Jts5665

TARGETED: EXCLUSIVE: The Treasury Department Spied on Flynn, Manafort, and the Trump Family, Says Whistleblower.

President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department regularly surveilled retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn’s financial records and transactions beginning in December 2015 and well into 2017, before, during and after when he served at the White House as President Donald Trump’s National Security Director, a former senior Treasury Department official, and veteran of the intelligence community, told the Star Newspapers.

“I started seeing things that were not correct, so I did my own little investigation, because I wanted to make sure what I was seeing was correct” she said. “You never want to draw attention to something if there is not anything there.”

The whistleblower said she only saw metadata, that is names and dates when the general’s financial records were accessed. “I never saw what they saw.”

By March 2016, the whistleblower said she and a colleague, who was detailed to Treasury from the intelligence community, became convinced that the surveillance of Flynn was not tied to legitimate criminal or national security concerns, but was straight-up political surveillance among other illegal activity occurring at Treasury. . . . This ruse was to get around using classified resources to surveil Americans, she said. Once the Treasury personnel had enough information about someone they were targeting from the black box, they would go to the white box for faster and more informed search.

It was routine for these searches that had no criminal nor national security predicate, merely a political predicate, she said.

People need to be jailed for this kind of thing. If not shot.

HOW DARE YOU ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING WITHOUT US! F.D.A. Halts Coronavirus Testing Program Backed by Bill Gates.

The program involved sending home test kits to both healthy and sick people in the hope of conducting the kind of widespread monitoring that could help communities safely reopen from lockdowns. Researchers and public health authorities already had tested thousands of samples, finding dozens of previously undetected cases.

But the program, a partnership between research groups and the Seattle and King County public health department that had been operating under authorization from the state, was notified this week that it now needs approval directly from the federal government. Officials with the Food and Drug Administration told the partnership to cease its testing and reporting until the agency grants further approval.

One thing we’ve learned from this pandemic is that there’s too much regulation.

NEWS FROM MY NECK OF THE WOODS: Knox County reports no new COVID-19 cases, no current hospitalizations. It’s been two weeks since our reopening.

Related:

It’s too early to say, but what if we’re topping out?

Also related: Spot The Difference: Two Governors Reopened Their States, Only One Was Accused of ‘Human Sacrifice.’

ACLU SUES TO OVERTURN DUE PROCESS PROTECTIONS FOR THE ACCUSED: Headlines I hoped I would never have to write, but feared I would.

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Around the world, both state and local governments looked at wildly exaggerated computer model projections of millions of virus deaths, declared a “State Of Emergency”, and foolishly pulled the wheels off of their own economies. This has caused pain, suffering, and loss that far exceeds anything that the virus might…

THE COWARD OF THE COUNTY — BUT WITH A SWEET UNACCOUNTABLE PUBLIC UNION JOB:

Remember: When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. Or maybe out in the parking lot, hiding behind their cars like a little, highly-paid weasel.

THE ROAD TO JONESTOWN: On this day in 1931, Jim Jones—the charismatic religious leader who instigated a terrifying mass murder-suicide—was born in Crete, Indiana.

Personally, I am not a big fan of charisma. I like my leaders—religious or otherwise—to be more on the sober side. Downright boring isn’t a deal killer for me. Exciting leaders tend to lead their followers to places they’d prefer not to be—like the remote jungles of Guyana.

Jones grew up poor with an interest in religion that was unusual for his age. Also an avid reader of Marx, Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Gandhi, he began attending gatherings of the Communist Party USA in 1951. Determined to become a great man, he asked himself, “How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church.”

In the early 1950s, with Father Divine as his role model, Jones established in Indiana what evolved over time into the “Peoples Temple.” Unlike many churches at the time, it welcomed people of all races. Jones became a crusader for civil rights. His church grew.

After reading in a magazine that Brazil would be a safe place in the event of nuclear war, Jones flirted with the idea of relocating his congregation there. Ultimately, however, he decided on California. Prophesizing that nuclear war would hit on July 15, 1967, he urged his congregants to follow him to the Golden State.

Things got crazier and crazier as he bounced from town to town in California. The gospel he preached was no longer Christianity. It was socialism. “[T]hose who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment—socialism.” “If you’re born in capitalist America, racist, America, fascist America, then you’re born in sin. But if you’re born in socialism, you’re not born in sin.” He condemned the Bible.

By the 1970s, he was a hard-core loon. He claimed to be the reincarnation of Gandhi, Father Divine, Jesus, and Lenin. For anyone with eyes to see, the Peoples Temple was obviously a cult.

But when it established itself on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, it grew and grew. Because of its emphasis on civil rights, it appealed in particular to African Americans. But the members of its governing council, like Jones himself, were usually white.

The Temple soon became a political force to be reckoned with. Indeed, it is unlikely San Francisco’s progressive Mayor George Moscone would have won election in 1975 without Jones’s help. In the precincts where Temple members got out the vote for Moscone, he won 12 to 1. The losing candidate—conservative John Barbagelata—always maintained that Temple members committed massive election fraud, and it may well have been true. But true or false, Moscone rewarded Jones by appointing him to the San Francisco Housing Commission where he was made chairman.

One after another big-wig Democrat kissed Jones’s ring. Willie Brown was Master of Ceremonies at a large testimonial dinner in Jones’s honor. Governor Jerry Brown and Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymally also attended. Harvey Milk spoke at rallies held at the Temple. After one occasion he wrote, “Rev Jim, It may take me many a day to come back down from the high that I reach today. I found something dear today. I found a sense of being that makes up for all the hours and energy placed in a fight. I found what you wanted me to find. I shall be back. For I can never leave.”

Even national figures had to pay homage to Jones. Walter Mondale, then a candidate for Vice President, met with and praised Jones. First Lady Rosalynn Carter met with him on several occasions and corresponded with him about Cuba.

None of them seemed to have noticed that Jones was stark raving mad. Or if they did, they were careful not to say so. Jones had the ability to turn out the vote, and that’s what mattered to Democratic Party leaders.

Eventually, in 1977, things started to unravel for Jones. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter started investigating. The article he produced contained allegations of physical, emotional and sexual abuse of Temple members by Jones, some of it clearly criminal. But Jones had a lot of clout, so the reporter faced resistance at the Chronicle.

Ultimately, the allegations were published elsewhere—New West Magazine. Just prior to publication, Jones and many hundreds of his followers decamped to the cult’s compound in Guyana. Indeed, Jones left the very night an editor read him the article over the phone.

Interestingly, Mayor Moscone continued to support Jones and blandly insisted that his Housing Commission Chairman had broken no law.

The Guyana compound—known as Jonestown—has been in works for a while. In the middle of nowhere, it was to have been Jones’s socialist paradise. It was now his escape from the possibility of prosecution. Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymally (himself a native Trinidadian) had earlier helped Jones negotiate with Guyana’s Prime Minister Forbes Burnham for permission to move his followers there. And, yes, the belief that Jones had the support of Mondale and the First Lady was thought to be a plus by Guyanese officials.

Conditions were appalling. Like many “socialist paradises,” members were not allowed to leave. Jones himself appeared to be strung out on drugs. And entertainment took the form of Soviet propaganda shorts. But all that was trivial compared to Jones’s increasingly apocalyptic mood. He began to advocate what he termed “the Translation,” in which he and his cultists would die together and be magically transported to a better world where they could live happily.

Much to Jones’s dismay, attention from the media didn’t stop once they arrived in Guyana. Ultimately Congressman Leo Ryan (D-CA) insisted on travelling to Jonestown to investigate whether cult members were being held against their will and forced to engage in heavy labor. Ryan had a special motivation.   He knew the father of a former member who had earlier turned up dead after he had apparently resolved to leave the Temple.

The State Department opposed Ryan’s plan. So did some California Democrats. Harvey Milk, for example, wrote to President Jimmy Carter in 1978 attesting to Jones as “a man of the highest character” and arguing that Temple defectors were engaging in “apparent bold-faced lies” about Jones. He told Joseph Califano, Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, that Jonestown was “a beautiful retirement community in Guyana, the type of which people of means would pay thousands of dollars to patronize.”  But Ryan went anyway, taking with him an entourage that included current Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-CA) (then a Ryan aide).

Once in Guyana, getting permission to visit Jonestown wasn’t easy. But eventually Ryan was able to visit and talk to several Temple members who wanted to leave. But this was fewer than he might have expected, perhaps because his visit was carefully limited. For a while it looked like Ryan would be able to take this small number who expressed a desire to leave back to the United States. But on November 18, 1978, Ryan and members of his now-expanded entourage were gunned down on Jones’s order while attempting to fly out of the airstrip at Port Kaituma near Jonestown. Speier was among the survivors.

What happened later that evening is the part of the story that Instapundit readers are most likely to be familiar with. I will therefore be brief: Jones called upon all his followers to commit suicide.  And they did … en masse. In total, 909 men, women, and children died in Jonestown, including Jones and his wife (who left a note leaving her assets to the Soviet Communist Party). They drank grape-flavored Kool-Aid (or rather Flavor-Aid) laced with cyanide and tranquilizers. Death came quickly to those who obeyed.

Jones called it an act of “revolutionary suicide.” But in fact many were given the choice between drinking the Kool-Aid and being gunned down and some were indeed shot, so murder-suicide is more accurate.

There were few survivors. A handful of Temple members sensed which way the wind was blowing earlier in the day and escaped into the jungle. One member either slept through the whole thing or managed to hide under her bed (depending on which version of the story you believe).

Even for those, like me, who are old enough to remember the events, the story has a feeling of unreality about it. Things like that can’t possibly happen. And yet sometimes they do.

I’M SENDING COVID-19 PATIENTS TO NURSING HOMES, BUT ALSO I’M PULLING MY MOM OUT:

This month a consortium of Mid-Atlantic newspapers under the USA Today Network detailed the policy in Pennsylvania and other states that’s ordering nursing homes to admit medically stable residents infected with the coronavirus.

Spotlight PA, a partnership between the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Harrisburg’s PennLive, also found evidence the Pennsylvania Department of Health drafted a quick strike plan to protect nursing homes in March, but never fully implemented it.

In the meantime, some facilities have become death traps. . . .

Levine was asked by a reporter Tuesday about her mother being moved out of a long-term care facility, Levine said she was allowing the wishes of her 95-year-old mother to move from a personal care home to a hotel.

Death is for the little people, and their parents.

NEITHER THE MODELS OR THE MODELERS HAVE COVERED THEMSELVES WITH GLORY, BUT THE EXPERT CLASS AS A WHOLE HAS BEEN A PANTLOAD OF FAIL UNDER COVID-19: Can we trust Covid modelling? More evidence from Sweden.

When people finally got to look under the hood of the famous Imperial College study, they found twisted and tangled code. And most of the model’s predictions bear little resemblance to what is actually happening. Some defend the models by saying that their predictions turned out to be wrong only because governments imposed harsher restrictions than the coders expected.

If so, we have a perfect experiment. Sweden did not close borders, shut down schools, businesses, restaurants, gyms or shopping centres and did not issue stay at home orders. So it should be the one country where the models fit. Let’s see. . . . At this moment, when the models suggested that Sweden would have 30 to 40 patients fighting over every available ICU bed, there is spare capacity in beds, equipment and personnel of around 30 percent.

Pantload.

MICE GET ALL THE BEST TREATMENTS FIRST: Experimental gene therapy prevents obesity, builds muscle, without exercise or dieting. Of course they also get the worst ones first.

IT’S A SMALL MAP AFTER ALL:  Scientists mapped an entire mouse brain, and the results are mesmerizing.

YOU CAN TAKE A PILL TO INHIBIT VENOM ACTION BEFORE TRAVELING TO A CLINIC FOR ANTIVENOM:  Researchers found an novel way to treat snakebite victims.

DRAMATIC AGING REVERSAL IN OLD RATS, USING PLASMA FROM YOUNG RATS: Reversing age: dual species measurement of epigenetic age with a single clock.

Interesting Twitter thread from David Sinclair here.

Human treatments will ultimately involve isolating the active factors from young plasma and administering them as a drug, probably. Though possibly the young plasma’s benefit is that it lacks pro-aging factors that the old plasma contains. In that case, perhaps some sort of filtration or blocking agent. Stay tuned!

INFLAMMATION AND MITOCHONDRIA HAVE GENERATED A LOT OF INTERESTING DISCOVERIES LATELY. NOW THIS: Team finds link between blood vessel inflammation, malfunctioning cellular powerhouses.

MATT RIDLEY: We know everything–and nothing–about Covid. The lockdowns were imposed in a state of ignorance. It now looks as if many of the early cases were caught in hospitals and doctors’ offices and nursing homes.

If Covid-19 is at least partly a ‘nosocomial’ (hospital-acquired) disease, then the pandemic might burn itself out quicker than expected. The death rate here [in the U.K.] peaked on 8 April, just two weeks after lockdown began, which is surprisingly early given that it is usually at least four weeks after infection that people die if they die. But it makes sense if this was the fading of the initial, hospital–acquired wave. If you look at the per capita numbers for different countries in Europe, they all show a dampening of the rate of growth earlier than you would expect from the lockdowns.

So if it wasn’t the lockdowns that slowed infection . . . .

It is possible that washing your hands, not shaking hands with others, not gathering in large crowds, and wearing a face mask in public, but no more than this, might have been enough, as Sweden seems to suggest. Forcibly shutting schools and shops and aggressively policing sunbathers in parks may have added little in terms of reducing the rate of spread.

But it did give politicians a chance to order everyone around, so there’s that.

HEY JOURNALISTS: WANT PEOPLE TO STOP THINKING OF YOU AS GARBAGE? STOP BEING GARBAGE.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY AND 2020 BATTLEFIELD PREPARATION:

SO MUCH OF THE CULTURE WE WERE FED IN THE SIXTIES WAS THE SAD BULLSHIT OF SELF-JUSTIFYING SOCIAL LOSERS: The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.

Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”

They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).

They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen’s perfectly healed leg. . . . It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.

So why did William Golding write such a sad, depressing version of the same story?

I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.

We got a lot of culture largely based on the “sad self-knowledge” of people who were psychological and moral outliers — social and moral losers, as I say — but who fancied themselves representative of humanity and who managed to sell that self-justifying delusion to the rest of society. The costs were significant.

SO FAR, EXPERTS AND EXPERTISE HAVE NOT PERFORMED EXACTLY BRILLIANTLY IN THIS CENTURY: The fallen state of experts: How can governments learn from their expert failings?

Today we have the “rule of experts.” Monopoly experts have the power to choose for you in one field after another, including child protective services, economic policy, and pandemic response. But if you give some humans the monopoly power to choose for other humans, you have created some dangerous incentives. The rule of experts gives you the highest chance of expert failure. We should value expertise, but fear expert power. Whenever possible, then, we should do away with the rule of experts by empowering the people. Let each person choose for themself, and let the experts compete with each other to provide advice. That’s a call for ramping down the power of government bureaucrats and ramping up personal freedom. But you can push that idea only so far with pandemic policy.

Whatever the best policy might have been, at least some restrictions were clearly needed. In the moment of danger, governments cannot avoid turning to experts to help them craft policy. When confronting a pandemic, then, is there nothing a government can do but listen to the epidemiological experts and obey their wizardly words? There may be a few things governments can do to limit “expert failure” in moments of crisis.

Governments should recognise that their experts are, all of them, giving a partial perspective. Apparently, British and American policy was driven primarily by a report whose lead author was Neil Ferguson. That report seems to have considered only one danger: Covid. The one-sided analysis of that report may have left governments in the US and UK insensitive to the possibility that that lockdown itself might create its own fatalities, which might even end up larger than the number of Covid deaths. As economists never tire of reminding us, we are always facing tradeoffs and must adjust along all margins.

Governments should also be more diligent in the pursuit of competing opinions. In his essay, “What is science?” Richard Feynman remarked “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” A government that respects science should be sceptical of experts and, perhaps, more diligently seek out multiple viewpoints. In other words, when governments cannot leave the matters in the hands of the people, it should do what it can to simulate a competitive market for expert advice. A simulation is not the real thing, and we may grimly expect that in future crises governments will again fall victim to expert failure. But a greater effort to engage diversity of expert opinion within and across areas of expertise and a livelier scientific scepticism toward experts and their expertise may at least make expert failure less frequent and less severe.

I would feel better if experts had more skin in the game. Neil Ferguson had a history of being spectacularly wrong in the past, but that cost him nothing.

NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Arizona: Muslim Students Threaten to Kill Prof for Suggesting Islam Is Violent.

Flunk ’em, they don’t know how to argue.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MANCHURIAN MEDIA: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Changes Anti-Epoch Times Headline Three Times, Removes More Than 300 Comments.

Take off to the Great Red North!

MATT RIDLEY: It is time to take seriously the link between Vitamin D deficiency and more serious Covid-19 symptoms.

#JOURNALISM:

WELL, IT’S NOT WARP DRIVE, BUT IT’S SOMETHING: Engineers Just Tested an ‘Impossible’ Detonation Engine For The First Time – And It Works.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Child’s Public School Apocalypse.

When I was on the editorial board at the Dallas Morning News, my colleagues cared a lot about school reform. Really passionate folks. Once we were doing election season interviews with school board candidates. We had one session between incumbent Lew Blackburn, an African-American man representing some of the poorest school districts in the city, and his challenger. I don’t remember the specific question one of my colleagues asked, but it had something to do with testing, and the district’s very poor results. Blackburn’s response was something to the effect of (I paraphrase), “What do you expect? These kids come from poor families. Lots of them only have one parent. Those with two parents, the mom and dad are often both working long hours.” After the meeting, some of my colleagues were really hot at Blackburn. They couldn’t believe that he was so fatalistic.

I remember thinking, though, that Blackburn, who may or may not have been a deadhead in his job, understood something about human nature that us middle class people do not. What made me think that is all the stories I had from friends in Texas and Louisiana who taught in public schools serving poor populations. These were all idealistic liberals whose ideals were taking a hellacious beating in the real world. One of them, a Dallas man who had been teaching for only a few years, but who had already won an award, told me that one of the most important lessons he learned was to keep his little girl out of public schools if he possibly could — not because of the teachers, but because of the children of the public.

Education is not a mechanical process (inputs + process = outputs), but an organic one. It requires students, teachers, and parents working together, in harmony. The role parents play is to create a habitus in which the student is prepared to learn, and to acquire the self-discipline to participate in the process. If parents do not or cannot do that, the system breaks down. I have heard this from public school teachers and private school teachers alike (the private school version is: “These parents think that if they’ve written a tuition check, they’ve done all they have to do.”) A friend who teaches at a very poor rural school here in Louisiana told me at length that the biggest obstacle to his students learning is the culture they bring with them into the classroom. It is a culture of natural hatred of authority, of chaos, and in the worst cases, contempt for schooling. He said that when you meet the parents of these kids, you know exactly where it comes from. He told me that he does his best to single out the few kids in each class who really do want to be there, and tries to give them extra attention, but the whole thing feels hopeless.

As George Will asked in 2017: What if Major Causes of Poverty Are Behavioral?

That’s a topic that Thomas Sowell and Theodore Dalrymple have been writing about for decades. As Sowell wrote in 2015, in a piece headlined, “The Inconvenient Truth about Ghetto Communities’ Social Breakdown,” “Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read [2001’s] Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.”

FASTER, PLEASE: A Microbe That Seems to Stop Mosquitoes Spreading Malaria Has Been Found.

HE’S JUST PUTTING IN WORDS WHAT EVERY DEMOCRAT IS THINKING: Politico Co-Founder Martin Tolchin: ‘I Don’t Want an Investigation’ Into Tara Reade Allegation, ‘I Want a Coronation of Joe Biden.’

Martin Tolchin, a veteran journalist who worked for the New York Times before departing to help found The Hill and Politico, rejected an investigation into Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation against 2020 Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden, Monday, in case it results in Biden being found guilty and losing the election.

In a letter to the New York Times, which was written in response to an editorial board article titled, “Investigate Tara Reade’s Allegations,” Tolchin wrote, “I totally disagree with this editorial.”

“I don’t want an investigation. I want a coronation of Joe Biden,” he declared. “Would he make a great president? Unlikely. Would he make a good president? Good enough. Would he make a better president than the present occupant? Absolutely.”

“I don’t want justice, whatever that may be. I want a win, the removal of Donald Trump from office, and Mr. Biden is our best chance,” Tolchin added, concluding, “Suppose an investigation reveals damaging information concerning his relationship with Tara Reade or something else, and Mr. Biden loses the nomination to Senator Bernie Sanders or someone else with a minimal chance of defeating Mr. Trump. Should we really risk the possibility?”

I don’t want justice — I want a win. That could be the party slogan these days.

CANADIAN POLICE, WITH WEAPONS DRAWN, CUFF GIRL DRESSED AS STAR WARS STORMTROOPER FOR  “MAY THE FOURTH” DAY (Video): “Let’s salute our first responders who heroically disarmed what looks to be a hundred-pound girl in an obvious costume. A little blood was spilled but after they took away her plastic phaser; you never know if she could use her 100lbs to overpower all the cops there.”

As James Lileks wrote late last month about “small-minded public officials: ‘I don’t make the laws, sir, I just enforce them with a great deal of enthusiasm.’”