Champion of Truth
“At the moderate end, among the media-skeptic pro-Trump crowd, the virus is real and it’s scary, but so are liberal overreach, open borders, government spending, breathless public-health fearmongering and criticism of Trump. At the extreme end, let’s call it Full QAnon, the outbreak is engineered by Chinese scientists, Big Pharma or criminal celebrities, and may or may not be real.”
“The Covid-19 crisis is exactly the kind of moment when we need our leaders to reassure and protect us most. Instead, recent reports suggest several United States senators responded by protecting themselves first, selling stock to avoid personal financial losses from a growing public health crisis that they knew, from confidential intelligence briefings, was probably going to be much worse than the public knew at the time.”
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“Should members of Congress even be permitted to trade securities or engage in significant outside business activities at all? I don’t think they should.”
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“This isn’t the first time that members of Congress have faced accusations that they misused information they learned on the job for their personal benefit. In November 2011, “60 Minutes” released an investigative report suggesting that several had engaged in extensive stock trading after learning secret details regarding the last financial crisis, in 2008-09. The problem was that while it looked and smelled like corruption, not everyone agreed that it violated federal securities laws.”
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“Members of Congress and their staffs learn a lot of information that the general public doesn’t know: They get briefings from others in government; they get selective information from large companies and trade associations. Congressional members are granted access to information precisely because they have the ability to influence outcomes, and they are entrusted to use their knowledge to make the best decisions for our country. Shouldn’t they then have a “duty” to not use the information they learn in their jobs for their own personal financial benefit?”
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“Why should we expect them to even be capable when making business decisions of separating what they know as a result of their governmental job and what they might otherwise know as private individuals?”
“Choosing to ban abortion in cases where rape caused pregnancy would be difficult to argue as biblically supported, as the Book of Numbers prescribes a potion that should cause sterility and perhaps even abortion as the enforced consequence of infidelity. As a result, it is hard to argue that the Bible always speaks out against abortion.”
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“All in all, the Bible does not speak as clearly about abortion as some politicians might wish. Where it does speak about pregnancy and abortion, the God-given character of human life is an important point of departure. On the one hand, there are passages that state how God has plans for some special human beings, his prophets, already during their stay in their mother’s womb. This implies that already at that stage God had selected them as the persons they would become. On the other hand, some passages indicate that human life was only thought to begin either at the moment the fetus was fully developed or even up to a month after the baby’s birth. It is therefore difficult to refer to anything like “the Bible’s teaching on abortion.” The Bible contains a diverse collection of views on the origin of human life. Any attempt to base a political strategy on the Bible should always indicate, for honesty’s sake, that such a “biblical view” is based on a conscious choice of passages and interpretations by each individual speaker.”
“The rush to embrace data-sharing and even apps that track infected people’s whereabouts raises the question: Where are Europe’s data regulators? For now, they are largely keeping an eye on developments and even in some cases giving their blessings to new data-collection initiatives.”
“The Department of Homeland Security stopped updating its annual models of the havoc that pandemics would wreak on America’s critical infrastructure in 2017, according to current and former DHS officials with direct knowledge of the matter.
From at least 2005 to 2017, an office inside DHS, in tandem with analysts and supercomputers at several national laboratories, produced detailed analyses of what would happen to everything from transportation systems to hospitals if a pandemic hit the United States.”
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” the work abruptly stopped in 2017 amid a bureaucratic dispute over its value, two of the former officials said, leaving the department flat-footed as it seeks to stay ahead of the impacts the COVID-19 outbreak is having on vast swathes of the U.S. economy. Officials at other agencies have requested some of the reports from the pandemic modeling unit at DHS in recent days, only to find the information they needed scattered or hard to find quickly.”
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““A lot of what we’re doing now is shooting in the dark, and there’s going to be secondary impacts to infrastructure that are going to be felt in part because we didn’t maintain these models,” said one of the former DHS officials. “Our ability to potentially foresee where the impacts are or may manifest is a result of the fact that we don’t have the capabilities anymore.””
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” Much of the blame for the switch in focus at DHS, according to two of the former officials, falls on longtime DHS employee Robert Hanson, who became division director of prioritization and modeling at the department’s Office of Cyber and Infrastructure Analysis (OCIA) in May 2016.”
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“Hanson wanted to focus more on visualizations of events like hurricanes and “going down rabbit holes that really didn’t need to be done,” according to one of the former officials. He also wanted to focus more on elections and cybersecurity because “cyber is the magic word to attract money,” said the other former official.
“They’ve allowed a lot of capability to decay, including the pandemic models and transportation models and a whole bunch of other stuff in favor of chasing the soccer ball on different cyber things,” including trying to use machine learning and AI in work on cybersecurity, this person said.
In an interview, Hanson acknowledged decreasing some funding away from pandemic modeling to other topics of research because he had “been given direction by my leadership at the time to reprioritize a lot of the projects,” and he agreed it was necessary. He also said that when he took over the modeling program, it was considered “ineffective” by DHS leadership and by executive branch overseers.
Hanson thought, too, that pandemic modeling was best done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the former DHS officials said, although the CDC’s mandate is different and researchers there don’t focus on how a pandemic could affect non-health related infrastructure.”
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“It wouldn’t be easy for DHS to rebuild its capacity to model pandemics, given the brain drain within the department: Many of the people who worked on the models have now scattered across the government or left government service altogether, one of the former officials said.”
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“current officials are left essentially to reinvent the wheel in the middle of a pandemic”
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” “I’ve heard people say it’s a black swan. It’s not a black swan,” said one of the former DHS officials. “This is the whitest of white swans. This was absolutely inevitable, and the fact is we didn’t even maintain the capacity that we had or even the records of what we had done so that information could be quickly located and turned over to people who are making the critical operations right now.””
“New York is both the country’s most populous city and its most densely populated. Vinetz said both the city’s high density and the fact that it is densely populated across a large region could be exacerbating factors. Vinetz also cited the city’s status as a hub for global travel as a factor that could be contributing to the outbreak there.”
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“there are too many unknowns to draw firm conclusions at this point, and residents of the rest of the country should not assume they will avoid New York City’s fate”
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” interviews with New York residents and officials suggested that both the New York lifestyle – replete with shoulder-to-shoulder public transportation, frequent dining out because of the limits of apartment living, and reliance on crowded city parks for daily recreation – as well as a certain stubbornness in curbing it may have contributed to New York’s high infection rate.”
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““Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo also have density and nowhere near the kinds of outbreaks we have,” Hendrix said. “Density also requires good governance coupled with reinforced strong social norms to counter the spread of contagious disease. What you’re seeing today is the fruit of a slow government response to a crisis.”
While Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have been ahead of the federal government in issuing calls for social distancing, an early spate of mixed messaging from elected officials may have led some New Yorkers — especially those who perceive themselves as young and healthy — to take unnecessary risks.”
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“Less than three weeks ago – March 5 – de Blasio took a subway ride to show his confidence in the safety of the city’s transportation system and his administration told the city’s 4.3 million straphangers that they were safe riding in jam-packed subway cars as long as no one coughed or sneezed directly on them.”
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“Cuomo claims that the high rate of cases is correlated to testing at “the highest per capita level in the United States.””
“At the White House podium over the last few weeks, each member of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force has been cognizant of two messages: one for millions of Americans; another for the man just a few feet away. Even the health experts — many of them not political appointees — have made sure to deliver some praise to the president to help the medicine go down as they dish out some of the more dire predictions about the growing pandemic.
Critics have noted that aides have been premature at times to lavish compliments on the president as they continue to fight the virus. They compared the constant thank-yous to Trump’s televised Cabinet meetings, during which Trump went around the room and had each senior official praise him.
“It undermines the credibility of the experts. … What people need are the facts. They don’t need experts spending time fluffing up the commander in chief,” David Lapan, a former Pentagon spokesperson and vice president of communications at Bipartisan Policy Center said.”
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“For those who know the president, public praise and flattery are a valuable political currency. Trump has been noticeably more gracious towards several Democratic governors during the coronavirus outbreak, often citing their praise of his current leadership.
The president on Sunday noted that state governors were “very, very complimentary” on a recent nationwide coronavirus call.
“I watched, over the last few days, Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo, I watched Gavin Newsom,” Trump said, referencing the Democratic governors in New York and California, two of the hardest-hit states. “I watched both of them. And they’ve been, you know, very complimentary.””
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“The president is hyper aware of TV ratings, which are compiled weekly for him in the White House, and viewership of the briefings during the daytime hours have seen a notable spike as Americans anxiously watch from home.
Administration officials say it’s an opportunity for experts from the task force to answer questions, but it also gives the president a national platform to assure the public and offer himself a pat on the back.”
“the Fed under Chair Jerome Powell, which has endured more than a year of abuse from President Donald Trump for not doing more to boost the economy, is now embarked on the quickest and most massive response to a crisis in its more than 100-year history.”
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/24/21191008/congress-incapacitated-coronavirus-constitution-quarantine
“All three of the shows making up the network’s top-rated primetime lineup — Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham — featured segments about the coronavirus that ran with misinformation President Trump has embraced, from advocating that people start thinking about heading back to work even if it could leave more people dead to promoting unproven and potentially dangerous drugs as coronavirus cures.
Trump and his high-profile backers are struggling to come to grips with the reality that there are no shortcuts back to normalcy. And now shows watched by millions could put a lot of people’s health and lives in danger.”