19 September 2020

How Fatal Is CCPVirus? Not Very

How fatal is CCPVirus?

Perversely, that is a question the legacy media has never properly answered, nor even attempted to answer. Of all the legacy media's many journalistic sins in covering the CCPVirus "pandemic", their complete ineptitude and even outright dishonesty in addressing the true dangers and risks from the disease unquestionably ranks at or near the top of the list.

We should not be overly surprised, therefore, that close scrutiny of the data reveals the virus to be significantly less lethal than has been claimed in the legacy mediaThe legacy media has gotten the CCPVirus story wrong from the very beginning, so it perhaps to be expected that they have bungled the most crucial element of the pandemic narrative--the degree to which the virus actually causes fatal disease.

18 September 2020

Speech Or Silence: FactCheck.org Flunks Basic English

Free Speech is a moral imperative.

I have said this innumerable times when rising to the defense of various silenced speakers, most recently to protest the deplatforming of philosopher, online commentator, and host of FreeDomain Radio, Stefan Molyneaux, as well as other notable figures. What I said then is just as true today, and just as applicable to Chinese virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan as it is to any political, moral, or philosophical commentator. Free Speech is the necessary moral standard because any other stance is a moral double standard, an hypocrisy, an indefensible abdication of our status as a free people.

If we accept the double standard, if we tolerate and excuse one rule for conservative voices and another rule for progressive voices, then our speech is no longer free, and we are no longer free.

At its core, all censorship rests on the hypocrisy of the double standard. The proposition that some ideas should be silenced and others not is the very essence of what a double standard is. That hypocrisy is why censorship can never be the right thing to do, why it is always the wrong thing to do. Avoiding that hypocrisy is why the alternative, free speech, is always the moral imperative.

Yet we must also recognize that deplatforming is but one form of censorship. There is another, more insidious and more perverse form of censorship: the "fact check" of a claim which is itself based on a lie.

FactCheck.org, in attemting to dismiss (and really to defame) Dr. Li's research into the origins of the CCPVirus, engages in an horrendous and self-evident lie, that her research is somehow "baseless". The only thing FactCheck.org establishes with its critique is that the author flunked 8th grade English.

07 September 2020

Where Are The CCPVirus Patients? Apparently Not In Hospital

As I have observed on more than one occasion, perhaps the most important question when analyzing data is "does this make sense?". The data must completely explain an hypothesis or narrative, or there is more research yet to be done. The hypothesis or narrative must completely account for all the data (even if only to identify a data point as an outlier and not indicative of a broader trend) or it must be revised so that it does.

This is the basis of all scientific inquiry, the foundation of all diagnostic disciplines, including those that have informed my more than 25 years as a Voice and Data Network Engineer. If things do not make sense, the analysis is not yet complete.

When we attempt to assess the current state of the global CCPVirus pandemic, the data simply does not make sense.

05 September 2020

Rumors Of Civil War: Democrats Say This Must Happen

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 

The Gospels teach us there is a certain inevitability to conflict. Good will always be matched against Evil, and men will always be called to choose the side on which they stand.

Viewed against that backdrop, the civic strife that has dominated the legacy media in 2020 was always fated to happen. The accumulated disputes and disagreements of decades have, in such an hypothesis, coalesced into existential crisis of putative Good against seeming Evil.

That is one interpretation.

Another interpretation is that the orgy of violence that has racked cities from Portland to Kenosha to Minneapolis to Atlanta is not merely the boiling over of long-simmering disputes, but is rather the calculated design of malign actors as a pathway to political power. Disturbingly, this view of things is substantiated not by sacred text but by the headlines and reporting of the legacy media. When viewed as a whole and not piecemeal, the media coverage of the various riots and protests in this country presents a clear and deliberate moving of this country towards civil war.

30 August 2020

Violence Is Silence: There Is No Defense For Riots

Violence Is Silence: There Is No Defense For Riots
Portland is burning still. After months of unrest and anarchic violence masquerading as "peaceful protest", Portland is still burning.
Still we have learned nothing.

Still we have the legacy media cowering behind weasel words, giving the authors of the violence--Antifa and the BLM movement--veneer of legitimacy by describing them as "protestors".
A man whose hat bore the insignia of a far-right group called Patriot Prayer was fatally shot late Saturday during a clash between Trump supporters and counter-protesters, capping a violent week in America that began with a white police officer shooting Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back seven times in Kenosha, Wis., last Sunday. Two days later, a white teenager from Illinois allegedly shot three people in Kenosha, killing two of them.

 No. This is not accurate. This is not honest. This is not true.

23 August 2020

Ignorance Is Not Bliss: The Legacy Media Is Both Incompetent And Dishonest About CCPVirus Treatments

Ignorance Is Not Bliss: The Legacy Media Is Both Incompetent And Dishonest About CCPVirus Treatments
We must not be surprised when politicians engage in hyperbole. For better or worse, it is a staple of political rhetoric--everything they do is "the best" and everything their opponents do is "the worst". This has been true of politics dating back to the Roman Republic.

We can therefore be reasonably skeptical when President Trump's Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, describes FDA authorization of Convalescent Blood Plasma as a "breakthrough". We should expect such hyperbole for every bit of good news coming from any President's administration.

We should be far less forgiving, however, of the legacy media treating the hyperbole with a strange naivete, especially when choosing to downplay both the announcement and the significance of the treatment option. Convelscent Blood Plasma may be many things, but what no treatment that has been around for nearly 160 years can be called is a "breakthrough"--and it beggars belief that the legacy media remains studiously unaware of this fact.

16 August 2020

Farther Down The Rabbit Hole: The Long Dark Twilight Of America's Banking Collapse

In his August 15, 2020, press conference, President Trump delivered a glowing assessment of the current state of the United States economy,  spending considerable time crowing about the speed of the current economic "recovery". 

There is just one problem with his economic analysis: it is completely wrong.

In his zeal to both defend his policies and maintain a spirit of optimism for the future, President Trump is relying on certain top-level benchmark indicators while ignoring the far less favorable dynamics taking place underneath. The top level numbers do suggest expansion is occurring, but they overlook the distorting impact of the massive government injections of money into household incomes as well as the ongoing injections of liquidity by the Federal Reserve into financial markets. 

To accurately assess the true state of the economy, we must first unwind these distortions.

09 August 2020

Congressional Bailout: President Trump Drop Kicks The CCPVirus "Relief" Can Down The Road

In keeping with the prevailing attitudes for 2020, President Trump has extended the bailout philosophy to the United States Congress, effectively taking them off the hook for a potentially disastrous second crash of the economy by letting key provisions of March's CARES Act expire.

After a week of stalled negotiations between the White House and Congressional Democrats over such relief measures as the eviction moratorium (which expired on July 25) and the FPUC stipend of $600 per week (which expired on July 31), President Trump signed a series of Executive Orders to unilaterally address these items.

The new orders will:

  • Eliminate the payroll tax
  • Extend unemployment benefits by $400 per week, down from $600
  • Defer student loan repayments through the end of the year
  • Extend protections against evictions

Democrats Cry "Foul"

In a move that surprised exactly no one, the Democrats reacted with their reflexive high dudgeon over all things Trump. 

“This is not presidential leadership. These orders are not real solutions,” said presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. “They are just another cynical ploy designed to deflect responsibility. Some measures do far more harm than good.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on Trump and Republicans to return to the negotiating table to work out a bill.

“We’re disappointed that instead of putting in the work to solve Americans’ problems, the president instead chose to stay on his luxury golf course to announce unworkable, weak and narrow policy announcements to slash the unemployment benefits that millions desperately need and endanger seniors’ Social Security and Medicare,” the Democratic leaders said in a statement. The payroll taxes Trump targeted fund Social Security and Medicare.

In doing so, the Democrats employed a staple of modern political rhetoric: fuzzy math. It is at the very least disingenuous to accuse President Trump of "slashing" unemployment benefits when his Executive Order means that Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation recipients will be receiving $400 more next week than they did last week. The unmentioned conceit is that, since the FPUC stipend had already expired, one full week of benefits were paid out without the $600 stipend that had been included in the CARES Act passed earlier in the year.

With as many as 30 million unemployed Americans receiving compensation, the expiration of the stipend amounted to the abrupt withdrawal of $18 billion in consumer spending from the American economy. For those wishing an example of the term "demand shock", such a drop-off in spending is exactly that.

The Democrats are also conveniently ignoring the 2.3 million Americans suddenly at risk of eviction for unpaid rents, once the CARES eviction moratorium expired. President Trump's Executive Orders restored the moratorium for the time being.

While Executive Orders are not at all any form of permanent resolution to these isues, the Democrats claim that Trump has "slashed" benefits is politely described as "horse hockey."

Republicans Discover The Constitution

In a move that will also shock no one, Senate Republicans are fretting over the Constitutionality of the President's Executive Orders.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Nebr.), who has largely spoken out against the government spending large sums of money in coronavirus legislation, offered one of the party's more cutting rebukes, calling the theory behind the move "unconstitutional slop."

"The pen-and-phone theory of executive lawmaking is unconstitutional slop," Sasse said in a statement issued by email and obtained by The Hill. "President Obama did not have the power to unilaterally rewrite immigration law with DACA, and President Trump does not have the power to unilaterally rewrite the payroll tax law."

While the good Senator's criticisms are not entirely without merit, they lack a certain moral gravitas given Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's willingness to take a back seat in negotiations with Congressional Democrats, preferring the Trump Administration to do all the heavy lifting.

"Wherever this thing settles between the president of the United States and his team that have to sign it into law, and the Democrat -- not insignificant minority in the Senate and the majority in the House -- is something I'm prepared to support, even if I have some problems with certain parts of it," Republican McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill.

Nor is it as if President Trump did not telegraph this move well in advance. In the middle of last week, with negotiations at a standstill, Trump said he was looking at doing these measures via Executive Order if the Democrats did not bend and negotiate in good faith, and that was an escalation of his earlier rhetoric about using Executive Orders to address the eviction moratorium, about which he made his position quite clear:

"I could do that if I want, and I want to do that. I don’t want people to be evicted," Trump told reporters about whether he would suspend evictions. A federal moratorium on evictions, which was passed in March’s CARES Act, expired last month.

Regardless of the Constitutionality and legality of the President's Executive Orders, the Republicans had ample time to both a) register their objections to them, and b) craft an actual piece of compromise legislation with the Democrats. They declined to take either option seriously.

A Win, Politically

As alternative-media commentator Mike Cernovich observed after the orders were signed, the move was a clear political win for Donald Trump:

There is little doubt that Trump's political base is energized and encouraged by the executive orders, and there is equally little doubt that Congressional Democrats have few good options available to oppose them. The simple mathematics of the orders is that, regardless of Constitutional strictures, forcing the orders to be rescinded is tantamount to subjecting over 2 million Americans to imminent eviction and snatching $400 per week out of the hands of every unemployed person in the country. Optically, that puts the Democrats in the position of "slashing" benefits.

Moreover, as Cernovich points out, even a rebuke by the courts can be a political win for President Trump. In the wake of Chief Justice John Roberts' undeniably politicized ruling aborting President Trump's efforts to end Barack Obama's unconstitutional DACA program, President Trump's voter base is quite willing to believe the Supreme Court is a nakedly political body, and not a neutral arbiter of the Constitution. A rebuke from the Supreme Court would be received by many Trump supporters as yet another case the Court got completely wrong.

President Trump ran as a populist, and his rhetoric has been steadfastly populist. Regardless of their legality, it should surprise no one that populist measures are going to be well received by his political base.

Economically, A Loss

While the optics on the EOs are undeniably favorable to the President, their economic consequences to the country are unlikely to be entirely benign, and arguably they are counter-productive.

The eviction moratorium, while undoubtedly popular, particularly with lower-income voters, does nothing to address the costs and financial obligations landlords incur even as it shields renters from the consequences of non-payment of rent. In very practical terms, the moratorium is an additional (and significant) regulatory burden on landlords, greatly increasing their costs and turning rental properties into a money-losing proposition:

Trump emphasized that halting evictions and keeping people in their homes has become a priority. A big part of the problem is that letting people remain in the property without paying rent does not stop the bills a landlord must pay from coming due. This rapidly makes being a landlord a money-losing proposition.

The FPUC stipend, on the other hand, is extremely problematic for one simple reason: It is not much of an economic stimulus.

A big part of the problem with the stipend is that, for many Americans, it amounts to an increase in income over their previous wages, and thus for them is a significant disincentive to look for a job.

Under the Pelosi policy, 5 out of 6 unemployed workers are getting paid more NOT to work than to return to the job, according to the Congressional Budget Office. We estimate that most workers who earn $30 or less are financially better off staying off the job -- even as the economy improves. Many workers can get twice as much for staying unemployed. Workers are supposed to lose unemployment benefits if they are offered a job and don't take it. But workers know how to game the system. They can pretend to be sick, and employers are loath to bring a contagious worker back in the office or factory.

Conservative thinkers blame the stipend on the odd economic phenomenon of America having some 5 million unfilled jobs, some 25 million unemployed, and no one is rushing to take one of those 5 million jobs. 

Nor is this a criticism per se of workers. Those that are acting in the way described above are merely rationally attempting to maximize their income. While some might accuse them of gaming the system, the sober reality is they are playing the game by the rules laid out by Congress. That the rules arguably act as a disincentive to employment is a sin of Congress, not of workers.

More crucially, however, is the glaring hole in the entire political strategy of providing "relief": a complete lack of serious efforts to encourage job creation and new business formation. With 71,500 businesses advertising on Yelp! have closed their doors permanently, when 80% of restaurants in San Francisco and 50% of mall businesses are closing or are about to close permanently, there is a clear need for encouragements to start up new businesses to replace the closed ones.

Nor does the stipend confront the reality of current increasing joblessness. During the first week of August continuing jobless claims rose by 1.3 million--almost the same amount as the number of jobs created in all of July (1.8 million or 1.4 million, depending on whose numbers you are prepared to believe). That rise in continuing claims comes on the heels of the previous two weeks' increases in initial jobless claims--indicating that joblessness began rising before the FPUC stipend expired.

Nor has President Trump been able to extend or renew the Payroll Protection Program, a forgivable loan program intended to keep people on a payroll in some form or fashion that expired on August 8.

As was shown after the 2008-2009 recession, extending and increasing government benefits does not stimulate the economy over the long term, and there is considerable evidence that the American economy resumed economic contraction during July:

Just as the FPUC stipend initially failed to mitigate these issues, Donald Trump's executive orders also fail to address these issues.

Kick The Can

Ultimately, Donald Trump's Executive Orders do little more than kick the economic can down the road. The renewal of the stipend forestalls the demand shock that would have attended upon an abrupt withdrawal of some $18 Billion in spending per week from the economy. The eviction moratorium staves off a potential crisis in homelessness. Congress, for its part, is able to negotiate without pending economic crisis hanging over it like the mythical Sword of Damocles.

Yet kicking the can down the road is all these EOs provide. It is all these EOs can provide. The real issues remain unresolved (and even unaddressed). Lunatic lockdown orders persist in many parts of the country, and are dragging the economy down even as they fail to reduce the spread of CCPVirus.

The EOs quite possibly will fail to even sustain the economy, and do little to prevent further economic collapse.

Aside from President Trump, the only group that clearly benefits overall from these EOs is Congress itself. With a stroke of a pen Donald Trump has removed a major Congressional logjam and spared them the growing humiliation of seeing their supine legacy media outlets grill them persistently about the relief bill and what Congress has to say to those people who's benefits were all but obliterated at the end of July.

For the rest of America, the need is still crystal clear. The country needs jobs--lots of jobs. Until such time as there is a mammoth effort to replace the tens of millions of jobs lost, measures such as these EOs will remain but half-measures of little to no positive economic impact.

08 July 2020

Speech Or Silence: Free Speech Is A Moral Imperative

I have said it before and I will say it again: Free Speech is a moral imperative.

I will keep saying it, because it needs to be said. It needs to be heard. So long as the Big Tech social media platforms believe they can silence and suppress dissenting voices with impunity, it needs to be heard.


Because YouTube banned Stefan Molyneux, accusing him of "hate speech", while the legacy media absurdly characterized him as "far right" (proving that they have not studied any of his content), it needs to be heard.


07 July 2020

Justice Kagan's Accidentally Correct Opinion: The States Elect The President

As the Supreme Court finishes out the 2019-2020 term, it ruled on two small, barely noticed cases from the 2016 Presidential election. Indeed, the cases were noteworthy more for having received a unanimous vote from the Court than from any contentious debate over finer points of Constitutional law, and from the fact that the two cases were heard separately, as Justice Sotomayor had to recuse herself from one case but not the other.

However seemingly minor the cases appear to be, arising from two lawsuits over a state's authority to bind Presidential electors to a specific voting preference, the ruling reiterates an important aspect of Presidential elections that has all but disappeared from political discourse and debate in this country: A President is elected not by the people but by the States. In issuing their per curiam opinion in Chiafalo, et al, v Washington (591 U.S. ___ (2020), Docket 19-465), the Supreme Court laid down a legal reminder of the Constitutional order of things.

04 July 2020

Decent Respect To The Opinion Of Mankind: Declaring The Why Of Independence

Decent Respect To The Opinion Of Mankind: Declaring The Why Of Independence
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Every Fourth of July, Americans celebrate one of the world's most remarkable documents. On that day, in 1776, the Second Continental Congress issued a declaration of their intent to be free from British rule, and by so doing made real a radical proposition that hitherto had only been a quaint abstract concept: that political authority, and the right to govern, descended from the people of a nation.

We are rightly awed by the majesty of Thomas Jefferson's rhetoric. We are properly impressed by the hope and humanity of the ideals he set forth. From that first Fourth of July until now, America has struggled imperfectly to measure up to the premise of universal human equality at the heart of the Declaration of Independence.

Yet the Declaration of Independence is more than its ideals. It is more than a mere assertion of inalienable rights. It is also an homage to humanity.

18 June 2020

Roberts DACA Ruling: An Act Of SCOTUS Repugnant To The Constitution

Roberts DACA Ruling. An Act Of SCOTUS Repugnant To The Constitution
The legacy media could scarcely contain its glee when Chief Justice John Roberts elected to ignore the Constitution and the rule of law to block President Donald Trump's efforts to end Barack Obama's unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Here was proof, they claimed, that the laws are not what Donald Trump says they are, but whatever the Supreme Court says they are.

What the legacy media gets wrong is the same thing Chief Justice Roberts gets wrong: the only standard of law is the Constitution. No act of government which goes against the Constitution can ever enjoy force of law. No act of government which contradicts the Constitution can ever be considered part of the law.

All acts of government repugnant to the Constitution are null and void. That includes Presidential orders and Supreme Court rulings.

14 June 2020

Lessons From Antifastan: Celebrating The Mayflower Compact

The evolution of the "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone", which has sprung up more or less spontaneously around the East Precinct building of the Seattle Police Department, is arguably many things.

With their declaration of autonomy, the zone is almost certainly an insurrection against the laws of the United States. Their clear affiliations with the "Antifa" movement (itself a domestic terrorist group) and "Black Lives Matter" (arguably also a domestic terrorist group) further enhances this depiction, leading to the somewhat unkind but not entirely inaccurate depiction of the zone as "Antifastan".

Having moved into an area effectively abandoned by the Seattle Police Department, some also want to compare the zone to the Paris Commune of 1871, and other radical communities throughout history. Without passing judgment on the merits of the zone itself, a consideration of how the zone has evolved during its as-yet brief existence offers an opportunity to reconsider--and renew appreciation for--early America's own experiments in building new societies and creating new government. In particular, events in Antifastan highlight the unique success and wisdom of the Mayflower Compact, perhaps the earliest charter of self-government in North America.

Still No Third Option. All Lives Must Matter

Still No Third Option. All Lives Must Matter
We have learned nothing.

We have learned nothing from the death of George Floyd.

We have learned nothing from the riots and anarchy that followed.

The legacy media has learned nothing about the importance of reporting stories accurately and honestly.

Is it any surprise we have more hysteria, more riots, more howling mobs after the shooting death of Rayshard Brooks by the Atlanta Police?

06 June 2020

All Lives Matter Or No Lives Matter. There Is No Third Option

All Lives Matter Or No Lives Matter. There Is No Third Option
Despite the arrests of the officers involved in the killing of George Floyd, the protests catalyzed by Floyd's death continue. Whether the protests continue to devolve into riots, looting, and anarchy remains to be seen, although in New York City at least, where some of the worst violence has taken place, peaceful protest appears to be making somewhat of a comeback.

The rallying cry for both the protests and the riots: "Black Lives Matter", the slogan popularized after a police officer shot and killed a young black man in self defense.

In both the present and the past, the rallying cry is simply the wrong message and the wrong motivation. In both the present and the past, "Black Lives Matter" seeks not to end injustice, but to rationalize it, and to amplify it.

In the past, present, and the future, black lives matter only if all lives matter. If all lives do not matter, then no lives matter. There is no third option.

04 June 2020

George Floyd Was Never The Issue

George Floyd Was Never The Issue
Today memorial services were held in Minneapolis for George Floyd, a man wrongfully killed by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin (since fired).

While Floyd is being laid to rest, the controversies surrounding his death are far from being laid to rest. Derek Chauvin and three other MPD officers are now facing criminal charges over his death, which sparked a number of protests as well as violent destructive riots nationwide.

Yet when we examine the current headlines on Google News, which are almost entirely stories related to George Floyd's death, there is a curious quality to most of them: very few of the stories are actually about George Floyd or even his death at the hands of the MPD. There is an important realization to be had from this, which is that George Floyd was never the issue. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the controversy and debate is not about George Floyd, nor should it be.

31 May 2020

George Floyd Mattered, Just Not To The Legacy Media

George Floyd Mattered -- RIP
There is no question that George Floyd's death was murder. There is no doubt that Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin had no business kneeling on his neck. There is no doubt that George Floyd's death was an appalling example of police brutality.

Because George Floyd was black and Derek Chauvin is white, many argue that Floyd's death is also an example of inexecusable racism within the Minneapolis Police Department itself. Certainly there have been few facts to rebut that particular charge, although the extent to which racial animus played a role cannot be conclusively established with facts currently available to the public.

How many of those facts will ultimately be made public is a question still to be answered, for once again the legacy media has displayed its usual incompetence, indolence, and indifference to journalism, choosing instead to push narrative, with or without facts.

15 May 2020

No Finality For Flynn: Judicial Chaos Is Justice Denied

The case United States v Michael T. Flynn has become a neverending saga of chicanery, controversy, and arguably corruption. Even though by all outward appearances, the case should have ended on May 7 with the Department of Justice filing a motion to dismiss the case with prejudice, Judge Emmet Sullivan seems determined not to let the case go gently into that good night. 

On May 12, Judge Sullivan delayed his final ruling on the motion by opening the proceedings up for potential filings by amicus curiae wishing to opine on the propriety or impropriety of the motion. On May 13, Judge Sullivan fueled controversy even further by issuing an order appointing retired judge John Gleeson as amicus and directing him to present arguments against the DoJ's motion. Judge Gleeson is further ordered to present arguments regarding a possible contempt charge against General Flynn for his efforts to withdraw his guilty plea. Both orders represent a significant departure from normal trial procedure within the Federal courts.

In many ways, the Flynn case has become a disturbing political Rorschach test across American society, with perceptions of Lieutenant General Flynn's ultimate guilt or innocence, as well as the severity of his alleged offense, colored primarily by whether one supports or opposes President Donald Trump. One need only briefly consider Congressman Jerry Nadler's Twitter meltdown over the motion to dismiss to apprehend the passion and the illogic governing peoples' view of the Flynn case.

We must be mindful, however, that within the American legal system criminal trials are not to be governed by political considerations, but solely by relevant facts and applicable law. The facts especially in Flynn's case are not friendly to Judge Sullivan's actions, and suggest that Sullivan, far from keeping political animus away from the proceedings, has made it the essence of the case.

09 May 2020

Follow The Data -- The Facts Are Out There

What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

The foundation of any reasoned argument, the basis of all rational debate must be facts and evidence. Whether the topic is "collusion" between Donald Trump's 2016 Presidential campaign staff and elements of the Russian government, the legal case (or lack thereof) against Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, or  the origin of the CCPVirus, reasoned discourse begins and ends with the facts, with what we can prove is so.

Thankfully, the real world abounds with facts.

07 May 2020

Finality For Flynn: Justice Delayed But Not Wholly Denied

Today the Department Of Justice filed a motion with the US District Court for the District of Columbia to dismiss with prejudice the entirety of its case against Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who previously had pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI, and has in recent months been seeking to withdraw that guilty plea.

This one motion marks an abrupt and final end to one of the more notorious legal controversies in recent memory. The Department of Justice' rationale for the dismissial was fittingly blunt.
The Government has determined, pursuant to the Principles of Federal Prosecution and based on an extensive review and careful consideration of the circumstances, that continued prosecution of this case would not serve the interests of justice.
The DoJ moved to dismiss because it admitted it had no case, which it acknowledged in the body of the motion.

02 May 2020

CCPVirus: Yes, It Is A Bioweapon

There can be no disputing that the  legacy media has been far more a source of propaganda, lies, and misinformation about the SARS-CoV-2 virus (which I label the CCPVirus, as this virus is a gift of the Chinese Communist Party to the world) and the related disease, COVID19, than they have been a source of relevant information. They have promoted a quasi-official narrative, and undermine competing narratives with suppression and censorship, calling such narratives "conspiracy theory" or even "misinformation" (irony abounds).

Facts and evidence are stubborn things, however, and never quite so easily dismissed. Eventually even the legacy media must bow to the inevitable and acknowledge when "conspiracy theory" has become substantive truth. Reluctantly, this they have done with theories which contradict the preferred narrative on the origins of CCPVirus and assert the virus is a man-made artifact from a Chinese virology lab.

The refusal of these theories to simply fade away leaves us with but one conclusion abut the CCPVIrus pandemic: it is a Chinese bioweapon, a deliberate effort by the Chinese Communist Party to inflict egregious harm upon the rest of the world.

24 April 2020

Who Needs Science When You Have Experts?

"Science", we are told, is the foundation of all which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)--the government agency tasked with protecting the nation's public health--undertakes. Their decisions and recommendations are always guided by science--and presumably not by politics.

How do we know this? They tell us this. They promise us this.

Base all public health decisions on the highest quality scientific data that is derived openly and objectively
When it comes to the current COVID-19 (aka "CCPVirus") pandemic, however, they are falling far short of the mark. Many of their decisions and pronouncements lack scientific support or scientific rigor. The latest and most glaring example of this is the hype du jour over the wearing of masks and facial coverings to mitigate the spread of the disease.

18 April 2020

Lies, Damned Lies, And COVID-19 (CCPVirus) Deaths


"There are lies, damned lies and statistics."

Earlier, I noted that the real world data on the COVID-19 pandemic diverged from the "experts" projections in several key respects.  As I said at the time, "we're missing cases."

It turns out that not only are we missing cases, we are missing quite a few deaths as well.

16 April 2020

Free Fall: Where Will It End?

With the April 16 report of initial jobless claims, United States reached a grim milestone in grappling with the CCPVirus outbreak: 22 million people have now filed for unemployment in the past four weeks. To put that number in some perspective, the number of jobs destroyed by the CCPVirus shutdowns exceeds the total number of jobs created since the end of the "Great Recession" in 2009.

More remarkably, these jobs were not lost due to an external supply or demand shock, but due to deliberate government action. The United States quite simply chose to destroy a minimum of 22 million jobs, in what is already proving to be an act of economic suicide.

I will not delve further into the particulars of why the lockdown strategy was the wrong strategy to take. My comments on the strategy, as well as on the ultimate cost in lives, have already been made, and nothing has yet arisen to cause either their revision or retraction. The legality, the Constitutionality, the wisdom or unwisdom of the strategy, are all now as they have been.

The lockdown strategy, for better or worse, is the strategy that has been chosen to mitigate the effects of the CCPVirus--which is the proper name for the COVID-19 coronavirus, for it would not exist but for the malignancy and malevolence of the Chinese Communist Party. For better or worse, its consequences will shape the United States and the world going forward. We must consider those consequences if we wish to emerge from this crisis with any shred of what was.

12 April 2020

Who Counts The Deaths From Recession?

As of this writing, there are 551,081 cases of COVID-19 (aka CCPVirus) infection in the United States, and there have been 21,668 deaths. Worldwide, there have been 1,837,785 infections, resulting in 113,312 deaths. To prevent further deaths, we have been told extreme measures over and above rudimentary "social distancing" are necessary, including the wholesale closures of businesses, the destruction of millions of jobs, the contraction of the world economy on a massive scale.

We are rigorously counting every death from the CCPVirus, taking care not to miss any. Yet who is counting the deaths from the economic chaos being unleashed on the world?

Do Not Look For The Living Among The Dead

Why do you look for the living among the dead?
On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; He has risen! Remember how He told you, while He was still with you in Galilee: ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ ” Then they remembered His words.

When the women who followed Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem returned to the tomb in which He had been laid after His crucifixion, they were coming to ritually anoint His body with perfumes and spices in accordance with Jewish tradition, having waited through the Sabbath to do so. This was how they would say their final farewell to Him.

However, instead of saying "goodbye", they heard a most miraculous "hello!"

The women were also presented with a question: "why do you look for the living among the dead?"

24 March 2020

Destroying Society Is No Way To Save Society

In just under three months, the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, aka COVID-19, aka the CCPVirus, has completely remade the world in which we live.

We have gone from marveling at the seeming unwisdom of the Federal Reserve's rampant money printing and obsessive interventionism to wondering if their interventions will be enough. Where before the talk of China revolved around Hong Kong protests and trade wars, now we are coming to terms with China's shocking crime against humanity in creating and releasing COVID-19.

28 February 2020

Narrative Fail: We're Missing Some Coronavirus Cases.

One of the most important questions the serious analyst can ever ask is the simple "Does this make sense?" In my career as a Voice and Data Engineer it is a crucial step in any diagnostic process--if the data and reported symptoms do not fit together into a coherent description of a situation, it is absolutely certain that something is missing.

Above all else, data must make sense. Hypotheses must fit the data to become theories--and they must fit all the data. When something does not fit, that incongruity is where our attention is properly focused.


In assembling and digesting the media reports about the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic (yes, it is a pandemic even though the WHO still dithers and dickers about using the "p-word"), a glaring incongruity stands out: we are missing cases. More precisely, we are missing large numbers of severe cases and pneumonias. Based on the "official" data, there should be far more severe cases reported than there are.


21 February 2020

COVID-19 As A Bioweapon: Conspiracy Theory Or Fact?

The reflexive derisive insult the legacy media routinely applies to stories of which is disapproves is "conspiracy theory". Such stories, we are told, are the mere deluded ramblings of the misinformed and the uninformed. Such stories, we are told, are the ludicrous efforts by the paranoid the prey on the prejudices of the public. Such stories, we are told, are journalistic garbage.

Yet we cannot ignore such stories, because often the "conspiracy theory" narrative turns out to have more substance than the narratives of the legacy media. We must not forget that it was the "conspiracy theorists" at alternative media sites such as ZeroHedge that first drew the world's attention to the coronavirus, while the legacy media has been a primary purveyor of misinformation and pro-China propaganda. 

Today's "conspiracy theory" can all too quickly become tomorrow's substantive fact.

We must bear this in mind when considering the most disturbing "conspiracy theory" we have yet on COVID-19: that the virus is a laboratory construct, a bioweapon released either by accident or by design.

18 February 2020

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here? Only If We Listen To "Experts"

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto III line 9

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." 

Some would deem that a fitting sign to hang in the concourse of Beijing Capital International Airport, given China's current Dantesque state:
Keep in mind all of this has taken place in China within just the past three weeks, since the beginning of February.

Yet if China is truly on a descent into Dante's Inferno, it is not traveling alone. A veritable globalist caravan seems intent on making the journey with them.