The devastation that has occurred because of this panic in high places is not likely to have cameras trained on most of it. If the cameras are running, and someone walks up behind someone else and clocks him with a baseball bat, the cause and effect is easy to see. The fellow who does that sort of thing is therefore charged with assault. And this is because everybody can see that an assault is in fact what happened. What happened is visible to all.
But when the damage is done to millions of people, and a large number of well-connected other people profit from it, then the case devolves into a political battle. Factions and parties develop, and all the usual political tools, manufactured in our national laboratories of obfuscation, are deployed. And so the chances are excellent that during the course of the debate, the people directly affected will fade into a gray statistical twilight.
Meanwhile, the damage is actually done, and for those willing to look straight at it, there is no denying it. The people on the margins are the ones who will be hit hardest, but because political careers will be dependent upon not ever recognizing the damage we have done, the chances are good that that we will be compliant, and will not recognize it.
Scientific consensus is oxymoronic. Faith in the scientific process is one thing. Faith in scientists is quite another. Faith in scientific spokesmen (e.g. Fauci or Birx) is actually faith in telegenic people with scientific credentials who have been selected for political reasons. And that is why we have been slathering the nation broadside with scientific solutions when there should have been a scientific debate.
But there are some signs of hope. Despite what I just wrote, there are signs that a debate might occur anyhow, however belated, and I am doing my best to see that it happens. This was as debacle for the ages. And this leads me back to the theme of this post.
One of the “tells” that indicates that something is seriously wrong is that the governor of a conservative state like Idaho can simply announce that he is doing something, cite the part of the Idaho Code that authorizes him to do it, but then, when we go and have a sober look at that portion of the Idaho Code we find something else entirely. But we have written constitutions for a reason. We have legal codes, written down in big, fat books, for a reason.
The code says you can quarantine the sick. What was done was a quarantine of the healthy. The code says that you can isolate the contagious. What was done was the isolation of everybody.
Following this logic, the right to keep and bear arms means that you don’t have the right to keep and bear arms. The right to free speech means that you had better shut up. The right to assemble means that you can look at flickering images on Zoom, with no telling who is vacuuming up that data.
In early March, President Donald Trump was lambasted for saying on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show that he had a hunch the coronavirus fatality rate, which the World Health Organization pegged then at 3 to 4 percent, was in fact much lower, under 1 percent. Many commentators, myself included pointed out that the beginning of a pandemic medical crisis was not the time to be floating hunches. But, as we always knew was possible, it looks now like the president might well have been right.
New data from random antibody tests conducted in New York State suggest that as many as 2.7 million people statewide have had the coronavirus. That along with the just over 15,000 deaths that have occurred leads to a fatality rate for the virus of .5 percent according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Here is what Trump said on March 4:
“Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number. Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor.”
He went on to say:
“I think that that number (the WHO number) is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent.”
Democrats and media pundits blasted Trump for spreading “misinformation.”
While this data is preliminary, it is backed up by another study in Los Angeles that found 40 times more people had carried the virus then were previously known. This dropped the fatality rate in LA from 4.5 percent to .1-.3 percent.
It is difficult to stress how important these findings are.
It’s very difficult to argue you’re just trying to protect the kids when the biggest worry you can conjure is that some students may still need to interact with religious folk
Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School, managed to break through the endless COVID-19 news cycle when she was quoted extensively by Harvard Magazine, citing her recently published article: “Homeschooling: Parents Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection.”
Tragically, Bartholet’s concern for children, which she is using as a bludgeon to attack conservative Christians, is authentic but horribly corrupted. Bartholet is a woman who by all accounts truly cares about children ahead of politics or agendas, yet has fallen prey to the left’s manic need to substitute the state for the parent, or more accurately, for the traditional Christian parent.
Masking her disdain for conservatives behind a veneer of concern for children’s welfare, Bartholet’s argument concludes that homeschooling threatens not just children, but society, because the majority of homeschoolers are conservative Christians, and thus indoctrinate their children with religious ideology and antidemocratic notions.
“[I]t’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints,” Bartholet asserts, before arguing for a presumptive ban on homeschooling parents, specifically those guilty of not agreeing with tolerant progressives.
It’s Clear Bartholet’s Biggest Concern Is Ideology
Bartholet has a long career of advocating for child welfare policies, so her alleged concerns for child safety are almost convincing. However, she gives the game away when she lists the potential costs of her proposed restrictions on homeschooling.
Bartholet’s only real concern is not that children may be subjugated to failing school systems or become victims of bullying, reasons commonly cited by homeschooling parents as their motives for pulling their children out of school. These concerns she dismisses out of hand.
No, Bartholet’s largest worry is that since some public schools may reflect the conservative regions in which they are located, students may still be forced to attend “Some schools that teach views and values that mirror those of conservative Christian homeschoolers.” It’s very difficult to argue you’re just trying to protect the kids when the biggest worry you can conjure is that some students may still need to interact with religious folk.
When the lockdowns began last month, we were told that if we didn’t stay home our hospitals would be overwhelmed with coronavirus patients, intensive care wards would be overrun, there wouldn’t be enough ventilators, and some people would probably die in their homes for lack of care. To maintain capacity in the health-care system, we all had to go on lockdown—not just the big cities, but everywhere.
So we stayed home, businesses closed, and tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs. But with the exception of New York City, the overwhelming surge of coronavirus patients never really appeared—at least not in the predicted numbers, which have been off by hundreds of thousands.
During a press conference Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis noted that health experts initially projected 465,000 Floridians would be hospitalized because of coronavirus by April 24. But as of April 22, the number is slightly more than 2,000.
Even in New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last month he would need 30,000 ventilators, hospitals never came close to needing that many. The projected peak need was about 5,000, and actual usage may have been even lower.
Other overflow measures have also proven unnecessary.
The Infection That’s Silently Killing Coronavirus Patients
This is what I learned during 10 days of treating Covid pneumonia at Bellevue Hospital.
By Richard Levitan
Dr. Levitan is an emergency doctor. New York Times
I have been practicing emergency medicine for 30 years. In 1994 I invented an imaging system for teaching intubation, the procedure of inserting breathing tubes. This led me to perform research into this procedure, and subsequently teach airway procedure courses to physicians worldwide for the last two decades.
So at the end of March, as a crush of Covid-19 patients began overwhelming hospitals in New York City, I volunteered to spend 10 days at Bellevue, helping at the hospital where I trained. Over those days, I realized that we are not detecting the deadly pneumonia the virus causes early enough and that we could be doing more to keep patients off ventilators — and alive.
On the long drive to New York from my home in New Hampshire, I called my friend Nick Caputo, an emergency physician in the Bronx, who was already in the thick of it. I wanted to know what I was facing, how to stay safe and about his insights into airway management with this disease. “Rich,” he said, “it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
He was right. Pneumonia caused by the coronavirus has had a stunning impact on the city’s hospital system.
[Elizabeth Bartholet is a "Liberal Tyrant" according to Timothy P. Carney, writing in Washington Examiner. She teaches at the Harvard Law School. To put the matter succinctly, she is "liberal tyrant", wanting to ban home schooling in America.]
About Elizabeth Bartholet and homeschooling, Alexandra de Sanctis writes: “Though she doesn’t acknowledge it, the result of her ban on homeschooling would be that wealthy parents can continue to avoid public schools by sending their children to expensive private institutions while a dearth of school-choice policies and a lack of financial resources leave lower-income parents with no options at all.”
Most wealthy families do not avoid public schools by sending their children to expensive private schools. They segregate themselves geographically in affluent neighborhoods, where the high cost of entry and heavy tax burden perform the role of tuition and private-school entry requirements — exclusion. You can pay for exclusivity through tuition or you can finance it through your mortgage, but the result is the same.
Bartholet is pretty open about her program, which has less to do with ensuring equal educational opportunity across socioeconomic groups (ho, ho!) and more to do with extending the surveillance state, lest unsupervised proles make child-rearing decisions at odds with the priorities Bartholet would prefer to see enforced.
The conception of the public schools as a coercive and homogenizing moral force is fundamental to the mandatory-education project — our very first public-education law (known by the wonderfully evocative title “Old Deluder Satan Act”) was explicitly anti-Catholic in its intent, as were many of the public-education laws (Blaine amendments, etc.). Like our Puritan forebears, contemporary progressives believe that what keeps the infidels from the One True Faith is mostly ignorance, which can be cured through coercive indoctrination.
Leaving poor families with no choice in educational matters is, from that point of view, the great selling point of abolishing homeschooling and other alternatives — not a regrettable tradeoff.
We talk about the “separation of church and state,” but the Left is very much interested in evangelism and in using the apparatus of the state to that end. Homeschooling is one of the few authentically radical movements of any consequence in contemporary American life, and the desire of powerful people such as Elizabeth Bartholet to inhibit it is very strong.
I’d like to see more separation between the schools and the criminal-justice system. Instead, we will continue to use the education system as an instrument of surveillance and coercion to bully poor people into uniformity with the cultural and aesthetic preferences of Harvard professors, one more on-ramp to child-protective services, family court, jail, etc.
President Trump announced that he would halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) pending an investigation into the agency’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The White House based its decision on a series of misleading statements issued by the WHO, as well as on director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus’s effusive praise of the Chinese government. (Not coincidentally, China backed Tedros’s bid to lead the organization in 2017.)
Critics charge Trump with scapegoating the WHO for the administration’s failures, while others caution that pulling funding will weaken efforts to combat the pandemic. They are wrong on both counts.
It’s no secret that the White House got off to a late start in combating the coronavirus. Trump downplayed the threat of the disease even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Americans to brace for an outbreak, and we criticized him for it. But this obviously doesn’t vindicate the World Health Organization. We noted its failures last week.
Tedros objected to Trump’s correct decision to impose travel restrictions on China, claiming it would “have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit” — a stark contrast with his deferential statements about China’s response. In mid January, the WHO announced that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus,” despite numerous reports to the contrary. Parroting Chinese misinformation wasn’t enough for Tedros: He went on to praise the Chinese Communist Party for “setting a new standard for outbreak control.” Later, Tedros overruled the objections of WHO colleagues and delayed the declaration of a public-health emergency, which cost the world precious time in preparing for the pandemic.
A police officer in Lancashire, England was recorded threatening a British citizen with arrest on made-up charges during a coronavirus confrontation that has gone viral on social media.
Lancashire Police said that they are investigating an incident in which an officer told a member of the public that he would “make something up” in order to arrest the man. It is unclear what the reason was for the altercation, in which the member of the public accuses the officer of “harassing” him.
“If you want to fucking step to me and push your chest out and something like that then fine, I’ll lock you up. We’ll do that shall we?,” the officer told the man, Lancashire Live reports. The unnamed man protested his innocence, claiming that he had done “nothing wrong” — to which the officer replied: “I’ll make something up. Public order. Squaring up to a police officer. Shall I do that?”
“Who are they going to believe me or you? Who are they going to believe me or you?” the officer warned.
Consistent Christians are not anarchists or scofflaws. We are gathered together today in this particular way precisely because we are not scofflaws. Every Christian who reads his Bible knows and understands that we are supposed to submit to the authorities that God has placed over us. What every Christian does not know, however, is that there are various understandings of how we are to do this. So yes, this is what we are to do. But how are we to do it? Are there different approaches to this assigned task? Are there disagreements we must work through first? And the answer is yes to both questions.
The Text
“Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well. For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: As free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God. Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king” (1 Peter 2:13–17).
Summary of the Text
In this passage from 1 Peter, we are told that we do whatever it is we do for the Lord’s sake. We obey magistrates in the Lord’s name, and we are not to obey them in their own name (v. 13). Their authority is not original with them. Their authority is derivative.
U.S. intelligence has “increasing confidence” that the novel Wuhan coronavirus outbreak began in a lab that was researching bat-coronaviruses, contrary to China’s claim that the pandemic emerged from a Wuhan wet market, according to multiple sources that briefed Fox News.
The sources told Fox News that the initial transmission of the virus looks to be bat-to-human, and that “patient zero” contracted the disease while working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, before going into the general population. While the lab is China’s first to achieve the highest level of international bio-research safety, known as BSL-4, its work with bats had been conducted at the lower protection level of BSL-2.
President Trump did not deny the bombshell when asked about details during Wednesday’s coronavirus press conference. “More and more we’re hearing the story . . . we are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation,” he stated.
Sources also confirmed that China used the wet market theory, which was parroted by the World Health Organization, to disguise and deflect exploration into the origins of the virus.
Despite introducing severe lockdown on its own residents, the UK government has not enacted any incoming travel restrictions, leaving over 100,000 arrivals a week free to enter the country unscreened, the health secretary revealed.
Asked by UK television host — and self-proclaimed “friend” of U.S. President Donald Trump — Piers Morgan on how many people were being tested for coronavirus as they stepped off international flights arriving in the nation’s airports, health secretary Matt Hancock revealed there was no routine testing at Britain’s air borders going on at all.
Following up that admission with the number of people still arriving in the United Kingdom by air, despite much of the global flying industry working at minimum capacity, Mr Hancock said around 15,000 people a day were landing, reports London’s Times.
While this number is a fraction of the number of people normally arriving in the United Kingdom — Heathrow, the country’s largest airport, would typically see an aircraft land or take off every 45 seconds and 213,000 people move through it a day — it still means a significant 105,000 people coming to Britain every week without a health check. [Emphasis, ours.]
An app used by an evangelical church in Idaho to stream Bible lessons and sermons was suspended by Google when the tech giant deemed its content insensitive.
The ministers and staff at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, a college town about 80 miles south of Spokane, Washington, are weighing their options after Google refused to budge on its decision that the church's app violates the company's "Sensitive Events policy" amid the coronavirus outbreak.
".@GooglePlay suspended our app today," the church tweeted on Good Friday. Speculating that pastoral calls for repentance during the pandemic and "short lessons on responding faithfully to the COVID-19 crisis" could have singled them out, the church added a photo of the Google notification informing them, "We don't allow apps that lack reasonable sensitivity towards or capitalize on a natural disaster, atrocity, conflict, death, or other tragic event." The Christ Church app was then scrubbed from the Google Play store, which leaves Android users unable to download it.
Christ Church later tweeted they had appealed Google's decree and had learned Google was suspending all apps related to the coronavirus.
Christ Church received a response to the appeal on Thursday, which reiterated that their app was deemed in violation of the Sensitive Events policy and would not be reinstated until all references to COVID-19 were removed. Google then directed them to a webpage offering examples of "common violations."
Ben Zornes, who has been an executive minister at Christ Church for four years, told the Washington Examiner, "So, essentially, merely referencing COVID-19 is putting us out of compliance with their 'Sensitive Events' policy. We are now evaluating the best way forward as we believe this is censorship, and wrong-headed.
We'll Show Those Churches! No, COVID-19 Didn’t Suddenly Empower Government To Do Anything It Wants To Churches
Banning church services and arresting pro-life citizens isn’t about public health and safety, it’s about some government officials silencing speakers they don’t like.
COVID-19 has touched every aspect of our lives, and our religious freedom is no exception. As the world deals with this pandemic, churches are finding creative solutions to minister to people in crisis. Yet too often they face unsympathetic or even hostile government officials, intent on needlessly shutting down their efforts.
Take Greenville, Mississippi, for example. During Holy Week, Temple Baptist Church found itself in the national spotlight after it invited congregants to safely gather and pray together, drive-in style, with congregants staying inside their cars.
That’s why my colleagues and I at Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit in federal court on Good Friday on behalf of Temple Baptist. Eight uniformed Greenville police officers went to a Wednesday night church service and ticketed church members $500 apiece for attending a drive-in service that complied with state safety and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.
In response to the lawsuit, the city refrained from ticketing congregants on Easter Sunday. But then on Monday, the mayor held a press conference and said that while the citations issued to Temple Baptist congregants would be dropped, Greenville’s unconstitutional ban on drive-in church services would remain in full force against future services.
But the First Amendment is not so easily ignored. ADF has asked the court for a temporary restraining order, and the U.S. government has filed a statement of interest in the case in support of the church. A different federal court called a similar ban in Louisville, Kentucky, “stunning” and “‘beyond all reason’ unconstitutional.”
Until I started travelling in the Communist world, my main experience of living under tyranny was my time at a boarding school on the edge of Dartmoor, 60 years ago. The headmaster, an enormous, booming man, had many fine qualities. But he was given to dreadful rages, which tended to strike late on Saturday afternoons.
He would throb with fury because some of the more loutish boys had left their games clothes on the changing room floor. For some reason, he viewed this as a terrible crime closely related to murder. So he would summon us into the assembly hall, and harangue us as darkness fell outside. The more we stood mulishly in front of him, saying nothing and with our eyes downcast, the angrier he became.
Sometimes he would hold up a pair of muddy football shorts as horrific evidence of the latest atrocity. Collective punishments – a ban on eating toast, or the cancellation of a promised film show – would follow, along with more shouting and angry notices in red ink, threatening worse to come. Most of us were guiltless of wrongdoing. But we were small, and he was huge. The staff seemed more scared of him than we were.
We were on a windswept hilltop miles from anywhere. We had no escape. We assumed our letters home were censored, so we put up with these ludicrous exhibitions and waited for the storm to pass.
Oddly enough, the terror did not work. People carried on leaving their clothes on the floor, just the same.
I had thought such childish things were long over in my life. But a week ago I found that I was, once again, living at the mercy of an equally petulant would-be despot.
Now that we have sprayed the whole jungle with Agent Orange in order to find out if anything nefarious was going on in there, the answers are starting to come back. Not any more.
Say that in your best Inspector Clouseau voice. Not any more.
Now that we survey the damage, along with the situation that seemed to say such damage was simply the price we had to pay, some people are starting to realize that this economy was a priceless Steinway. But . . . not any more.
Initial Reports
What am I talking about?
One study that got a lot of attention last week came out of Stanford, and suggests that the number of people who caught the COVID virus may have been 50 to 80 times higher than we thought. This likely means that the disease was much more contagious than was thought, that it was much less deadly than was thought, and that we actually may be coming down the other side of the curve, rather than climbing up the threatening slope.
And that aircraft carrier that we heard so much about, the Theodore Roosevelt, has had its entire crew tested. And in those results, 60% of the positive results that came back were from sailors who were entirely asymptomatic.
A leading British newspaper has decided to stop running paid propaganda articles from a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) amidst a global effort by the regime in Beijing to influence Western opinion on the Wuhan virus pandemic.
The Daily Telegraph has removed its longstanding ‘China Watch’ section, which the paper has run for over ten years. The segment featured propaganda articles from the Chinese state-sponsored media outlet China Daily. Another part which ran articles from the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, has been removed as well.
According to The Guardian, some examples of articles that have since been deleted by the paper include: “Why are some framing China’s heroic efforts to stop coronavirus as inhumane?”; “Traditional Chinese medicine ‘helps fight coronavirus'”; and “Coronavirus outbreak is not an opportunity to score points against China”.
NEW YORK, April 17 (C-Fam) One of the great debates at the UN over the last few decades has been over how to wedge the LGBT issue into the UN dialogue. Member states were largely uninterested. Conservative and religiously minded countries knew the issue was a radicalizing one.
The debate tended to play itself out in the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, far from New York headquarters where conservative western NGOs can play a more active role in the debate.
In Geneva, year in and year out, Brazil would play stalking horse for the pro-gay European countries. Annually, Brazil would propose language that would place “sexual orientation and gender identity” as a new category of non-discrimination. Each year it was defeated.
The issue came to fruition in 2016 with the adoption of a resolution calling for a report on violence against gays and called for the appointment of an “independent expert” to develop this report, someone who can travel around the world gathering information, making statements, and generally pushing governments toward acceptance of SOGI into non-discrimination law.
The fears of opponents have played themselves out in recent years with the appointment of Costa Rican Victor Madrigal-Borloz as the “independent expert.” Madrigal has gone far beyond reporting on violence against gays.
As I watched the Prime Minister order mass house arrest on Monday night, I felt revulsion, anger and grief – as anyone brought up when this was a free and well-governed country would. I also felt terribly alone.
You could not have known, from anything broadcast that night or printed the following day, that anyone was unhappy with these events. But they were. So, above all things this week, I would like to thank all the kind, perplexed people who have got in touch with me by so many means, to say they share my doubts about the Government’s handling of Covid-19.
There are, in fact, many of us. If you feel this way, you are nothing like as solitary as you think.
Next, I would like to thank all those who disagree with me, who choose to abuse me, often with lies, personal smears and swearwords. Your childish, intolerant reaction has strengthened me in my conviction that mine is the better case. If your policy is so good, why can you not defend it like civilised adults? Do you really think that I regret needless deaths any less than you? Can you not accept that I also have good motives?
I now suspect this dark season might get still worse before we see the clear, calm light of reason again. The greater the mistake we have made, the less willing we are to admit it or correct it. This is why I greatly fear worse developments in the coming few days.
When I predicted roadblocks in my column two weeks ago, which I did, I did so out of an instinct that we were entering on the craziest period of our lives since the death of Princess Diana.
A couple of days ago, a distinguished colleague ran past me a question which someone had put to him. Now that the church is delivering just about everything online, should we also have online Communion Services?
I must admit that I found the idea deeply disturbing, not merely because it presents yet another danger of rushing into an innovation without due theological reflection, but because it smacks of an exaggerated view of the importance of the Sacrament: the view prevalent in Roman Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, and Scoto-Catholic circles, in which the Eucharist is the primary means of grace, and its weekly (or even daily) ministration vital to a believer’s spiritual growth.
Such a point of view can hardly claim the support of the New Testament, where there is a remarkable paucity of references to the Lord’s Supper. Nor is it in line with the priorities of historic Protestantism. A famine of the Word of God would certainly be calamitous but, taking the history of the church overall, a 6-month hiatus in the ministration of the Lord’s Supper would not be at all unusual; indeed, in many Scottish congregations it was the norm until very recently; and that is before we even begin to think of the chronically-housebound who, in most churches, might have to go years without the Sacrament. Neither of these situations was ideal, but they may help us put the current disruptions in perspective.
The Lord’s Supper is not a sacrament on which we are free to innovate at will. We have a clear and authoritative norm: the accounts of the Last Supper handed down not only by all three gospels, but also by St Paul (the earliest account). Among the relevant considerations highlighted by these accounts are the following:
1. The most obvious feature of the Last Supper is that it was a shared meal; and those who shared it were not present only ‘in spirit,’ far less only virtually.
Beijing may pretend it has the coronavirus pandemic under control and insist there are no new infected cases. This week alone, however, the news of notorious accounting scandals in regard to two U.S.-listed Chinese companies surfaced, exposing yet another sickening event that has unraveled in China.
Luckin Coffee is a two and a half-year-old startup coffee chain in China founded with the intention to overtake American coffee chain Starbucks. Luckin’s growth speed has been astounding, from nine locations in 2017 to more than 4,500 locations across China in 2020, compared to Starbucks’ 4,200 locations.
Luckin boasts its success as being more of a technology company than a coffee company; customers use an app to order drinks, and the company uses the data it collects and artificial intelligence to improve its operations. Like many home-grown brands in China, Luckin’s impressive growth was achieved by underselling its competitors. Luckin’s coffee tastes average, but it is unbelievably cheap. Luckin’s latte costs about $1 versus $4 at Starbucks.
Luckin’s Luck Ran Out
Luckin was listed in the NASDAQ stock exchange in the United States in May 2019, giving the startup new access to foreign investors and additional credibility.
Standing alone, the imposing facade of the 640 year old cathedral behind him, the 60-year-old tenor delivered a haunting, melancholy rendition of the traditional "Great Awakening" hymn (in the clip below it begins at about 18:40).
The clip is intercut with images of empty streets from the three major cities from around the most closely associated with Milan: London, New York and Paris
ANDREA BOCELLI/YOUTUBE
The mayor of Milan requested Bocelli's performance. The city has been the epicentre of Italy's fight against Covid-19.
Milan, the financial capital of Italy's Lombardy region, has been the epicentre of Italy's fight against Covid-19. The region has reported more than 10,000 Covid-19 related deaths since February - more than half of all Covid-19 related deaths in Italy.
ANDREA BOCELLI/YOUTUBE
Andrea Bocelli's performance is intercut with images of empty streets from Italy and around the world.
Bocelli was asked to perform in Milan at Easter by the city's mayor Giuseppe Sala who anticipated a "very different" Easter in the devoutly Catholic country.
"I am sure that the extraordinary voice of Bocelli will be the embrace we are missing these days, a strong, special hug, capable of warming the heart of Milan, Italy and the world," Sala said in a statement.
In the introduction to the performance Bocelli said he believed in the "strength of praying together".
CATHEDRAL ORGANIST EMANUELE VIANELLI
Andre Bocelli and Cathedral organist Emanuele Vianelli perform from inside the empty cathedral.
"I believe in the Christian Easter, a universal symbol of rebirth that everyone, whether they are believers or not, truly needs right now," Bocelli's introduction said.
"Thanks to music, streamed live, bringing together millions of clasped hands everywhere in the world, we will hug the wounded world's pulsing heart."
The Andrea Bocelli Foundation has an emergency GoFundMe campaign to help hospitals purchase equipment for Italian medical staff.
ANDREA BOCELLI/YOUTUBE
Andrea Bocelli delivers a haunting rendition of Amazing Grace from the steps of Milan's Duomo cathedral.
Almost two weeks ago I offered at NRO a few synopses of various theories about why California — which, for a variety of reasons, had seemed so ripe for a New York–style epidemic — had nonetheless strangely been exempt at least for a while from the virus’s spread. I included the pedestrian possibility of some previously acquired “herd immunity,” given the state’s singular exposure from November to January 31 to direct flights from China, including those from Wuhan, and initial CDC and media reports last year of an unusually early and severe assumed flu hitting the state.
Within a few days, I was hit by media inquiries and private calls asking about my ongoing “coronavirus antibody testing studies.”
Despite ad nauseam corrections that I had never claimed in the NRO article or elsewhere to be a doctor, much less an epidemiologist or a conductor of any such study, and that the Hoover Institution is not a medical school, the fake news still spread.
Over the past few weeks – and particularly since “lockdown” began only two short weeks ago – we have seen police powers growing, seemingly by the day. It began with what former Commissioner Bush called a “three step process”: firstly educate, then warn, then if necessary arrest. Bush seemed to think the veiled threat of “a trip to our place” for those who didn’t satisfy his men somewhat amusing. It was made clear that what was envisaged for persons taken on that “trip” was a period of detention and then – if the person concerned was a good boy and agreed to whatever was asked of them – release without charge. So far so only slightly sinister, although it would be fair to say that most people didn’t really see it that way. It was only libertarians like me who had some disquiet from the beginning.
The next step was a exponential increase in police powers granted by the Medical Officer of Health, the apparently very capable Dr Ashley Bloomfield, by way of a Notice issued under s.70 of the Health Act 1956. It is no exaggeration to say that the powers granted to the police under that Notice far exceed anything seen in this country since the waterfront strike/lockout in 1951; they are arguably greater than 70 years ago.
If any reader thinks that statement is hyperbole, I strongly urge them to read the said section 70 – just Google “New Zealand Legislation” and insert “Health Act” into the box. A Notice under s.70 allows persons acting under the direction of the Medical Officer of Health to: order that animals be destroyed; require persons to submit themselves for medical examination or testing at a prescribed place and time; require persons and places to be disinfected; require persons to remain where they are until declared free of disease; and most draconian of all – and that is not a word I use lightly – do anything listed under s.70 (2), which bears quoting in full:
s.70 (2) The medical officer of health, and any environmental health officer or other person authorised in that behalf by the medical officer of health, may at any time, with or without assistants, enter on any lands, buildings, or ships, and inspect the same and all things thereon or therein; and may do, with respect to any persons, places, lands, buildings, ships, animals, or things, whatever in the opinion of the medical officer of health is necessary or expedient for the purpose of carrying out the foregoing provisions of this section
In other words, the police – or any other “authorized” person – may enter into your home and do “whatever in the opinion of the Medical Officer of Health is necessary or expedient…”. These are extraordinary powers, seemingly without obvious limit.
The release of Cardinal George Pell from prison and the quashing of his sentence by Australia’s High Court is a long overdue correction for one of the greatest miscarriages of injustice in Australian history. Also — and very nearly as satisfyingly — it represents the most tremendously crushing blow to leftists, Social Justice Warriors, eco-loons across the world.
These people wanted Cardinal Pell in prison because he represented everything they hated: old, white, outspoken, Christian, conservative, and climate sceptic. The fact that he was entirely innocent of the outrageous crime of which he had been accused was neither here nor there to the left-liberal lynch mob. They just needed a scalp — a ‘Great White Defendant’ — and poor George Pell fitted the bill just perfectly.
Pell’s ordeal — described as ‘one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Australian history’ — began in December 2018 when at the age of 78, he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old choirboy and molesting his friend after a Sunday Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in 1996.
Cardinal Pell spent 404 days in prison for a crime of which he was wholly innocent.
After failing to censor President Trump's press conferences, media are working on a new plan of pressuring him to remove himself from his press conferences.
For years, the media complained that President Donald Trump wasn’t holding enough press conferences. Now, as the media’s poor performance in his daily coronavirus press conferences is on worldwide display, they’re begging him to leave his own press conferences, and leave them alone to craft their anti-Trump storylines.
When March polls showed Trump receiving unusually high marks for his handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, and the media receiving their traditionally low marks for it, many journalists began pushing for censorship of the press conferences. While many outlets tried this approach, it obviously failed with viewers who turned to other outlets for the news they sought.
The media, however, continued to be mocked for the prevalence of silly and unserious questions from reporters who clearly think they come off better outside their echo chambers than they do.
In an attempt to regain control, the media have shifted to a new approach. Trump’s daily press conferences with updates on the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic are actually bad for him, yeah that’s the ticket!
The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman, who would be known for their extreme anti-Trump posture and histrionic analysis if it weren’t shared by nearly everyone else in the White House press corps, laid out their case in a tendentious essay that the usual followers at many media outlets echoed throughout the day.
The article claims that “White House allies and Republican lawmakers” — not the embarrassed media — are deeply concerned by the briefings.
WASHINGTON, April 10 (C-Fam) As European development ministers met this week to hammer out a $17 billion COVID-19 aid package, primarily for Africa, six of the world’s top children’s charities sent a letter urging that sexual and reproductive health and rights for children be “prioritized” as “life-saving.”
A draft letter obtained by the Friday Fax, including detailed recommendations from the organizations, said, “Girls’ and women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights must continue to be prioritized, funded and recognized as life-saving, along with essential health services for young children’s survival and healthy growth.”
The letter, confirmed to be an authentic draft from a coalition called Joining Forces, said, “It is critical that health workers are properly trained and able to provide non-discriminatory health services (including sexual and reproductive health) to adolescents and young people.”
During the Ebola crisis, the letter claims, “limited access to sexual and reproductive health information and services (including contraception and safe abortion) all contributed to the rise in teenage pregnancy rates and the number of maternal and child deaths.” It claimed that these conditions would be repeated in the COVID-19 crisis.
Joining Forces includes ChildFund Alliance, Plan International, Save the Children International, SOS Children’s Villages International, Terre des Hommes International Federation, and World Vision International.
The group’s six CEOs met with members of the European Commission and the European Parliament in February to “make sure the EU walks the talk on both the [UN Sustainable Development Goals] and the UN [Convention on the Rights of the Child].”
The children’s rights treaty does not mention sexual and reproductive health and rights or abortion, but UN staff include abortion in sexual and reproductive health programming.
It’s a complicated situation for religious conservatives. But these are complicated times.
In January 2021, someone will take the presidential oath of office, and religious conservatives will undoubtedly play a crucial role in whom it will be. Their influence will be the focus of an untold number of postmortems, of the type they’ve been accustomed to hearing since 2016, when the notorious “81 percent” of evangelicals voted for the unlikeliest of candidates: Donald Trump. There are two competing interpretations of Trump’s enthusiastic support from religious conservatives: that it is a lesser-of-two-evils transaction based on self-interest, or that it shows a voting bloc compromised by every form of democratic vice, whether racism, nativism, or nationalism.
If trends hold, there will be a similar turnout in 2020. Rather than wait for the postmortem, I can tell you what will happen now: Millions of religious conservatives will approach their votes with a political realism that requires balancing undesirable tensions and conflicting realities. They will vote not so much for Donald Trump — with his uncouth speech and incessantly immature tweets — as they will vote against the worldview of the Democratic platform.
Before our lives switched to lockdown and immobility, I was enjoying a few pints with a friend in a pub on Fulham’s bustling North End Road. We were discussing one of our favorite topics — Germany — and how we’ve both noticed that the country is infected with a rancid culture of snitching.
By contrast, Britain, I said, can take great pride from our national attitude against tattletales, which starts in the school playground before fermenting into full-blown opposition to informing on neighbors when the police come knocking.
He told me I was wrong, and that we’re just as ripe for the Germanic grassing (informing) that we both lamented. He has been proven right. The coronavirus epidemic has revealed that vast swaths of our society need little incentive to transform into curtain-twitching, proto-Stasi informants.
A little over two weeks ago, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced tougher restrictions on our liberty to prevent the spread of the virus. “Stay home and save lives” was his rallying cry. Unfortunately, many took this to mean “Stay home and make sure your neighbor does the same.”
Northamptonshire — which I now rank as one of England’s bottom three counties — has reported a thriving snitching community, with its chief constable, Nick Adderly, recently revealing that the force has faced a surge in calls from people reporting their neighbors for “going out for a second run.”
Not wanting to miss out on an opportunity to embarrass themselves in public, many of our overzealous police forces have launched online contact forms so people can grass on their neighbors.
The pro-family policies pursued by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s government as an alternative to mass immigration are reaping dividends, with births up 9.4 per cent year on year.
Eduard von Habsburg, the Central European country’s ambassador to the Holy See — and great-great-grandson of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary — reported that the “much-ridiculed” policies were also accompanied by a near-100 per cent increase in marriages and the number of children per woman rising to an average of 1.6.
“In Hungary, the population has been decreasing since 1981,” said Katalin Novák, Hungary’s State Secretary for Family, Youth, and International Affairs, in exclusive comments to Breitbart London explaining the enormity of the turnaround her government has achieved.
“In 2010, when [Orbán’s Fidesz party] won the elections with a two-thirds majority after eight years of socialist, anti-work, anti-economy, and anti-family governance, our country was at the brink of collapse,” she recalled, citing “austerity packages and the dismantling of the family benefit system”.
“In 2010, we started to build a family-friendly country… Our main goal is to eliminate the burdens that couples face when they would like to have children,” she said, highlighting policies including “lifelong exemption from personal income tax for women with four children”, partial mortgage write-offs for families after the birth of their second child, and grandparental leave.
“The recent demographic figures speak for themselves, the number of marriages is at its 40-year high, the fertility rate at its 20-year high, while the divorces haven’t been as low as last year in the last six decades,” she added proudly.
As the numerous state lock downs continue, and various Christian organizations have to make decisions about what to do about it, churches particularly, this brings into high relief all the various assumptions that Christians have been carrying about concerning Romans 13. Huh, we think. Look at that.
What I would like for this post to do is to provide something of a primer on sphere sovereignty? How are the governments God created to relate to one another in a time such as this? . . .
The Romans 13 Problem
As our session of elders has been working this out, one of our men helpfully outlined the three positions that Christians tend to take on the magistrate’s authority to shut down a church in an emergency situation.
The first is that the civil magistrate has no authority over whether a church holds worship services. They may advise, but not command. The church is like a house cat. Unlike a dog, it never obeys you; it sometimes agrees with you.
The second position is that the magistrate has genuine authority in times of emergency to command the church to do certain things, or refrain from certain things (as with a quarantine in a time of plague). When the church complies, it is obedience, not happenstance agreement. At the same time, because no human authority is absolute, and because every form of human authority can be corrupted, those under authority, including the church (and especially the church), have the authority to identify when the genuine authority of the magistrate is being abused or mishandled to the point where it is now legitimate to disregard what they are saying.
The third position is to take a surface reading of Romans 13 (obey the existing authorities) as a straightforward absolute. Whatever they say, we are supposed to do.
To help you keep track of things, I am arguing for the second position here. I am doing this because, among other things, it is the correct position.
Three Governments
There are three basic governments that have their existence directly from the hand of God.
Don’t Blame All Chinese People For The Actions Of Their Evil Government
When this pandemic is over, the rest of the world should continue to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for its deception. But a reckoning with the CCP is not the same as punishing all Chinese people.
As the confirmed number of coronavirus cases surpassed 1 million worldwide, and there is no end in sight for the prolonged lockdown in many countries. The call for holding communist China accountable for the coronavirus pandemic is getting louder. It’s important that in our quest for justice, we distinguish between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese people. At fault for the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus is the CCP.
Driven by the CCP’s overarching desire to suppress any bad news for the sake of social, economic, and political stability, Chinese government officials silenced Wuhan’s whistleblowers, covered up the truth from the Chinese people and the rest of the world, downplayed the human-to-human transmission risks in early January, took no measures to prevent the spread of the virus for nearly two months, and went ahead with provincial Communist Party planning meetings.
By the time the Chinese government finally took draconian measures to lock down millions of people in late January, efforts to prevent worldwide spread were already too late. A U.K. study shows that if the Chinese government had taken action three weeks earlier, the number of cases would be 95 percent lower than it is now.
The Chinese Communist Party Lied Repeatedly
Even after the danger of the virus became apparent, however, the CCP’s cover-up and lies continued.
Since its inception 112 years ago almost to the day, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been credited with the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of other devastating illnesses, including leprosy and river blindness.
This record of success makes the current corruption of the organization all the more shameful.
On December 30, Chinese doctor Li Wenliang warned colleagues about the outbreak of an illness resembling severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which sparked a pandemic in 2003. Public-health officials rely on the acuity of doctors like Li, whose early warnings prevent the spread of deadly diseases. But Chinese authorities didn’t reward Li; they summoned him to the Public Security Bureau in Wuhan on accusations that he had made false statements and disrupted the public order.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) followed up with numerous other arrests, and publicly warned that it would punish anyone spreading “rumors” on social media. By mid January, Chinese doctors knew that COVID-19 was spreading between humans, but on January 14, the WHO stated that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus.” Two weeks later, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus flew to Beijing for a meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, who so impressed Tedros that he lauded Chinese authorities for “setting a new standard for outbreak control,” praising their “openness for sharing information.”
Dr. Li might have disagreed with that sentiment. Alas, he was never able to voice his objections: He died after contracting COVID-19.
Killing Unborn Children Now a Lucrative Industry in NZ
Right to Life
Media Release Sunday 5th April 2020
It is deplorable that the government would contract out the killing of unwanted unborn children to a private company, Magma Healthcare Ltd. This company is owned by well-known abortionist Dr Simon Snook and abortionist Dr David Bivona, previously a member of the Abortion Supervisory Committee’s Standards of Care Committee. (our emphasis)
This government has shamefully abdicated its duty to protect the rightto life of our unborn children and the welfare of their mothers. It is equally shameful the the government is now contracting with a for profit company that is prepared to murder our children under the guise that this is health care.
It is believed that this company’s objective is profit. It is appalling that these abortionists are now profiting from their violently killing innocent and defenceless children. This for Profit Company was registered in May 2015 and now has three branches; Palmerston North, Masterton and a new branch launched in April 2020 in Invercargill. The company also provides free government funded abortions for residents of the Wanganui Health Board area. It is estimated that the total number of babies that will be killed by the dedicated staff of Magma Healthcare this year will be about 1,500. It is feared that this company will now be seeking to expand its business and its profitability by establishing additional abortion mills throughout New Zealand.
It is appalling that this company treats women with such disdain and trivialises the killing of the unborn child, the weakest and most defenceless member of our human family. Women who are facing a crisis pregnancy deserve to be treated with the greatest respect, compassion and to consult face to face with caring and ethical medical practitioners. A conversation initiated by a distressed woman seeking a medical abortion from an unknown person answering a 0800 phone number is neither professional nor ethical; our women deserve better.
Our women do not deserve to be treated like this. A woman with a crisis pregnancy is vulnerable. She needs to be offered protection and support, not powerful medications that place her at risk, physically, emotionally and psychologically.
Eduard Sakiz, the chairman of Roussel Uclaf, the French firm that developed RU486, Mifepristone, said that for women taking this lethal drug, ‘it was an appalling psychological experience and that it was a terrible emotional and physical ordeal.” Women suffered from the terrible guilt that it was because they had taken the lethal drugs, that it was they alone who had killed their child.
Right to Life is opposed to all abortions and believes that if abortions are permitted in law that they must be performed only in Public Hospitals subject to government control and public surveillance. We also urgently request, to protect women and the unborn, the government cease contracting and financing abortions to private businesses. We also request that the government protect women’s health by banning telehealth abortions, as these allow dangerous abortion drugs to be taken outside a Public Hospital.
By way of reminder, we have been visited with three distinct disasters. The first is the COVID virus itself. The second is the economic devastation that has been caused by a dramatic and unnecessary over-reaction to the virus. And the third is the threat to civil liberties that is posed by a thoughtless granting of sweeping emergency powers to the government.
What I would like to do here is bring you a bit of good news regarding the first rock that was dislodged at the top of this particular avalanche — meaning the virus, and possible treatments. And then I would like to discuss, for your edification and pleasure, why this news that is manifestly good news is not being treated by many as though it were good news. Even though it is.
Some Background
And as per the @IHME_UW projections, here is what happened in New York State (as of April 5). It is a comparison of the projection over against what actually happened.
In New York State, 69K hospital beds were projected as needed, and what were actually needed were 16.5K. The projection for needed ICU beds were 12.3K beds, and the beds that were actually required were 4K. For links to follow on this and related issues, check in with @AlexBerenson.
New Zealand is awash with criminal gangs. Here is a media account of a couple of gangs in action (against each other).
Mongrel Mob prospect Hayden Wallace clutched a loaded rifle inside one of three cars approaching the home of Black Power rival Josh Te Tua.
It was after dark on May 5, 2007 and the vehicle Wallace was in had turned off its lights. An hour earlier, amid a day of escalating tensions between the two gangs, three carloads of Mongrel Mob members and associates had driven past the Whanganui house and been pelted with bottles, bricks and other missiles. They were back for revenge.
During the earlier altercation, a brick smashed the windscreen of patched mobster Karl Check's four-wheel-drive. Unhappy, Check handed a .303 rifle to Wallace and was overheard telling him to "shoot him in the head".
Outside Te Tua's home, about 20 Black Power members and supporters had gathered on the lawn. As the vehicles carrying the Mongrel Mob members passed the property three gunshots rang out. The Black Power members dived for cover and escaped injury. One of the bullets went through a window and ripped through the chest of Te Tua's two-year-old daughter, Jhia, who was asleep on the couch.
Wallace, Check and Ranji Forbes, the driver of the car Wallace was in, were later found guilty of murder in one of the few cases in the past two decades where an innocent bystander has become a victim of warring gangs. [NZ Herald]
Intra-gang warfare has become a kind of entertainment. We can tolerate it, except for when things go too far--which they did in the case of the murder of two year old, Jhia.
It's around about at this point that we find our minds and memories drifting back to the Roman Empire.
When 96 percent of spy warrants reviewed contain serious errors or omissions — that’s wholescale fraud, not a few little slip-ups.
Consider this scenario: A federal lawyer is filling out applications requesting FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance) warrants to spy on American citizens who work for a major presidential campaign to determine whether the campaign staffers are collaborating with a foreign power to steal the presidency of the United States.
They must know that such a conspiracy, should it be exposed, would be the most explosive in the history of the nation — towering over the piddling criminality of Watergate or the Teapot Dome scandal. And any genuine effort to ferret out criminality and sedition within one of the nation’s major parties — perhaps going a high as the future president himself — would be supported by unimpeachable underlying evidence and undertaken with abundant care and meticulous oversight.
So what are the chances that a good-faith investigation would botch nearly every request to spy on the campaign when the FISA court is already signing off on over 99 percent of applications? What are the chances that the FISA applications of a good-faith investigation would be riddled with errors and rely on “misleading and inaccurate” information based on a fabulist document paid for by the opposing political party?
You would think that this kind of potential abuse by the Justice Department would pique the interest of mainstream journalists. No such luck.
Just over one week ago, 13-year-old Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab was at home with his mum, six brothers and sisters, doing what we’re all doing, watching TV, warding off boredom, isolating at home.
The healthy lad described by his family as ‘a bubble of life’ then started showing coronavirus symptoms. Soon he had difficulty breathing and was raced to King’s College Hospital.
He told ambulance paramedics that when he grew up he wanted to be a vet, as he loved animals. These were Ismail’s last words. The boy with no known health issues was put on a ventilator, induced into a coma, then suffered a cardiac arrest. He became the youngest fatality of Covid-19 in the UK.
Ismail died at 3am last Monday —without his mum, without his brothers and sisters, without anyone apart from the medical team who, we can be sure, tended him as lovingly as any strangers could. How unimaginably heartbreaking — for him in his last hours, as well as for his family who desperately wanted to be with him but couldn’t be because of the virus.
No child should die alone. It is alien to all our instincts.
Yes, you are right. We have gone quite mad. I know that many people are thinking this, but dare not say so. I will be accused of all kinds of terrible things for taking this view – but that is another aspect of how crazy things are.
Yes, coronavirus poses a risk. No, our response to it is not intelligent or useful. In fact, I think it is increasingly damaging and will soon become more so. The key word here is proportion. There is nothing wrong with simple, practical precautions.
I have for many years believed that door handles pose one of the greatest threats to health, and try never to touch them with the naked hand. I was taught from my earliest years to wash my hands before eating.
I am a health faddist. I work at a standing desk. For many years I have walked and bicycled wherever I can. I often take the stairs rather than the lift. I can’t understand how anyone in my generation or younger can smoke, given what we know about it. I regard sugar as a delicious poison to be avoided as much as possible. I drink little. I get up early and go to bed early.
I believe cars are heart-attack machines, noisy, smelly, ugly devices, which depreciate in the gutter while they are not stopping us from exercising and wrecking our lower backs. Yet our country is so badly planned that few families can manage without them nowadays.
For these reasons, I reckon that my risk from coronavirus is quite small. If I catch it, and I quite possibly will, I doubt it will trouble me all that much. The truth is, people with what are called ‘underlying conditions’, many of which follow decades without exercise, are in danger not just from coronavirus but from almost everything.
