Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
Many years ago I dated an (American) woman who literally spent two weeks wallowing in paroxysms of grief over the death of Princess Dianne, a women she’d never met or even spoken to. That’s when I knew she was mentally ill, and I broke off the relationship.
She made off with the loot, now she’s a victim?
Lucas Manfredi. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old … They literally know nothing.” Ben Rhodes
Over at Fox News, 27-year-old Lucas Manfredi reports on a motorcycle rally at Daytona Beach that’s expected to draw 300,000 visitors.
Here’s what passes for journalism these days:
While the event will continue as planned, city officials are hoping to avoid a coronavirus outbreak similar to an incident which occurred at a Sturgis, South Dakota motorcycle rally in August.
About 19 percent of 1.4 million new coronavirus cases in the U.S. between Aug. 2 and Sept. 2 were linked back to the motorcycle event, according to according to researchers from San Diego State University's Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies. That's more than 266,000 coronavirus cases attributed to the 10-day event, which more than 460,000 people attended despite fears it could become a so-called super-spreader event.
"We conclude that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally generated public health costs of approximately $12.2 billion," the researchers wrote in a paper. "This is enough to have paid each of the estimated 462,182 rally attendees $26,553.64 not to attend."
Scary stuff, if true, but is it? Nope, it’s pure, unadulterated bullshit, a bogus study with completely unsupported claims and conclusions that were picked up by our porn press and repeated as fact. (Tellingly, the link Manfredi provides to “the study” he’s pretending to report on actually leads back to another Fox article from August that makes the same false claims; echo chamber for idiots)
Even Sopes labels this claim as “unproven” – which is unduly gentle, and points out that both epidemiologists and statisticians scoffed at its entirely hypothetical conclusion.
Before we get to the expert opinions on this study, let’s dispel a few quick rumors on social media. This study did not claim, for instance, that 250,000 people tested positive for COVID-19 shortly after attending the rally. The research attempted to quantify how many cases of COVID-19 could potentially be linked to people who attended the rally, traveled to other locations, and then spread the disease among their communities.
It should also be noted that this is an estimate based on a wide variety of factors, not an actual headcount of COVID-19 patients who attended, or knew someone who attended, the rally. As mentioned above, this study was not peer-reviewed and was prefaced with a piece of text noting that “IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion.”
While this study may provide a broad estimate on how Sturgis could have impacted the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of epidemiologists and statisticians have taken issue with models used in the study and the report’s findings.
Jennifer Beam Dowd, the deputy director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford, also took issue with the paper’s conclusion in an article published on Slate. Generally speaking, Dowd argued that the researchers made assumptions that don’t always play out in reality. More specifically, Dowd took issue with how the study confidently presented a precise conclusion (266,796 COVID-cases) despite noisy results.
The 266,796 number also overstates the precision of the estimates in the paper even if the model is taken at face value. The confidence intervals for the “high inflow” counties seem to include zero (meaning the authors can’t say with statistical confidence that there was any difference in infections across counties due to the rally). No standard errors (measures of the variability around the estimate) are provided for the main regression results, and many of the p-values for key results are not statistically significant at conventional levels. So even if one believes the design and assumptions, the results are very “noisy” and subject to caveats that don’t merit the broadcasting of the highly specific 266,796 figure with confidence, though I imagine that “somewhere between zero and 450,000 infections” would not have been as headline-grabbing.
The claim that 250,000 COVID-19 cases were linked to Sturgis is based on one study’s estimate of how the motorcycle rally could have impacted the pandemic. As several statisticians and epidemiologists have noted, the models used for this study contained flaws, and the report arrived at a conclusion that was more precise than the available data would have allowed.
If you’re not bored by all this by now, here’s a bit more:
The only study I can find that actually tracked individual attendees was one conducted by the CDC of Minnesota residents Its conclusion: 86 contracted COVID, either directly, or secondarily.
Eighty-six Minnesota COVID-19 cases were associated with the South Dakota motorcycle rally; approximately one third of counties in Minnesota reported at least one case epidemiologically linked to this event,” said the study called COVID-19 Outbreak Associated with a 10-Day Motorcycle Rally in a Neighboring State — Minnesota, August–September 2020.
Cases were identified in people who worked at the rally and attended the rally and then, spread COVID-19 to others.
The numbers linked to the Sturgis Rally may seem small compared to the 461,000 attendees and the number of COVID-19 cases in Minnesota 249,906 as of Nov. 20, but the findings show how one large event can spread the virus, according to the CDC.
But this is our news coverage: a false claim, reported by one outlet as fact and then repeated endlessly, ricocheting around the fake news world until “everybody knows” that it’s true. Manfredi is not the only reporter out there who’s too lazy and too incurious to check his sources; in fact, he’s the very model of the incompetent modern journalist of today.
How Cereal Transformed American Culture
During the early 19th century, most Americans subsisted on a diet of pork, whiskey, and coffee. It was hell on the bowels, and to many Christian fundamentalists, hell on the soul, too. They believed that constipation was God's punishment for eating meat. The diet was also blamed for fueling lust and laziness. To rid America of these vices, religious zealots spearheaded the country's first vegetarian movement. In 1863, one member of this group, Dr. James Jackson, invented Granula, America's first ready-to-eat, grain-based breakfast product.
It’s a fun read
I also don’t know how many fishing poles and fly rods I have
Hero of the People and Guardian of the Currency, Nick maduro
Especially if it’ll only set you back fifty-three cents? Head for Venezuela.
Sean Penn was unavailable for comment on how what was once the richest country in South America is now its poorest.
Our Collapsing Culture: How the Church of Woke Upends Language and Ends debate
The Church of Woke™ and its catechism are slowly and surely deconstructing American culture and institutions. To stifle dissent and excommunicate non-believers, they have several tools in their arsenal. To engineer the deconstruction, Wokeists have created phrases that upend the meanings of words to prevent thoughtful discussion and end ideological debate. This twisted language serves to increase division and polarization based on group identity.
[…]
Finally, the Church of Woke™ uses false binaries. One of these is mask-wearing. If you disagree that you need to wear one at all times except perhaps in your own home, you are a heartless individual who doesn’t care if people die. False binaries are often used to virtue-signal, establishing one position as the moral one. As High Priestess Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once asserted, she didn’t need to be factually correct. It is more important to be morally right. There is no nuance in a false binary.
The priorities of the Church of Woke™ become useful tools for political and institutional leaders who want to avoid ideological debates. The obfuscation of the fundamental issues facing our country, like a crisis at the border, saves them from difficult questions. However, the use of twisted language and group identity also threaten a culture based on logic, reason, and the open exchange of ideas. Ultimately, they seek to destroy the meritocracy and individual freedom that allowed the United States to become one of the most innovative, powerful, and wealthy nations the world has ever known.
It’s a lengthy article and well worth reading beyond these two snippets
Yesterday, I expressed surprise and bewilderment that “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was being disappeared from TCM’s catalogue. Don Surber explains.
Sidney Poitier: Enemy of the People
In September 2019, the network hired film historian Jacqueline Stewart and made a big deal about her being black and female. Her books include Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity and L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema.
TCM is purging its movie library. Breitbart reported that among those on the "troublesome and problematic" list are Hitchcock's Rope (the villains are homosexual) and Psycho (the villain is a man in drag) as well as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and My Fair Lady.
[…...]
The trouble with Sidney Poitier?
He’s too white.
Via Breitbart, hostess Stewart said, "His career is so important for the ways that white Americans really started to have more sympathy and understanding of black people. But at the same time, there are aspects of his films that are clearly oriented primarily to white audiences. That opens up all kinds of complications for black viewers who felt that he wasn’t a representative of the race as a whole."
In the 1960s, when it came to black actors, he was it. Ivan Dixon did a good job in Nothing But A Man (and of course on Hogan's Heroes). But Poitier was only black star in Hollywood at the time. He did a bang-up job in A Raisin in the Sun, Lilies of the Field, To Sir with Love, In the Heat of the Night, and of course Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Those 5 films advanced racial equality far more than any of today's virtue signaling.
[…]
Surber concludes with this warning:
The point is not to erase Poitier but to erase the role of white people from emancipation and civil rights. Poitier served his purpose, now he must go. The same happened to Stalin. The same will happen to Obama.
They pose the problem Lincoln does by casting white people in a good light. Their rewrite of emancipation holds that while white people busied themselves with a civil war over states rights, those clever black people liberated themselves from slavery on Juneteenth. Liberals now make the same argument the Ku Klux Klan did in denying the civil war was about slavery.
Demoting Poitier to Stepin Fetchit status should serve as a warning not just to Will Smith and Obama, but to allThe point is not to erase Poitier but to erase the role of white people from emancipation and civil rights. Poitier served his purpose, now he must go. The same happened to Stalin. The same will happen to Obama.
Demoting Poitier to Stepin Fetchit status should serve as a warning not just to Will Smith and Obama, but to all black people. You may not be next, but you are on the list.
Neo-cons, start your engines, your long wait is almost over
Israel updating plans to attack Iran’s nuclear sites
Kerry and friends were busy undermining Trump by negotiating with Iran for the past four years. They’re now ready to cancel the sanctions against that country, restore the Obama-era’s friendly relationship with Hammas, and generally return to the status quo.
Israel is responding accordingly. I expect we’ll see war break out again sometime during the Kampalla Walla administration of the next 3 years.
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