than the news broke that the bi-state metro Kansas City would be subject to a stay-at-home order effective Tuesday morning. “After 30 days,” the TV News station reported matter-of-factly, “the jurisdictions will consider whether to extend the order.” That is how easy it is in 2020 America to suspend the U.S. Constitution and wreck the economy.

I would feel better about the order and my fellow citizens if some horrible plague were ravaging the metro. That is not exactly the case. As of Saturday night, there had been a total of four Covid-19 deaths in all of Kansas and Missouri, only one of which was in the KC metro area, a “man in his 70s with underlying health conditions.”
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The science establishment was just warming up. In the decades ahead, they would serve up global cooling, nuclear winter, the alar scare, second-hand smoke, global warming, climate change, and a host of other contrived doomsday scenarios. When the predicted doom failed to materialize, the prophets of doom shifted the date of doom forward and bought more beachfront property.

Never before, though, has a mania wreaked so much havoc so quickly as the Covid-19 scare. Many of the predictions are as incredible as those for heterosexual aids, and even if accurate, they do not justify the assault on our economy and our very freedoms.

Someone please warn the president about the scientists in his midst.

Looks like Dr. Fauci may be a bit over the edge in pushing medicine without due consideration for other social issues like the economy or individual responsibility. His role is being re-assed’ and the media is jumping all over that to support its anti-Trump narrative and agenda. This suggests a Fake News Alert may be in  order.

Robert Pearl: 7 dangerous myths about the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic – “Avoiding many of the worst consequences and doomsday predictions will depend, in part, on the ability of Americans to act according to the facts.” He needs to follow his own advice. Much like Berezow on the ‘hoax’ described earlier, Pearl also has perception and bias problems. As with several ‘concerns’ at KevinMD, doctors are fearful and often loose sight of the present in imaging a future and then use their doomsday fears to bias their perceptions and conclusions.

“As we now know, the coronavirus is far more lethal than the president first indicated.” Another post illustrates that the lethality depends upon where you look and an examination of the reference used. Exaggerations like “far” indicate the bias and start off Pearl’s column with an indication that he suffers from the panic and is another part of the cause and not the resolution. Several of his other 7 tend to illustrate just how far he is willing to go to impugn the President, which is another indicator that reason and integrity have left the building.

It is sad when reputable and professional resources fail in reason and integrity and you often have to go back to source material to find out what is actually going on. 

See Sabine Hossenfelder on youtube: How scientists can avoid cognitive bias.

Ned Ryun: Failures of the Administrative State in the Pandemic Crisis – “This isn’t the time to change our leadership in the White House. It’s time to change the government the person in the White House oversees. The American people deserve better.”

“Despite Democrats’ insistent focus on making this pandemic crisis about President Trump and his Administration—and the media happily jumping on that bandwagon—there are facts that cannot be ignored, and many of them are things the Democrat members of Congress (or former members of the Obama Administration) don’t want the American people to know.

Scott Johnson: Waiting for the FDA – “The WSJ reported yesterday that President Trump has “considered issuing an executive order greatly expanding the use of investigational drugs against the new coronavirus, but was met with objections from Food and Drug Administration scientists who warned it could pose unneeded risks to patients[.]”

Kurt Schlichter: The Media Is Even More Garbage Than Usual – “And remember, we are supposed to respect these people, to treat them as brave firefighters who risk it all to bring us the truth. Instead, they are cheesy little liars, and not very good ones. ”

“This was the media’s time to shine, a moment when we needed clear, objective information delivered by intelligent people who asked the important questions people care about so Americans could protect themselves and their families. It was a critical juncture when the media could step up and show us all that yes, the media is still important. It still matters. It still deserves our respect.

Instead we got, “Mr. President, isn’t accurately pointing out that the coronavirus originated in China racist?”

Scott Johnson: Kung Flu fighting – “The White House press corps performed at a shamefully low level in yesterday’s daily briefing, yet they represent the top ranks of their profession.” Also see Situation critical: WH press at work.

Donna Rachel Edmunds: Israeli Nobel Laureate: Coronavirus spread is slowing – “Michael Levitt praised Israel for its preventative measures. He said most people are naturally immune, and that since the infection rate in China is slowing down, “the end of the pandemic is near.”

Kristinn Taylor: Target Stores’ Chrissy Teigen To First Lady Melania Trump – but it’s Trump, who doesn’t use language like this and is not mean and ugly in his rhetoric who catches the flak.

Andrea Widburg: The Democrats are trying to create another “fine people” hoax against Trump – “We all know that Democrats, in the media and politics, lie about Trump. The most famous is the assertion that President Trump called white supremacists “fine people.” … “If you’re taking the mainstream media and the Democrat Party at face value, you are almost invariably misinformed.”

Tommaso Ebhardt et al: 99% of Those Who Died From Virus Had Other Illness, Italy Says – “After deaths from the virus reached more than 2,500, with a 150% increase in the past week, health authorities have been combing through data to provide clues to help combat the spread of the disease.”

Alex Berezow: Coronavirus: U.S. Is Not The Next Italy – “There are two false narratives emerging on social media that need to be addressed. The first is that the virus is a hoax. The second is that the U.S. is “the next Italy.” Both are wrong.” Whoops … Berezow blew it with a ‘both sides do it’ fallacy on his first assertion. He swallows a misdirection by the Left for his ‘hoax’ assertion and, in doing that, tends to illustrate and compound the problem rather then relieve it. He misses the point that his second assertion, and the call for his column, is a direct result of the first.

Anna L. Stark: A little perspective helps – “What’s worse? The rapid spread of a novel virus which originated in China or the media hysteria created and broadcast around the world?”

“If it was the intent of the American media to create a state of fear and panic, they’ve succeeded brilliantly. The dissemination of information pertinent to the virus has morphed into a murky river of rumors, innuendo, outright lies and blather proffered by pundits who are neither doctors nor experts on much of anything other than opinionating.
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Whether or not the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan province wet market, possibly transmitted to human hosts via the consumption of infected animals or accidently leaked from a Chinese infectious disease research facility may never be determined. The Chinese government won’t be forthcoming. Coronavirus won’t be the last pandemic in human history, but the number of fatalities will be greatly diminished by 21st century medical technology, research, and vaccines. It’s also worth mentioning that in comparison, deaths in the United States due to influenza has already topped 20,000 for the 2019-2020 flu season and for which there has been no media hype, nor panic.

Ed Driscoll: The Manchurian Media – “I’m pretty sure that John Frankenheimer didn’t intend for The Manchurian Candidate to be a how-to guide. But if the media were paid Chinese agents, could they do more to harm this country than they’re already doing now?”

Victor Davis Hanson: America In a New Upside-Down World – “Who can game the election-year politics of these chaotic times, especially the more macabre calculations of the electoral beneficiaries of the media-driven hysteria over the COVID-19?”

Scott Johnson: Notes on the pandemic – “As we continue to seek out noteworthy information and analysis, contrarian or otherwise, on the COVID-19 pandemic, I want only to recommend the items below to your attention.” … Ionaddis on “making decisions without reliable data”; Libsker “Humanity will survive”; Stern on vaccine progress; others

Luboš Motl: Can freedom, prosperity return at all? – “The Covid-19 hysteria has shown us that many people – including many of those who pretended something else – actually hate the civilization as it existed up to 2019, with some freedom, technological achievements, culture, sports, human contacts, religious events, and other things. In fact, many people – including TRF commenters – literally love the idea to spend their lives in a cage. ”

Matt Margolis: 10 Ways the Left Has Politicized the Coronavirus Pandemic – “It was disgusting to see the way Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders politicized the coronavirus pandemic during their debate Sunday night. I expected as much, to be honest.” A list of ten with chapter and verse, as if that makes any difference to the perpetrators. When will it make a difference to the voters?

Terry Jones: Will The Real Victim Of The Wuhan Flu ‘Crisis’ Be Your Rights? – “we’re told repeatedly that, out of “an abundance of caution,” we must shut down our economy. From New York to California, state and local governments have declared “emergencies.” So has the federal government, part of a much-broader “crisis” response.”

“This should be a concern to all Americans. Yes, we need to take reasonable precautions agains the Wuhan coronavirus to minimize deaths. We’re all for being careful. And, no, we don’t believe the Wuhan coronavirus is a hoax or anything like that. But the media focus has been hysterical to the point of absurdity, encouraging government to impose the most stringent controls in modern history.

That’s bad enough, given the mainstream media’s undisguised contempt for President Donald Trump. But they’re providing cover for those who would deprive us of our rights permanently.

Jazz Shaw: Coronavirus is the new excuse for universal basic income – “The latest installment in our series on Never Letting a Perfectly Good Crisis Go To Waste comes to us courtesy of Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii ”. Romney is in on it, too.

Cal Thomas: Is this panic over coronavirus justified, or not? – “Mainstream media loves fueling the fear factor”

“Are we being subjected to doublespeak when, on the one hand, we are told the coronavirus is nothing to be afraid of, if we take precautions and, on the other, we are told to run for the hills? Is this a biblical plague or a manageable ailment? Are we facing the judgment of God, or will this, too, pass like the flu or a cold, or other ailments from which most of us recover? …

I am no prophet, but just as other challenges have confronted America, we will recover from this one. The stock market will revive because the economy remains strong. Schools that are closed will reopen. Broadway lights will go back on. Sports contests with fans in the seats will resume. Church doors will reopen. Normalcy will return.

Andrea Widburg: The American press’s entire energy is bent towards destroying Trump – “The latest example comes from The New York Times, a once-respected institution that now would offend the birds whose cages it might line.” … “It turns out that the New York Times was engaged in a lie by omission something that, at common law, is every bit as wrong as an affirmative fraud.” See also John Hinderaker: More Lies From the New York Times – “One question that millions have asked is, if Donald Trump does so many terrible things, why do leftists constantly have to make up things he didn’t actually do?”

Andrea Widburg: Jennifer Rubin’s death wish for Republicans is factually wrong — and the maps prove it – “Once upon a time, Jennifer Rubin was an intelligent woman. Things started to go downhill when she went to work for the Washington Post, but what really flipped the switch in her brain was seeing Donald Trump become president.”

John Solomon: Obama DOJ officials privately told Mueller they were alarmed by FBI treatment of Flynn – “A little-noticed letter from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office divulges Obama DOJ concerns about FBI treatment of ex-Trump national security adviser.” Scott Johnson also has another hit on team Mueller: Escape from the Mueller miasma – “A lawyer for Concord said the case had ‘fundamental problems’ and said prosecutors wouldn’t have been able to prove at trial that the defendants knew they were violating U.S. laws. ‘The purpose of this indictment was to make a political statement regarding the outcome of the 2016 election that was grossly overstated.”

Anthony Watts: The 11 gaslighting characteristics of the climate debate – “This was originally from Psychology Today by Stephanie A. Sarkis Ph.D. but I immediately recognized how this is wholly applicable to the climate debate.” The term is making enough of an impression the Left has it moving up to joining accusations of racism as popular in smearing its opposition. Projection, anyone? “Gaslighting is a manipulation tactic used to gain power. And it works too well.” Here’s a summary:

1. They tell blatant lies.

2. They deny they ever said something, even though you have proof.

3. They use what is near and dear to you as ammunition.

4. They wear you down over time.

5. Their actions do not match their words.

6. They throw in positive reinforcement to confuse you.

7. They know confusion weakens people.

8. They project.

9. They try to align people against you.

10. They tell you or others that you are crazy.

11. They tell you everyone else is a liar.

Brian C. Joondeph: Remember the H1N1 Pandemic? I Don’t Either – “Swine flu came and went, leaving a far greater swath of destruction compared to the current coronavirus outbreak. Yet the reactions are far different.”

Frederic Lardinois: Trump says Google CEO Sundar Pichai called to apologize – “Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now. They have made tremendous progress”

“What is clear, though, is that Google and Alphabet CEO Pichai today posted an update to Google’s blog that outlines Google’s efforts. In it, Pichai clears up some of the confusion and describes the work the company is doing to get more information about the virus and COVID-19 to its users, as well as the work Alphabet’s Verily life sciences unit is doing to build a screening site for the Bay Area (and potentially for a nationwide rollout).
…
On Friday, Trump promised a nationwide website, developed by Google, that would be at the core of the government’s screening process. Google wasn’t ready for that announcement. The site didn’t exist yet. Even the limited version of that site, which wasn’t developed by Google, was ready and for the most part, a lot of us in the media probably now regret ever taking the president at his word. As of now, this is one of the most bizarre Google stories I’ve covered in recent years.

Now, it’d be great to hear more about what Pichai apologized for.

Perhaps if Lardinois got past his bias, realized that the situation is fluid, that misunderstanding is not unusual in fluid situations, and that jumping to conclusions (e.g. Trump lies. Always) in spite of wondering about Pichai does not help anyone. Trump’s word is still valid. He relayed what he understood from Pichai and the reason there is a bizarre Google story and a Pichai apology is because of the nature of the communications. Assuming lies and deceit in a rapidly evolving reveals a dangerous bias. In this case Google appears to have been a little ahead itself and unprepared for Trump speed. “Google wasn’t ready for that announcement.”

Where does the false history and cultural rot lead? Columbus did it!This is another case where a racial subgroup of the population is distinguished by unpleasant statistics and trying to shift blame. That results in greater social discord as problems are not addressed and solutions are distanced from reality.

“Douglas is an indigenous American artist, activist and registered member of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe. For her, the dance is more than a performance. She created it to process her experience of sexual abuse as well as the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW), which she says began with European colonization and has more recently been gaining attention through social media campaigns and hashtags such as #MMIW and #NoMoreStolenSisters.

Tabitha Mueller et al: Nevada officials, native community members grapple with high rate of missing and murdered indigenous women – “Legislation and other governing bodies have allocated more resources toward addressing MMIW, but those efforts are hampered by incomplete data and a tangled web of jurisdictions between federal, state and tribal law enforcement and prosecuting authorities.”

Terry Jones: Time To End Coronavirus Hysteria And Focus On Saving Some Lives – “is the hysteria warranted? What do we really know about this virus?” What we do know at this moment doesn’t warrant the hyperbole. 560,000 hospitalizations last year from the flu and there is uber-angst about a pandemic overloading the medical system with a current total, after three months, sick census of only 20% of that? For example of the FUD mongering see “No State Is Prepared” – Mapping Where Hospitals Will Run Out Of Beds First If Virus Cases Spike – “A USA Today analysis of American Hospital Association (AHA) hospital bed data shows that if confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths follow similar growth curves as in China, Italy, and Iran, there could be six patients for every existing hospital bed.” What’s wrong with this picture?

More of where this came from by Tyler Durden: A 70-Year War On “Propaganda” Built By The CIA – “The CIA really does not have the best track record for their role in “managing” foreign wars and counter-insurgency activities. In fact, they have been caught rather red handed in fueling such crisis situations. And these are the people who are deciding what information is fit for the American public, and western public in general, and what is not fit for their ears.” Therefore the ‘cold war’ is all America’s fault and the USSR is the model of truth and justice in its methods of keeping the public informed.

Tyler Durden: The S**t Might Actually Be Hitting The Fan But Somehow It Doesn’t Feel Real – “I’m sharing this because I bet a lot of people are feeling the same way. Second-guessing themselves. Doubting themselves. Feeling like they aren’t good preppers. You aren’t alone and I’ll bet a whole lot of folks who won’t admit it feel this way too.” i.e. I am feeding the panic to comfort myself with ‘vox populi’ logical fallacies.

“We don’t believe it because we don’t want to believe it. We never actually wanted to be right when we stockpiled and learned skills and bought more supplies that we actually had room to house.

But the thing that puts us ahead in this situation is that we prepared anyway. We learned anyway. And when we see the more obvious signs of a societal breakdown we will be able to accept it a lot faster than those who never even considered it.

Rational people don’t believe it because the numbers aren’t there and the FUD Mongerers, like Durden today, are cherry picking worst case scenarios and using logical fallacies for their views. Rational people are stepping all over themselves to explain that this isn’t a binary issue (calling out another common logical fallacy),that prudence isn’t a chicken little thing, and that the panic and hysteria are destructive rather than constructive.

Katherine Rodriguez: Judge Cites Coronavirus as Reason for Blocking Trump Admin Food Stamp Work Requirements – “a preliminary injunction blocking the recent Trump administration rule on food stamps, which the USDA estimates would have reduced federal spending by $7.9 billion over five years and gradually weaned 755,000 people off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the government program in charge of food stamps.” The Left worries about Trump being a dictator, facist, etc. but cannot find where he doesn’t follow the law. Here’s a judge using a current social panic to dictate national policy rather than the law. Hysteria should be no replacement for facts but here it is and it does support Durden’s broader fear about societal breakdown but from the judiciary and not the executive.

Dov Fischer: The Real Threat to Our Democracy During Coronavirus – “Pelosi, Schiff & Co. were too busy dragging the country through impeachment to pay attention to ominous developments in Asia.”

“From the moment that President Trump was elected, we have been battered by the percussion of a steady drumbeat amplifying the repeated mantra that “Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy.” We hear all the lies over and over:
…
But Trump is a Constitutionalist, and he also happens to play by rules.
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Rarely — if ever — before has a President’s fealty to the Constitution been as sorely tested as Donald Trump has encountered.
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If there ever was a real threat to our democracy in today’s rancid political climate, it emanates from Pelosi, Schumer, and the Democrats who follow them like lemmings.
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The CDC further announced at that time that the genome had been posted on the NIH genetic sequence database. It is a matter of public record that the Democrats, the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, CNN, and MSNBC all were obsessed at the time with the nonsensical still-born Pelosi impeachment, doing all they could to focus public attention on that foolishness in their never-ending effort to take down Trump, while the gigantic story under their noses — the emerging coronavirus plague — went virtually unreported.
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These endless internecine efforts by Democrats, aimed not at advancing the public’s needs or the common weal but solely at gumming up the machinery of government and sabotaging the Trump Administration, are proving to be the single greatest threat today to our democracy.

neo: This video shows what the MSM is about – “I realized that they could deny it and that they would deny it. They’d say that the news people involved used the phrase “Wuhan coronavirus” or “Chinese coronavirus” innocently and descriptively, but when Trump used the same words it meant something entirely different and was a racist dog whistle because racism engulfs his heart and mind. – I can’t watch the video without becoming furious and yet being impressed by what it reveals so succinctly about the MSM members involved: their poisonous hypocrisy and treacherous mendacity, delivered with such sober serious faces:”

Vivek Saxena: Ben Rhodes slapped with reality check when he longs for Obama leadership under coronavirus outbreak – “Repeatedly disgraced former Obama administration national security adviser Ben Rhodes stepped in it mightily Wednesday by daring to suggest without evidence that the coronavirus outbreak would have been handled better under his former boss.” … “Why? Because during the former president’s eight year veritable reign of terror, millions of Americans were infected by and at least 12,500 died from the swine flu.”

Willis Eschenbach: The Math Of Epidemics – “Now, this particular “s-shaped” curve is called a “Gompertz Curve”. It is a curious curve, in that it is not symmetrical. It goes up faster than it levels off.” The curve fits China and Korea data. What does it suggest about virus deaths elsewhere?

Greg Mankiw asserts that there will be a recession and demands that “President Trump should shut-the-hell-up” because he is an ignorant idiot. Hubris is dripping and that is, perhaps, more of the problem that is facing the issue than what the government is doing under the President’s leadership.

David Harsanyi: Joe Biden owes Clarence Thomas an apology — and so does the entire left – “For contemporary Democrats, the court exists primarily to safeguard the only constitutional “right” that really matters to them anymore: abortion.” … “the patriarchy must unilaterally surrender to the poetic truth, rather than to the evidence”

“If Biden should apologize to anyone, it’s Clarence Thomas, or maybe the American people, for allowing judicial confirmation hearings to be turned into partisan-fueled character assassinations, weaponized to destroy the legitimacy of the Supreme Court — all in the service of nothing more noble than the killing of the unborn.

So many smears, so little time …

Terry Jones: Time To End Coronavirus Hysteria And Focus On Saving Some Lives – “These are people who would rather get rid of Trump than save your life. Please remember that.”

John Merline: A Tale Of Two Pandemics: Media Downplayed Swine Flu Outbreak Under Obama – “When the WHO declared the swine flu “unstoppable” on June 11, 2009, CNN didn’t even lead with that story on its homepage. It was in a pile of links on the side of the page.”

Douglas MacKinnon: The Media-Induced Coronavirus Panic Is Worse Than The Disease – “In addition to the massive financial loss to our nation and the world is the haunting psychological trauma inflicted on untold millions now terrorized by the prospect of getting the virus.”

Roger Kimball: COVID-19 is terrifying — as a weapon of political propaganda – “The Wuhan Panic is a textbook case of the Rahm Emanuel principle that you never want a good crisis to go to waste.”

Matt Margolis: Joe Biden Blasts Trump’s Coronavirus Response, Then Plagiarizes Trump’s Plan – “Hey, guess what happened in January while Democrats were all focused on impeachment? The Trump administration fast-tracked the development of a vaccine with the goal of clinical trials to begin within months.” … “Plagiarism is hardly a new thing for Joe Biden, but this example truly takes the cake.”

Steven Hayward: The Great Toilet Paper Pandemic of 2020 (And TWiP Preview) – “This shows how crazy ideas (like socialism) can be more contagious than a virus. Talk about epidemiology: how does the idea that you need to hoard toilet paper get started and spread? How, exactly, does a big supply of toilet paper help you ward off a virus? Has circulation of the New York Times fallen so low that you feel compelled to stock up on toilet paper?”

neo: It literally represents an exponential existential threat – “Have you noticed that these three words – “literally,” “exponential,” and “existential”- have become more popular, while at the same time they’ve nearly lost their original more narrow meanings and have come to be used as mere intensifiers?”

Peter Skurkiss: The silver lining in the Wuhan Virus – “The Wuhan Virus is causing major disruptions in the U.S., from the stock market to the economy to social gatherings of all sorts. The virus itself is still not nearly up to the disease standards of the common flu or swine flu, even though the media hype of it has been off the charts.”

Kimberley Strassel: Adam Schiff’s surveillance state – “Mr. Carr doesn’t dispute that Congress may, “in at least some circumstances,” have the legal authority to obtain call records under the Communications Act. The offense, he writes, was denying his targets the right to fight the subpoenas:” … “This history is what made Mr. Schiff’s subpoenas so devious and abusive. He issued them secretly. He didn’t notify his targets, and Republican committee members were barred from telling the public what they knew about the subpoenas.”

Joel B. Pollak: Trump on Coronavirus: ‘Put Politics Aside, Stop the Partisanship, and Unify as One Nation and One Family’ – “Trump spoke calmly and in measured tones from a prepared text as he recounted the administration’s steps thus far to fight the spread of the illness, which the World Health Organization declared a “pandemic” earlier Wednesday.”

Helle Dale: Coronavirus Fears Fed by Soviet-Style Agitprop From Russia, China, and Iran – “Never letting a crisis go to waste, propagandists are using the coronavirus to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories about the United States.” … “Not only do these falsehoods distract from identifying the real source of the problem (the Chinese government’s delayed public acknowledgement of the epidemic), they also slander the image of the United States globally.”

“Today, the U.S. government will have to be equally deliberate in its efforts to fight not just the spread of the virus itself, but also the conspiracy theories spread by foreign actors.

Barnini Chakraborty: Inside China’s high-stakes campaign to smear the United States over coronavirus – “If you listened to Chinese state-run media, you’d think President Trump went to China and released vials of COVID-19 on groups of unsuspecting men, women and children.” … “It’s more than just some disinformation or an official narrative,” Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Schools of Information, told The Washington Post. “It’s an orchestrated, all-out campaign by the Chinese government through every channel at a level you rarely see. It’s a counteroffensive.”

Victoria Taft: The Media Succumb to Raging Case of Katrina Virus in Hopes of Infecting Trump. Trump Isn’t Having It – “As you may be aware, “Katrina moment” is to disasters is what Watergate is to corruption.” … “Trump’s fighting back, but will it be enough to give him immunity to the media virus?”

The “Katrina moment” never quite stuck to any number of President Obama’s missteps from Benghazi to the H1N1 outbreak. That’s what a fawning press will do for a president.

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19), the media has been waiting for President Trump to do or say something in order to pin the Hurricane Katrina label on him.
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The only thing the Katrina virus-infected mob hasn’t pulled at this point is arranging for a coronavirus whistleblower, leaking to Adam Schiff and calling for a special prosecutor.

There’s still time.

David Catron: Politicizing Coronavirus Will Cost Dems the House – “Their rhetoric concerning COVID-19 has been both irresponsible and politically inept.”

“Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, issued a joint press release Sunday that included the following fiction: “President Trump continues to manufacture needless chaos within his administration and it is hampering the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.” Predictably, Pelosi and Schumer fail to provide any objective facts to support this claim.
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These Democrats are particularly vulnerable after the impeachment debacle because they explicitly promised their constituents during their 2018 midterm campaigns that they would eschew hyper-partisan politics and work with Republicans on issues that mattered to real people. Predictably, most of these “moderate” Democrats forgot that pledge immediately after they migrated to the swamp.
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President Trump is right when he accuses the Democrats of working “to inflame the coronavirus situation.” They regard the outbreak as an opportunity for scoring political points. Moreover, they have behaved so irresponsibly during the past three years that what little credibility they enjoyed has evaporated.

Neo citing A doctor [who] counsels calm – “But mostly, I’m scared about what message we are telling our kids when faced with a threat. Instead of reason, rationality, openmindedness and altruism, we are telling them to panic, be fearful, suspicious, reactionary and self-interested.”

Brett T. Fake news: Daily Mail reports that President Trump stormed out of coronavirus briefing (very slowly) – “Daily Mail US goes on tirade of TDS Magnitude Level 9 threatening total implosion!!!!”

Anna Gaddy, MD: What COVID-19 taught me about autonomy – “When I self-reported my symptoms to the health department and my institution’s infection prevention department, things moved impressively quickly.” For those who worry about treating the disease seriously but not with panic, here’s a story of one experience.

Elizabeth Vaughn: Here’s How Eric Holder Helped the Obama Administration Transform the Democratic Party into a Party of Thugs – “It was during the Bush Administration that Democrats, overcome by Bush Derangement Syndrome, stopped trying to maintain the traditional veneer of civility. That turned out to be child’s play compared to what came next.”

Walter Olson: Trump campaign files round of defamation suits – illustrating assumptions indicating ‘professional’ TDS – “Given the broad protections for writing about public figures enunciated by the Supreme Court in the case of New York Times v. Sullivan, few if any of these suits are likely to prevail at final judgment. Still, a suit like this serves “to drag people into court and imposes the time, burden, distraction, and cost of having to defend themselves, with the added benefit that it may make people and the press less willing to criticize these people. ” [Howard Wasserman, PrawfsBlawg] Time for state legislators to consider enacting stronger protections against unfounded suits?” Olson shows absolutely no consideration for issues of libel in major media and appropriate responsibility in publication of libelous stories or ‘opinions’ for broad audiences.

Daryl McCann: The Trump Doctrine and the Return of Pax Americana – “What informs Donald Trump’s decision-making, according to most narratives, is nothing more than an incongruous compendium of braggadocio, narcissism, opportunism and impulsiveness.”

“to talk earnestly of a Trump Doctrine is to suggest a degree of lucidity in Donald Trump’s actions where none exists. As a consequence, the targeted killing on January 3 of Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Forces, foreign legion division of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, can make no strategic sense in the eyes of the experts, though it could—and still might—trigger general war in the region. Maybe it is the anti-Trump narrative that lacks credibility.

Scepticism about President Trump’s judgment in foreign affairs runs very deep.
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If even those close to him—or, at least, those who were close to him—have no confidence in President Trump, then why should anybody else make the case for a cogent Trump Doctrine? Haley’s disclosure gives credence to this sentiment, expressed in the aftermath of the Qasem Soleimani killing by the reliably anti-Trump journalist Joel McNally: “The most dangerous day of his presidency is always tomorrow.”

The fact remains that the Third World War has not erupted on the provocateur-in-chief’s watch.
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Trump’s America First framework borrows from the best of the two preceding foreign policy doctrines and omits many of their delusions.
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One of the secrets of the Trump Doctrine is that it eschews the pie-in-the-sky “new world order” fantasies of both the Bush Dynasty and the Obama Doctrine. The world is what it is.

Jacob Solis et al: Like the coronavirus itself, much remains unknown about its effect on health care system, tourism sector – “no one knows how widespread the coronavirus will emerge in Nevada or how long it will last, making public health and economic predictions difficult, if not, impossible.”

“My biggest concern is hospitals really both north and south that are already operating at capacity,” said Packham, who also chairs the Patient Protection Commission. “They already have disruption with just seasonal influenza, much less trying to think about how they’re going to deal with or isolate patients that have tested positive and so forth in their current operations.”
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“I think I’ve had a flu-like illness once in the last three to five years and all I do is see sick patients,” Carrison added. “I’m certainly not superman.”
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The proceed-as-normal mindset appears to be prevailing in the sports world as well — at least for now.

Then there’s ZeroHedge: All Hospital Beds In The US Will Be Filled With Patients ‘By About May 8th’ Due To Coronavirus: Analysis – How To Avoid Getting Infected By The Coronavirus – ‘Grand Princess’ Passenger Who Died Of Covid-19 Probably Caught The Virus In California, Carnival Says – Elon Musk Says Panic About Coronavirus, Which Has Killed Over 3,400, Is “Dumb” – Forget Covid-19, San Diego Faces Critical Quake Danger From Long-Inactive Faultline – Amtrak Suspends Some Non-Stop Acela Service Due To Virus – “It’s Like Scenes From A Mad Max Movie” – Americans Continue Epic Run On Costco – “We Are In An Adverse Feedback Loop”: How To Track The Coronavirus Hit To US Consumer Spending

Remember anything like this with H1N1? Swine Flu? Legionaire’s Disease? 

Leslie Eastman: Maybe it’s time to dial back the coronavirus drama – “Let’s begin by starting with some perspective. The current flu season has hit 32 million Americans, resulting in 18,000 deaths, and the vaccine that was selected for the flu season was limited in its effectiveness. Yet, we are not doing a daily flu death countdown.”

“The press is currently ginning up fear about the lack test kits. However, Pence noted that all the state labs that had requested test kits have received them. And because of the changes in the regulations implemented by the Trump administration last week, the state labs can actually run the tests.

Scott Johnson: Walton’s Whack – “The Journal editorial concludes with the understated observation Judge Walton’s “decision to add his political broadside [to his opinion] raises more questions about the judge than about the Attorney General.” More broadly, however, Judge Walton’s opinions seems to me yet another episode in the sorry saga of Trumplaw.”

John O’Sullivan: When the Left Lies, Conservatives Plead Guilty – “It controls all the cultural institutions, and it intends to use that power to determine what words mean, what political ideas will be allowed in public debate, and what people it is respectable to associate with.”

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.: Tired of Being Mocked? – “America has broken down into two different countries. One lectures us, mocks us, and lies to us. It is about to experience four more years of us.”

Bruce Thornton: Progressive Big Lies – “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

“This penchant for accepting lies as truth, however, has warped the minds of Leftists both hard and soft ever since New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty lied about Stalin’s engineered famines in the 1930s. They have accepted the Marxist, as in Groucho, stance “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”
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Worse yet, today’s progressives believe lies to be true despite their egregious falsehood.
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These lies and their dangers have been worsened over the last few decades by the degeneration of education from grammar school to university.
…
we might see for ourselves what George Orwell famously prophesied in 1984 as the consequences of the big lie:
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The progressive corruption of history demonstrates their control of the past. Their dangerous policies currently control much of the present. If they triumph in November, we all may have to experience the grim wages of their control of the future.

George Parry: Chuck Schumer, Wise Guy – “Yet his threats against Supreme Court justices are no laughing matter.”

John Sexton: Trump: Schumer Should ‘Pay A Severe Price’ For Threatening Supreme Court Justices – “Ed wrote about Schumer’s threats earlier today and Allahpundit wrote about Schumer’s follow up statement claiming he was being misconstrued (or something)” – What is missing is the comparison and contrast between Schumer’s and Trump’s comments directed at SCOTUS. One is a threat, the other is criticism. Conflating the two is deceit. Neo takes note of this: “There is no equivalence between a threat and a criticism. And trying to argue for a certain policy does not excuse making a threat.”

“What Schumer said earlier today was different. Supreme Court Justices aren’t elected; they are appointed for life. They won’t face the voters ever. So saying “you don’t know what will hit you” clearly can’t be a reference to the Justices being surprised at their comeuppance in the next election. In fact, the only way Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will leave the Court is if they a) resign or b) die. Obviously it’s more than a bit problematic to suggest either of those two things will be made to happen if they vote the wrong way on an abortion case.

Karen Townsend: “Out of line”: GOP chair responds as Donna Brazile doubles down – “harsh words were in response to Ronna McDaniel’s completely accurate description of 2016’s Democrat primary process.” Brazile is a Fox News employee.