"much of the social history of the western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good"

-thomas sowell

"hold my beer and watch this"

-andrew cuomo

though i suppose none of us should be surprised.

we live in a time when epidemiologists said that mass protests during a pandemic were OK so long as they were for "social justice"

massively delaying vaccine rollouts for the same reason seems like the next obvious policy.
how about this?

"anyone who needs to go protest racism, sexism, the patriarchy, or the police gets vaccine priority"

i hope i am joking.

i fear i may not be.

More from el gato malo

google censorship of great barrington declaration: update.

this morning, there was no link to it in a direct google search.

now, there is.

could this be because certain internet felines noticed this and @chiproytx and @tedcruz helped call them out on this?

we may never know.


but i'd like to think so.

the google page is still a mess. it's still mostly fringe publication hit pieces and conspiracy theories.

when "mother jones" is your top media result for a science search, well, that says it all, doesn't it?

yikes.

i mean, why would we trust THESE people instead of a reporter at one of the most partisan rags on earth? oh, wait..

they are not being censored for being wrong. they're being censored for being right and being credible

they're censored because the other side cannot rebut them


and that is simply not a thing we can or should tolerate, especially not in a search engine.

so remember this. look for it in the future. demand primary sources.

use other search engines.

bing seems to be seeking to inform, not to inflame and mislead.


if you missed it, the original thread was here:

(and yes, lots of people duplicated my finding this morning)

i'd be curious to see what they are all seeing
this simple, counter narrative fact keeps cropping up all over the world.

hospital and ICU utilization has been and remains low this year.

it's terribly curious that so few of these monitoring tools provide historical baselines.

getting them is like pulling teeth.


we might think of this as an oversight until you see stuff like this:

this woman was arrested for filming and sharing the fact that their are empty hospitals in the UK.

that's full blown soviet. what possible honest purpose does that

this is the action of a police state and a propaganda ministry, not a well intentioned government and a public heath agency.

"we cannot let people see the truth for fear they might base their actions on real facts" is not much of a mantra for just governance.


90% full ICU sounds scary until you realize that 90-100% full is normal in flu season.

staffed ICU beds are expensive to leave empty. it's like flying with 15% of the plane empty. hospitals don't do that.

and all US hospitals are mandated to be able to flex to 120% ICU.

the US is currently at historically low ICU utilization for this time of year.

61% is "you're all going to go out of business" territory as is 66% full hospital use.

can you blame them for mining CARES act money? they'll die without it.
for those looking for a compendium of mask studies this set from swiss policy research looks useful and has some good links and discussion.

also attaching 2 past debunkings of widely disseminated US studies that health officials have attempted to

first, the kansas study spread by CDC and so many "twitterdocs" and politicians.

it's a master class in cherry picking and misusing data through truncation.

the data proving it was false was widely available at the time it was


also the mass general study, a classic of the "sun-dance" variant: use no control group and then presume that any action undertaken was the result of some thing you did.

ignore the fact that the whole rest of (unmasked) massachusetts got the same


the fact that CDC has been spreading studies like these and using them alongside flimsy lab bench experiments with no clinical outcomes or even real world measurement speaks poorly of both CDC & the evidence for masks

the good studies do not support use



and lab bench droplet projection studies are meaningless.

it's one tiny aspect of a large system and may actually be counterproductive if masks are nebulizing droplets and making virus more aerosol in spread and more deeply
did you consider checking the facts before buying into such hysterical claims?

this is LA department of health services hospital census. it's essentially identical to the levels from last year.

the media have had a severe tendency to overstate these issues. https://t.co/ktTPIbKcdQ


as you can see, visits to emergency departments have been quite stable for 4 months.


and ICU bed availability has been flat for the whole month of december.

keep in mind that 90-100% ICU capacity is normal this time of year and that all ICU's must be able to flex to 120% (by federal law) and most can hit 150%.


and if you will not take my word for it, just ask the CEO's of the hospitals in texas everyone was so breathless about this summer.

they were not worried. and they were


hospital census in LA seems to be about 3000 patients below where it was in july.

this seems to imply a drop in staffed beds which, contrary to the narrative is not from "exhaustion" but rather from people being laid off or staying home because kids are not in school.

More from Politics

All the challenges to Leader Pelosi are coming from her right, in an apparent effort to make the party even more conservative and bent toward corporate interests.

Hard pass. So long as Leader Pelosi remains the most progressive candidate for Speaker, she can count on my support.


I agree that our party should, and must, evolve our leadership.

But changed leadership should reflect an actual, evolved mission; namely, an increased commitment to the middle + working class electorate that put us here.

Otherwise it’s a just new figure with the same problems.

I hope that we can move swiftly to conclude this discussion about party positions, so that we can spend more time discussing party priorities: voting rights, healthcare, wages, climate change, housing, cannabis legalization, good jobs, etc.
My piece in the NY Times today: "the Trump administration is denying applications submitted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services at a rate 37 percent higher than the Obama administration did in 2016."

Based on this analysis: "Denials for immigration benefits—travel documents, work permits, green cards, worker petitions, etc.—increased 37 percent since FY 2016. On an absolute basis, FY 2018 will see more than about 155,000 more denials than FY 2016."
https://t.co/Bl0naOO0sh


"This increase in denials cannot be credited to an overall rise in applications. In fact, the total number of applications so far this year is 2 percent lower than in 2016. It could be that the higher denial rate is also discouraging some people from applying at all.."

Thanks to @gsiskind for his insightful comments. The increase in denials, he said, is “significant enough to make one think that Congress must have passed legislation changing the requirements. But we know they have not.”

My conclusion:
I think a plausible explanation is that whatever Corbyn says or does, his critics will denounce - no matter how much hypocrisy it necessitates.


Corbyn opposes the exploitation of foreign sweatshop-workers - Labour MPs complain he's like Nigel

He speaks up in defence of migrants - Labour MPs whinge that he's not listening to the public's very real concerns about immigration:

He's wrong to prioritise Labour Party members over the public:

He's wrong to prioritise the public over Labour Party

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