COVID Hyperbole Syndrome

Cartoon credit: Cartoonstock

Lionel Shriver’s column at The Spectator is titled “Never Has  Virus Been so oversold:  I’d like to sign on with COVID’s agent. What a publicity budget.” She sets forth the grotesque trade-offs we are seeing in both the US and the UK – with no end in sight.  An extract:

The more relentless these micro-managing policies of ‘social distancing’ (an expression I’ve come to loathe), mandatory masks, continued closures and capriciously restored regional lockdowns apparently on the basis of a miserable uptick of 14 extra cases, the more we relocate what had lurked far at the back of our minds to the front: other people are sources of contagion. We used to live with that fact. But this on-going risk of mixing with other human beings we’re now, apparently, to find intolerable.

I’m currently in New York, where the medical paranoia is sustained, and social life is nearly nonexistent. This week, a rarity, a couple came inside our house. They didn’t sit down, didn’t stay long, and were careful not to touch anything. When they left they were clearly relieved, and immediately doused themselves in hand sanitizer. I don’t think it’s going to be any different next summer. Google, for example, has already advised its employees to work from home for the next 12 months.

The graph of new cases in the UK roughly leveled off throughout July — but it has not plateaued at zero. The PM gives every indication that only zero will do. Thus as long as the coronavirus persists, the fearful prophylactic measures will continue. In trade for this valiant vigilance on our behalf, we merely have to sacrifice: our friends. Any new friends. All live performance — music, plays. Restaurants. All occasions, like proper weddings, funerals, birthdays and extended-family celebrations. Travel. Colleagues. Any search for love. Any moving communal experience, like festivals. Dentistry. A functional National Health Service. Oh, and the economy — and in case you need translation, that means the country, full stop.

Boris’s ‘nuclear option’ of another total national lockdown remains on the table. Why on earth? The one constructive conclusion to draw from this debacle is that long, indiscriminate national lockdowns to suppress infectious disease are a catastrophe. Yet the most horrifying consequence of COVID-19 could be that lockdown — which once applied only to prisons — becomes officialdom’s established knee-jerk response to any new contagion.

There will be a new contagion, too, and a new one after that. How many times can you send the national debt soaring, devastate small business, paralyze government services — including healthcare — and cancel for months on end the civil liberties of an erstwhile ‘free people’? In preference to this repeated carpet-bombing, a literal nuclear option might at least get the agony over with fast.

Read the full column here (h/t Instapundit).

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President Donald Trump in Ohio today

ospreys overhead

police patrol

Air Force One (C32 a/k/a/ Boeing 757 -- the smaller one) at Burke

Images by PatDooley photography

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Woke vs. awoken

photo credit: foxnews

From guest blogger Pat:

Leo Terrell was woke but now he has awoken. He's not alone.

People are seeing the destruction wrought on major American cities by looters and rioters, led by Antifa shock troops armed with hammers, bear spray, blinding lasers, commercial fireworks, Molotov cocktails, and more while protected by shields, helmets, industrial quality gas masks and the ability to blend into a larger crowd of BLM protesters for protection. 

The MSM [mainstream media] support Antifa and BLM and hide from public view the violence committed by those radical groups. When Rep. Jim Jordan showed a video of the violence at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in Congress, the MSM cut away. The head of the Committee, one Jerrold Nadler, flat out denied that the protests were anything but peaceful.

But, the MSM no longer has a monopoly on the news. Citizen journalists, bloggers, talk radio and even local TV channels are reporting on the destruction, which largely impacts poorer neighborhoods. The locals are figuring out that the white Antifa radicals that attacked their local supermarket, drugstore and police precinct are not fighting to improve their lives. Nor are the mobs that follow, under the umbrella of BLM, that loot and destroy these neighborhood foundations. 

BLM, Antifa and the MSM may be the woke darlings of today's Democrat party but they have awoken a silent coalition of all races and creeds that rejects divisive rhetoric and violence and wants a civil society restored. Despite the best efforts of the woke tech giants, it will be restored on November 4th, 2020.

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The Universal Mail-In Voting Sham

The Universal Mail-In Voting Sham: 

The major domestic threat to the legitimacy 

of the 2020 presidential election.

Unfortunately, since the most recent (primary) election in Ohio relied on mail-in ballots, there is now precedence. This report by Joseph Klein at Front Page Magazine provides useful talking points in the event that the Secretary of State decides to try to lock in mail-ballots for the November 2020 election.  

. . .

So why did President Trump bring up the possibility of election delay in his tweet (with four question marks) in the first place? The reason was to call attention to the dangers of universal mail-in voting that threaten the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. There is a real potential for fraud, to be sure. But even in the absence of widespread fraud, universal mail-in voting faces significant challenges in ensuring a fair election result, starting with its reliance on the all too unreliable U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Moreover, states’ broad authority in the administration of elections in which their citizens vote, including federal elections, does not mean they can throw caution to the wind and dilute the voting power of clearly qualified voters. This will most certainly happen when states introducing universal mail-in voting for the first time in a presidential general election do so without robust safeguards to ensure the integrity of the mail-in process. There is too little time to devise and implement anything close to the safeguards that presently exist for in-person voting and the more limited use of absentee ballots as the exception rather than the rule. There are a few smaller states that have used all or majority mail-in voting for years with safeguards that have proven workable. However, such safeguards cannot simply be transplanted into the systems of larger states overnight.

The U.S. Postal Service has proven its inability to handle properly the huge anticipated volume of mail-in ballots in a timely and uniform fashion across the United States. As a Democratic commissioner and co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections said: “One of the big problems of going to a vote by mail system is that the Boards of Elections are now in partnership with the U.S. Postal Service for conducting the election.” We are still awaiting the final results in a few contests from this past June’s Democratic primary in New York where there was significant reliance on mail-in voting.

. . .

In Ohio, there was evidently an “unintentional mis-sort” of more than 300 ballots, according to the U.S. Postal Service’s chief operating officer, which caused them to be delivered too late to be counted by a county Board of Elections. “An unintentional mis-sort of a tray of Butler County return ballots ultimately contributed to a gap in the mail flow, resulting in the delay,” he said, which he identified as “an opportunity for improvement.” 

. . .

The examples of post office related problems with mail-in voting described above, as well as breakdowns in other states, occurred before the July 10, 2020 implementation date for the new Postmaster General's changes. We are talking about a record of sheer incompetence that, when replicated on a far larger scale in connection with this year’s general election, could well affect the final results in swing states such as Ohio and Wisconsin.

Read the entire report here.

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Dragon splashdown

photo credit: nasa

Live stream link at YouTube to the Space X splashdown on Aug-02:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-l6f4wcv2I&feature=youtu.be

Action Alert for Ohio

image credit: Professional Adviser 

The good news headline:

Ohio pharmacy board backs off hydroxychloroquine ban
at Gov. Mike DeWine’s urging

The bad news headline:

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine proposes banning liquor sales
after 10 p.m. to stop coronavirus spread in bars

This is one smart virus that knows how to spread itself around more after 10pm.

In our neighborhood, at least half the restaurants have not re-opened since the lock-downs and the riots, and those that have opened are under onerous orders to enforce masks, distancing, etc.;  three citations and they get closed down for good.  And now comes this latest regulation to further cripple the restaurant and bar businesses.

The Ohio Liquor Control Commission is slated to hold a hearing on the rule 9 a.m. Friday. If approved, DeWine said he would sign an order that would go into effect Friday night.

Contact Gov. Mike DeWine: (614) 644-4357 or by email

Please share with your friends.

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Heather Mac Donald on crime, race and policing

photo credit: City Journal 

John Hinderaker at PowerLine announces an event with Heather Mac Donald tomorrow Jul-30 at noon central / 1 pm EST.  I’ll post the link (probably  later tomorrow) that will let you watch and listen at your leisure.

AMERICA’S TOP EXPERT DEFENDS THE POLICE

Thursday, day after tomorrow, at Noon Central, Heather Mac Donald, the nation’s premier expert on the intersection of crime, race and policing, will deliver the definitive smackdown of the anti-police myths that not just liberals, but corporate America, sports teams, and many Republicans have bought into. The truth is that there is no “systemic” racism in American policing. Heather’s data-rich presentation will make that clear.

How do I know that Heather will lay waste to the mythology of the Left? I’ve seen the script. The data are overwhelming. Contrary to popular belief, blacks are not “over-represented” in “police shootings,” the vast majority of which are praiseworthy. On the contrary, using crime data as the guide, they are under-represented.

There is much more, which you won’t want to miss. To see our event live, go here to register. The event is free. Registration means you will get email reminders, but anyone can watch the event live on American Experiment’s YouTube channel or Facebook page, and it will be archived for a long to come on YouTube, Facebook, the American Experiment site, and more.

Hope to see you on Thursday. It should be a dynamite event.

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