Bad Stats

Back when I worked for the Great Big Research Company in Johannesburg, I had a boss who had the unnerving habit of doing random checks on my calculations.  (I should point out for my Readers who were born after we discovered the wheel that computations were done not with slide rules but with the newfangled invention called a “calculator” — which could do only the basic math functions of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division — and the literally thousands of numbers were taken off pages and pages of computer printouts from a thing called a “mainframe”.)

Anyway, if the Poison Dwarf (as we not-so-jokingly called him) discovered a single mistake, he would tear it all up and make me redo the entire job, with the rationale that “If I can’t trust one thing, I can’t trust anything.”  The result, after only a couple of these episodes, was that I not only took an inordinate amount of time in performing the calculations, but spent almost as much time rechecking everything to make sure that absolutely every statistic or number I presented to my clients was 100% correct, and they could take the actions I recommended with complete confidence in the strength of the data.

The time spent in doing all this was based on another of the Poison Dwarf’s aphorisms:  “There’s never enough time to do the job properly, but there always seems to be enough time to do things over.”  Well, I never had enough time to do things over — I had client meeting deadlines — so I had to get it right the first time, regardless of the time taken.

That habit persisted with me for the rest of my working career.

I say all this so everyone will know exactly where I stand on bullshit like this (with emphasis added):

A young Florida resident who died in a motorcycle accident is included in the state’s official COVID-19 death count, a state official reveals.
FOX 35 News in Orlando discovered this after asking Orange County Health Officer Dr. Raul Pino about two young COVID-19 patients in their twenties who died, and whether they had any preexisting conditions that contributed to their deaths.
“The first one didn’t have any. He died in a motorcycle accident,” Pino said. Despite this shocking answer, Pino was not aware of this person’s data being removed from the state tally when asked.
“I don’t think so. I have to double-check,” Pino answered. “We were arguing, discussing, or trying to argue with the state. Not because of the numbers — it’s 100… it doesn’t make any difference if it’s 99 — but the fact that the individual didn’t die from COVID-19… died in the crash.”

You stupid fucking quack.  It’s not whether it makes a difference between 99 and 100 — it’s how many more mistakes of this kind have occurred in your compilation of the data.

Remember the Poison Dwarf:  “If I can’t trust one thing, I can’t trust anything.” 

So if one death (1%, in this case) was incorrectly attributed to the Chinkvirus, how many more cases are incorrect?  10%?  20%?  90%?  We don’t know, because the numbers were obviously not checked after being submitted.

Here’s something from Powerline which makes the same case quite succinctly:

Funny, but not so funny.

Here’s the thing.  A lot of decisions, very weighty and momentous decisions, are being made based on the data our much-vaunted medical establishment is presenting.  States’ economies are being damaged or destroyed, people’s livelihoods ditto, and I’m not even going to start to estimate the social cost of foolish governmental decisions taken on the basis of what may turn out to be fatally-flawed data.

So I’m going to mimic the Poison Dwarf (for the first time ever):  I’m not going to trust a single fucking piece of data these assholes present to us, ever again.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s all lies and bullshit, and I don’t trust any of them.

The Hydra Problem

After the French Revolution, the majority Jacobin party created the ironically-named Committee of Public Safety (the first soviet) and through that body instituted the Reign of Terror, the goal of which was to stamp out all vestiges of Royalist and religious (in those days, “right-wing”) support and causes.

(An aside:  for those who aren’t familiar with the period, the political terms “Left” and “Right” are derived from the French Legislative Assembly, in which the Jacobins and their allies sat on the left side of the chamber, and the Royalist- and Church supporters on the right.)

Over time, the Committee of Public Safety (note how the Left appropriated the word “safety” to their own purposes;  sic semper tyrannis ) came to be dominated by Maxim Robespierre (who was not a working class revolutionary, but a middle-class lawyer — some things just never change).  As the CPS became more and more extreme, and the guillotine was extended not just to the hapless King and Queen and sundry nobility, but to anyone considered to be a “counter-revolutionary”, the spiral of violence spread outward further and further, until literally anyone could be arrested and tried for “treason”.  Needless to say, the Reign of Terror was often used to “purge” opposition within the country (and within the Party), and it lasted for about a year.

Then Robespierre overplayed his hand, and stated that he had discovered a list of “counter-revolutionaries” —  whom he refused to name — whereupon the other members of the CPS clubbed together in what became known as the Thermidorean Revolution, and had Robespierre guillotined.

And just like that, the Reign of Terror ended.

I read The Great Awokening (via Insty, thankee Squire), and one rather gloomy paragraph stood out (emphasis mine):

The other day, I saw a tweet from a group of armed Texans ensuring the Alamo was protected. A great many Rightists praised them, and while I agree that it was a good thing, I disagree that this means anything in the long run. Eventually Texas will go Leftist. In a decade. Two, maybe. I don’t have a good handle on any kind of timeline, but it will. And then the Antifas will burn it down. Do you think activists have forgotten that Texas was a slave-owning society that took land from Mexico? That’s how they’re going to see it.
You might save the Alamo today. You won’t tomorrow. They will come, one day.

The modern-day Jacobins, or “Wokists”, practice a philosophy composed of nihilism, aggrievement and terror (in its modern sense:  the fear of being “canceled”, or losing one’s job, or actual physical attack by a mob).

All the BLM / Antifa / Marxist slogans and such are just packaging of their true purpose which, as any student of history knows well, is to rule over others.

Of greater concern to us, as conservatives, is that so far there has been no single figure emerging as the leader of Wokism — not even a modern-day “Committee of Public Safety”.  Instead, we are faced with a decentralized command system of cadres who are probably not even fully aware of other such cadres, but who are all more or less united behind the principles of Wokism, such as they are.

There is no Robespierre, the removal of whom might put an end to this Reign of Terror.  As is so often the case, there is no magic silver bullet [sic]  solution to the problem.  The Woke-Left has it easy, because  they have a single figure they can attack:  Donald Trump;  we have no such target, because Wokism is diffused among the academia, the media, the entertainment industry, corporations — and most especially, the technocracy of mega-entities like Google and Apple which control the Internet.

There are only two ways that we, as conservatives and Constitutionalists, can resist this feral and malignant movement:  one is to keep resisting, just as the group protecting the Alamo did, and as others are doing all over the country, by gathering in groups to protect property and livelihoods in our own neighborhoods.  It takes a lot of effort, and is fraught with danger in that one day, as certainly as the sun rises in the east, the bullets will start to fly.  I only hope that they start it, and not we.  (This is why the Wokists are so anti-Second Amendment, of course:  they want a monopoly on violence, but are prevented from going full Jacobin because the outcome would not be decided by the state cannons of 13 Vendémiaire, but by the modern-day militiamen of Red America.)

Another path of resistance is to keep voting conservatives — in the true sense of the word, people who wish to preserve our Republic and its Constitution — like Trump into power.  This has to be done not just at the national level, although that helps a great deal;  it has to be done at all levels:  municipality, county, and state.  (The effectiveness of popular revolt as characterized by “Second Amendment sanctuary” jurisdictions is proof of the need for voting local conservatives into office.)  Note that the Wokists are actively trying to overcome this by ballot-box stuffing means like mail-in voting, which is why we have to fight tooth and nail against such wickedness.

As has become quite obvious over the past few weeks, this is not a battle which will be won in the cities, :  this is a neighborhood battle.  The cities are lost, and our only hope is that they will collapse and burn, both figuratively and literally.

Absent the two ways above, we can only hope that Wokeism will turn on itself and self-destruct — which may happen, but remember that the Reign of Terror lasted for over a year and frankly, I’m not that patient.  Nor am I content to hope that this will actually happen sooner rather than later, and that a Chief-Commissar Wokist may emerge to make himself a target.

All it takes is resolution, participation in the electoral process, and a willingness to be part of the citizen militia — our citizen militia, and not the Wokists of BLM, Pantifa and the Democrat Party.  In this respect, we are in a far better position than the anti-Jacobins of Revolutionary France, but the forces aligned against us are also in a better position than their murderous counterparts in the late 18th century.

Wait… You Mean This Is NORMAL?

Hector Drummond (who is rapidly becoming my go-to guy in matters of Britishland Chinkflu stats) has some graphs*, and comes to this conclusion (my emphasis):

Even I am astonished by these graphs.  I was expecting to see something in the graphs by week 13, even if I wasn’t expecting anything scary.  But there’s just nothing.  And you can’t say the lockdown caused this, because the UK lockdown had only been going for four days by this time.  We’ve locked down the country for a supposed mass killer that still isn’t visible in the stats even after the lockdown was declared.  We locked the country down for something that at the time only existed in Neil Ferguson’s dodgy computer models.

Our numbers may (repeat:  may ) be better than the BritGov’s, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that our response to the Chinkvirus has been as overblown and pointless as theirs.


*I’m not sure, but I believe that “ONS” stands for Office of National Statistics.  Maybe one of my Brit Readers can confirm.

Tragedy, Repeated

While we all feel for the folks in Oz whose environment is being set to BROIL, it’s worth noting that many of their problems have been caused by the same people as the California genus:

But let us not allow the heartbreak and the emotion to distract us from the truth about this natural disaster: it has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘climate change’.
…[charts and graphs etc]…
So, to be clear, there is zero evidence of any change in climatic conditions that might have increased the likelihood or severity of these bush fires. This is not — repeat NOT — a man-made climate change story, and anyone who claims otherwise is either a gullible idiot or a lying charlatan.
There is, nonetheless, good reason to believe that the stupidity and irresponsibility of man is at least partly to blame for this disaster — just not quite in the way that the left-liberal MSM and the green wankerati would have you believe.

Read the article for the full story, but if you have insufficient time, here’s the executive summary:

Animal-worshipers, Greens and pyromaniacs.  Just like in California.

I feel the need for mass whippings, hangings etc. starting to build… but no doubt someone’s going to have  problem with this.

News Roundup

…of all the stupid shit out there that isn’t worth a post of its own.

1) NRO advancing space technology, developing tactics to defend satellitesthat would be the first time that  National Review Online has done anything worth a damn.  [/snark]

2) Emma Thompson foresees us eating our petsto quote Truman Capote:  “Actors are stupid.”

3) Brennt Paris?quick, spot the picture where one of the protesters has borrowed a disguise from a 2020 Democrat presidential candidate.  (Spoiler follows)

4) Student jailed for saying what the rest of us thinkand yet, Muslims can say that Israel (and by definition, all Israelis) should be obliterated, without penalty.

5) Employers hate usbut they’ll take our money as customers, of course.

6) Charlize Theron can’t actsee #2 above.

7) Britain sees positive side of gun controlhere, here, here and especially hereand that’s just over the past 12 hours. (Hint:  one of those isn’t really a shootworthy thing, but it should be.)

8) Show yer bum for charity — oh, why not?

9) America’s love affair with guns is only getting strongertake that, Beto you has-been loser.

10) Headline of the yearwho would have thought that this was illegal in Britain?


Bonus points if you can identify the source of #3’s headline.