A Quick Run Around the Web (4/28/2020)

"3 Reasons I Ditched My BUG OUT BAG"--Warrior Poet Society (19 min.)

• "How to Spot a Bad Guy- A Comprehensive Look at Body Language and Pre-Assault Indicators"--Active Response Training. A must read, not just because of the information on giving you warning about an impending attack, but also because the information is useful for articulating why you may have used force or drawn a weapon.
• "Police Tactics: Using a Patrol Car as Cover During a Shootout"--Tactical Life. The author relates a DEA test of a vehicle where after receiving a barrage of bullets, not only where the targets in the car (under the front dashboard area of the driver’s side and another simulating a crouched suspect in the backseat floor area) unscathed, but the instructor was able to drive the car off the range. But, as the author notes, cars are not made of homogeneous materials, so some areas may be easily penetrated by bullets, while others (e.g., the engine block) can provide hard cover against small arms fire. An excerpt:

      I strongly recommend that you try various positions of cover with your patrol car. I remember taking a rookie I was training back behind an industrial complex at night on patrol and practicing “debussing” drills, counter-ambush drills and how to use the patrol car as cover.

      Just seated behind the wheel or in the passenger seat and using the front “A” pillars as cover takes some work. A right-handed officer firing from the driver’s seat should keep his or her feet inside the car. Once you place your feet on the ground outside the car, they are susceptible to bullets skipping off the deck or fragments of pavement from rounds fired into the asphalt or concrete. Leaning forward, a right-handed officer has to cant his or her pistol outboard to clear the pillar. Another consideration is your cruiser’s spotlight, if you have one; both the handle inside and the light housing itself may get in your way. A right-handed officer in the front passenger seat will have an easier time, but practice both so that it’s easier to get into these positions in a shooting. You can minimize your exposure behind the pillar and dash by extending your legs and slouching in the seat. Once again, except for the window gears and metal framing, side doors in this technique offer little protection.

After going over advice as to shooting stances and staying a bit back from the vehicle, the author goes on to recommend:

If better cover is available and within close proximity, move to it prior to engaging the suspect; there’s a lot of concrete, brick, trees and poles in our modern environment. But if a spontaneous assault occurs while you’re behind the wheel or in the car as a passenger, maximize your effectiveness and protection by positioning behind the most solid points in the car.

• "Duty weapon retention"--Police One. Short take: "Having a tactical knife accessible from your weak side may be the best way to protect your duty weapon."
• "Front Waistband Disarming with Police Krav Maga"--Police Magazine. Although this article is more of an advertisement for the author's classes, he does raise a couple useful points:

       A suspect in close proximity to an approaching officer unexpectedly reaches for a handgun in his waistband. The officer's sidearm is holstered. Because action beats reaction, the perpetrator is likely to outdraw the officer, something that is borne out by the numbers.

      Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) 2004 statistics indicate that a perpetrator can deploy a handgun from his waistband in as little as one-third of a second. In stark contrast, FLETC notes the average officer's reaction time to counter-draw a weapon is between two and four seconds.

      • The NYPD's 2010 LEOKA report underscores that 55% of officers killed were within 0-5 feet of the assailant.

      • The FBI Unified Crime Report 1980-2010 corroborates a similar number of 53% of officers killed within five feet of an assailant.

• "Hiding a gun — The rules of three"--Backwoods Home Magazine. The author discusses three reasons why you might want to hide (i.e., cache) a gun, three types of guns you might want to cache, three ways to prepare the firearm for caching, three types of storage containers, three types of places to cache them, and, finally, three ways of noting the location so you can find it later. Note that the last is very important: a cached weapon is of no use if can't find it later. His suggestions on this last point:

       You should mark the location of your hidden weapon in three different ways. You should have a compass or a GPS unit (or both) and know how to use them.

      First, identify the location visually, preferably using distant and/or virtually immovable features of the landscape. Mountain peaks, waterfalls, house-sized boulders, freeway interchanges, ancient monuments, etc. Then you can take note of nearby trees, rocks, and other objects as a backup. It’s probably more useful to make note of the terrain than features on the terrain. Note whether the ground rises or falls around your stash, or how many paces the stash is from a nearby hillock.

      Second, take compass headings to your cache location from at least three different recognizable objects. Again, you should choose objects that aren’t likely to move. But if you take a heading from a power pole, a tree, and a boulder, and 10 years later the tree has fallen down, you still have other things to guide you.

      In using a compass you must know the declination in your area — that is, how much magnetic north varies from true north. Later, when you’re ready to go back to find your hidden tools, you should check the declination again (NOAA has a website for this). Magnetic north drifts from year to year. I was aware of this but didn’t realize how much the drift could impact caching until Carl Bussjaeger, a writer and a reader of my blog, alerted me. Then I checked. Turns out, over 10 or 15 years, the change in declination in a given area could easily be enough to put you many feet away from your hidden stuff if you don’t adjust for it. (It’s easier than it may sound, though.)

     Finally, you should mark the location with your standalone GPS unit (and remember, never, ever with a cellphone). Then, when you get home, transfer those coordinates to a piece of paper or an encrypted computer file (along with your compass headings), and erase them from the GPS unit.

     If you write the coordinates down, disguise them in some way. One blog reader who works in security suggested making them look like a phone number and putting them in your address book. It goes without saying that you should hide or disguise your record of the coordinates very well — but not so well that you can’t find it years later. But then, that’s why you use three marking methods; if one fails, you still have the others.

I question the efficacy of caching because of the difficulties of locating and accessing caches, especially if several years intervene between when you cache the item and when you need to get it. A lot can change, especially if some major disaster intervenes; and something like a repeat of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812 or "the Big One" expected for California would probably make it impossible to locate a buried cache. And don't expect GPS (or, at the least, accurate GPS) in the event of war or civil upheaval. 

• "Behind Enemy Lines: Guns of Vietnam's SOG Warriors"--American Rifleman. These were forces that operated in Laos and Cambodia, and thus American deniability was a requirement. Accordingly, in the early years of the conflict, the forces used a variety of foreign weapons or weapons dating from the World War II era that could not be definitively traced by to the United States. But the article notes:

By 1967, the enemy had captured enough U.S. weapons in South Vietnam that weapon deniability was relaxed for missions into Laos, although the requirement continued another two years for Cambodia. Teams could now carry M16s, but they soon were rearmed with what would become SOG recon’s trademark arm—the CAR-15.

The units also used a variety of suppressed firearms and other modified weapons. The article is an interesting read. 

• "Breaking Down 5 Different 300 Blackout Loads’ Terminal Ballistics"--Outdoor Hub. All shot from an 8-inch barrel AR pistol. I've been using the 110-grain Hornady V-Max but I may have to take a closer look at the Barnes 110-grain TAC-TX.
• "Are You Chitting Me? Preparing Seed Potatoes for Planting"--Preparedness Mama. The author explains that pre-sprouting potatoes is called chitting or greening. From the article:

      Potatoes are a cool weather crop and should be planted about one month before your last frost date. In my Zone 8, the last frost is Mar 15. This is important because the productivity of potatoes falls in weather above 90 degrees and anything hotter than that may even kill the plants.

      I plan on starting my seed potatoes by February 1st so they can be out in the garden by March 15th.

      Chitting is best done 6 weeks in advance. If the potatoes sprout earlier than that you can remove any sprout larger than 2″. This way, the sprout will not grow back but the potato will be able to focus its entire stored energy into growing or producing new sprouts just in time for planting.

* * *

       You can pre-sprout and plant whole seed potatoes (2 inches and under) or cut them into pieces with multiple eyes. By cutting them into multiple pieces, you’ll get fewer but bigger potatoes than you would if you planted them whole.

      However, if you do plant them whole, sprout only egg-sized potatoes with at most three eyes on each (as someone’s potato-loving Grandma’s once aptly put it, “One [eye] for shoots, one for roots, and one to thank God.“)

* * *

     Under normal conditions, one eye will produce three tubers: one large, one medium-sized, and one egg-sized. It is best to keep the egg-sized potatoes from a harvest for a new crop next year.

     If you do cut the sprouted potatoes in pieces, give them a day or two to callus over and cure. Some old timers dip them in wood ash to help the process. This curing is important if you are going to plant in damp, cold soil to prevent rot and fungus growth.

Lots more advice so read the whole thing.

• Related: "Why You Should Plant Potatoes For Survival"--Backwoods Resistance.

• "Canoeing: Learn the A to Z Essentials of Piloting a Canoe"--Real World Survival. This article covers not just different methods of using a paddle, but discusses essential kit. I've wondered about getting into canoeing, but the fact of the matter is that most of Idaho is high mountain desert and lacking in navigable streams or lakes. 
• "The 10 Most Gruesome, Shocking, and Bizarre Survival Stories Ever"--Field & Stream. This article is a series of short excerpts that link to longer stories on the particular topic. Nevertheless, one of the items related was: “The elk lunged at me. My hand slipped off, and the antlers hit my face. ‘You have a hell of a hole in your neck,’ my son-in-law said. ‘And it’s bleeding good, too!’ It had happened so fast that I didn’t even feel it.”
• "Start Here"--Lizard Farmer. His recommendation for a good place to start in learning about defense of a homestead or rural community. And that place is this short, online book called The Farmer At War about farmers and what they did to survive during the Rhodesian conflict. 
• "How To Master The Sitting Position"--Shooting Sports USA. 
• "Review: Midwest Industries Combat Rifle Offset Sight Set"--Shooting Illustrated. More than just a review, it discusses the advantage of using an offset set of backup iron sights when employing a telescopic sight on your modern sporting rifle.
• This sure seems to be going down the memory hole fast, probably because it demonstrates that gun control laws are a farce--articles about the Nova Scotia shooter, Gabriel Wortman:

• "Nova Scotia shooter’s profile an ‘outlier’ to the police impersonator archetype"--The Globe and Mail.

• "Canada mass shooting erupted after argument between gunman Gabriel Wortman and his girlfriend: official"--South China Morning Post. 

• "LILLEY: PM using Nova Scotia massacre to push misguided rifle ban agenda"--Toronto Sun. 

      It took the Mounties until Wednesday afternoon to admit publicly they had known since they first heard Wortman’s name and ran it through the computer that he didn’t have a gun licence.

     Yet somehow, Wortman was armed with a gun or guns. We don’t know for sure because the RCMP won’t say.

     As first reported by my colleague Joe Warmington and has since been confirmed elsewhere, Wortman took the service pistol and magazines from RCMP Const. Heidi Stephenson after he killed her.

      Asked about the guns Wortman used, the RCMP has been silent even though they obviously know what type of firearms he was found with. Could it be because they don’t want to admit this rampage was carried out in whole or in part with RCMP guns?

• "Some of N.S. gunman's weapons came from U.S., police say"--CBC. This article indicates that Wortman used a handgun and multiple long guns, but no details about the weapons or how he obtained them. 

"Solar Superstorms | Field Collapse Risk [Part 1]"--Suspicious Observers (5 min.)

• Can't stump the Trump, 2020 edition: "Looks Like Trump Was Right About The Coronavirus Fatality Rate"--The Federalist. On March 4, the President predicted that the actual fatality numbers would be well below 1%; current studies are showing 0.5% or less. 

       While this data is preliminary, it is backed up by another study in Los Angeles that found 40 times more people had carried the virus then were previously known. This dropped the fatality rate in LA from 4.5 percent to .1-.3 percent.

     It is difficult to stress how important these findings are. The 5-week lockdown that has destroyed the American economy was put in place by contemplating what looks to be rather absurd numbers by the WHO.

     While the United States has nearly lost a terrible 50,000 lives to the virus, this radical shift in our understanding of just how deadly it really is should make us question not only the logic of the lockdown in the first place, but more importantly how much longer we are going to stay on this destructive course.

• Ditto: "Coronavirus treatment hope in form of an antiviral drug taken as a nasal spray as lab tests show it 'blocks the deadly virus from latching on to lung cells'"--Daily Mail. 
• And another ditto: "An Experimental Ultraviolet Light Treatment for Covid-19 Takes Political Heat: Trump’s musings prompt social-media censorship of information about an experimental treatment."--Instapundit quoting from a Wall Street Journal article:

      I ran an obscure pharmaceutical company until a few days ago. Then we got famous. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Aytu BioScience made a commitment to find ways to help. One of those ways came through our newly formed relationship with a prominent Los Angeles hospital.

     On April 20 we put out a press release titled “Aytu BioScience Signs Exclusive Global License with Cedars-Sinai for Potential Coronavirus Treatment.” The treatment is called Healight, and it was developed by research physicians at the hospital’s Medically Associated Science and Technology Program. The technology, which has been in development since 2016, uses ultraviolet light as an antimicrobial and is a promising potential treatment for Covid-19.

      Aytu and Cedars-Sinai have engaged with the Food and Drug Administration to pursue a rapid path to human use through an Emergency Use Authorization. But hardly anyone noticed—until Thursday, when President Trump mused, “. . . supposing you brought the light inside the body . . .”

     My team and I knew the president’s comments could trigger a backlash against the idea of UV light as a treatment, which might hinder our ability to get the word out. We decided to create a YouTube account, upload a video animation we had created, and tweet it out. It received some 50,000 views in 24 hours.

      Then YouTube took it down. So did Vimeo. Twitter suspended our account. The narrative changed from whether UV light can be used to treat Covid-19 to “Aytu is being censored.”

      These days, politics seems to dictate that if one party says, “The sky is blue,” the other party is obligated to reply, “No, it’s not, and you’re a terrible human being for thinking that.” That leaves no room for science, in which the data speak for themselves, regardless of ideology, and only when they’re ready. Unfortunately, the visceral excitement of political conflict draws far more clicks and better ratings than the methodical world of science.

      Technologies like Healight, which if borne out through clinical studies may represent a viable way to kill coronaviruses, aren’t provided the clear-headed consideration they deserve but are instead flushed into the political mosh-pit of “us vs. them.”

     Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo are under enormous pressure from political activists. They also need to ensure that information on their platforms is safe and accurate. That’s exactly why Aytu decided to post videos and tweet about Healight.

      We at Aytu BioScience are confident that treatments for Covid-19 will be found. We hope we can help. But above all we hope science will ultimately speak louder than politics.

• The suicide of expertise: "'The Pretense of Knowledge' has Cost America Dearly"--The American Thinker. Discussing the Wuhan outbreak models that were so grossly wrong:

       ... In retrospect, and despite their air of authority, the experts never had enough knowledge about this virus to make reliable calculations about the future.

      But the real problem with the models weren’t that they proved to be false, but rather that they were promoted with false certitude.

• QOTD: "If the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated anything, it is that there is no situation so severe that government can't make it worse."
• "IT’S TIME TO BUILD" by Marc Andreessen. The author writes concerning the reaction to the pandemic:

      Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.

     We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!

     We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses. Our scientists will hopefully invent therapies and a vaccine, but then we may not have the manufacturing factories required to scale their production. And even then, we’ll see if we can deploy therapies or a vaccine fast enough to matter — it took scientists 5 years to get regulatory testing approval for the new Ebola vaccine after that scourge’s 2014 outbreak, at the cost of many lives.

      In the U.S., we don’t even have the ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it. Tens of millions of laid off workers and their families, and many millions of small businesses, are in serious trouble *right now*, and we have no direct method to transfer them money without potentially disastrous delays. A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most.

     Why do we not have these things? Medical equipment and financial conduits involve no rocket science whatsoever. At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard. We could have these things but we chose not to — specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to *build*.

      You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.

Read the whole thing.

• Related: "Up to 13.9 million Americans are out of work but have NOT been able to register for unemployment benefits, Economic Policy Institute survey finds"--Daily Mail. 

• Related: "Single mom, 37, who filed for unemployment 44 days ago and still hasn't seen a single payment says she's 'lost all hope' as she now relies on loans from relatives"--Daily Mail. 

• "The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation"--The Hill. The doctor that authored this piece explains:

      Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.

     Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.

      The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies.  

     In New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic with more than one-third of all U.S. deaths, the rate of death for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01 percent, or 10 per 100,000 in the population. On the other hand, people aged 75 and over have a death rate 80 times that. For people under 18 years old, the rate of death is zero per 100,000. 

     Of all fatal cases in New York state, two-thirds were in patients over 70 years of age; more than 95 percent were over 50 years of age; and about 90 percent of all fatal cases had an underlying illness. Of 6,570 confirmed COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 6,520, or 99.2 percent, had an underlying illness. If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.

     Fact 2: Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding.

     We can learn about hospital utilization from data from New York City, the hotbed of COVID-19 with more than 34,600 hospitalizations to date. For those under 18 years of age, hospitalization from the virus is 0.01 percent, or 11 per 100,000 people; for those 18 to 44 years old, hospitalization is 0.1 percent. Even for people ages 65 to 74, only 1.7 percent were hospitalized. Of 4,103 confirmed COVID-19 patients with symptoms bad enough to seek medical care, Dr. Leora Horwitz of NYU Medical Center concluded "age is far and away the strongest risk factor for hospitalization." Even early WHO reports noted that 80 percent of all cases were mild, and more recent studies show a far more widespread rate of infection and lower rate of serious illness. Half of all people testing positive for infection have no symptoms at all. The vast majority of younger, otherwise healthy people do not need significant medical care if they catch this infection.

     Fact 3: Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem.

     We know from decades of medical science that infection itself allows people to generate an immune response — antibodies — so that the infection is controlled throughout the population by “herd immunity.” Indeed, that is the main purpose of widespread immunization in other viral diseases — to assist with population immunity. In this virus, we know that medical care is not even necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected. It is so mild that half of infected people are asymptomatic, shown in early data from the Diamond Princess ship, and then in Iceland and Italy. That has been falsely portrayed as a problem requiring mass isolation. In fact, infected people without severe illness are the immediately available vehicle for establishing widespread immunity. By transmitting the virus to others in the low-risk group who then generate antibodies, they block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat. Extending whole-population isolation would directly prevent that widespread immunity from developing.

      Fact 4: People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to hypothetical projections.

     Critical health care for millions of Americans is being ignored and people are dying to accommodate “potential” COVID-19 patients and for fear of spreading the disease. Most states and many hospitals abruptly stopped “nonessential” procedures and surgery. That prevented diagnoses of life-threatening diseases, like cancer screening, biopsies of tumors now undiscovered and potentially deadly brain aneurysms. Treatments, including emergency care, for the most serious illnesses were also missed. Cancer patients deferred chemotherapy. An estimated 80 percent of brain surgery cases were skipped. Acute stroke and heart attack patients missed their only chances for treatment, some dying and many now facing permanent disability.

      Fact 5: We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures.

     The overwhelming evidence all over the world consistently shows that a clearly defined group — older people and others with underlying conditions — is more likely to have a serious illness requiring hospitalization and more likely to die from COVID-19. Knowing that, it is a commonsense, achievable goal to target isolation policy to that group, including strictly monitoring those who interact with them. Nursing home residents, the highest risk, should be the most straightforward to systematically protect from infected people, given that they already live in confined places with highly restricted entry.

      The appropriate policy, based on fundamental biology and the evidence already in hand, is to institute a more focused strategy like some outlined in the first place: Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent large-group precautions. This would allow the essential socializing to generate immunity among those with minimal risk of serious consequence, while saving lives, preventing overcrowding of hospitals and limiting the enormous harms compounded by continued total isolation. Let’s stop underemphasizing empirical evidence while instead doubling down on hypothetical models. Facts matter.

• From another doctor: "I’ve worked the coronavirus front line — and I say it’s time to start opening up"--New York Post. He raises several points to support his contention, the first being:

First, the wave has crested. At 1 p.m. April 7, the COVID-19 arrivals slowed down. It was a discrete, noticeable event. Stretchers became available by 5 p.m., and the number of arriving COVID-19 patients dropped below the number discharged, transferred or deceased.

• "‘This Is Insanity’: Tucker Carlson Questions The ‘Science’ Behind The Shutdown"--The Daily Caller. 

       “Mass quarantines, they tell us again and again, are the only way to save lives,” Carlson said. “But that’s a lie. They don’t know it’s true, despite what they’ve claimed. There’s no scientific record to consult. It’s never been done. We’re currently living through the largest and most expensive experiment ever conducted in human history. We’ve spent trillions of dollars, and crushed millions of people, purely on the guess that a nationwide lockdown would save us from the coronavirus. Has it worked? Was the guess correct?”

      Looking at the “data,” the Daily Caller co-founder noted that the eight U.S. states that have yet to issue shelter-in-place orders are still “below the national average in coronavirus cases, and deaths, per capita.” He then referred to the work of “journalist and professor Wilfred Reilly,” who “did the math” comparing per capita numbers per state and finding that “a state’s lockdown strategy had virtually no effect on how severe its outbreak of the Wuhan coronavirus was.”

     “Are you surprised by this?” Carlson asked. “Maybe you shouldn’t be. You can see the same trend at work in other countries. Sweden, most famously, has never locked down. Restaurants there have never closed. That country is still suffering from coronavirus, suffering more in fact than we are in the U.S. But the country’s epidemic appears to have peaked. And without locking down, Sweden has, and this is the key, has fared far better than other European countries that did lock down. That includes Britain, Italy, Spain and Belgium.”

• "Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No." Instapundit quotes the following from a Wall Street Journal article.

      To normalize for an unambiguous comparison of deaths between states at the midpoint of an epidemic, we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21-day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million—e.g.,‒three deaths in Iowa or 19 in New York state. A state’s “days to shutdown” was the time after a state crossed the 1 per million threshold until it ordered businesses shut down.

      We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. (The trendline sloped downward—states that delayed more tended to have lower death rates—but that’s also a meaningless result due to the low correlation coefficient.)

     No conclusions can be drawn about the states that sheltered quickly, because their death rates ran the full gamut, from 20 per million in Oregon to 360 in New York.

• "California Docs Say Lockdown vs. Non-Lockdown 'Did Not Produce a Statistically Different Number of Deaths'"--PJ Media. 
• "Instead Of ‘Flattening The Curve,’ We Flattened Hospitals, Doctors, And The U.S. Health Care System"--The Federalist. The author begins by noting:

      When the lockdowns began last month, we were told that if we didn’t stay home our hospitals would be overwhelmed with coronavirus patients, intensive care wards would be overrun, there wouldn’t be enough ventilators, and some people would probably die in their homes for lack of care. To maintain capacity in the health-care system, we all had to go on lockdown—not just the big cities, but everywhere.

      So we stayed home, businesses closed, and tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs. But with the exception of New York City, the overwhelming surge of coronavirus patients never really appeared—at least not in the predicted numbers, which have been off by hundreds of thousands.

Because those Wuhan virus patients never showed up, and hospitals and clinics are empty of patients, hospitals are laying off or cutting back hours and many could go bankrupt.

• "NYT’s Friedman: ‘Depths of Despair’ by Crushing the Economy Will Kill More People Than Coronavirus Itself"--Breitbart. For the environmentalists and global warming fanatics, that is just a bonus.
• "Never waste 'a crisis': IMF chief sees coronavirus as 'great opportunity' to create a green economy"--Washington Examiner. From the article:

      Environmentalists have an unprecedented chance to turn their policy hopes into a global reality during the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, according to the head of the International Monetary Fund.

      “You know, a crisis [is] never to be missed as an opportunity to do better,” IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva said Monday.

      Georgieva, a Bulgarian economist who took over as IMF chief last year, has a prominent role influencing how countries soften the economic blows delivered by the pandemic. She is also working on strategies to “jump-start economies” after the contagion passes. She favors a “coordinated fiscal stimulus that can generate a new momentum for the world economy,” crafted with an eye on climate change as well as the coronavirus crisis.

      “Look, Mother Nature is not going to let us forget that climate change is a major risk to the well-being of people and the well-being of economies,” she told the Atlantic Council via videoconference. “Right now, we are concentrated on the immediate emergency, and rightly so, but as we deal with COVID-19 and we restart economies, it is a great opportunity to see what are the policies that we can put in place and even accelerate so we can [see] climate-friendly growth in the future.”

      The opportunity for environmentally-minded policymakers derives in part from the global nature of the response to the pandemic, which means that green policies developed now could see wider adoption than any prescription spurred by an environmental disaster.

* * *

     She ... even suggested that people who “have difficulty to service their mortgages” could be incentivized to adopt green energy practices.

      “What if we decide to have a program that if you retrofit your house, you get a discount on how you service your debt or you have a prolongation of servicing that debt?” Georgieva suggested. “There are many policy ideas that can serve us really well, so we come in a way better off.”

• "Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer wants a 28-day emergency powers extension for her state days after armed protesters gathered at her home over her plan to extend stay-at-home order to May 15"--Daily Mail. Whitmar is quoted in the article as saying: "The emergency powers that I have as Governor do not depend on the Legislature, but the protections do."
• "Tens of thousands swarm California beaches despite governor's stay-at-home orders"--The Blaze. 
• "Protesters Descend On Wisconsin Capitol To Send A Message: We’re Done Staying Home"--The Federalist. 
• "America Held Hostage"--American Thinker. 

      We're allowing governors to restrict people's movement; prevent citizens from assembling; and order mandatory masks, testing, and vaccines.  These governors now claim the right to track our every move, to surveil every American in order to ensure compliance.  This shutdown is not just a slippery slope to socialism and communism; it's a downhill slalom.  

      How did we get here?  Americans aren't cowards who would eagerly surrender liberty for immunity.  But therein lies the genius of the left.  It's not just about you and me, now, is it? 

     The left has hostages: our aging parents, grandparents, sick relatives.  Either we put down the Constitution and slowly back away or the hostages will die. 

• "Will States Owe Businesses Just Compensation for Forced Closures When the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Over?"--Foundation for Economic Education. The author presents an argument why the forced closure of businesses was a taking compensable under the Constitution.
• A lot of rich people just lost a lot of money: "Hopes dashed as coronavirus drug remdesivir 'fails first trial'"--BBC. 
• The banality of evil: "Sting operation nabs 2 after salon services offered during lockdown"--AJC. Yet property crimes are almost never investigated. The article has a nice summary of several events where police have broken social distancing to arrest people and lock them in jails for not obeying quarantine orders, even if that person in the middle of the ocean by himself.