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Friday, November 6, 2020

Election Fraud

Those who spent the last four years convinced there was election interference are now saying there's no way it the election could be rigged.

For more than a century America was the gold standard for participatory democracy. Today, November 6, 2020, the rest of the world is aghast at how inept our election system has become. Countries across Europe shake their heads in disbelief at the idea that you don’t have to show identification to vote in this country. Voter fraud has come out of the shadows has been practiced in broad daylight, as if those perpetrating the fraud are daring Americans to challenge them. Crooked, politically biased judges, law enforcement, governors and secretaries of state either look the other way or actively participate in adulterating the election process to ensure that their favored candidate wins.

The stakes are high, and the reward even higher. United States of America is both the largest economy and the largest military power in the world. The difference between a favorable and unfavorable government could mean hundreds of billions of dollars of profits or losses to foreign interests and domestic corporations. Investing billions or tens of billions of dollars to guarantee a favorable outcome is a cheap price to pay for an unscrupulous stakeholder. The rank-and-file American people cannot compete against the forces arrayed at getting a predetermined outcome from our election.

“Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” This rule of propaganda, popularly attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, is one of the leading tactics of the American left. Liberals and Democrats deny that any election fraud is occurring, try to make the case that it’s insignificant and irrelevant, or insist that it’s the conservatives and Republicans that are perpetrating the fraud.

By the very nature of the crime, it’s very difficult to produce a smoking gun to show that substantial and egregious election fraud is occurring right under our noses in 2020. Taken alone, the evidence would be considered anecdotal and inconsequential. The “fact checker” industry and the news media is quick to dismiss any charges of voter fraud as unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. What I endeavor to do here is consolidate the mounting evidence of voter fraud to make the case that not only is it real and substantial but that it has reached an overwhelming level and threatens the very foundation of our Republic.

Vote rigging: How to spot the tell-tale signs (This was from 2016.  How many can you see today?)

‘American Hustle’: Party Insiders Tell The True Story Of How Philadelphia Elections Work




















Mail Carrier Arrested For Dumping Mail, Including Ballots (Orange County went 54.2% for Trump)













































































Former U.S. Congressman and Philadelphia Political Operative Pleads Guilty to Election Fraud Charges

Let's review the video of election night.

At 1:24 am (6:20:41 into the video) Pennsylvania reported 66% in with Trump leading Biden 2,691,960 to 1,994,274. That's a 16% spread, and in any other election the networks would have called it for Trump easily, because the spread just doesn't change that much between 66% and 100%. one or two points, maybe, but 16 points ? Not possible for Biden to make that up. . . unless you cheat.

Let's do a little math. . .

At 1:24 am (7:06:09 into the video) Pennsylvania reported 74% in with Trump leading Biden 2,956,791 to 2,283,656. A difference of 673,135 votes. if this vote tally is 74%, then 100% of the voters in PA would be 7,081,685. So there are 1,841,238 votes left to be counted. This means that all the remaining votes to be counted would have to break for Biden 2:1, i.e. for every reaming Trump vote, there would have to be two Biden votes (2.16, actually). In a state where Trump is leading by 12 percentage points? Do you even know the slightest thing about statistics? This is simply not possible.

At 12:56 am (5:52:00 into the video) Georgia reported 83% in with Trump leading Biden 2,250,565 to 1,976,548. That's a 6% spread, and in any other election the networks would have called it for Trump easily, because the spread just doesn't change that much between 83% and 100%. one or two points, sure, but 6 points ? Not possible for Biden to make that up. . . unless you cheat.

At 1:20 am (6:17:00 into the video) Michigan reported 60% in with Trump leading Biden 1,827,175 to 1,535,541. That's a 8.5% spread, and in any other election the networks would have called it for Trump easily, because the spread just doesn't change that much between 60% and 100%. one or two points, sure, but 8.5 points ? Not possible for Biden to make that up. . . unless you cheat.

At 2:00 am (6:55:05 into the video) Wisconsin reported 81% in with Trump leading Biden 1,496,350 to 1,379,913. That's a 4% spread, and in any other election the networks would have called it for Trump. I've seen networks call races with less of a spread and less of a percentage counted, and they rarely if ever have turned out wrong, because trends don't change. Theoretically possible for Biden to make this up, but highly unlikely and historically unprecedented.

The tallies were slow from the blue urban areas in all these states, where the vote counting was controlled by Democrats, and they deliberately slowed the process so they could see how many votes they had to manufacture to win.

It was in your face, and the fact that you got the result you wanted shouldn't affect the chilling effect that in the United States of America, the example the rest of the world looks to, a national election was blatantly stolen in front of your face and you don't seem to give a shit. Everything you ever thought this country stood for is made a mockery by this, but hey, it's fine, the orange man with the mean tweets is gone.


Thursday, October 1, 2020

The Climate Hoax Continues to Unravel

Every day, more scientists are coming out of the woodwork and denying the precepts of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).  Bookmark this page, because as I come across more evidence mounting against the Climate science hoax, I'll be posting it here.

August 18, 2022
1,100 scientists, scholars: 'There is no climate emergency'

May 9, 2021
Large Increase In Number Of Sunshine Hours Likely Behind Warming, Glacier Retreat In Alps Since 1980

Feb 3, 2020

Jan 22, 2020

Jan 21, 2020
Climate Change Hoax COLLAPSES as New Science Finds Human Activity Has Virtually Zero Impact on Global Temperatures

Oct 24, 2019
Climate Science’s Myth-Buster

Oct 2, 2019
UW Prof. Cliff Mass called racist for opposing carbon tax initiative

Oct 1, 2019
University of Washington censors Faculty, denies freedom of speech in favor of Groupthink.

Sept. 29, 2019

Sept 26, 2019

Sept 24, 2019
In Letter to UN, Scientists Say There Is No Climate Emergency
Text of the letter here.

Sept 24, 2019
Top-level climate modeler goes rogue, criticizes 'nonsense' of 'global warming crisis'

Sep 23, 2019
No Climate Emergency For Polar Bears Or Walruses

Sept 22, 2019
My Gift To Climate Alarmists (Climate Alarmists Debunked)

August 25, 2019
Christopher Monckton discusses a verified model by two Irish climatologists that puts the whole AGW issue to rest and why they're not getting any platform to present it.  More on this study when it becomes available.
Christopher Monckton: New Irish study shows greenhouse gas effect cannot cause global warming

August 16, 2019
Global Warming: Fact or Fiction? Featuring Physicists Willie Soon and Elliott Bloom

July 12, 2019
Climate change hoax COLLAPSES as new science finds human activity has virtually zero impact on global temperatures

July 12, 2019
Green New Deal Scam Destroyed By New Scientific Study On Global Warming

July 9, 2019
90 Scientists: Global Warming Is a Total Hoax

June 20, 2019
I’m a climate scientist, and I reject forcing climate propaganda on children

June 19, 2019
90 Leading Italian Scientists Sign Petition: CO2 Impact On Climate “UNJUSTIFIABLY EXAGGERATED” … Catastrophic Predictions “NOT REALISTIC”  (English Translation)

May 28, 2019
Scientists caught 'adjusting' sea level data to create false impression of rising oceans

April 1, 2019
Climate change agenda is being driven by hysteria, not facts

February 3, 2019
University of Alabama scientists: 'No evidence' climate change causes extreme cold

January 15, 2019
CO2 is not causing (statistically relevant) global warming

October 19, 2018
How Al Gore Built the Global Warming Fraud

October 16, 2018
Former Harvard U. Physicist rejects new UN IPCC report: ‘Similar claims are on par with the spam about penis enlargement’ 

October 3, 2018
Dr. Tim Ball On Climate: Lies Wrapped In Deception Smothered With Delusion

September 13, 2018
Tim Ball: The Evidence Proves That CO2 is Not a Greenhouse Gas

May 2, 2018
Is climate alarmist consensus about to shatter?

December 19, 2017
Dr. Tim Ball: The Disastrous Economic Impact of CO2 Reduction Policies

October 18, 2017
Climate change is ‘the biggest scientific fraud ever perpetrated’: scientist


June 17, 2014

Monday, May 18, 2020

Okay, Time to Stop the Bullshit.


Two months ago, things were looking pretty alarming.  COVID-19 was getting its feet under it in the USA, and the growth curve had every indication that it was undergoing a logarithmic progression.  Following the trend forward, it was looking like as many as ten million people could be infected in the US by the end of May if the projection went unchecked.  You can go back in this very blog and see the rationale that seemed the prudent thing to do back in March.  But then about the first week of April, the daily numbers of infected in the USA leveled off and have been about 30,000 a day and slowly dropping.

Back then we didn’t even know what we didn’t know about this pandemic.  We had the experience of the overloaded hospitals in Italy, and we were facing a logarithmically increasing number of infected people. The prudent thing to do was to break the cycle of infection by social distancing.  The purpose of this was to slow the advance of the virus so that our medical resources weren’t overwhelmed.

Does social isolation really save lives?  That depends on whether our medical resources would be overwhelmed if we didn’t isolate.  Based on our experience the last two months, the answer to that is an emphatic no.  Our medical resources haven’t been challenged to within 10% of their capacity.

This virus is not going to magically go away. As virulent as it is, your chances of catching it are very good. No matter when they re-open the world, you're going to see the infection rate jump. Right now, holding the country in lock-down is probably the worst thing you can do, because you're providing isolated pools in which the virus can mutate. Think about "flu season" which is when the school kids come back from three months of relative isolation and start spreading the flu mutations they acquired over the summer.

Here's the fact: You, me, everybody are probably going to catch it at some point, just like the flu. It's inevitable, it's not going away, and it's very contagious, and we can't live as hermits forever. Some people will die from it, just like the flu.  If the medical resources aren’t overwhelmed, the number of people who are going to die from COVID is going to be the same, whether we isolate or not.  Eventually, you’re going to get it, just like the flu.  The only way that isolation would save anyone’s lives is if people were dying because there was no medical resources available to care for them, and they die when they would have lived if they got appropriate medical attention.  We now know that scenario isn’t going to happen.

The lock-down never had anything to do with stopping the virus or preventing people from getting it. It was designed to mitigate the rate of propagation so that our medical resources weren't overwhelmed. It was a prudent thing to do in the early stages of the pandemic when we didn't even know what we didn't know.
We have a lot more data now. Our medical resources were never even challenged to within 1/10th of their capacity. The only lives that might be saved by locking down are the ones who would have been denied medical treatment because of an overloaded system. Now we know that's not going to happen.

Now we know that there may be a huge reservoir of people out there who have been infected, and never became symptomatic.  Non-mainstream news has pointed out that the death rate may have been exaggerated, because there was a financial incentive to classify deaths as COVID deaths.  We know the only country that we can trust less for accurate numbers than China is North Korea.

Wearing a mask will do very little to protect you from getting the virus.  Masks are designed to protect everyone from your germs, not you from everyone else’s germs.  Think of it like someone pissing on your leg.  If you’re wearing pants, you’re still getting soaked, but if they’re wearing pants, only they get soaked.  Gloves are useful, if you know how to use them, and dispose of them as soon as you leave a contamination area, to prevent cross-contamination.  Think of it like dipping your gloved hands in paint.  You wouldn’t want to touch anything with your paint covered gloves that you’ll later want to touch with ungloved hands.

If you’re driving your car or walking down the sidewalk away from other people in a mask and a gloves, I’m sorry, you’re an idiot, and don’t really grasp the concept.

When you see a state lift restrictions and suddenly have a jump in reported cases, you know you’re being lied to.  This has an incubation period of up to two weeks.  You won’t see any increase in infection rates for at least two weeks after you lift restrictions.

The left and Democrats are heavily invested in continuing this farce as long as possible.  It takes the attention off the shit show that their presidential primary had become, and Sleepy Joe Biden isn’t making a fool of himself on national TV on the campaign circuit.  If they can prolong this to November, they can push hard for vote-by-mail nationwide, and the ensuing opportunities that will entail for massive voter fraud that would make even the Democrats blush.  They have an idea that they can lay the blame for the wrecked economy at Trump’s feet and capitalize on it politically.  It shows you where the Democrats are at when they are joyful at the misery that the economic chaos has caused, because to them the allure of political power is far more important than the pain of the average working class American.  They want you to believe they care about you and are helping you by printing money they don’t have and giving it to you, devaluing the money in your bank with an invisible tax and increasing the national debt beyond our capacity to ever repay it.

Our supply chains are breaking down.  Food isn’t getting to market because the processing plants have closed because of COVID.  Yesterday my wife witnessed a fight at the grocery outlet over the last remaining bag of beans.  The government gets to decide who is essential, and who is not, who has permission to conduct commerce and who cannot.  People are being arrested for being alone in solitary activities that even in normal times mean getting away from other people.  There’s little rhyme or reason for often arbitrary enforcement, and apparently no common sense.  The one thing this has taught us all is who should not have been entrusted with the power they were given, who the petty tyrants are when given the chance, and who among our neighbors will turn you into the authorities as happened in Germany in the 1930’s and ‘40’s. 

If people are paying attention, we will rid ourselves of the leftist tyrants come this November and restore the country to its constitutional foundation.  This pandemic has been a free trial of socialism.  I hope everyone, especially the young people, have taken its lesson to heart.

We're nowhere close to challenging our medical resources. Open the damn economy. Stop the bullshit.

Sunday, April 12, 2020

The Mark of the Beast

"And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six." Revelations, 13:16-18, KJV translation


Scholars have been scratching their heads about this passage of revelations for centuries, wondering what the significance of 666 is. Is it an anagram?  I've seen many attempts to assign numerical values to letters to come up with a "count" for a word that means the beast, which is silly, because the ones I've seen are in English - a language that wouldn't exist for 1500 years after St. John penned this passage on the Island of Patmos.  Some have used gematria - a form of Jewish numerology that assigns numerical value to Hebrew letters and words - to try to tease out a hidden meaning of the number, but gematria doesn't appear anywhere else in the New Testament.

I recall a comedy about the apocalypse named "668 - the Neighbor of the Beast."  Nice to have fun with this stuff.

More people focus on the mark on the forehead or the hand, and ignore the significance of the number itself.  They panic when they hear of ideas to implant RFID in people's hands for easy recognition - "The mark of the Beast!  Noooo!" While I'm ambivalent about the idea, I can see some utility, and I recognize that our current preoccupation with personal privacy is a relatively recent development in human society.  Throughout most of history, you were well known within your community and were deemed suspicious if people didn't know you personally, including your history and social standing.  No, such an idea is not a harbinger of the beast.

To really understand the Number of the Beast, you have to look at the context.  St. John was given revelation in the form of visions, and he faithfully recorded what he saw, even if he didn't quite understand it at the time.  He was allowed to see future events, but it wasn't always explained to him.

Let's look for a second at the original Greek that Revelations were written in:

ωδε η σοφια εστιν ο εχων τον νουν ψηφισατω τον αριθμον του θηριου αριθμος γαρ ανθρωπου εστιν και ο αριθμος αυτου χξς
-Revelations 13:18.

I've highlighted the "666" in red.  The written Greek language had no numbers.  They used letters to represent certain numerical values.  Below is the table of the Greek numbering system.





So we see that St. John wrote "chi - xi - stigma."  These letters mean nothing in Greek by themselves, so it must be a reference to a number, and that's confirmed by the context where St. John refers to it as a number.  Subsequent translations have rendered it as 666.

Was St. John really referring to a number, or just recording what he saw, and his own interpretation?  People from all walks of life receive the mark, and without it, they are not allowed to function in society.  What is the mark?  "chi - xi - stigma."  Three Greek letters.  Is it an anagram?  If it is, is it in Greek?  Is there anything else that can be confused for these letters?

It turns out there is. In a language whose written form would not be recorded for another 600 years from St. John's time, which reads from right to left, instead of left to right as Greek does.



In Arabic, the words "Bismallah" ("In the name of Allah!") followed by the crossed swords of Islam (remember, Arabic reads right to left) bear a striking resemblance to the Greek letters "chi - xi - stigma."

Did St. John see a vision of the Jihadist movement, where everyone wears a green bandanna on their head or arm ("hand"), indicating their allegiance to Allah and the Quran and chanting death to infidels? Not understanding the Arabic writing (How could he?), he recorded what he saw, and decided it was a number, for it couldn't be anything else.

Anyone who has studied the Quran from the frame of reference of Christianity understands its Satanic origin.  It teaches many doctrines of the Anti-Christ, not the least of which is the denial that Jesus was ever crucified. We know the Beast is the Anti-Christ.  We know the overt, stated goal of Islam is world domination, and the subjugation of all peoples under Islam.

So don't panic when you see people getting RFID chips or invisible barcode tattoos. As questionable as those sound to liberty and privacy minded modern people, they're not the mark of Satan or the Beast.  The Beast is Islam, and St. John overtly told us what to look for, even if he didn't have the frame of reference to understand what he saw at the time. 


Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Flu Fiction

Essential to review this episode of Mythbusters these days, where Adam and Jamie show how easy it is to spread a virus, and how best to mitigate it.  Works best with Firefox.  May require you to fill a captcha.

https://ww1.1movies.is/series/mythbusters-season-8/26250/33746/B6dUOl1g-watch-online-free.html

Saturday, March 14, 2020

Get With the Program on COVID-19






So I asked myself about five times this evening, “How many times do I have to deal with this bullshit today?”

Here’s a common meme that’s going around that’s trying to assuage everyone’s fears and claim that this is an overreaction.





Let’s break this down.

As of this writing ( March 14, 19:20 pacific time), there are 156,169 cases of COVID-19 worldwide. I’m using the numbers from Johns Hopkins University.

80,995 of those are in China.

Which means that since this idiotic meme was published the infection rate outside of China has gone, well, viral. So the number of people in China vs the numbers outside of China are meaningless about your chances of catching it.

Yes, there are mild cases. No, if you’re a reasonably healthy person, you’re not going to die from COVID-19. That’s not the point! There are a huge number of at-risk people who can easily die from this. Elderly. Immunocompromised. Asthmatics. People with COPD. Probably others that don’t come to mind at the moment.

Taking a single sample from the “worst” day in China is disingenuous, because China has managed to control the spread by using the power of its totalitarian communist dictatorship to seal off provinces, impose strict quarantine, and established curfews. Since they did this, the infection rate has leveled out and it’s stopped spreading. For a country of a billion people, to have a mere 80,995 reported infections from something this infectious is pretty damn impressive. Of course, it begs the question, can we really trust the numbers coming out of China? I don’t know if we can trust the actual numbers, but I’m reasonably sure we can trust the derivatives scaled over time. They might have ten times more people than they admit, but I’m reasonably confident they’ve stopped the spread of the virus and held down the number of new infections.

Now, we need to look at some realities.  

Worldwide, there has been currently 156,169 cases of COVID-19 reported worldwide. Of those, 79,785 have been reported resolved. Of the resolved cases, 5,830 died. Of the remaining 76,384, 65,594 are outside of China. That means for all the patients for whom the disease has run its course, 7.31% of them have died worldwide. Yes, these are mostly old people or people in high-risk categories.  

The question is, do we disregard the health of these people because we personally aren’t going to get very sick?

The Chinese experience informs us that without medical care, the mortality rate is about 12%. With medical care, this comes down to about 1%.  

A very conservative estimate based on the rate of infection in the United States, assuming we take no preventive measures to increase social distance is that we’ll hit 1 million reported cases sometime in late April. A less conservative estimate is that we’ll get there in early April. Again, if no action is taken, we’ll be on track to hit 10 million by mid-May.  

Actual mileage may vary. Personal habits, sanitation, hygiene all play into this. Americans are a standoffish lot, we’re reasonably clean and we generally eschew public transportation. All of these lower our chances of contracting the virus, yet in the last 24 hours the number of cases reported in the USA have nearly doubled.

This is the power of exponential compounding. It starts out slow, and then ramps up fast once it hits critical mass.

And this is why these idiotic memes comparing absolute numbers of flu cases and flu deaths are meaningless and counterproductive. The seasonal flu is endemic, and the rate of infection isn’t exponential. COVID-19 is epidemic, and its rate of infection is exponential. So the next time you see one of these that tells you how many people contracted the flu and how few died and try to show how paltry the COVID-19 body count is in comparison, remember that we’re in the early stages of this, it’s highly contagious, and an order of magnitude more deadly. It kills the same demographic as the flu, but it does so with ten times the efficiency. The flu is planned for, it doesn't come in a huge wave, we have seasonal models that predict how many people contract it and how many people will need medical care, and we're ready for that.




The United States has 924,107 fully staffed hospital beds. I don’t know, I’m guessing about 50% of those are in use on any given day. Suppose we get to the 10 million reported cases we’re expected to get in May if we do nothing. According to the meme above, 19% of the cases are moderate to critical, and will require medical intervention to some degree. That’s 1.9 million patients, more than twice the number than we have facilities available to treat. Based on the numbers from the epidemic worldwide, this means a death toll from 400,000 to 700,000. And that’s just May. 

Look, as contagious as this is, you’re probably going to get it. It’s eventually going to take its place along with the common seasonal flu. It will eventually burn itself out. The thing we need to work towards is to contain the spread to a manageable rate, to spread the infections out over time so our medical resources aren’t overwhelmed.  





Eyewitness accounts in Italy tell us that this has overwhelmed their system. Doctors are conducting triage, determining which patients can go home without medical care, which patients will survive with medical treatment, and which are going to die if they get treatment or not. It sounds heartless but it's normal when medical services get overwhelmed. Look, Italy is like the worst possible place to be letting a bug like this loose. They're the oldest demographic in Europe. They greet each other by kissing each other's cheeks. They have a personal space of about four inches. They all smoke. It's a dirty country. Literally everything you can think of to do wrong when there's a highly contagious respiratory disease going around is literally built into the Italian culture. So a LOT of people are going to get sick, and the medical services are overwhelmed. But it's a numbers game. Given an unrestricted contagion, it can happen anywhere. If we don't start isolating people who have been exposed right now, this calculus could be coming soon to a hospital near you.

The Science

Seasonal flu is an “all human virus”. The DNA/RNA chains that make up the virus are recognized by the human immune system. This means that your body has some immunity to it before it comes around each year... you get immunity two ways...through exposure to a virus, or by getting a flu shot.

Novel viruses, come from animals.... the WHO tracks novel viruses in animals, (sometimes for years watching for mutations). Usually these viruses only transfer from animal to animal (pigs in the case of H1N1) (birds in the case of the Spanish flu). But once, one of these animal viruses mutates, and starts to transfer from animals to humans... then it’s a problem, Why? Because we have no natural or acquired immunity.. the RNA sequencing of the genes inside the virus isn’t human, and the human immune system doesn’t recognize it so, we can’t fight it off.

Now.... sometimes, the mutation only allows transfer from animal to human, for years it’s only transmission is from an infected animal to a human before it finally mutates so that it can now transfer human to human... once that happens..we have a new contagion phase. And depending on the fashion of this new mutation, thats what decides how contagious, or how deadly it’s gonna be..

H1N1 was deadly....but it did not mutate in a way that was as deadly as the Spanish flu. It’s RNA was slower to mutate and it attacked its host differently, too.

Fast forward.

Now, here comes this Coronavirus... it existed in animals only, for nobody knows how long...but one day, at an animal market, in Wuhan China, in December 2019, it mutated and made the jump from animal to people. At first, only animals could give it to a person... But here is the scary part.... in just TWO WEEKS it mutated again and gained the ability to jump from human to human. Scientists call this quick ability, “slippery”

This Coronavirus, not being in any form a “human” virus (whereas we would all have some natural or acquired immunity). Took off like a rocket. And this was because, Humans have no known immunity...doctors have no known medicines for it.

And it just so happens that this particular mutated animal virus, changed itself in such a way the way that it causes great damage to human lungs..

That’s why Coronavirus is different from seasonal flu, or H1N1 or any other type of influenza.... this one is slippery AF. And it’s a lung eater...And, it’s already mutated AGAIN, so that we now have two strains to deal with, strain s, and strain L....which makes it twice as hard to develop a vaccine.

We really have no tools in our shed, with this. History has shown that fast and immediate closings of public places has helped in the past pandemics. Philadelphia and Baltimore were reluctant to close events in 1918 and they were the hardest hit in the US during the Spanish Flu.

The Misinformation

But why didn't we see this kind of panic with SARS?  It had more people infected and killed more than COVID-19 has (so far).

SARS was easy. It presented with very specific symptoms that were easily identifiable.  If you had these symptoms, you reported to medical services, got treated and quarantined. It didn't have a significant incubation period during which you were contagious. There was no reason to disrupt life for most of the country.  COVID-19, on the other hand, has a significant incubation period during which it's contagious, and the carrier doesn't even know they're sick. It presents with a wide variety of symptoms, as reported by the Italian medical experience, so most people think they have a cold or the regular flu and don't seek treatment, or necessarily even isolate themselves.  This makes the spread extremely difficult to identify and contain, unlike SARS.

Another common trope is that we don't know how many cases aren't reported, so the death rates aren't really as bad as they seem.  Bullshit.  It doesn't matter how many aren't diagnosed.  The ones who are diagnosed are showing an alarming trend. Reported cases in the US have more than doubled in the last 24 hours. At the current rate, in the US alone we're headed for a million sometime in April, as many as 10 million by mid-May if we don't quarantine to the level China has. Those are reported cases.  Yeah, there might be 20 million more that are unreported and of no concern, but the death rate of all the resolved cases that are reported is running around 7% at the moment. There's no reason to think those absolute numbers are suddenly going to change or that the number of critical cases that are currently going to be reported is going to change if we start counting total infections vs reported infections.  The unreported number of infections is a red herring.

The only way of slowing this down and managing it is to increase social distance. Communist China did it with totalitarian efficiency. In spite of what the Democrats and Liberals would like, we can’t get away with that here in the West. We have to convince people of the seriousness of the problem, so they’ll self-isolate and get the same effect China did. So stop the bullshit memes saying this is an overreaction. The numbers say it’s not, for those of you who can do a basic mathematical extrapolation. Stop saying it’s no worse than the flu. The numbers tell us it kills ten times as many people as the flu does. Stop saying it’s a media hoax. It’s not.  

Like a tidal wave in the open ocean, there’s a monster headed our way. I at first thought it was an unnecessary panic myself, until I started extrapolating the numbers and reading through the propaganda. It’s real. So for the sake of the elderly, the immunocompromised, the asthmatics and those with COPD, stop your bullshit, stop saying there’s no problem. Isolate, watch the numbers, take precautions when you’re out, and work with society to keep the deaths to a minimum. You may be safe, but to say that’s all we need to worry about is nothing but a big “fuck you” to millions of Americans who statistically are likely to die if we don’t keep a handle on this.







Sunday, March 1, 2020

Electoral Apportionment

A bone of contention these days is the Electoral College.  The Democrats want to get rid of it because, well, Democracy.  Republicans want to keep it, because it's one of the cornerstones that keeps the country together.  The common mantra is that if we went to a direct majority wins election that New York and California would decide the president.  That's a little bit disingenuous, but not far wrong.  Texas and Florida would also get a say.

Currently in 48 of the 50 states, electors are chosen by a winner-take-all system.  Which ever candidate wins the states gets all the electors for that state.  Each state gets a number of electors equal to the number of congressional seats they have in the House, plus two representing the Senate seats for each state.

Sidebar: Electors for each party for each congressional district are chosen at the party state conventions.  That elector gets to cast his vote only if his party wins the overall state election, even if the candidate lost the district that elector represents.

 That's all the US Constitution says about the electoral college. How the electors are chosen by the states is entirely up to the State legislatures.  There's no Constitutional mandate that states use the winner-take-all system.

The purpose of districting to determine a nationwide election is to actually increase the power of your vote. I won't go into the math about how it accomplishes this here, that was done very will in an old article by Will Hively in Discover magazine, called Math Against Tyranny. The problem with this, though is it only works if the districts are roughly equal size -- like congressional districts.  When your uber-districts are states, they no longer are equal size, and in fact dampen the effect of their constituent districts.

There seem to be a couple of different ways of dividing the electoral votes.  The winner-take-all system is one.  The problem with this is that it concentrates power in the urban areas of the largest states.  Win those urban areas, and you win the state.  By this method, California, New York, Texas and Florida together account for 28% of the voting power in the country, and much of that power is concentrated in some very small densely populated congressional districts.

Then there's Individual apportionment.  Under this scheme, Each Elector is selected based on the winner within his own district, without regard to how the candidate did statewide.  The two electoral seats for each state would then be apportioned to the statewide winner of the election. Under this scheme, you could easily have a minority of electors from a state that do not represent the candidate who won the state.

I suggested this recently on a public forum, and was shouted down by conservatives, who acted more like liberals do when you pee in their cornflakes.  I was called all kinds of vile epithets, accused of being a liberal and had a whole lot of people who apparently didn't read what I wrote and thought I was suggesting abolishing the electoral college.

So I ran the numbers.  I examined the 2016 election and calculated how the Electoral College would have voted if the Electors were selected by their individual districts, instead of winner-take-all.  The results were interesting.  Trump would have still easily carried the election with 291 vs 247, but not by as wide a margin.  The overwhelming significance of New York and California would have been dampened.  Florida's significance disappeared entirely, as it split pretty evenly between the two candidates.  Texas' significance also diminish, counteracting the significance of New York and California, as many of the border district voted for Clinton.

Of most interest was Minnesota, whose 10 electoral votes for Clinton came up 5 and 5 for the two candidates. The pro-Trump districts were weakly for Trump, and the pro-Clinton districts were strongly for Clinton, giving Clinton the state, even though more districts voted for Trump.

State Number of districts Voted Trump Voted Clinton at large number of electoral votes winner take all independently apportioned
Trump Clinton Trump Clinton

 Alabama
7 6 1 2 9 9 0 8 1

 Alaska
1 1 0 2 3 3 0 3 0

 Arizona
9 5 4 2 11 11 0 7 4

 Arkansas
4 4 0 2 6 6 0 6 0

 California
53 7 46 2 55 0 55 7 48

 Colorado
7 3 4 2 9 0 9 3 6

 Connecticut
5 0 5 2 7 0 7 0 7

 Delaware
1 0 1 2 3 0 3 0 3
 Florida
27 14 13 2 29 29 0 16 13

 Georgia
14 10 4 2 16 16 0 12 4

 Hawaii
2 0 2 2 4 0 4 0 4

 Idaho
2 2 0 2 4 4 0 4 0

 Illinois
18 7 11 2 20 0 20 7 13

 Indiana
9 7 2 2 11 11 0 9 2

 Iowa
4 4 0 2 6 6 0 6 0

 Kansas
4 3 1 2 6 6 0 6 0

 Kentucky
6 5 1 2 8 8 0 7 1

 Louisiana
6 5 1 2 8 8 0 7 1

 Maine
2 1 1 2 4 1 3 1 3

 Maryland
8 1 7 2 10 0 10 1 9

 Massachusetts
9 0 9 2 11 0 11 0 11

 Michigan
14 10 4 2 16 16 0 12 4

 Minnesota
8 5 3 2 10 0 10 5 5

 Mississippi
4 3 1 2 6 6 0 5 1

 Missouri
8 6 2 2 10 10 0 8 2

 Montana
1 1 0 2 3 3 0 3 0

 Nebraska
3 3 0 2 5 5 0 5 0

 Nevada
4 2 2 2 6 0 6 2 4

 New Hampshire
2 1 1 2 4 0 4 1 3

 New Jersey
12 5 7 2 14 0 14 5 9

 New Mexico
3 1 2 2 5 0 5 1 4

 New York
27 8 19 2 29 0 29 8 21

 North Carolina
13 10 3 2 15 15 0 12 3

 North Dakota
1 1 0 2 3 3 0 3 0

 Ohio
16 12 4 2 18 18 0 14 4

 Oklahoma
5 5 0 2 7 7 0 7 0

 Oregon
5 1 4 2 7 0 7 1 6

 Pennsylvania
18 12 6 2 20 20 0 14 6

 Rhode Island
2 0 2 2 4 0 4 0 4

 South Carolina
7 6 1 2 9 9 0 8 1

 South Dakota
1 1 0 2 3 3 0 3 0

 Tennessee
9 7 2 2 11 11 0 9 2

 Texas
36 22 14 2 38 38 0 24 14

 Utah
4 4 0 2 6 6 0 6 0

 Vermont
1 0 1 2 3 0 3 0 3

 Virginia
11 6 5 2 13 0 13 6 7

 Washington
10 3 7 2 12 0 12 3 9

 West Virginia
3 3 0 2 5 5 0 5 0

 Wisconsin
8 6 2 2 10 10 0 8 2

 Wyoming
1 1 0 2 3 3 0 3 0
DC 1 0 1 2 3 0 3 0 3
Total electoral votes 436 230 206 102 538 306 232 291 247

All in all, the net results don't change much. There are a number of red districts in the blue states that have no real say in the winner-take-all system.  These are offset by the minority of blue districts in the red states, but there's a lot more red states with one or two blue districts.

The net result is a more even distribution of voting power, with the 100 at-large electors who vote according to the whole state creating a bit of a smoothing function.  The dominance of the four big states is reduced, as their electoral votes will usually be split pretty decisively.  The net result would be that candidates would have to court more widely and consider the rural vote more.  Because of the way the electors were defined in the Constitution, I doubt the framers had in mind that Electors would be assigned on a winner-take-all basis from each state.

Click here for a map of the 2016 election by congressional district.

Unfortunately, there's no Constitutional prohibition from states casting their electors according to the national popular vote.  It's an exceedingly idiotic thing to do, and essentially the states who pass this have disenfranchised themselves.  I expect numerous court challenges based on lack of representation within the states who have passed this.  I also expect that if Trump quite likely wins the popular vote this 2020 election, you'll see these states falling over themselves trying to roll back the National Popular vote movement.