Suifenhe is a county-level city on the eastern edge of China’s 4,300-kilometer/2,500 mile border with Russia. It is 2,000 km away from Wuhan, where the COVID-19 crisis began late last year, and until recently, the epidemic may have felt quite distant.

Locally, Suifenhe is best known for a series of increasingly extravagant national gates in its land port, which are designed to project China’s progress over recent decades, in the face of Russia’s simultaneous decline.

Right now, it is the focus of the huge problemsbetween Russia and China due to the China flu virus.

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One of the Left's standard attacks on the president is that he doesn't listen to the science!  Sadly, he did listen to the so-called experts who predicted wildly hyperbolic death and destruction, and he agreed to the economic shutdown.

The president surely realizes by now that he should have operated on his gut instincts, which rarely fail him.  Dr. Fauci, for example, sees no patients.  He looks at computer models, all of which were wrong.  Dr. Birx probably has more hands-on experience, but she too recommended closing up the nation. They were both wrong.

At every press briefing on the pandemic, the scientists to whom Trump has been listening have presented their data upon which the president has relied.  But the numbers extrapolated from their models were all wrong.  And now this mass hysteria that has brought the American economy to a full stop is devastating millions and millions of Americans.

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With the latest reports of plummeting death rates from all causes, this crisis is over.

The pandemic of doom erupted as a panic of pols and is now a comedy of Mash-minded med admins and stooges, covering their ifs ands and butts with ever more morbid and distorted statistics.

The crisis now will hit the politicians and political Doctor Fauci who gullibly accepted and trumpeted what statistician William Briggs calls “the most colossal and costly blown forecast of all time.”

Flattening the curve was always a fool’s errand that widened the damage.

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All my life, I have dismissed fear on the right (“America is headed to communism”) and the left (“It can happen here”—referring to fascism). It’s not that I’ve ever believed liberty was guaranteed. Being familiar with history and a pessimist regarding the human condition, I never believed that.

But the ease with which police state tactics have been employed and the equal ease with which most Americans have accepted them have been breathtaking.

People will argue that a temporary police state has been justified because of the allegedly unique threat to life posed by the new coronavirus. I do not believe the data will bear that out. Regardless, let us at least agree that we are closer to a police state than ever in American history.

We are presently living with all four of the key hallmarks of a police state.  Here they are.

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Sometimes I will, then again I think I won't Sometimes I do, then again I think I don't

-- Chuck Berry, Reelin’ and Rockin’ 1957

The news is suddenly awash in reports that, on May 6, Netflix and the Barack and Michelle Obama production company will premiere a documentary about the book tour Michelle Obama did in connection with her memoir.  Both the memoir and the documentary are entitled Becoming.  What's interesting is that this premiere is a surprise:

Am I the only one who finds this "surprise" an amazing coincidence when taken in conjunction with Joe Biden's declining candidacy?

Additionally, Michelle has been popping up all over the place.  Yes, surprise, surprise.

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Plans for a new Baltic–Black Sea waterway, passing through Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, have the potential to revolutionize the geopolitics of Europe’s East as well as exacerbate East-West tensions.

The transit project would not only help the economies of all three participating countries and their neighbors.  It would also promote trilateral cooperation on other issues, including security, and make each one of them more attractive partners for the West.

Not surprisingly, such prospects are gaining support in the US and part of the EU but generating ever more opposition in Moscow. Russia rightfully views E40 as a threat to its influence in the region and even, according to some analysts, as an existential threat to Russia itself.

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“Sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing…”

How many times did we sing that, never thinking about those simple, precious words?  Yet if history teaches us anything it is that liberty is elusive.  Precious.  It can slip away like a shadow, with hardly a whisper.  Before you know it it’s gone and once gone it is not so easy for the people to get back.  The powerful do not readily let it go.  It has to be ripped from their hands.  Fought for.

Two hundred and forty-four years ago, the founders of the United States began a long and bloody war to wrest liberty for us from the hands of King George  and secure it for posterity.

Yet, like the frog that will jump out of a pot of boiling water but swim contentedly until he becomes cuisses de grenouilles in water that is gradually warming, we have stood by in modern America and watched as our liberties have been eroded.  Now, today, we are suddenly in dire jeopardy of them being gone forever.

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The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts.

Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.

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

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