Trump Looking at..

PJ Media

Trump Looking at 

a Two-Week Quarantine for All Americans

It's just one option on the table, but Donald Trump and his virus task force are seriously considering a nationwide two-week quarantine to slow the spread of COVID-19. Trump is also considering calling up the National Guard to enforce it.

Basically, the White House would ask people to "stay at home" with only grocery and drug stores remaining open. Several states have already announced a "stay at home" policy, with Illinois being added to that list yesterday.

And there are other ideas being considered.

Washington Examiner:

Senior officials have said that dozens of radical ideas are being considered and that the president and his virus task force are moving quickly to protect the nation.

Trump has praised the public for following the rules he has put in place, but the new plans are an acknowledgment that many people are not taking the warnings seriously.

Trump has been allowing state governors to act independently with support from Washington when practicable. But only the federal government can take some actions, like banning all domestic flights.

None of this will happen immediately, although as more people test positive for the virus, our outline of the problem is becoming clearer, as well as the need for swift, decisive action.

The federal government has been reluctant to order a “stay in place” order. But officials have said that the administration has been briefing Congress, states, and industry leaders about a potential shutdown that could start next week and after the president taps the Stafford Act that some say allows a national quarantine.

The goal, said officials, is to stop the spread of the virus and potential deaths.

The unknown: The administration hopes that the number of cases of the coronavirus does not surge too much.

Several states have already called up their National Guard units. But Trump has in mind using them to help enforce the national quarantine.

A knowledgeable source said that Department of Homeland Security officials are telling states that it is ready to mobilize the National Guard and dispatch them with U.S. military and first responders.

The goal is to have them dispatched before any call for a national quarantine. The reason: Stop looters and other violence.

They will announce this as soon as they have troops in place to help prevent looters and rioters and will announce before the end of the weekend.

This is the stuff of nightmares, so let's hope it won't be necessary.

Trump's rationale is that the U.S. should endure a little pain now in order to avoid much worse later. The duration of the quarantine -- two weeks -- isn't going to be long enough when states are already closing schools till the end of April. But perhaps after that period of time, the White House will have a much better idea of what they're up against and can target quarantines to hot spots, avoiding a nationwide lockdown.

Chinese Propagandists Used ‘Wuhan Virus’ Before Condemning It as Racist

 
Article by Yuichiro Kakutani in "The Washington Free Beacon":

China has accused U.S. leaders of racism for referring to the new coronavirus as the "Wuhan virus." But an examination of Chinese state-media reporters shows the term was used frequently in their coverage during the initial stages of the outbreak.

A March 8 report from the government-backed Global Times, for example, condemned Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's use of the term, arguing that it was a "rude and vicious comment" and "a new low in his personal conduct." But Chinese state-media outlets routinely referred to the pathogen as the "Wuhan virus" or "Wuhan pneumonia" through mid-February.

"Wuhan pneumonia a wakeup call for basic Chinese research," read the headline for a Jan. 22 piece published by Global Times, the same outlet that criticized Pompeo. "China, where both SARS and the Wuhan virus first emerged, failed to be the first in relevant diagnostic research and development (R&D) in both cases."

State-media outlets adopted new names for the pathogen just as China launched a global propaganda campaign to deflect responsibility for the pandemic. The world-spanning media blitz, involving both state media and ambassadors, argued that China's successful response bought time for the rest of the world—a talking point regurgitated by the New York Times on March 12. The propaganda effort also seeks to minimize the botched response of the Wuhan and Chinese authorities, in part by blaming the U.S. military for the outbreak without any evidence.

Despite the triumphant claims of propagandists, Chinese authorities exacerbated the pandemic by attempting to keep it under wraps for weeks after the first coronavirus case emerged in December. China's failed cover-up wasted precious time during the early days of the pandemic. One study found that coronavirus cases could have been reduce by 95 percent if China started its response three weeks earlier.

On February 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses officially named the new pathogen SARS-CoV-2, and the disease it causes as COVID-19, which stands for Corona Virus Disease. But before that date, media outlets across the world used a variety of different names to refer to the new pathogen, including Wuhan, the Chinese city where the disease was first observed.

For example, a Jan. 9 article published by the Xinhua News Agency, a state-propaganda organ, labeled the new disease "Wuhan's viral pneumonia epidemic with unknown causes" in a Chinese-language article. People's Daily, the official party paper of the Chinese Communist Party, reported that the "fourth death [was] confirmed in Wuhan pneumonia cases" on Jan. 21. Global Times also published an article on Jan. 25 in English, calling the disease the "Wuhan pneumonia."

None of those outlets returned requests for comment.

The propaganda outlets stopped including references to Wuhan in their Chinese-language publications around the end of January, with one Jan. 29 Xinhua editorial arguing that the term "Wuhan pneumonia" is "prejudiced" and disrespectful to the city's residents. By February, editors started applying the same standards for English-language articles: One Xinhua opinion column from Feb. 12 requested Western journalists to "quit racist reporting" and refrain from calling the virus the "Chinese virus" or the "Wuhan virus."

But the new editorial standard took some time to permeate across all Chinese propaganda outlets, especially those that publish in English. After Global Times condemned Western outlets for using the term "Wuhan virus" on Feb. 6, it published a new article two weeks later featuring the prohibited term. "Chinese netizens fear Japan would repeat Wuhan virus mistake at early stage," read the headline for a Global Times piece published on Feb. 17.

The naming conventions used by U.S. media outlets have also evolved over time. As recently as Feb. 3, when the virus was mainly hammering mainland China, the Associated Press issued a guideline encouraging journalists to refer to the new pathogen as "‘the new virus from China,' ‘the new virus,' ‘the coronavirus from China,' etc." on first reference.

After WHO granted the virus its official name and China condemned references linking the outbreak to China, AP revised its coronavirus guideline by dropping any mention of China. Now, the wire service recommends that journalists use "the new coronavirus," "the new virus," or "COVID-19." As a result, many media outlets that previously referred to the virus as the Wuhan virus or the Chinese virus are condemning President Donald Trump for doing the same.

WHO has also asked people to refrain from using the term SARS-CoV-2 to talk about the pandemic because the term SARS might "create unnecessary fear for some population, especially in Asia." The new coronavirus is related to but not the same as the pathogen that caused the 2003 outbreak.

In the past, WHO has recognized several diseases that explicitly reference the disease's origins or initial outbreak site. For instance, contagion-caused diseases such as the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) first started in Saudi Arabia, and the Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever refers to the two locations where the disease was first found.

https://freebeacon.com/media/chinese-propagandists-used-wuhan-virus-before-condemning-it-as-racist/ 

We'll Be Alright, and then We Must Reckon with Communist China

 

Article by Bryan Preston in "PJMedia":

On the first day of the coronavirus quarantine I went for a walk through my neighborhood to the park. The weather was warm and the walk was nice. The park looked like a park in central Texas should in the spring, with wildflowers and bluebonnets in bloom and dandelions popping up like little white clouds above the grasstops. Kids were out playing, oblivious as they should be to the world’s problems, when they should have been at school. But everywhere I looked on the way to the park, where there should be empty driveways, there were cars. Everyone was home. It looked like a Saturday morning, but it was Tuesday.

Some of my neighbors were working from home, as I was, teleworking to avoid coronavirus. But surely some were home because they could no longer work. Their businesses are shut down by the virus. They were inside, worrying how or if they can keep their homes. Worrying about what tomorrow would bring, and the day after that. This creeping dread we all feel once in a while has taken up residence in millions of American homes.

There’s a little church along a country highway heading east that I pass often, a small thing that some pastor had the vision to build to reach a small community. It’s a shell now, empty. Closed. It failed. Someone cuts the grass around it every once in a while, probably a city crew, but when they delay the grounds get overgrown and it looks lost in time.

There are few things in modern life that gnaw at me like a shuttered church. There’s something heartbreaking about a place built to exemplify faith that has failed and hollowed out. We’re seeing a lot of shuttered churches now, not because of any failures within them. Their faith is fine, maybe stronger now than a few weeks ago. Hardship will do that. They’re closed because we can’t gather in groups anymore, because of the virus. We can’t worship together, or have large weddings or funerals. Games and graduations and concerts are canceled. The gatherings of our lives are gone for a while. Because of the virus.

Right along with shuttered churches, shuttered businesses break the heart. A failed business represents a failed dream, livelihoods lost, risks taken but not rewarded, the end to something that often did not lead to a new beginning, just bankruptcy. Before the virus, out-of-control property taxes were killing businesses around here. Now it's the virus.

We have hundreds of thousands of churches and businesses and schools across America that are closed now. Many of them will not re-open. They didn’t fail because of some flaw within them or because their model didn’t work. They failed, or will fail, because of a tyrannical system beyond our shores that lied to the whole world. America’s churches and businesses and schools are closed because on the other side of the world, China’s amoral dictators failed to be a normal nation and do the right thing. They lied out of their paranoid obsession with power. In America, we can make fun of Trump, call him names and mock whoever we want and find others who will laugh with us. In China, merely displaying a cartoon of Winnie the Pooh - because of his resemblance to dictator Xi - risks imprisonment. Should we do business with such a thin-skinned despot?

China’s coronavirus actions have been entirely indefensible. Not that you would ever know that if you listen to some in the media and among our smug elites. There was, first, the lie that the novel virus would not infect humans. Then the communists order the early samples destroyed and silenced the doctors, at the point of a gun that Mao himself may as well have been pointing at them. They prosecuted the doctor who sounded the alarm, making a noble hero die a criminal. China abused its manufacturing power to build and then hoard the N95 masks doctors and nurses the world over need as they battle the virus. Some medical heroes will become infected and die, because of China. China’s communists did all this, while the whole world watched and suffered, and while Italy’s coronavirus death toll surpassed the grim toll of 9-11. China now says its coronavirus infection rates are dropping, but can we believe them? When China is pushing a crank conspiracy that the US created the coronavirus? China’s communists are trolling the world to dodge responsibility and keep their power. This cannot stand.

We tried making China rich to make the Chinese people free. The globalists’ theory was that trade would make prosperous people who would then demand their freedom, and the Chinese Communist Party would either grant it or die. It hasn’t worked. China has become more prosperous but less free. Its people live under a digital dictatorship fed by social media algorithms and always-on video surveillance. Their future is cradle to grave monitoring for thoughtcrime. The paranoid communists are as brutal and ruthless as ever, shuttering churches with hammer and sickle and using Uighurs and dissenters as slave labor. China uses its wealth to buy hearts and minds in Africa and positive propaganda press everywhere. China uses its wealth to fracture our own bedrock rights, as when it turned the NBA into its red white and blue thought police right here on American soil. This cannot stand.

The world cannot get into this situation again. We can’t just pretend this did not happen, resume normal trade relations, go on with our lives, and keep allowing the communists to rob us blind and make us vulnerable. We can’t let China’s criminal caste of communists brutalize their own people, threaten their peaceful neighbors and menace the world. We can’t.

We depend on China for cheap labor and cheap goods. But we cannot afford China any longer. The price is too high. We must divest. We must redirect. Some of our manufacturing in China must come back home. Some must go elsewhere, to India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, to other free republics with open societies. We must favor free peoples everywhere, shun tyrants everywhere, and do business with friends of liberty everywhere. For our own good.

The free world built up China’s economy in a naive attempt to free its people. This faith that has truly failed. This is one business we should no longer patronize, one school that has taught us its final lesson. This church should empty now and seal up its doors.

 https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/well-be-alright-and-then-we-must-reckon-with-communist-china/

Prepare or Suffer

 
 Article by Jack Carr in "Townhall":

There is wisdom in the 1907 Scouting motto “Be Prepared,” and over a century later we would be wise to heed its innate wisdom.

In December 2019, a new coronavirus was detected in China.  By late January 2020, the World Health Organization categorized COVID-19 as a “global health emergency.” By February, it had become an “epidemic,” meaning the countries in which it appeared had lost control over its spread. On March 11th, the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic, indicating it had spread to levels and areas that impacted the entire planet. On March 13th, the President of the United States declared a state of national emergency. 

Uncertainty has thrown world financial markets into a tailspin and prompted many to clean out supermarkets and pharmacies in preparation for possible isolation and quarantines.  As we wash our hands vigorously and frequently while repeatedly reminding our children to do the same, the health care system braces for an influx of contagious patients who they are ill prepared to handle. California had issued a statewide shelter in place order.  In other states across the country, schools are shut down, restaurants and bars are closed, travel bans are initiated, sporting events and festivals are canceled, social distancing has become the norm, and the largest and most influential companies in the world (along with growing numbers of small business across the country) have mandated that employees work from home.  With history as our indicator, we should have been ready.  

Best estimates are that between 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population was killed by bubonic plague in the 1300s.  In 1918, the influenza pandemic infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 50 million, 675,000 of those in the United States.  Actions to contain what became known as the Spanish flu and mitigate its transmission are similar to the recommendations in place to combat the spread of COVID-19. Infectious diseases are not a new phenomenon and the Wuhan coronavirus will not be the last invisible killer we will face.  In 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 405,000 people died from malaria.  Infectious diseases such as plague, cholera, Ebola, Zika, and Chikungunyaremain responsible for approximately 10 million deaths each year.  Though the United States is geographically isolated from the environments that generate many of these diseases, there is no guarantee they, or something equally as deadly, will not cross our borders. 

I firmly believe that as a citizen, husband and father it is my responsibility to be prepared and ensure my family is prepared to be self-reliant in times of trouble. As Americans, being prepared is in our DNA.  It was not long ago that there were no other options.  We are all here today because our ancestors had no choice but to be self-reliant. We are citizens, not subjects.  We don’t just survive.  We prevail.  

I encourage you to take notes today and over the coming weeks.  Were you comfortable with your level of preparedness lastweek?  Is there anything you would have done differently? What if this situation is compounded by a tsunami, an earthquake, a hurricane, tornados, floods, fires, or a terrorist attack?  Do you have enough food, water, and medical supplies?  Do you have a way to filter water?  To start a fire?  Are you relying on the good will of those who have not prepared to not take what you have and to do you no harm?  Or, do you have a rifle, shotgun, and/or pistol at the ready, and are you and your family trained in the effective use of weapons?  What’s your plan if no one is there to pick up your 9-1-1 call?  If your house catches fire, does your family have a plan?  Do you have fire extinguishers?  Do you know where they are?  Has everyone in your family practiced with one so they know how to use them?  Do you know your neighbors?  Will they be assets or liabilities?  What can you do to help them become assets?  Are the cars gassed up?  Do you need extra fuel?  If you or someone in your family slices themselves with a knife making dinner and the hospitals are overrun with virus patients, do you want to go in for sutures?  What if cell service goes down?  Do you have a way to link up with family members who might not be at home?  Are you prepared to live without electricity for an extended period? These are the questions you need to address before an emergency.  If you felt helpless or ill-prepared last week, remember how it felt.  Keep your notes, and most importantly, take action.  

Our current situation has given us the ability to test our levels of preparedness. It’s not about being paranoid. It’s about the peace of mind that comes from being ready. Most people don’t get a second chance to prepare. That opportunity has been forced upon us. Don’t squander it.   

https://townhall.com/columnists/jackcarr/2020/03/21/prepare-or-suffer-n2565424

After the Coronavirus, the Media are Exposed

After the last two weeks, no reasonable person can conclude that the media is just biased or driven by personal animus to the president. Now it is clear they are willing to exploit human tragedy and a national emergency for their own financial and political profit.

Sebastian Gorka for American Greatness

This too shall pass. When President Trump says that we will overcome the threat posed by the Wuhan Coronavirus, of course, he is right.

Despite recent panic selling on the stock market and the day-in-day-out fear-mongering of the legacy media, we are still the strongest and richest nation in the world. We remain rated the most capable country when it comes to dealing with any type of pandemic.

We must be thankful that the president initiated an early travel ban from China and then Europe, measures that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of our professional medical response to the virus, has admitted made us significantly safer than countries whose leaders did not exercise their authority to protect their citizens.

Have the rest of the domestic responses been the right ones?

Some seasoned observers, such as my Salem Radio colleague, Dennis Prager, have argued that the massive planned bailouts, the closing of restaurants, bars, theaters, and sporting events is a gross overreaction for a virus that so far has killed less than 150 people out of a population of over 327 million.

These arguments seem intuitive, especially when we consider the annual deaths from other causes such as the regular flu, or opioid overdoses. The former results in 55,000 Americans dead in a year  and the latter closer to 70,000, yet we don’t shutter the NBA or close restaurants as a result of either. Only time will tell if our actions were proportionate to the threat posed. In the meantime, however, there are things we can say for certain, or predict with a larger than usual degree of certitude.

First, the FakeNews Industrial Complex is an even greater threat to the Truth than it was during the previous three and a half years of “Russia collusion” and Ukrainian “quid pro quo.” This crisis has barely begun, but already the mainstream legacy media has been caught repeatedly manufacturing fake stories in order to attack the president and weaken his response to the Wuhan virus. Here are the 11 most egregious examples, from the false reports that a national curfew was imminent, that Fauci had been muzzled by the president, and that President Trump had told governors to “get their own ventilators.”

Even if you are used to the lies of the legacy media, this is a watershed.

After the last two weeks, no reasonable person can conclude that the media is just biased or driven by personal animus to the president. Now it is clear that the likes of CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and Washington Post are willing to exploit human tragedy and a national emergency for their own financial and political profit. This will remain a challenge to our Republic even after we have isolated the virus, found a working vaccine and returned to some kind of normalcy. Re-electing President Trump this November would go a long way to breaking the FakeNews as an Enemy of the American people for good.

Paradoxically, the foreign threat may be easier to overcome than the domestic one of a seditious press. And this is the good news we can already identify coming out as a result of the Wuhan virus.

However long we are sequestered at home, whatever the transitory effect on Wall Street, the American people will never again allow our safety to be held hostage to the world’s largest Communist regime. It may have taken scores of American deaths, but never again will we allow another country, especially a dictatorship, to be the manufacturer of the majority of our medical needs, and more than 80 percent of all our antibiotics.

Whether we have overreacted to this threat or responded just right, the coronavirus emergency has proven President Donald Trump—and the 63 million Americans who voted for him—right on the threat China poses to our nation, the need to bring jobs and manufacturing back home, and to secure our borders for good.

The Zombie Apocalypse of...

by Daniel Greenfield for FrontPageMag

The Zombie Apocalypse 

of Leftist Institutions

Like every virus, leftist politics cease to have

any meaning once the host is dead.

March 20, 2020

Western civilization depends on the existence of objective truths. And not just any objective truths. All societies believe in something, but our civilization is unique in forming intellectual systems for discovering truths, objectively determining their validity, and building institutions around them.

That is the genius of western civilization.

America took this genius to its apex with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, taking government out of the realm of mysticism, away from specialists, and turning it over to the people, guided not by class and title, but by pursuing their own interests with character and virtue.

Today, American government is almost wholly run by specialists, a massive administrative state whose employees are virtually impossible to fire, and an elected class of officials with near universal law degrees, without character or virtue, for the sake of the collective good. As they understand it.

Our institutions are useless and mistrust is universal because we have run out of objective truths. Institutions and intellectual systems don’t function without objective truths. Neither do people.

The Left began its civilizational assault by spreading mistrust in the independence of the individual and the worth of institutions through conspiracy theories about class, gender and then race. It undermined confidence in meritocracy and individual initiative to build support for a takeover of institutions through violent revolution and political agitation so that those institutions would pursue its political goals.

The Declaration of Independence was not just a name. It asserted the independence of nations and individuals within the nation as the best means of assuring their happiness and their interests. The Left is its antithesis, agitating for the collectivization of individuals and nations, the sacrifice of personal interests and individual life, to the greater good of all of humanity, through institutional takeovers.

The politicization of institutions of ideas, especially academic and cultural, poisoned the well of ideas at the source. Unable to challenge our objective truths on their own terms, they went high or low, attacking the structure of reality or demanding that all ideas reflect the problems of society. Often, they did both, arguing, for example, that science is invalid because it’s the work of white men, attacking objective truth through social criticism, insisting that reality is subjective, and therefore unknowable.

Science has since been reinvented as a social criticism conspiracy theory to focus on the environmental apocalypses supposedly caused by capitalism and industry. The same ideological movement that attacks scientific truths for having sprung from insufficiently diverse sources, accuses those who question its politicized advocacy of environmental causes of not believing in science. But if scientific truths are only as valid as the personal makeup of their practitioners, then there is no reason for anyone to accept claims made by those who don’t share their worldview. Truths are either objective. Or they aren’t.

The measure of objectivity is that facts and truths can be verified regardless of worldview. The Left denies the validity of an apolitical objectivity while insisting that its beliefs are objectively true.

The media traded objective journalism for political narratives, and yet insists that any objective person would recognize that its narratives are true. It is convinced of this because of the truth of its beliefs. But embedding your worldview in all institutions, educational, cultural, economic, and political, while using it as the absolute measure of truth, is the antithesis of what made western civilization so successful.

And yet that is what leftist movements have done to America.

Societies require objective truths, objective standards, and objective institutions to function. When these are politicized, no one believes in the truth, standards of conduct collapse, and the institutions that keep a society going are no longer trusted. The politicization of the objective is a virus that spreads mistrust and destroys common ground. Every institution it travels through becomes a factional zombie, using its power, not for the public good, but for a partisan agenda, and destroying trust in its function.

Politicized universities cease educating, and begin indoctrinating, leading to massive mistrust and hostility that cuts off academia from the country at large. Cultural industries exchange the assertion of common values for their own political values. And much of the public tunes out the entertainment industry leading to the collapse of a common culture. Radicals elected to higher office pursue their agendas without regard to the law until the structure of the administrative state becomes the enemy.

Politics is meant to operate within the framework of objective truths, standards, and institutions. When it becomes the truth, the standard, and the institution, then a period of total warfare commences. Politicizing institutions is bad. But when those zombie institutions politicize people, then the zombie apocalypse in which all human values and standards are reduced to a political outcome is upon us.

That zombie apocalypse arrived in the sixties. America has been increasingly overrun by it since.

Our politicized institutions don’t work.

The schools and colleges don’t actually educate anyone. As the rot moves outward from the cultural studies to the scientific ones, our medical and technological prowess will collapse along with the rest. The modern tech pioneers are already often college dropouts. Our last burst of technological progress was built by defectors from academia even as it was being incubated in its universities.

Does anyone seriously believe that the diversity assault on STEM and objective scientific methodology will lead to any future technological revolutions emerging from the universities?

The only parts of government that work to any degree are those where heroic individualism is still possible, the military, emergency services, and some elected offices, because of individuals risking everything to do the right thing. The system, the leadership, and the daily protocols in all these areas are hopelessly broken and in the case of a serious disaster pose an existential threat to our survival.

Just like Communist China, the system is incapable of quickly recognizing a crisis and strategizing to meet it on its own terms, instead of resorting to its hodgepodge of brutality and protocols, filtering the problem through its worldview, dismissing it until it’s no longer able to do so, and then botching it.

Natural disasters, warfare, crime, homelessness, drugs, or diseases: it’s all the same failing cycle.

Major corporations with broken business models and shaky monopolies are going ‘woke’ because they have run out of ideas. And once you’ve run out of ideas, there’s nothing left to do but to go ‘woke’.

The cure begins with recognizing that ‘wokeness’ is the poison in the country’s veins. It’s not just companies. As America goes ‘woke’, we go broke, economically, culturally, and personally. The real ‘brokeness’ is not just financial, though the economic devastation of leftist policies is incalculable, but a cultural bankruptcy, deep institutional failures, and a civilizational collapse of values and standards.

The Left bet our entire civilization on its vision of how things should be. Like the USSR and other Communist countries, not to mention Bernie’s democratic socialist nations, nothing works as it should. The plans, as Elizabeth Warren could tell you after her defeat, never go according to plan. The more the system controls everyday life through its institutions, the fewer people trust the system and its institutions. Individuals become untrustworthy, communities collapse into neighborhoods of suspicious strangers, and the very notions of truth, honesty, and integrity become laughably naïve delusions.

This is, in one form or another, how life is lived in much of the world. America was better. It can be again. The virtuous society has fallen leaving pockets of virtuous communities and individuals.

Changing that requires faith and truth.

The Left is what people believe in when they no longer believe in anything else. It swallows up everything, our society, our beliefs, and our institutions, with nothing to offer beyond its promises. Once there is no longer anything external to struggle against because it controls everything, it cycles through purges, and slowly rots in its own corruption until an internal rebellion or external attack kills it.

Like every virus, leftist politics cease to have any meaning once the host is dead. But once the host is dead, the death of the zombie is no longer enough to bring the country and its society back to life.

Conservatives fight to conserve, not because we can turn back the clock to 1950, 1889, or any other past that has passed, but to conserve the form, the values and the truth of a society worth living in. Only a society worth living is a society is worth fighting for. And the only such society is one of free people.

Our fundamental difference with the political enemies of America is their belief that a society makes people good, whereas we know that people make a society good. Their every experiment at building utopia by seizing control of society has produced the same miserable results that prove that truth.

The Left wrecked America by trying to control its institutions and use them to brainwash its people. The ultimate defeat of that movement will only come when institutions no longer control people, but people once again control institutions, and when the ideas those institutions controlled are set free.

Only free people can reclaim objective truths, and celebrate beauty and virtue once more.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

YouTube and Netflix to reduce streaming quality to stop internet from breaking

YouTube and Netflix have said they will reduce the streaming quality of videos to avoid straining the internet due to the unprecedented usage during the coronavirus pandemic.
Millions of people are working from home across the European Union in order to tackle the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, which is now confirmed to have infected more than 244,000 people worldwide.
 "Streaming platforms, telecom operators and users... have a joint responsibility to take steps to ensure the smooth functioning of the internet during the battle against the virus propagation," the EU's markets and services commissioner, Thierry Breton, said yesterday.

In a statement, YouTube said it was complying with the commissioner's request for a month: "We are making a commitment to temporarily switch all traffic in the EU to standard definition by default."
A spokesperson for Netflix said the company was also acknowledging Mr Breton's concerns.

"We estimate that this will reduce Netflix traffic on European networks by around 25% while also ensuring a good quality service for our members," they added.
Despite Mr Breton's request, internet service providers have not reported a sharp increase in peak traffic - although peak times, normally between six and nine in the evening, are beginning much earlier.

None have also expressed concern about the capacities of their networks being maxed out.
Although video streaming makes up a large proportion of all data usage on the internet, technical advances have reduced how expensive it is for networks to send this data to users.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-youtube-and-netflix-to-reduce-streaming-quality-to-stop-internet-from-breaking-11960725

It’s time to practice social and economic distancing from China

Marc A. Thiesson at WaPo

Americans are practicing social distancing to stop the spread of the coronavirus that the Chinese regime’s lies and mismanagement unleashed onto the world. It may also be time to start practicing social — and economic — distancing from China as well.

China’s dictatorship bears ultimate responsibility for the pandemic lockdown that is crushing our economy. Axios reports that if China had acted just three weeks earlier to contain the virus rather than suppress information about it, “the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95 percent and its geographic spread limited.”

But the ensuing crisis has also exposed just how dependent we have become on China in key sectors of our economy. Case in point: In recent days, the Chinese state news agency Xinhua warned that if the Trump administration is not careful, China could ban pharmaceutical exports and plunge the United States “into the hell of a new coronavirus pneumonia epidemic.” The threat is real. China supplies more than 90 percent of antibiotics used here. It also produces many other drugs and biologics that Americans depend on, including heparin, HIV/AIDS medications, chemotherapy drugs, antidepressants, and treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine,” told the New York Times this month, “If China shut the door on exports of core components to make our medicines, within months our pharmacy shelves would become bare and our health care system would cease to function.”

We also depend on China for respirators, surgical masks and other protective gear that doctors and nurses need to deal with the coronavirus. Since the pandemic began, China has ramped up production, but the government has taken over factories that make masks for U.S. companies such as 3M and is hoarding the supply, leaving Americans at greater risk.

Our dependence on China is not just for medicine and devices to deal with this pandemic but also for technology that is critical to our long-term economic and security interests. Take the development of next-generation 5G networks, super-fast cellular technology that the Wall Street Journal reports will soon enable “a world of robot-run factories, remote surgery and driverless vehicles to power a ‘fourth industrial revolution.’ ” The market for 5G technology is dominated by Huawei, a company linked to the Chinese Communist Party. In a recent speech, Attorney General William P. Barr warned that China’s dominance of 5G poses “a monumental danger” that could facilitate Chinese espionage or allow Beijing to remotely control or disable devices — giving Beijing a stranglehold on Western economies. So far, we have been unable to persuade allies such as Britain not to use Huawei equipment because we have no alternative to offer; no major U.S. manufacturer produces alternative 5G equipment. “For the first time in history, the United States is not leading the next technology era,” Barr said.

The current pandemic has exposed the fact that we are dependent on China for everything from iPhones and computers to clothing and footwear —supply chains that have been disrupted by the coronavirus outbreak. It’s one thing to depend on China for cheap T-shirts and sneakers. It’s another to depend on a brutal communist dictatorship for life-saving drugs and the communications infrastructure that will undergird the 21st-century economy.

So what is the solution? When it comes to pharmaceuticals, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said, “It’s time to pull America’s supply chains for life-saving medicine out of China,” and he has introduced legislation with Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) to do just that. When it comes to 5G, Barr has suggested that the United States buy a controlling stake in Huawei’s only serious competitors — Nokia, based in Finland, and Ericsson, based in Sweden — and create an alternative to Chinese dominance of 5G.

More broadly, my American Enterprise Institute colleagues Derek Scissors and Dan Blumenthal have recommended that the “United States should change course and begin cutting some of its economic ties with China.” This economic decoupling, they say, “should be limited to areas that are genuinely vital to national security, prosperity and democratic values.” The U.S. government should bar Chinese companies that steal U.S. intellectual property from doing business with U.S. firms, and block access to American capital markets — including listing on American exchanges — of any Chinese company that is tied to espionage, the People’s Liberation Army or internal repression. Such actions may raise costs for U.S. consumers in the short term but are vital to their health and safety in the long term.

The Chinese government’s complicity in the coronavirus pandemic is an opportunity for the United States to reevaluate its economic ties to Beijing and develop alternative supply chains for medicines and critical technology. China’s lies about a virus have us hurtling toward a recession. It is time to immunize our economy and national security from our dependence on a deceitful regime.

It still isn’t time for...

AEI

It still isn’t time for a universal basic income. 

And the pandemic doesn’t change that.

The idea of giving all Americans a universal basic income remains a policy answer in search of an actual policy problem. And the ongoing COVID-19 crisis doesn’t change that. Sure, there’s currently good reason for Washington to consider cutting checks to help vulnerable households. Whether the issue is lost jobs or reduced wages and hours, people still have bills to pay. It makes sense for the federal government to help support those distressed households. Maybe a $1,000 as soon as next month. And maybe in May, as well.

Such talk naturally reminds people — well, UBI activists, at least — of former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and his Big Think Idea: a monthly $1,000 basic income for all. Perhaps the virus will be the unexpected catalyst to turn a far-out policy idea into reality, proponents have been suggesting. And count Yang among them. As he recently toldThe Washington Post: ‘“Certainly I would never hope that UBI gets adopted because of this terrible virus. But I will say it’s somewhat surreal to suspend my presidential campaign in February and see it potentially implemented in March.”

Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang speaks during the AFL-CIO Workers Presidential Summit in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., September 17, 2019. REUTERS/Mark Makela

Yang originally pushed a UBI as a solution to help mass unemployment due to robots taking all the jobs. That, even though there’s been little evidence that robots are taking all the jobs. Turns out that what really might take all the jobs is the pandemic. Or, to be more specific, the government response to the pandemic. Shutting down consumer-facing businesses and telling people to stay home means significantly shutting down the economy. Such “mitigation” measures are why we see dramatic Wall Street forecasts of second-quarter real GDP declines of 10 percent or more. 

And while some Wall Street forecasts show a sharp recovery in the second half of 2020, there’s considerable uncertainty around those relatively optimistic scenarios. For instance: Barclays ponders a “severe” scenario where every quarter is negative. So maybe $1,000 checks month after month. 

Of course, it would be better to prevent such an extended downturn. Checks to individuals won’t stop the disintegration of American business, especially smaller firms. And that’s happening now.

To ready the American economy for an energetic, post-virus awakening, government must supply direct financial aid to keep businesses whole and their workers on payroll. AEI’s Stan Veuger and GWU economist Steven Hamilton recently wrote that “with a temporary financial boost by government, these businesses could float through the crisis and, once it lifts, spin back up quickly—scaling up hours for their workers, purchases from their suppliers and sales to their customers.”

Veuger and Hamilton noted that in Australia, for instance, “every Australian small and medium business will receive a check worth between $1,300 and $15,900.” But those aren’t forever checks and neither would financial assistance to American firms. Just a bit of temporary help during what is looking like a once-in-a-century pandemic. And those checks to people should be temporary, too.

Fauci Love Letter to Hillary Clinton Surfaces

Hat Tip GKJoe

I knew there was something sketchy about Dr. Anthony Fauci.  Within the WikiLeaks HRC email files there’s a letter from Fauci to Hillary Clinton through her aid/lawyer Cheryl Mills: “Please tell her that we all love her and are very proud to know her.”  LOOK:

[Link to Source]

Media And Corporate Elites Act As PR Machine For Chinese Communist Party

The Chinese Communist Party is in an all-out propaganda war to deny its hand in unleashing a plague upon the world, and American corporations and media elites are helping.

Madeline Osburn reporting for The Federalist

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is in an all-out propaganda war to deny its hand in the plague they unleashed on the world, and American corporations and media elites are wholly accepting its unverified information.

Goodwill is central to the statecraft of the people’s Republic of China, which is why their response to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak is two-fold. First, they suppressed information, threatened doctors, and allowed the new virus to spread rapidly in its infancy. Destroying evidence of what happened under their roof is crucial to maintaining their status on the world stage. Second, the CCP is not only looking to shift the blame away from itself, but painting China as the world’s humanitarians by sending doctors and supplies to Italy and other countries suffering from their own deathly decisions.

“They tried to suppress this information…instead of trying to actually do the work to suppress the virus, which is what the world demanded,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News.

Deathly decisions are not new or foreign to the CCP. It’s estimated that the Chinese Communist Party is directly responsible for the death of more humans than is any other organization in human history. The number of lies told by the CCP are impossible to know, much less count. Despite their attempt to suppress all truth, we know about Tiananmen Square, the organ harvesting, the mismanaged SARS outbreaks, and the more recently discovered “re-education” camps of the country’s ethnic minorities.

Despite this well-known history of deception, the mainstream media has cheerfully regurgitated Thursday’s “reports” from China that their country has no new locally transmitted cases of the Wuhan coronavirus. A CNN report from Hong Kong blared the headline “No New Local Infections.”

The Guardian ran two stories, one calling China’s lockdown “brutal but effective,” and another reporting “no new domestic transmissions of Covid-19.” The same from NPR, Forbes, NBC, ABC, Vox, and The New York Times. Each and everyone of these story’s only source for this claim? China’s National Health Commission.

A key part of the CCP’s virus cover-up has included expelling American and foreign journalists from the country, under the guise of ceasing the spread of “rumors.” Squashing “rumors” was also its reasoning for censoring and jailing doctors and officials in Wuhan who attempted to raise alarm at the beginning of the outbreak. Why would Western outlets, whose journalists have been barred from reporting in China and with no way to verify, feel confident in reporting that the number of China’s new cases did not gradually taper off, but just suddenly ceased to exist?

Other fables spun by China have landed in American news reports as well. A New York Times story titled “Its Coronavirus Cases Dwindling, China Turns Focus Outward” depicts China as a thoughtful and gracious world peacekeeper. It features more unverified data about China’s cases, and touts China’s donations of masks and other supplies to Italy, only to then bury the fact that those supplies were sold, not donated, as a “critique” at the bottom of the story.

In segments on Thursday, this same story of Chinese humanitarian goodness played out in segments on both CNN, which said China is leading the world while Trump abandoned it, and on NBC, which claimed China “helped” the world by “delaying” the spread of coronavirus.

Perhaps the worst, or best from China’s perspective, purveyor of CCP talking points is The Atlantic, which has published a slew of articles claiming calling the “Wuhan virus” by its name is “xenophobic.”

Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said that although the story of Wuhan coronavirus may be new territory, we are not in new territory on the nature of the actors involved in this story.

“We know the track record of the Chinese Communist Party. We know they lie, we know they falsify medical data. That’s been proven in scientific medical journals,” Smith said. “I do not think we have any evidence that the Chinese Communist Party is operating in good faith at this time. We have a ton of evidence that they lie, and every piece of data coming out of China right now should be verified independently.”

Either our media are completely ignorant of the CCP’s motive, or they have an ulterior motive. And if this week’s White House briefing circuses and sustained story line over the racist linguistics of “Chinese virus” are any indication, it seems to be the latter. While Americans fear for their lives and their livelihoods, politicizing President Donald Trump’s response to the pandemic remains the media’s top priority, even if it means reporting unverified Chinese talking points.

But the media is certainty not alone, and maybe not even the worst, at protecting the CCP’s story, because they don’t get paid for it. Big corporations and organizations like Google, the National Basketball Association, Marriott, Apple, and major Hollywood production studios are notorious for bending the knee to China’s demands. There is, of course, a lot of money to be made there.

On Thursday, the president and CEO of Mariott International, Arne Sorenson, released a video to address how Mariott is responding to the spread of the virus. Sorenson repeated the same talking point, the “good news” that China has succeeded in reducing the spread of the virus, “through strong counteractions.”

In 2018, Mariott fired an employee who “liked” a tweet by the Friends of Tibet Twitter account, a group that supports Tibet’s independence. In fact, here are 14 times major brands and corporations censored themselves or apologized to appease the CCP.

“Within these corporations there is a certain team, or certain set of individuals who are responsible for maintaining the relationship with China,” Smith said. “And on the Chinese side, that always is under the control of and includes individuals that are a part of Chinese State Security.”

It’s more than likely the same corporate individuals at companies like Marriott, who tell the CEO all new cases of the Wuhan virus in China have ceased, are the same individuals being leaned on by their Chinese counterparts to silence Americans for liking tweets about Tibet. Operators of the Chinese Communist Party may not be experts at rapid response, but they are extremely good at maintaining process and pressure points.

All of China’s doubling down — the conspiracy theories, the claims of racism, the booting of journalists, the humanitarian facade — is a deflection from their totalitarian systems that inevitably led to this global pandemic. They know that their standing in the world is in the toilet.

Our media and our corporate elite should know better than to fall for well-established totalitarian tricks. They should not be so easily fooled, so easily tempted by anti-Trump sentiment, or so easily tempted to trade good business for the sake of Communist China’s geopolitical problems.