George Rebane

Happiness is being tested positive for C19 antibodies.

The US has five times as many per capita ventilators as does the UK.  This was reported on the news tonight along with other real stats showing the comparative lead the US has over other countries in fighting C19.  Concurrently we have the Democrats doing everything they can to lie, misconstrue, block, extend, dun, … any and every area of progress we have been making in tackling this global disaster, one that the country has not experienced in at least a century or perhaps ever.  Team Pelosi/Schumer are filling the lamestream’s bandwidth with snark, lies, and misrepresentations of data in order to pave the way for Bumblebrain Biden in the fall.  They blame it all on Trump in the most vicious ways possible.  None of them mention that the bat-originated coronaviruses were identified and the warnings published in October 2007 as the Bush2 administration was ending (one of our readers dug it up for us here).  Obama did NOTHING over his eight years to prepare the country.  In states, governors like our Moonbeam dismantled the preparations that Schwarzenegger had put in place.  EU nations with socialized healthcare have responded woefully late and ineffectively to the virus, as we have shown in these pages, while attempting to replicate US policies.  None of this makes no never mind to our socialist Left.  After spending three extremely disruptive years to impeach Trump the first time, Pelosi is already making plans to start impeaching the President once more should he be re-elected.  The Demonic Party cares only for the power over the people that they can garner if they can make Trump look like he delivered too little too late, and then only when the Dems made him do it.  Ignoring Trump’s way with words, he is doing the right thing at every turn with the information and wherewithal the country has.  Just calling out the Dems’s Big Lies grossly understates what those people are really doing to our country.

[1apr20 update]  Multi-attribute utility – that is the set of horns America is attempting to balance on today.  Such a utility does not present a stark choice as in ‘Your money or your life?!’, it’s more nuanced and real like ‘Your health or your economy?’.  In the latter you can see the utility of maximizing measures of the country’s health through policies that minimize the near-term C19 morbidity and mortality, while teetering on the other end is maximizing measures of our economy like continuing employment and GDP.  In decision theory these are competing attributes of a single utility function (Figure of Merit, if you prefer) that computes to a single number which you try to maximize through correct decisions.  Coming up with a broadly accepted utility is ALWAYS an exercise in compromising subjective values, and therefore always hard.  Even if you agree on the attributes to be included, placing weights on them becomes the next contention to overcome – say, you accept U = w1*(GDP) – w2*(total deaths) to be maximized over the next twelve months.  What values should we accept for the weights w1 and w2?  Capice?  That’s the kind of exercise staffers versed in this art are attempting to educate their principals so that more rigorous analytics can then be brought to bear on candidate policies (i.e. the decisions) to evaluate their relative merits.  For a variety of reasons, most politicians hate utility functions and rigorous analytics.

Eschewing President Trump’s daily C19 briefings.  The demonic Dems have a conundrum since all but FN have decided not to broadcast the briefings, labeling them as nothing but ‘Trump campaign rallies’.  The problem is that these cynical dufuses know that these are anything but political rallies.  They consist of factual information and data delivered by domain (here, healthcare) experts in understandable formats that summarize the progress of C19 across the land and explain the technologies and logistics brought to bear in fighting the pandemic.  They include our political leader’s exhortations, apprehensions of policy, and expressions of hope – all proper content in a perilous time such as this.  And then all of them can be questioned by the few attending reporters (most there for ‘gotcha’ questions).  His political enemies, media mouthpieces, and the country’s inculcated pretend to abhor and ignore these daily sessions, all the while carefully watching FN so that they can have something to say during their hours of vituperation.  The Dems really have a problem – no viable candidate, no policies, nothing but TDS to tell Americans, and now how to pick and promote an alternative (e.g. Cuomo) during our national hunkering down time when the election has taken a back seat, and all attention is focused on the doings of Team Trump.

[2apr20 update]  Daniel Pearl murderer gets reprieve from death sentence (here) .  Omar Saeed Sheikh, along with others, were convicted by a Pakistani court in 2003 of murdering WSJ South Asia bureau chief Daniel Pearl.  Today we learn that the “court reduces charges against British national Omar Saeed Sheikh to kidnapping, cuts sentence from death to seven years.”  Danny’s kidnapping and beheading in 2002 was the first of many such murders by various Islamic terrorists in the years that followed.  His father Dr Judea Pearl is a Turing laureate (2012) and world-famous computer scientist with ground-breaking work in heuristics, Bayesian inference, and causality.  Judea and Danny’s mother Ruth launched the Daniel Pearl Foundation that brought many Muslim journalists for sabbaticals in American media companies as an effort to foster greater understanding between Islamic and western cultures. (more here)

[3apr20 update] ‘Questions About Accuracy of Coronavirus Tests Sow Worry’ (here and here) reports on the concerns that are now beginning to trouble both healthcare workers and political leaders.  RR readers received a thorough tutorial on the reliability of such tests in ‘The Value of Testing’.  Our innumerate citizenry doesn’t really have a clue on the impact of testing on the spread of C19 virus.  At least now some people are beginning to take note that testing is NOT the denied big salvation that the Dems have been screaming about, and using the test shortage as one more reason to attack the administration and divide the country.  I will do an update on the significance of current test performance numbers (sensitivity = Pr(test positive given you have C19), and specificity = Pr(test negative given you don’t have C19) which are still a mystery to the medicos.  Right now I’m trying get out the first post on my epidemic spreading model Epidyne(V1.0) which should provide some answers to the uncertainty in the predictions that we receive from the daily C19 briefings, and also answer some questions on what levels of infections and deaths we can expect as this epidemic sweeps the country.  As some of you know, the healthcare pros are having quite a consternation on the conflicting reports from their many spreading models (hence the reason I developed Epidyne).

Parents are a danger to their children’s carefully inculcated minds in these times during their enforced home stays.  That is the opinion of an emerging clutch of unionized woke (aka evil) teachers as cited by one of our regular commenters (someone please find the link for me so that I can include it herein, thanks).  These ‘educators’ are afraid that their years of drilling large government socialism into their formative minds will all be washed away when they spend more time with their parents and learn an alternative set of values and mores, and God knows what else with which they may pollute their carefully nurtured brain bones.  The little darlins may even come back to school with an appreciation of capitalism, free markets, and religion (gasp!).

[4apr20 update] Trump’s “off color” joke.  The demonic Dems are showing off their hyper-hypocritical side again by suddenly becoming paramount prudes.  In his yesterday’s C19 briefing the discussion went to the deaths predicted by the models.  After Dr Brix finished her contribution on the various results from the various models, the President interjected, “The models show hundreds of thousands of people are going to die and you know what I want to do? I want to come way under the model,” then adding a tongue-in-cheek, “The professionals did the models. I was never involved in a model. At least this kind of a model.”  And the liberal media went ballistic.  Now these are the same ‘journalists’ and media mavens whose demand for freedom of speech focuses on being able to inject “shit”, “fuck”, …, and people humping into America’s films and TV fare as frequently as possible.  Then they get the vapors when Trump delivers his little bon mot.  (As a relevant aside, FLOTUS Melania was a professional model and a business woman when she and Donald were married.)