Jim Fleming – a lawyer and good acquaintance – wrote on Facebook (and I’m quoting with permission):
“Well, the CDC says . . . .”
Every time someone starts a discussion with me, using this language, I steel myself against the loss of good humor. I do not trust the CDC. Period. Why? Because it is primarily a political organization, which sings the song of those who feed it the most bread. Proof?
Well, try this. In 1995 Criminology Professors Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, published the 1993 National Self-Defense Survey that argued that Americans use firearms to defend themselves (from display gun – no shooting to pull gun and actual shooting with fatal effect) on the order of over 1 million times each year. (Actually they said more likely two to three million times per year).
Of course the anti-gun lobby went absolutely batshit crazy and numerous attempts were made to discredit Kleck and Gertz. Results? Lions – about 11, “Christians” – 0. Kleck and Gertz repeated their studies several times with the same results. Numerous studies attempting to discredit them, were unsuccessful. The part the CDC played in all of this?
“In 1996, 1997, and 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted large-scale surveys asking about defensive gun use (DGU) in four to six states. Analysis of the raw data allows the estimation of the prevalence of DGU for those areas. Estimates based on CDC’s surveys confirm estimates for the same sets of states based on data from the 1993 National Self-Defense Survey (Kleck and Gertz 1995). Extrapolated to the U.S. as a whole CDC’s survey data imply that defensive uses of guns by crime victims are far more common than offensive uses by criminals. CDC has never reported these results.” Forbes magazine, April 2018, author Paul Hsieh..
Now, in 2013, Father Obama (the smartest man in the world – just ask him) yet again ordered the CDC to conduct a study and this time “get the numbers right!” So, eating the bread and clearing its throat to sing, the CDC ordered The National Academies’ Institute of Medicine and National Research Council to conduct the survey. They did, and they came back and reported that, “Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence”: Matching the results found by Kleck and Gertz, lo those many years before. “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”
Obama was outraged, primarily because he was going around telling everybody that it was not true. So,he ordered the results buried. (In the old days, they simply killed the report writers to silence their tongues, but modernly that is frowned upon) And the results were buried, from that day forward, until recently.
Moral: Just because officialdom spews a line of bullshit at you, does not, in any way, mean you have to lap it up like mother’s milk. Being an American, patriotically vigilant about liberty and justice for all, is hard goddamned work. It requires objective, critical thinking, every day. The herd cannot and will not do this. Those who do not run with the herd get really good at it.
Don’t be part of the herd. . .z . . .
We’ve got an awful lot of people in this country – including way too much of the media – who think “guy in a white coat” = “science” – and, by extension, “political appointee boss of guy in white coat” – “science”, too.
And the terrible job out schools do at teaching critical thinking is going to be an even bigger problem in 20 years than it is today, as all those Sander/AOC/Omar supporters become the generation that actually controls things.
Heaven help us all.
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I am going to post this here as a marker. Not OT for the “follow the herd” lesson: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/footnotes-in-watchdog-report-indicate-fbi-knew-of-risk-of-russian-disinformation-in-the-steele-dossier/
“Footnote 350 in the IG report addresses the FBI’s knowledge of Russian contacts with Steele and the potential for disinformation. Steele had ‘frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarchs, we identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from (redacted) indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting.'”
The only presidential campaign that colluded with Russia is 2016 was the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Some people, even some conservatives, followed the MSM herd, including its political arm, the Democrat Party, off the cliff on this.
People who used reason, rather than emotion, it was always obvious that the Mueller/Weisman investigation was going nowhere because it never looked at the obvious connections between Steele’s dossier, Russian state actors, and the Clinton campaign.
Well, let’s see what Wally and his minions do about this.
https://www.postbulletin.com/news/business/facing-3b-loss-mayo-announces-payroll-spending-cuts-through-dec-31/article_ff9e9d0a-7aa8-11ea-8f9b-43fa72576d73.html
And this is happening all over the country, because elective surgeries have been cancelled.
Wally and his minions will do nothing. They may shed crocodile tears, but they will do nothing.
It is a tough problem. Most politicians and bureaucrats know that, above all, they want to keep things from going into a runaway state. Think of covid-19 as an event that begins to push the processes that keeps our society stable, towards it rails. You don’t want things to hit the rails, because at that point the measures that you take to compensate for the event and keep things stable stop working as expected.
So the social managers, the politicians and bureaucrats, see an event which will cause disaster and drive things off of the rails by overwhelming the health care system and causing an unimaginably large number of deaths. Early predictions said the US would experience as many as 2,000,000 deaths. If that happened, we’d be burning bodies in pits.
So they shut down the economy & issue stay-at-home orders for perfectly healthy people in order to keep the health care system from being overwhelmed.
Then you start to hit the economic and social rail. Eventually, you will have civil unrest, and the US has no obvious way to manage widespread civil unrest (the Chinese do. The Russians do).
Getting things back to normal will require a deft hand and luck. So far luck seems to be on our side. The virus seems to be less communicable and less lethal than predicted. Trump and congress seem to understand that tradeoffs are involved, economic activity and personal freedom for deaths of mostly the elderly. It is a cruel world.
Governors have an awful lot of authority in a pandemic. Normally you would expect governors to keep a cool head. They are politically accountable. They understand local conditions better than the feds.
But not so fast. In my state the gov is term limited. He ain’t going to run again. And governors, it seems, believe that they can cripple their state economies because Uncle Same will helicopter in pallets of greenbacks. Maybe, maybe not
I am lucky. I have a pile of cash and other capital. The island & state I live in has, so far, only been lightly touched by the virus. Also, it is a pretty nice place.
Today I went to the Safeway to pick up a few things. Easter hams were on sale for 50% off, since families aren’t getting together on Easter. Really cheap. Then I saw that they had prime rib on sale for the same reason. A four pound prime rib is $24. That is hamburger price in Hawaii, folks.
MP.
The fact that the CDC is lumping all deaths from respiratory distress with Wuhan flu, regardless of cause of death or underlying health problems of the deceased, should be pissing everyone off, regardless of what side of the aisle they are on. We may never know the actual number of deaths from it.
Many people are wondering how a pandemic can go from fifteen cases down to zero and end up turning into 560,433 active cases and killing over 22,115 Americans in less than a month.
Oh, Emery, you useful idiot. You obviously haven’t been paying attention.
Since the CDC has been falsifying death records and have instructed doctors to do the same thing, we peasants have no idea what the REAL number of deaths can be attributed to the virus. We aren’t hearing if there were underlying medical conditions the deceased may have had. Further, if they are falsifying death records, which is illegal, how do we know how many true active cases there are? The answer is NO ONE does. Well, except you, because you are the smartest guy in the world.