RUTHFULLY YOURS

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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.