George Rebane

SAT tests are biased and inequitable.  That is the claim by leftwing academics over the past few years.  The evidence shown for this assertion is that black and Hispanic students don’t get the same pro rata scores with the white students.  Today the SAT people say that they’ll fix that by having different tests for different students which should cut down cheating and drive the test scores into some par region for the races. (here and here)  If white student scores are the anchor range to which other must hew, then that means the black/Hispanic tests will be dumbed down to raise their scores, and tests given to Asian-descent students will be made tougher to lower their scores.  As with all such collectivist social engineering undertakings, the causes – home culture, quality of education, heritance – for the diverse results are either denied or ignored; the overarching motive is political correctness, no matter how much the students and the country are harmed by such ideological machinations.  I covered the race-based reason for such differences in ‘Equity Denies Reality’.

Testing to slow the spread of Covid is futile and also nonsensical, as these pages have revealed over the last two years.  Professor Daniel Halperin makes this point clear in ‘Omicron Is Spreading, Resistance Is Futile’ in the 25jan22 WSJ.  A highlight in the article is its revelation of the difference between the ‘gold standard’ PCR and the more available antigen tests, the former taking days to get results and the latter being the ‘rapid test’.  Both suffer from weaknesses I have described and quantified in previous posts that involve the tests’ sensitivities – P(TP|V) – and specificities – P(-TP|-V).  Sensitivity is the probability of a ‘test positive’ given that you have the virus, and specificity is the probability that you get a correct negative result given you don’t have the virus.  It turns out that the PCR tests have a high false alarm rate, i.e. low specificity; and the antigen tests miss detecting the virus too frequently, i.e. low sensitivity, especially in the critical early days of the infection.  The bottom line is that both tests give jaundiced results in addition to the entire overarching argument that testing doesn’t contribute anything to slowing the spread of Covid.

Other dubious Covid stats we are inundated with is “Covid hospitalizations” and Omicron deaths.  The former bamboozled number counts “patients admitted for other reasons who incidentally test positive” that analysis shows these amount to about half of the hospitalizations.  And fear-mongering Omicron deaths is done without telling people that these number no more than the normal death rates encountered during normal flu seasons.  Dr Halperin concludes with – “It’s past time to shift focus from trying to stamp out all new infections to protecting the most vulnerable from severe disease directly through vaccination and other evidence-based measures and alleviating hospital staffing shortages. Ending mask mandates, de-emphasizing isolation and encouraging vaccination ought to be a compromise most of us can live with.”  Finally, as we have known all along, masks are a farce – more below.

Local bureaucrats are still attempting to mandate masks in their allocated public spaces.  Today the 25jan22 Union features their lead story (here) telling of an encounter between a citizen group wanting to enter the Nevada County Clerk Recorder’s office to check on the proper filing of their BoS recall papers, the directions for which were confused by the Clerk Recorder staff.  They were denied entry because they did not wear masks.  Such a denial was totally illegal since there is no state or county mask mandate in force.  Tinpot bureaucrats cannot just make up their own rules for how the public must deport themselves when entering their fiefdom.  But that is the way of our country now – the Left fear-mongers Covid for establishing a new precedence for public control, and the Right refuses to play along while pointing to constitutional norms that prevent such gratuitous imposition of arbitrary rules.

[27jan22 update]  “Fair and honest elections, with votes cast by knowledgeable and informed citizens, are an integral part of our democratic republic”, asserts Terry McLaughlin in her excellent 27jan22 Union column on voting rights (here).  On the other hand, I’m in receipt of an email from a liberal friend that contains a desperate Democrat plea for funds for their ‘Ron Begone’ with which to defeat Gov Ron DeSantis of Florida, the man they perhaps fear the most on the 2024 Republican ticket.  DeSantis is launching a voter integrity program, manned by “far-right election police” that the Dems claim will “intimidate and discourage Democratic voters”; yep, only the Dems will be kept away by this new program designed to “erase the voting rights” of, wait for it, only Dems.  It’s unbelievable how dumb their elites consider their grassroots true believers to be.  Their ‘Ron Begone’ brochure concludes with, “MAGA Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is the worst Governor in America and an utter nightmare for Floridians. He is relentless in his praise for Donald Trump, he completely botched Florida’s pandemic response and put lives at risk, and he gave scarce COVID vaccines to his major campaign donors instead of the most vulnerable Floridians. He MUST be defeated in the next election. We know for sure that Donald Trump is going to go ALL OUT to help DeSantis win, so we need to start fighting back today by building a massive coalition of good Democratic supporters.”  Exit problem:  Count the number of lies in this plea for money.

[2feb22 update]  Re the restraining order against my daughter and two other individuals active in promoting the recall of the Nevada County Board of Supervisors as reported in 2feb22 Union. (here)  The accounts of what happened in the brief encounter at the Clerk Recorder’s office differ widely.  What is clear is that the staff of the Clerk Recorder decided unilaterally to establish and physically enforce a mask mandate.  Such a mandate was not in force in Nevada County or at the Rood Center.  The restraining order appears to be a political instrument launched by Rood Center insiders opposing the recall, and using for its substantive basis a staffer becoming somewhat hysterical about her safety after being asked to give her name to one of the recall promoters who entered the office.  Here the fundamental question is, does a subordinate public bureau of the county government have the right to unilaterally establish and enforce mandates on the public to restrict legitimate business with the bureau, mandates that have not been established by the county nor enforced by its law enforcement arm (i.e Sheriff)?  For the record, neither Jo Ann nor I are in favor of the recall.  Our adult daughter follows her own counsel and ideology which does have considerable overlap with ours, while neither being the subset of the other.