Month: March 2020

Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA) told Breitbart News Saturday that America will be “stronger than ever” after the country becomes less reliant on China for the production of supplies, medication, and pharmaceuticals.

Hice spoke to Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle as the coronavirus outbreak has potentially jeopardized America’s access to life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical devices. China produces most of America’s medical devices and pharmaceuticals.

The Hill reported Sunday that one of the reasons bipartisan support for a massive coronavirus stimulus package has fallen apart is, once again, because Democrats want the bill to prop up Planned Parenthood.

According to the Hill:

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) told Breitbart News that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and House Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) are obstructing a tentative emergency relief bill to provide financial relief to Americans during the coronavirus outbreak.

“It’s incredibly frustrating,” said Cassidy in an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak. “Democrats and Republicans broke down into five working groups. They came to agreement on all five areas — appropriations, for example, tax law changes upon health and welfare issues, etcetera —  we put them into a package, and now we had a vote tonight that would just allow us to continue to debate it for the next 30 hours. Keep in mind, all this negotiation has taken place between Democrats and Republicans. Pelosi came over with Schumer after having agreed to everything, and then said no, they that wanted something different, far different.”

It looks as though, in this time of wokeness running amuck, we all are being instructed that we live in a “gender-fluid America.”  Consequently, if that is the case, I can be on strong ground and not accused of a dreaded sexism charge in pointing out that many members of the White House Press Corps are channeling their inner “Mean Girls.”

Almost as part of the plotline from Tina Fey’s brilliant movie Mean Girls, the “in crowd,” the White House Press Corps turned on an accomplished outsider with this brouhaha:

A reporter from right-leaning One America News was roasted on social media on Thursday after asking President Trump if he thought the term “Chinese food” is racist, with one member of the press calling it “the dumbest question I’ve ever heard.”

Au contraire, you snarky lightweights, the person asking the question for One America News is Chanel Rion, an accomplished Harvard Grad.

In teasing up an important point about the media actually having such a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that many are taking their lead from Chicom propaganda, she was both entertaining and spot on.

The fact that her clever phrasing drew immediate counter-battery fire from curmudgeons without a sense of humor is a testimony to her hitting the target.  The perfidy of PRC leaders — for example, accusing the U.S. Army of conducting germ warfare — combined with most in the White Press corps apparently lacking a sense of humor is the personification of a horrible trend into hotter and hotter nasty ignorant pack journalism.  It is just my opinion, but I believe that most Americans see what I am saying.

It is the Chinese or Wuhan Virus, full stop, and just because PRC propaganda can’t handle the truth, the truth is still the truth.  President Trump is also correct in expressing empathy and understanding about the plight of the Chinese people when he says they have gone through Hell.  All of us who have dedicated our professional lives to take on the rise of the People’s Republic of China have always separated the long-suffering Chinese people from the communist brutality of their leaders.

Sadly, even now, there are two ugly bounces by the PRC leaders’ lying that are directly hurting the health of all humanity.  The first is the obvious point that much earlier warning would have saved countless lives before the coronavirus reached pandemic stage.

During a March 11 event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien blasted Beijing for covering up the coronavirus outbreak in China at its early stages.

Rather than using best practices during China’s early handling of the highly contagious and deadly disease, “this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up,” O’Brien declared.

“There’s lots of open source reporting from Chinese nationals that the doctors involved were either silenced or put in isolation … so the word of this virus could not get out,” he added.

If China had been cooperative at the beginning of the outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) could have dramatically curtailed what happened in China and what’s now happening across the world,” O’Brien said.

“It probably cost the world community two months to respond, and those two months … could have dramatically curtailed what happened in China and what is now happening across the world,” he also said.

The second bounce into hurting all is simple: if China lies about events in the beginning, then there is poor trust in the progression of the Chinese virus in China.  This is more serious than people think.

Having built mathematical models for the Office of Net Assessment during the Cold War, we know that in many modeling trends, mathematicians’ and statisticians’ quest for a dynamic called “the law of large numbers” is available and accurate.

This research paper from Cornell is but one of many examples of the need for accurate large numbers:

Suppose that initially there are only a few infective vertices. We prove there is a threshold for a parameter involving the rates and vertex degrees below which only a small number of infections occur.  Above the threshold a large outbreak occurs with probability bounded away from zero.  Our main result is that, conditional on a large outbreak, the evolutions of certain quantities of interest, such as the fraction of infective vertices, converge to deterministic functions of time.

In other words, as a proud Cornelian with a graduate degree (graduate T.A., essentially for computers and decision-making), I can state that the motto of Faber College is what the professors are saying in their research: “Knowledge is good.”

With one clever question, Chanel Rion put pressure on all in the news media to stop covering for PRC dictators and their propaganda machine.

Image: armistiser via YouTube.

It looks as though, in this time of wokeness running amuck, we all are being instructed that we live in a “gender-fluid America.”  Consequently, if that is the case, I can be on strong ground and not accused of a dreaded sexism charge in pointing out that many members of the White House Press Corps are channeling their inner “Mean Girls.”

Almost as part of the plotline from Tina Fey’s brilliant movie Mean Girls, the “in crowd,” the White House Press Corps turned on an accomplished outsider with this brouhaha:

A reporter from right-leaning One America News was roasted on social media on Thursday after asking President Trump if he thought the term “Chinese food” is racist, with one member of the press calling it “the dumbest question I’ve ever heard.”

Au contraire, you snarky lightweights, the person asking the question for One America News is Chanel Rion, an accomplished Harvard Grad.

In teasing up an important point about the media actually having such a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that many are taking their lead from Chicom propaganda, she was both entertaining and spot on.

The fact that her clever phrasing drew immediate counter-battery fire from curmudgeons without a sense of humor is a testimony to her hitting the target.  The perfidy of PRC leaders — for example, accusing the U.S. Army of conducting germ warfare — combined with most in the White Press corps apparently lacking a sense of humor is the personification of a horrible trend into hotter and hotter nasty ignorant pack journalism.  It is just my opinion, but I believe that most Americans see what I am saying.

It is the Chinese or Wuhan Virus, full stop, and just because PRC propaganda can’t handle the truth, the truth is still the truth.  President Trump is also correct in expressing empathy and understanding about the plight of the Chinese people when he says they have gone through Hell.  All of us who have dedicated our professional lives to take on the rise of the People’s Republic of China have always separated the long-suffering Chinese people from the communist brutality of their leaders.

Sadly, even now, there are two ugly bounces by the PRC leaders’ lying that are directly hurting the health of all humanity.  The first is the obvious point that much earlier warning would have saved countless lives before the coronavirus reached pandemic stage.

During a March 11 event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien blasted Beijing for covering up the coronavirus outbreak in China at its early stages.

Rather than using best practices during China’s early handling of the highly contagious and deadly disease, “this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up,” O’Brien declared.

“There’s lots of open source reporting from Chinese nationals that the doctors involved were either silenced or put in isolation … so the word of this virus could not get out,” he added.

If China had been cooperative at the beginning of the outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) could have dramatically curtailed what happened in China and what’s now happening across the world,” O’Brien said.

“It probably cost the world community two months to respond, and those two months … could have dramatically curtailed what happened in China and what is now happening across the world,” he also said.

The second bounce into hurting all is simple: if China lies about events in the beginning, then there is poor trust in the progression of the Chinese virus in China.  This is more serious than people think.

Having built mathematical models for the Office of Net Assessment during the Cold War, we know that in many modeling trends, mathematicians’ and statisticians’ quest for a dynamic called “the law of large numbers” is available and accurate.

This research paper from Cornell is but one of many examples of the need for accurate large numbers:

Suppose that initially there are only a few infective vertices. We prove there is a threshold for a parameter involving the rates and vertex degrees below which only a small number of infections occur.  Above the threshold a large outbreak occurs with probability bounded away from zero.  Our main result is that, conditional on a large outbreak, the evolutions of certain quantities of interest, such as the fraction of infective vertices, converge to deterministic functions of time.

In other words, as a proud Cornelian with a graduate degree (graduate T.A., essentially for computers and decision-making), I can state that the motto of Faber College is what the professors are saying in their research: “Knowledge is good.”

With one clever question, Chanel Rion put pressure on all in the news media to stop covering for PRC dictators and their propaganda machine.

Image: armistiser via YouTube.

Contrarian and compelling voices are rising to warn that the lockdown of the American economy is overdone, not sustainable — from the Wall Street Journal editorial pages to a standalone blog entry from a Hoover Institution economist highlighted by the Power Line blog to the Cato Institute.

In fact, the economic lockdown itself is unfolding into a catastrophe, needlessly devastating the engine of American exceptionalism itself.

The economic shutdown by government fiat, driven by public health authorities’ overreach — led by the CDC, whose recent preoccupations have been focused on the phantom enemies of racism, global warming, and gender dysphoria, rather than communicable diseases — is looking like the Vietnam war cliché: “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

Yes, the CCP Wuhan COVID-19 virus is serious stuff, but not exactly an unknown.  We know that it is a super-contagion, but its ravages can be confined to identifiable clusters, and the disease duration in any person is on average short-lived, more virulent than the flu, less virulent than SARS.

Let’s understand what the CCP Wuhan virus is not: it is not a bio-terror weapon infecting the water supply; it is not an electromagnetic cluster bomb shutting down communications and transmission of electrical power; it is not a thermonuclear event covering the globe with radiation.  This is not pestilence wiping out food supplies, nor Vesuvius-Pompeii-style volcanic eruptions.

Since the lockdown of the U.S. economy began the week of March 9, with a fifteen-day initial phase announced by President Trump on March 16, several therapeutic solutions are in the works.  Even some have been deployed, notably a decades-old quinine compound — chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine — used for malaria and lupus, which  apparently has been successful in reversing the CCP Wuhan virus within six days in small but promising sample populations.  It is also odds-on that the increasing sunlight UV duration in the northern hemisphere — increasing by some 30% from March 15 to March 30 — will knock down the virus’s chemical bonds.

The death rate, unwelcome for sure, is nowhere near the catastrophic projections.  The overall infection rate is a fraction of SARS.  It is likely that the CCP Wuhan virus has been floating around since November, maybe late October.  The vast majority of infections are relatively mild, in some cases asymptomatic, with recoveries on par with the flu. 

In the meantime, we also know that the economic shutdown is costing us between one and two trillion dollars per month, a government-induced depression that, if prolonged beyond a few weeks, may be impossible to overcome.  The social-cultural dislocation will be immeasurable, indeed cataclysmic.

And we have top-level public officials ranging from the CDC’s Dr. Anthony Fouci to N.Y. State governor Andrew Cuomo speculating about sheltering in place lasting from 45 days to a few months.  That’s the sort of reckless talk that, if enacted, would destroy the nation.

Why are we willing to spend untold trillions on economic resuscitation plans that may not work, no better than “peeing on the ashes”?  Why not keep the economy driving while directing emergency funds and other resources to the front-line health care workers, hospitals, clinics, and researchers? 

Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan seem to be coping while not completely scorching their economies.  What are we missing?

Maybe we will we be rescued by mass disobedience from everyday Americans, who soon enough will say ” hell, no” to enduring prolonged madness, nullifying hysterical and misguided governance.

Who shall soothe the unbridled rage of everyday Americans when they lose their livelihoods, their homes, their savings, and their communities, realizing they were betrayed by the terrified governing clan?

President Trump’s fifteen-day protocol says the shutdown of American life and its economic engine will be evaluated by March 31.  That is too late.

The American engine needs to be restarted now.  Suffocating the economy has been easy; reviving an economic corpse will be the stuff of hopeless heroics, fit only for Disney happy endings or the Hallmark channel.  Simple commonsense leadership is the cure.  Let’s get back to work — today.

Image: Jeff Turner via Flickr.

Contrarian and compelling voices are rising to warn that the lockdown of the American economy is overdone, not sustainable — from the Wall Street Journal editorial pages to a standalone blog entry from a Hoover Institution economist highlighted by the Power Line blog to the Cato Institute.

In fact, the economic lockdown itself is unfolding into a catastrophe, needlessly devastating the engine of American exceptionalism itself.

The economic shutdown by government fiat, driven by public health authorities’ overreach — led by the CDC, whose recent preoccupations have been focused on the phantom enemies of racism, global warming, and gender dysphoria, rather than communicable diseases — is looking like the Vietnam war cliché: “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

Yes, the CCP Wuhan COVID-19 virus is serious stuff, but not exactly an unknown.  We know that it is a super-contagion, but its ravages can be confined to identifiable clusters, and the disease duration in any person is on average short-lived, more virulent than the flu, less virulent than SARS.

Let’s understand what the CCP Wuhan virus is not: it is not a bio-terror weapon infecting the water supply; it is not an electromagnetic cluster bomb shutting down communications and transmission of electrical power; it is not a thermonuclear event covering the globe with radiation.  This is not pestilence wiping out food supplies, nor Vesuvius-Pompeii-style volcanic eruptions.

Since the lockdown of the U.S. economy began the week of March 9, with a fifteen-day initial phase announced by President Trump on March 16, several therapeutic solutions are in the works.  Even some have been deployed, notably a decades-old quinine compound — chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine — used for malaria and lupus, which  apparently has been successful in reversing the CCP Wuhan virus within six days in small but promising sample populations.  It is also odds-on that the increasing sunlight UV duration in the northern hemisphere — increasing by some 30% from March 15 to March 30 — will knock down the virus’s chemical bonds.

The death rate, unwelcome for sure, is nowhere near the catastrophic projections.  The overall infection rate is a fraction of SARS.  It is likely that the CCP Wuhan virus has been floating around since November, maybe late October.  The vast majority of infections are relatively mild, in some cases asymptomatic, with recoveries on par with the flu. 

In the meantime, we also know that the economic shutdown is costing us between one and two trillion dollars per month, a government-induced depression that, if prolonged beyond a few weeks, may be impossible to overcome.  The social-cultural dislocation will be immeasurable, indeed cataclysmic.

And we have top-level public officials ranging from the CDC’s Dr. Anthony Fouci to N.Y. State governor Andrew Cuomo speculating about sheltering in place lasting from 45 days to a few months.  That’s the sort of reckless talk that, if enacted, would destroy the nation.

Why are we willing to spend untold trillions on economic resuscitation plans that may not work, no better than “peeing on the ashes”?  Why not keep the economy driving while directing emergency funds and other resources to the front-line health care workers, hospitals, clinics, and researchers? 

Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan seem to be coping while not completely scorching their economies.  What are we missing?

Maybe we will we be rescued by mass disobedience from everyday Americans, who soon enough will say ” hell, no” to enduring prolonged madness, nullifying hysterical and misguided governance.

Who shall soothe the unbridled rage of everyday Americans when they lose their livelihoods, their homes, their savings, and their communities, realizing they were betrayed by the terrified governing clan?

President Trump’s fifteen-day protocol says the shutdown of American life and its economic engine will be evaluated by March 31.  That is too late.

The American engine needs to be restarted now.  Suffocating the economy has been easy; reviving an economic corpse will be the stuff of hopeless heroics, fit only for Disney happy endings or the Hallmark channel.  Simple commonsense leadership is the cure.  Let’s get back to work — today.

Image: Jeff Turner via Flickr.