FOR A GUY WHO THEY SAY LOST, TRUMP SURE HAD STRONG COATTAILS, AND FOR A GUY WHO WON, BIDEN SURE DIDN’T:
Archive for 2020
November 20, 2020
COLOR ME SKEPTICAL: Statin side effects may be ‘all in your head,’ study suggests.
THE DATA DOESN’T FIT “THE SCIENCE”: Lockdown Addicts. A new — and impressively huge — study of a natural experiment in Sweden shows that closing schools does practically nothing to save lives or stop the spread of Covid. Swedish economists compared Covid infection rates and medical records for all the parents (hundreds of thousands) at senior high schools, which went online during the spring pandemic, against the parents at junior high schools, which stayed open and did not encourage students or teachers wear face masks.
The parents whose children kept going to school were no more likely to be treated or hospitalized for Covid than were the parents of the online students. And the teachers who remained in the classroom had lower rates of infection and hospitalization than did the parents.
A study of this quality ought to be the final word on the subject. But as I write at City Journal, it doesn’t fit “the science” that’s guiding Joe Biden’s Covid advisory board — and the Democratic politicians eager for more lockdowns.
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: New Yorkers ask: Is today the day someone attacks me on subway?
YA THINK? Americans experience ‘pandemic fatigue’ as restrictions continue. It’s made worse by the way the public health community has been conflicting and politicized in its advice.
Related: Gavin Newsom’s French Laundry Outing Crystallizes the Arrogance of COVID-19 Dictators.
ROGER SIMON: The Plot Against Sidney.
Lee Smith wrote an explosive narrative of the Russia collusion hoax in the number one best-seller “The Plot Against the President” that became a hit documentary film.
Someone should now write “The Plot Against Sidney,” because Trump and General Michael Flynn attorney Sidney Powell is currently in the crosshairs and then some.
And the attacks are coming not just, predictably, from the left, but from people you would think would be her natural allies.
Tucker Carlson, until recently literally king of cable news, called Ms. Powell out for being unresponsive and repeatedly failing to produce evidence of her claims about Dominion and Smartmatic computer systems and software on his Fox show.
Respected conservative columnist Byron York asserted about Thursday’s Giuliani/Powell/Ellis press conference in his daily email:
“But Powell did not prove it. She did not even allege with any specificity what she believes actually happened in the election. Powell said the Venezuelan software has the ‘ability to flip votes’ and can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President [sic] Biden, which we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system, and that’s what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in.”
Powell has already responded to Carlson early Friday morning on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business show:
“Maria Bartiromo: How did you respond to Tucker Carlson? Did you get angry with the show because they texted you and asked you to provide evidence of what you’re alleging?
“Sidney Powell: No, I didn’t get angry with the request to provide evidence in fact I sent an affidavit to Tucker that I had not even attached to a pleading yet to help him understand the situation and I offered him another witness who could explain the mathematics of the statistical evidence far better than I can. I’m not really a numbers person. But he was very insulting, demanding and rude and I told him not to contact me again in those terms.”
I’m not going to speculate on what’s motivating Tucker and Byron. They are friends and they have their reasons. Apparently, they are not disturbed by such things as “weighted-voting algorithms” or the astonishing fact that Dominion does not even report vote totals, only percentages.
Nor will I wave a finger at them because representatives of Dominion did not show up as promised Friday morning for a fact-finding hearing with a committee of the Pennsylvania House. What did they have to hide?
Well, maybe they do have something to hide.
The biggest issue here is not the presidential election of 2020, gigantic as that may be. It is the integrity of electoral systems world wide.
It is, in a word, democracy.
Are computers subverting it? Have they made democracy obsolete?
If this is true, and she is able to stop it, Sidney Powell may deserve a monument the size of Washington’s.
For counterpoint, as Paul Mirengoff writes at Power Line, “If Powell has evidence to back this up, have at it. But so far, she hasn’t produced evidence. And she declined Carlson’s invitation to go on his show or to provide him with any. Powell has no obligation to litigate on television. But she’s already doing so to some degree. With her various utterances, including the highly dubious one that Trump won in a landslide, she’s made, in effect, her opening statement. It would be nice if she offered some evidence to back it up. If it turns out that Team Trump doesn’t have the goods to back up the claim of an international leftist conspiracy, the allegation will have to be considered demagoguery. And it will have caused profound damage to the nation.”
Which will have been compounded with damage done by the Obama administration in their own waning days: The Obama-Trump Transition Was More Like Sedition.
WHEN THE NEW YORK SCHOOL SYSTEM LOSES SUPPORT OF THE NEW YORK TIMES…The Problem With Coronavirus School Closures: When Trump Was Right and Many Democrats Wrong.
THIS SEEMS LIKE A NEW BID FOR GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES: GM Accelerates Electrification Timeline, Plans 30 EVs by 2025.
WHY NOT TAKE A BREAK FROM THE SERIOUS NEWS FOR A FEW MINUTES? Florida Man Friday: The Delirious Week the Whole Country Went Full Florida.
CHARLES LIPSON: Can Trump’s Lawyers Offer Real Proof of their Vast Allegations?
THE FALLEN STATE: You can watch my interview with Jesse Lee Peterson live at 3:00 eastern. You can watch the recorded version here.
WHEN I TALKED TO JIMMY LAI THE OTHER NIGHT, he said that AI is the censorship tool to be feared. But here the IEEE’s magazine is approving it. How Facebook’s AI Tools Tackle Misinformation: Facebook’s weapons against hate speech improve their aim, identify permutations of misinformation, CTO says.
“Misinformation” is just dictatorspeak for wrongthink.
AT AMAZON, Black Friday Deal, DEWALT 20V MAX XR Rotary Hammer Drill Kit, D-Handle, 1-Inch.
COLORADO: Color purple added to fear mongering dial in CO.
Most of the Front Range — where the majority of the population lives — just got categorized as “Red – Severe Risk,” whatever that is.
But it’s the VodkaBride’s birthday today and I still have a couple of last-minute things to pick up, so I’ll carry on as usual.
AT THIS POINT I DON’T THINK THEY WANT US TO RECOVER: Listen to the Science, Listen to the Students: Schools Can and Must Reopen. “Keeping kids out of the classroom will make recovering from the pandemic harder in the long term.”
YES. NEXT QUESTION? 2020 election polling: was it really as bad as they say?
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Joe Biden Glitches Again Mid-Sentence.
AT THIS POINT WE’VE HAD CONTACT-TRACING FOR EIGHT MONTHS. HUNCHES AND SKEPTICISM SHOULD BE REPLACED BY SCIENCE BY NOW. Disease experts skeptical on safety of indoor dining at restaurants. My own county health department has twice said that their contact tracing doesn’t show bars and restaurants as significant transmission sites, yet we continue to regulate them. Where’s the science?