"Doctors are increasingly confident that children are less affected by the new coronavirus than adults, a finding that could aid governments considering next steps in reopening economies.
"Medical professionals recognized early in the global pandemic that children generally appeared to be less susceptible to falling ill from the new bug, with fewer confirmed cases, hospital admissions, serious complications or deaths than their parents or grandparents."
School “districts are giving up on remote learning and ending the academic year early.” WSJ 4/29/20
This makes little sense. It wasn’t until week six that online courses even started here. Students missed weeks of learning while teachers were trained in this new way of teaching. To pull the plug early is the exact opposite of what should be done.
If you watched cable news one month ago today, you might have heard this scary prediction: “Ezekiel Emanuel: U.S. Will Have 100 Million Cases Of COVID-19 In Four Weeks, Doubling Every Four Days.”
Just wondering, was he right? Do we have 100 million cases?
Scott Adams: Only an utterly disgraceful set of media pundits could come up with the ridiculous conclusion that the President endorsed bleach injections!
“The one thing that’s obvious, he’s not talking about putting bleach and isopropyl alcohol into your body on your own. He’s definitely not saying that!”
"A new study of the more than 300 outbreak clusters of COVID-19 in China reveals that the majority of the outbreaks were fueled by indoor transmission of the disease, while outdoor transmission was scarce."
More data for my campaign to get you all to go outside!
Question I’d like to ask Drs. Fauci and Birx: “At what point, will it be the patriotic duty of healthy young (under 60) Americans to get the infamous virus, develop immunity, and thus protect the elderly and unhealthy amongst us?”
Why not now? When everything is already shut down, people are quarantined and the health care facilities are not overwhelmed.
What’s the alternative? Permanently shutting down on the possibility that one day there may be a vaccine or cure? There is no guarantee that will ever happen.
Perhaps we can further spare our health facilities by scheduling the monthly infections by last name in alpha order. A-E, F-L, etc.
Kind of like the Selective Service and the draft. It’s a huge risk to become a soldier or sailor or marine. Some are permanently disabled. Many die. No guarantees. But they serve and protect the nation.
If it’s a war, let’s stop sulking in our homes and do something.
The recent flurry of marches, demonstrations and
even riots, along with the Democratic Party’s spiteful reaction to the
Trump presidency, exposes what modern liberalism has become: a politics
shrouded in pathos. Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and
’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with
heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and
downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream
in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism.
All this suggests lostness, the end of something rather than the beginning. What is ending?
America,
since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white
guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an
exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of
culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us.
White
guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the
night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical
mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual guilt in the world
would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere
pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last
half-century.
White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered
by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old
bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized
as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly
stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this,
of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites
to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a
mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy,
pity and regret.
It is also the heart and soul of contemporary
liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt,
and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real
liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is
not its raison d’être; moral authority is.
When America
became stigmatized in the ’60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it
wanted moral authority above all else. Subsequently the American left
reconstituted itself as the keeper of America’s moral legitimacy.
(Conservatism, focused on freedom and wealth, had little moral clout.)
From that followed today’s markers of white guilt—political correctness,
identity politics, environmental orthodoxy, the diversity cult and so
on.
This was the circumstance in which innocence of America’s
bigotries and dissociation from the American past became a currency of
hardcore political power. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good
liberals both, pursued power by offering their candidacies as
opportunities for Americans to document their innocence of the nation’s
past. “I had to vote for Obama,” a rock-ribbed Republican said to me. “I
couldn’t tell my grandson that I didn’t vote for the first black
president.”
For this man liberalism was a moral vaccine that
immunized him against stigmatization. For Mr. Obama it was raw political
power in the real world, enough to lift him—unknown and untested—into
the presidency. But for Mrs. Clinton, liberalism was not enough. The
white guilt that lifted Mr. Obama did not carry her into office—even
though her opponent was soundly stigmatized as an iconic racist and
sexist.
Perhaps the Obama presidency was the culmination of the
age of white guilt, so that this guiltiness has entered its denouement.
There are so many public moments now in which liberalism’s old weapon of
stigmatization shoots blanks—Elizabeth Warren in the Senate reading a
30-year-old letter by Coretta Scott King, hoping to stop Jeff
Sessions’s appointment as attorney general. There it was with deadly
predictability: a white liberal stealing moral authority from a black
heroine in order to stigmatize a white male as racist. When Ms. Warren
was finally told to sit, there was real mortification behind her glaring
eyes.
This liberalism evolved within a society shamed by its
past. But that shame has weakened now. Our new conservative president
rolls his eyes when he is called a racist, and we all—liberal and
conservative alike—know that he isn’t one. The jig is up. Bigotry
exists, but it is far down on the list of problems that minorities now
face. I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find
an open door. It’s harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.
This
is the reality that made Ms. Warren’s attack on Mr. Sessions so
tiresome. And it is what caused so many Democrats at President Trump’s
address to Congress to look a little mortified, defiantly proud but dark
with doubt. The sight of them was a profound moment in American
political history.
Today’s liberalism is an anachronism. It has no
understanding, really, of what poverty is and how it has to be
overcome. It has no grip whatever on what American exceptionalism is and
what it means at home and especially abroad. Instead it remains defined
by an America of 1965—an America newly opening itself to its sins, an
America of genuine goodwill, yet lacking in self-knowledge.
This
liberalism came into being not as an ideology but as an identity. It
offered Americans moral esteem against the specter of American shame.
This made for a liberalism devoted to the idea of American shamefulness.
Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to
receive. Thus liberalism’s unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.
Let’s
stipulate that, given our history, this liberalism is understandable.
But American liberalism never acknowledged that it was about white
esteem rather than minority accomplishment. Four thousand shootings in
Chicago last year, and the mayor announces that his will be a sanctuary
city. This is moral esteem over reality; the self-congratulation of
idealism. Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption. Mr.
Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is
author of “Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country”
(Basic Books, 2015).
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the U.S.
