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Today we feature Drifting Texas Sand by Webb Pierce (1951). THE WESTERNER https://thewesterner.blogspot.com/

New research indicates that the coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, weeks before the first confirmed case, and that travelers brought in the virus mainly from Europe, not Asia. “The majority is clearly European,” said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-wrote a study awaiting peer review. A separate team at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine came to strikingly similar conclusions, despite studying a different group of cases. Both teams analyzed genomes from coronaviruses taken from New Yorkers starting in mid-March.

Dr. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota physician and Republican state senator said he received a 7-page document coaching him to fill out death certificates with a COVID-19 diagnosis without a lab test to confirm the patient actually had the virus.“Last Friday I received a 7-page document that told me if I had an 86-year-old patient that had pneumonia but was never tested for COVID-19 but some time after she came down with pneumonia we learned that she had been exposed to her son who had no symptoms but later on was identified with COVID-19, then it would be appropriate to diagnose...

Pray For the Peace of Jerusalem (Music in The Bible) Psalms Psalm 150 1 Praise the Lord.[a] Praise God in his sanctuary;     praise him in his mighty heavens. 2 Praise him for his acts of power;     praise him for his surpassing greatness. 3 Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet,     praise him with the harp and lyre, 4 praise him with timbrel and dancing,     praise him with the strings and pipe, 5 praise him with the clash of cymbals,     praise him with resounding cymbals. 6 Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. Footnotes: 1. Psalm 150:1 Hebrew Hallelu Yah; also...

Unemployment claim figures for last week are out.

While I was looking around for something else I stumbled upon this joke that JtE left over 6 years ago: Janice the American Elder • 6 years agoThere was a man stuck in a traffic jam on the freeway, and his car hadn't moved in half-an-hour. Suddenly, someone knocks on his window. He rolls down the window and sees a man standing there next to his car. He asks "So, what's up?"    The standing man says "There was a news alert on the radio. Terrorists have taken all of congress hostage. If they aren't paid ten million dollars, they...

It’s just the flu, bro. What can/should Trump do? My preference is immediately end the lockdown and fire Fauci and CDC says vulnerable should be careful and they might want to consider staying home. Reality is that he probably won’t do that because maybe people will panic. Worst case is Trump says we need to listen to the medical experts and stay strong as a united nation to completely defeat this invisible enemy. He follows that speech up with a 3 month extension on the lockdown - an extension that he further extends out another 3 months. Politics involves sausage...

Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein responded to the end of the presidential campaign for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) by telling her followers to exit the Democratic party, and many Democrats were incensed at the suggestion.

Last week CBS News painted a dire picture from New York City this week in their coronavirus coverage. On Wednesday morning CBS aired this footage from a New York hospital: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWm0ytokzOI&feature=emb_title This video is where the original hospital footage was aired via Sky News back on March, 22nd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J60fQr0GWo&feature=emb_title There’s no doubt that the situation in New York is serious. But it’s unfair and alarming that our media would just use footage of sick patients from another country and not even bother to alert their viewers. There was no need to add that footage except to stoke panic. CBS put...

Freedom of the press isn’t something we can take for granted and in the White House briefing room, it doesn’t even exist anymore. One America’s Pearson Sharp explains how the biased Press Corps is trying to shut down news organizations like OAN for not pushing their left-wing narrative.

Did you hear about the 2017-2018 U.S. flu season? How about the 2017-18 flu season overwhelming the hospitals and creating bed and ICU bed shortages? Neither did I, but it was the worst flu season in recent years. During the 2017-2018 flu season the CDC’s preliminary estimate is that 810,000 patients were hospitalized. It is still a preliminary estimate, so that the upper range of uncertainty is 1.4 million hospitalizations due to the flu during the 2017-2018 season. That flu season also had the highest peak hospitalizations in recent years. That hospitalization peak was the highest in recent years ran...

During the corona-madness lockdown, I watched my favorite movie, The Natural for the gazillionth time. Insanely, that movie still makes me tear up. Due to my late preacher dad's DNA, I see numerous life lessons and sermons in that movie. Farm boy Roy Hobbs is a gifted baseball player. His supportive dad warns that talent is not enough. On the train to try out for a major league team, Roy is shot by a wacko woman. Following a long recovery, Roy was told he could never play baseball again. Roy struggled to find work, lost his confidence, and wandered. Sixteen...

As Democrat power brokers survey the constantly shifting ground in the lead-up to the national election, it is not hard to guess the candidate strategy discussions going on in their super-secret supervillain lairs. Plan A: Hide a BidenThe first strategy is to run nobody at all, which is another way of saying they stick with Joe Biden. The idea here is to use the current COVID-19 environment to keep Joe Biden safely tucked away and quiet while the media and surrogates do the heavy reinvention. This is not an altogether bad strategy and probably the best one they have if...

Courtesy Dean Weingarten At the end of March 2020, Newsy.com/IPSOS conducted a survey asking people if they had purchased a firearm in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The survey is reported to have found one in 20 households purchased a gun with that reason in mind. Another one in ten households were said to be considering purchasing a gun for that reason. From newsy.com: One in 20 households say they've bought a gun in response to the coronavirus outbreak. That's according to an exclusive Newsy/Ipsos survey showing that many Americans have reacted to COVID-19 and the uncertainty brought on by...

I swear I do not make this stuff up. Who could? – You could never make it up – never in a million billion gazillion years. I kid you not: The President of the United States of by-God America was asked by some doofus reporter yesterday evening if he was planning to pardon…wait for it…oh, you have to wait for this one…JOE freakin’ EXOTIC!!! Yes, this guy: What life is like for Joe Exotic in jail You don’t have to believe me, you only have to believe your lyin’ eyes and ears: Daily Caller ✔ @DailyCaller President Trump is asked...

** In January Dr. Anthony Fauci told Newsmax TV that the United States did not have to worry about the coronavirus. Now, three months later, he wants to shut down every state! ** Dr. Fauci warned of an apocalyptic pandemic and later compared the coronavirus to a bad flu. ** Dr. Fauci based all of his predictions on models and then told reporters this past week, “You can’t really rely on models.”And on March 20th Dr. Fauci “corrected” the president during a press briefing on hydroxychloroquine saying, “You got to be careful when you say ‘fairly effective.’ It was never...

This is the fourth in a series of columns of random thoughts written in the spirit of being stuck inside and the things that occupy the mind in times of quarantine. Yearning for normalcyIf this had happened when I was young and single, there is no way I wouldn’t have violated stay at home orders. It would’ve been stupid, but who isn’t stupid when they’re young?I lived alone, I lived near bars and people I knew, people my own age; there would have been phone calls, meet-ups, and drinking. I don’t know how people who live alone, especially young people, can do this for much longer. Since my...

..The developing wisdom—earned the hard way in Wuhan, Washington, and Italy—has been that older people and sicker people are substantially more likely to suffer severe illness or die from COVID-19 than their younger, healthier counterparts. Older people are much more likely than young people to have lung disease, kidney disease, hypertension, or heart disease, and those conditions are more likely to transform a coronavirus infection into something nastier. But what happens when these assumptions don’t hold up, and the young people battling the pandemic share the same risks? So far, about one in 10 deaths in the United States...

Can any government statistics on COVID-19 deaths be trusted? It is an open question now that we are learning that the highly respected, world-class Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been lying to us. This revelation comes a few days after I wrote here at American Thinker that New York City was lying about COVID-19 deaths. The normal rules about reporting deaths have been violated by that city in the rush to inflate the body count, presumably to steer more taxpayer money to the Big Apple. That the CDC isn’t telling the truth to Americans is no conspiracy...

Marshal Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto commanded the Imperial Japanese Navy in World War II until he was killed in April 1943. Despite the dialogue from the 1970 WWII film "Tora! Tora! Tora!" Yamamoto probably did not say in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." But Yamamoto likely either wrote or said something similar: "I can run wild for six months ... after that, I have no expectation of success." Yamamoto summed up a general feeling among the Japanese admirals that...