Home » Samaritan’s Purse sets up a field hospital in Central Park

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Samaritan’s Purse sets up a field hospital in Central Park — 56 Comments

  1. Some people underestimate what other people can and will do when they believe that death is not the worst thing that can happen to them.

  2. Paul:

    Great comment.

    Neo:

    “I also wonder whether some people who have contempt for evangelicals will revise their opinions of them on hearing this news.”

    I’m gonna bet “no”. Pity, but no. It’s a tribal thing. And they belong to the tribe called smug. Like Hillary’s “deplorable” statement. Same tribe.

  3. Evangelicals are not only Protestants; they are also Roman Catholics, though this is not widely recognized.
    Evangelization is Christian outreach, independent of denomination.
    And I agree the smugs will remain unchanged.

  4. Neo:

    “ I also wonder whether some people who have contempt for evangelicals will revise their opinions of them on hearing this news.”

    Sadly, probably not. After all, how many times has the military come to the aid of people in disasters and yet they still look look down their noses at our folks in uniform?

    Paul,

    I agree with F. Very, very well put.

  5. Unbelievers don’t change their mind about Christians because the do good things. Unbelievers also don’t come to faith just because a church is cool. A person is just gonna believe when God invites them to.

  6. Nope. The antireligious (not just not-religious) see any believer who sins as proof that the whole enterprise is fatally flawed. And the religious know that we all fall short of the glory of God.

  7. “The antireligious (not just not-religious) see any believer who sins as proof that the whole enterprise is fatally flawed.”

    Preening evangelical douche David French proves it’s not just the antireligious who feel that way.

    Mike

  8. A part of this organization came to Chico in the wake of the Paradise Fires. Other arms had already set up around Redding in the wake of the earlier firestorm there. The function of this group was simple. They were equipped and experienced in sifting the ashes of people’s burned homes to recover important objects that may have survived the blaze.

    I put my name in to be helped in that way but the line was so very long in the Paradise fires that the unit had to leave before everyone could avail themselv es of their service. They did remain for almost five months as it was.

  9. Brian Morgan —

    I suspect that the virtue-signaling scolding of anyone who wants to get back to work will start to fade when the unemployed run out of money and start ending up on the street.

    Coronavilles, anyone?

  10. If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, who led the study. The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all…

    The research presents a very different view of the epidemic to the modelling at Imperial College London, which has strongly influenced government policy. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” said Prof Gupta…

    The Oxford study is based on a what is known as a “susceptibility-infected-recovered model” of Covid-19, built up from case and death reports from the UK and Italy. The researchers made what they regard as the most plausible assumptions about the behaviour of the virus…

    If the findings are confirmed by testing, then the current restrictions could be removed much sooner than ministers have indicated.

    University of Oxford Study

    Via New York mag, here’s how one reporter who specializes in covering disease outbreaks explained the importance of serological testing:

    One of the things we would love to know right now is how many people who have had pneumonia since January were actually COVID cases? Having answers to that question would make a difference on a policy level. If we were suddenly seeing a surge in hidden pneumonia cases since mid-February, that would tell us we’re in deep, deep doo-doo; that this thing is like Italy; that we’re going to suddenly skyrocket and our hospitals are going to be overwhelmed. But if, by contrast, the same number of cases are found in the historic samples going back to the first of January, that would tell us, “Okay, it’s gradually unfolding, we don’t have to go down to lockdown every single person in New York, we may be able to flatten the curve.” And that makes a big difference in terms of how drastic our policies need to be. There’s a reason that the governor and the mayor and the mayor’s own department advisers are arguing. We just don’t have good, solid data to work with. We’re flying blind in New York City. They’re even blinder outside the city because the population’s more scattered.

  11. Neo.
    wrt yr last graf:

    Not likely. For one thing, people who do that are the lower orders. The betas, in the Brave New World sense. See Noonan’s post 9-11 “Welcome back, duke”. So getting all grubby while messing with sick people is….infra salt. The people being treated are as likely to be unworthy as well.
    But not all lefties are irredeemable. Some may look at this, or any other charitable activity not involving calling somebody out from behind a keyboard, as…noble. But knowing they have neither the skills, the courage, or the self-abnegation, or the pure charity, they become defensive.
    Once upon a time, decades ago, I happened on an accident. Guy had a sucking chest wound. First aid for this is not taught in civilian first aid. But I had been awake for that block of instruction in Basic. The ER guys told the EMT guys who told the cops I had saved the guy’s life. What do you think the lefties would think of that?

  12. Neo.
    wrt yr last graf:

    Not likely. For one thing, people who do that are the lower orders. The betas, in the Brave New World sense. See Noonan’s post 9-11 “Welcome back, duke”. So getting all grubby while messing with sick people is….infra salt. The people being treated are as likely to be unworthy as well.
    But not all lefties are irredeemable. Some may look at this, or any other charitable activity not involving calling somebody out from behind a keyboard, as…noble. But knowing they have neither the skills, the courage, or the self-abnegation, or the pure charity, they become defensive.
    Once upon a time, decades ago, I happened on an accident. Guy had a sucking chest wound. First aid for this is not taught in civilian first aid. But I had been awake for that block of instruction in Basic. The ER guys told the EMT guys who told the cops I had saved the guy’s life. What do you think the lefties would think of that?

  13. “I also wonder whether some people who have contempt for evangelicals will revise their opinions of them on hearing this news.”

    Absolutely not. They will loathe them all the more. As Artfldgr pointed out, after hearing about a perceived good act like this, they will double down on their contention that religious rubes attending their silly and meaningless church services were the main reason the virus spread and that we are now in this predicament. The Left will project ulterior motives onto their actions, knowing that the only way that they (the Left) would put themselves out there like this and be perceived as helping others is if they were getting something out of it, if there was a selfish angle to it.

    My guess is that they’ll end up saying that the evangelicals are ONLY doing this to obscure (and atone for) the fact that they were the “dirty” people spreading the virus in the first place. They will insist that the motivation of these so-called “religious” is half CYA and half guilty conscience.

  14. I generally use my progressive sister as a guide to likely reactions. For many years now, her consistent reaction to any evangelical good works is horror that they impose their religious views on their patients. She suspects that they withhold care until the patients profess agreement, and objected to Mother Theresa on this ground.

    I can’t emphasize enough, this is an intelligent woman with the same genetic and educational advantages I have had. Her victimhood mentality never takes a break.

  15. Neo,
    Here in nyc, the gothamist is the pulse of the mainstream far left liberal activist set

  16. Morning update: US active cases now well away from an exponential rise, and as of yesterday I’m able to fit very closely with a sigmoid function. If it were still exponential, total cases as of yesterday would have been near 240,000, instead of the 155,000 reported. We should see curve flattening in about 10 days with a total of about 325,000 cases. NY also well away from exponential, but my state CT, is very exponential at the moment. Any one know of a way to insert an excel graph into a comment here? I’d really like to be able to show what I see going on.

    Artfldgr quoted “If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta,”

    So yesterday my wife reminded of something. My nephew has been working in China for 10 years reporting for the WSJ and NYT. He was in Hubei in early December covering the developing outbreak, and is now one of the targeted journalists being kicked out. He visited his family in Pittsburgh for xmas and New Years. The second week of January his parents came to CT for a funeral that we all attended. At the time my BIL and SIL were not feeling well, and my other nephew’s family (also in Pittsburgh) were all sick with the “flu”. A week later, I developed a fever for 3 days, and my wife had a slight cough. My wife now speculates that we would test positive for the virus. Who knows? She may be right.

  17. Nope. There was a “concerned” commenter claiming that the tents would blow away in the first thunderstorm. That is certainly possible, but I’m going to guess that the Samaritans know what they are doing.

  18. I can’t emphasize enough, this is an intelligent woman with the same genetic and educational advantages I have had. Her victimhood mentality never takes a break.

    What you’re describing isn’t a victimhood mentality. It’s malignant, reflexive hostility. Except for a few wonks like Harold Pollack, portside politics has three aspects: sentimentality, the open mouth saying ‘I want’, and the malignancy you describe. As time goes on, the third thread grows more prominent while the first withers.

  19. Seems like most of the commenters to this thread share my opinion that the anti-evangelical smuggers will not “revise their opinions of” the evangelicals. Our experience across the board appears to be common: these people just gotta hate.

  20. . . . we would test positive for the virus

    Yep. It’s all the more reason the US ought to be concentrating on serological testing, as Germany and now Gr.B. are doing. We need to know who has cleared the bug and poses no risk to anyone, neither to themselves nor others. Germany will be issuing “certificates” to the cleared so they can go back to work. Britain plans more or less the same.

  21. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/it-s-surreal-nurse-practitioner-says-field-hospital-set-central-n1172376

    They look fairly sturdy and waterproof. Not my hobby. Here are some instructions from a back packer on pitching an ordinary tent in gale force winds.

    https://www.backpacker.com/skills/how-to-camp-in-the-wind

    Here you can see the National Weather Service’s monthly summary of conditions in Central Park for the month of February 2020.

    https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=NYC&product=CLM&format=CI&version=1&glossary=1&highlight=off

    The most windy day had mean speeds of 28 mph, a Beaufort scale 6 ‘strong breeze’. The strongest gust recorded during the month was a Beaufort scale 8 ‘fresh gale’ of 46 mph. I don’t think that will blow those tents down.

  22. Texan99,

    What you describe is like most of the Anti-Christian leftists I know. They all believe that The Handmaid’s Tale (book and TV series) is ‘important’ and we’re all just a heartbeat away from sliding into a repressive Christian theocracy.

    That’s just their tendency to project because we all know what they would do.

  23. The NY Times free “Daily Briefing” shows a photo of a “field hospital” in Central Park today, Samaritan’s Purse and evangelicals nowhere mentioned.

    In Greensboro, NC, where the abortion clinic and liquor outlets are deemed “essential”, but silent prayer on private property by seven who were 6-foot- spaced “violated” the mayor’s orders and multiple cops arrived to arrest the Christian abortion foes:
    https://pjmedia.com/trending/christian-round-ups-continue-in-greensboro-7-arrested-for-praying-near-abortion-clinic/

  24. I am an American constitutional lawyer – and I see our government using Covid-19 to take away our fundamental rights
    https://www.rt.com/op-ed/483758-coronavirus-constitutional-rights-government/

    Do we really think “it can’t happen here” in America? Could we quarantine the constitution? Are we doing it already?

    Panics from pandemics unleash unchecked governmental power. The very premise of popular films like V for Vendetta reveal this: a group uses a virus to seize power and create a totalitarian society. Anyone could witness this from far-off lands, watching the news about China locking people up in their own homes and then removing them screaming from those homes whenever the state wanted. World War I and the Great Depression birthed virulent forms of governments with leaders like Hitler, Mao, Mussolini and Stalin.
    Read more

    Governments across America already used the pandemic, and the media-stoked panic around the pandemic particularly, to limit, restrict or remove First Amendment freedoms of speech and free association, with officials complaining about the potential restraints the freedom of religion imposed upon them. Others denied or declared the right to deny Second Amendment rights of gun purchase for personal safety (at a time governments are issuing no-arrest and no-detention orders for a wide range of crimes in their community while publicly freeing inmates from jails and prisons). They want to coordinate with tech companies to surveil and spy on your everyday movements and activities, in violation of the Fourth Amendment and potentially waive, unilaterally, your medical right to privacy in multiple contexts. Stay-at-home orders deprive you of your profession, occupation, business and property, without any due process of law at all beyond an executive fiat in violation of the Fifth Amendment right to due process. Governments request the authority to involuntarily imprison any American on mere fear of infection without any probable cause of crime or clear and present danger of harm by that person’s volitional conduct, deny access to personal counsel in an unsupervised, un-surveilled manner in violation of the Sixth Amendment, and act as judge, jury and executioner in violation of the Seventh Amendment right to a trial by jury, as jury trials themselves get suspended around the country in the nation’s quieted courts and fear-muted public.

    The real pandemic threat is here. It’s the panic that will quarantine our Constitution.

    First Amendment Quarantined?

    Already, governments in America suspended the First Amendment freedom of millions of citizens with shutdown, stay-at-home, curfew orders that prohibit obtaining a petition for a public protest, or even being physically present for a public protest. Indeed, even meetings in “more than ten” are prohibited by various governing jurisdictions within the United States. Surprising places like Missouri did so. Towns like Hartford did so. Maryland soon followed suit. The effect of the stay-at-home orders of New York, California, Nevada, Illinois and Pennsylvania effectively achieve the same outcome. Other governing officials recognized the dubious lawlessness of these orders, but remain outliers. Remember the Hong Kong protests? Gone. Remember the Yellow Vest protests? Soon to be gone. Seen any protests on American streets today? A pandemic is here. Protests gone. Constitution quarantined.

    Second Amendment Quarantined?

    But that is not all. Under the guise of “unnecessary businesses,” “emergency powers,” or simply by furloughing or reducing staff in the background checks department, governments show the willingness to limit Second Amendment rights as well as First Amendment protections. Mayors declare the right to ban gun sales, governments declare no background-check personnel to process a background check, delaying gun sales indefinitely, and other governments simply shut down all gun sales businesses entirely. Most worrisome, this happens while governments release inmates into the streets, and discussreleasing even more, and, at the same time, issue no-arrest and no-detention orders from Philadelphia to Fort Worth for a wide range of criminals. Want to defend yourself, give yourself a deep sense of personal protection that comes with gun ownership for many, as the Second Amendment safeguards? Well, no luck, according to too many of our governing overlords. A pandemic is here. Self-protection sacrificed. Constitution quarantined.
    Fourth Amendment Quarantined?

    Few protections are more American than the right to privacy against coerced, compelled, secretive, subversive invasion. The government operates like a virus in a case of a pandemic panic, infecting our minds and bodies, monitoring speech, association and movement, with tools of surveillance unthought-of to the founders. Coordinating with private companies (unrestrained by the Fourth Amendment; why do you think NSA uses them to gather all your emails, conversations, texts, and internet searches, at the first stage?), governments used the panic about the pandemic, a panic the government itself stoked with aid of a compliant, complicit press, to waive your medical privacy and invade your personal privacy, looking for tools to monitor your every movement, associations, activities, and behavior. The watching eye in the sky can now be the Alexa in your home, the camera on your computer, and the phone in your hand. A pandemic is here. Privacy ended. Constitution quarantined.
    Read more
    ‘They have been LYING from the start,’ lawyer tells RT as medics sue French PM, ex-minister over Covid-19 inaction ‘They have been LYING from the start,’ lawyer tells RT as medics sue French PM, ex-minister over Covid-19 inaction
    Fifth Amendment Quarantined?

    The protection for our right to make a living arises from the Fifth Amendment right to property without deprivation by due process of law, and the obligation for the government to compensate any such takings. Yet, governments across America did just that to millions of businesses, workers, and property owners, stripping them of their ability to make a living, or even to engage in a free market of commerce, by shutdown orders, curfews, and stay-at-home orders. The political and professional class ensconced in its work-from-home environs fails to appreciate the hardship this imposes on working people. No compensation. No substitution. No wages. No revenues. No opportunity. Labor lost that can never be recovered, ever, while it leaves our economy teetering on the edge of a worst-ever depression. The foundation of government is to protect the pursuit of happiness. Now all we get to pursue is Netflix-and-chill and hope miracles happen to pay next week’s bills, and pray the market doesn’t crash like in 1929. A pandemic is here. Opportunity & property gone. Constitution quarantined.
    Conclusion

    Our founders were intimately familiar with pandemics, viruses and plagues, yet they did not allow any to suspend our Constitutional liberties. Not one word in the Constitution about plagues or pandemics to exempt the government from any of our Bill of Rights. Why do our current courts allow it? Because the public is asleep at the wheel. Think the pandemic threatens to kills us all? A review of the data shows the pandemic is more panic than plague.

    Time to wake up. Maybe it is time in the motto of V for Vendetta, to “Remember, remember the fifth of November, the gunpowder treason and plot.” As that film’s lead character well said: “People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.” Only when an awake public asserts their human liberties to protest the loss of their liberties will, then, governments quit using public health crises to seize power that does not belong to them. The answer to 1984 is still 1776.

  25. “I also wonder whether some people who have contempt for evangelicals will revise their opinions of them on hearing this news.”

    Not a chance. They are far too invested in their bigotry.

  26. Further to artfldgr’s points is this from NYC:
    New York’s Langone health center says “it will support emergency-room staff who ‘withhold futile intubations,’ threatens to discipline doctors who talk to the press.”
    Said discipline can extend to termination.

  27. Most leftist-leaners won’t ever know that Samaritan’s Purse did anything at all, and Cicero aptly describes how the media frames most humanitarian efforts by Christians, most other religious people, and conservatives in general, should they deign to notice them, which they usually don’t.

    I notice that no one is seeing reports on the MSM of what the LDS Church did in the early months (which is ongoing worldwide), and what it routinely does in crises around the world, unless the impact is too noticeable to miss.
    Catholic Relief Services, and I’m sure many others, don’t get a lot of press these days, and the treatment of The Salvation Army is venomously hostile now.

    I do think this malice and neglect have increased over the last few years, but it would take some research to pin down that impression.

    I first became aware of Samaritan’s Purse because someone (probably CTH) pointed out that a reporter “on the ground” in Puerto Rico after the 2017 hurricane* was lamenting the dearth of government-supplied aid (and we all know the truth about that now), but the Samaritan’s Purse plane off-loading at the same airport was deliberately excluded from her camera shots.

    Fair and balanced: NBC did carry a decent story, so good on them.
    It was the only MSM post I found on the duckduckgo search front page.

    https://www.samaritanspurse.org/article/nbcs-today-features-video-of-samaritans-purse-working-in-the-caribbean/

    *caveat: I’m pretty sure this was the crisis that sparked the story (the plane in the NBC story looks similar), but it could have been a different one. However, even if my anecdote is fake, it is accurate.

  28. “I also wonder whether some people who have contempt for evangelicals will revise their opinions of them on hearing this news.”

    Well, wonder no more. The people who have contempt for evangelicals will never revise their opinions, because anti-religionists are the most dogmatic religious fanatics on the planet.

  29. Has anyone read this story and watched the video?

    “New Yorkers baffled over ‘unsettling’ Empire State Building siren display”
    https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/new-yorkers-baffled-over-unsettling-empire-state-building-siren-display/

    It brought me back to the days and months following 9/11. I worked in the city just a couple blocks from the United Nations. With some regularity President Bush’s motorcade motored by. Like clockwork the employees of the firm I worked for descended to the curbside and flipped him the bird and shouted obscenities as he drove by.

    I was shocked. Just months ago they were crying for someone to rescue them. When the cavalry arrived they turned their venom on him. My opinion of New Yorkers dropped into the toilet like a foul-smelling turd. I hope that President Trump knows that he will be blamed. He can never go back. There is a strange mental illness in New York City.

  30. Revise their opinion? Heaven forbid!

    Part of being in the in-crowd is knowing who to hate – and hating them. Most Dem teachers are mildly hostile to churches, and church schools. More of the others are strongly hostile than are neutral or supportive. The US educational establishment believes, and believes very strongly, that religion is opposed to science. Especially Christian religion, and most especially pro-life Christians who didn’t go to college.

    Their identity tribe depends on their belief in intellectual superiority, and the resulting rational moral superiority.

    They’re so smart they know how to lie to themselves – so they never have to face the truth.

    Colleges should be sued, and lose, over discrimination against Reps and against pro-life Christians.

  31. Like clockwork the employees of the firm I worked for descended to the curbside and flipped him the bird and shouted obscenities as he drove by.

    That’s bizarre. I worked for a place where the salaried employees outside the practical domain were all Democrats but where the rest of the workforce was variegated and not politically engaged for the most part and I neither saw nor heard anything remotely resembling that.

    In my lifetime, the only Republican president who presented much of a systemic challenge to the regnant establishment in the realm of political economy was Ronald Reagan. Yet, media liberals have expressed no respect for any Republican occupant of that chair bar when they were exploiting one to slam disparage another (Bush I v. Reagan or v. Bush II; Ford v. Nixon). The situation’s been more qualified on Capitol Hill, of course. It reached a lunatic pitch during the Bush II administration. See Mitch Daniels account of Bush II’s dispositions toward Congress. For all that he was in certain venues an abnormally competitive man, his basic impulse on public policy was davidgergenism: split the difference every time.

    Partisan Democrats hardly notice, I think because these men had cultural markers which they regarded as anathema. All of them were at home with the surburban bourgeois order, Recall Gerald Ford bellowing to his audience “You are the people who pay the taxes and obey the laws”; implicit in that is an inversion of what the liberal regards as proper status distinctions. None of these men rejected the protestant dispensation (though Nixon was not a regular churchgoer and Reagan’s attendance varied over the course of his life). All of these men were patriots in a fairly straightforward way, which Democratic politicians are generally not and liberal word-merchants never are, None of them measure themselves by fanciful ideas about what black people think of them, something liberals do routinely. Bush II also made a point of studying Scripture.

  32. Samaritan’s Purse set up a field hospital in Cremona, outside Milan, recently. They regularly turn up following disasters here in the US. I’m sure those field hospital tents are sturdy; they’ve been doing this awhile. When there are major disasters, people wanting to help would do well to donate to Samaritan’s Purse, where the money will be well-used. The same is true of other religious charities, as AesopFan points out.

    In the early history of Christianity, Christians worked among the plague-stricken, helping many and sometimes dying with their patients.

  33. When I was young, most Democrats were patriots.

    The degree to which Democratic pols place themselves among the crew Thos. Sowell calls ‘the one-uppers’ and the way that’s expressed has varied over time. With the end of the Cold War, what you might call ‘the faculty attitude’ is less a matter of concern than was once the case. My rough sense is that Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and Barack Obama all maintained the faculty attitude. However, they were working in different matrices and had different habits of self-presentation. In Dukakis it was written all over him, and that made an opening for Bush-Atwater to stick it to him. People like Michael Kinsley and Garry Trudeau were poleaxed by this and cried foul, too obtuse to realize they were banking on their own (less defensible) cultural antagonisms being sufficiently ambient among the public to put their candidate over the finish line.

  34. “Art Deco:

    When I was young, most Democrats were patriots.”

    I agree. This is not the Democrat party of JFK, Scoop Jackson, or even more recently Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman; all of whom I would consider patriots. It’s the Dem party of the 1969 radical Boomers and the 40 year mission of Bill Ayers et al to infect Gen X and the Millennials. Boy, have they been successful.

  35. This is a moving video about the reaction to the emergency by people of Bergamo (“i Bergamaschi”):
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGZ45W1XNkg

    I hope you can understand something. In the first scene the workers are chanting:
    “La gente che non molla siamo noi”.
    “We are the people who don’t give up”

    You can understand why Lombardy is the economic motor of Italy, I’m proud to belong here.

  36. Art Deco: “In my lifetime, the only Republican president who presented much of a systemic challenge to the regnant establishment in the realm of political economy was Ronald Reagan.”

    Agreed. It was 1983. I worked in downtown Manhattan when HIV/AIDS struck. All I remember was that President Reagan was blamed.

    For those of you with Progressive relations and friends, I ask you to bring up Reagan in conversation. I would be interested to know what they say.

  37. I read israel’s link to The Gothamist. I read the comments. Good heavens. I’ve had occasion to help people in matters large and small. It never occurred to me to wonder whether they were afflicted with wrong think and I’m pretty sure they weren’t wondering about me.
    But after reading the Gothamist hatefest, I might be convinced.

  38. Sadly, the venomous comments at the Gothamist are spot on for what I would expect from that crowd. Some people don’t know how to behave without hating.

  39. @charles

    One of the saddest decisions made in the early days of the public Internet was allowing people to adopt usernames/handles/aliases. The worst comes out when people think they have anonymity. Me? I use my birth name. It’s a governor. Plus my technical background informs me that if someone really wants to know who you are, there is no hiding, they will find who you are regardless.

  40. Agreed. It was 1983. I worked in downtown Manhattan when HIV/AIDS struck. All I remember was that President Reagan was blamed.

    The gay lobby also blamed Mayor Koch. There were a couple of strands of pathology in the political discourse of the times, one characteristic of gentry leftists, one of politicized homosexuals. It’s a testament to the political skills of Dianne Feinstein that she managed to avoid being a scapegoat.

  41. It’s the Dem party of the 1969 radical Boomers and the 40 year mission of Bill Ayers et al to infect Gen X and the Millennials. Boy, have they been successful.

    There I disagree with you. What I’ll call ‘the faculty attitude’ is manifest among perfectly ordinary bourgeois professionals and in our own time has found its way into corporate management. The echt example of the late Cold War was Michael Dukakis. Recall also the more qualified and idiosyncratic case of Gary Hart, whose witless statements were the subject of occasional jabs and eyerolling from Walter Mondale. A reporter interviewed him on a campaign plane once and Hart offered his assessment of Anastasio Somoza, complete with gruesome historical examples. The reporter runs it by Lawrence Pezzulo, who had been ambassador to Nicaragua during the Carter Administration. Pezzulo’s response, “I never heard of such a thing. Even the Sandinistas never accused him of that”. Hart had his biases, picked up in graduate school at Yale. They rendered him quite credulous. I don’t think Al Gore maintained this disposition, at least at that time. Obama OTOH strikes me as the sort of person for whom The New York Review of Books (if not The Nation) is written. However, this sort of thing was less salient in his time than in Dukakis, and the media more subservient to the Democratic Party.

  42. For those of you with Progressive relations and friends, I ask you to bring up Reagan in conversation. I would be interested to know what they say.

    I’m reminded of a story a Methodist pastor told about a conversation with a seminary admissions examiner. He told her the following exchange is the mode in his work:

    Examiner: So, why do you wish to enter the clergy?

    Applicant: I’d like to work with people.

    Examiner: Oh? Do you know many?

  43. Art Deco: “The gay lobby also blamed Mayor Koch”

    Please forgive me but I believe the reason why they targeted Koch was because he closed down the bathhouses, which was his effort to prevent the spread of the disease.

  44. Art Deco:

    I liked Mayor Ed Koch but then again I was more liberal back then. Even so from what I remember I would like him today compared to the current crop of misfits.

  45. PowerLine answers your question: the Left hates all Christians, regardless of the actual objective good that they do.

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/03/was-it-something-he-said-3.php

    Minnesota’s MyPillow man Mike Lindell joined President Trump and [others] at yesterday’s daily White House Coronavirus task force briefing. Lindell is a recovering addict, an outspoken Christian, a fervent Trump supporter, a successful entrepreneur and all-around remarkable gentleman. Lindell spoke for less than three minutes (video below). He announced that MyPillow was repurposing part of its factory to make cotton face masks for health care workers. It will be cranking out 50,000 masks a day by the end of the week.

    Lindell added a few words expressing his gratitude for Trump’s election and urging Americans to pray. As a result, he set off a wave of hatred and contempt on Twitter. FOX News has compiled a useful selection in “MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, at White House coronavirus briefing, tells people to pray during crisis.” If it weren’t for contempt and will to power, these people would have nothing at all to offer.

    Ending with this:

    Quotable quote (Ben Shapiro via FOX News): “If you’re angry at the guy shifting over his factory to produce 50,000 facemasks a day for medical professionals, you’re doing being human wrong.”

  46. Cicero on March 31, 2020 at 12:26 pm said:
    Further to artfldgr’s points is this from NYC:
    New York’s Langone health center says “it will support emergency-room staff who ‘withhold futile intubations,’ threatens to discipline doctors who talk to the press.”
    Said discipline can extend to termination.
    * * *
    As we have learned from the UK and the Netherlands, there is a lot of leeway in the definition of “futile” when no one is held accountable for their choice.

  47. In light of the recent arrest of the pastor for holding services against city policy (turns out it was just an advice, not an order, anyway and thus not subject to criminal arrest*), here’s a paragraph from the new city order in Abilene TX (via my brother who lives there):

    Individuals are being asked to remain home unless they need to access essential needs. That includes going to work, obtaining medical care, purchasing food or other basic need items or to maintain personal mental and spiritual health.

    The exception was made despite the actions of one particular self-centered resident:

    City Manager Robert Hanna said he will enforce the quarantine for COVID-19 patients, and the members of their household, with all the measures at his disposal. That includes fines of up to $1,000 per day per occurrence, up to 180 days in jail, police monitoring and ankle monitors.

    Hanna says Abilene Police are monitoring one couple that recently returned from New York and officials are in the process of pursuing ankle monitors for them. After returning from the trip, the man was symptomatic, and the couple did not self-quarantined.[sic]

    Big mistake not to ban flights out of NY?
    (also big mistake to drop all the line-editors from online publications; that wasn’t the only grammar mistake in the article)

    *explains the difference between advice and orders toward the end
    https://tampabayguardian.com/2020/03/30/sheriff-chronisters-big-bromance-event-11-weeks-ago-with-pastor-he-now-arrested/

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