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  • 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.)

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  • 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 –

    C19_lockdownEffectiveness

    SgtBumblebrainBiden 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.

     

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  • 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.

    C19utilitiesFor 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]

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  • Hunker Down Diary – 9may20

    George Rebane

    Today is HD63 in the Rebane household, and we are beginning to see little stirrings of sanity across California with even timid Nevada County showing signs of developing a C19 resistant backbone.  Now we are starting to see appeals from various late comers for letter writing campaigns to our electeds to exhort them to end our county’s lockdown.  In response, our Supes are now meeting in secret with the county health officer and others to develop plans to return to some semblance of normalcy, having taken the first baby step to loosen things to the level dictated from Sacramento (really a cop out, here).  Many other counties have more courageously and correctly led the state in returning their communities to prudent post-C19 environments of business, commerce, and social interaction.  That one-size-fits-all policies are wrong can be seen from the data on the disparate impact that the virus has had on our country. (here)

    The upshot of it all, one that escapes many people and all progressives, is that we will sooner than later end the lockdown no matter what our command/control governments tell us.  This is an easy deduction, and one that RR (along with other conservatives) has attempted to communicate for the last two months.  We can open up quickly and purposefully with a set of broadly agreed prudent behaviors that are integrated into our new social contract, thereby saving the substantial part of our economy that remains and can launch into rapid recovery.  Or we can continue hunkering down toward a complete destruction of our economy so that unemployment rates go north of 50%, and result in a wholesale grassroots rebellion of a paupered citizenry with unpredictable results.

    (more…)

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  • Local liberals lambast loosening lockdowns (updated)

    George Rebane

    As we and others across the country have pointed out, phasing out the C19 lockdowns has become the latest political chasm in the Great Divide.  You know that our country is now fundamentally transformed when it can no longer come together for a unified response to a national emergency.  It’s not a reach to conclude that had we this kind of schism in our citizenry in 1940, then the US entry and participation in WW2 would have been very different with historical consequences of creating a world we would not recognize today.

    Our leftwing wants the country to suffer enormously and enduringly – first, in order to defeat Trump in November, and then to remain in a devastated state during which main street mobs will rise to demand a bigger government to save them.  Today the most reliable way for the Left to achieve this state of affairs is to maintain the economy destroying lockdown for as long as possible while buying votes wholesale with government checks drawn on newly printed money.

    On the local scene we see this policy promoted daily in the pages of The Union by our county’s progressives.  Most recently, columns by conservatives Terry McLaughlin (here) and the wife of my life, Jo Ann Rebane (here) have drawn extensive ire on the matter of loosening the local lockdown.  It is particularly instructive to read the comment stream under Ms McLaughlin’s column, and the same can be said for Jo Ann’s column.  A more measured response to the latter is in the 7may20 print edition of The Union from a Mr Paul Hauck.  He claims Rebane’s call to prudently loosen the Nevada County lockdown is both unreasonable and factually incorrect.

    Nowhere did Rebane promote a “precipitous” abandonment of social distancing, masks, etc.  And whether through careless reading, promoting an agenda, or both, he disputes the cited university reports on the estimated levels of existing herd immunity in California, and goes on to doubt her understanding of “the causal connection” between stay-at-home and low C19 incidence (no active cases currently) in the county.  I personally can attest to the lady’s deep and detailed understanding of such factors affecting pandemics, which appears to be a cut above Mr Hauck’s own understanding of regional herd immunity variances in the country.  (My own analysis of the impact of herd immunity levels and the intensity of a ‘second wave’ was published here and in the 18apr20 Union.)  He most certainly does not know what other countries have done and are doing to effectively loosen their lockdowns.

    We know the story of Sweden (more here), and are learning daily how other EU countries have fared on their return paths to normalcy.  The evidence, as I have presented before, shows little correlation of death rates between various lockdown levels implemented by countries.  The latest good news comes from Germany (here), a country that never went into a draconian destruction derby with its economy, and is now rapidly reinstating pre-C19 norms in its commercial sector.  Such reports are, of course, omitted or on page seven in the lamestream media.

    The main point that is lost in such leftwing opposition to prudent paths to loosen the lockdowns is both gratuitous, and definitely politically motivated to retain public policies that will maximally stifle the healing of our economy and the return to normalcy.

    [update]  Are we in the middle of a ‘Plandemic’?  Along the line of argument presented here and elsewhere in these pages, I received this video of an interview with renowned molecular biologist and medical researcher Dr Judy Mikovitz, PhD (here). She did seminal work on viruses in the development of vaccines and the eradication of HIV/AIDS.  Her PhD dissertation and subsequent discoveries put big pharma at risk, and she was successfully attacked and silenced for 5 years by court order (while uncharged with any crime) and threat of fabricated prosecution.  This interview is not only a pertinent revelation about the underside of what’s happening now in our nation’s C19 response, but also about how an entire industry controls the science and released public information about infectious diseases.  The five years are up, and she has co-authored a book (here) about the massive subterfuge that is drawing legions of physicians equally concerned (outraged?) about how our power establishment is managing the business of infectious diseases.  I personally am a bit astounded that in today’s environment of corporatist censorship, that this video is still available to us (YouTube took it down).  It’s worth your time to view it and see what you will make of it.

    And make no mistake, there is plenty of opposition to Mikovitz and her assertions of conspiracy at the highest levels that include recently canonized St Anthony of Fauci.  Here and here are a couple of links to give balance to the above.

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  • Where is the Covid Deaths Bump?

    George Rebane

    For the past week I’ve been poring over various data from different sources on Covid-19 deaths and death rates.  It’s been a frustrating enterprise due to definitions ranging from vague to insane, and numbers that just don’t tie.  The quest is important though, because we have been deluged for the past couple of months with what can now be called the metrics of mass madness.  The ongoing efforts to afflict major damage to our economy are all based on the allegation that a national lockdown will greatly reduce the number of people dying from the virus, and therefore the calls for opening up are nothing less than the voices of greed putting profits before people.

    However, when we take a closer look at C19 deaths, the lockdown arguments and reasoning don’t add up.  What every histrionics laden report ignores and/or hides is the entire question of how many would have died anyway from their ‘underlying conditions’, or from the legion of other causes that kill almost 2.9 million Americans year in and year out.  In other words, at any given age, if you don’t die of this, then you’ll die of that anyway, C19 or no C19.

    So, from all the blizzard of mostly irrelevant and bad data available to us, the objective to sustain lockdown arguments is to see if there is an abnormal bump in the current number of deaths due to the corona virus.  We must also keep in mind the hanky-panky that is going on with how C19 deaths have been and are being counted – in many health care systems/institutions patients dying of anything during this epidemic have been put down as succumbing to C19.  The National Center for Health Statistics assures us that the most reliable data are the “provisional death counts (that) deliver our most comprehensive picture of lives lost to COVID-19. These estimates are based on death certificates, which are the most reliable source of data and contain information not available anywhere else, including comorbid conditions, race and ethnicity, and place of death.”  (more here)

    So here’s the drill.  The CDC tallies total C19 deaths from 1 Feb 2020 to 1 May 2020 at 37,308 out of a total of 719,438 US deaths for that three-month period (here).  The current ‘normal’ (pre-C19) annual death rate in 2019 for the US is 8.8 per thousand (here).  This says that out of a population of 328,000,000 we have a total of about 2,886,400 Americans die annually, or 722,000 during a three-month period (or 55,500 every week).  To emphasize again, this is the pre-C19 death rate for last year.  Not to put too sharp a point on it, this year’s total deaths, with C19 raging in that three-month period, don’t even come up to our norm for a three-month period.

    The reasonable explanation is that the corona virus’s marginal contribution to America’s annual deaths count is literally so low as to be swallowed by the country’s natural mortality rate.  Highlighting (hyping?) C19 deaths due to the worldwide pandemic has made us all accept draconian personal lockdowns and the arguably insane shutdown of America’s commerce.  And it has been done without the presentation of any substantive information (i.e. data formatted to support decision making), only the daily death counts and emotional appeals to ‘save human lives’ from the ravages of a disease that is doing little or nothing extraordinary, save focus our fearful attention on it so that we will compliantly accept new layers of controls from federal and state governments pursuing more fundamental agendas while desperately seeking to convince us that they are ‘doing something’.  So today we have a population that does not understand the role, power, and development of herd immunity in stopping pandemics.  And most certainly, no one has asked to see the extraordinary bump in total deaths caused by C19 (aka SARS-CoV-2).  Is this how sheeple behave?

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  • Sandbox – 5may20

    [Feliz Cinco de Mayo compadres!  And re Corona beer about which you've all heard the story?  You haven't?  Well, they had a big international beer judging competition in Munich to which all the major and wannabe brewers sent their various brews for judging and receiving the prestigious awards.  The Corona folks also sent their finest.  A couple of weeks passed and when the award ceremonies were over, the Corona folks had heard nothing, not even an email acknowledging their entry.  So they inquired, and the next day they got a reply from a German vet in Munich that read 'I was forwarded the specimen you submitted, and am sorry to inform you that your horse has diabetes.' ;-)  gjr]

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  • The Real Value of Unreliable Tests and Testing

    George Rebane

    Every social issue draws relevance ONLY through its numbers, which if you don’t understand, then you cannot participate in a reasoned discussion about the issue.

    Today we are concerned with two types of C19 tests and testing policies.  Tests fall into the ‘detect presence of infection’ variety, and the ‘detect presence of immunity’ variety – I’ll call them infection and immunity tests respectively.  Testing on an individual basis is supposed to allow the healthcare professional to decide whether you need further attention (drawing down on limited healthcare resources).  Conducting a comprehensive test on a sample drawn from a target population is done to advise response policy makers about ultimate levels of infection, mortality, and time to achieve each that will advise what kind of policy to implement, and then also monitor how well the implemented policy is working.

    The infection tests seek to identify the guilty pathogen (today the C19 virus) or the presence of one of its bio-proxies, and the immunity test is used to identify the presence of antibodies or antigens (more here) which the body has produced after being infected, and which are now providing immunity to the individual.  The problem with interpreting the results of such tests is that they are inherently unreliable (used in the technical sense) – their sensitivities and specificities are less than perfect.  We recall that sensitivity is the probability of testing positive, given that you are infected – that is P(TP|V).  And specificity is one minus the probability that you test negative, given that you are not infected – that is P(¬TP|¬V) = 1-P(TP|¬V).  Here we recall that TP means test positive, and V denotes the presence of the virus or not indicated by ¬V.  Good tests enjoy high values for both sensitivity and specificity.  I have presented an extensive discussion of the impact of such a test administered for an individual in ‘Testing’s Tower of Babel’.

    In this commentary I want to interest the reader in how to understand and evaluate unreliable testing of a target population for the purpose of determining the fraction of that population that is infected or already immune.  Since testing the whole population is almost always impractical, the tool used to determine that fraction is through comprehensive testing of a random sample of people drawn from the target population.  A drawn sample is ‘random’ only when each member of the target population has an equal chance (probability) of being included in the sample.  (Target populations segmented according to a set of attributes may be randomized by ensuring that the known segment shares are represented in the sample according to each segment’s share of the overall target population.)

    (more…)

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  • Ruminations – 3may20 (updated 5may20)

    George Rebane

    You can indeed have your own opinions AND your own facts – America proves it daily.

    Know the denominator!!  The innumerates of the land are constantly bombarded with naked numerators about this stat and that stat.  And none of them make a peep that they know about what they are being told.  That the US has suffered more than 60K C19 deaths means nothing unless you know either the total number of infections or America’s population.  Naked numerators are NOT news unless you know what the denominator is and how that compares with others in the same class (e.g. international C19 death rates) in which the numerator belongs.  Dumbth rules.

    Dr Fauci is quoted saying, “Opening too soon COULD cause a (C19) rebound.”  Well, no shit Red Ryder.  Reported by everyone from FN on down, this is a tautology of cosmic proportions; a real nothing-burger seen as ‘news’ only by the nation’s light thinkers.  Fauci had to say that because it's also his job to disperse palliative pabulum, true statements masquerading as epiphanies of expert opinion.  But it’s up to us Americans out here in television land to understand that we learned nothing new.  And woe be to them (and really to us all) if enough of our fellow citizens really thought they were enlightened by something actionable.

    Asymptomatic C19 carriers are not contagious, shows a new German study, thereby debunking the Chinese claim to the contrary, and making moot more of the claims by the nation’s CCP-celebrating lockdown loonies.  (more here)  H/T to correspondent since the lamestream has a tendency to suppress such news.

    Censorship rising.  The Left, supported by corporatist America, now determines which facts and opinions may be publicly expressed in the various media.  Even FN can no longer claim to “fair, balanced, and unafraid.”

    ‘I vas just following orders.’  Does anyone else notice how many of our police are becoming automatons, mindlessly carrying out their lockdown orders, no matter how insane?  This behavior is a harbinger of the police state the progressives intend to implement sooner than later when they tip the balance of power.  And as has happened in so many other countries, historically and especially during the last century, the government people with the guns will always act to first and foremost protect their own jobs and families’ security at the expense of yours.  The Left has a full pipeline of laws and regulations awaiting implementation to control every aspect of our lives and livelihoods.  But there are still LE voices in the wilderness that recognize and oppose the national insanity; here is one from the Sacramento Deputy Sheriffs Association. (H/T to reader)

    Nevada County – ‘still a day late and a dollar short’.  As of 2may20, NC with 100K residents has a total of 41 C19 cases that include one death, two still active, and 38 recovered.  Our hospital is empty of C19 patients, and western county has had no new cases since 17 April.  Also, as of 2may20 Yuba and Sutter counties with a combined 175K residents have 50 recorded cases that include 36 recoveries and 3 deaths with the remaining 11 being active.  Yuba and Sutter have opened up their businesses with the advisory that commercial enterprises “use all appropriate health measures” in the public square.  As a remote rural county that doesn’t understand the nature of the current coronavirus epidemic and how it compares to a regular flu season which has never impacted the conduct of commerce, NC remains closed, fearful, and continues to shutter and threaten its businesses.  Talk about rank ignorance and political CYA.

    [4may20 update]  Prof Alan Blinder, the very liberal Princeton economist, was interviewed in the 4may20 WSJ, a newspaper in which he regularly appears.  Asked about the Fed’s response to the C19 pandemic, he gave it high marks for immediately providing lavish liquidity to commerce (part of its monetary policy), but reminded us that the Fed cannot create jobs because that is the role of government’s fiscal policy (taxes, tariffs, fees, regs).  Of interest to me was that he never deigned to elaborate on the fiscal policy required to create jobs, avoiding this important detail for good reason.  To the leftist economists proper fiscal policy here means government creating winners and losers in the commercial sector by selectively issuing taxes, tariffs, fees, and regs.  That has never worked, and it’s always been the opposite of the government getting out of the way that has given rise to rapid economic growth (witness the most recent snail’s pace of growth stifled by Obama.)  But the Blinders of the world cannot make their case to a knowledgeable audience without inviting more public blowback on their cherished collectivist economics.  So the good professor left it to the reader to interpret which kind of fiscal policy would be needed today to rescue our economy.

    Seventy-one years ago the refugee Rebanes from Europe arrived in the Port of New York aboard the troopship USS General Harry Taylor packed with a regiment-load of WW2 survivors.  We had spent the last ten days on the storm-tossed North Atlantic housed in huge sleeping bays like sardines in canvas sleeping bunks stacked 5 and 6 high. (more here)  And finally, on the morning of 4 May 1949 we landed in the world’s greatest country that promised all of us lucky ones life, liberty, and the ability to pursue happiness as each of us saw fit and were capable, … and did we ever!

    [5may20 update]  Aerosols, droplets, speaking, singing, …, and Covid-19.  Here is a very illuminating summary of how the virus can be transmitted and the effectiveness of masks.

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  • Scattershots – 28apr20 (updated 2may20)

    George Rebane

    501c3 bets to co-locate money and mouth.  RR’s commenters have over the years made assertions and predictions with such deeply held convictions as to draw more than a smile from the rest of us.  So here’s a proposal (again) – offer odds and a material dollar bet that your measurable assertion will come true.  The bet may be taken up to a specified dollar amount by challengers.  The loser must remit his lost amount to the bona fide 501c3 charity chosen by the winner.  Say, one of our lefties and true believers in Bumblebrain’s November victory offers 2:1 odds for a maximum of $500.  Then if I take a $100 of that and lose, I have to mail a check to the 501c3 that he specified.  If I win, then the leftie has to mail a $200 check to my 501c3.  The bettors will confirm and adjudicate their own bets – honorable behavior is paramount. The comment streams will become the indelible archive of such bets, and I will keep an updated post of all such pending bets similar to how I ran the Dropout Derby.  The aim here is to sanitize RR comment streams from the reams of unmitigated bullshit posted by commenters, some who have the courage to use their real names, and the sackheads who don’t have any perceivable courage of their convictions as they continue spouting anonymous crap in these pages.  I have labeled these as ‘501c3 bets’, and a commenter can challenge the veracity of another commenter with such a bet, that if refused will communicate to all the level of conviction.  My own prediction is that most commenters will be happy to continue just passing hot air anonymously.

    Socialist scumbags want others to pay off their perfidious vote buying debts.  For the last few decades our progressives have bought the votes of public sector employees – police, first responders, teachers, pencil pushing bureaucrats, … – through thug-like union negotiations for lavish pension plans that are now unfunded to the tune of trillions.  Today the evil Dems in Congress are attempting to attach to C19 relief legislation pension bailouts for the various Dem run states.  In short, they want future, say, Floridians to pay for the retirements of, say, Illinois state employees.  As Sen Rick Scott (R-FL) points out (here), federal bailouts like these are a very bad policy to begin with, but more so because they reward the continuance of blatantly corrupt and cunning incompetence by liberal politicians in such state governments.

    ‘You can never, ever trust the Communists.’ is a wise exhortation memorialized by William McGurn writing (here) about an elderly Hong Kong lawyer and democracy activist recently arrested by the Chinese communists for his role in illuminating the illegal conversion to totalitarianism of the former British colony.  The takeaway here is that today communism sports a broad halo of similar ideologies embraced by the greater Left who range from kitchen table communists, through practicing progressive academics, to legions of liberal politicians, media personalities, and entertainers, all abetted by a solid phalanx of leftwing government employees embedded in countless agencies and bureaus across the country.  Their common denominator is the Alinsky Almanac of public propaganda which was first institutionalized by V. Lenin who held that “Communists have only contempt for the ‘bourgeois’ idea of objective truth, replacing it with a morality that holds ‘truth’ to be whatever is expedient for the party at that moment. “  We see that replicated daily in our lamestream media.

    Nevada County government is turning out to be a toady when it comes to asserting the obvious fact that rural counties are not the same as urban counties, and should therefore not be forced to adhere to the one-size-fits-all lockdown mandates from Sacramento.  Absent our county, six northern California counties have joined in a publicized protest (here) of the governor’s wrong-headed program to fight the C19 virus at great cost to the state’s private and public sectors.  Gavin Newsom, along with other Dem governors, sees this as another opportunity to ratchet up the state’s power over citizens, power once institutionalized that will be hard for citizens to walk back once the crisis is over.  ‘How Louisiana Reopened After Hurricane Katrina’ is only a recent example of how the government takes and keeps.  Closer to home, Nevada County has now issued a formal legal lockdown order that is to stay in force until 15 May 2020 (here).  The document is beyond byzantine government-speak with detailed exceptions that continue for pages and can be gratuitously interpreted 20 ways from Sunday.  Reading such prolific verbiage always makes me wonder again what happens to otherwise normal and reasonable people after they enter politics.  To various degrees they all become tainted personages who confirm their obvious blemishes by posturing themselves as being exalted by their positions of power.

    [29apr20 update]  Anti-C19 drugs are on a rollercoaster ride of acceptability.  First we heard good things about re-purposing hydroxychloroquine (HCL) plus additives as being both a C19 prophylactic and a curative, then the lamestream screamed at Trump for suggesting its use and studies were dug up to show that it didn’t work.  The same happened to Gilead’s Remdesivir, first it was good (here), then it was totally ineffective according to the lamestream.  Now it looks like both HCL and Remdesivir are back up on the C19 Pharma Hit Parade.  As of 1030 29apr20 the Dow is up 609 (2.55%) on news of a most comprehensive study showing that Remdesivir works (here and here), and also other studies coming in showing that HCL also works (here).  A kicker for this news is that several pharma companies developing C19 vaccines report progress is being made much faster than the experts anticipated with at least two candidates going into early human trials.

    [30apr20 update]  C19 mortality rates.  A correspondent sent me a link to a website (here) that specializes in collecting data and making information out of it.  Of current interest are the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.  This posting covers the age and health factors on C19 deaths.  Analysis of the data delivers the punchline – “both aging and being unhealthy, separately, contribute to a greater risk of dying from Covid.  The risk from being unhealthy, though, is far greater.”  This important finding is backed up by numerous clearly laid out charts and tables from which I lifted the one below.  (Actually, TypePad is partially up right now, but won’t accept graphics for posting.  1may20 – and now it will.)

    C19deathsByAge

    [1may20 update]  More C19 data to assuage the TDS sufferers who can read.

    C19deaths200501

    [2may20 update]  The mentality of the Nevada County BoS.  The Supes shut down our local ‘transfer station’ (aka county dump) for a week before wholesale public uproar made them rescind their dictum.  What haunts me about their action, as the most recent and locally accessible decision by government politicians, is how could they possibly have come to such a conclusion to limit the hours and number of vehicles that the Waste Management dump could, should, and would service in a day.  When some county staffer laid such a proposal before the Board, why was it not unanimously rejected in the first, say, 3 to 5 milliseconds?  Cleaning up junk from your household and land during an imposed lengthy quarantine is an extremely useful, rewarding, timely, and safe activity.  Packing your vehicle or trailer with junk and taking it to the dump exposes no one to unnecessary risk of infection, including to Waste Management’s workers who need their hours in this time of economic distress.  All that became obvious to our Supes only after they were overwhelmed with the public pushback that they had acted with blatant and palpable idiocy to compliantly place yet another such unreasonable restriction upon the citizenry.  The item of enduring interest is what went through their collective minds when they issued that edict.  The record shows that not a single supervisor stood to publicly oppose it.  Understanding this same process, as it is historically practiced by politically powerful assemblies at all levels across the land, is important for us as a free people, so that we can be vigilant and work hard to reduce and/or eliminate its effects on our lives.

     

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