Unleash Prosperity Hotline
Issue #44 By Stephen Moore
1) “Health Experts” Say Rioting and Looting are Essential
At first, we thought the headline in slate.com had been ripped off from a satirical site like The Onion or the Babylon Bee.
“Public Health Experts Say the Pandemic Is Exactly Why Protests Must Continue.”
This headline from Slate isn’t satire, it’s real:
“Facing a slew of media requests asking about how protests might be a risk for COVID-19 transmission, a group of infectious disease experts at the University of Washington, with input from other colleagues, drafted a collective response. In an open letter published Sunday, they write that ‘protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.’… By Tuesday afternoon, more than 1,000 epidemiologists, doctors, social workers, medical students, and other health experts had signed the letter.”
Now left wing ideology has even infected the medical community.
2) Heather MacDonald Explodes the Myth of Systemic Police Racism
From The Wall Street Journal, Heather MacDonald, author of “The War on Cops”:
“A police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer…
“The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.
“Floyd’s death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.”
3) Lockdowns Cause Depression
We know that the COVID lockdowns have destroyed the jobs and disrupted the education of millions of young Americans. The civil unrest we’re seeing can be traced to some of the lockdown-linked despair, anxiety, and idleness… Now a research team of analysts based in California is attaching some survey numbers to this sad situation.
Using a platform provided by Amazon, the team surveyed respondents based on their demographics, socioeconomic status, behavior and employment changes related to COVID-19, and the fear of COVID-19. The platform assessed the health status of respondents compared with representative samples in both online and face-to-face panels before COVID-19 hit.
The survey found significant increases in post-COVID anxiety and depression among young people under the age of 30. Many are convinced that their futures have been curtailed. (Ya think?)
“Immediate action must be taken to prevent these consequences from progressing further,” says Dr. Joel Hay, a professor at the University of Southern California, the leader of the research team. He is preparing its findings for publication this week, and we’ll report back on them in more detail.
4) Celebrities Call For Abolishing Police
Only people who live in gated communities, have private bodyguards and security, and have their children in elite schools, and live as far from inner-city high crime areas as possible could possibly be this deranged, or mendacious, or both.
It’s the only explanation we can think of as to why many celebrities signed an open letter calling for the defunding of all police departments in the country. It claims that the $200 billion or so spent on police has produced “continued profiling, harassment, terror and killing of Black communities.”
As an alternative, the celebrities insist that the money spent on police should go to “building healthy communities,” or “to the health of our elders and children, to neighborhood infrastructure, to education, to childcare, to support a vibrant Black future.”
Among the celebrities who’ve endorsed the letter are Natalie Portman, Jane Fonda, America Ferrera, Brie Larson, singer John Legend and ACLU executive director Anthony Romero.
We feel safer already!
5) The Good News About Virus “Super Spreaders”
Now that lockdowns are ending you’ll no doubt hear a lot about “super spread” events, outbreaks of coronavirus in which one person spreads the disease to many others.
Bloomberg News notes most people who get COVID-19 don’t pass it on to dozens of others, and many don’t pass it on to anyone at all. One new global study estimates that about 10 percent of those infected with COVID-19 cause 80 percent of the secondary transmissions. “This imbalance explains a lot about why Covid-19 has spread so unevenly and unpredictably around the world. It also, perhaps counterintuitively, appears to make the disease easier to control than it would be if super spreaders weren’t so important.”
This could help explain why the strictness of government lockdowns in different European countries did not seem to be correlated with success in slowing the spread of the disease: “Apparently, once you’ve eliminated large, indoor gatherings with lots of yelling or singing, there may be diminishing returns to other lockdown restrictions.”
This could also explain how Japan did so well with no lockdowns.
6) Where Do I Go To Get My College’s Reputation Back?
Remember the dustup over Liberty University and its response to the coronavirus? Back in mid-March, the private Virginia university had to close after Governor Ralph Northam banned any assemblies of more than 100 people. Liberty shifted to online learning, but President Jerry Falwell Jr. allowed students – especially international ones with no place to go – to come back to campus if they chose, and 1,200 of them did. Appropriate precautions were taken.
The New York Times pounced with a March 29 article headlined: “Liberty University Brings Back Its Students, and Coronavirus, Too.” It reported that nearly a dozen students had come down “with symptoms that suggested Covid-19.”
Times columnist Paul Krugman sneered that Falwell “seems to have created his own personal viral hot spot.” The Washington Post piled on with a piece headlined: “An authoritarian power structure brought coronavirus to Liberty University.”
Nearly three months later it turns out that Liberty has ended the school year with zero cases on campus. One online student, McKenna Dallmeyer, told the College Fix that Liberty is often targeted by the media because it is a large Christian school. “For a virus that disproportionately affects older citizens, it did not make rational sense to uproot and displace a younger age group for the sake of looking ‘good’ in the media’s eyes,” she said.
We don’t think the folks at Disney Corporation fully thought this one through. They have been using employees dressed as Star Wars storm troopers to crack down on social distancing violators at the Disney Springs shopping center in Orlando. The characters tell people to ‘stay in your sector’ and ‘move along.’
People dressed as Storm Troopers were also used to secure the Denver airport for a day as part of a Disney promotion.
We realize this all supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but it hits a little hard when politicians have militaristically enforced mandatory quarantines.
Here’s hoping that Disney’s version of lockdown enforcement is short-lived.
8) Hero of the Day: Greg Abbott
Validating our move to improve his grade from a B to an A, Abbott announced yesterday Texas will immediately increase all businesses — including professional sports — to at least 50% capacity, with full capacity now allowed for essential businesses, churches, child care, youth camps, and recreational sports. Restaurants go to 75% capacity on June 12.
9) Anti-Hero of the Day: Kim Jong Phil
After more than 6,000 fatalities in New Jersey’s long-term care facilities, yesterday New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced via tweet that he will “directly and aggressively confront the challenge in our long-term care facilities. Together, we will make New Jersey a national leader and national model.” Bit late there, chief.
10) Quote of the Day
“If you’re actively supporting, or even just passively enabling, the people who are destroying black neighborhoods, businesses, and jobs, aren’t you supporting white supremacy?”
Joel Kotkin, executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, writing at quillette.com
11) Exactly.
