#more like if covid killed u faster

[cringefail-bbg]

Not a zombie au

[back-and-totheleft]

‘There’s still a presence out there reminding people not to speak about JFK’s killing’

Oliver Stone is not a fan of “cancel culture”. “Of course I despise it,” the Oscar winning filmmaker says, as if utterly amazed that anyone needs to ask him such a dumb question. “I am sure I’ve been cancelled by some people for all the comments I’ve made…. it’s like a witch hunt. It’s terrible. American censorship in general, because it is a declining, defensive, empire, it (America) has become very sensitive to any criticism. What is going on in the world with YouTube and social media,” he rants. “Twitter is the worst. They’ve banned the ex-President of the United States. It’s shocking!” he says, referring to Donald Trump’s removal from the micro-blogging platform.

It’s a Saturday lunchtime in the restaurant of the Marriott Hotel on the Croisette in Cannes. The American director is in town for the festival premiere this week of his new feature documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, in which he yet again pores over President John F Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963.

“I am a pin cushion for American-Russian peace relations… I had four f***ing vaccines: two Sputniks and two Pfizers,” Stone gestures at his arm. The rival super-powers may remain deeply suspicious of one another, but Stone is loading himself up with potions from both sides of the old Iron Curtain.

He has recently been travelling in Russia (hence the Sputnik jabs) where he has been making a new documentary about how nuclear power can save humanity. He also recently completed a film about Kazakhstan’s former president Nursultan Nazarbayev which – like his interviews with Vladimir Putin – has been roundly ridiculed for its deferential, softly-softly approach toward a figure widely regarded as a ruthless despot.

Dressed in a blue polo shirt, riffing away about the English football team one moment and his favourite movies the next, laughing constantly, the 74-year-old Oscar-winning director of Platoon, Wall Street, Natural Born Killers et al is a far cheerier presence than his reputation as a purveyor of dark conspiracy thrillers might suggest. He is also very outspoken. For all his belligerence, though, Stone isn’t as thick-skinned as you might imagine. I wonder if he was hurt by the scorn that came his way when his feature film JFK was released in 1991.

“I was more of a younger man. It was painful to me,” the director sighs as he remembers being attacked by such admired figures as newscaster Walter Cronkite and Hollywood power broker Jack Valenti for listening to the “hallucinatory bleatings” of former New Orleans DA Jim Garrison when JFK came out. “It was quite shocking actually because I thought the murder was behind us. I did think there was a feeling that 30 years later, we can look at this thing again without getting excited. But I was way wrong.”

Garrison, of course, was the real-life figure portrayed by Kevin Costner in the film; he was the original proponent of the theory that the CIA were involved in the killing of the US president, after his 1966 investigation. Garrison wrote the book On the Trail of the Assassins, on which the movie was partly based.

Even the director’s fiercest detractors will find it hard to dismiss the evidence he has assembled about the JFK assassination in the new documentary. Once I’d seen it and heard him hold forth, I came away thinking that only flat-earthers can possibly still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy all on his own. It’s that convincing.

Stone blitzes you with facts and figures about the Kennedy killing and its aftermath. At times, he himself seems to be suffering from information overload. “I am sorry. There are so many people,” he apologises for not immediately remembering the name of Kennedy’s personal physician, George Burkley, who was present both at Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy was first taken, and then at Bethesda, where the autopsy took place. Burkley was strangely reticent when giving evidence to the Warren Commission.

“I think there’s still a presence out there which reminds people not to speak. I’ve heard that in, of all places, Russia,” Stone says. He was startled to discover that the Russians knew all about his new documentary long before it was discussed in the mainstream press. “They said, ‘We heard about it.’ I said, ‘How?’ They said, ‘We have our contacts in the American intelligence business. They are not very happy about it.’”

Stone believes that no US president since Kennedy died has been “able to go up against this militarised sector of our economy”. Even Trump “backed down at the last second” and declined to release all the relevant documents relating to the assassination. “He announced, ‘I’m going to free it up, blah blah blah, big talk, and then a few hours before, he caved to CIA National Security again.”

The veteran filmmaker expresses his frustrations at historians like Robert Caro, author of a huge (and hugely respected) multi-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson, for ignoring the evidence that has been turned up about the assassination.

“I can’t say [LBJ] was involved in the assassination,” explains Stone, “but it certainly suited him that Kennedy was not there anymore and he covered up by appointing the Warren Commission and doing all the things he did.”

Stone tried to cast Marlon Brando in JFK in the role as the deep throat source Mr X, eventually played by Donald Sutherland.

“I realise now I am grateful that he turned it down because he knew better than I that he would make 20 minutes out of that 14-minute monologue and it wouldn’t have worked.”

Nevertheless, he filled the film with famous faces. He thought that having familiar actors would make it easier for audiences to engage with what was an immensely complicated story.

Getting Stone to stop talking about JFK is like trying to pull a bone from a mastiff’s jaws. To change the subject slightly, I ask if he is still in touch with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He is and is utterly horrified at how Assange is being treated, especially given that Siggi the Hacker, a key witness in the extradition case against Assange, admitted recently that he lied. Stone praises Assange’s partner Stella Morris as “the best wife you could ever have. She really is smart, she’s a lawyer … he has two children. He can’t even touch them or see them. It’s barbaric. It indicates America is declining faster than we know. It is just cutting off dissent.”

The mood lightens when I invite Stone to discuss some of his favourite films. He recently tweeted a list of these, which included Darling starring Julie Christie, Joseph Losey’s Eva starring Stanley Baker and Jeanne Moreau, and Houseboat, a frothy comedy starring Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. “I love films, always have. People don’t know that side of me. I could go on forever.”

Between his darker and more contentious efforts, Stone has made a few genre films himself, for example the underrated thriller U-Turn starring Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez. He notes, though, that even when he tried a sports movie, he ended up right back in the firing line. The NFL was furious about his 1999 American Football film, Any Given Sunday. “They (the NFL) are arrogant, very rich people who close down any dissent, so I had to change uniforms and names… but they got the point.”

Last year, Stone published the first volume of his autobiography, Chasing the Light, which took him from childhood up to his Oscar triumph with Platoon. It was well received but it didn’t make nearly a big enough splash for his liking. “There was a curtain of silence about that. Maybe it is Covid… it was not reviewed by many people,” he says. “I wish the timing had been better. The publisher was terrible. They didn’t really promote anything. So now I have to start over again if I am going to do a second book, which I would love to do. But I have to find the right publisher.”

The book contains a barbed account of Stone’s experiences as a young screenwriter working in London for British director Alan Parker and producer David Puttnam on Midnight Express. “I wrote about it in the book, so you got my point of view. They were not very friendly people. I gave my criticism of Parker that he had a chip on his shoulder. He was from a poor side of the English. There is this phenomenon you see in England of hating the upper classes until they approve of you.”

No, they didn’t stay in touch. “And Puttnam is a Lord, right? He reminds me of Tony Blair. He is such a weasel.” For once, Stone feels he has overstepped the mark. He doesn’t want to call Puttnam a weasel after all. “Put it this way, Tony Blair is a weasel. I wouldn’t trust Tony Blair. Puttnam is a supporter of Blair. Let’s leave it at that.”

On matters English, he isn’t that keen on soccer either. He watched the semi-final between England and Denmark but had no intention of tuning into the final.

“Soccer is a different kind of game. It’s a different aesthetic. It is constant movement. The United States game allows you to re-group after every play and go into a huddle and so it becomes about strategy. I still enjoy it although people think I am brutal.”

Ask him why he so relishes American Football and he replies that he “grew up with violence in America … we were banging – cowboys and Indians, a lot of killing and that stuff. How do you get away from that? We weren’t playing with dolls.”

Stone’s feelings about the US are deeply ambivalent. He is old enough to remember a time in the late 1940s and early 1950s when “everything in America was golden” and part of him still seems to love the country but his mother was French and he talks about the US as a nation now in near terminal decline.

Perhaps surprisingly, his real political hero isn’t JFK. It’s the former President of France, Charles de Gaulle. “He said no to NATO and he said no to America. He understood the dangers of being a satellite country to America. You have no power in Europe. Don’t kid yourself. The EU is just an artificial body that was amazingly stupid in cutting off Russia and cutting off China too now.”

He doesn’t much like Boris Johnson either. “Boris, listen. He’d simply throw you in jail in a second.” He rails against the English for holding Assange in Belmarsh prison.

When he is not on a crusade or unravelling a conspiracy, Stone relaxes through Buddhist meditation. “Moderation in all things,” the man who came up with the phrase “greed is right, greed works” says with no evident sense of irony. He enjoys hanging out with his friends. “I have a nice life. I’m lucky,” he says before quickly adding, “I wish I had been more honoured and respected in my lifetime, but it seems that I took a course that is in conflict with the American Empire.”

Stone’s films have had relatively few strong female characters. Ask if he welcomes the #MeToo movement and the challenging of old gender norms and he gives a typically contrary answer. “It cuts both ways, though. There are reasons for patriarchy through the centuries,” he says. “Tribes tend to have a strong leader. You need strong leaders, but I do see the feminine impulse as being important, especially when situations become too militant. The feminine impulse, I’m talking about the maternal impulse not the Hillary Clinton/Margaret Thatcher version of feminism. They’re men. They’re not women,” he says. “I don’t want women in politics who want to be men. If a woman is a woman, she should be a woman and bring her maternalism. It’s a leavening influence.”

The director deplores the rush to judge historical figures about past misdeeds from a contemporary point of view. “I am conservative in that way… don’t expect to rejudge the entire society based on your new values.”

He met with Harvey Weinstein in Cannes a few years ago to discuss a potential Guantanamo Bay TV series. “At that point, maybe he knew he was on the ropes; he was delightfully charming and humble.” The project was scuppered by the scandal that that engulfed the former Miramax boss, who is now behind bars as a convicted sex offender. Stone’s gripes with Weinstein are less to do with his sexual offences than with the way that he attacked films like Born on the Fourth of July and Saving Private Ryan to boost his own movies.

“The press loved him [Weinstein]. Don’t forget, they loved him in the 1990s,” he says, remembering the disingenuous way in which Weinstein portrayed himself as the underdog taking on the big, bad Hollywood system.

“I think he robbed Cruise of the Oscar, frankly,” Stone huffs at the intensive Weinstein lobbying which saw Daniel Day-Lewis win the Academy Award for Best for My Left Foot, denying Tom Cruise for Born on the Fourth of July in the process.

Stone acknowledges his status in Hollywood has diminished. “All that’s gone. The people have changed,” he says of the days when the studios doted on him and his films were regularly awards contenders. Now, he’ll often finance his work out of Europe. He is developing a new feature film (he won’t say what it is). “Never say die, never say it’s over,” he says of his career.

Stone is based in Los Angeles and also has “a place in New York”. During the pandemic, he still managed to travel to Russia to make his nuclear power/clean energy documentary. “I got my shots over there because the EU is so f***ing stupid,” he says of the of the Europeans’ refusal to recognise the Sputnik vaccine. “It’s ridiculous, part of the political madness of this time.”

Now, he is putting all his energy into his new documentary about nuclear power. He waves away the idea that the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters show what can go wrong – they were accidents.

“Accidents you learn from. If there were not a few crashes, how would you fly?” he says. It’s a line that somehow seems to express his entire philosophy of life.

-Geoffrey Macnab interviews Oliver Stone, The Independent, Jul 15 2021 [x]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 22, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

A week after the Taliban took control of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, as the U.S. was withdrawing the forces that have been in the country since 2001, the initial chaos created by the Taliban’s rapid sweep across the country has simmered down into what is at least a temporary pattern.

We knew there was a good chance that the Taliban would regain control of the country when we left, although that was not a foregone conclusion. The former president, Donald Trump, recognized that the American people were tired of the ongoing war in Afghanistan, which was approaching its 20th year, and in February 2020, his administration negotiated with the Taliban to enable the U.S. to withdraw. In exchange for the release of 5000 Taliban fighters and the promise that the U.S. would withdraw within the next 14 months, the Taliban agreed not to attack U.S. soldiers.

Trump’s dislike of the war in Afghanistan reflected the unpopularity of the long engagement, which by 2020 was ill defined. The war had begun in 2001, after terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11 of that year. Taliban leaders in control of Afghanistan sheltered al-Qaeda, and after the attacks, the U.S. president, George W. Bush, demanded that Afghanistan hand over the terrorist leader believed to be behind the terrorist attack on the U.S: Osama bin Laden. In October, after Taliban leaders refused, the U.S. launched a bombing campaign.

That campaign was successful enough that in December 2001 the Taliban offered to surrender. But the U.S. rejected that surrender, determined by then to eradicate the extremist group and fill the vacuum of its collapse with a new, pro-American government. Al-Qaeda leader bin Laden escaped from Afghanistan to Pakistan, and the U.S. project in Afghanistan turned from an anti-terrorism mission into an effort to rebuild the Afghan government into a modern democracy.

By 2002 the Bush administration was articulating a new doctrine in foreign policy, arguing that the U.S. had a right to strike preemptively against countries that harbor terrorists. In 2003, under this doctrine, the U.S. launched a war on Iraq, which diverted money, troops, and attention from Afghanistan. The Taliban regrouped and began to regain the territory it had lost after the U.S. first began its bombing campaign in 2001.

By 2005, Bush administration officials privately worried the war in Afghanistan could not be won on its current terms, especially with the U.S. focused on Iraq. Then, when he took office in 2009, President Barack Obama turned his attention back to Afghanistan. He threw more troops into that country, bringing their numbers close to 100,000. In 2011, the U.S. military located bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and launched a raid on the compound where he was hiding, killing him. By 2014, Obama had drawn troops in Afghanistan down to about 11,000, and in December of that year, he announced that the mission of the war—weakening the Taliban and capturing bin Laden—had been accomplished, and thus the war was over. The troops would come home.

But, of course, they didn’t, leaving Trump to develop his own policy. But his administration’s approach to the chaos in that country was different than his predecessor’s. By negotiating with the Taliban and excluding the Afghan government the U.S. had been supporting, the Trump team essentially accepted that the Taliban were the most important party in Afghanistan. The agreement itself reflected the oddity of the negotiations. Each clause referring to the Taliban began: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban will….”

It was immediately clear that the Taliban was not living up to its side of the bargain. Although it did stop attacking U.S. troops, It began to escalate violence in Afghanistan itself, assassinated political opponents, and maintained ties to al-Qaeda. Nonetheless, the Trump administration put pressure on the leaders of the Afghan government to release the 5000 Taliban prisoners, and they eventually did. Before Biden took office, Trump dropped the U.S. troop engagement in Afghanistan from about 13,000 to about 2500.

When he took office, Biden had to decide whether to follow Trump’s path or to push back on the Taliban on the grounds they were not honoring the agreement Trump’s people had hammered out. Biden himself wanted to get out of the war. At the same time, he recognized that fighting the Taliban again would mean throwing more troops back into Afghanistan, and that the U.S. would again begin to take casualties. He opted to get the troops out, but extended the deadline to September 11, 2021, the twentieth anniversary of the initial attack. (Former president Trump complained that the troops should come out faster.)

What Biden did not foresee was the speed with which the Taliban would retake control of the country. It swept over the regional capitals and then Kabul in about nine days in mid-August with barely a shot fired, and the head of the Afghan government fled the country, leaving it in chaos.

That speed left the U.S. flatfooted. Afghans who had been part of the government or who had helped the U.S. and its allies rushed to the airport to try to escape. In the pandemonium of that first day, up to seven people were killed; two people appear to have clung to a U.S. military plane as it took off, falling to their deaths.

And yet, the Taliban, so far, has promised amnesty for its former opponents and limited rights for women. It has its own problems, as the Afghan government has been supported for the previous 20 years by foreign money, including a large percentage from the U.S. Not only has that money dried up as foreign countries refuse to back the Taliban, but also Biden has put sanctions on Afghanistan and also on some Pakistanis suspected of funding the Taliban. At the same time it appears that no other major sponsor, like Russia or China, has stepped in to fill the vacuum left by U.S. money, leaving the Taliban fishing for whatever goodwill it can find.

Yesterday, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo flagged tweets showing that members of the Afghan government, including the brother of the president who fled, are in what appear from the photos posted on Twitter to be relaxed talks about forming a new government. Other factions in Afghanistan would like to stop this from happening, and today Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned that ISIS-K, another extremist group, is threatening to attack the airport to destabilize the Taliban.

Meanwhile, there are 10,000 people crowded into that airport, and U.S. evacuations continue. The Kabul airport is secure—for now—and the U.S. military has created a larger perimeter around it for protection. The U.S. government has asked Americans in Afghanistan to shelter in place until they can be moved out safely; the Qatari ambassador to Afghanistan has been escorting groups of them to the airport. Evacuations have been slower than hoped because of backlogs at the next stage of the journey, but the government has enlisted the help of 18 commercial airlines to move those passengers forward, leaving room for new evacuees.

Yesterday, about 7800 evacuees left the Kabul airport. About 28,000 have been evacuated since August 14.

Interestingly, much of the U.S. media is describing this scenario as a disaster for President Biden. Yet, on CNN this morning, Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2004, noted that more than 20,000 people have been evacuated from Afghanistan without a single loss of an American life, while in the same period of time, 5000 Americans have died from Covid-19 and 500 have died from gunshots.

—-

Notes:

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/29/810537586/u-s-signs-peace-deal-with-taliban-after-nearly-2-decades-of-war-in-afghanistan

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/08/12/obama-afghan-war-ending-afghanistan-papers-book-excerpt/

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/you-wouldnt-know-it-from-the-us-news-coverage-but

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/16/kabul-airport-chaos-and-panic-as-afghans-and-foreigners-attempt-to-flee-the-capital

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/08/22/afghanistan-biden-evacuations/

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/21/politics/kabul-airport-terror-warning/index.html

Mediaite @MediaiteMatthew Dowd Defends Biden on Afghanistan Withdrawal, Says Media Coverage 'Way Over the Top'

Matthew Dowd Defends Biden on Afghanistan Withdrawal, Says Media Coverage ‘Way Over the Top’Matthew Dowd defended President Joe Biden on Sunday over the avalanche of serious criticism he’s getting for the chaos in Afghanistan.mediaite.com

214 Retweets714 Likes

August 22nd 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/08/17/treasury-taliban-money-afghanistan/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[biorusted]

Immigration, Covid-19 and, The Administration (op-ed for class) (long ish post)

Social Distancing is not an option at the US-Mexican border. With barely any solid structure, no established health care in place and the Trump Administration shutting down immigration, asylum seekers are helpless against the raging pandemic that has already killed more people than 9/11. In one particular camp in Matamoros, people are packed in flimsy tents and are recommended to sleep head to toe in order to decrease possible contamination (Flores, Ivan.). The majority of the camps that have been set up along the border do not have ventilators, masks, proper hand watching station, or any solid form of health care or prevention needed to provide care for possible patients, and while there are volunteers providing signage and some health care tips, it is up to the refugees to fend for themselves.  It is only by luck that there has not been a case reported in these camps, however who is to say this is true; they are not provided test kits or have a lot of hospitals (Flores, Ivan.). Once Covid 19 finds its way to these thousands of vulnerable people, there will be tragedy.

Not only do people at the boarder have the raging pandemic to deal with, but for months now the Trump Administration has been pushing back against asylum seekers by slowly cutting off their access to America. Starting with pushing back asylum hearing dates to now, closing the boarder and the asylum program altogether, a program that has been ongoing for decades (Alvarez, Priscilla). To further the scare, the US has as of April 9th, expelled 7000 people from the US-Mexico border, sending all people, the elderly, young and vulnerable back to countries that cannot support them in any way (Verza, Maria).

A lot of this mess and death could have been avoided with proper prevention and humanitarian care spanning back from when the ‘boarder crisis’ began. Disregarding the obvious failures of the current administration with regards to the pandemic response—including, but not limiting to, giving out misinformation, promoting re-opening of the states despite knowing cases would increase, and removing offices specifically intended for crisis like these-- if proper housing facilities and offices were built at the boarder to provide proper care (as in food, shelter, health care and help with entrance papers) then the current pandemic might have been less of a humanitarian crisis. Of course, just building new facilities wouldn’t have a long-term solution, thus a change in the outdated immigration process to allow for faster visas, asylum, and citizenship needs to be drafted. Currently it may take years of waiting in a normal, safe environment to receive a visa or any form of aid from the US, one could only imagine the anxiety and pain the process could bring when someone is seeking safety for themselves and their friends and family. But yet, general racism and xenophobia has prevented preventative measures to take place, inadvertently causing a crisis at the border. Children in cages, rapid racism, ICE raids, attacks on POC US citizens and the poor conditions in the facilities that are there have been brought into the light in recent years with just regards to Latin American peoples, highlighting over and over again that this country is not capable of caring for immigrants, despite advertising our core values as ‘land of the free’ and ‘better than the rest.’ These people stuck at the boarder are people, but they are being treated like chattel, and the USA’s response to the general crisis as well as the new pandemic has been either lacking or abhorrent.

Proper care for any American can’t even be achieved in our own hospitals amidst the pandemic. Those sick with Covid-19, those who’s treatment have been put on hold and, even health care workers are suffering from a lack of basic amenities. Misinformation has caused unnecessary casualties and false sense of security, leading  to my belief that we, as an American society, are not fit to provide aid to other people, and yet it is still our responsibility to help those seeking asylum. Closing the boarders was a closed minded, racist executive order from Trump that has gone largely unnoted amidst the panic. Trump did this without congressional approval under the guise of security of public health, which may be true and many other countries have done the same, however we can’t ignore the fact that Trump has been wanting to close the boarders his entire time in the political spotlight—‘building a wall around Mexico’ being one of his major stances from the beginning (Verza, Maria). If our asylum program is closed for the first time in decades and no travel permitted, when will it open again? Are we still providing aid across the closed boarder to our own asylum and citizenship seekers? If this country continues to handle the pandemic poorly, how long will the people-- men, women, children and the elderly-- have to wait in flimsy structures and poor health conditions have to wait?

We can’t forget the asylum seekers in the south, abused and vulnerable as they already are. Without proper care, if Covid-19 entered the camp, there is no predicting how devastating the losses will be. Pushing through this pandemic will take a long time and have many problems in between, but it will be so much worse for those that we, the American citizens, chose to ignore. The people in power have pushed this issue far enough, it’s time for reform of the policies and aid to be given to those who need it. There is a saying; we are only as strong as our weakest link. In this case, how long we’ve ignored and abused these innocent people represents our weakest link. If we are truly #inthistogether then we need to prove it.

---

works cited under the bar

Works Cited

Alvarez, Priscilla. “Trump Administration Has Made Sweeping Changes to the US Immigration System during the Coronavirus Pandemic.” 21 Apr. 2020, https://cbs58.com/news/trump-administration-has-made-sweeping-changes-to-the-us-immigration-system-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic.

Flores, Ivan. “A Desperate Scramble to Prevent the Pandemic at a U.S.-Mexico Border Camp.” Foreign Policy, 30 Mar. 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/30/a-desperate-scramble-to-prevent-the-pandemic-at-a-u-s-mexico-border-camp/.

Verza, Maria. “Trump Quietly Shuts down Asylum at US Borders to Fight Virus.” Buisness Insider, 9 Apr. 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-quietly-shuts-down-asylum-at-us-borders-to-fight-virus-2020-4.

[libertariantaoist]

News Roundup 5/1/20

by Kyle Anzalone

US News

The Navy awards a $5.5 billion contract to Fincantieri to build warships. [Link]

An Air Force intelligence report was leaked to the press explaining that US sanctions on Iran are harming the country’s response to coronavirus. [Link]

Russia says it will oppose the US effort to extend the arms embargo against Iran. [Link]

Trump threatens to take action against China over the coronavirus. Trump blames China for the virus. [Link]

A UN human rights expert calls on the US to lift its embargo of Cuba to help the island save lives in the battle with coronavirus. [Link]

Afghanistan

The US has under 10,000 troops remaining in Afghanistan. The US drawdown is currently ahead of schedule. Trump has been pushing to remove US troops faster because of coronavirus. [Link]

The Inspector General for Afghanistan says coronavirus will likely be a health disaster. [Link]

Middle East

An Israeli helicopter fires missiles into Syria. [Link]

Trump threatened that Saudi would lose US military support if it did not cut the production of oil. [Link]

The US Envoy to Syria says the US wants Turkey to maintain pressure on jihadists groups in Idlib, Syria. [Link]

Egypt

Ten Egyptian soldiers were killed or injured by a bomb in the Sinai. [Link]

Read More

[davidblaska]

from coronavirus AND the pandemic panic? 

When Number One son was a toddler, we realized he was watching too much television network news, filled as it was with war, hurricanes, and plane crashes. Our intelligent little boy was becoming a little worry wart. As a corrective, we noted that mommy at that very moment was preparing our favorite meal and so were a million mommies across the world but none of that would make the news because abnormal is the news — the man-bites-dog thing.

(When my own dear mother died around that time, No. #1 Son asked my mother-in-law to take over her duties. Everyone should have a mommy.)

However great the medical threat, is there any doubt that at least part of the Resistance Media’s wall-to-wall coverage of coronavirus is driven by its hatred of Donald Trump?

  Don’t believe it? Fallen down the memory hole is Nancy Pelosi leading a parade through Chinatown, “hugging and waving,” saying All Is Well in Pavlovian response to that Orange Meanie Trump, who had just closed off pandemic-ridden China because … “racism.”

Friday’s Reopen Wisconsin rally 04-24-2020

“We know that fake news travels faster than true news. So in the current environment, unfortunately, we have generated a very heavily panic-driven, horror-driven, death-reality-show type of situation.” So says Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine, interviewed in today’s Wall Street Journal.

He notes that Covid-19 is far less deadly than modelers were assuming. … The U.S. fatality rate could be as low as 0.025% to 0.625% and put the upper bound at 0.05% to 1% — comparable to that of seasonal flu.

“If that is the true rate,” he wrote, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”

⇒ “No bump in COVID-19 rates after Wisconsin’s April 7 election, study says.” (More here.)

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Is it possible to be too careful?

Which is to say, science is rarely “settled.” One more observation: the great mass of people are NOT stupid, despite the cluck-clucking of Madison’s progressive bien pensants. 

•   Any takers yet for that MASH unit full of beds Tony Evers built in the Alliant Energy Center? Empty, so far.

•   That 1,000-bed Navy hospital ship dispatched to New York City? Treated all of 182 patients. Returned to its home port.

•   Beds are empty. A ventilator shortage did not materialize,” Holmen W. Jenkins Jr. reports in the Wall Street Journal.

“Not even the U.K. Imperial College study [which predicted more than 2.2 million coronavirus deaths in the U.S.] that so alarmed the world’s policy makers recommended indiscriminate lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders.”

There’s far, far more young people who get cancer and will not be treated, because again, they will not go to the hospital to get treated because of Covid-19. —  Stanford U. medical prof John Ioannidis

Experts versus The People

Final word to Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal:

Columbia University once found that [only] 20% of flu sufferers and 5% of cold sufferers bothered to see a doctor. This is why the Wuhan virus was destined to go world-wide even if China had been upfront or an American president had been clairvoyant. … Infectious respiratory diseases are a fact of nature. …

We decided that, whatever contributes to killing Americans … it shouldn’t be the coronavirus. Accidents, yes — 6% of deaths. Heart disease, yes —23%. Flu and pneumonia, yes — 20%. These deaths are allowed but not deaths from the coronavirus even at the cost of economic ruin for millions.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: There’s a reason why criminal court cases are tried by 12 men and women, good and true, and not “experts.” When you think about it.

What is YOUR verdict?

Is America recovering? from coronavirus AND the pandemic panic?  When Number One son was a toddler, we realized he was watching too much television network news, filled as it was with war, hurricanes, and plane crashes.