Archive for the 'Politics' Category

Just so you know, via Instapundit.

News from Cleveland.

CLEVELAND (WJW) — What started as a peaceful demonstration in downtown Cleveland to protest the death of George Floyd turned violent on Saturday.

Those intent on turning the protest into a riot, systematically smashed out windows and looted stores, restaurants and bars. But when they got to Corbo’s Bakery on Euclid Avenue, they were met with resistance.

After protesters tried to force their way inside with bats and other weapons, owner Joe Corbo and his two sons armed themselves with guns and told the rioters that they would not allow them inside the bakery.

“We don’t want any trouble, we don’t want you guys in here damaging our property, we’re just protecting our business and truthfully, I would say maybe 80% of them understood, they left us alone and kept walking, and then there was that 20% that just were accusing us of some things and crazy things that just weren’t true. We weren’t there to hurt anybody or cause a problem, we were just protecting our business,” said Co-owner Selena Corbo.

The protesters apparently took note of the weapons and the determination of the Corbo family to protect their bakery and decided to move on to other businesses, but not before breaking out a large window at Corbo’s.

I’m glad it mostly turned out okay for the owners.  There’s video at the link.

I found it amusing that the first thing one of the thugs did when he tried to break in and saw guns was apologize for trespassing.

No, I’m just kidding.  He got on his knees and chanted, “hands up, don’t shoot.”  As if he had a right to steal from the store, and the owner was a cop, and bad man for stopping him thus infringing on his right to do whatever he wanted.

Gateway Pundit.

(WHAM) – Disturbing video recorded by a person in Rochester shows a group of people attacking a woman outside a business amid widespread looting and rioting in downtown Rochester Saturday evening.

In the video, a woman pleads with the people smashing the exterior of Rochester Fire Equipment Company on Marshall Street to stop. The woman yelled at the group of people, who were apparently trying to loot the jewelry store next door.

Several of the people then turn on the woman and begin attacking her, hitting and kicking her, and then used boards to hit her.

The woman’s husband runs in toward the end of the recording and tries to break up the attack while swinging a golf club. He was then attacked himself.

The woman is reportedly recovering on Sunday morning.

The woman and her husband are tenants who live above Rochester Fire Equipment. Joe Painter tells us he was out grocery shopping when he came upon the scene and started taking video on his cell phone.

Painter, who says he is a veteran of the War in Afghanistan, says it was one of the worst things he’s ever witnessed. He said he stopped recording abruptly because some of the people who attacked the woman in the video started running toward him.

There’s video at the link.

So I realize America has taught several generations of inner city youth that they have a right to steal whatever they want with impunity, destroy things and abuse other people like this, but it seems like this poor woman would have had rights too, yes?  Because she is made in God’s image?  Yes?

And I’m sorry to the Afghan war vet, but people running after him too isn’t an excuse to ignore the suffering of others.  Every man dies.  It matters how you live, and it matters how you die.

I have nothing detailed at the moment.  Lot’s of stuff in the pipeline, maybe.  Or maybe not.

So here’s my questions to the rioters.  Where were you, oh self righteous pricks, when open carry fishermen in Florida were body slammed by cops?

Where were you, oh self righteous rioters, when innocent former Marine Jose Guerena was raided and killed in his own home, having the trigger discipline never even to fire a shot in return?

Where were you this morning when the Supreme Tyrants declared that California, and thus any state, could prohibit Christians from worshiping?

Oh, I see.  Rights for some, but not for others.

Be careful folks.  Don’t align yourself with people who would take those very cops they hate so much and turn them on you to confiscate guns if they had the chance.  Don’t align yourself with people who would force Christians into hiding because of their own hatred for us.

BLM and Antifa couldn’t care less about your rights as a Christian or gun owner.

Here, and David Codrea also has video.

However, you’d better watch yourself.  The cops don’t like it one bit.  How do I know this?

Rieple’s arrest came after Libor Jany, a journalist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, reported, via a police source, that Rieple had shot and killed a suspected looter at his business. Police confirmed in their first press conference on the shooting that they were investigating the theory that the owner of the Cadillac Pawn & Jewelry store shot a suspected looter, but they said they were also investigating other theories they wouldn’t describe. Police spokesman John Elder confirmed at midnight that one person was in custody and one person was dead but named neither.

Elder also said he believes Minnesota’s “duty to retreat” law means a businessowner doesn’t have a right to defend their property with lethal force because it’s not their home. You can read more about the duty to retreat law here.

Records obtained by Heavy show that John Richard Rieple, 59, of Galesville, Wisconsin, is being held in the Hennepin County jail.

In a state like that, if a thug comes in to steal your property, you have to retreat and let them do it.  In other words, you have to trust that stealing is all they really intend to do.

Make sure of the laws in your state, and be prepared to do – or not to do – whatever is necessary to do what it is you intend to do.

In other words, don’t back yourself into a legal corner you can’t get out of.

“You shall rise up before the grayheaded and honor the aged, and you shall revere your God; I am the LORD.” (Leviticus 19:32).

News from New York and the Northeast on how they have treated the elderly.

Health policy expert Avik Roy noted on Twitter Tuesday morning that if you remove New York from the national statistics, the percentage of COVID-19 deaths attributed to nursing homes jumps to 52%. Roy also reminds us that “only 1.8% of U.S. residents live in nursing homes or assisted living facilities, meaning that people in one of those facilities are 23 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than anyone else.

This isn’t without background.

Those deaths have occurred as Cuomo’s critics say he has taken a hands-off approach to regulating the healthcare industry interests that helped bankroll his election campaign. In March, Cuomo’s administration issued an order that allowed nursing homes to readmit sick patients without testing them for Covid-19. Amid allegations of undercounted casualties, the governor also pushed back against pressure to have state regulators more stringently record and report death rates in nursing homes.

And then came Cuomo’s annual budget – which included a little-noticed passage shielding corporate officials who run New York hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities from liability for Covid-related deaths and injuries.

GNYHA – a lobbying group for hospital systems, including some that own nursing homes – said it “drafted and aggressively advocated for” the immunity provision. The new law declares that top officials at hospital and nursing home companies “shall have immunity from any liability, civil or criminal, for any harm or damages alleged to have been sustained as a result of an act or omission in the course of arranging for or providing healthcare services” to address the Covid-19 outbreak.

Prior to the budget language, Cuomo had already temporarily granted limited legal immunity to doctors and nurses serving on the medical frontlines. But the carefully sculpted passage buried in the state’s annual spending bill expanded that by offering extensive immunity to any “healthcare facility administrator, executive, supervisor, board member, trustee or other person responsible for directing, supervising or managing a healthcare facility and its personnel or other individual in a comparable role”.

One of the most hideous things done in American history, second to abortion.

Politico.

The battle over the impact of coronavirus lockdown measures on Americans’ religious observances has reached the Supreme Court as a Southern California church and its pastor made an emergency appeal for relief from executive orders issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Lawyers for the South Bay United Pentecostal Church and Bishop Arthur Hodges asked the justices to step in Sunday after a federal appeals court panel rejected a similar emergency application Friday.

The decision from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals came on the same day President Donald Trump publicly backed churches seeking to escape various stay-at-home orders in place across the country. Trump said he was ordering governors to exempt churches “right now” by declaring religious services to be essential, although he lacks any evident legal authority to impose his view on state officials.

Still, Trump’s pointed rhetoric added new fire to the simmering legal battles, including pledges by thousands of churches to defy local public-health restrictions by holding services on Pentecost, which falls next Sunday.

In the California-focused case that reached the high court Sunday night, a 9th Circuit panel split, 2-1, with the majority declining to disturb the state government’s action in light of the health dangers posed by the ongoing pandemic.

“We’re dealing here with a highly contagious and often fatal disease for which there presently is no known cure,’” Judges Barry Silverman and Jacqueline Nguyen wrote. “In the words of Justice Robert Jackson, if a ‘court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.’”

Silverman, a Clinton appointee, and Nguyen, an Obama appointee, were dismissive of the church’s arguments in the Friday order, devoting only two paragraphs to the substance of the dispute.

However, the third judge on the panel — Trump appointee Daniel Collins — weighed in with an 18-page dissent arguing that Newsom’s orders are impermissibly intruding on religious freedom protected by the First Amendment.

“I do not doubt the importance of the public health objectives that the State puts forth, but the State can accomplish those objectives without resorting to its current inflexible and over-broad ban on religious services,” Collins wrote.

Collins noted that the orders allow many workplaces to open, but ban religious gatherings even when they could meet the social distancing standards imposed on other activities that are now permitted.

“By explicitly and categorically assigning all in-person ‘religious services’ to a future Phase 3 — without any express regard to the number of attendees, the size of the space, or the safety protocols followed in such services8 — the State’s Reopening Plan undeniably ‘discriminate[s] on its face’ against ‘religious conduct,’” the judge said.

The legal dispute may turn on how much weight the justices choose to give to a 115-year-old Supreme Court precedent, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld a mandatory vaccination scheme for smallpox.

Who wants to lay bets with me?  I say the Supreme Court punts and refuses even to hear the case, leaving it to the cowards in the Ninth Circuit who didn’t even have the courage to hear the case En banc.

News from the NIH.

455 contacts who were exposed to the asymptomatic COVID-19 virus carrier became the subjects of our research. They were divided into three groups: 35 patients, 196 family members and 224 hospital staffs. We extracted their epidemiological information, clinical records, auxiliary examination results and therapeutic schedules.

The median contact time for patients was four days and that for family members was five days. Cardiovascular disease accounted for 25% among original diseases of patients. Apart from hospital staffs, both patients and family members were isolated medically. During the quarantine, seven patients plus one family member appeared new respiratory symptoms, where fever was the most common one. The blood counts in most contacts were within a normal range. All CT images showed no sign of COVID-19 infection. No severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections was detected in 455 contacts by nucleic acid test.

In summary, all the 455 contacts were excluded from SARS-CoV-2 infection and we conclude that the infectivity of some asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers might be weak.

If someone doesn’t feel bad and exhibits no symptoms of disease, he can generally go about his business without harming others.  If you feel bad, you should stay home.

If you feel bad, stay home.  If you feel okay, report to school or work.  So what have we learned in this study that our mothers didn’t teach us?

Virtually everything the government (federal and state) has done has been ass backwards through this epidemic.

They began by saying the virus led to ARDS.  That myth was completely shattered early on by Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell who treated many patients in New York, and continues to be debunked by more doctors.  And yet, I have in my possession a 60+ page PowerPoint presentation sent to medical workers in North Carolina just several weeks ago restating the ARDS mythology.

The very term “happy hypoxia” came from this treating this disease, and it is now clearly isn’t an ARDS disease, and attacks the blood and CNS/PNS.  All that’s required to ascertain this is a little reading and investigation, and being open to learning from the rest of the world.  But apparently that cannot be done in my home state of N.C., where our awful governor surrounds himself with awful people.

Next up, the wearing of masks.  I have some experience in air filtration engineering from my early career testing and balancing HEPA filters and charcoal adsorbers.  HEPA filters (of concern here) work by particle interception due to electrostatic force.  Surgical masks, cloths, handkerchiefs, and other manner of cotton material (cotton is cellulose) do not have that.

My daughter wears one in surgery and the ER to prevent potential blood-borne pathogens from entering her mouth, not to prevent SARS-CoV-2, flu or the common cold (which is also a Coronavirus).  N95 masks are just that, 95% efficient for particles down to a given size.  Moreover, when a nuclear or chemical worker wears a full face respirator, if the wearer is a male and has a beard, he must shave.  Workers have tried to create work-arounds for this by glazing their face with Vaseline, but the seal never works.  The bulk of breathing air goes around the filtration media if there is no testable seal, not through it.  This is true of full face respirators, and it is true in the superlative for these silly little masks half of America is wearing.

When you put an N95 mask on, the bulk of your breathing air is going under and over the top of the mask, not through it.  Furthermore, every decontamination technique eventually destroys the electrostatic charge on the fibers, thus rendering the mask useless.  It’s designed to be worn and then thrown away.  It’s actually worse than useless, because we are now learning that there is a heavy viral and pathogenic loading on both the outside and the inside of the filter media, and we also now know that the degree to which a patient suffers from this disease is a function – at least partially – of the amount of inoculate that you breath.

Next up, Hydroxychloroquine.  Even the most recent trial of Hydroxychloroquine don’t include the administration of Zinc, and thus the trial is probably useless (a fact that had to be pointed out by Glenn Reynolds).  And despite the medical bureaucracy panning the use of Hydroxychloroquine, they didn’t back in 2005, when they said exactly the opposite.  And while we’re on the subject, while they also pan the use of Hydroxochloroquine for not having their control group and “double blind” study, Anthony Fauci’s much heralded Remdesivir lacks the very same thing.  But Remdesivir is better, because shut up.

Next up, I’ve lost count of the number of times the medical bureaucracy has told us not to put our hopes in “snake oil” or natural remedies.  And yet, we now know that China began pushing Vitamin C in their military as soon as this outbreak occurred.  I’ve sent myself articles on the effectiveness of Vitamins C and D3 in combating this virus, or at least, in showing how those most badly affected by the disease were low in those vitamins (see for example this study, this post, and this study).

Next up, what we did with the elderly will go down as one of the most inhumane things every done to people in American history.  We should have sent them home to be with loved ones, or if they couldn’t, sent them out on field trips into the sun and given them vitamins.  Instead, we sent more diagnosed patients to live among them.

Finally, the number of deaths in America from cancer, suicide and other diseases that haven’t been treated while we’ve been locked down will far outnumber the deaths from this virus when all is said and done, and that, after the economy has been utterly smashed on the rocks, rendering a brand new sector of Americans in poverty after working their entire lives to build small businesses.

Again, virtually everything the medical bureaucracy has done has been ass backwards.  Most of them deserve to be frog marched into the city square and put in stocks.  Sadly, many of them aren’t political appointees and cannot be fired.  They are lifers in the FedGov or StateGov, those seeming repositories of incompetence and malfeasance.

Reason.

An Arizona bill requiring police and prosecutors to get a criminal conviction before they could attempt to force defendants to forfeit their assets died Thursday at the hands of a bloc of mostly Democratic lawmakers.

Civil asset forfeiture is a mechanism that lets law enforcement seize and keep the assets of people believed to have committed crimes. Many states do not require defendants to actually be convicted—or sometimes even charged—with a crime before police take their property. People are thus put in the position of having to prove their innocence in order to get the money back, subverting due process. Meanwhile, police agencies keep the money they seize and sell the other property they take, thus filling in gaps in their budgets.

This leads inevitably to corruption, as cops look for a pretext to stop people, search them or their vehicles, and—if they find large sums of cash or other valuable property—claim it simply must be proceeds from drug trafficking and try to keep it for themselves. This process was sold to the public as a way to fight drug cartels and other criminal kingpins, but in reality most forfeitures are for relatively small amounts taken from underprivileged people who lack the resources to fight back.

[ … ]

What’s extremely unusual is for all the Democrats to vote against a forfeiture reform bill, especially after the same legislation passed out of the Senate unanimously. In their explanation for why they voted no, a couple of legislators said the quiet part loud: The pandemic is hurting government budgets, and they don’t want to give up the revenue.

Dam the constitution and due process rights.  Money is money, and if it’s gotten immorally, then so be it.

We are rulers.  “All of your money are belong to us.”

Politico.

A federal judge on Sunday dismantled Florida’s restrictive felon voting rights law in a ruling that could open the door to hundreds of thousands of new voters being added to rolls just ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle declared key portions of the state’s felon voting law unconstitutional, ordering the state to put in place a new process that would help people register to vote in the state.

And just like that, he likely handed Florida to the democrats in the upcoming election.

Plan accordingly.