Rebane's Ruminations

Riot Reflections – 5jun20 (updated 6jun20)

George Rebane

Taking a knee during our national anthem.  This has now become the woke behavior of all right-thinking people in our land where we are free to protest our government and institutions 24/7 (although not always with impunity since the 1A is ailing and in desperate straits).  Given that, remains there no sacrosanct ceremony or totem for us where showing our unabashed allegiance and gratitude for this unique land is not sullied for yet another opportunity to denigrate and protest?

Sheriffs and police chiefs marching with protesters??!  Can some of the more knowledgeable among us shed light on what these LE department heads were trying to communicate with their attendance in the throng?  Were they protesting their own inability to bring about the protesters’ desired changes in their departments (e.g. defunding), or were they just ropa-doping ‘solidarity’ with the protesters in the attempt to mollify their eventual morphing into a riotous mob?

“rightwing anarchists” is one of progressives’ phrases-of-art du jour.  Not surprisingly, it even appears on Bob Crabb’s blog to apparently identify one of the major causes of today’s nationwide riots, having no mention of the otherwise obvious participants with their desiderata prominently displayed on slogan embellished signs, graffiti, online manifestos, megaphoned gatherings, stashed caches for burnings, lootings, … .  Where can we go to witness these rightwing anarchists who are the root and visible causes of all this mayhem?  What is their number?  Where do they congregate on our streets?  Have any of them been captured or arrested?

Memo to President Trump – ‘Please STFU, give it a rest, and let the news cycle contain something else – e.g. good ecnomic news, waning pandemic – besides the lamestream’s trumpeting about your latest foot-in-mouth tweets.  Thank you.’

[update]  Economists miss May job numbers by more than 420%.  The predicted an 8M jobs loss into the face of 2.5M jobs added.  When they start doing numbers, economists are a real sorry lot, especially when we need them the most, like during this historic recession.  They do a lot of harm when they gather in bunches such as in the Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget – they really are gangs that can’t shoot straight.  You’d think that screwing up time after time they’d find other kinds of work – don’t they ever get embarrassed?

Bad poll numbers again for Trump.  So reports one of our more prominent commenters who is now easily past his fourth year of a steady stream of announcements about Trump’s declining poll numbers that are always setting record lows, especially now during the pandemic.  According to him the president never seems to recover.  So how is it that after all these years of drastic losses of public confidence, Trump’s poll numbers haven’t zeroed out, but instead remain pretty much the same.  Sounds like some kind of numerical magic to me.  Perhaps he’ll explain it to us.

[6jun20 update]  D-Day 76 years ago.  In 1944 the Rebanes had recently arrived in the Third Reich from Estonia, and were living in a hastily government-erected clapboard cabin (about 500sqft) in Stettin-am-Oder – an old German cultural and trade center, now named Szczecin in Poland.  As refugees, my electrician father was pressed into a work battalion to reinstall electricity (that or fight on the eastern front) after the nightly bombings by mostly Soviet bombers.  My seamstress mother was put to work sewing rank insignia and epaulets for Wehrmacht uniforms.  In the evenings we heard Goebbels telling the Reich of the latest German victory that somehow always was closer to Berlin than the previously reported victories.  On the night of 6 June 1944 we heard him boast of how the Wehrmacht in France was pushing the long expected allied landings in France back into the English Channel.

Revolution YES, Vigilantes NO.  That is the message from our eternally dysfunctional Democratic functionaries who rule our riotous cities on both coasts, with some more sprinkled in between.  These historically-innocent politicians are celebrating the “protests” conducted by thugs who smash and burn property while killing and maiming anyone who attempts to stop them.  We are assured that such protests are good revolutionary expressions, and America always was a revolutionary country.  In the same breath they tell law-abiding suburbanites and business owners that to defend their stores and homes with guns is illegal vigilantism, and that is not allowed.  Only the rioters are free to assault the social order with arson and mayhem while police watch.  These power-infused dufuses have no idea that the American Revolution and other laudatory labor revolts always started with citizens joining together as vigilantes when needed to oppose or augment the established order.

Sandbox – 4jun20

[Apologies for letting the 2jun20 Sandbox get out of hand with all of its misplaced comments that I should have deleted as they appeared.  Here I’m talking about the pandemic and George Floyd response comments that had homes under my other topical commentaries.  I’ll try to do a much better job in this sandbox to delete all misplaced comments immediately before they become lengthy discussion threads.  And thanks for your support.  gjr]

Returning to Race-based College Admissions

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my resumed regular KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 3 June 2020.]

Former University of California regent Ward Connerly founded the American Civil Rights Institute in response to the corrupt racism that affirmative action introduced into state government contracting, public jobs hiring, and deciding who would be admitted to state schools.  Almost 25 years ago he launched Prop 209 which was the successful ballot initiative that made it illegal for California to consider race in performing any of those functions.

Being able to award contracts, jobs, and admissions on the basis of race was a big progressive vote getter for the state’s Democratic Party, and leftwing politicians have been chafing for all these years trying to figure out how to make racial patrimony legal again.

In the meantime, race-based admissions into the nation’s universities and colleges has become a much-publicized issue, especially after it was discovered that elite universities were leading the pack with racial quota systems in their admissions programs applied in the most corrupt and merit-free manner.  For these elitist administrations academic merit became a racist criterion when considering applicants for their freshman classes.  Since African-American and Hispanic students ranked way below the Asians and whites in academic achievement, it was clear that something had to be done to ‘level the playing field’ and bring social justice to bear.

The result was that race quotas were pushed to the top, and academic merit was demoted in the ranking of factors that would recommend admission.  The proponents of academics started pushing back when these admissions policies came to light.  However, nobody really cared how the white applicants were discriminated against.  What really hit a nerve on the race-based policies was the dirty deal dealt to Asian-American applicants.  This cohort of minority students always blew the tops off their high school grades, achievement tests, and any other criteria like extra-curricular activities and breadth of interests.  If the new progressive race-based admissions standards were fairly applied to all minorities, the Asian-American kids would have flooded the enrollment rolls.  What to do now?

Well, the answer to the progressive administrations was obvious, lay on another layer of corruption and eliminate any semblance of balance between minority and academic requirements.  If you were black or Latino, you went to the head of the line until the quota was filled, and that was that.  However, when the Asian-American community got wind of such obviously biased and unfair practices, they got active and involved.  The result was that these tilted playing field practices made national headlines with our polarized country predictably lined up on both sides of the issue.

Today, California’s Democrats see an opportunity to eliminate the last barriers to race-based admissions policies.  This week the State Assembly’s Appropriations Committee will vote to pass ACA5, the proposed constitutional amendment to overturn Prop209, and again legitimize race-based admissions.  The 81-year-old Ward Connerly has returned to work with a handful of very devoted Asian-American civic groups to stop ACA5, which most likely will be railroaded through the Senate during this pandemic season without a single public hearing.  It will then appear on the November ballot to let Californians again decide how they want to diminish and demote the state’s higher education systems.  The reinstatement of this corrupt practice will be sold to our electorate under the guise of affirmative action.  In opposition, Asian-Americans against ACA5 know that “If it passes, Asian-American students will be further scapegoated and penalized in college admissions.”  Those Californians who believe in a colorblind society when it comes to government preferences and perks should join to oppose ACA5 on the November ballot.

Should it pass, lawsuits are already being prepared to fight this discriminatory amendment.  And there’s a good chance the case will end up before the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs hope that the court would then rule as clearly and categorically as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 opinion: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” (more here)

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Scattershots – 3jun20 (updated 4jun20)

George Rebane

Worldwide lockdowns were triggered by panicky politicians who listened to the ‘eminent epidemiologist’ Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.  He came out with a slew of mortality predictions almost every country of note by monkeying with his models.  Trouble is that none of them came anywhere near true, but politicians were reluctant to let go of the new dimensions of power they had appropriated.  So most of the world shut down economies and also caused untold more deaths and morbidity (as many of us then predicted).  Now Ferguson, with stiff upper lip firmly in place, admits to having observed these “interesting” realworld results, perhaps starting with the admission, “Without instituting full lockdown, Sweden is essentially getting the same effect.”  (whouda thought?  H/T to reader and more here)  And here is a confirming update on the C19 stats from Sweden (H/T to reader).  Consider this report in the context of my 16may20 commentary that also appears in today’s 3jun20 Union (here).

My ‘Unsettling ‘Settled Science’’ was published in today’s (3jun20) Union.  As expected, it drew a lot of ire from our local leftwingers.  Almost all of it was hard to connect with the points I made in the commentary.  Some even rejected my propositions on the basis of their similarity of what they may have heard from Limbaugh, or that it “was written by a staunch trump supporter”.  But a comment from George Boardman, one of our liberal thought leaders and intellects, piqued my interest.  He asked why Jo Ann and I “have been sheltering in place for 70 plus days”, since my “oft-expressed skepticism of the conventional scientific wisdom”.   To start with, Mr Boardman apparently is not a very careful (or comprehending?) reader of RR.  From the body count alone, no one should doubt that the elderly are in the most vulnerable group.  So there was no point in our going out just to solicit the infection - after all I am a Bayesian.  But the main reason is that all of our outside activities were canceled and many brought online, not by us, but by the government – in short, there was no place for us to go, save to run the usual store errands which we did.  However, undeterred we continued seeing our family and Nevada County friends on a regular basis – e.g. we had an ‘essential’ dinner party at our house last night – during this months-long interval of insane and conflicting dicta issuing from various government offices (see the latest from Neil Ferguson above).  Boardman, flying hot, true, and normal with his fellow progressive pundits, evinces no capability of nuancing anything he sees.  I have found people like that to operate in what we control engineers call ‘bang-bang mode’, their needle gets pegged at either end with no readings from the middle.  But perhaps I too am missing something here.  I’d like to lunch with George Boardman and have each of us really get the cut of the other’s jib.

This is what we see on the streets, and what the Democrats and the lamestream refuse to denounce.

[update]  Yellow journalism on Bret Baier’s FN program.  For the program’s panel tonight, Baier had assembled Ari Fleischer (Bush2 press secretary), Mara Liaisson (NPR political correspondent), and Mo Elleithee (Georgetown Institute of Politics) – a laudible 2-to-1 in favor of leftists.  Subject: Trump’s threat to use military against rioters if states can’t control them.  In his comments Elleithee said, “(Trump) authorizes militarized law enforcement to use excessive force against peaceful protesters.”  We all expect that kind of crap out of leftwing ideologues like Elleithee and Liasson, but since Trump said no such thing (it was just one more in the Left's daily avalanche of uncounted lies), the ‘fair, balanced, and unafraid’ Baier’s next question should have been, ‘Mo, what evidence do you have that the President said any such thing?  Please share it with us.’  Instead the network’s flagship anchor again showed his lily liver, and let the whole statement slide as if it were a commonly known truth.  Back in older days FN journalists would not have allowed that kind of crap to just float out there unchallenged.  Today their lead correspondent has taken the knee on truth, and has yet to update his closing line to ‘Feebly balanced and scared shitless.’  FN is rapidly becoming a CNN-in-training outlet.

[4jun20 update]  Apropos to ‘settled science’ (here) and making decisions on the basis of ‘science not politics’, we now read the WHO has flipped on their hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) admonitions cum screed. The widely cited study ‘disproving’ the effectiveness of HCQ turns out to have been badly flawed, as attested to by 120+ scientists who examined the record. (more here)  So now they’re going back to square one and resuming the trial that they prematurely aborted.  And, of course, we’re all familiar with the field day the Democrats and their lamestream lackies had when during the early days of the pandemic President Trump suggested that HCQ might be something we should also examine.  Don’t expect any of those sumbiches to show any remorse at their TDS-powered hipshot remonstrations.

Common Core curriculum fans rejoice.  One of your aims was for the new educational initiative to “narrow the performance gap” between the high-end students and those at/near the bottom.  According to both the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) the gap is being closed, not by boosting the academic performance of the low achievers, but by dumbing down the high achievers.  We have reported on this many times, and now Union columnist Terry McLaughlin writes in the 3jun20 edition of the newspaper, “After decades of slow and steady improvement, reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have seen historic declines in the six years since most states implemented national Common Core English and math curriculum standards”. (more here)  Bill Gates’ sponsorship of Common Core did immeasurable damage and played right into the progressives’ agenda to dumb down succeeding generations of American voters.  As a humorous footnote, RR’s spam folder correctly trapped a well-known leftwing local who sought to comment on ‘Returning to Race-based College Admissions’ by declaring his ignorance of the legislature's initiative to repeal Prop209 that prohibits race-based state contracting, hiring, and admissions.

Sandbox - 2jun20

[It's now established that we have a full-service House Speaker in Nancy Pelosi.  She has donned the additional mantle of Congressional Spiritual Adviser.  And as her first task in that new responsibility, she has taken the President under her wing with pointed counsel directing his scriptural pursuits.  We already know of her as a woman of manifold talents and a multitude of concerns - her capacity to care knows no bounds.  However, pursuant to this new expansion of duties, were I the current House Chaplain, Fr. Patrick J. Conroy, S.J., I would be very worried.  The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.  gjr]

Riot Reflections – 1jun20 (updated)

‪"Black votes matter to many politicians — more so than black lives. That is why such politicians must try to keep black voters fearful, angry and resentful. Racial harmony would be a political disaster for such politicians."‬ Thomas Sowell (and an oft-cited tenet of Rebane Doctrine)

George Rebane

Well, given what we see in the streets, we can safely conclude that the pandemic lockdowns are over, and all business are open except those that have been boarded up or burned down.

Starting with local police departments, all fielded LE units/agencies are now conducting defensive operations to preserve themselves.  They are no longer out there to protect persons or property.  The compelling explanation for this kind of CYA behavior is that they don’t see support from their political leaders, the law-abiding public, and most certainly not from the protesters and rioters.  Law enforcement today stands politically abandoned.  They are indicted by a long history of law enforcement ‘mistakes’ that recently have culminated in the outrageous public murder (execution?) of George Floyd, a black petty criminal, by the Minneapolis police, and the killing of Breonna Taylor, an innocent black woman gunned down in her own home by Louisville Metro Police mistakenly raiding her house in the middle of the night.  Both should be seen as preventable crimes by institutions that have lost sight of their reason for being.

No one has really determined the make-up of the legitimate protesters in the streets, nor if they are the same ones who turn into destructive rioters after the peaceful phase of their demonstrations are concluded.  Does the non-violent cohort then go home to be replaced by the violent ones who mostly conduct themselves as Antifa members?  (To my knowledge, Antifa is still a distributed national protest movement that shares literature, values, dress, street tactics, …, but having no common leadership, managed funding, or central control.)  From the reports from the media and police on the scene, the non-violent protesters appear to morph into violent rioters at some point, mostly after the sun goes down.  Today the violent are all masked (perhaps because of the pandemic) and therefore act with impunity because their anonymity is secure.  In the meantime, the cities’ progressive political leaders are desperately looking for the illusive out-of-town white supremacists who are really the instigators of looting and burning.

Today’s street conflicts are also culturally confused and confusing.  There is no common social contract in evidence among the street borne polyglot.  Everyone is doing their own thing, milling from here to there or just idly standing by and watching the show.  Some have come with prepared signs with the usual slogans demanding justice and change.  But when interviewed, no one has a clue as to what exactly needs to be done to bring about the change and the new age of justice.  Moreover, no one even thinks that there need be some deeper thought behind the demands on the displayed placards – their histrionics are sufficient unto themselves.

If really pressed for specifics, black leadership in the media can drill down no deeper than spout the Democratic Party talking points – ‘Shut down white supremacy and white privilege.’  This is the closest that any leftwinger can come to specifying what needs to be done to bring about the “change” that the protesters are demanding.  What white supremacy should be shut down how?  Which white privileges should be legislated into criminality?  And their political party and political leadership are equally clueless as to what specific and feasible programs should be implemented across the land to prevent future Floyds and Taylors being killed at the hands of various law enforcement agencies.

In the meantime, there is political hay to be made in this election year that has already given our Left so much ammo against President Trump and the Republicans.  For a party without a single viable idea of how to better respond to the virus, let alone how to revive the economy, all they have to offer is solution-free partisan vituperation to convince their constituents and light-thinking lackies that a new glorious age will spontaneously start if we can only get Trump out of the White House, Republicans out of Congress, and pack SCOTUS with an enlarged bench of progressive justices.  The rest will miraculously take care of itself under a distended government that will redistribute the country’s wealth, hire more of the unemployable incompetents, pay everyone regardless, and become the major player in our economy – i.e. socialism on steroids.

When the dust settles, what will the gutless politicians do with police departments that are becoming more insular and frustrated as they are charged with keeping the peace in public environments ever more conflicted in values, mores, attitudes, perceived pasts, fearful futures, …, all existing under a shroud of confusing, contradictory, unknown, and variously interpreted and randomly enforced laws, regulations, and codes that become more impenetrable by the day?  The cop on the beat can no longer reliably predict anyone’s behavior, and must therefore become a programmed automaton who survives his shift by avoiding conflicts and strife whenever possible, and when not, then apply one-size-fits-all rules in the most self-defensive and often ruthless manner possible.

[update]  We just finished watching the evening news that covered the ongoing demonstrations from several big cities across the country.  The President made a ‘law and order’ speech in which he separated those lawful protesters from the thugs, looters, arsonists, and now killers on our streets.  We hear people of all ranks, starting with the Floyd family, calling for the violence to stop, that such behavior is not serving the memory of their murdered son George, nor anything good that hopefully would come out of this after the dust settles.  The politicians calling for calm and calling out the rioters are all from the Right.  The only political leader voices from the Left are using this ongoing national tragedy to attack the administration, and to further divide us and convince all that there is no hope of unity in the future.  They realize more than any of us that those on the streets are their imperturbable constituents, loyal voters, and their very political lifeblood – they can do no wrong.

If a progressive wanted to counter any of this shameful behavior by their political leaders, one need only ask, ‘Where are the Pelosis, Schumers, Obamas, Bidens, Jacksons, Sharptons… with their messages of peace and calm, calling for the protesters to abide by the law and rioters to stand down?’  The only words from their and their lamestream lackies’ mouths do nothing but throw fuel on a raging partisan fire, and give their imprimaturs to the lawlessness on the streets by pledging their solidarities from which are absent any condemnation of the riotous mobs.  Even the word ‘riot’ is not in their vocabulary when they occasionally stray from lauding the “just protests” on our cities’ streets.  In Democrats’ eyes, it is all one homogeneous nationwide protest against Republican racism and social injustice.  For them this indeed is one helluva crisis not to let go waste.

Riot Reflections - 30may20 (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 3jun20)

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 – 3jun20 edition.  “Fauci changes tune, now says second COVID-19 wave may never happen — and mask-wearing is symbolic.”  (more here and 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.

[31may20 update]  Here’s one for the ‘Say whaaat??!’ department.  James ‘Forked Tongue’ Clapper has just been appointed to the Executive Board of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) at the University of Pennsylvania.  This announcement bounced off my eyeballs as I opened the most recent copy of Aviation Week & Space Technology.  Don’t ask how they came to pick up that major faux pas on the part of CERL (see for yourself here).

‘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.

Sandbox -26may20

[What remains the point of debates which are empty of citations that are commonly accepted by the debating parties?  As I have pontificated here for some years, and am now joined by my betters like Victor Davis Hanson among others, we are so polarized that we no longer share any cognitive common ground.  In other words, we arrive at venues like RR, not only with our own opinions, but also with our own unique ‘facts’ (thereby giving lie to Sen Moynihan’s dictum).  The ensuing melee is then composed of nothing but ejecta of hot air flung at the other which make no lasting impact, let alone changing anyone’s beliefs.  And yet, … and yet we continue to regularly assemble on both sides of this arena to dance our ferocious dances, making threatening sounds while shaking our spears and shields at the other side, like the natives of primitive tribes or beasts of the jungle that learned to wage faux ‘wars’ without really harming each other.  Realizing this, perhaps we can all join in the attempt to discover the point of it all.  gjr]

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.

Some flavors of mindlessness (updated 25may20)

George Rebane

In the mindless department, we start with a letter from a Skip Pollard in the 22may20 Union that takes to task the 6may20 column by Terry McLaughlin where she substantiates the thesis -  

“No one could have predicted with certainty a viral pandemic arising in 2020, and no human being could have been entirely prepared in the moment to make the perfect decisions that would best preserve life and livelihoods.” – and substantiates it with a timeline of C19 pronouncements and assessments made by various agents worldwide.  That assessment didn’t sit well with the TDS crowd who still proclaim to their followers that Trump’s "mismanagement of the pandemic" has caused tens of thousands of preventable deaths.  But here is the example of the “omission” cited by Pollard to make his case that McLaughlin “cherry picked” the C19 timeline –

April 23: President Trump says, “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.”

Now what in hell does that perfectly good observation and question asked by the president have to do with the timeline of policy pronouncements on the pandemic’s progress assembled by McLaughlin; logically it can’t even be shoehorned into a timeline of similar events.  But to TDS sufferers like Skip Pollard, this liberal logic makes all the sense in the world.  The mentality of such people is literally unfathomable to the unafflicted, and explains a forte why communication with them is futile.  Perhaps one of our liberal readers can help Mr Pollard by citing a substantive omission from Ms McLaughlin’s column.

Long before I warned you of Dr Fauci, President Eisenhower did.  In the same farewell speech in which he called for vigilance of the doings of the country’s “military-industrial complex”, Ike also warned us that scientists dependent on government contracts and grants might cripple scientific breakthroughs. Specifically, he said “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”  And all this because “the prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”  Yes, if you follow the money, then scientific consensus becomes the order of the day, and those innumerates innocent of science will not be the wiser, as they continue their habituated genuflections before anything proclaimed as ‘scientific’.  In Ike’s words, “partly because of the huge costs involved (in scientific research), a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”  So, today Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is one of the “scientific-technological elites” that Eisenhower warned against. (more here)

Others have echoed and expanded on this new secular religion of science.  Author Tom Bethell in his Politically Incorrect Guide to Science tells us -

Government funding has… promoted the idea that a theory can be regarded as true if it enjoys enough support. … Consensus discourages dissent, however. It is the enemy of science, just as it is the triumph of politics. A theory accepted by 99 percent of scientists may be wrong. Committees at the National Institutes of Health that decide which projects shall be funded are inevitably run by scientists who are at peace with the dominant theory."

Here we note that 99% of scientists accepted ALL theories that were subsequently toppled by new discoveries during the age when science was still “an open platform”.  A fundamental truth that you can bank today is that “when any single source of funding dominates, science will almost certainly become the handmaiden of politics.”  And we have seen that happen countless times during the last half century, most recently in the politically stifled science that promotes preventable man-made global warming.

As one of today’s ‘scientific-technological elites’, Dr Fauci’s words are to be taken as unquestioned gospel about the recent coronavirus disease and the nation’s response to the pandemic.  We do so at our peril. 

[update]  ‘America is Reopening for Summer and Tensions are High’ in the 22may20 WSJ reports that “Tensions are intensifying between those celebrating the end of shutdowns and those fearful of the virus’s re-emergence, between those driven by economic desperation and those eager to resume a semblance of normalcy. As restrictions eventually fall in large cities including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, those dichotomies are likely to become more acute.”  What I find puzzling is the report of tensions between those wanting the lockdowns to remain and those who don’t.  What’s the big deal?  Anyone is free to quarantine themselves to their hearts content.  And if the rest of your neighbors risk themselves and contribute to economic recovery, then those who remain hunkered down will receive even more and better services from those who don’t.  Everyone gets to exercise their own risk tolerance, and the only ones with noses out of joint are them that demands a ‘one size fits all’ America.

[25may20 update] As we pointed out almost two months ago, the C19 quarantines would soon cause more corollary mortality and morbidity than any reasonable estimate of health benefits (including number of deaths) from the pandemic.  Now we are beginning to see reports coming in telling of people dying at home from chronic and topical (including psychological) maladies that would have been addressed through normal visits and access to the medical industry.  One recent article reports ‘California doctors say they’ve seen more deaths from suicide than coronavirus since lockdowns’ (H/T to reader).  Add these to the butt-stupid policies like Gov Cuomo’s sentence of almost certain death to those New Yorkers he condemned to be transferred to 24/7 care facilities, and then round out what our dreadfully incompetent governments have inflicted on us in their power panic to appear to ‘do something’ that looks to most like we’re fighting the virus.  In the final analysis the fault of it all belongs on us mal-educated citizens who shrink from every politically identified risk, and demand that government immediately leaps in to keep us safe, no matter the cost in dollars or liberties.  With the passing years, fewer of us remain who still understand that growth of government power is a one-way ratchet toward revolution.  For the rest, the state is ever the benevolent Big Brother.

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.

Journalists' Opinions

George Rebane

City Editor of The Union, Alan Riquelmy, writes that ‘What matters is your opinion’ in the 20may20 edition of the newspaper.  His op-ed piece is about the Tara Reade imbroglio, and his involvement interviewing the lady and her contacts.  But that’s not what drew my interest in his remarks.  Let me begin with the admission that I don’t know Mr Riquelmy personally, have perhaps howdied with him at some local affair we both attended, and have exchanged cordial emails about some Other Voices pieces I have submitted for publication.  But from what I do know of him, everything confirms that he’s a fine gentleman and a diligent journalist doing a commendable job during difficult times at The Union.  Full disclosure:  As a member of the Union’s editorial board, Jo Ann has known and worked with Mr Riquelmy during the years she has been on the board, and she speaks highly of him.

What really piqued my interest in Riquelmy’s op-ed, and actually gave me concern, was his attitude about opinions that people, including him, hold.  Since Ms Reade has local roots, Riquelmy did some interviews with her about her allegations and published them in the newspaper.  The word got out that Riquelmy might have some new perspectives about Reade that would be of interest to wider national audiences.  Therefore, some media reporters wanted to interview Riquelmy, but he “declined all of them”, stating that “the reason is because my opinion on Reade and her allegations doesn’t matter.”

I would take exception to that sentiment/belief.  There’s more here than just his opinion on Reade and her allegations.  What may be of greater importance is how he, as an experienced professional journalist, came to the opinions he formed from his interviews and research.  Most certainly that is my greater interest, and I submit is also the interest of other media professionals.  Today, opinions about Reade et al are a dime a dozen, but Riquelmy had a unique opportunity to form his opinions, and that is of interest.

If we take a step back, we see that ‘matter’ is itself a subjective opinion.  What and how something matters is in the eye of the matterer.  Since none of us can claim to be paragons of objectivity, how someone of note and interest forms opinions and views of the world matters much, in this case to Mr Riquelmy’s readers of whom I am one.  We who regularly read the words that he puts through his ‘matter filter’ would benefit knowing about the contours, tenets, and operation of that filter.  Because such a matter filter is an embodiment of one's belief system, knowing of it we will know from where someone's ideas and assertions are coming.

Without such knowledge, the reader is left to solve two intertwined puzzles – first, understanding the chosen words and how they were assembled, and second, from what foundation did such choices and assembly arise.  Today, journalism is one of the few professions that has long been consigned to the bilges of public opinion, and for very good reasons.  One of them is the journalists’ assumed hubristic mantle of objectivity, which almost all of them wear poorly.  A journalist who reveals certain relevant tenets of his belief system to readers would be a breath of fresh air to the profession.  And who knows, it may even become a welcome new standard to lift the media industry from its dismal depths.

Coda.  As RR readers know, I am an explicitly professed ideologue, commentator, and definitely NOT a journalist (more here).  However, I pride myself in having the confidence to make my own credo (belief system) fully known to my readers, along with a glossary of terms which I use that may have a more specific or different definition than found in dictionaries, or worse, incorrectly assumed by the reader. (see upper right panel)  My credo is not poured in concrete or recorded on stone tablets.  Instead, it is open to critical examination by one and all, and since I am a Bayesian, it is malleable in the Keynesian sense.  As Fisher and Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project taught us long ago (more here), the subject matter discussed in these pages demands nothing less.  The only downside I’ve encountered is that readers, either innumerate and/or burdened with calcified ideologies, have not always found my ideas easy to understand.  Nevertheless, I soldier on. 

Sandbox - 20may20

[Apologies for the delay in getting new sand.  In future sandboxes I'll try to notify readers of topics I cover in subsequent commentaries so that their topical comments can find the appropriate comment stream.  gjr]

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’

[This commentary was also published here in the 3jun20 edition of The Union.]

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.

 

Sandbox - 10may20

[It's remarkable how well these C19 utility functions perform in their ability to predict the statements - ranging from policies to pabulum - of the three cohorts today exhorting us to do this vs that.

For those comfortable with such models of the realworld, they compress a whole lot of explanatory power about the debate to loosen the lockdown. (more here).  gjr]