Burying the lede

Robert Moses’ would have loved the Kung Flu shutdown

Testing shows a huge percentage of prisoners testing poise for Kung Flu, but up to 98% of them are asymptomatic.

The press and hysterics, but then, i repeat myself, are screaming that this means we’re killing prisoners, and of course, are using these numbers as “proof” that we need more testing before we’re released from home confinement, but they’re deliberately missing the point: the models have hugely overstated the death rate of this flu.

“As mass coronavirus testing expands in prisons, large numbers of inmates are showing no symptoms. In four state prison systems — Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia — 96% of 3,277 inmates who tested positive for the coronavirus were asymptomatic, according to interviews with officials and records reviewed by Reuters.

***
After a recent spike in cases at the Neuse Correctional Institution in Goldsboro, North Carolina, state correctional officials tested all 723 prisoners last week. Of the 444 who were infected by the virus, 98% were asymptomatic, the state’s department of public safety said. …

Similarly, mass testing at two Arkansas prisons — the Cummins Unit in the city of Grady and the Community Correction Center in the state capital Little Rock — found 751 infected inmates, almost all of them asymptomatic, the state corrections department said.

The implication, of course, is that vastly more Americans have had the virus than has been believed. That would be great news, because it means that 1) the disease is far less lethal than was once feared, almost certainly in the range of a seasonal flu virus, and 2) we are farther down the road to herd immunity than has been believed.

For reasons I can’t explain, those commenting on the Reuters story don’t see the fact that the virus produces no illness in the overwhelming majority of people it infects as good news:

“Prison agencies are almost certainly vastly undercounting the number of COVID cases among incarcerated persons,” said Michele Deitch, a corrections specialist and senior lecturer at the University of Texas. “Just as the experts are telling us in our free-world communities, the only way to get ahead of this outbreak is through mass testing.”

What, exactly, will testing prove? A negative test conducted at, say, a doctor’s office means nothing: the patient could stop at a supermarket on his way home from the doctor’s and get infected by a fellow shopper. And positive tests of asymptomatic people will merely demonstrate what’s already known: this is a false panic, whipped up by “health experts” who are neither.

PJ Media’s Matt Margolis:

Appearing on Justice with Judge Jeanine on Saturday night, Dr. Debora Birx admitted something that anyone paying attention to the coronavirus pandemic has known for some time now. “I think we underestimated very early on the number of asymptomatic cases,” Dr. Birx said. “And I think we’re really beginning to understand there are people that get infected that those symptoms are so low-grade that they don’t even know that they’re infected.”

The question, of course, is how much? Well, we have a rough idea already.

But, first, let’s go back to what experts said originally. Back in March, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a 3.4 percent fatality rate and Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was about 2 percent. “If you look at the cases that have come to the attention of the medical authorities in China, and you just do the math, the math is about 2%.”

Some of us will remember [ but not the press, which savaged him for saying so - ED] how President Trump endured a lot of criticism for saying that he had a “hunch” that the WHO’s estimate was too high and that the fatality rate of the coronavirus might actually be below 1 percent. “Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number. Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor,” Trump said. “I think that that number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent.”

There have actually been at least five studies that found the coronavirus has a fatality rate of less than one percent, just like Trump said.

None of these studies were perfect. Some are large, some are small. As you’ll see, they came up with a range of fatality rates, but considering our country was shut down over the belief that the coronavirus had a CFR of 2% to 3.4% and all of these studies suggest the actual CFR is under 1 percent, it makes you wonder why the country was shut down.

A better, saner approach might be to protect the vulnerable, like nursing home patients and let the rest of the country go back to work so they can earn the money that pays the taxes that pay for health care in the first place.

As California keeps its beaches safe, police play catch and release

Glendora Police arrest same man three times in one day

On Wednesday, April 29th, at about 8:28 a.m., our officers responded to a call of a male who was attempting to break into a vehicle in the 1400 block of South Grand Ave. When we arrived, we contacted Dijon Landrum, M/24, from Monterey Park, as he was attempting to drive away in a stolen vehicle. (The vehicle had been stolen out of East Los Angeles.) In addition to driving a stolen vehicle, he had stolen property and narcotics with him. Landrum was arrested. Due to the California Zero-Bail Policy, he was issued a citation and released.

Approximately one hour after Landrum was released, at about 2:20 p.m., we received a call of unknown male in the area of Bennett and Pennsylvania. This male was carrying a box, and was walking through front yards of residences. It appeared that the male was placing items in this box as he was walking through the properties. When we arrived, we contacted Dijon Landrum a second time, and it appeared he had property in his possession that did not belong to him. Due to the California Zero-Bail Policy, he was issued a citation, and the property was recovered by our officers.

Several hours later, at 8:49 p.m., we received a call of a vehicle that had just been stolen out of a parking lot in the 1300 block of South Grand Ave. Our officers were able to track the vehicle and found it westbound on the 10 freeway in the area of La Puente. With assistance from outside agencies (LA County Sheriffs and California Highway Patrol), they located the vehicle and a pursuit began. The pursuit ultimately ended in Pasadena, and Dijon Landrum was again arrested for being in possession of a stolen vehicle, and also for evading officers. Due to the California Zero-Bail Policy, Landrum was released with his third citation of the day.

We want to thank all of the citizens that helped with this investigation, particularly those that called when they noticed something suspicious. If anyone has any additional information regarding any of these investigations, or noticed any suspicious activity on home surveillance cameras during that time frame that may be related, please contact our dispatch at 626-914-8250. [Emphasis added]

So let's slash their federal aid by 37%

Get outta here!

NYC drives out “homophobic” Samaritan’s Purse hospital because the organization doesn’t approve of gay marriages.

Last I heard, there were no requests for a gay marriage ceremony to be conducted in the Central Park tents, and Samaritan’s Purse never turned down a patient based on race, creed, or the color of his mumu., but never mind; if you don’t condone gay marriage, the city doesn’t want your help.

The Village Sun reported that Mount Sinai initially invited some of the Samaritan’s Purse medical staff to stay on at Beth Israel Hospital to continue working: “40 Christian medical personnel from Samaritan’s Purse will take up residence in the Gramercy hospital, where they will treat critically ill patients, presumably those with COVID-19. They’ll sport their Samaritan’s Purse scrubs, complete with the group’s logo.”

The invitation enraged State Senator Brad Hoylman, who represents the district where Beth Israel is located. Hoylman is the only openly gay member of the State Senate.

“Now that the USNS Comfort has set sail and the temporary hospital at the Javits Center is closing its doors shortly, Franklin Graham should pack up his medical tents and leave New York City for good,” Hoylman said in a press release Friday. “It was bad enough that Donald Trump’s failure to prepare the nation for this pandemic forced New York to accept charity from a bigot like Franklin Graham. Inviting Graham to stay on longer is an insult to LGBTQ New Yorkers and sends the dangerous message that homophobia and transphobia are acceptable.”

“It is time for Samaritan's Purse to leave NYC,” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said on Twitter Friday.

Gallup reports that 63% of American adults think gay marriage should be legal, so presumably 37% of the federal aid sent to New York is sourced from bigots — we should spare NYC from being forced to choose between accepting tainted money and standing up to homophobic taxpayers, and just deduct it off the top.

A fishy story called Wanda

Bottoms up!

Alanna Davis, an investigative reporter for the Free Beacon, has been looking into the death of Gary Lenius, the supposed idiot who ingested aquarium cleaner in reliance on Trump’s advocating it as a Chinese Flu preventative. Her first report, published last week, made it clear that (a) Lenius was a highly intelligent retired engineer whose friends insist would never, ever do such a dumb thing, and (b) his wife Wanda Lenius is a crazed woman with a history of domestic violence.

"Wanda would constantly berate Gary in public," said a source who asked that all identifying information be withheld. "Everyone was embarrassed for him, but he outwardly did not seem to care much."

"In our opinion, their marriage was seen outwardly to be as one-sided as a marriage possibly could be: Gary worshiped Wanda," this person said, adding that his wife "would routinely call him a ‘doofus'" and humiliate him in public.

Lenius's friend recalled Wanda Lenius destroying her husband's aircraft model collection after he returned home late for a meal.

"These planes take many dozens and sometimes hundreds of hours to complete," said the friend. "Gary did not get angry, he simply junked the planes that were not repairable and fixed the rest. That is the Gary I knew, he would never get upset, he just accepted what happened and carried on."

In another recent instance, the same friend said Wanda Lenius broke her husband's laptop screen, allegedly because she was angry he had updated the Windows software on her computer.

"Gary just ordered up a new LCD screen from Dell and took it apart and replaced the screen himself," said the friend. "He knew nothing about repairing laptops, but he was a smart guy, he learned how."

The couple met while working at John Deere in Waterloo in 2000, according to Wanda Lenius. Gary Lenius was a longtime senior engineer at the company and Wanda Halverson had recently started as a temp worker. Both were divorced. They married by the end of the year, and Wanda Lenius was hired full time in the company's supply management division.

Seven months after their wedding, the Waterloo Police Department responded to a domestic incident at their home. The couple had gotten into an argument "concerning counseling and a possible divorce" during which Wanda allegedly hit her husband in the chest and swung a mounted birdhouse at him, according to a court affidavit from the responding officer, William Sauerbrei.

The state attorney's office charged Wanda Lenius with misdemeanor domestic abuse assault. But the couple reconciled and Gary Lenius testified in support of his wife at the trial, saying he was not hurt or put in fear of injury. The judge found Wanda not guilty.

In the verdict, Judge Nathan Callahan wrote that the "911 tape certainly contains sufficient evidence to establish probable cause for [Wanda Lenius's] arrest, and the observations of the officers were consistent with a finding of probable cause for arrest of the Defendant." But due to Gary Lenius's trial testimony, the judge said he was unable to find "proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Defendant either placed her husband in fear, injured him, or that she had the intent to do so."

In 2005, after working full time at John Deere for four years, Wanda Lenius went on long-term disability after developing debilitating mental and physical health problems from gender and age discrimination she faced at the company, according to court records in a 2012 lawsuit she filed against John Deere.

Wanda Lenius told the court that she faced "gender-based harassment" and age discrimination, including getting passed over for promotions because she was a woman in her 40s. The litigation was similar to a lawsuit she had filed in 1997 against her former employer, the Cedar Valley Medical Clinic, although in that case, she said the company discriminated against her because she was viewed as a "young, single girl." That case was dismissed in 1999.

Dr. James Harding, Wanda's psychologist at the Black Hawk-Grundy Mental Health Center in Waterloo, told the court in the John Deere lawsuit that Wanda had post-traumatic stress disorder and anger issues due to her experience at the company.

"In the process of externalizing her stress, she remains very angry and full of adrenaline much of the time which has been very hard on her health," he said in a July 31, 2013, letter. "Anything related to John Deere such as signs, colors, even former friends there can be powerful triggers to flashbacks, causing rage and a desire to attack back."

Our mainstream media dropped the story once it was through using it as a tool to attack Trump, but reporter Davis wasn’t the only one interested in learning how, exactly, the aquarium cleaner ended up in Lenius’s drink. Yesterday she reported that the police are now poking around too:

The Mesa City Police Department's homicide division is investigating the death of Gary Lenius, the Arizona man whose wife served him soda mixed with fish tank cleaner in what she claimed was a bid to fend off the coronavirus. A detective handling the case confirmed the investigation to the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday after requesting a recording of the Free Beacon's interviews with Lenius's wife, Wanda.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Not worth a Tinker's damn

End of this particular road for Michael Metter, though he’s sure to be working his talents elsewhere — possibly Boca Ratan?

Or not much of one, anyway. 1 Tinker Lane once owned y former WGCH owner and fraudster Michael Metter has been sold by his lender for $1.2 million. It was once listed for $3.550 million a number as phony as Metter himself. We’ve chronicled the man’s various scams over the years here, and Crain’s summed up his Spongetech fraud back in 2012 in a concise fashion.

But give Metter credit: from his first arrest by the feds in 2009, he hung on for years, batting away creditors and prosecutors alike. The foreclosure on this house wasn’t even begun until 2015, and he managed to drag it out for five full years. I think our state courts’ tolerance of lengthy foreclosure procedures ultimately hurts lenders and legitimate borrowers alike, but that’s the system we have, and we seem to be stuck on it. Have I mentioned that trial lawyers dictate policy in Hartford?

Regardless, $1.2 seems about right for this house, though I personally would have advised a buyer not to risk any number over $950, $975. We have a depression coming.

Why do so few of us who were around at the time remember the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968?

Partly because we didn’t have bogus computer models or a press intent on spreading panic, but mainly because the world didn’t shut down.

There were a million estimated killed worldwide, with 100,000 killed in the United States. There were no lockdowns, nor stay at home orders although there were hygienic measures like social distancing and washing hands encouraged.

From the Daily Wire: 

The Wall Street Journal explained. “The novel virus triggered a state of emergency in New York City; caused so many deaths in Berlin that corpses were stored in subway tunnels; overwhelmed London’s hospitals; and in some areas of France left half of the workforce bedridden.”

As John Fund notes in National Review, the Hong Kong Flu “was an especially infectious virus that had the ability to mutate and render existing vaccines ineffective … Hundreds of thousands were hospitalized in the U.S. as the disease hit all 50 states by Christmas 1968. Like COVID-19, it was fatal primarily to people older than 65 with preexisting conditions.”

The Encyclopedia Britannica pointed out the highly contagious nature of the disease: “Indeed, within two weeks of its emergence in July in Hong Kong, some 500,000 cases of illness had been reported … The 1968 flu pandemic caused illness of varying degrees of severity in different populations. For example, whereas illness was diffuse and affected only small numbers of people in Japan, it was widespread and deadly in the United States.”

As John Fund remembers, the economy was not shut down, schools weren’t closed and things like concerts continued. There was none of the reaction we have now.

There was no political blame, it would appear, ascribed for the virus hitting the shores or spreading.

A vaccine was developed quickly by August 1969, although the virus, H3N2, still circulates as influenza A.

Yesterday Maine’s governor took it upon herself to order the state’s tourism industry to close for the summer, told 150,000 unemployed citizens that they’ll have to wait until fall to work again, and informed retailers large and small that they would stay closed, most of them permanently. Maine has seen 1,040 cases of the China Flu since it invaded the state, 163 hospitalizations and 51 deaths, almost all in nursing homes. Governor mills and her fawning press claim that this economic ruination is all “for the greater good”. How 51 people constitute “the good” for the state’s other 1.3 million citizens is left unsaid.

(Go to this link for interactive versions of the following charts)

Blue and dark blue, 13 deaths. 10 counties, no deaths, 0-3 cases reported.

No, foreclosure auctions aren't usually good deals — there's a reason the debtors couldn't sell them

17 Steeple Chase, ”just five miles from Armonk!”, was purchased at a foreclosure auction for $1.575 million in 2015, then renovated, and has been on the market since July 2018, when it started at $2.495. Today it was marked down to $1.925, with still more room to drop.

A dull contemporary in awful shape, stuck in the high sinuses of Greenwich’s frontier; what could possibly go wrong?

$1.575, bid up from $1.350 — a new twist on the phrase, “Chump change”

circa 2015

Nicely redone, but to what purpose?.

Tales from the perma-inventory

Or perhaps tales from the crypt. Either way, 544 North Street has cut its price to $2.595 million, down substantially from its 2015 asked-for price of $3.995. The owners paid $3.725 for it in 2005 to owners who’d purchased it just the year before for $3.1.

Go figure.

House arrest and our country

If it saves just one life ….

Wikipedia explains house arrest:

In justice and law, house arrest (also called home confinement, home detention, or, in modern times, electronic monitoring) is a measure by which a person is confined by the authorities to their residence. Travel is usually restricted, if allowed at all. House arrest is an alternative to being in a prison while awaiting trial or after sentencing.

While house arrest can be applied to criminal cases when prison does not seem an appropriate measure, the term is often applied to the use of house confinement as a measure of repression by authoritarian governments against political dissidents. In these cases, the person under house arrest often does not have access to any means of communication with people outside of the home; if electronic communication is allowed, conversations may be monitored. [See, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, el al - ED]

The terms of house arrest can differ, but most programs allow employed offenders to continue to work, and confine them to their residence only during non-working hours. Offenders are commonly allowed to leave their home for specific purposes; examples can include visits to the probation officer or police station, religious services, education, attorney visits, court appearances, and medical appointments. [ None of which are permitted citizens in our current lockdown - Ed] Many programs also allow the convict to leave their residence during regular, pre-approved times in order to carry out general household errands, such as food shopping and laundry. Offenders may have to respond to communications from a higher authority to verify that they are at home when required to be. Exceptions are often made to allow visitors to visit the offender.[5]

The types of house arrest vary in severity according to the requirements of the court order. A curfew may restrict an offender to their house at certain times, usually during hours of darkness. "Home confinement" or detention requires an offender to remain at home at all times, apart from the above-mentioned exceptions. The most serious level of house arrest is "home incarceration", under which an offender is restricted to their residence 24 hours a day/7 days a week, except for court-approved treatment programs, court appearances, and medical appointments.[2]

In some exceptional cases, it is possible for a person to be placed under house arrest without trial or legal representation, and subject to restrictions on their associates.[6] In some countries this type of detention without trial has been criticized for breaching the offender's human right to a fair trial.[7] In countries with authoritarian systems of government, the government may use such measures to stifle dissent.

Life in the People's Republic of California

Cops roust old couple sitting on beach chairs. The beaches are sort of kinda open, but the citizens must sit directly on the sand or boulders because reasons.

It’s no coincidence that the most draconian, senseless shutdown rukes are being imposed by leftist governments. Statists crave the power to tell ordinary, unenlightened people what to do, and Kung Flu is providing a grand opportunity to do that.

Portland, Maine’s city council, for instance, not only banned restaurants from offering curbside service, it prohibited shop owners from fulfilling mail order purchases. Vermont has forbidden large stores to sell books, paint and clothing, Michigan won’t let them sell vegetable seeds and seedling during the planting season. None of these activities spreads the dreaded virus (that has to be spread anyway, if group imunity is to be developed) but does impose economic destruction “equally” — with exceptions granted only after proper pleading to the authorities, pleadings which recognize and acknowledge the power of those authorities.

Portland’s city council, for instance, rescinded its ban on retailers shipping orders from their stores after store owners begged them to, and one poor, pathetic businesswoman actually “thanked them for listening”, when a bullwhip would have been the proper response.