RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/enough-already-with-the-ihme-covid-19-model/

After repeated failures, it has now been completely revamped. It can’t be trusted at such a critical time in the coronavirus pandemic.

 I have precisely zero envy for anyone trying to predict where the COVID-19 pandemic is headed. There’s a ton we don’t know about how quickly the virus spreads under different conditions, what new treatments will appear, how policy will change in the future, and how well the public will practice social distancing during the summer regardless of policy. Even the world’s top epidemiologists cannot be expected to give us more than educated guesses that are based on reasonable, clearly explained assumptions — and that improve as new information comes in.

Some of those guesses can be quite valuable even as they’re quite uncertain. Given the massive funding behind it and the faith placed in it by the now-moribund White House Coronavirus Task Force, I once hoped that the COVID-19 model from the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) would prove to be one such valuable tool. But those hopes have been dashed: The model simply doesn’t work, and the folks behind it are still futzing with its fundamental workings as the pandemic enters its least predictable phase.

During this crucial period when the country is reopening, we can have no faith in the model’s output. It shouldn’t be used to inform policymaking decisions at all. This isn’t to slight the scientists who took on such a difficult task; it’s just a realistic assessment of how the project turned out.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

What happened to Flynn is quite simply an atrocity. Everyone responsible should lose their jobs, if Flynn’s lawyers betrayed their client they should be disbarred, and the whole crew of plotters should be hauled off to jail. And Michael Flynn deserves his job back.

Michael Flynn was vindicated last week. While conservatives tend to be pro-law enforcement, here they are reminded of how the government’s criminal justice apparatus can be abused. The Russian collusion hoax weaponized our intelligence agencies and the FBI to spy on a political campaign and ruin the lives of numerous patriots, including decorated American general, Michael Flynn. 

Worse, documents obtained by Flynn’s new defense team show the absence of a crime—he apparently forgot some details in an interview with FBI agents, which to their minds became “obstruction” and “perjury”—but also show that the FBI knew there was no crime and still planned to entrap him through an ambush interview in the early days of the Trump administration. 

The Logan Act offense that justified his interview was a pretext; that law has been sitting on a shelf since 1799 and was dusted off to trap Flynn. Every journalist and lobbyist in Washington, D.C. is probably guilty of a violation. The real goal was to get him to talk to the FBI without counsel present, a situation that inevitably leads to some mix-ups and forgetfulness, so that he could be fired. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/our-dangerous-illusions-about-risk-bruce-thornton/

The coronavirus pandemic and the draconian lock-down responses to it have given us an object lesson in just how irrationally we evaluate and compare risk. For all our pretenses that “experts” have enough reliable knowledge to mitigate risk based on facts, we still make policy decisions based on fear, self-interest, or ideology. Even before the current medical crisis, our distorted and excessive aversion to risk has led to policies rife with moral hazard that create new and more dangerous consequences.

There’s no doubt that the current shut-down of the economy and public spaces is a consequence of bad risk assessment. These policies were based on lethality models that lacked sufficient data such as the rate of infection, and that projected numbers of dead later reduced significantly. Stoked by panic and incomplete models, radical self-quarantining was mandated even for the healthy young, and open-air activity proscribed even though a viral load necessary to sicken us requires enclosed, crowded spaces and prolonged exposure to a carrier.

Nor is there any certainty that these policies contributed to flattening out the rate of known infected and dying. Germany to date has had one of Europe’s lowest mortality rates, which many attribute to its early and severe lockdown. But recently the reproduction rate of the virus, the number of people one carrier will infect, has been rising after restrictions were lessened. As the Wall Street Journal  reports, “The upward drift in the reproduction rate now suggests that those measures may not have stopped the disease in its tracks so much as delayed the inevitable—and at enormous cost.” 

Science without humility is a parlor game that can turn lethal.

 D uring this entire epidemic, and the response to it, there is a growing tension between front-line doctors and scientific researchers, between people who must use and master numbers in their jobs and university statisticians and modelers, and between the public in general and its credentialed experts.

Fact and Theory

In a nutshell, the divide reflects the ancient opposition between empiricism and abstraction — or more charitably common sense and practical application versus scientific knowledge.

When the two are combined and balanced, then knowledge advances. When they are not, both are deprived of the wisdom of the other.

Unfortunately, in the present crisis, we have listened more to the university modeler than to a numbers-crunching accountant. The latter may not understand Banach manifolds, but he at least knows you cannot rely on basic equations and formulas if your denominator is inaccurate and your numerator is sometimes equally unreliable.

NOW WATCH: ‘Coronavirus Update: U.S. Turning the Corner on Coronavirus Testing’

It seems a simple matter that the small number of those testing positive for the virus simply could not represent all those who are infected with the contagion. Yet such obviousness did not stop modelers, experts, and political advisers from authoritatively lecturing America on the lethality and spread of COVID-19.

Internet coronavirus-meters feign scientific accuracy with their hourly streams of precise data. But those without degrees wondered why such metrics even listed China, whose data is fanciful, or why the number of  “cases” is listed when it hinges entirely on the hit-and-miss and idiosyncratic testing of various states and nations.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/trump-johns-hopkins-coronavirus-model-statistics

Johns Hopkins University said Tuesday that a leaked FEMA document featuring charts projecting nearly double the current daily coronavirus death toll by the end of May is not a “final version.”

The charts used data from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/neil_ferguson_who_started_the_lockdown_panic_cheats_on_his_own_lockdown.html

“The icing on this cake is that Staats, the married girlfriend in the posh London home, works for an anti-Semitic, hard-left Soros-funded organization”

England’s initial impulse with Wuhan virus was to go with the plan that Sweden implemented: Keep the country open while protecting those most vulnerable to the virus. Neil Ferguson changed all that. He and his Imperial College London epidemiology team predicted that, if Britain went ahead with that plan, more than 500,000 people would die. He also warned America that anything less than a total, Chinese-style lockdown would result in 2.2 million deaths.

It was Ferguson who sparked the lockdown frenzy in both countries. He later lowered his estimates and real events have shown how grossly wrong he was. Still, thanks to his initial hysteria, the harm was done.

Ferguson has often been wrong. When Frederick Forsyth blasted the British government for relying on Ferguson, he referenced past Ferguson predictions:

He was the genius who, on the issue of swine flu, confidently forecast global deaths at four million. The worldwide total turned out to be 18,500. In 2005, Ferguson said that up to 200 million people could die from bird flu. Between 2003 and 2009, just 282 people died worldwide from the disease.

With that track record, it’s possible that Ferguson doesn’t believe in his own data. That would explain the major story that broke in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper.  It seems that Ferguson was forced to resign from his government advisory position because, while he was on lockdown, he got several visits from his girlfriend, a married woman with two children:

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2020/05/05/scotus-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-hospitalized-with-infection-n388463

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is reportedly hospitalized with a gall bladder infection. ABC News reported,

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hospitalized Tuesday afternoon for “a benign gallbladder condition” that had caused an infection, according to Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg.Ginsburg is expected to remain at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for a day or two but still participate in the telephonic oral arguments Wednesday when the court will hear oral arguments in a case involving the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate.

Ginsburg, 87, had participated in the oral arguments that the SCOTUS held via teleconference on Monday and Tuesday on a live stream due to the Chinese virus lockdown precautions. The famous judge has had a string of health scares over the last year. Unlike leftist Twitter that jumped on a chance to kick a conservative when he is down, like Rush Limbaugh when he announced his cancer diagnosis, conservative Twitter is wishing the far-left radical judge well.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-5-4-will-the-rogue-fbiciadoj-operat

It has been obvious now for multiple years that the whole Trump/Russia “collusion” narrative was a total hoax from the start, concocted by high-ranking but rogue members of the intelligence community in the latter days of the Obama administration. This misuse of the powers of the government by the intelligence community to attempt to influence the 2016 election, and then to undermine President Trump after his election, has been described by many as the greatest scandal in American political history. The perpetrators of the scandal range from CIA head John Brennan, to FBI head James Comey, to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, to senior FBI agent Peter Strzok, and many others too numerous to mention.

All of the people named have lost their previous jobs, but beyond that none have thus far faced any consequences, particularly any criminal prosecution. They have books on sale or cable news gigs or both. We know that a federal criminal prosecutor, John Durham, has been named by Attorney General Barr to look into the matter, but after many months, we hear nothing. Several commenters have asked for my thoughts on whether criminal consequences are likely for any of these miscreants, and, if so, on what basis.

My bottom line: As egregious as the conduct of these people was, I still think it’s only about 50/50 that any of them get charged and convicted of any criminal offense. There are two major issues: (1) What is the crime? and (2) How do you prove the case?

What is the crime?

https://spectator.us/covid-statistics-politics-other-means/

Statistics is the continuation of politics by other means, to misquote Clausewitz. One hundred and fifty years after the crushing of the revolutionary Paris Commune, historians still clash aggressively about the death toll. Was it as high as 40,000 or as low as 10,000?

It matters because the Paris Commune is a shibboleth, a great left-wing site of memory and martyrdom, made famous by Karl Marx’s pamphlet The Civil War in France. He presented the Paris Commune as the first great experiment in communist government. Its crushing by the army of the conservative Adolphe Thiers is depicted in left-wing folk memory as the ‘reactionary, repressive forces of capitalism’ ending an idyllic experiment in socialism. So for martyrdom’s sake it is better to put the number ‘slaughtered’ at 40,000 rather than 10,000. And historians go to great lengths to adduce statistical evidence in one direction or another.

In the 1960s demographers revealed that the Soviet government stopped publishing its statistics on life expectancy because they were not progressing as fast as in the West. Today Chinese GDP growth statistics are widely viewed as manipulated. COVID-19 pandemic statistics have inevitably become political too. As the Cambridge statistician Prof David Spiegelhalter wrote in the Guardian on April 30, ‘people are not so interested in the numbers themselves — they want to say why they are so high, and ascribe blame.’ And why do they want to ascribe blame? Because other political agendas have not been laid to rest.

And so COVID statistics are the continuation of politics by other means. The relish with which certain international media highlight the death toll in the US, for example, is a rather transparent attack on Donald Trump, especially when they fail to adjust deaths to 100,000 population.

The otherwise authoritative left-of-center French daily Le Monde for example refers to the United States ‘as the most affected [country] as much in number of deaths (67,682) as in cases (1.15 million)’ but fails to account for population, which puts the US around 10th in the world.

Don’t blame big pharma…blame the big stockholders in Gilead Bill -Gates and George Soros and their media pet Dr. Anthony Faulti………rsk

Gilead’s Remdesivir is getting a lot of praise from the NIH, while the much cheaper hydroxychloroquine is getting a cold reception. Wonder why.

When President Trump brought up hydroxychloroquine as a promising potential treatment for COVID-19, a huge upsurge of negative political publicity followed from it.  It was strange stuff, because up until then, the treatment, which had been safely used to treat malaria, lupus, and arthritis, had been seeing promising results for COVID-19, too.  Yet the condemnations from all sides poured for weeks.  It wasn’t just the political establishment blasting it; it seemed to be the medical establishment, too.  That raises questions as to whether financial interests might be involved here.

It started with the press engaging in its customary contrarianism against Trump when he called the treatment “promising.”  The logic was simple: If Trump liked it, then it had to be bad.

How’s this for a slanted headline and report from NPR, which ran on April 10?

COVID-19 Patients Given Unproven Drug In Texas Nursing Home In ‘Disconcerting’ Move