Rebane's Ruminations

Riot Reflections (updated)

George Rebane

The videod murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police gave rise to justified public protests that quickly turned into destructive and violent riots which have little to do with the death of Mr Floyd, and instead have again revealed that we Americans are no longer ‘one people’ who can be called to ‘come together’.

Law enforcement agencies of all stripes provide daily demonstrations that they are an institution unto themselves, there to overwhelmingly look after their own interests and provide little or no security for those who pay them to preserve society and civilization.  As clearly admitted by the Minneapolis police chief who publicly stated the reason his officers are standing back, standing down, and hightailing it from rioters is that he does not want to put them in harm’s way in situations that could turn dangerous.  Think about that.  What if firemen would only fight unrisky fires?  What if the FBI adopted a similar policy, no field operations in which their agents were put at risk?  What if the Secret Service would protect the President only to the extent that it would not be dangerous to them?  What if our military didn’t want to commit troops into situations in which casualties would result?

So the police et al, those who do attend the riots now taking place in cities across the land, simply gather in solid self-defensive phalanxes to watch the rioting mob loot and burn.  Over the lamestream media we are informed in an ongoing stream of commentary that these are not riots (a word absent in lamestream reports) led by criminal thugs, but simply justified “protests” attended by “protesters”.  The rest of us are told by our politicians that any criminality that is evident is justified, and that we must simply let it play out.  Actually, its more than that as FN’s Tucker Carlson explained in a landmark monologue last night – ‘Our leaders have sided with the agents of chaos – we're told crimes of the mob are our fault’.

Local business owners who witness their life’s work and savings go up in flames are seen pleading with the mob to no avail.  Some are again taking up arms to defend their lives and livelihoods, and most cynically, the police are arresting those who dare shoot (at) rioters inside their premises in acts of arson and looting.

No doubt one can draw a connection between the lengthy pandemic lockdowns and the number of urban dwellers eager to get out of their houses and small apartments to protest undeniable injustices at the hands of law enforcement and our entire ‘justice system’.  But in doing so, they do underline that we are not one people as former DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile asserts in her ‘We are one people’.  The rioters are not people who built this country, as they claim, and are therefore entitled to ‘burn it down’.  These are people who have their very own and distinct social contract with the institutions of our government – contrary to their protestations, they have rights and privileges, demonstrated daily, that people like me and mine wouldn’t dream of having in a civilized society.

Here’s an interesting question – what would the police do if law abiding folks of all colors showed up armed in downtowns to protect and defend the properties and property owners against the rioting mobs?

And here’s an even more interesting question – what would local governments and law enforcement agencies do if the streets were filled with peaceful protesters of all colors who looked like you and me?

And finally – what if all those law-abiding peaceful protesters against LE injustice showed up also demonstrating why Americans are unique with their constitutional 2A rights?

[update] A reader sent me a link to a Powerline article on the Twin Cities riots.  It appears that both Democrat Mayors Jacob Frey and Melvin Carter are doing their best to dodge any and all responsibility for what's going down in their mismanaged metropolises, even to the anticipated desperate accusation that the riots are being instigated by out-of-state "white supremacists".  How do self-respecting Democrats elect such misfits to office?  (more here and here)

Ruminations – 29may20 (updated)

George Rebane

How soon they forget - “The accusation that Trump got rid of a pandemic office is among the left’s politicized attacks on the White House since the coronavirus outbreak began. The administration assembled a coronavirus task force run by Vice President Mike Pence to address security and medical issues.”  This was echoed in chorus by all of our local leftwing lackies who took their cue from the lamestream.  (H/T to reader and more here)

Fauci the Fickle – 28may20 edition.  “Fauci changes tune, now says second COVID-19 wave may never happen — and mask-wearing is symbolic.”  (more here) How’s that tune go? ‘First you say you do, and then you don’t, …’  Never mind Dr Fauci, Dr Rebane says that unless we miraculously get everyone vaccinated in time, the second wave is inevitable with the high likelihood that it will be a small fraction of the first wave.

Bejing pissing on the Hong Kong parade. (here)  Now there’s a puzzle, or maybe not.  HK is the acknowledged “cash cow” for the mainland, handling much of the foreign investments into the Chinese economy, and Chinese IPOs placed on foreign exchanges.  Screwing with the contracted freedoms of this principality will cripple the cow or even kill it.  Is the CCP now so brittle that it is scared of HK’s freedom virus spreading to the mainland when that possibility is added to the lack of progress Beijing has made with reintegrating Taiwan?  From my perch, the answer is Yes.

[update] “Donald Trump knows nothing about the strength of Minneapolis,” said the liberal Mayor Jacob Frey in an early news conference this morning.  Don’t know what all we need to know about the city after watching understandably justified peaceful protests turn into mobs looting and burning.  Am reminded of a Rodney King joke that quoted tongue-in-cheek a white resident of Simi Valley (home of one officer on trial who was involved in the King beating), ‘If they find those police officers guilty, you bet we’re gonna burn down our town!’

Speaking of President Trump and Minneapolis – I think he stuck his foot in it again.  Have no idea which of his constituencies he was trying to impress with the tweets that were definitely untimely and off-the-mark.  Don’t get me wrong, naming the looting and burning thugs in Minneapolis as “thugs” was not wrong, but it was a sophomoric political error compounded by his threat to send in Minnesota’s National Guard, which under our system of federalism, the state’s governor already has done.  All this grandstanding does is give the TDS crowd more fuel to ignite nationwide fires.

All published pandemic data and information is now both wrong and the remainder highly suspect.  Here and across the world we continue to receive a torrent of reports about the virus’s death counts, case numbers, recoveries, etc, a couple of days later which turn out to be the stuff that you shovel out of a stall, all disguised as the sober and considered prescriptions and proscriptions from our elected ‘honorables’ and degreed ‘experts’ citing science and medicine.  And since most of it comes to us through the media filter of double-dummy and/or agenda-driven reporters (aka ‘journalists’), we have very little idea of what’s really happening, and how we should respond.  Your governments in peace and war.  [more update]  Just received this little tidbit from a reader to underline the above.  It now appears that all the bad juju about HCQ that was recently blasted out by the TDS crowd was a bit premature.  No less than the NYT had to publish a 'Hold on there' report citing unsettled science.

‘Seize the Moment’

George Rebane

So exhorts The Economist (here), Britain’s famous weekly ‘newspaper’ since 1843 that has metamorphosed over the years into a leftwing trumpet with an international audience.  The lead editorial in its 23may20 issue counsels countries, especially the US, to use the coronavirus pandemic to include in their government aid machinations additional laws, regulations, codes, restrictions, taxes, fees, fines, … to advance the global socialist agenda while their citizens are focused on maintaining health and hearth.

The number one supernumerary policy having nothing to do with the pandemic relief involves climate change legislation and subsidies.  They are more open than Team Pelosi about not wasting this crisis – “The covid-19 crisis reveals how hard it will be to tackle climate change – and creates a unique chance to do so.”  Specific recommendations focus on first instigating new “carbon pricing”, their code for passing massive new carbon taxes which “schemes” they claim will “use the power of the market to incentivise consumers and firms to cut their emissions, thus ensuring that the shift from carbon happens in the most efficient way possible.”

Anyone with even a smidgen of capitalism in their veins knows that such government dictates have nothing to do with “the power of the market”.  In enforcing the use of uneconomical alternative energy sources with the government gun simply mangles the markets beyond recognition, and in its wake leaves an economy mired in ‘mother-may-I’ mandates that will impede economic recovery wherever it seeks purchase to climb out of its current hole.

Socialists use their gross misunderstanding (or cynical ignoring) of the ‘Broken Windows Fallacy’ (here) first illuminated by Frederic Bastiat a little after The Economist was launched.  In his ‘That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen’ Bastiat introduces us to the important economic concepts of “crowding out” which denies the existence of “idle resources”, and the little recognized distinction between wealth and employment.  The parable has a hooligan break a baker’s window which act is ameliorated, actually even celebrated, by onlookers as being beneficial to the economy in that it now will create extra business for the glazier when the baker spends to replace his broken window (that which is seen).  However, this creates no new wealth or work since the baker had other uses for the money he lost, uses that would have expanded his business creating more wealth and other income for his suppliers (that which is not seen).

Socialist economists like Paul Krugman agree with the crowd in the fable, and in their ideologically-blindered, profound ignorance don’t recognize that “if that which is not seen is taken into consideration, because it is a negative fact, as well as that which is seen, because it is a positive fact, it will be understood that neither industry in general, nor the sum total of national labor, is affected, whether windows are broken or not.”  And so it will go with the funding and created jobs of climate change to replace existing, cheap energy sources, with manmade make-work before the market is ready to accept them.  We will never know what other unseen advances and social benefits we will deny ourselves by implementing such still uncompetitive ‘sustainable energy sources’ through the seen artifices like punitive carbon taxing.

Which now brings us to the more fundamental crisis that pre-dates the pandemic – why our country is terminally polarized and “why we hate each other”.  The real answer to those questions is more often than not papered over by various kinds of feel-good pabulum.  An example is the op-ed ‘Why We Hate Each Other’ by Scottie Hart in the 28may20 Union.  She cites “solid research” by sociologists that point the finger at our loneliness being caused by modern technology-induced isolation.  Put simply, our online virtual relationships are not cutting it.  “A wide array of prominent health organizations now recognize deep, pervasive loneliness as a major public health issue, eroding our lives and often prematurely ending them. … Even before COVID-19, long-term trends have changed, and will continue to change our lives. As we negotiate the enormous shift from an industrial, manufacturing world to a near-virtual, technological world, it is no wonder we feel disoriented and vulnerable.”

Ms Hart is a self-avowed, good-hearted liberal who totally misses the deeper schism between us.  The country now is home to two cohorts of citizens with profoundly different beliefs about what constitutes a beneficial and preferred socio-economic structure for maximizing our quality of life.  Those of the various flavors of the collectivist Left see an ever-encompassing growing government that will ultimately provide succor, sufficiency, equality, and social justice to all its citizens through central planning and control, a social structure in which citizens will gladly trade their liberties and freedom for promised risk-free living where the meritocratic competition between the competent and incompetent will be banished forever.  This course has been successfully pursued now for over fifty years, and there is no indication that it will do anything but accelerate.

The various flavors of the conservetarian Right see the Left’s pursuits as leading to an enforced egalitarian amalgam ruled over by a corrupt elite that wields all power.  Given all the diverse human frailties, the Right recognizes that life does contain more than a modicum of risk for any individual in their pursuit of happiness.  But that risk is worth taking within a society that recognizes and promotes individual initiative and enterprise, with all the necessary freedoms and liberties, under a social contract based on laws under which we are all treated equally.  And yes, the outcomes there will be unequal where those who can and do will naturally want to provide for those who can’t or won’t in order to maintain the social order.

Such views are intrinsically incompatible within one sovereign nation-state, and that is why we are polarized and, as the Ms Harts among us observe, that we ‘hate each other’.  Today we are two incompatible countries trying to live within a single border under an increasingly dysfunctional state.

Factors Fighting the Pandemic

George Rebane

This is a simple and straightforward influence factors diagram that relates the relevant aspects in the policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.  The salient influences are indicated by the arrows with plus/minus signs at the destination arrow heads.  A plus ‘+’ indicates that the influencing factor and influenced factor go up and down together.  A minus ‘-‘ indicates that the influencing factor causes the opposite effect in the influenced factor.  Capice?  (more here)

It should not be too difficult to identify the virtuous and vicious cycles in the diagram, and relate them to what’s happening as America’s federal and state governments respond to the pandemic.

Scattershots – 26may20

George Rebane

What is the death rate of those infected with SARS-Cov-2 (here C19)?  Well, the more we try to find out, the more it gets curiouser and curiouser.  The latest attempt to explain the whole matter to us is put forth by Reason magazine in their ‘Do the Divergent Results of COVID-19 Antibody Studies Reflect Real Differences?’  Their quest for the answer was launched with the premise “The infection fatality rate (IFR) probably varies from one place to another.”  Well, no sh!+ Red Ryder, you’d think?  Then after a head-spinning discussion, about all the reader can walk away with is that IFR varies anywhere from 0.0005 to 0.013.  And IFR is strongly correlated with old age, especially those with preexisting comorbidities.  But then a little later, someone concludes that, no matter your age, it’s actually mainly your preexisting comorbidity that determines your probability of dying, and old age is just a prominent proxy for that since almost all old people have one kind of preexisting malady or other.  But what brought a smile to my face was their attempt to buttress the piece by injecting numbers.  All kinds of talk about test 'specifities' and disease 'prevalence', and the resulting 'positive predictive values' were bandied about which the reader is supposedly able to follow with their numbers.  But it turns out that none of it could be followed because nowhere do they bring up, let alone cite, the related test sensitivities without which their discussion is a meaningless jumble.  The point they try and fail to make is that which I presented in ‘Image of ignorance and/or incompetence’ along with its preceding tutorials on testing.  The bottom line here is that to understand how C19 relates to the mostly insane current response policies is almost impossible.  Since everything, like IFR, depends on so many different factors, to get even a glimmer, one has to have more than a smidgen of numeracy under their belt.  And if you’re going to publish something about it, you’d better be at least numerate.  Today none of that is a prerequisite before spouting volumes about the pandemic.

This PAN-DEM-IC looks like a DEM-PANIC when we consider how the Dems are doing everything they can to blame the whole shebang on President Trump – everything from the economy to the number of deaths attributed to the corona virus.  A reader sent an article from American Thinker (here) that details the whole thing, including why cooking the books on the body count has become a cynical political football.  November is coming and the Democrats are desperate to making something stick on Trump before they have to let Bumblebrain out of the basement.  No matter who the DNC picks for Biden’s VP, I bet they will demand that the presidential debate(s) will be presented in a tag-team format so that Bumblebrain will have someone with him on stage who can talk – otherwise it will be a bloodbath.

Memorial Day – 25 May 2020

George Rebane

On this Memorial Day we reflect on the words of General Jack Keane (Ret) about those who risked all - "None of them wanted to die, certainly. What's different about them is that they were willing to and they were willing to put at risk everything that they care about, you know, having a long life, having friends in your life, being a parent, having love in your life to love and to be loved, … People said, 'Why would they do that?' I've been around these troops forever and I think the answer is, it's pretty simple. ... It's out of a very simple yet profound sense of duty. And it's also because they do it for one another. And I think that's true honor. And we can never, ever take that devotion for granted."  (H/T to RR commenter)

Hunker Down Diary – 23may20

George Rebane

Competition is the only cure for incompetence.

On this Memorial Day weekend today is HD77 for Jo Ann and me.  Even though we have not left the county, we have taken a number of ‘essential’ trips to the grocery, nursery, and hardware store.  We have also had a number of essential dinners with family and local friends, and continue our Facetime cocktail hours.  Jo Ann has her farm planted for this year, and everything appears to be on track for a bountiful summer and fall.  I overdid it on splitting firewood; we now have enough to finish out this season and much of next season.  Both of us keep attending Zoomed meetings of the various organizations in which we are active.

As political animals, we maintain ferocious reading and writing schedules.  For better or worse (currently still worse), we have not touched our portfolio during the recent wild dip and roller coaster recovery.  So far so good.  I am having a great time rummaging around the technical sides of epidemic science and management.  Readers know my thoughts on the amount and kind of ‘science’ that has been brought to bear on this coronavirus pandemic here in America and also in other developed countries.  As more and more people begin to understand and admit, there is little or no science that is evident in the measurement and/or management of this disease (you heard it first here two months ago).  The whole C19 affair is a dreadful self-inflicted farce that continues to play out in the healthcare and economic sectors.

The record of pronouncements by both our national and state healthcare professionals, and political leaders illustrate a growing tsunami of contradictory statements regaling us with predictions, prescriptions, policies, and prohibitions which range between the comical and insane.  Basically, no one knows anything definitive about how/what to measure that can be used to track and support a coherent set of response policies.  Everyone is flying by the seat of their pants under the rubric, repeated with the greatest gravitas, that ‘we will be guided by science and not politics’.  Given the bevy of brown numbers that continue to flow from universities and alphabet-soup agencies, the real national and state responses long ago succumbed to exactly the opposite guidance – what little science there is about dealing with the coronavirus, it doesn’t have a chance.  In the meantime, people are revolting against the lockdowns and betting on herd immunity until a vaccine makes its debut from the wings.  Actually, it’s only half the people who understand the real desolation that economic destitution brings, the other half don’t have a clue and believe in the tooth fairy, endless newly printed money, and the states’ national guards mobilized to work the farms, deliver the goods, and staff the grocery stores, until the all-clear is sounded by Drs Fauci and Brix.  (more here)

And to put a ribbon on it or add insult to injury, we here on Hind Tit Rd (aka Cement Hill Rd) suffered our second power outage in a week.  Don’t know what the boys and girls at PG&E are doing, but they ain’t doing it right.  I again draw your kind attention to my above tagline.

Fair, Balanced, and Scared Sh!+less (updated 25may20)

George Rebane

‘Fair, balanced, and unafraid’ has been the smug, self-preening tagline for Fox News, most prominently used by Bret Baier as the sign-off to his daily flagship Special Report program.  Perhaps that was once true, but during the last couple of years FN has changed by markedly migrating toward the lamestream media.  While still covering news items totally absent or buried on leftwing outlets, the network bends over backward to feature as many progressive guests and commentators as possible on every issue of current interest.  Today it is literally impossible for a middle-road viewer to determine the ideological bent of most of FN’s programming during the 24-hour cycle.  The only exceptions to this are perhaps Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham.  These, however, are balanced with other FN stars such as Chris Wallace with a marked and longstanding tilt to port.

The biggest change is that the palpable lies and propaganda narratives of leftwing guests and interviewees are no longer challenged for their verity.  These days the leftwinger can tell an obvious whopper, and the FN host will go on to the next question or subject without so much as lifting an eyebrow.   Led by Baier and Martha McCallum, the remaining daytime FN personalities do everything they can to avoid controversy on the air, and therefore leave its viewers to sort things out as they witness equal time and voice given to leftwing opinions and interpretations that not only go unchallenged, but are presented as having equal weight with any and all opposing opinions and interpretations.  Is it really fair to present obvious falsehoods without so-much as giving the audience some factual context within which to interpret such assertions?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not asking FN to limit featuring its parade of leftwingers making news and shaping opinions.  But I am asking all so-called journalists to have the guts, then and there, to call out the obvious lies and baseless opinions of their guests, be they from the Right or Left.  (As RR’s polarized commenters have been doing for years.) And here’s the critical question every media interviewer should have the timely wits and courage to ask their guests each time they land a load of crap onto the airwaves –

‘Your viewpoint is fairly controversial, where can our viewers go to see the evidence that made you say that?’

Timidly scurrying on to the next question or topic doesn’t cut it for the claim of being ‘Fair, balanced, and unafraid.’  Time to reinstall that backbone.

[25may20 update] 'The ‘Liberal Leaning’ Media Has Passed Its Tipping Point’, so confirms Van Gordon Sauter, former president of CBS News.  This is the belated point that many on the national scene are finally beginning to recognize.  A phenomenon that became apparent to many of us at the grassroots level years ago (RR stands on its 14-year record).  No one well-read on the socio-politics of America for the last 50 years believes that the country’s Fourth Estate will ever regain its credibility - journalists are all biased ideologues lying to their audiences about being 'fair and balanced'.  All we are now doing is the Great Divide two-step that is becoming more pronounced with every passing month.  Any semblance of a middle ground disappeared years ago.  Look at the 14-year record of RR comment streams, which confirm an unpretentious, simple yet significant reflection of Main Street America’s understanding, beliefs, and sentiments.

Scattershots – 17may20 (updated 19may20)

George Rebane

Two-faced reporting.  How many times have we seen the same liberal reporter be comfortable with two distinct narratives depending on whether they are on FN or NPR, CNN, or any other lamestream outlet.  Unfortunately, NPR’s politics correspondent and a woman of gravitas, Mara Liasson is such a two-faced journalist.  As an FN panelist for years, she always presents very balanced views of the topics discussed.  However, when we see her elsewhere, especially on NPR’s home turf, Mara becomes an extremely convincing hyper-partisan with an extremely effective delivery of the current TDS narrative.  Last Saturday morning Mara did her pirouette from Trump-the-Russian-colluder to Trump-the-one-who-Russia-put-in-the-WH.  With her even pitched alto voice she intoned how “All of our intelligence agencies agree that Russia influenced our election in Trump’s favor”.  With that assertion she would have been eaten alive on FN.  There was no discernment between ‘sought to influence’ (for which there is evidence), and “influenced” (for which successful fait accompli there is absolutely no evidence).  But Mara, a true patriot of the progressive cause, let her NPR audience know again that Trump’s 2016 victory remains illegitimate and a fraud perpetrated by a foreign power.  And frosting on the cake was her accusation that Trump attempted to “cover up Russia’s influence”(??!!), all which is the new post-collusion narrative heading into the election now that the four-year collusion farce has proved to be an embarrassment.

‘Largest ever DMT survey travels to the fringes of psychedelic science’.  This psychedelic drug – also known as psilocybin and formally N,N-dimethyltryptamine – is today “on the cusp of final FDA approaval as groundbreaking PTSD (and suicide) treatment.”  An additional benefit of the widespread use of this drug will accrue to the elderly who often are depressed, lonely, and desperately are trying to stave off their fear of death.  DMT would literally then give them new lives for their remaining years.  (more here)

Obamagate – “… the fact is that we already have more compelling evidence that the Obama administration engaged in misconduct than we ever did for opening the Russian-collusion investigation.” (more here)  And this is not a conspiracy, it is instead the beginning of a large-scale criminal investigation that will be driven by evidence made widely accessible, and opposed by all the forces of collectivism and globalism that are taking an historic hit during this hyper-fabricated C19 ‘crisis’.  Having said that, the outcome is by no means certain, given the Left’s control of our media, education, entertainment, and the deluge of embedded dumbth that has already covered the land.  The proponents of Obamagate may well end up in re-education camps.

[18may20 update]  Sanctuary cities are popping up, much to the chagrin of lockdown liberals.  Atwater, CA is one of the latest as reported here in the American Thinker.  (H/T to reader)  I guess both sides can have sanctuary cities, “sanctuary from tyrannical government draining the lifeblood from the people”.  "The Dems are discovering that with sanctuary cities, what goes around ... comes around."  The Left’s sanctuary cities are designed to weaken America, and the Right’s are hell-bent on saving America.  In our Sandbox you can see the glee with which liberals report any rise in C19 cases, again confirming what future they all root for.

[19may20 update] Interesting column by George Boardman in the 19may20 Union (here).  His outline of the cases facing SCOTUS is informative and reveals just a tinge of his TDS and political leanings.  He also gives today's betting industry a treatment.  Bad news for sports-betting going forward, but he does encourage the ability to place bets on distinct outcomes of non-sports events like election winners, political appointments, sex-abuse allegations, etc.  Readers will recall that RR also described such a betting market with proceeds going to winner-designated charities.  All in all, Mr Boardman gave us some good food for thought.

Reopening the country is yet one more polarizing experience for America.  This is now beginning to be seen by national commentators in major publications.  Such an attitude toward returning to a healthy post-covid state of affairs was apparent to many of us two months ago.  RR readers were aware of and extensively started discussing this ‘perfect storm’ for progressives.  Writers like congress critter Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) asks and answers ‘Why Does Reopening Polarize Us?’, and he almost gets it right (here).  His labored insight is that “The divide over lockdowns reflects deeper differences in attitudes about risk, liberty and morality.”  Actually, he misses it on ‘risk’ and ‘morality’, but hey, batting 333 is good in any league.  The Dems have the exact same assessment of reopening risk as do the Repubs; both know that the economy will bloom again and the deaths will be minimal when we reopen.  The Right welcomes it, the Left is terrorized by it.  And morality as a guiding principle for the Left is and always has been a joke - recall cracked eggs and omelettes.  Today we hear a lot of them promote lockdown policies with use the old moral shibboleth, ‘If it saves even one life, then it’s worth doing.’  According to Rebane Doctrine, that competes for the all-time, most butt-stupid belief award, especially when held by public officials.

Covering anything beyond the C19 news is now a "diversion" as far as the Dems and their lamestream lackeys are concerned – that’s the new narrative.  Never mind what all else is going on in the world, and especially in the rapidly developing Obamagate case involving Gen Flynn and three years of Russia collusion lies fostered by federal agencies at the highest levels.  And a judge who is so far outside the law that it defies classification – a court is supposed to adjudicate cases that are brought to it by legal adversaries, when none exist, then the judge of the court has no legal basis for starting to beat the bushes in order to make/revive a case.  But that makes no never mind to the evil Dems, the only news that’s fit to print today involves only their allegations against the Trump administration.

Hear about the new regs prescribing how the NFL must recruit head coaches?  Yep, the gummint has a new role defined for itself.  Now each team looking for a new head coach must certify that it has included at least two, count ‘em, two blacks for the job.  There’s a new one for the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Any peoples willing to put up with this kind of bullshit deserves its chains.  As Pogo once said, ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.’

C19 testing continues as a source of abundant heat and no light.  The Dems are still screaming about the lack of testing.  All the while hundreds of thousands of test kits are sitting on shelves all over the country unwanted and unused.  No one yet has any idea about what kind of tests should be used in what kind of feasible testing programs to support what kind of public policy decisions.  The only use for ‘testing’ in America is as a political football played by politicians and watched by over 300 million double dummies who have no idea what the real issues are.  We just sit there and nod or shake our heads, depending … .  (example here) Check on Pogo, one mo’ tahme.

 

Unsettling ‘Settled Science’

George Rebane

None are so certain about science as those outside looking in.

Today, the SARS-CoV-2 (or Covid-19 or simply C19) pandemic ‘science’ in the public square rapidly became a mish-mash of unreliable reports, contending medical views, and ideologically tailored fake news.  One thing you can always take to the bank – people claiming ‘settled science’ is the litmus test for identifying the charlatans, the ignorant, and the ignorant charlatans.  Historically all important scientific advances were met with an overwhelming chorus of opposition from the entrenched establishment.  Their consistent theme was citing how the new was not in accord with the old, or worse, that the new directly contradicted the long and dearly held beliefs.  In our highly polarized and politicized society, it is safe to say that all reports purporting a solid scientific foundation are at a minimum suspect.

The C19 virus has been uniformly mischaracterized in the popular press and politics.  As more and more evidence climbs out from under widespread media (broadcast and internet) censorship, it becomes clear that the national lockdown was and continues to be a horrible mistake of yet to be tallied cost in lives and livelihoods.  And that lockdown was imposed by governments citing ‘science’ when no such science existed to support the mandates to shutdown commerce and impose stay-at-home.  It now turns out that C19 is only a bit more virulent than our seasonal flus, and the cited data claiming otherwise is dreadfully flawed and misreported.

Many reasoned, reasonable, and experienced voices have sought to counsel holding back on the draconian measures our politicians have imposed on the country.  An example of one of the more recent ones is epidemiologist Dr Knut Wittkowski, former head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science (here).  He points out that, far from being settled, the science around C19 is “bitterly contested”, as confirmed by anyone doing an internet search on the topic.  The bottom line that the expanding data on the pandemic now shows is that C19 is NOT significantly more dangerous than our usual infectious diseases (which don’t require forsaking freedoms and destroying economies), unless you have an age-related comorbidity.  And then you are in line to die anyway, either of an unfortunate C19 infection or something else.

Sadly, Americans don’t ‘do numbers’.  We are an overwhelmingly innumerate nation educated in dumbed-down public schools that have a decades-long record of abysmal and declining performance now imposed on the third generation of young people as documented by the National Center for Education Statistics of the Department of Education.  And when it comes to STEM-based knowledge, you can forget it.  As a population, we are at the mercy of the loudest demogauges that rise above the media cacophony, with no way to even reasonably assess alternative viewpoints and opinions.  We have found that the safe and sane way to handle the daily conflicts and conundrums is to adopt a simple set of beliefs, view everything through its lens, and comingle within a cohort of common, confirming, and comfortable minds.

Those who have spent their lives in and with science have an easier time and a natural inclination to say ‘it ain’t necessarily so’, and then use their skills to examine and evaluate alternative explanations.  But not everyone so blessed will voice such doubts if their job, livelihood, and/or reputation depends on swimming with the established school of thought that succors the correctly like-minded with grants, stipends, tenure, endowed chairs, published peer-approved papers, … .  And unfortunately, science is such a multi-variegated field that there is a lot of latitude in the words that can be chosen to support or remain circumspect about any scientific position.

Politicians like Governors Cuomo (NY) and Newsom (CA), and Mayors de Blasio (NYC) and Garcetti (LA) have been quick to tell their flocks that their lockdown and loosening mandates are based on science not politics.  And those carefully taught in their compliant constituencies have no available alternative than believe in the cited ‘science’ dispensed from on high.

At this point your columnist will usually offer a solution to get us out of today’s judiciously fabricated dilemma – ‘profits before people’ or ‘people before profits’.  Unfortunately, those of us having spent our lives in and with science can offer no science-based acceptable solution, because here it is all politics.  Today America’s answer to Keynes’ immortal question, ‘When I get new information, I change my mind.  What do you do?’, is a confidently calcified ‘Nothing.’

[Addendum]  People are now being told of herd immunity thresholds (HITs).  These are percentages of populations immune, at the crossing of which herd immunity kicks in and does the good things variously reputed to it – primarily starts tilting the number of currently infected curve downward.  M. Gomes et al have done a recent study of how individual variation in susceptibility and likelihood of exposure (actually exposure rate) to C19 would lower the herd immunity threshold (here).  It’s a technical paper with squigglies, but also fairly readable graphs, and therefore worth reading by the non-techie by just skipping over the obtuse parts and concentrating on what’s known, and what’s known to be unknown.

The takeaway is that at best today’s C19 HITs lie somewhere between 10% and 70% of target populations.  The authors also go into some detail on what is required to nail down a HIT, and doing it doesn’t look promising for any time soon.  The good news from the analysis is another corroboration that lockdowns do little to reduce morbidity or mortality.  Sooner or later the susceptibles have to come out, become the exposed, and get infected.  Depending on how many were hunkered down and now out-and-about, the next wave will be big or small.

So we come full circle on the argument presented here and elsewhere – do away with the lockdowns, and let people prudently go about their business knowing that there’s a bug out there that is likely to kill the elderly with comorbidities, against which there still is no vaccine, but for which the likelihood of your getting a debilitating infection starts out low and diminishes with every passing day as herd immunity increases.

Image of ignorance and/or incompetence (updated 14may20)

George Rebane

To again illustrate what we have been talking about the government’s basis for C19 policy decisions, the above graph and its annotation (from the 13may20 SacBee here) show raw test positive (TP) ratios over time, giving no hint of either the test’s reliability parameters, the tested sample (size and provenance), or knowledge that raw TP fractions are next to useless in low prevalence populations and need to be corrected to obtain actual population fractions to support policy decisions.  If any of these people, starting with WHO personnel and working down to the state level, claim to have a relevant education to qualify them for their positions, they have every right to demand a full tuition refund from the school(s) they attended.  Unfortunately, the beat goes on.

[update]  Here’s another example of what NO ONE is telling the unquestioning public, and no one knows to ask (or even cares as witnessed by RR commenters).  The graphic below shows two curves for a certain ‘infection test’ – the blue one is the probability of actually being currently infected with the C19 virus, given that your test came back positive; and the orange one gives the probability that you are free of the virus, given that your test came back negative.  The test's sensitivity, P(TP|V), and specificity, P(-TP|-V), are shown.  Our prevalence (fraction of population currently infected) is at most 5% or 0.05.  So if your test came back positive, the chance P(V|TP) that you actually had the disease is only 0.333 or one out of three.  That means that it’s two out of three that you are not infected.  However, at such a low prevalence if your test came back negative, the chance P(-V|-TP) that you don’t have the coronavirus is 0.9994, or almost certain that you are virus free.  The problem now is what are you or anyone else going to do with those test results.

Well, if you tested positive you can always request to be tested again.  Given that first positive, if the second test comes back positive again, your probability of having the virus jumps up to 0.826 or a little more than 9 out of 11.  If the second test comes back negative, then your probability of being infected drops to 0.027, or about 1 out of 40.  The question now is, what facilities will be available to do multiple testing on each individual so as to push the probability of infection or of no infection beyond some required threshold that determines what to do with the patient.  The answer is ‘no one knows’ because no one has considered these questions amid the cries for testing and more testing – there is no guidance to the states, and apparently the states aren’t smart enough to determine and announce their own probabilities and response thresholds.  Among all the shouting about testing, that’s the reality of how the pandemic is being handled by government healthcare ‘experts’.

[14may20 update]  As we have been telling readers, lockdown is NOT a solution - short or longterm. 'Stanford Antibody Studies Indicate No Safe Option for Eradicating COVID-19, Including Lockdown'.

Liberty’s Twilight - 13may20

George Rebane

Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in her Louisville, KY home when the police erroneously broke through her front door in the middle of the night seeking a narcotics suspect who was already in police custody.  Not knowing the invaders during the break-in, Ms Taylor’s boyfriend sought to defend themselves by shooting one of the assailants in the leg.  In the following melee the other police officers returned fire, pumping eight rounds into Ms Taylor and killing her.  Her boyfriend was arrested and charged with the attempted murder of a police officer.  The family is now suing the police department (more here).

Over the years we have lost count of this kind of mistaken killings of innocents by incompetent law enforcement agencies.  But that is not the real point here.  What’s germane is that our homes are no longer our castles.  We have no right to defend ourselves within the confines of our own four walls when LE executes one of its surprise assaults into our living quarters, our most inner sanctums.  These unnecessary attacks mimic criminal home invasions which now, according to the ever-growing leviathan, put the onus on the home owner to ascertain the identity of those breaking through his front door BEFORE he is allowed to start defending himself.  The assailant now has the de jure right to take the first shots at the victim.  And only after the assailant’s identity has been confirmed by the victim, can his defense begin.  Moreover, in some states it’s not even legal to ‘stand your ground’ in your own house if it is later determined that you could have retreated out of the back door or an open window.  The law has been stood on its head, and we sheeple must comply.

In a practical sense, there is never a need for LE to ambush someone with deadly force in a known residence.  The state always has the resources to surround the habitat and then make their presence known.  LE officers breaking and entering in the middle of the night is now an established tactic of state thuggery.  According to our Constitution and Rebane Doctrine, an American has every right to initiate the use of deadly force against any unidentified assailant who forcefully enters his home.  And an innocent man being accused of attempted murder of a police officer after such an incident is the beyond-cynical elimination of the last vestiges of justice that should be brought to bear after such a tragic incident.  Our quiet acceptance of these proceedings, just because it happened in distant Louisville, is testimony to how inured we all have become to the growth of our autocratic governments in these United States.

Testing – One mo’ tahme (updated 11may20)

George Rebane

The discussions about the procedures, reliability, timeliness, types, … of testing in the media, and even in these pages, can bring a smile to the lips of those with a modicum facility with numbers.  People still believe that testing for active infections at current levels (about 5%) of C19 prevalence is the secret sauce to stopping the epidemic within these shores.  The Left uses this argument to lambast Trump – if he’d only started test making and testing earlier, then none of this would have happened.  Any realistic look at the timing, what we knew when, and the logistics involved would reveal these arguments as sophomoric, destined for even more simple ears.

Contagious diseases spread through a population by a process in science known as diffusion, a physical process that is described by some really snarly partial differential equations.  As we have discussed in these pages, epidemiologists have broken it down into a couple of graspable concepts (to some) in the forms of “the basic reproductive number”, R0, and herd immunity.  R0 can be understood as the number of vulnerable people an infectious person will infect in a relatively short interval after becoming contagious, which is of the order of a week or less in a low prevalence population like ours today.  According to the CDC (‘High Contagiousness and Rapid Spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2’), the Wuhan population diffusion data indicated an initial R0 = [2.2-2.7] which subsequent analysis upped to R0 = 5.7, (95% CI 3.8–8.9).

The CDC paper gives even the technical reader a bit of a headache as to how their analysts handled the multiple levels of modeling complexities, each requiring the use of blatantly brown numbers to fill in for the unknowns and the barely perceived.  But CDC’s timing the receipt of the China data and its subsequent massagings again makes clear that there was no chance for anyone in America (or Europe) to have been sufficiently prescient to comply with the butt-stupid accusations of Trump’s mishandling preparations for the onset of C19 on these shores.  Unfortunately, it takes a technician with some appreciation for the math and probabilistics involved to understand how facetious these know-nothing charges from the Left are – however, the sheeple remain clueless and at the mercy of the loudest shouters.

But back to the numbers.  Today, 10may20, we are told that there are approximately 20K/day of new confirmed C19 cases, each of whom have already contributed their reproductive number of new cases that will become apparent in about a week.  We may safely assume that at least another 20K/day will remain asymptomatic, with each doing their R0 subrosa infections, and recovering on their own.  If we take the CDC’s low end R0 of about 2.5, then we have an infection doubling time of about a week.  That means that the 20K+20K infected individuals have now become 80K, with the symptomatic ones waiting to be discovered.  Now consider what level of infection testing is required to ferret out these 40K infected persons from a population of 330M containing, say, 20 high density, interacting (diffusing) sub-populations, before some of them become symptomatic, how many thousands will be missed by even the most comprehensive testing programs (which I have covered in detail), and what was the contacts fan-out for each of these infectious persons before they were taken off the streets.

It is this fan-out of contacts which now must be traced, tested, and quarantined in very short order.  And it doesn’t stop there, the fan-outs have fan-outs have …, I hope you get the idea how this expanding ripple-cum-tsunami works.  There aren’t enough tests, or timely and reliable testing procedures, or fan-out tracers to even make a pin prick in the numbers required to "control" C19 or any other human-to-human contagious disease in dense, high population areas, except perhaps at the earliest level when there are substantially fewer than maybe 100 infected, and when all response systems are assembled, alert, properly positioned, and ready to leap into action (think of the cost to maintain such systems at the ready in perpetuity, like the fire department or EMT).  And at such a low number of infecteds, the authorities will take a week or two to confirm what’s happening, then scratch their asses, and puzzle out some initial inevitably ineffective response.  That’s what happened, and will happened again and again.

OK boys and girls, can we all now spell ‘H-E-R-D  I-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y’, and then ‘V-A-C-C-I-N-E’?

[11may20 update] Well, well, well – we finally have someone from the medical community starting to think strategically about the realities of testing, something we’ve been doing on RR for almost two months.  Philadelphia cardiologist Dr Anish Koka offers his quantitative take on testing in ‘Why More Testing Won’t Solve The COVID-19 Crisis’ that concludes, “Inherent limitations of the tests we currently have make it unlikely that applying testing to the entire population is going to be very useful.”  His incomplete analysis ranges between confusing and clutsy, mainly because he doesn’t understand the role of Bayesian inference in computing the results from unreliable tests applied to populations with an estimated prevalence of a disease.  But not to put too fine a point on it, the published attempt is a start of actually dealing with the realworld factors of testing, factors which continue to be absent in today’s national C19 dialogue.  Innumeracy at our highest levels of leadership, let alone the know-nothing media, is such a curse in our nation, mostly because no gives a crap about such ignorance.  (RR shibboleth: If you don’t understand the numbers related to a social problem, then you don’t understand the problem and can only emote about it.)

Scattershots – 10may20 (updated 14may20)

George Rebane

Medicos' use of ventilators for C19 patients is changing.  It seems that the virus has exposed another major area of ignorance for us about the workings of the human body.  Some patients exhibit blood oxygen levels that were previously symptomatic of imminent organ failure and death, and their standard of care would call for immediate intubation.  Instead, they feel quite well (more here).  So the docs are holding back on strapping them into ventilators, which is correctly classified as an invasive treatment.  I bring this up in the context of my longstanding gimlet eye view of the entire medical profession.  With the many birthdays under my belt, I’ve had several opportunities as a systems engineer to work closely with some leading physicians in cardio-vascular and oncology fields developing decision algos and medical devices.  Bottom line, I have come to know the contours and boundaries of their professional knowledge bases.  None of them have the basis to deport themselves hubristically, and the good ones don’t.  In working with them, I have always been treated as a peer as we mutually acknowledged how the realworld has from time to time kicked us in the butt when we started behaving a bit uppity in thinking that we knew it all.  It is in this light, the counsel of our ‘healthcare heros’ should be taken with a grain of salt or two as they pontificate about C19 response policies.  A current example of this is the Left's fight against the use of HCQ in the treatment of early onset patients which continues in the comment stream and the 10may20 update to 'Fighting C19'.

South Korea’s second wave may be about to start.  Over 50 new cases traced to a single infectious bar hopper in Seoul have been registered, and most likely more on the way.  But that will not shut down SK’s economy; it will just give rise to some focused pullback measures.  We will undoubtedly have similar occurrences as we loosen our lockdown.  But when that happens, we can expect screams of anguish from the lamestream and additional demands to investigate Trump from the evil Dems.  To all of them, it will just be another blessing with which to torpedo the president’s re-election bid.

Teaching Western civilization has almost disappeared from academe.  Why?  Because white Europeans are a singularly evil race on this planet - the only ones to invade and treat other civilizations in manners unspeakably heartless.  To those of us who were first introduced to history when the subject was still an intellectual quest, we learned and confirmed from ample evidence that all civilizations of Man have expanded their domains and influence through conquest when that was possible.  And this has continued onto this day.  Historian Prof Andrew Roberts, of King’s College London and Stanford’s Hoover Institution, offers a compelling counter in his ‘Why We Must Teach Western Civilization’ wherein he makes the strong point that “the legacy of our culture is  unsurpassed in human history, to ignore it is an act of rank self-hatred.”  Our Left knows in the marrow of their bones that this knowledge dispersed will be the greatest impediment to achieving their Orwellian objectives, and they have acted accordingly.  (Readers recall one of RR's paramount shibboleths - 'I am a child, student, and defender of Western Civilization'.)

Consensus, consensus, wherefore art thou?  I recently opined again on the Great Divide, pointing out that we Americans are now a sorry lot, not being able to come together even in the face of a national emergency, instead using it to divide us further.  Kevin Wilson’s ‘Who Killed Consensus?’ expands on this.

[12may20 update]  Various media are attempting to inform their readers on simereasonable ways to understand economic recovery, specifically, what different measures of a recovery would look like.  The most accessible definitions involve plots of GDP that show the C19 dip, and then various paths back up (e.g. see 12may20 WSJ print edition graphs).  Looking at these attempts of explaining various ‘V-shaped’ vs ‘swoosh’ recoveries, we recall the stifling pace of the Obama recovery.  During those years RR readers were made aware of a better presentation (here) that may bear repeating now.  The bottom line is that recoveries come in many flavors, and most journalists and politicians don’t know what they’re talking about when they pontificate to the masses to whom recovery means only when it doesn’t hurt any more.

Today’s headline – ‘Fauci Warns of “Needless Suffering and Death” if U.S. Reopens Too Quickly’.  So what are you supposed of make of that profound tautology.  Well, start by trying to understand what some talking head or expert means by ‘needless’.   Does Fauci know of ways to remain hunkered down without some suffering and death; or continuing to hunker will result only in needed s&d; or are there ways of achieving the same pace of recovery by reopening later or at a different pace which then results in acceptable or ‘needed’ s&d; or … ?  You get the drift here.  Does anyone really know what such an obvious platitude means?  Most thinkers know the utility of such pabulum in the public media – it’s put out there for political reasons to be used by various proponents of various narratives.  While medical expertise was implied, none was delivered – Joe the Plumber could easily have brought us the same message with the same understanding and information content, but it would not have landed with the same political panache as from the now-iconic Dr Fauci.  We have to be aware of how we are carefully taught.

Lockdown Effectiveness - On WUWT David Middleton answers the question –

Biden knows NOTHING of the extensive Obama plot to destroy the Trump administration launched early in 2016 and carried out continuously since the President was inaugurated on 20 January 2017.   Bumblebrain has made extensive claims how he and Barack worked cheek-by-jowl to bring about all the ‘good things’ that he wants to take credit for while serving as Vice President.  But somehow and mysteriously, President Obama cut him out of the advise and consent loop when it came to the meticulously executed plan to eliminate Gen Mike Flynn from the Trump administration and destroy his private life.  Like the immortal Sgt Schultz of ‘Hogan’s Heros’, on the developing disgraceful Flynn scandal, Bumblebrain claims, ‘I know nothing, nothing!’

[14may20 update]  One of Nevada City’s communists Nory Fussel in the 14may20 Union writes about Jeff Bezos’ $140B wealth (here), and lets us know that his money really belongs to the government (‘the peehpul’).  His having earned that amount is “socially insane, immoral, and therefore almost certainly criminal”.  Not only is Ms Fussel an ideological idiot, she also has no concept of arithmetic, numbers, and the length of a year.  She tells us that if we could appropriate “only one-half of his stash, … (we could) write a check in the amount of $2,600 to each of the (27M unemployed)”.  To give you a real idea of her room temp IQ, the woman claims, “If you spent $1 million per day, every day since Jesus walked on earth, you would still not have (spent) $1 billion.”  Absolutely amazing – not only about her arithmetic, but because today it’s not only legal, but exemplary for her to submit a ballot that counts as much as your vote when everything is added up.  Now that's what the Left calls social justice.

 

Hunker Down Diary – 9may20

George Rebane

Today is HD63 in the Rebane household, and we are beginning to see little stirrings of sanity across California with even timid Nevada County showing signs of developing a C19 resistant backbone.  Now we are starting to see appeals from various late comers for letter writing campaigns to our electeds to exhort them to end our county’s lockdown.  In response, our Supes are now meeting in secret with the county health officer and others to develop plans to return to some semblance of normalcy, having taken the first baby step to loosen things to the level dictated from Sacramento (really a cop out, here).  Many other counties have more courageously and correctly led the state in returning their communities to prudent post-C19 environments of business, commerce, and social interaction.  That one-size-fits-all policies are wrong can be seen from the data on the disparate impact that the virus has had on our country. (here)

The upshot of it all, one that escapes many people and all progressives, is that we will sooner than later end the lockdown no matter what our command/control governments tell us.  This is an easy deduction, and one that RR (along with other conservatives) has attempted to communicate for the last two months.  We can open up quickly and purposefully with a set of broadly agreed prudent behaviors that are integrated into our new social contract, thereby saving the substantial part of our economy that remains and can launch into rapid recovery.  Or we can continue hunkering down toward a complete destruction of our economy so that unemployment rates go north of 50%, and result in a wholesale grassroots rebellion of a paupered citizenry with unpredictable results.

Local liberals lambast loosening lockdowns (updated)

George Rebane

As we and others across the country have pointed out, phasing out the C19 lockdowns has become the latest political chasm in the Great Divide.  You know that our country is now fundamentally transformed when it can no longer come together for a unified response to a national emergency.  It’s not a reach to conclude that had we this kind of schism in our citizenry in 1940, then the US entry and participation in WW2 would have been very different with historical consequences of creating a world we would not recognize today.

Our leftwing wants the country to suffer enormously and enduringly – first, in order to defeat Trump in November, and then to remain in a devastated state during which main street mobs will rise to demand a bigger government to save them.  Today the most reliable way for the Left to achieve this state of affairs is to maintain the economy destroying lockdown for as long as possible while buying votes wholesale with government checks drawn on newly printed money.

On the local scene we see this policy promoted daily in the pages of The Union by our county’s progressives.  Most recently, columns by conservatives Terry McLaughlin (here) and the wife of my life, Jo Ann Rebane (here) have drawn extensive ire on the matter of loosening the local lockdown.  It is particularly instructive to read the comment stream under Ms McLaughlin’s column, and the same can be said for Jo Ann’s column.  A more measured response to the latter is in the 7may20 print edition of The Union from a Mr Paul Hauck.  He claims Rebane’s call to prudently loosen the Nevada County lockdown is both unreasonable and factually incorrect.

Nowhere did Rebane promote a “precipitous” abandonment of social distancing, masks, etc.  And whether through careless reading, promoting an agenda, or both, he disputes the cited university reports on the estimated levels of existing herd immunity in California, and goes on to doubt her understanding of “the causal connection” between stay-at-home and low C19 incidence (no active cases currently) in the county.  I personally can attest to the lady’s deep and detailed understanding of such factors affecting pandemics, which appears to be a cut above Mr Hauck’s own understanding of regional herd immunity variances in the country.  (My own analysis of the impact of herd immunity levels and the intensity of a ‘second wave’ was published here and in the 18apr20 Union.)  He most certainly does not know what other countries have done and are doing to effectively loosen their lockdowns.

We know the story of Sweden (more here), and are learning daily how other EU countries have fared on their return paths to normalcy.  The evidence, as I have presented before, shows little correlation of death rates between various lockdown levels implemented by countries.  The latest good news comes from Germany (here), a country that never went into a draconian destruction derby with its economy, and is now rapidly reinstating pre-C19 norms in its commercial sector.  Such reports are, of course, omitted or on page seven in the lamestream media.

The main point that is lost in such leftwing opposition to prudent paths to loosen the lockdowns is both gratuitous, and definitely politically motivated to retain public policies that will maximally stifle the healing of our economy and the return to normalcy.

[update]  Are we in the middle of a ‘Plandemic’?  Along the line of argument presented here and elsewhere in these pages, I received this video of an interview with renowned molecular biologist and medical researcher Dr Judy Mikovitz, PhD (here). She did seminal work on viruses in the development of vaccines and the eradication of HIV/AIDS.  Her PhD dissertation and subsequent discoveries put big pharma at risk, and she was successfully attacked and silenced for 5 years by court order (while uncharged with any crime) and threat of fabricated prosecution.  This interview is not only a pertinent revelation about the underside of what’s happening now in our nation’s C19 response, but also about how an entire industry controls the science and released public information about infectious diseases.  The five years are up, and she has co-authored a book (here) about the massive subterfuge that is drawing legions of physicians equally concerned (outraged?) about how our power establishment is managing the business of infectious diseases.  I personally am a bit astounded that in today’s environment of corporatist censorship, that this video is still available to us (YouTube took it down).  It’s worth your time to view it and see what you will make of it.

And make no mistake, there is plenty of opposition to Mikovitz and her assertions of conspiracy at the highest levels that include recently canonized St Anthony of Fauci.  Here and here are a couple of links to give balance to the above.

Where is the Covid Deaths Bump?

George Rebane

For the past week I’ve been poring over various data from different sources on Covid-19 deaths and death rates.  It’s been a frustrating enterprise due to definitions ranging from vague to insane, and numbers that just don’t tie.  The quest is important though, because we have been deluged for the past couple of months with what can now be called the metrics of mass madness.  The ongoing efforts to afflict major damage to our economy are all based on the allegation that a national lockdown will greatly reduce the number of people dying from the virus, and therefore the calls for opening up are nothing less than the voices of greed putting profits before people.

However, when we take a closer look at C19 deaths, the lockdown arguments and reasoning don’t add up.  What every histrionics laden report ignores and/or hides is the entire question of how many would have died anyway from their ‘underlying conditions’, or from the legion of other causes that kill almost 2.9 million Americans year in and year out.  In other words, at any given age, if you don’t die of this, then you’ll die of that anyway, C19 or no C19.

So, from all the blizzard of mostly irrelevant and bad data available to us, the objective to sustain lockdown arguments is to see if there is an abnormal bump in the current number of deaths due to the corona virus.  We must also keep in mind the hanky-panky that is going on with how C19 deaths have been and are being counted – in many health care systems/institutions patients dying of anything during this epidemic have been put down as succumbing to C19.  The National Center for Health Statistics assures us that the most reliable data are the “provisional death counts (that) deliver our most comprehensive picture of lives lost to COVID-19. These estimates are based on death certificates, which are the most reliable source of data and contain information not available anywhere else, including comorbid conditions, race and ethnicity, and place of death.”  (more here)

So here’s the drill.  The CDC tallies total C19 deaths from 1 Feb 2020 to 1 May 2020 at 37,308 out of a total of 719,438 US deaths for that three-month period (here).  The current ‘normal’ (pre-C19) annual death rate in 2019 for the US is 8.8 per thousand (here).  This says that out of a population of 328,000,000 we have a total of about 2,886,400 Americans die annually, or 722,000 during a three-month period (or 55,500 every week).  To emphasize again, this is the pre-C19 death rate for last year.  Not to put too sharp a point on it, this year’s total deaths, with C19 raging in that three-month period, don’t even come up to our norm for a three-month period.

The reasonable explanation is that the corona virus’s marginal contribution to America’s annual deaths count is literally so low as to be swallowed by the country’s natural mortality rate.  Highlighting (hyping?) C19 deaths due to the worldwide pandemic has made us all accept draconian personal lockdowns and the arguably insane shutdown of America’s commerce.  And it has been done without the presentation of any substantive information (i.e. data formatted to support decision making), only the daily death counts and emotional appeals to ‘save human lives’ from the ravages of a disease that is doing little or nothing extraordinary, save focus our fearful attention on it so that we will compliantly accept new layers of controls from federal and state governments pursuing more fundamental agendas while desperately seeking to convince us that they are ‘doing something’.  So today we have a population that does not understand the role, power, and development of herd immunity in stopping pandemics.  And most certainly, no one has asked to see the extraordinary bump in total deaths caused by C19 (aka SARS-CoV-2).  Is this how sheeple behave?

The Real Value of Unreliable Tests and Testing

George Rebane

Every social issue draws relevance ONLY through its numbers, which if you don’t understand, then you cannot participate in a reasoned discussion about the issue.

Today we are concerned with two types of C19 tests and testing policies.  Tests fall into the ‘detect presence of infection’ variety, and the ‘detect presence of immunity’ variety – I’ll call them infection and immunity tests respectively.  Testing on an individual basis is supposed to allow the healthcare professional to decide whether you need further attention (drawing down on limited healthcare resources).  Conducting a comprehensive test on a sample drawn from a target population is done to advise response policy makers about ultimate levels of infection, mortality, and time to achieve each that will advise what kind of policy to implement, and then also monitor how well the implemented policy is working.

The infection tests seek to identify the guilty pathogen (today the C19 virus) or the presence of one of its bio-proxies, and the immunity test is used to identify the presence of antibodies or antigens (more here) which the body has produced after being infected, and which are now providing immunity to the individual.  The problem with interpreting the results of such tests is that they are inherently unreliable (used in the technical sense) – their sensitivities and specificities are less than perfect.  We recall that sensitivity is the probability of testing positive, given that you are infected – that is P(TP|V).  And specificity is one minus the probability that you test negative, given that you are not infected – that is P(¬TP|¬V) = 1-P(TP|¬V).  Here we recall that TP means test positive, and V denotes the presence of the virus or not indicated by ¬V.  Good tests enjoy high values for both sensitivity and specificity.  I have presented an extensive discussion of the impact of such a test administered for an individual in ‘Testing’s Tower of Babel’.

In this commentary I want to interest the reader in how to understand and evaluate unreliable testing of a target population for the purpose of determining the fraction of that population that is infected or already immune.  Since testing the whole population is almost always impractical, the tool used to determine that fraction is through comprehensive testing of a random sample of people drawn from the target population.  A drawn sample is ‘random’ only when each member of the target population has an equal chance (probability) of being included in the sample.  (Target populations segmented according to a set of attributes may be randomized by ensuring that the known segment shares are represented in the sample according to each segment’s share of the overall target population.)

Ruminations – 3may20 (updated 5may20)

George Rebane

You can indeed have your own opinions AND your own facts – America proves it daily.

Know the denominator!!  The innumerates of the land are constantly bombarded with naked numerators about this stat and that stat.  And none of them make a peep that they know about what they are being told.  That the US has suffered more than 60K C19 deaths means nothing unless you know either the total number of infections or America’s population.  Naked numerators are NOT news unless you know what the denominator is and how that compares with others in the same class (e.g. international C19 death rates) in which the numerator belongs.  Dumbth rules.

Dr Fauci is quoted saying, “Opening too soon COULD cause a (C19) rebound.”  Well, no shit Red Ryder.  Reported by everyone from FN on down, this is a tautology of cosmic proportions; a real nothing-burger seen as ‘news’ only by the nation’s light thinkers.  Fauci had to say that because it's also his job to disperse palliative pabulum, true statements masquerading as epiphanies of expert opinion.  But it’s up to us Americans out here in television land to understand that we learned nothing new.  And woe be to them (and really to us all) if enough of our fellow citizens really thought they were enlightened by something actionable.

Asymptomatic C19 carriers are not contagious, shows a new German study, thereby debunking the Chinese claim to the contrary, and making moot more of the claims by the nation’s CCP-celebrating lockdown loonies.  (more here)  H/T to correspondent since the lamestream has a tendency to suppress such news.

Censorship rising.  The Left, supported by corporatist America, now determines which facts and opinions may be publicly expressed in the various media.  Even FN can no longer claim to “fair, balanced, and unafraid.”

‘I vas just following orders.’  Does anyone else notice how many of our police are becoming automatons, mindlessly carrying out their lockdown orders, no matter how insane?  This behavior is a harbinger of the police state the progressives intend to implement sooner than later when they tip the balance of power.  And as has happened in so many other countries, historically and especially during the last century, the government people with the guns will always act to first and foremost protect their own jobs and families’ security at the expense of yours.  The Left has a full pipeline of laws and regulations awaiting implementation to control every aspect of our lives and livelihoods.  But there are still LE voices in the wilderness that recognize and oppose the national insanity; here is one from the Sacramento Deputy Sheriffs Association. (H/T to reader)

Nevada County – ‘still a day late and a dollar short’.  As of 2may20, NC with 100K residents has a total of 41 C19 cases that include one death, two still active, and 38 recovered.  Our hospital is empty of C19 patients, and western county has had no new cases since 17 April.  Also, as of 2may20 Yuba and Sutter counties with a combined 175K residents have 50 recorded cases that include 36 recoveries and 3 deaths with the remaining 11 being active.  Yuba and Sutter have opened up their businesses with the advisory that commercial enterprises “use all appropriate health measures” in the public square.  As a remote rural county that doesn’t understand the nature of the current coronavirus epidemic and how it compares to a regular flu season which has never impacted the conduct of commerce, NC remains closed, fearful, and continues to shutter and threaten its businesses.  Talk about rank ignorance and political CYA.

[4may20 update]  Prof Alan Blinder, the very liberal Princeton economist, was interviewed in the 4may20 WSJ, a newspaper in which he regularly appears.  Asked about the Fed’s response to the C19 pandemic, he gave it high marks for immediately providing lavish liquidity to commerce (part of its monetary policy), but reminded us that the Fed cannot create jobs because that is the role of government’s fiscal policy (taxes, tariffs, fees, regs).  Of interest to me was that he never deigned to elaborate on the fiscal policy required to create jobs, avoiding this important detail for good reason.  To the leftist economists proper fiscal policy here means government creating winners and losers in the commercial sector by selectively issuing taxes, tariffs, fees, and regs.  That has never worked, and it’s always been the opposite of the government getting out of the way that has given rise to rapid economic growth (witness the most recent snail’s pace of growth stifled by Obama.)  But the Blinders of the world cannot make their case to a knowledgeable audience without inviting more public blowback on their cherished collectivist economics.  So the good professor left it to the reader to interpret which kind of fiscal policy would be needed today to rescue our economy.

Seventy-one years ago the refugee Rebanes from Europe arrived in the Port of New York aboard the troopship USS General Harry Taylor packed with a regiment-load of WW2 survivors.  We had spent the last ten days on the storm-tossed North Atlantic housed in huge sleeping bays like sardines in canvas sleeping bunks stacked 5 and 6 high. (more here)  And finally, on the morning of 4 May 1949 we landed in the world’s greatest country that promised all of us lucky ones life, liberty, and the ability to pursue happiness as each of us saw fit and were capable, … and did we ever!

[5may20 update]  Aerosols, droplets, speaking, singing, ..., and Covid-19.  Here is a very illuminating summary of how the virus can be transmitted and the effectiveness of masks.

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.

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.

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 … .