Rebane's Ruminations

Scattershots – 28apr20 (updated 2may20)

George Rebane

501c3 bets to co-locate money and mouth.  RR’s commenters have over the years made assertions and predictions with such deeply held convictions as to draw more than a smile from the rest of us.  So here’s a proposal (again) – offer odds and a material dollar bet that your measurable assertion will come true.  The bet may be taken up to a specified dollar amount by challengers.  The loser must remit his lost amount to the bona fide 501c3 charity chosen by the winner.  Say, one of our lefties and true believers in Bumblebrain’s November victory offers 2:1 odds for a maximum of $500.  Then if I take a $100 of that and lose, I have to mail a check to the 501c3 that he specified.  If I win, then the leftie has to mail a $200 check to my 501c3.  The bettors will confirm and adjudicate their own bets – honorable behavior is paramount. The comment streams will become the indelible archive of such bets, and I will keep an updated post of all such pending bets similar to how I ran the Dropout Derby.  The aim here is to sanitize RR comment streams from the reams of unmitigated bullshit posted by commenters, some who have the courage to use their real names, and the sackheads who don’t have any perceivable courage of their convictions as they continue spouting anonymous crap in these pages.  I have labeled these as ‘501c3 bets’, and a commenter can challenge the veracity of another commenter with such a bet, that if refused will communicate to all the level of conviction.  My own prediction is that most commenters will be happy to continue just passing hot air anonymously.

Socialist scumbags want others to pay off their perfidious vote buying debts.  For the last few decades our progressives have bought the votes of public sector employees – police, first responders, teachers, pencil pushing bureaucrats, … - through thug-like union negotiations for lavish pension plans that are now unfunded to the tune of trillions.  Today the evil Dems in Congress are attempting to attach to C19 relief legislation pension bailouts for the various Dem run states.  In short, they want future, say, Floridians to pay for the retirements of, say, Illinois state employees.  As Sen Rick Scott (R-FL) points out (here), federal bailouts like these are a very bad policy to begin with, but more so because they reward the continuance of blatantly corrupt and cunning incompetence by liberal politicians in such state governments.

‘You can never, ever trust the Communists.’ is a wise exhortation memorialized by William McGurn writing (here) about an elderly Hong Kong lawyer and democracy activist recently arrested by the Chinese communists for his role in illuminating the illegal conversion to totalitarianism of the former British colony.  The takeaway here is that today communism sports a broad halo of similar ideologies embraced by the greater Left who range from kitchen table communists, through practicing progressive academics, to legions of liberal politicians, media personalities, and entertainers, all abetted by a solid phalanx of leftwing government employees embedded in countless agencies and bureaus across the country.  Their common denominator is the Alinsky Almanac of public propaganda which was first institutionalized by V. Lenin who held that “Communists have only contempt for the ‘bourgeois’ idea of objective truth, replacing it with a morality that holds ‘truth’ to be whatever is expedient for the party at that moment. “  We see that replicated daily in our lamestream media.

Nevada County government is turning out to be a toady when it comes to asserting the obvious fact that rural counties are not the same as urban counties, and should therefore not be forced to adhere to the one-size-fits-all lockdown mandates from Sacramento.  Absent our county, six northern California counties have joined in a publicized protest (here) of the governor’s wrong-headed program to fight the C19 virus at great cost to the state’s private and public sectors.  Gavin Newsom, along with other Dem governors, sees this as another opportunity to ratchet up the state’s power over citizens, power once institutionalized that will be hard for citizens to walk back once the crisis is over.  ‘How Louisiana Reopened After Hurricane Katrina’ is only a recent example of how the government takes and keeps.  Closer to home, Nevada County has now issued a formal legal lockdown order that is to stay in force until 15 May 2020 (here).  The document is beyond byzantine government-speak with detailed exceptions that continue for pages and can be gratuitously interpreted 20 ways from Sunday.  Reading such prolific verbiage always makes me wonder again what happens to otherwise normal and reasonable people after they enter politics.  To various degrees they all become tainted personages who confirm their obvious blemishes by posturing themselves as being exalted by their positions of power.

[29apr20 update]  Anti-C19 drugs are on a rollercoaster ride of acceptability.  First we heard good things about re-purposing hydroxychloroquine (HCL) plus additives as being both a C19 prophylactic and a curative, then the lamestream screamed at Trump for suggesting its use and studies were dug up to show that it didn’t work.  The same happened to Gilead’s Remdesivir, first it was good (here), then it was totally ineffective according to the lamestream.  Now it looks like both HCL and Remdesivir are back up on the C19 Pharma Hit Parade.  As of 1030 29apr20 the Dow is up 609 (2.55%) on news of a most comprehensive study showing that Remdesivir works (here and here), and also other studies coming in showing that HCL also works (here).  A kicker for this news is that several pharma companies developing C19 vaccines report progress is being made much faster than the experts anticipated with at least two candidates going into early human trials.

[30apr20 update]  C19 mortality rates.  A correspondent sent me a link to a website (here) that specializes in collecting data and making information out of it.  Of current interest are the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.  This posting covers the age and health factors on C19 deaths.  Analysis of the data delivers the punchline – “both aging and being unhealthy, separately, contribute to a greater risk of dying from Covid.  The risk from being unhealthy, though, is far greater.”  This important finding is backed up by numerous clearly laid out charts and tables from which I lifted the one below.  (Actually, TypePad is partially up right now, but won't accept graphics for posting.  1may20 - and now it will.)

[1may20 update]  More C19 data to assuage the TDS sufferers who can read.

[2may20 update]  The mentality of the Nevada County BoS.  The Supes shut down our local ‘transfer station’ (aka county dump) for a week before wholesale public uproar made them rescind their dictum.  What haunts me about their action, as the most recent and locally accessible decision by government politicians, is how could they possibly have come to such a conclusion to limit the hours and number of vehicles that the Waste Management dump could, should, and would service in a day.  When some county staffer laid such a proposal before the Board, why was it not unanimously rejected in the first, say, 3 to 5 milliseconds?  Cleaning up junk from your household and land during an imposed lengthy quarantine is an extremely useful, rewarding, timely, and safe activity.  Packing your vehicle or trailer with junk and taking it to the dump exposes no one to unnecessary risk of infection, including to Waste Management’s workers who need their hours in this time of economic distress.  All that became obvious to our Supes only after they were overwhelmed with the public pushback that they had acted with blatant and palpable idiocy to compliantly place yet another such unreasonable restriction upon the citizenry.  The item of enduring interest is what went through their collective minds when they issued that edict.  The record shows that not a single supervisor stood to publicly oppose it.  Understanding this same process, as it is historically practiced by politically powerful assemblies at all levels across the land, is important for us as a free people, so that we can be vigilant and work hard to reduce and/or eliminate its effects on our lives.

 

Sandbox - 28apr20

[Autocracy rising, even more.  Two California docs dared cross the hallowed political divide of rope-selling capitalists at Google’s YouTube and give a reasoned criticism of California’s C19 lockdown diktat.  It made it on to YouTube, and then was promptly taken down by its corporatist toadies. (more here)  Meanwhile, Gov Nuisance appears to start seeing a difference between rural and urban counties in his promised new look at how to release the state from its insane economic self-immolation.  gjr]

Hunker Down Diary – 27apr20

George Rebane

Today is HD51 for the Rebanes.  As most people, we have been doing extensive Facetime with family and friends, and Zooming in for meetings.  We also meet surreptitiously for dinners with equally hunkered family and friends. The rest of the time is taken up with household chores and deskwork.  RR readers know what I’ve been noodling about.  Jo Ann has been busy with her Republican Women Federated, NC Republican Central Committee,  and Union editorial board work.  My labors on the boards of MIM and SESF have been minimal since the C19 lockdown.  And now that the weather guessers are predicting warm weather going forward as far as the eye can see, it’s time to get the farm going and the horseshoe court spiffed up for competition.

We are also participating in weekly online cocktail sessions with other couples.  These have turned out to be more fun than we anticipated, and all of us look forward to the next week’s happy hours.  So all in all, social life continues along newly created paths.  We always have a fire going during the evenings which are divided into TV nights and reading nights.  The TV fare is all prerecorded stuff of various series, new/commentary programs, movies, and documentaries.  (Years ago, we pretty much weaned ourselves off of live broadcasts, everything gets put on the DVR – we pace the presentations, they don’t pace us.  I suppose everyone now does that so it’s hard to see why advertisers still pay to advertise, unless some people still watch live TV.)

Today we had to make a trip into town for bags of soil and sand – soil for Jo Ann’s farm and sand for refurbishing my world-class horseshoe court.  She gets the best manmade soil you can buy which contains all the nummies that her veggies want, including 15% chickenshit.  Long ago we decided not to run the numbers on the actual cost of our vegetables – we’re not in competition with Safeway, but they are with us.  It has turned out to be a labor of love and the pure joy of eating loads of home-grown veggies.  We even enjoy the late night hunts for tomato worms with our UV flashlight.

But my big report of the day is that regardless of what our out-of-step governor dictates, the people of Nevada County are not staying at home.  Traffic on the roads and Brunswick Basin was somewhere between normal and heavy.  The nursery parking lot was so full with people coming and going that they had two clerks out there directing traffic.  Picking up sand at B&C was no different.  The entire shopping center’s parking lot was full of cars, and the store full of  people.  More than half the people were not wearing masks.  It is clear that it is the people who have ended the lockdown – rural Californians are not waiting for the word from Sacramento.  The only thing we are still waiting for is the county to get their jackboot off our necks and let the restaurants, bars, churches, and theaters open up for sit-down food, worship, and entertainment.

Sometime in the not too distant future I’d like to see some constitutional legal beagles from the Left argue the legality of the government’s peremptory shutdown and destruction of our economy and social life.  From my perch, this has not been the finest hour for enterprising and independent America.  And now the data is coming in from multiple sources overseas and within our borders that national lockdowns are wrongheaded and more dangerous, most certainly in the long run, than hunkering down.  (more here)

Scattershots – 25apr20 (updated 27apr20)

George Rebane

The C19 timeline again shows that the WSJ does not walk on journalistic water.  In its 29jan20 edition the newspaper published a whopping load of bullcrap, reporting that “Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told President Trump the coronavirus epidemic was under control.” Turns out he said no such thing, nor did he say/imply a number of other claims that the article by Rebecca Ballhaus and Stephanie Armour reported.  The Federalist has a detailed timeline (here) that should dispel the other lies that also continue from the Left’s lamestream about how Trump’s administration fell down on the job responding to C19.  Should be interesting reading, especially for those suffering from chronic TDS.

Death by ‘doctor’.  Longtime RR readers know of the respect I have for the medical industry that is lead by the untouchables who hubristically exhibit their exalted position in our society and resort to high dudgeon whenever their opinions or performance is called into question by the lay public.  It turns out that I have been a bit soft on the sawbones and the whole lot that supports them when I have cited that they and theirs kill almost 200,000 of us annually through what are swept under the rug as “under-recognized medical mistakes”.  Well I was wrong.  Johns Hopkins Medicine, you know the data guys on C19, has just concluded a new study that shows “medical errors are now the third leading cause of death in US.” (more here)  Almost 10% of all US deaths are due to medical screw-ups.  Today that amounts to over a quarter million (251,454 to be exact) buckets kicked prematurely even way back in 2013.  What would you say if America’s airline industry plowed three wide-bodies chuck full of passengers into the mud every day, day-in and day-out, year after year?  And our political leaders and the media don’t make a peep.  They keep their high-flying jobs by making it very hard to get that MD after your name, and reducing the types of available healthcare providers who could more economically minister to our everyday ills.  ‘First and foremost, do no harm.’ (Primum non noceres’, as the ol’ Hypocrites used to say.)  Hah!  Double Hah! 

California’s next economic enema.  The state is in dire financial straits because of the way it has set up milking its high earners for tax revenues while buying votes from the welfare throngs who pay little or no taxes.  The Hoover Institution explains the matter here, and points out that “in every recession, California inflicts its own fiscal wounds by relying on a tax system "that is explicitly designed to collect gobs of revenue during booms, but which completely goes in the tank during downturns, much more so than any other state. … To give you a sense of the inefficiency of California’s tax system, consider California’s economy just after the financial crisis of a decade ago. In fiscal year 2010, California revenue fell by 20 percent, compared to less than a 2 percent drop in state GDP.”  And the double dummy Democrats in Sacramento have brought this upon all of us as the decades-long political custodians of the once Golden State.

[26apr20 update]  How to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.  From time to time RR presents various pieces of generally useful information as a public service.  This is a short video that summarizes the comprehensive recommendations from our authorities on how to correctly combat C19 in these trying times.

The C19 interviews with ‘experts’ and talking heads are getting beyond boring.  If you can predict exactly how the person will answer, it’s like playing the same record over and over again.  And it is very easy to do once you know whether the person is a Lefty or healthcare professional, or a Rightie.   If your choice was to add another trillion to the national debt or accept one more C19 death, then the answer for most people is easy and it bookends the dollar value of a human life.  And if your choice was to pay $10 more in annual taxes to save a particular person from dying, most people would pay, thereby establishing the other bookend value of a human life.  So now that we’ve established that human lives have a dollar value, we can cut the ‘… if it can save even one life, then we should …” crap.  The problem that makes TV interviews boring I covered in ‘Fighting C19’ where we illustrated the different utility functions for the Right, the Left, and the healthcare people in the middle.  The latter only concern themselves with policies that would save one more human life, so you know what they’re going to say.  The Right is concerned with saving the economy by assuming risks to minimize additional C19 deaths; the Left simply wants the economy to tank, preferably while keeping the death rate high.  After all November is just around the corner.  Meanwhile the pabulum pours out of the boobtube.  So, dear reader, if you’re a thinking person, how many additional dollars would you add to national debt to prevent another C19 death?

[27apr20 update]  Today’s WSJ reports on a “Secret Group of Scientists and Billionaires Pushing Trump on a Covid-19 Plan."  They are working around the clock to cull the world’s most promising research for what they describe as a virus-era Manhattan Project.” (here)  This self-identified group of “America’s top scientists and a collection of billionaires and industry titans” with high-access to the Trump administration has been doing a lot of research on C19.  They have published a short readable report on their conclusions to date that you can download here – Download Scientists_to_Stop_COVID19_2020_04_23_FINAL.  Bottom line, some of their pharma recommendations on repurposing of existing drugs are already dated (e.g. the hoped for effectiveness on Gilead’s remdesivir - here), but their assessment of tests and testing strategies are valid and totally in line with what my fevered brain deduced starting a month ago – no one knows jack about test reliabilities, and effective testing programs require tests administered wholesale and frequently to everyone who desires to be out and about.  The rest of today's hyper-ventilation about tests and testing is just that.  They give short shrift to herd immunity and see the conquest of C19 to be based on medicines and new vaccines.  Until then they accept the RR recommendation I gave (here and here) for getting our economy back on its feet.  

A Nation Risk Averse - Scared, Cowering, and Compliant

George Rebane

In the middle of the 20^th century we lived in a world filled with ‘unconquered’ infectious diseases that were both life threatening and life limiting.  Everything from measles to polio lurked in places unknown.  And, of course, we had the rates of mortality and morbidity to show for it.  Nevertheless, life went on in full recognition of the hidden dangers laying in wait.  None of us thought of shutting down the country and cowering in our homes until someone somewhere in authority would make the dangers go away.

The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic killed 50M worldwide and somewhere well above half million Americans died of the disease.  But life not only went on, it thrived in the years after WW1 with the country’s economy growing while people were still coming down with the virus and other maladies.  Little to no mention of the disease made the news nor required special government dispensations affecting the entire population.  The flu was there, it would stay for a while, and then it would go away – meanwhile try not to get sick.

The same happened later in the century when we weathered the ‘Asian flu’ in 1957 – over 110,000 deaths in the US and 1M worldwide.  And then there came the ‘Hong Kong flu’, another Asian flu in 1968 – 100,000 deaths in the US and 1.1M worldwide.  From the NIH we learn that “within the past one hundred years, four pandemics have resulted from the emergence of a novel influenza strain for which humans possessed little or no immunity: the H1N1 Spanish flu (1918), the H2N2 Asian flu (1957), the H3N2 Hong Kong flu (1968), and the H1N1 swine flu (2009).”  They summarize these pandemics in the following table.

And then there were others like the avian or ‘bird flu’ which killed 70,000 Americans; and even more - it’s all very confusing.  But the bottom line is that people didn’t lose jobs, companies didn’t go out of business, the fed and state governments didn’t go autocratic, no one panicked, life went on.

Hunker Down Diary – 23apr20 (updated)

George Rebane

We are now in HD47 and watching how the national lockdown has slowly turned from a health safety policy to yet another political match between the Left and the Trump administration.  These days we do a lot of reading about C19, recognizing new data on the extent of existing herd immunity, greatly lowered death rates, and contagion numbers a bit higher than the annual flu, in addition to the curves already being flattened.  And therefore, by our lights it’s long-past time to end the lockdown; at least start a rapid phased loosening of commerce that’s based on regional factors.

It is clear which side wants maximum misery and economic disruption/destruction in these months leading up to the election.  The party with no policy but continuing criticism of those fighting the pandemic is working wonders to rend the country during this global pandemic.

In the meantime, we note that Placerville has already appealed to Gov Newsom about pulling back on his ‘one size fits all’ statewide C19 proscriptions so favored by socialists.  Placerville correctly argues that it is a low-density rural town which does not compare with LA and the other metro areas of the state.  Meanwhile, our own county and city governments continue to meekly toe the lockdown line, making not a discernible peep to Sacramento as to the growing insanity and hardship of practicing the statewide policy in these foothills.  The correct way forward here is to let the shops and public spaces open, and then deal with any jackboot responses from state bureaucrats – always better to ask for forgiveness than permission.  What the hell can they do to us anyway as other states and regions of similar descriptions are already going on with their lives?

In the ‘don’t let a crisis go to waste’ department, we note that California has now issued a new set of guidelines to start statewide death panels in healthcare facilities like clinics and hospitals.  People will be scored based on age and health to determine their priority/access to healthcare.  The whole process is sold on the basis of “life-cycle considerations” to allocate treatment resources.  The idea being that older folks have already had enough enjoyment out of life, and since the younger ones haven’t, scores based on age should be used in allocating limited care.  There is no provision in these guidelines for other factors like the social contributions that many older people continue to provide their communities. (more here)

I think such an allocation policy has been done informally on a case-by-case basis for years, and I see nothing wrong with that practice.  But bureaucratized formalization is a giant step toward bringing the state into the middle of intimate doctor-patient relationships, and a notch away from new requirements for healthcare professionals having to request permission before providing this or that type of care, and then reporting what was provided and its aftermath.  As most of us know, once this kind of command/control starts, it is almost impossible to walk back.  And within the greater embrace of encroaching socialism, in America it has already started.

In the 23apr20 WSJ Dan Henninger writes a compelling column – ‘How We’ll Live With Coronavirus’ - wherein he argues that human nature will trump egregious lockdown policies, and people will learn to live with C19 as just another disease that needs to be recognized and dealt with in the daily round, much as we did with all the other dreaded diseases before we eventually conquered them.  Extended cowering has never been a prominent part of how people behave – save perhaps under the tender mercies of a KGB or Stasi.

[update] Newsom’s 6-point plan to lift lockdown was released about a week ago - I forgot to mention it above.  On the face of it, his plan ranges somewhere between cynical and insane.  For openers, most of its provisions are either unattainable or will only come to pass in the far future.  You can review them here.  His message to the state’s idiots is a warning that the dependers on relaxing the shutdown would hang on “science, not politics”.  Now that is one the largest cartloads of bullcrap any politician has delivered in a long time.  Of course his decision will depend on politics – the current delay in opening up already confirms it.  The many considerations that will go into his actual decision will be munged over only in the political arena, and science will enter in only for CYA purposes to camouflage some more partisan and self-serving factor that cannot be revealed to the public.

The whole thing reeks of the usual subterfuge used to cover the socialists’ perpetual campaign to remove citizens’ rights and freedoms.  I’m reminded of the ongoing 2A battle that cites ‘gun violence’ as its raison d’etre.  There the Left has been diligent in constructively abrogating our 2A rights.  How?  By not being able to directly confiscate our firearms, they instead continue to pass collateral laws and regulations which make their purchase, possession, storage, transport, use, and purchase of related equipments (e.g. ammo for openers) between difficult to illegal.  This approach works wonderfully with those in the land grouped under the ‘myth of the rational voter’ (cf. Bryan Caplan).

The Great Divide – A Solution RFP

'The goal of socialism is communism.'  Vladimir Lenin

George Rebane

This is another request for proposal to our leftwing fellow citizens to offer a solution to the irreparable Great Divide which has been instituted over the last 50 years in America, and continues to be widened daily.  Our Left and Right citizenry no longer shares a common history, values, mores, facts, humor, logic, ethics, science, economics, culture, national future, …, unto even our language for which the Left now has its own new lexicon, semantics, and proscribed usages. 

These pages give ample evidence, over a decade’s worth now amplified by the national emergency, that there is absolutely no common ground left between us upon which to meet.  We on the Right have recognized this for some time, and many essays have lamented this state of affairs.  We on the Right have also proposed, pursued, and continue to pursue solutions, all with a common basis that calls for various forms of orderly separation between the two ideologically riven peoples that results in a physical and political division of two more culturally cohesive populations.  The Left has ignored the problem almost in its entirety, and continues in its own way to understand the schism as arising from a primitive belief system that burdens a minor cohort of ignorant and evil Americans, beliefs that now should belong in the dustbin of history.

To date, the Left’s only semblance of a solution conforms to and seeks to repeat the 'solutions' of past collectivist regimes – identify, control, punish, and re-educate the remnants.  The Left wants neither a physical nor a political separation.  The Right’s view of the Left mostly mirrors theirs, and proposes solutions that hew to those exercised by our forebears and Founders.

So I am again soliciting from our leftwing readers to provide or point to a clear assessment of today’s ideological landscape in America, and methods to remedy the Great Divide in an orderly and non-violent manner, with a description of what such a fundamentally transformed America would then look like.  To give our opposites a firm set of starting blocks from which to launch such a proposal, I refer them to The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Engels, and The Progressive Manifesto (2003) by Anthony Giddens.

Surely someone of our local Left has a communicable vision of the America that they and theirs labor daily to bring about.  I will post for discussion on RR all such proposals under their authors' bylines.  Thank you.

Local Launch of Left’s New Covid-19 Narrative

George Rebane

The country’s Democrats are in a wholesale, smelly-sweat panic about the upcoming election – in reality a progressives’ pandemic.  They have wound up with an unelectable presidential candidate-in-waiting.  No one knows this better about Bumblebrain Biden than the DNC and its congressional leadership.  What to do?

The obvious answer - now that all the other years-long forays against Trump have not only come up empty, but also left the party’s faithful with maximum egg-on-face as November approaches  - is to loosen their lamestream lackeys along with its local acolytes with a new narrative about the causus belli du jour, and how President Trump mishandled the country’s C19 response, thereby causing thousands of additional deaths.

A long-languished letter

[Way back when, before C19 conquered the media, I was taken to task in its lead 13mar20 column by a Union reader about my views on the electoral college and democracy.  I submitted the following rebuttal which became a coronavirus casualty.  Its posting here is for the record, and an acknowledgement that not all my submissions get published.  So there.  gjr]

An Electoral College dialogue continued

Mr Dick Sciaroni wrote ‘Electoral College reform – it’s up to us’ in the 13mar20 Union, a measured and civil response to my 7mar20 Union column, ‘Democracy Destroys the Electoral College’, wherein he concludes with, “Is it time to reform the Electoral College system? Perhaps. It’s up to all of us, the citizens, to decide. That means dialogue, not diatribe.”  However, a more careful read of what I wrote would reveal that nowhere did I oppose a national dialogue on the continued utility of the Electoral College in the governance of our republic.  What I do oppose is the current approach to its sub-rosa and de facto elimination through the little known National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Mr Sciaroni writes, “The Founders’ decision how they should choose a president should have no overriding claim on 21st century America such that we cannot change it. After all, we are talking about our government. It’s ours. Why can’t we change it?”  In this he implies that I oppose any such change.  I don’t, but I do oppose what’s going on now.  The NPVIC is intended to surreptitiously sidestep a national dialogue, and most certainly subvert a constitutional process, through the leftwing mainstream media’s daily diatribes that call for a precipitous elimination of the Electoral College.  I highly doubt that more than one in a hundred Americans are aware of the NPVIC’s existence, its role in eliminating our EC, and current progress toward that goal – all happening without the national dialogue which Mr Sciaroni and I would welcome. 

In his piece, nowhere did Mr Sciaroni acknowledge that my arguments were directed against imposing governance by direct democracy on large diverse populations, in accord with our Framers.  Instead he did repeat the Left’s talking points that the configuration of the EC by our Framers was a devious stratagem to keep wealthy white men in power, and therefore is now a dated construct of our government that needs major overhaul, and perhaps removal altogether.

And his main point about the pervasive role of money in our elections ignores recent evidence that undermines his arguments.  In 2016 Hillary outspent Trump by far, in the current election Steyer, Bloomberg, and Bernie have all outspent our former VP Biden, and most certainly President Trump.  Yes, modern campaigns demand more funding to get out the message, but the evidence at hand is that it still continues to be the message, not the money that shapes the voters’ preferences.  In sum, such evidence should weigh heavily to counter Mr Sciaroni’s “final analysis” wherein he maintains that “the downside of the Electoral College is that it works hand-in-glove with moneyed interests to give a small number of people – not surprisingly, white males – access to the presidency of a country in which they are the decided minority.”  By all means, let us all talk about this.

George Rebane is a retired systems scientist in Nevada County who blogs on Rebane’s Ruminations.

Sandbox – 21apr20

[We will now witness the latest tsunami of lies from the demonic Dems as the country begins to loosen its C19 quarantine restrictions state by state, and region by region.  The lamestream’s central theme will be the amplification of ‘profits before people’ that will be carried out by rightwing gun nuts and bible thumpers according to the dictates of Wall Street and its evil corporations.  gjr]

Testing to determine population fractions – extended (updated 23apr20)

George Rebane

In ‘Testing to determine population fractions’ I introduced the reliability aspect of tests for both infection and immunity.  This is still not a serious consideration brought up in the daily WH C19 briefings, and, of course, nothing of this level of complexity is covered in the media for various reasons ranging from the acumen of their ‘journalists’ to the media-perceived acumen of their audiences.  Here we are not deterred by such deficits.

In the referenced post the strong point was made that it is not appropriate to take the uncorrected fraction of tests positive from a random sample, and apply that to the target population from which the sample was drawn.  The correction formula was derived and illustrated, along with how errors in the poorly known test sensitivities and specificities propagate into even the corrected estimates of target population fractions.  Since then I’ve done more work to graphically illustrate these mathematics in a visually accessible manner by introducing the population fraction correction surface on which these mathematical concepts can be illustrated for the non-technical reader.  The updated technical note that explains all this can be downloaded here - Download TN2004-2v200420  The figure below is a sample of the explained correction surface for a scenario in which 45% of the tested sample yielded positive test results.  Two tests of different reliability are shown in the figure, details in the technical note.

[21apr20 update]  Tonight we hear from the FDA that more than 50 different immunity testing kits are being developed by the private sector, and submitted for regulatory approval by the agency along with corroborating data derived from the companies’ “self-validations”.  But the FDA's report and subsequent questions from the nation's top reporters sitting in the WH press room are woefully inadequate for any inquiring mind.  Not one word is said about what kind of test reliability data will be required, collected, and supplied from the self-validations.  (Readers who understand and care know that the seminal information about ANY test includes first and foremost its sensitivity and specificity numbers along with their error bounds.  Without those numbers, the rest is bullshit.)  And not one word is said or asked about what kind of testing is intended to support what kind of C19 response policies.  Again, the simple inclusion of the word ‘testing’ in the media blather is considered sufficient for a nation seen as consisting overwhelmingly of double dummies.

[23apr20 update]  Bootstrapping parameters for a new test.  There may be times when we want to introduce into field use a new test for reasons having, perhaps, to do with cost, ease of application, rapid results turnaround, etc.  We want to get the new test online as quickly as possible, which requires that we also must quickly determine its performance parameters without having to go through the more lengthy and costly formal process.  Given the development in the above described TN2004-2, a method for bootstrapping such parameters for a new test is introduced in TN2004-3 which can be downloaded here -  Download TN2004-3v200425

Ruminations – 20apr20

George Rebane

“We are all in this together.”  Who make up the “we”?  What defines the “this”?  Porter Stansberry makes a very compelling cast that this assertion by the governments and their loyal lackies is the Big Lie of today (here)  – we are not all in this together, and the ‘this’ is different for all of us who live in various regions of the country. Its main purpose is to convince good-hearted people to overlook the realities of the C19 epidemic and follow the ever more invasive and pervasive dicta of the authorities who laying in command and control procedures that will survive the end of the epidemic by decades.  What’s happening now that we’re hunkering down is training us to accept a whole slew of new constraints on the liberties that our Constitution guarantees.  Again, harbinger Numero Uno is when they come for our guns.

The Great Divide confirmed more than ever.  Cohesive nation-states have always come together and shown their fundamental unity when confronting an external threat or national emergency.  America has been a posterchild of such unity since the War Between the States (erroneously still called the Civil War).  No more.  As we have been observing now for over a decade, the divisions between us today are unfathomable and too large to overcome.  Nowhere is this demonstrated with greater unambiguity than in our response to the C19 pandemic.  Here in this election year, one party is doing its best to heal the nation and return to normalcy, while the evil party is doing everything possible to extend the human misery, bring longterm destruction to our economy, and blame America under the current administration for any and all ills across the world.  Their goal is to bring the US to its knees as the disease abates, in order to present the global collective a fundamentally transformed nation that is weak, compliant, and chastened.

Under ‘Autocracy Rising’ we are getting reports of new egregious behaviors by our LE cadres as they start imitating Stasi tactics across the land during this pandemic.  One Florida student who caught C19-type symptoms on a high school band trip and recovered, posted her experience on Instagram.  The school became enraged and sicked the local cops on her.  These showed up at her residence and threatened to “start taking people to jail” for “disorderly conduct” unless she immediately removed her post, which she did.  Later it was pointed out that our Constitution makes no “pandemic exception” for denying 1A rights.  Sign of the times – bend over and spread ‘em. (more here)

More on Autocracy Rising - NYC mayor and its Stasi’s Oberführer Bill de Blasio is now exhorting New Yorkers to report social distancing infractions by neighbors to the authorities (here). He wants the citizen snitch to take a picture of the scofflaws, and send it immediately to the police so that “we can get help there to fix the problem.”  Gotta love them Dems – give ‘em an inch, and they’ll take … .

C19 - a rose by any other name would …

‘For yourself, never seek justice, only mercy.’ Coach Dick Beedy

George Rebane

The pathogen causing today’s worldwide pandemic is referred to by many labels – novel coronavirus, Covid-19, 2019-nCoV, SARS-CoV-2, Wuhan virus, CCP virus, China virus, … .  The politically correct don’t want to attach a “stigmatizing” name to anything that may gore the reputation of one of their champions in today’s ongoing ideological narrative that propagandizes and defends their vision of a brave new world, so the WHO selected Covid-19 as its official name to the virus.

My own penchant for labels favors those that have the fewest readily-available characters, eschewing all unnecessary delimiters (which are also characters), and that unambiguously identify that which is labeled.  As a bleeding edge techie all my life, I’ve enjoyed the pleasure of giving new names to countless things just discovered, invented, developed, … that never had a name, let alone a short spiffy name or a distinguishing TLA (three letter acronym).

After reviewing the plethora of labels for our current dastardly ‘bug’, I said what the hell, and referred to it simply as C19 in these pages – writing or speaking elsewhere, I pick a more communicative label from the above list.  Nevertheless, I have been taken to task here by one of our more tightly-wound, assiduous intellects, and longtime readers with a technical background.  His point is not so much that RR readers would misunderstand, as it is that C19 doesn’t accurately and repeatedly focus blame on the country, ideology, and political party to blame for loosing this dreadful disease on the world, nor is it the technically correct label for the virus.

He has a point worth considering on the ‘blame’ component of his criticism – screw the technically correct part.  Since I am a dedicated anti-communist, anti-collectivist ideologue of established repute (I suspect it’s in my double-helix), I should take every opportunity to dun the dastardly sumbiches of the CCP when writing about C19.  After all, the CCP lays uncontested claim to operating history’s biggest murder machine on mankind, having killed hundreds of millions of people, and making life a misery for more hundreds of millions.

But then again, I’m also a somewhat lazy sumbich, especially when in the white heat of laying down some thoughts on the keyboard.  So for the time being at least, I will go on using C19 in these pages, and, without prejudice, continue suffering the subsequent slings and arrows that may still come my way.

What is the purpose of testing???

George Rebane

This may be the most definitive evidence that dumbth is the established order of the day in America.  Everyone has been screaming about testing, and continues that to this minute.  But no one has told us why test – what kind of metric is testing supposed to provide to public policy makers, and how will it be used to support those policies.  I would think that this would be something that we would be briefed on instead of hearing from one side that there are not enough tests, and the other citing the numbers of tests that have been administered and shipped.

The dumbest thing I hear from the daily briefings is that we have now given over 3 million infection tests – really!!?  BFD!  What the hell are you going to do with the results of 3 million infection tests, results obtained willy-nilly from all over the country over the last 5-6 weeks?  I don’t hear the Drs Fauci or Birx telling us jack about how the test results will be used.  And what should be even more amazing – but is not – is that our crack journalists, double dummies all, have never thought to even consider asking for the purpose of testing.

Some silly shit answer like, ‘well, it’ll tell the healthcare people if the tested person has C19’ – so what?!  If the sumbich already feels poorly with C19 symptoms, it isn’t the test that’s going to get him admitted into a clinic or hospital.  And if he isn’t symptomatic, then it’s pure happenstance that a serendipitous test of unknown reliability tests positive, and he’s then advised to get off the streets, and wait until his symptoms appear before he bothers anyone.

And then some other worthy will explain to the peanut gallery that we need testing to find out the extent of the pandemic and identify new C19 hot spots early.  Does anyone at NIH or CDC have a clue about the kind of testing program required – its extent, frequency, and duration – for that??  We hope that someone there passed a stats class somewhere in their career, but today they sure as hell don’t act like it. 

Infection testing needs to be conducted continuously on random samples drawn from critical target populations – remember, infection tests are snapshots the results of which can and do change overnight.  To be fair, Dr Fauci last night finally acknowledged that neither the US nor any other country has the ability to do the kind of infection testing for early identification of hot spots.  And don’t get me started again on factoring in test reliabilities into any kind of a non-existent organized testing program; no one has even made a peep about that. 

Immunity (antibody/antigen) testing gives time-dependent enduring results that tells us the extent of herd immunity that may already exist in a target population.  However, Dr Birx also finally admitted that today’s immunity test reliabilities are so bad that it’s futile to use them with any confidence to determine the recovered share of target populations.  When and if such tests become reliable, at that point if the recovered share is sufficiently high, then even ‘lives over profits’ policy makers can start staging back-to-work policies.  And if the recovered population grows too slowly, then that advises that the target population is hunkering down too hard, and we again need to loosen things up a mite to start making progress against C19.

But in the meantime, what in hell is going on out there with our political leaders and their teams of so-called ‘experts’??  Given what we can and cannot do in the testing field, the known attributes of C19, and the general dynamics of virulent epidemics, it’s past time to start a programmed loosening up of America’s commerce.

Scattershots – 15apr20 (updated 18apr20)

George Rebane

For a progressive the content value of delivered messages depend only on the correct credentials of the messenger. 

Autocracy rising.  Granted that all the federal and state hunker-down mandates have taken a big bite out of our civil liberties (here and here), we witness and read daily of people being stopped, harrassed, arrested, and even handcuffed for engaging in non-infectious activities like walking in the woods, surfing alone, riding a bike, driving a car, … .  Given their head to control and dictate, government workers are becoming more autocratic, hubristic, and commanding in their relations with regular citizens.  Don’t get me wrong, they were no paragons of helpful knowledge and assistance in the best of times, but now we get regular reports of everyone from law enforcement people to clerks behind counters beginning to act like the caricature authorities of tyrannies like the USSR, East Germany, Red China, Iran, Cuba, … .  In such behaviors these bureaucrats have predictably wrapped themselves in the mantle of inflexible machines executing pre-programmed and unwavering dicta from on high.  I recently ran into that on an call to our Rood Center on an administrative manner.  The response between now and then was markedly different.  And it’s all being helped by the legions of naïfs who continue to repeat the mantra, ‘It can’t happen here, cause we’re Mericans.’

“Bernie’s an American original”, embellished Barack Obama during his announced support for his former VP Joe Biden.  Calling Sanders a “man who has devoted his life to giving voice to working people’s hopes”, Obama kind of goes off the rails because the record of all of Sanders’ proposed policies would have reduced the number of jobs available to working people, grown government, and made those same working people de facto wards of the state.  An ‘American original’ indeed; Obama’s intellect has never embraced history (among other pursuits), so he doesn’t realize that Comrade Bernie is nothing but a clone of old school Moscow.

Sandbox - 14apr20

[While I'm much in favor of opening up the economy sooner than later, I can't understand the Trump/Cuomo pissing match now going on (here).  The President is all wet in asserting that it is only he who gets "to call the shots" on opening up the country.  The country was not 'closed' on the basis of some federal imperative, and so it does not stand that it awaits the President's removal of such a non-existent imperative.  In the meanwhile, the governors are in charge of lawful public intercourse in their states.  As usual, Trump is burning  up political capital better put to use elsewhere, and the lamestream is eating it up.  gjr]

The Second Wave of Covid-19 (updated 15apr20)

George Rebane

[A rewrite of this piece for broader audiences - 'The big decision and the second wave' - appeared in the 18apr20 online and print editions of The Union.]

As we start to turn the corner on the initial wave of C19 infections sweeping the land, people are already talking about the second wave and what it may look like after we carefully restart the economy.  I did some noodling with Epidyne about what a second wave might look like as it takes another cut at us in California.  Our state is thought to have had a large TBD fraction of people who already became immune last fall and early this year through asymptomatic infections.  This is plausible from what we now know about the 2019 timeline of the Wuhan virus.

This assumption goes a long way to explaining why California’s infection, morbidity, and mortality numbers are so low, especially since we are one of the major Asia gateways into the US.  The bottom line here is that we in our state already had developed a high level of herd immunity (q.v.) when the real C19 hit the country in early February of this year.

I ran a number of scenarios of a second wave using the latest CDC max reproduction rate of 2.6 which gets whittled down as herd immunity grows.  And everyone now says that the Germans have calculated the most accurate death rate of 0.4% of the infected for developed country healthcare systems.  Using these numbers on California’s 40M population, and letting the immunity fraction from the first wave vary from 0% (no one became immune) as an unrealistic bookend, to 50%, which most epidemiologists now think is closer to truth, I generated the infected population curves shown below.

The Epidyne model (here) illustrates the highly non-linear nature of epidemic spread experienced in populations with various levels of herd immunity.  We see the impact of the disease weakening as the percent immune increases in a fairly orderly way with little change in the second wave’s onset and its duration.  This begins to markedly change as the immune percentage passes 30%.  Then we see the curves flattening out with a delayed onset and a longer duration.  Keep in mind that the infected cohort is made up of the asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, and those requiring professional medical attention.  The latter comprising of about 10% of the infected according to the latest figures.  It is also from this cohort that we derive the mortality numbers.

The table below shows the maximum infected, the maximum hospital load, and the number deceased for the second wave as a function of the initial percent immune.

From the graph above we see that the duration of the wave for the lower immunities is about 2.5 months, and for immunities above 40% the epidemic’s onset is later, of lower intensity, and lasts about 3 to 3.5 months.

We must also note that the above numbers don’t reflect any imposition of a second statewide quarantine.  Were we to take a more reasoned look at what kind of second wave we would have, I would agree with those who calculate that California’s immunity percentage would be very close to 50% coming out of the first wave that includes the cohort of pre-first wave immunities.  Of course, if a second widespread quarantine is imposed that impacted proportionately the uninfected vulnerable and immune populations, then the intensity curves would all be lower and also more spread out.

Important in all this policy making is the ability to conduct immunity (antibody/antigen) testing on random samples from the state.  I have extensively discussed testing previously (here and here), and also introduced readers to Epidyne (here).  And when all is said and done on running these numbers, it sure looks like we should be ready soon to loosen the reins on our economy, and then not be too apprehensive about the so-called second wave - it will be quite manageable.

[update]  So what all should policy makers actually consider as they wrestle with the decision of when and how to reopen the economy?  Items definitely to include involve and understanding of the scenarios I have illustrated above regarding second wave infections.  (We assume they have access to spread models at least as powerful as Epidyne.)  But before that, one needs to take a measure of the situation in answering the question, what is and/or should be the immunity level in the target population I’m considering opening up.  From above we saw that the immunity level should be somewhere north of 40% so that herd immunity can kick in and reduce the severity of the second wave after we have again started doing business in the land.

That decision will again involve another round of testing a random sample drawn from such a population.  This time the test will be for the presence of immunizing antibodies/antigens, and these tests will also have their own levels reliability expressed in their sensitivities and specificities.  More formally these are respectively the probabilities of test positive given the presence of the ‘antis’, here P⁺. and test positive when no ‘antis’ are present, here P^-.  I explained the whole process here, for those needing a review.

The remainder of this update has a couple of squigglies in it that makes it easier to read from this pdf - Download SecondWaveUpdate 

[15apr20 update]  The Epidyne second wave results shown above are now beginning to be described by prominent contagious disease experts and epidemiologists in interviews and columns that forebode ill if C19 returns to a population with a still WIP herd immunity.  They are now doing some Monday morning quarterbacking on the governments' policies of people quarantining, sequestering themselves at home, and social distancing on their infrequent forays to gather their necessaries (more here). Their arguments about “unintended consequences”, of course, make sense.  All epidemics burn themselves out primarily through the beneficial action of herd immunity among the survivors of the disease (else they just kill everyone infected).  But herd immunity is inhibited by premature and too comprehensive and longlasting quarantines.  This means that once the people are ‘released’, any residual contagious agents will necessarily reinfect and start the disease cycle all over again.  I have illustrated that with the Epidyne spread model, generating a number of epidemic return scenarios as a function of various levels of herd immunity being in place when society was opened up again.

Documentary on the origin of the CCP virus

George Rebane

A reader sent me an interesting piece in the Epoch Times, an independent non-partisan news outfit rapidly gaining a reputation for their no-nonsense reporting.  They have put some effort into assembling a detailed documentary video on the origin of C19, aka CCP virus, aka Covid-19, aka (longer and more detailed labels).  The information presented in this documentary (here) is definitely explosive if some other name news outfit or organization confirms their findings.  I was impressed that respected syndicated columnist and China expert Gordon Chang lends his name to this documentary.  Those who on a reasonable basis reject the evidence presented in this somewhat exhaustive journalistic enterprise, then have a lot of counter evidence to present.  American Thinker picks up on this story here.

A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place

[This was submitted by reader and Nevada County resident Don Bessee.  It is posted as received. gjr]

Don Bessee

Commercial activity in Residentially Zoned neighborhoods is fundamentally in conflict with their land use protections that everyone agreed to when they signed their title papers that included mandated disclosures.

There are allowed things like piano lessons and day care and there are limits on the traffic those produce in your neighborhood that are meant to protect your peace and personal space.

There is a concept that your home is your castle, but I would submit that your home is your place to relax and enjoy the fact we live in a pine forest and the joy that brings to us all. Avian joys as well as the critters wandering around who are not threatened by us. Ticks notwithstanding.  A tranquil island of peace in a sea of turbulence if you will.

For some reason the County is considering an assault on our homeowner’s rights by expanding COMMERCIAL activity in peaceful residentially zoned neighborhoods.

They are still looking to abuse the neighborhoods again by trying to repeal or grossly modify the OUTDOOR EVEN ORDIANCE that became necessary to protect our neighborhood from folks that didn’t care about your block’s peace or your property values. It was all about the Benjamin’s for those abusers.

Some years ago there were people who disrespected their neighborhoods to grab a quick buck and endangered their Fire Evacuation routes in spite of their zoning not allowing their commercial party plans. It was the Road Association Folks who were having their pockets picked for road maintenance to support 1 properties commercial parties that led the way from across the county to stop it with the outdoor event ordinance.

The wedding planners who did not want to pay their way were incredibly aggressive against the neighborhoods in the committee that developed the ordinance with rhetoric that did not stand up to the actual wedding license activity record. Then Chair Beason bought their own industrial journal to refute the spin and hyperbole! I believe the video is still available.

Then Chair of the Board Beason and Supervisor Anderson were on that committee with me that included department heads, County Council,  both sides of the issue as well as Fire,  Law Enforcement to speak to the reality on the ground and the very real fire threat to Neighborhoods as well as Environmental Health issues.

Code has no presence on Friday afternoon to Monday to protect you and they knew it.  That’s why we need the Sheriff to protect the neighborhoods peace on the weekends.

Recently I was being lobbied with the line that the hospitality industry was crushed by the heartless Outdoor Event Ordinance.

Yet again the facts do not support the narrative no matter who is repeating the tired narratives.

The numbers tell the story as they always do.

Weddings are a trackable metric with the license data just like they were the last time around.

The average number of wedding licenses issued in Nevada County over the last 5 years was 453.

In 2015 there 435 licenses issued.

In 2016 there were 480 wedding licenses and that was very near the highest ever.

In 2017 there were 465 licenses issued.

In 2018 there were 432 licenses issued.

In 2019 there were 457 wedding licenses issued in Nevada County.

If you live in LOP or lake WW you might think its not your issue because of your CC& R’s that won’t allow a property to do that there.

The real financial threat my friends is that they want to do for profit events that will not generate new business but just cannibalize the business of those venues that have to pay a ton to support their commercial infrastructure in the properly zoned areas such as country clubs and event centers.

The idea to double the allowable events to 8 from 4 in your neighborhood is intolerable.

1 Saturday event in your neighborhood means trucks moving in on Friday to setup then departing, the event and all the cars of the attendees in and out, then another caravan to breakdown on Sunday.

Does that sound like something you want 8 times a year in your neighborhood?

The Ag tourism project portion of this proposal looks totally viable and appropriate.

If you live in a R1 or RA neighborhood then you are threatened by this erosion of your established rights as a homeowner. If you live in WW or LOP the financial stability of your country club/restaurant is at risk.

Tell your supervisors what you think of this assault on neighborhood rights.

He is Risen!

George Rebane

Hearing that strong assertion, the Christian answers joyfully, ‘He is risen indeed!’

For us, Christmas is the promise, and Easter its fulfillment.  The summation of all Christianity is Christ’s covenant in the promised transcendence of Man, all concentrated into one simple declaration – ‘He is risen!’  Without this, our faith is a fraud; with it, Christianity promises Man to become an unending part of God’s love of all Creation.

Hunker Down Diary – 11apr20 (updated 12apr20)

George Rebane

Today is HD35 for the Rebanes.  And all things considered on our ridge top overlooking Deer Creek Canyon and the Central Valley, we are doing well.  We’ve gone out twice now for groceries and haven’t even come close to hitting our ‘large scale emergency’ stash.  We continue to meet online with our respective organizations, and there has been plenty of time for books and projects.  Most of you have caught a whiff of my squiggly pushing projects, specifically in epidemic spread modeling and testing.  Playing different scenarios through these models has been both revealing and educational (I’ll share some of these in the by and by.)  

I am a dyed-in-the-wool numbers guy and confirm daily that people who don’t know the numbers on any given issue, don’t know what they’re talking about.  And knowing the numbers is just the start on the road to understanding anything in the public arena – then you run into things like different utilities to support decisions, and various collections of knowledge shared by decision makers.  What is most frustrating to me is how little our government bureaucrats know what is going on, and what it takes to gather such knowledge.

The medical industry has never impressed me, quite the opposite.  They are primarily good-hearted technicians and journeymen operating in the dark, trying to follow dated rules and regulations while suffering through the usual human frustrations and weaknesses.  As covered elsewhere, their mistakes cause around 200,000 deaths annually.  The only hope to make that industry more beneficial to society is to allow its practitioners to have more freedom to devise and apply better methods for healing, and allow entrepreneurs easier access to bring the fruits of their labors to bear on the sick and suffering.  Instead, we appear to be going exactly in the opposite direction both by bumbling and on misguided purpose – half of us want to supersize regulatory control and apply central one-size-for-all planning.

Testing to determine population fractions

George Rebane

In ‘Testing’s Tower of Babel’ I promised to inform readers of the reliability of testing in order to determine the fraction of a target population that has a defined attribute.  Today the whole country is supposed to be interested in the extent of the C19 infection, and also the extent of the recovery from the disease.  Such test results are supposed to inform government policy makers about the stage of the pandemic, and whether to respond with more draconian quarantines or begin reviving the nation’s economy – important information indeed.

Let me begin with the punchline of this treatise – to determine a population fraction is more complex than people (and policy makers) are led to believe, and the ‘naïve’ approach of just taking the number of those testing positive from a random sample and dividing that by the size of the sample gives answers that are significantly in error.  That is apparent by just recognizing that a real test is unreliable, having less than perfect sensitivity – it misses infected people – and also specificity – it counts some uninfected as infected.  Such a test will give a wrong answer for the fraction infected when using the naïve approach on a tested random sample from the target population.

That motivated me to take a closer look, and after pushing some squigglies, the solution to calculating the correct fraction of infected emerged.  As expected, the formula involves sample size, and the test’s reliability parameters.  All such theoretical developments need confirmation, so I wrote a program to simulate real test results that takes into account errors in all parameter values involved in such testing.  The results were heartening, the derived correction formula nails the actual infected fraction, its confidence bounds are easily computed from the relevant input error distributions.

I provide the supporting details for all this in a technical note that you can download here – Download TN2004-2

As a teaser for some more noodling about assessing the state and progress of the C19 pandemic, we read that it’s not only the Chinese who have been lying through their teeth about what happened in Wuhan and what is still going on in the country.  Our own mavens of morbidity have not been all that professional and meticulous about the data they publish.  Here is a piece in the American Thinker that exposes our CDC which now confesses to having lied about C19 death stats.  In ‘The CDC Confesses to Lying About COVID-19 Death Numbers’ we read, “How many people have actually died from COVID-19 is anyone’s guess … but based on how death certificates are being filled out, you can be certain the number is substantially lower than what we are being told.  Based on inaccurate, incomplete data people are being terrorized by fearmongers into relinquishing cherished freedoms.” (H/T to reader)

This also has a bearing on testing.  When composing a random sample, how do we treat those in the sample who have recently died of C19 (or something else) or have already been diagnosed with C19?  Different approaches will inform different policy decisions.  Our media are not smart enough to either understand or report on any of these considerations.  And does anyone really care about such details, beyond just using their misunderstandings to cast aspersions at each other from their ideological perches?

Now for the downside on the call for all this testing.  No one knows how reliable the tests are, especially the new ones. (more here)  Somehow all of that has passed by our entire news industry, showing again what kind of pikers they are.  Since we know neither the average sensitivity and specificity of the tests, nor their probabilistic dispersions, all of these calls for testing are nothing short of an exercise in politics and emotions.  Has anyone even heard Drs Fauci or Brix bringing up test reliability, or showing even a smidgen of concern about that overarching reality in the use of tests and testing????  We'll see what kind of interest RR readers show in this issue.

Sandbox - 8apr20

[I again remind readers that the Sandbox is for opinions, insights, and issues not covered in my other recent topical commentaries and posts.  Now isn't this blog a pain in the ass?  gjr]

Dropout Derby - 8apr20

George Rebane

And then there was one, but perhaps not quite.  Comrade Bernie bites the dust because he couldn't motivate anyone besides his clatch of useful idiots to back his campaign, and it turns out that not many of those dolts actually vote.  So left standing, or is it tottering, is ol' Uncle Joe the existential Bumblebrain of the Democratic Party.  The reason I am not closing out this Dropout Derby today is that methinks the DNC has something up its sleeve - you do recall that to those masterminds our primaries don't mean a thing if it doesn't deliver the swing to their preferred candidate?  And there stands in the wings Gov Andy of Albany, dutifully denying that he has any interest in the presidency, which of course is his consuming interest.  The good governor, along with President Trump, are both using their 'leadership on parade' in this C19 crisis as the perfect platform from which to campaign during this extended period of social distancing and online politicking about who didn't do what when.  This will be an historical presidential campaign in ways that we have yet to count.  In any case, this derby will end when the Dems choose their champion for November, and not a day before.  (The astute reader will recognize that this delay makes no never mind, since either way Bumblebrain will be the last to 'drop out' of the race.)

Hunker Down Diary – 8apr20

George Rebane

Today is HD32 for the Rebanes.  Yesterday morning we strapped on our pitifully sparse PPE (masks and gloves) and went to our usual Safeway to replenish the larder – we brought home a ton of veggies, canned goodies, and fresh pieces of dead animals.  The store had only one door open through which the customers were being metered – there was no line to get in and the people density was low.  Nevertheless, shelves containing paper products, sanitary supplies, and staples like flour were empty.  The last was important to me since I’m a baker and have baked ALL of our bread for the last 23 years.

For such things the dictum still holds that shortages and empty shelves will be the order of the day until all closets in America are filled with what people fear most doing without.  Fortunately, we have practiced the full closet FIFO system since we first were married and immediately witnessed the buying panic in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis (people suddenly preparing for WW3).  Actually, I already came with that kind of household policy which was hardwired into me by my parents through the WW2 years and then more years in post-war DP camps.  It has served us well, and I recommend it to all families as do our Mormon brethren – when society churns, it’s good to stay at home until at least some of the smoke clears.

Anyway, we’ve been home doing all kinds of projects, continuing our organizational meetings online, having FaceTime cocktail hours with friends, and even venturing a couple of visits to a neighbor and our local daughter, both households carrying out equal hunker down policies.  I’ve also been busy pushing squigglies on various C19 analyses, another one which I will post today.  It’s interesting that RR’s commenter cohort could care less for anything quantitative or technical, but I take heart in all that through an extensive correspondence and telecons with STEM oriented friends and colleagues who are also squiggly savvy and share my criterion for what’s really required to understand the issues du jour.  Fun time.

On this same thread, I find myself revisiting the question as to why I continue to bother posting on socio-political topics and issues, especially since I have pretty much shot my wad on how this pilgrim views the world about all things considered.  Any reader who cares, has at his disposal my entire ontology.  The only answer to that puzzle that comes up is RR’s readership; I feel that they have become part of my greater circle, perhaps even my greater family whose ongoing presence with their insights, reports, opinions, … I get a measure if not a corroboration of my picture of the world’s goings on that I update continuously.  In any case, the jury’s still out.

More later?