by Marilyn Stern
Middle East Forum Radio
April 16, 2020

Jonathan Spyer, a research fellow at the Middle East Forum and the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, and the executive director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis (MECRA), spoke to Middle East Forum Radio host Gregg Roman on April 8 about the U.S. strategy to counter the Iranian regime’s influence in Iraq and the Middle East.

While ISIS remains a threat in Sunni central Iraq, according to Spyer the more immediate threat is “the Iranian project for regional domination” that seeks to “essentially absorb Iraq in the same way that Iran has absorbed Lebanon in recent years.” To counter Iran’s ambition, the U.S. will need a “coordinated strategy” encompassing military, intelligence, economic, and political efforts. “It’s not enough just to do military stuff,” he said, noting that the Iranians do “multilevel stuff extremely well.”

Although America has a central role to play in challenging Iran’s domination of Iraq and the region, “it must also be a mission undertaken by Iran’s other Middle Eastern enemies,” such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and American Kurdish allies in Iraq and Syria. “It needs to be a full-court strategic push.”
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By Ebony Bowden, NY POST April 16, 2020

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Thursday announced new guidelines for reopening states as soon as May 1 now that the coronavirus appears to be peaking in the US, but he left the decision up to each state’s governor while recommending criteria that would have to be met for each to gradually reopen.

“America wants to be open, and Americans want to be open,” Trump said at the White House during the daily Coronavirus Task Force press briefing.

“Based on the latest data, our team of experts agree we can start the next front in our war, which we are calling Opening Up America Again, and that is what we are doing, opening up our country, and we have to do that.”
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So what’s their end game?

By Leo Hohmann

‘Different horse, same jockey’

The article below addresses the 11,000-pound elephant in the room that nobody in the mainstream media or our government wants to address. The COVID19 coronavirus is not the first or even the most dangerous pandemic to hit the world over the last 20 years. Others have infected more and killed at a rate at least as high. That begs the question: Why?
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Across the U.S., tens of thousands of similar academic research labs have the expertise and equipment to help the country test for Covid-19. If even one-tenth of these labs joined the effort, we could test an additional 500,000 to one million samples a day.

We Have a Coronavirus Test—Let Us Use It

By Jack W. Lipton and Caryl E. Sortwell, WSJ  4-15-20

Our research team used Food and Drug Administration guidelines and a scientific report from Wuhan, China, to develop a Covid-19 test in early March. It took one week. Our test doesn’t use the reagents other labs are desperately seeking, and it can identify levels of virus so low that a typical test could miss them entirely. Yet our lab sits idle.

Across the U.S., tens of thousands of similar academic research labs have the expertise and equipment to help the country test for Covid-19. If even one-tenth of these labs joined the effort, we could test an additional 500,000 to one million samples a day.

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By Irina Tsukerman, BESA April 14, 2020

Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, photo via Office of the President of Russia

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The recent news about the involvement of Iranian diplomats in the murder of an Iranian dissident in Turkey sparked a flare of international interest from within the all-encompassing coronavirus pandemic coverage, largely thanks to unflattering comparisons with coverage of the Jamal Khashoggi murder in 2018 (which the Iranian press promoted with gusto). The relative lack of interest in the crime from within Turkey itself reflects Ankara’s willingness to consort with Shiite Islamists to its own advantage. Read more…

L Goudsmit.  This is the most concise and important analysis I have read to date.

It’s time for all true patriots to take a stand, or risk being led blindly into a new dark age.

LeoHohmann.com

Bill Gates, left, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins and NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci at a 2017 Gates Foundation global health workshop on topics that included vaccine research.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, also known as AOC, rewrote the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and rebranded them as the Green New Deal, many conservatives were heard laughing out loud.

She couldn’t be serious, could she? But who’s laughing now? AOC has gotten most everything she wanted in the Green New Deal.
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By Peter Skurkiss, AMERICAN THINKER

The response to the Wuhan virus by the federal and state governments is unprecedented. Given the magnitude of the effects these actions are having on the American society, one would expect that cost-benefit analyses would be taken into account. But no, not even at a rudimentary level. Instead, decisions are made based on epidemic models, models that have proven wildly inaccurate. And then on top of that, we have wild statements like this from New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy: “There is no price too high to save a life,” or New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: “We will not put a dollar figure on human life.”

Are they serious? Of course not. But as Holman Jenkins, Jr. noted in his Wall Street Journal column:  “The problem here is not an inability to think clearly. It’s an unwillingness to be seen thinking clearly.” Nobody wants to be seen as callous or a meanie. Bringing sober cost-benefit analyses into consideration would be akin to bringing a skunk to a garden party.
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By Peloni

From now on comments on every post must relate to the content of the post.

Comments that don’t relate to the post must go here.

Any person who contravenes this demand will be put on moderation. Also their offending comment will be trashed.

The reason for this demand is so that people who want to read comments which pertain to the post, don’t have to wade through the chatter.

Everyone will be happier.

Dr. SHIVA Ayyadurai, MIT PhD Crushes Dr. Fauci Exposes Birx, Clintons, Bill Gates, And The W.H.O

A letter from a high official in Jerusalem to the Jewish garrison on Elephantine in fifth century B.C.E. Egypt is the oldest known ex-biblical account of the Pesach ritual

By Ruth Schuster, HAARETZ

The remnants of the “Passover Letter” written in the fifth century B.C.E. Egyptian Museum of Berlin

In 419 B.C.E., as the land of ancient Egypt groaned under the Persian boot, a Yahwistic Jewish community living on an island in the middle of the Nile River celebrated Passover. And in their solitude far away from the center of Yahwism, they may have sought counsel from Jerusalem, from whence they received a letter ahead of the holiday – the “Passover Letter” of Elephantine.

It is the oldest known ex-biblical account of Passover ritual, said Prof. Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, in a Zoom lecture on Sunday. Read more…

By Jonathan F. Keiler, AMERICAN THINKER

The President, Congress, state governors and epidemiologists may argue about coronavirus policies, but the people driving matters are without constitutional authority or expertise of any kind — the mainstream media and its social media accelerant.  No matter what the President and his experts want to do, or even his congressional and gubernatorial rivals, the media largely dictates the extent of public cooperation or panic, which is true power.

From the get-go, at least in the West, and especially in the United States, the coronavirus pandemic has been more a media event than anything else.  Coronavirus is a serious international public health concern, but the weight of evidence currently suggests that it is also not an unusually dangerous one.
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By Noah Rothman, COMMENTARY

Though it is taking place amid some of the most terrible circumstances imaginable, the coronavirus outbreak is also a real-world experiment. We are testing many of the assumptions shared by those who invest a lot of trust in public knowledge and government competence. The experiment isn’t going so well.

For example, the mandatory substitution of one set of economic activities with another—or, in some instances, replacing conventional economic activity with nothing at all—is increasingly at the heart of the progressive project. Americans are living through a unique circumstance: an engineered recession. The voluntary cessation of much non-essential commerce has put millions out of work or into a state of suspended animation, and the associated hardships are gradually trickling up the economic ladder. These unbearable conditions may be demanded of a nation struggling to contain a pandemic, but an engineered recession is precisely what the Green New Deal’s proponents envision.
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It may seem compassionate, or chic, to denounce putting dollars before lives. But it’s worse than nonsense. Lives depend on ‘the economy’

By John Robson, NATIONAL POST

The Canadian government has been criticized for lack of transparency on COVID-19. But since politicians’ reflexive secrecy often hides embarrassing ignorance not inconvenient knowledge, here’s what we and they need to make intelligent choices.

First, à la Donald Rumsfeld, we must realize what we don’t know. We’ve all seen those colourful charts about whether we’re flattening the curve, and apparently not really because the number of “cases” keeps rising fast. But actually they show “identified cases” which, absent widespread random testing, tell us something about serious cases but nothing about total numbers so nothing about the trend. If the pandemic spread silently for months we may already have “flattened the curve” of total cases even as hospitalizations continue to rise.

We also know less than we think about how deadly SARS-CoV-2 is because of the crucial distinction between two terms we should all be familiar with, case fatality rate (CFR) and infection fatality rate (IFR). As the BBC recently explained, CFR means “the proportion of people who die who have tested positive for the disease,” while IFR means “the proportion of people who die after having the infection overall.” Since in a crisis doctors focus on testing those with serious symptoms, CFR exaggerates lethality.
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SEE ALSO:Army Field Hospital in WA Tells Stunning Story of COVID Overreaction

By Michael Austin, THE FEDERALIST

Rob Kim/Getty Images; Johannes Eisele / AFP via Getty ImagesThe coronavirus pandemic has forced countless businesses to close nationwide, and the American population to get used to the idea of wearing surgical masks in public. Now, some are questioning whether it was worth it considering how far off projections about the spread of the illness have been. (Rob Kim / Getty Images; Johannes Eisele / AFP via Getty Images)

Businesses have been destroyed and countless jobs have been lost because of scientific models predicting that the effects of the coronavirus epidemic would be devastating.

That would’ve been a necessary sacrifice to make, if not for the fact that those models were “garbage.”

That’s the take from prominent conservative and co-founder of The Federalist, Sean Davis, who called out the inaccuracy of models by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation that are used by the White House.
Read more…

April 14, 2020