Home Of The Whopper

 

And if you believe that wagonload of horse cobblers,
we have a bridge for sale, cheap...

Natzsofast

from WRSA :26/27, and one clinker

The difference between a rose, and rose fertilizer, in one quote.

Said Julius Caesar. Genghis Khan. Napoleon. Bonnie and Clyde. Hitler. Mao. Castro. The Manson Family. Pol Pot. The Clintons. MS-13. BLM. Jeffrey Epstein. Some 19 y.o. @$$hole in Uvalde. Ad infinitum. All of whom acted "according to the dictates of" their own consciences. Which was exactly the entire problem there. Kindly show all work if you're going to espouse such claptrap.

This is simply "If it feels good, do it." It's total unadulterated bullshit since its utterance by Simone de Abbatoir. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's literally the exact lie of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, from which proceedeth all subsequent human error and catastrophe to date.

Anyone you could think of, from Victor Davis Hanson, to Thomas Sowell, to Peter Hitchens, to Jordan Peterson, to Bill Burr, to Ricky Gervais, would make anyone espousing the same wish they'd never been born inside of 10 seconds' simple explanation.

Meme selection fail. Re-think.

Naked Men Should Not Do Magic Tricks

Some people disagree, fallaciously.

Because we can see where you're getting that rabbit, and now we know why it's brown.

Sorry to have to point out the obvious, but this is bassackwards, and btw, no, wet streets do NOT cause rain, and roosters crowing don't make the sun rise. That's reasoning on the level of an immature and ignorant child.

The recockulous and asinine implication stated therein is that "NATO and the US giving military aid to anyone is going to cause WW III".

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

This is like footnoting your thesis that short skirts cause rapes.

How fucking retarded is it?

It's as retarded as saying that you buying more guns and ammo is going to cause feral monkeys to do a home invasion on your place, kill you, rape your wife, kidnap your children, and sell your stuff at the pawn shop.

It's your fault.

The feral monkeys will stand blameless.

So might there be a WW III? Certainly.

Because Russia, (by which I mean PUTIN) is an expansionistic dictatorial terrorist state, attempting to grab every bit of not-its-territory it can steal, and sees the rest of the world, let alone the wishes of the object of its obsession, as no brake on its intentions.

It's not working out like he planned (gloriously!), and apparently he hasn't been kicked in the dick enough times to want to cease and desist. Yet.

When a pitbull has your neighbor by the throat, do you stop trying to change his plan because he's latched on like a tick, and the first ten whacks with the baseball bat to doggo's head haven't fully gotten his attention yet? No, you do not, unless you're a lazy worthless asshole.

Sending Ukraine whatever we can to deal with Russia's unconscionable invasion is what you do unless you're a lazy worthless asshole neighbor. If Russia(Putin) thinks nuclear war is the answer to that (rather than letting go, and knocking that off), then we can all worry about who rules in Hell, but clearly, anyone that insane isn't going to respond well to tender entreaties, they'll be emboldened in their insanity by your weakness, and you don't let them walk around on the loose either. (And we still suspect that at that point, Putin gets the 9mm Q-tip he's been begging for since late February, courtesy of someone within his inner circle with more of a grip on sanity, and less wedded to the idea of restoring the Soviet Union's full glory, even at the cost of global thermonuclear annihilation.)

To those who think this unreasonable:

Those who think otherwise would bargain with a crocodile in order to be accorded the privilege of being eaten last, and not see the problem there until their leg was in process of being bitten off up to their own ass.

Such people should be accorded no attention, and in fact ridiculed as harshly as is possible, commensurate with then ignoring any further babblings they might make. They are idiots. When in positions of decision, they are dangerous idiots.

Chamberlain's stupidity and France's cowardice plunged an entire continent into war. But, we almost forget, there was this feral asshole (or four) who may have had a wee bit more direct role in all that, wasn't there?

We tried isolationism in the 1930s. It got us precisely the World War of the 1940s almost nobody wanted. Because the fascist axis (which included Russia, until the honor among co-thieves caught up with them) were expansionist dictatorial terrorist states. And they would have happily taken everything without that war, but in the end, they wouldn't have settled for not getting what they wanted, and if all it took was a war, they thought the lemon was worth the squeeze.

Isolationism isn't an option ever, and in fact is even less of an option now than it was 80 years ago, when it was merely stupid and short-sighted. Now, it's suicidal. 

If you're still suffering from Stockholm Syndrome after nine decades of socialism lite here, it's time to seek professional help. (Or maybe a stout crowbar and some vaseline, to pull your head out of a very dark and smelly place. Dealer's choice.)

If you think arming your neighbor is what's going to cause bad people to attack them, and/or you, you're quite frankly around the psychological bend, and should be locked up for your own good, and heavily medicated, because logic and reason has left your zip code.

And concluding that helping somone else out to prevent a war here by letting them fight theirs there might not avail, does not therefore make that aid a cause of such a war, if it afterwards occurs.

But don't take my word for it. The fallacy underlying that sort of logical idiocy is well known;  you could look it up.

If someone wants to make the case that we're broker than broke, to the tune of negative trillions, and shouldn't be throwing around even more billions we don't have, make that argument. But you'd better be prepared to show the money we'll spend giving Social Security to illegal aliens and fake refugees, and handing out free crack pipes, which money will be spent, and without you raising a peep, is a far better investment of money-we-don't-have.

Otherwise, raise ten times more hell over that, or else STFU about the relative federal pittance "wasted" kicking Vlad in the nuts.

He needs it, and to the degree it's actual aid and not grift-bait, it's money well spent.

The Ministry Of WTF?!?

 

Natzsofast, Guido

 

I see where several blogs (and I'm not gonna point fingers) are commenting on Vodkapundit's article on PJ Media, regarding Italy "revising" their Kung Flu death numbers.

Except, not so much. Italy did not go all Democrat on Glenn Youngkin's vote tallies with their COVID death rate, and just try to erase 97% of them. Anyone who suggested that isn't very bright, or worse. They simply moved most of them from "dead only from COVID" to "dead from COVID and more". What, people with pre-existing serious chronic conditions might have died from COVID because those exact conditions made them less able to cope with a debilitating systemic illness? WHO KNEW? I mean, besides every doctor except maybe Dr. Phil, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Seuss, or Dr. Doolittle.

Look, I like Stephen Green (Vodkapundit), he's a funny guy, and I've watched him for years with Bill Whittle, but the way he's portraying this is flat-out moronic (and face-palmingly wrong), and he needs to put the bottle down before he blogs anything further. And when the alcohol wears off, he's going to have a helluva time getting his foot out of his mouth on this. It's that stupid. Or else deliberately deceptive.

Point of order:

Those people in Italy didn't all spontaneously die without COVID either, and they had all those chronic conditions for years and decades without dying - until they got COVID.

So this is Italy re-arranging deck chairs, and tidying up their casualty lists a very, very small bit.

Not lowering the overall CFR for COVID. Just for "COVID alone".

The videos of dead people stacking up outside hospitals there, or Italian hospitals chock-a-block with the sick and dying, multiple hospitals being overwhelmed, and doctors triaging people over 70 to "wait outside and die quietly", while letting people under 70 into the hospitals for treatment, because they didn't have the resources to care for both groups - like has happened never in modern peacetime history with "just the flu" - didn't just suddenly not happen. And Green knows it.

So let's not pretend those other 97% died from "something else". Didn't happen. They died from COVID plus comorbidities, not the other conditions alone, which exact comorbidities made them a lot more susceptible to dying than people who were otherwise healthy, and got COVID alone.

All this revision tells us is that 97% of the people who died with COVID had a comorbidity, and only 3% of those who died from COVID alone didn't have any such thing.

So the COVID CFR didn't drop by 97%. And Green is either too stupid to notice that he left off the key word "alone" from that sentence, or he's deliberately lying like a sonofabitch. There is no third option besides stupidity or mendacity: he's either a moron, or a liar. It's not a pretty place for him to be.

Nice try, but no cigar.

The COVID alone CFR did drop by 97%. BFD.

COVID still killed just as many people in Italy today as it did when originally reported. Anyone who couldn't suss that out on their own in 0.2 seconds is simply not tall enough for this ride. 

Italy is simply acknowledging that a host of conditions gave COVID a great big boost at knocking people off at 28X the rate, in Italy overall, as "just the flu", with those having significant comorbidities like obesity, hypertension, COPD, and cardiac disease, at a tremendous disadvantage compared to people without them.

This "news" is about as earth-shattering as telling me really short people have trouble seeing over the heads of any crowd, and that fat people are easier prey for predators than skinny ones.

And it doesn't change the COVID mortality rate a whit. It simply bifurcates it into those already hamstrung by other problems (97%), and those whacked by the 'rona outright, despite being healthy (3%). Total dead: 100% of those reported dead in the first place. Gee thanks, I feel so much safer now.

This is an exercise in precision, not a revision of absolute COVID mortality downward by 33X.

Telling me people with cardiac conditions survive head-on impacts more poorly than people without them doesn't make head-on collisions safer, either.

There's a lot of people who should know better celebrating a non-news item that is functionally meaningless regarding COVID, and a lot of people who are flaming statistical and mathematical blithering idiots cock-a-doodle-dooing because they're so stupid they don't know what they don't know.

Let's please not fall into either category.

Whiplash

 h/t Sal

COVID Vaxx Not Mandated For CDC

 h/t Phil

Laws For Thee, But Not For Me

And why would they mandate that?

The shot doesn't work to prevent COVID transmission;

The vaccinated are just as contagious as the unvaccinated;

Vaccine passports based on the jab are pointless, worthless, and stupid;

And even getting the shot doesn't eliminate the need for masks in public venues.

But they're still thinking of going for a third dose of the pointless vaxx!!

Don't believe me. Listen to the head of the CDC >spit!< tell you herself:

YouTube

Oh, wait, you can't do that because the CNN interview on YouTube was already pulled, in less than 24 hours after it escaped into the wild. Bravo, Comrade Partyline! Motherland Is Proud!

Too bad it was uploaded to Rumble already.

Watch it here.

Stick a fork in the cover stories. They're done.

As for the population Control Freaks (for all values of that phrase):

Oak stake through the heart, or bayonet through the liver.

Dealer's choice. Either one robustly recommended.

Rifle of Color Coffee Company Redux

 

Nuremberg Defense 2.0

See  previous comments.

"I'm smart enough to run a multi-million-dollar nationally-known company, and I'm conservative, - no, really, cross my heart - but as God is my witness, I didn't know the NYSlimes might bend someone's words."

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Pull the other one; it's got bells on it.

I'd advise the execs at the company to start drinking heavily.

Nuremberg Defense 3.0, 20:1 odds: press release tells us CEO Hafer is going into Stupidity Rehab, to come out sheep-dipped in 30 days, and certified 99 44/100ths Stupidity Free.

As if.

Fire CEO Hafer. Publicly, and for cause. He's either too stupid to be in charge, or actually evil. Probably both. Like Dubbya, he's only a gift to conservative bloggers and late night talk show monologue writers.

Force him to put his shares into a blind trust, and relinquish control of the company for 10 years, if not forever. Bring in someone completely untainted in his stead. Have them loudly proclaim their conservative bona fides 24/7/365 forever, starting with calling out Biden's electoral fraud in such a way that the enemedia has no choice but to blacklist them as hard as they did Mike Lindell and MyPillow. Then double down on conservatism. Until CNN, PMSNBC, Rachel Madcow, and the witches' coven at The Spew hate your guts and want you dead, you're not trying nearly hard enough.

Or else admit the charade, fold your tent, and go sell shovels to shit miners.

There's no other way out of this tar baby for them. And the sooner they quit flailing at it, the better off they'll be.

To My Brothers and Sisters In The Military

 

In 1945, before even most of your parents were born, the American military, along with those of the British, French, and Russian forces, put on trial the senior officers of the German military, for their role in following the tyrannical and despotic regime of Adolf Hitler, even into genocidal mania.

In every case, those commanders pled to that tribunal that they had no idea what all was being carried out by the Nazi high command, and that they were military soldiers, doing their jobs, and  "just following orders".

To a man, that defense was thrown out as completely insufficient, and wholly inexcusable, and as a result, they were given harsh prison terms, and some were executed by hanging, for crimes against humanity. Because they did, indeed, "just follow orders". 

The execrable letter above, from your duly appointed commanders, is nothing more nor less than them telling you to "just follow orders".

The best face to put on it is that it constitutes nothing less than deliberate and damnable treason, by those very officers entrusted with the leadership of you all, and protecting the safety of the nation.

The generals and admirals you all swore oaths to obey (I swore the identical oath, like you, and it had no expiration date) have abdicated their leadership role above you, and have, with lies of omission, committed you to the same path as the German generals and admirals did to their troops in 1933. Rest assured, both they and the nation will bear the cost of their leadership failure, here and hereafter.

There are serious questions and challenges about the presidential election of 2020. Criminal flaws and unconstitutional breaches of law led to massive irregularites, and make that entire election's alleged result entirely suspect, and the declared winner completely fraudulent.

You know about fraudulent enlistments. Some of you witnessed people in your basic training units or first duty stations suddenly whisked away, because it was determined by proper investigations that they had enlisted to serve fraudulently. That's how it works in the military, and how it's supposed to work in the nation at large. But the nation has been failed by those who should have known better. States certified elections, for partisan reasons, which even a blind man could see were falsified. Courts refused to so much as examine a single piece of evidence that would have proved such was so, beyond any reasonable doubt. The Congress followed suit and ratified those fraudulent certifications, and all levels of government intend to see to swearing in a commander in chief over you who has no more right to the office than does a banana.

We are not a banana republic. But your leadership wishes to behave as though we were.

Your leadership was therefore placed in the unenviable position of having to decide whether to exercise the judgement entrusted to their leadership positions. To a man, they have chosen to abdicate that trust, and command you to follow them down that dark road of feigning no knowledge of the realities above. Just follow orders.

Almost every one of you knows the Leadership Traits. Many of you, by heart, and you live and embody them every day, upon which the safety of the nation depends.

Your commanders have failed to show Integrity, failed to exercise Intelligence, completely abandoned Courage, used criminally poor Judgement, completely abandoned Justice, and acted entirely out of Selfishness, in ordering you, in no certain terms, to jump off the cliff with them and for them, lest they risk their own positions of confidence and trust. They have sold you and your loyalty down the river to protect nothing but their own pensions and positions of authority.

If they had possessed the slightest inkling of duty or honor to their country, they would have resigned and turned in their stars, rather than order you all to do what they should not and could not do. They are faithless and worthless for failing to do so.

They have, by these breaches, made an unsound and untimely decision, set a horribly bad example to their troops, utterly misinformed you, and have abandoned any pretense of looking out for your welfare, or that of the nation they are charged to serve. Those are leadership failures of the worst kind.

America has many enemies. As always, most of them are foreign, and we beg you and pray you to continue to serve us all, to protect this great nation from them. But now we also have domestic enemies. Your chain of command has chosen to ally with them, and certify the presidency of a banana.

In terms you cannot misunderstand, 

That is an unlawful order. It carries no weight, commands no obedience, and following it will not protect you from any consequences, nor the wrath of a justifiably enraged public.

Rest assured, there is ALWAYS a Day Of Reckoning for nations who follow the path you've been ordered to take. The consequences will be dire and eternal.

Disobedience to your chain of command, justified or not, is a fearful thing, whether one is a private or a general officer. Anyone who does so will face harsh discipline, by a system with swift and draconian punishments for those it deems guilty.

And yet, your leaders, by abandoning their duty in this matter, have now forced every man and woman under their command to have to weigh and consider every order they are given, from here on out, and decide which orders are lawful, in furtherance of the oaths you and they took, and which ones may be or are unlawful, and command you to undertake things as horribly wrong and vile as anything perpetrated by soldiers serving the Nazi regime.

Your command, by failing to acknowledge reality, has lied to you, and is trying to lie you into obedience to an entirely unlawful and illegitimate command, and left you in the difficult position of deciding when and whether to obey, and when and whether to disobey, any further orders.

You alone will bear the consequences of your moral choices. And any immoral choices, should you make them.

I thank Fate and a merciful God that in two separate terms of enlistment, I never served under such circumstances, but I pray for you the wisdom to know your duty, with every order you are given. And I pray that should you find yourself at the fork in the road between serving honorably, and "just following orders", you will find it in yourselves to be honest, intelligent, courageous, just, and unselfish, and do the right thing, as you have done every day since you enlisted or were commissioned, and undertook the heavy burden of your oaths of service.

It is supremely unfair and wrong that your commanders have laid such a heavy burden on every serving person's shoulders, but such is the situation in which you now find yourselves. I would be derelict in the oath I took were I to fail to inform you that this is so.

Choose Honor.

Do what is right, always, even at the risk of disobedience. You must do no less.

We, the People, do not ask this of you. 

The oaths you took DEMAND it, and your consciences compel it.

The fate of the nation hangs on your every decision, both in the here and now, and in the hereafter.

- Aesop, USMC

Once A Marine, Always A Marine

Ten Mouseclicks

I like the internet, overall. It provides a plethora of information. Some of it better than anything the MSM comes up with. One way I find it, is by multiple visits daily to Irish's blog, The Feral Irishman. Not so much for the content, as for the blogroll over on the right. It's a Who's Who and What's What of what's going on, updated several times daily, apparently whenever Irish feels like hitting "Refresh". One of the sites there, and a fairly frequent (though probably not daily) visit is Brock Townsend's blogshop over at Free North Carolina. (I confess I can't tell if he's reporting NC's current status, or demanding it. But I digress.) Because he has far-ranging sense of history, particularly local, unique and interesting insights, and a facility for expressing same.

Today, however, I noticed the following post header there:

In Colorado, They're Counting Gun Shot Fatalities as COVID Deaths

So I clicked on over.

You can too, if you like.

TL;DR: Well, no, actually, they're not doing any such thing.

It turns out the county coroner in Podunk, er, Grand County, is all kerfluffled because two people who died of terminal lead poisoning from personal weaponry, also turned out to test positive for the Kung Flu virus.

Which she reported to the CDC, who classified them as a "death with COVID-19" (which they both were), but not as a "death from COVID-19". This got her to hyperventilating, because besides being factually true, exactly as she admits in the very TV news report linked, She's worried that putting two additional people reported as dead with COVID (which, we repeat, they undeniably were) in that county might put tourists off visiting, or somesuch. (Apparently folks out thataway are fine with two homicides from gunshots, but a coronavirus infection that had no impact on their demise whatsoever would scare the hell out of folks all over the Rockies. We confess we did not know Colorodans to be so wussified, but we defer to her expertise as a 40-year resident of the area.)

Nonetheless, we performed a wee few additional mouseclicks, to obtain that curious thing that the late great Paul Harvey used to call "The rest of the story".

We repeat also that we love the internet, because Mirable dictu! it was no harder to find than our post's title might have foreshadowed, ever so subtlely.

We shared our findings with the bloghost.

FWIW:

1) COVID is being listed as present at death, not cause of death, in the named cases. There's nothing suspicious about that, since County Coroner Brenda Bock admits that to be factually true, in the TV news interview.

2) There is zero evidence that the CDC is adding the cases to the list of overall COVID deaths, anywhere. (Contrary to the OP title, not to put too fine a point on it.) If they were doing that, there would be no need whatsoever for the separate categories, would there?

3) Brenda Bock has no M.D. appended after her title, which set my spidey sense atingle. And lo and behold, Brenda Bock isn't a pathologist. In fact, she isn't even a physician of any type. There is no listing of her holding any sort of professional license of any type from the State of Colorado's online database. (Have I mentioned that I love the internet?)

CO Professional License Lookup

4) In fact, from the bio before her last election run, her only medical qualification in any medical capacity was as an EMT (a whole 110 hours of training at the 13th grade level, i.e. only slightly higher than that given in Red Cross Advanced First Aid) in which capacity she last functioned in prior to 1995, a mere 25 years ago. She's mainly been a county volunteer, then part-time, later full time, deputy coroner. Before getting a mail order certificate for a job she'd been on for 7 years, and which she received 18 years ago. In a county with a tad more than 14,000 residents, total. (In Texas, they call 14,000 a middle school crowd for a football game. On a school night. In NYFC, they call 14,000 people 1 city block.) In short, she's a well-meaning amateur, whose medical expertise barely crests above "stayed in a Holiday Inn Express once". If there's a veterinarian in that town, that person outranks her in terms of medical training. In fact, if there's even a retired paramedic in that town, that person has 20 times the medical training that Bock, the county coroner, has.

In summation, it was a slow news day at the BFColorado branch of SeeBS Snooze, so they decided to throw an M-80 in the outhouse, just to watch the feces fly.

So consider the source of the story, then Google up Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

The entire story is a non-event, from a non-entity, who's grossly under-qualified for even the job she holds, and speaking about things far beyond her ken.

She reminds me of nothing so much as doddering Aunt Clara from Bewitched, except Bock isn't acting.

What credence one should therefore place in her concerns is probably something too small to be measured with existing instrumentation. Any geezer at the general store who's had a sick cat is probably better informed, medically, than that county coroner.

I have no doubt that at some, or perhaps even many, times and places, people have pooch-screwed the COVID statistics, accidentally and/or deliberately. With 300,000 such examples, such is nigh inevitable.

This incident however, is manifestly not one of those times. And theoretically, Bock, as the County Coroner, the person who actually fills in the cause of death on the death certificates, should have known that from about the first second before she opened her mouth.

"These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along."

Maybe they didn't cover that in mail order death investigator school, or else she may have been sick that day. There's no way of knowing.

UPDATE:

The stupidity above has taken on a life of its own: here and here. And now here.

"A Lie gets halfway around the world before the Truth has gotten its boots on." - Winston Churchill

About Those Studies



Peer review on those Kung Flu studies is in...

 

You may recall we've had a bit to say, and none of it good, about the surveys that allege that Kung Flu is vastly more widespread than was supposed.

 

We pointed out no small number of major flaws in all those studies.

 

Lest you think I'm alone in this, let me share a few links and pull quotes, courtesy of MD Ed Grouch:

"(The Guardian/UK) Both studies [at Stanford and USC/LA County] used an antibody test made by Premier Biotech company that has not been approved by the FDA and comes with an acknowledgment that it can record false positives. 

Hundreds of antibody tests have emerged on the world market in recent weeks, including some that promise a result from a finger prick in just hours, an executive from the diagnostics and pharmaceutical company Roche told Reuters on Tuesday. None of them currently have FDA approval and some of them are “a disaster”, the Roche CEO, Severin Schwan, said. 

Then there are concerns about the Stanford study’s sample and statistical analysis. The biggest criticism was that it estimated cases for the whole county’s population based on detecting only 50 positives out of 3,300 people sampled. And since the tests had a false positive rate in one assessment of two out of 371, critics argued all the Covid-19 cases detected by the tests in Santa Clara could conceivably have been false positives.

“I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology,” wrote Andrew Gelman, director of the applied statistics center at Columbia University, who has written numerous books on teaching statistical methods. “We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error.”  

The prominent Washington state genetics researcher Trevor Bedford said on Twitter he was glad to see antibody studies emerging but was “skeptical” of the high results. The author and biotech investor Peter Kolchinsky tweeted that the “flaws with this study could trick you into thinking that getting shot in the head has a low chance of killing you”.  

The study was also criticized for recruiting its volunteers on Facebook, a method some critics charged could have induced some to participate in the study because they had had symptoms but were unable to get tested. Researchers say they attempted to screen for this by collecting information from participants on any recent symptoms, such as coughing or fever. 

Both the Stanford University team and the researchers at USC declined to respond to a request for comment.

We're just getting started.
From a peer review of the Stanford study posted on Medium

1. First, the false positive rate may be high enough to generate many of the reported 50 positives out of 3330 samples. Or put another way, we don’t have high confidence in a very low false positive rate, as the 95% confidence interval for the false positive rate is roughly [0%, >1.2%] and the reported positive rate is ~1.5%.
2. Second, the study may have enriched for COVID-19 cases by (a) serving as a test-of-last-resort for symptomatic or exposed people who couldn’t get tests elsewhere in the Bay Area and/or (b) allowing said people to recruit other COVID-19 cases to the study in private groups. These mechanisms could also account for a significant chunk of the 50 positives in 3330 samples.
3. Third, in order to produce the visible excess mortality numbers that COVID-19 is already piling up in Europe and NYC, the study would imply that COVID-19 is spreading significantly faster than past pandemics like H1N1, many of which had multiple waves and took more than a year to run their course.

From Columbia University's Statistical Modeling page, quotes from an e-mail sent to Andrew Gelman, Director of Columbia's Applied Statistics Center, and posted on their site:

It’s perfectly plausible that the shocking prevalence rates published in the study are mostly, or even entirely, due to false positives. 

Recruitment was done via facebook ads with basic demographic targeting. Since we’re looking for a feature that affects something like 2% of the population (or much, much less), we really have to worry about self selection. They may have discussed this in the portions of the paper I didn’t read, but I can’t imagine how researchers would defeat the desire to get a test if you had reason to believe that you, or someone near you, had the virus (and wouldn’t some people hide those reasons to avoid being disqualified from getting the test?).

So all 50 positives could be statistical error, and they had people self-selecting with an ulterior motive, either of which, by itself, could have represented the entire positive sample size. That's about as crapola as you can get.

But wait! There's more, this time about the tests being used in those studies:

(NBC News) But some COVID-19 antibody tests, including those being used by public health departments in Denver and Los Angeles and provided to urgent care centers in Maryland and North Carolina, were supplied by Chinese manufacturers that are not approved by China's Center for Medical Device Evaluation, a unit of the National Medical Product Administration, or NMPA, the country's equivalent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, NBC News has found.

Two U.S. companies — Premier Biotech of Minneapolis and Aytu Bioscience of Colorado — have been distributing the tests from unapproved Chinese manufacturers, according to health officials, FDA filings and a spokesman for one of the Chinese manufacturers. Many of the unapproved tests appear to have been shipped to the U.S. after the FDA relaxed its guidelines for tests in mid-March and before the Chinese government banned their export just over two weeks later. 

If COVID-19 antibody tests are unreliable, they can produce false results, either negative or positive, health officials said.

Sketchy tests, with accuracy so dubious it even worries the Chinese, with false results both positively and negatively, being used to do surveys on which public health decisions might be made. What could possibly go wrong?

I repeat, all the US surveys to date have HUUUUUGE problems with sample size, selection bias, accuracy of the tests, and are unpeer-reviewed hokum and horsie pooh that should be laughed out of any serious consideration.

You're being bullshitted by people who should know better, doing shoddy work, using subpar tests, and passing it off as research.

Today On The DUH! Channel...

h/t IOTW Report

The White House doesn't trust China's coronavirus numbers.
No, really.

Wait...what?!?

Yeah, who could possibly have seen that coming?

Oh, wait, that would be everyone else.

Economics 102:

Adam Smith called. He said this scheme is still a load of
codswallop, and he's getting his mailed glove to have another
swipe at your head with his Invisible Hand.

So, despite earnest entreaties, some folks still can't grasp basic economic fundamentals that would and do make "Legalize and tax" schemes with respect to drugs a financial and sociological impossibility.

In the military, the standard instruction, upon receipt of an utterly asinine order, was to follow it to the hilt. First, because rules is rules, and mutiny was a hanging offense, but mainly because the easiest and least insubordinate way to show some gold-braided asshole how big a jackass he was, was to do exactly what was ordered. Good and hard.
(I'm here to tell you that in peacetime, that approach works like magic. I wartime, I suspect grenades with the pins pulled are part of the alternative therapy. C'est la guerre.)

Similarly, with philosophical constructs and hypotheticals, usually the easiest way to watch them crumble and fall on their metaphorical ass, is to grant the recockulous premise.

Thusly:

Okay, all drugs are legalized. You're going to tax them and put the drug cartels out of business. You imagine.

So, Poindexter, let us examine your scheme.
1a) Where do coca leaves come from, to make cocaine?
2a) Who controls that real estate, for miles and miles?
3a) Who will set the price for which they'll deliver you the product, to sell in the U.S.?
4a) Who will control all distribution of same to you?

1b) Same set of questions, for opium.

1c) Same set of questions, for marijuana.

So, Pablo Escobar being out of the equation now, when his successor, Pablo Hersheybar, Lord of Bolivian Marching Powder, determines he will only sell you coca leaves or processed cocaine at 20 times the current street price, WTF are you going to do about that?
[You're going to eat shit.]

When he thusly makes your legal and taxed cocaine orders of magnitude more expensive, and short-supplied, than his illegal, untaxed cocaine, which he has in boundless quantities, and you're funding his illegal activities to boot, what are you going to do about that?
[You're going to eat shit.]

When Bolivia, Columbia, etc., decide they don't want you buying cocaine after you completely reversing course on drug policy, and their government doesn't want their number one export to be drugs, and they don't want a fully funded drug cartel to become the de facto government, because they're tired of paying the price there, in lives ruined, policemen killed, and society subverted for your gringo loco addictions, and they're not as fucking insane as you are, and they shoot down your planes and sink your ships trying to pick it up, WTF are you going to do about that?
[You're going to eat shit.]

Will you invade a sovereign allied country, and fight a jungle war, to subjugate entire countries to force them to let you buy your dope?
(History majors, stop me if you've heard this one.)
[You're going to eat shit.]

If not, HTF do you think you're going to get your cocaine at a lower price than Pablo can sell it illicitly?
[You're going to eat shit.]

Now do that again, for heroin.
Except for Pablo, we'll substitute the Taliban.

Repeat, for marijuana.
Now it's Mexico, and those cartels.

Oh wait, for pot, you'll just grow it in the U.S.?
Genius!

Tell me, how many battalions of security troops does a cornfield require, currently?
Think that'll be true for a pot field??
[Nope. More shit for you to eat.]

If not, tell me how you're going to sell at a lower price after hiring all that 24/7/365 security, for acres and acres of land.
[You're going to eat a party sub of shit.]

Especially when Pedro and his buddies from Guadalajara are willing to hump it across the 100° desert in 80# bundles now, for a few pesos (and not getting his head cut off).

So you're over a barrel, forever, and every cent spent to purchase the product you NEED for the U.S. "legal" market will go directly to drug cartels and the Taliban, destabilizing entire regions, FOREVER, just to satisfy your plan for "Legalized and taxed" drugs, to supply the 1-5% of Americans who are fucking dope fiends.

That's asinine, moronic, insane, and evil, all at the same time.
Well-played.
QED

Some old enough may recall that when they got tired of Western exploitation, oil producing countries got together and jacked up the price of their oil to the West.

So, econ geniusii, WTF are you going to do when the drug countries resolve to form the Drug Origin Producing and Exporting Countries organization, and DOPEC tells you the new street price for heroin and cocaine is now 50 times what it was last year, because they don't like gringos and infidels?
[You're going to eat a big shit sandwich, at a 5000% mark-up.]

And then, after bleeding you dry financially for a few years and a few trillion dollars, they then decide to give their shit away by the metric fuckton virtually free, just to give your tottering drug-addled country a push into the shitter of history?
[You're going to choke on shit.]

Historical note: Alcohol was legalized when Prohibition was repealed in 1933.
So tell the class in what year moonshining stopped in the U.S....?__________

That would be never. It's NEVER stopped.
So why will "Legalize and tax" work with drugs, when it hasn't worked for alcohol once in 86 years??

Tobacco has never been illegal.
So, why are people smuggling untaxed cigarettes in 24/7/365?
Shouldn't "Legalization and taxation" have stopped all that?
If not, why not?

So, how do you go after that criminal conduct, plus do it for drugs, without continuing the exact same War On Drugs you say you want to end, because it's stupid and wasteful???

Answer those last five questions first, or admit this whole idea is full of more shit than a Christmas goose, and Let. It. Go.

It will never work because it can never work, and never has.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part V

Welcome To You Bet Your Life

We called this one correctly Saturday morning.
We doubled down when the bogus arrest affidavit was released Tuesday morning.
We filleted calls that "maybe she was telling the truth" Wednesday morning.
With the last bit now, this makes this case a grand-slam slam-dunk.

30 y.o., 5'3", with a badge, a gun, and an attitude.

Absolutely zero surprise on this, and huge kudos to commenter Nemo for the DailyMail story link:

1) Officer Amber Guyger's bullshit story was that the vicitm's door was "ajar" at 10PM when she entered.

Oops. The UK DailyMail has a video that shows that all the doors in the complex are on automatic closers, and if let go they automatically close and lock.

Ignore most of the additional crap added by this version;
the first 55 seconds are all that matter.

So that would be perjury for Officer Guyger. And she's now a documented liar.
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus is the legal guideline on such things.

2) The apartment numbers are lit up by blazing white lights, in letters 2" high, right next to every door in the complex.

Wrong door

Killshot's door.

And, exactly as described by witness, there was a big red doormat outside Not-Her-Door that should have been a major clue, had this been "just a terrible accident".

Officer Killshot's door

Dead victim Jean's door, with red doormat. Flowers are recent additions, obviously.

But wait! There's more!

The neighbor, who lives two doors down from cop Amber Guyger, 30, but asked not to be named, said he did not believe the petite blonde would have been able to force her way in.

Pointing to his own heavy metal door, the same as both Jean's and Guyger’s, he said: ‘These are fire doors. You can’t really leave it open.

‘The key situation too – you can’t get into any place, you can’t. It’s impossible. You can put it in but you can’t open it.

‘You can put it into somebody else’s key hole but you can’t open anything. This key isn’t programmed for my door – if I put it in, nothing happens apart from this red light.’

With no signs of forced entry, and the "it was ajar" now pure fantasy bullshit, the only way the door opened, was that, exactly as neighbors related, Killshot Guyger pounded on the door, and when Dead guy victim Jean opened it, she drew and shot him.

Because, she claims, she "thought he was a burglar".
 

And now for the closer:

DailyMail.com can also reveal that Guyger had made noise complaints about Jean, 26, to the building management in the days before his death.

Her neighbor, a Hispanic man in his mid-20s, said she had been cross about him making noise early in the mornings.

He said: ‘She filed a noise complaint earlier on in the day which said that he had been making noise before she leaves for her shift.’

The family lawyer Merritt confirmed his account in an interview with CNN, telling the channel: ‘The only connection we have been able to make is that she was his immediate downstairs neighbor.

‘And there were noise complaints from the immediate downstairs neighbors about whoever was upstairs, and that would have been Botham.

‘In fact, there were noise complaints that very day about upstairs activity in Botham’s apartment. Botham received a phone call about noise coming from his apartment from the downstairs neighbor.’

Bingo.
Motive. Means. Opportunity.
Not a terrible mistake.
Not some guy she had no connection to.
But rather, the guy upstairs pissing her off and ruining her beauty sleep.
Multiple (unresolved) complaints.
Settling an ongoing grudge, because big badge and big gun.

And it seems she "neglected to mention" that ongoing little detail of life, the universe, and everything during her after-incident Come-to-Jesus debriefing. Which shows again, consciousness of guilt, intent to deceive, and deliberate attempt to hide an obvious motive, and a hitherto unknown connection to the guy she murdered. Prosecutors love that shit. Even when it's a cop. Juries too.

In legalese, it's called mens rea: literally "guilty mind".

It means when you do things crooks do, like lie about what happened, you've just put your head into the noose of being a crook.

She was Officer Respect Mah Authoritay, he wouldn't keep it down to suit her changing shifts, so after this shift, she went to his door, beat on it until he opened it, brief words are exchanged, and she draws her gun and kills him.

Like she did.

And BTW, the apartments are right next door to DPD HQ. So her drive home was apparently about 60 seconds.

Murder, first degree: pre-meditated, with malice aforethought.

Stick a fork in her.

If Texas needs someone to put the IV in when she gets the needle, I'll pay for my own airfare, roundtrip.

This lying bitch is a cold-blooded killer.

And the DailyMail is HQ'ed in flippin' London, England, and they pulled this together in a day or two, but the Texas Rangers, right there in Texas, couldn't figure any of this out before they recommended a bullshit manslaughter charge???

Somebody at the Rangers needs firing, or Chuck Norris' boot roundhouse kicked up their ass.
Or, just for the novelty, discipline them for incompetence, and demote them.
Actually prosecuting them for accomplice after the fact would be nice, but they probably need to be dragged back to reality kicking and screaming, so I suppose small steps are indicated. Six months patrolling BFTexas back roads, on graveyard shift for six months, after a month home without pay, would be an excellent start.


BONUS QUESTIONS:
This CNN video from Tuesday

shows a brief clip of Guyger in uniform on her cell phone after the shooting. The one she didn't use to call for back-up when she supposedly found her door "ajar", with a possible burglar inside, at her apartment (50 yards from the Dallas PD police station she had just left, and from which she could have expected 5-10 cars for back-up in about 2 minutes, had she called 911, like she would have done if on duty.) I had assumed from pictures that the 4th floor corridor was fully enclosed, but obviously, it's open to the ground. Possibly not just at the point where she was filmed.

So my additional question is:
We're supposed to believe she couldn't tell the difference between being on the middle (3rd) floor, where she wasn't, and being on the uppermost (4th) floor, where she was, from her car to the door in question, when it sits another 10' higher above the ground??
Who, besides Stevie Wonder, can't tell the difference between the middle floor and the top floor in a 4-floor apartment building?

I'm betting anyone who went to the South Place apartments, and filmed two videos,
1) one of the route she would normally take, and
2) one of the route she took that night, from the point of driving in and parking on the wrong floor, and from there to the victim's door
it will show pretty conclusively that her claiming to have "made a mistake" would require her to be either catatonic, or blind. Which her subsequent marksmanship that night would tend to belie.

Or else, lying her ass off to cover a squabble with an upstairs neighbor that turned into a murder. Which she's already been caught lying about in multiple ways, from the moment it happened.

 

No. Just No.

In response to any amount, type, and repetition of Earnest Mystical Hand-Waving Attempts to tell me the wizards of the YouTube/Internet Collective Brain have sorted out that the Vegas shooting had to be accomplished by a belt-fed .30 cal.MG, pulled from the same genius that brought the Warren Commission the Magic Bullet Theory, write this down on your hands with a laundry pen:

You (and the other people trying this game on YouTube, etc.) are taking a video (or any 50 of them, because if one bag of fertilizer doesn't avail, a truckload might?) from hundreds of yards from the source, coming from a source embedded in a multi-acre wall of glass, and passing over another multi-acre concrete open space, (ignoring the hundreds of barriers, structural walls, and, oh yeah - a wide-open concert-quality sound system with open mics, rebroadcasting the rounds and all those source sounds and echoes passing in proximity over amps and speakers stacked high enough to rebroadcast their sounds over that same multi-acre venue - let alone not just ricochets, but serial sonic cracks of rounds that haven't impacted yet passing on both sides, overhead, etc.) and telling me that there are no echoes?

Mirabile dictu.

From a notional 600RPM source flinging 10 supersonic projectiles per second in the direction of the exact crap microphones in question. Which may or may not have been pointed 180 degrees out from the source, being on the opposite side of the camera, which neither you nor I nor any number of notional angels dancing on the head of a pin know for sure, but whilst their owners clutch the cases in deathgrips, trip, fall, run, bounce off of pavement, barriers, etc. sufficient to soil 20,000 sets of underwear, and trample some 400 of their peers seriously enough to require hospitalization. (Silently, perhaps?)

If only I hadn't spent two decades watching boom guys on production sets levitate $1K+ microphones over actors at ranges of 2-25 feet with the skill of surgeons, just to capture simple spoken dialog cleanly and without any sound artifact, at a spoken word rate far lower than 600 wpm, and feed it to guys whose sound package alone would buy hundreds of cell phones, and likely more cell microphones than the total present at the entire venue in question, to know whereof I speak here...)

Were these magic gunshots? Perhaps the laws of physics ceased to exist on this video. Maybe the person using this cellphone purchased it from the same guy who sold Jack the magic beanstalk beans. And maybe grits on your stove cook faster than anywhere else in the entire grit-eating world.

The volume, pitch, fidelity, and fifty other medium-induced artifacts and variables are precisely the point at issue with an abysmal-quality microphone that consists, in most instances, of a single 1mm hole in a plastic case, with their low-fidelity pre-bastardized product digitized and compressed, then uncompressed, then uploaded, then transmitted, until played through your speakers or mine, with any nameable range of audio fidelity.
And compared with audio from similarly audio-crap videos on YouTube, under the same parameters.

Do this math for me:
Shit x shit x shit x shit, compared with shit, played over speakers ranging from quality ranging from 0 to infinity (where 0=shit, and infinity equals pristine clarity) = __________?
a) shit
b) diamonds
c) magic diamonds
d) I don't understand the question
(Caveat: I may even be understating the number of shit multiplications in the first part of the problem by a factor of 2 to 5 times. Cheers.)

I'll reduce the equation for you:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP = QRSTUV = WXYZ(infinity) =
belt-fed .30 cal machinegun
QED

Solve for all variables.
Show your work.

And you're convinced, because what you hear "sounds" right to you.
Because, for reference comparison, you have extensive experience with the sound of an actual belt-fed .30, fired at you from several hundred feet above you and hundreds of yards away, from a multi-echo location, to a multi-echo location, amidst screams, panic, chaos, etc., as you seek cover while in fear for your own life, and it sounds exactly like the shit squared squared crap audio on the clip, with epic levels of non-quantifiable changes before arriving at your eardrum.

From which you're going to extrapolate caliber, cyclic rate, and exact type of weapon, and simultaneously excluding every similar type of weapon of any other caliber (which would run to several hundreds of possible exemplars), based on yours/YouTube's extensive experience and sound catalog of every other weapon extant, since the year Gatling worked out the cranked multi-barrel carriage gun, and simultaneously rule out any possibility of it being any one of 20+ weapons in the room, with or without bump-fire stocks.

Because the audio quality of the video is so bad is doesn't capture any anomalies, just the exact phenomenon you're advocating.

And all this minor series of miracles absent any corroboration like expended links, piles of 7.62 brass, slugs, video or eyewitness testimony reporting seeing any given shooter firing this weapon (or weapons).

Let me sum up your case:
It's true, because biblical levels of reasonable doubt, times magic, and trust you, and lack of evidence proves the correctness of the original assertion.

Got it.
Thanks for playing.

See if you can guess my response, sitting in the jury box, as you give your closing argument.

Seriously, tell me you work in a call center in Mumbai, and don't do anything where your grasp of physics, science, math, technology, etc, might be responsible for anyone's life or livelihood. Let me attempt for you a small example from my world.
This is a standard hospital pulse oximeter:

When it's properly applied, working correctly and a number of potential error-inducing problems* corrected, it tells me and many other professionals
a) your pulse rate
b) how much oxygen is flying around your bloodstream.
*(Keep your finger in that spot. I'll be coming back there.)
But not, Gentle reader, by me reading that number on the remote screen, does the number on the screen = Truth.
How does it work? The probe shines a red light on one side through your fingertip (earlobe, neonate's foot, etc.) and a receiver on the opposite side sees the received light, counts the rate of the waves as it changes, and via analysis of the color of light received, calculates the amount of oxygenated hemoglobin racing through your veins and arteries, and derives (by way of more math and science than you need to know) your heart rate and what amount of oxygenation of your tissue that equals.
*Unless (I told you we'd be coming back here)
Someone is moving the probe - like you tapping your finger.
Or me tapping your finger.
Or someone doing CPR while bumping the hand it's on.
Or you're wearing nail polish of any of various shades.
(Ask me how I know all these are true.)

What happens when you don't correct for that?
You get a reading of a good pulse and normal oxygenation on a corpse. You get a reading of dead on a live person. Or anything in between. (I can tap on one with no patient, and get readings in the normal range from absolutely no patient at all. That does not, thereby, proves the existence of ghosts.)

How do you fix that?
You look at the monitor, and see if the pulse ox waves match the heartbeats.
You look at the patient, and see if they're pink, awake, and talking, versus blue-lipped with crossed eyes and not breathing.
You wipe off their nail polish.
You stop the probe from moving.

In short, you treat the patient, not the monitor, because you don't try to pull an elephant out of your ass based on A SINGLE PIECE OF POTENTIALLY CORRUPTED DATA.

You brighter folks, tell the less-bright why extrapolating a particular machinegun from one single datum, in this case one or more sound recordings, of hugely dubious accuracy, unknown and suspect fidelity, and therefore little utility, might therefore be slightly left of retarded on the IQ curve. If that doesn't work, try a bigger Wand Of Truthiness until the problem resolves.

Those of you with new lumps on your heads:
Your abacus fingers are not fast enough to do the calculus which answer you claim to be pulling, from parts of anatomy better left unnamed.

I'm sorry if logic annoys you, but I'm simply telling you, Orville and Wilbur, that no matter how many rubber bands you wind around the propeller, you will not ever get your pig to fly. And strapping rockets to the pig will not overcome the problems with aerodynamics, but you will splatter bacon much farther from the site of the inevitable smoking-hole failure of subsequent attempts.

Like trying to teach a pig to whistle, you're wasting your time, and annoying the pig.

Most depressing part of this post: knowing that now, another dozen jet-fueled geniuses will redouble their efforts on YouTube, and the Internetz.