What’s Going on Here? Coof Madness Update

“America’ COVID Response Was Based on Lies” This is a Newsweek article, published today. In other words, a tactical ‘information’ release by some faction of our government. I’m not a student of the internal power struggles that characterize emerging oligarchies, so I have few thoughts on why, after three long years, an organ of the oligarchs is saying what every scientifically literate and non-terrified person was saying since April of 2020. Somebody perhaps wants to see certain people swinging from lamp posts, or at least fire a shot across the bow to keep opposing factions in line. Or maybe something else – but nothing gets published these days without getting run by some faction or other of the Ministry of Truth.

Here’s the list of lies from the article, along with some light commentary in italics. I could link back to articles here on this blog showing where I said pretty much the same damn things, but I’m beyond sick of this crap.

1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude. The coof is bad cold level dangerous. People forget the common saying: “Catch your death of cold”. Old people – and the median age at death “from” Covid is around 80 – very commonly die from pneumonia, where a cold or flu settles into their lungs for keeps. The coof is no different, and no more dangerous.

2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus. If you’re under 50 and reasonably healthy, you might as well worry about getting struck by lightening as dying of the coof. If you are reasonably healthy at ANY age, coof adds very little to your overal risk profile.

3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new. The very concept of a “completely new” virus reveals complete ignorance of basic biology and logic.

4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread. Here is a classic reversal: rather than the people making a claim providing the evidence that their claim is true, they assume they are correct, and attempt to make people challenging the unsubstantiated claim provide the proof. No. The way it works: you want me to do or believe something? You convince ME. I don’t have to prove to you that asymptomatic people spread a disease – YOU need to prove to me that they do. But such transmission was conclusively presumed, and anyone who pointed out the utter lack of evidence that it was true was vilified.

5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus. Now we’re playing the game of pretending these brutal, totalitarian measures ‘worked’ in some vague sense, but certainly not the sense in which, you know, they slowed or stopped the spread of the virus.

6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread. Ignoring 100 years of studies and the experiences worldwide during the Spanish Flu, our betters produce the famous 70 studies within weeks all purporting to prove that masks slow the spread of the Coof, and vilifying anyone who dares disagree. Riiiiight.

7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory. “Known to be” – how? How does one even go about proving such a thing?

8. Teachers are at especially high risk. Right. 80 year old teachers with cardiovascular failing in nursing homes, maybe.

9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection. Too stupid to even address.

10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine. Huh? Again, relying on the public’s complete ignorance of how immunity works.

And I’d add a Lie #11. More than 1 million American died from Covid. As Dr. Atlas more properly puts it: More than 1 million American deaths have been attributed to that virus. The processes by which they were so attributed guarantee that that number wildly overstates the true number of deaths *from* Covid versus deaths *with* Covid. Our CDC staunchly refused to collect and publish the data that would enable a reasonable person to determine how much the official death numbers overstate Covid deaths, but studies from other nations show something under 10% of attributed deaths were caused *by* Covid, as opposed to a person dying anyway but being diagnosed with Covid – such as the 50-60% of the Covid deaths that happened in nursing homes, where Americans go to die.

Timelines

Guillaume de Machaut (c1300 – 1377) and Nicole Oresme (c. 1320–1325 to 1382) were contemporaries, a fact that somehow escaped me. These are two very interesting characters, and are, in my limited knowledge, the only two great creative geniuses who flourished during the 14 century in Europe, with the exception of Dante, who died in 1321.

Nick at work

Why this is interesting to me: the High Middle Ages, in the sense of a healthy, European-spanning civilization, ended in 1315 with the Great Famine at the end of the Medieval Warm Period. Efforts to reestablish the social order destroyed by the famine were crushed by the Black Death starting in 1347, leaving only an empty shell of what was before. After half or more of the population of Europe died, the social disruption was irreparable. The famine disrupted the land-based wealth of the aristocracy, the foundation of the the various feudal structures: a vassal theoretically held land in exchange for military service, such that a knight needed enough surplus off his land to maintain his small military retinue – armor, horses, weapons, squires, maybe a smith, and supplies for all of the above. And so on, up the line: the kings counted on their lords, the greater lords counted on their knights, and it all came down to counting on a peasantry that could consistently produce more food than they needed to survive.

Now starve out those peasants for 3 solid years, wash away their farmland, starve their animals to death or force the peasants to eat them – and, once things got back to ‘normal’ in 1322, that surplus is out the door. And the weather has turned colder and less benign. Knights aren’t able to maintain their arms; the wealth of the lords was stretched beyond breaking, and kings, both weakened and seeing weakness all around them, start in on the never-ending wars that characterize the 14th century, most famously the 100 Years War 1337-1453.

Italy was spared the worst effects of the Famine, which mostly struck Northern Europe. Italy was also the least ‘feudal’ place in Europe, with communes and city-states dominating the social structure, not liege lords and vassals. The Plague hit Italy bad.

Dante dies in 1321. He represents, perhaps, the apex of medieval thought. He was both a rigorous Thomist/Aristotelian and on fire with Franciscan spirituality. I’ve read (but have no way of verifying, as I don’t read Italian or Latin) that for most of the next century in Italy, poetry, as well as other arts such as painting and sculpting, aped the styles dominant in 1321 – Dante and the sweet new style in poetry and Giotto in painting. Can’t verify, but this stagnation would fit. The energy evident in the previous century, where a southern Italian – Aquinas – studied in Paris under a German – Albert the Great – and taught Frenchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards, Czechs, and so on, who brought their learning throughout Europe – seems to be gone.

Except not quite. During the 13th century, the first surviving evidence of polyphonic music is created. The names of the first two composers of whom we have any records are recorded – Leonin and Perotin – or Little Leo and Little Pete, as I like to call them. They were masters of organum, adding a vocal line or lines to a modified chant melody. The few shreds of written evidence suggest organum was already an old practice when Leo and Pete got to it. The practice was continued and presumably developed over the 13th century by their unknown successors

A century later, Willy Machaut almost comes out of nowhere, with his Ars Nova, or new art (‘new style’ is probably a better way of understanding it). Willy is the first composer for which we both have a large body of work and about whom we know a lot. He was well know all across Europe as a composer, poet, diplomat, and soldier. The uniquely Western development of polyphony spread, until, over the next two centuries, we reach an apex in Josquin and Palestrina.

Nick Oresme was a French professor, scientist, cannon, and bishop. He is the last great scientist of the Middle Ages. Here’s something about him I quoted about a year ago:

The next (and, as it proved, final), steps taken in this direction (physics of motion – ed)  were the accomplishments of the last and greatest of the medieval scientists, Nicole Oresme (1325 – 1382). …devoted much of his effort to science and mathematics. He invented graphs, one of the few mathematical discoveries since antiquity which are familiar to every reader of the newspapers. He was the first to perform calculations involving probability. He had a good grasp of the relativity of motion, and argued correctly that there was no way to distinguish by observation between the theory then held that the heavens revolve around the earth once a day, and the theory that the heavens are at rest and the earth spins once a day. 

Then everything came to a stop. Given the scientific and mathematical works of Descartes and Galileo, but no chronological information, one might suppose the authors were students of Oresme. Galileo’s work on moving bodies is the next step after Oresme’s physics; Cartesian geometry follows immediately on Oresme’s work on graphs. But we know that the actual chronological gap was 250 years, during which nothing whatever happened in these fields. Nor did any thing of importance occur in any other branches of science in the two centuries between Oresme and Copernicus.

 James Franklin, Honorary Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New South Wales

Both these guys somehow survived the Black Death. They might be called the exceptions that prove the rule, the rule being that the high intellectual energy of the Middle Ages came grinding to a halt in the mid-13th century.

That’s my amateur take, anyway.

Coof Madness

Long time, no touch this issue. Two items:

Today, the excellent Coffee and Covid newsletter sums up the news:

I was able to find one person in the U.S. — little Sally Rodriguez, 3rd grade, from Akron, Ohio — who was surprised yesterday to learn that the CDC’s vaccine approval committee (“ACIP”) met, took public comment, and then voted 15-0 recommending that covid shots be added to the childhood vaccination schedule.

Two of the 15 committee members, who supposedly are experts or something, were wearing a mask ON ZOOM. They actually believe covid travels over the internet. Or maybe they think they can get it from THEMSELVES. Either way, it was a bad sign right from the jump.

Um, yeah. Tinfoil hats make more sense.

The committee, who were all sitting in little boxes in a dystopian version of “Celebrity Jeopardy,” never discussed the fact that covid poses a miniscule risk to healthy kids. The committee never discussed natural immunity. The committee never discussed adverse events.

The CDC hasn’t yet officially added the shots to the standard school schedule, but given the unanimous recommendation from the committee, it’s a sure bet, likely to happen today or tomorrow.

As soon as that happens, the vaccine makers will permanently enjoy liability protection, and the national state of emergency that is currently shielding them can end. So that’s a blessing. Then it will be up to each state whether to follow the CDC’s new guidance and include the mRNA shots in its list of vaccines required to attend school. Many states allow religious exemptions, and a few states have recently eliminated exemptions.

To recap: generally, before 2020 and even with all the interested parties (that would be both the drug makers and the government approval agencies) playing the hell out of our flawed and biased drug approval process, it took 8 to 10 YEARS and about a $1B to get a new drug approved. Now, after less than 2 years OF FIELD TRIALS – that means WE ARE THE GUINEA PIGS – and, effectively, none of the usual trials done before a drug is approved FOR ANYONE, the CDC MANDATES a drug FOR CHILDREN who are, according to their own numbers, effectively at no risk. After two+ years of shouting down, demonizing, and destroying the careers of people who pointed out the bald refusal of the drug companies and the CDC to follow any of the basic science standards (e.g., no ongoing control groups, no double-blinds, no support for adversarial positions (to put it mildly), no serious adverse affects studies, no cost-benefit analyses) they MANDATE this drug FOR CHILDREN.

Satanic.

Another Coffee and Covid reference from a couple days ago:

A new pre-print study published on medRxIV last week titled, “Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly informed from pre-vaccination national seroprevalence studies.” In the study, researchers calculated the current worldwide ‘infection fatality rate’ for covid. You remember the IFR — it’s the ratio of number of deaths to number of confirmed infections.

Back in the day, you could get canceled for comparing covid’s IFR to the flu’s IFR.

The researchers found, for unvaccinated and for previously uninfected, the median covid infection fatality rates were:

• 0.0003% at 0-19 yrs
• 0.003% at 20-29 yrs
• 0.011% at 30-39 yrs
• 0.035% at 40-49 yrs
• 0.129% at 50-59 yrs
• 0.501% at 60-69 yrs

I probably don’t need to say this, but for all cohorts under 50, these IFR’s are far below the flu. For 50-59, the covid IFR is comparable to flu. And, flu IFR’s are also higher for older people, I just don’t have those figures handy this morning.

So.

Long-time readers may recall that, early on in the panic, I (along with many others) pointed out the absurdity of the CFR – Case Fatality Rate. In a disease with a huge percentage of asymptomatic infections, and where even symptomatic infections tended to have very minor symptoms, it is inevitable that huge numbers of infections were going to go unnoticed or otherwise unreported. This, before noting the panicky, highly incented drive to overcount infections and deaths. Put it all together, and I (and, again, many other people) pointed out that simply applying a little logic to the picture, and the IFR, meaning, the chance of anyone dying from a Covid infection, had to be at least an order of magnitude under the scary-sounding CFR.

The above numbers suggest that even that idea was overly pessimistic. A person under 20 stands a three in a million chance (per year, I assume, since these numbers tend to be annualized) of dying from a Covid infection. That’s what we numbers guys tend to call noise, in the big picture. Of all the bad things that can and do happen to young people, this ain’t the one to worry about.

Today’s Essay by William Briggs

No time to write anything, but can link to stuff you should read. Like this:

All Those Warnings About Models Are True: Researchers Given Same Data Come To Huge Number Of Conflicting Findings

Some brave souls handed out a massive dataset to a bunch of sociologists, and asked them to use it to determine some very sociological-sounding relationship: “Whether “more immigration will reduce public support for government provision of social policies.””

Hilarity ensued.

I’ve loved reading Dr. Briggs since I first came across his blog many years ago, because, as a pro, a real mathematician and a scientist, he gives succinct and accurate statements where I, the amateur (in the best sense of the word, I’ll own) have only scattered and sometimes overbroad thoughts. For example, here he sums up the fundamental, inescapable problems with modeling:

There are many warnings about models we examined over the years, you and I, dear readers. Two that should have stuck by now are these:

1. All models only say what they are told to say.

2. Science models are nothing but a list of premises, tacit and explicit, describing the uncertainty of some observable.

The first warning is easy to see, and it goes some way in removing the mysticism of “computer” models (that a model was computed still impresses many civilians). Every one of those 1,253 models was a computer model.

The second warning I can’t make stick. Let me try again. By premises I mean all the propositions, or assumptions, observational or otherwise, that speak of the observable. This also includes all premises that can be deduced from the premises.

Even before I spent a couple of decades working with a particular mathematical financial model, a million plus lines of code describing all the cash, tax, and accounting implications of a given transaction, I knew instinctively that models just describe a perfect world that lives only inside the model builder’s head. After asking clients a thousand times to specify what they wanted to model to do, and telling them a thousand times that, no, the model output doesn’t predict the future other than saying what will happen IF a giant list of assumptions hold exactly as specified, I knew two things:

1. A well-built model can be very useful if used intelligently by people who understand how it works;
2. Almost nobody understands how models work.

The pros I worked with understood that any transaction can be blindsided by some random unpredictable or at least unexpected event with financial implications. “Risk” was thus built into the model – but only insofar as such risk could be measured. But since very well compensated and trained professionals have been working to identify and quantify risk for centuries now, there’s a certain level of confidence that models like the one I worked with can be useful. But an 8-point quake hits California? Krakatoa goes off again? Some drooling imbecilic pushes the Big Red Button while reaching for his tapioca? Hey, all bets are off.

Slightly more subtly: while any number of individual disastrous events may be vanishingly unlikely, taken all together, it’s all but inevitable that some unexpected disaster or other will in fact happen sooner or later. This observation hardly rates as science – it’s more like history, or common sense. But it is nonetheless real.

Anyway, read and enjoy.

In a Cabin in the Woods (not working on my manifesto – I ain’t even got one!)

Checking in, from beautiful Arnold, CA. (pop 3,288; elevation 3,999′) where the entire family is meeting up. But am working on a few things, as follows.

I’ve been working on the pulp-style space adventure from 28 years ago that I found 50 pages of when packing up to move. ‘Working on’ here means taking pictures with my iPhone, offloading them to my laptop, then using Googledocs’ OCR function to open them up as text. It kind of works! I will need another hour or two to clean up the formatting and obvious mistakes, and still need to find the penultimate chapter that somehow got separated from the other draft chapters and read it in. Still faster than retyping it, for me, anyway.

While the writing is obvious amateur first draft level, I love the ideas. I’ve got Dante in there – one of the bad guys is named Smarrita, as in:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood
Where the straight way was lost

And the deal gone bad is with a race I call Selvans – our hero finds himself in a dark spot in the ‘woods’. And so on, I was being cute.

Funny: Brian Niemeier’s Soul Cycle (reviewed beginning here) is all about Dante in Space, and here I was, 28 years ago, writing a very different Dante in Space book. I would be happy to be half as good as Niemeier. Along the same lines, found a short story from back then where the premise is that explorers crash land on an Eden-like planet, only to slowly starve to death, as their bodies can’t break down the available nutrition – a variation on a theme from Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim. I’ve been obsessed with this thought for decades: that the chemistry of LAWKI is so weird and unique, with seemingly arbitrary ‘choices’ among chemicals and stereoisomers, with crazy things life-threatening prions, it would be amazing if encounters with alien life, no matter how superficially benign, didn’t kill us. I would think that the first step toward terraforming would be to nuke the planet from space, just to be sure. This is a theme in several short stories and two novels I’ve started drafting over the last 30 years or so.

Also, is anyone else bothered by the ‘enhanced’ pictures we get from the Hubble, and will no doubt soon get from the Webb? I look, and see nothing; I look, and see nothing even using fantastical modern tech. BUT – I don’t look, let that tech feed its input into spectrographs, computer algorithms, and other fancy stuff, and they produce:

Beautiful, but what is its relationship to reality? I don’t know.

This is also a ‘picture’ of the Pillars:

Also beautiful.

In what sense are either of those pictures real? Certainly, no naked eye look at the Pillars is going to look anything like either of these, even ‘naked’ eye through a powerful telescope. The question becomes: what information do we want to convey? In the old pulp draft, I have passages like these:

The small circular viewports on either side of the module cabin dimmed automatically for a moment, to protect the delicate eyes of the occupants from the brilliant flash of the cruiser disintegrating into plasma and dust. On the front viewer, a computer processed image revealed the details of the explosion, all extraneous light and radiation filtered away. On that screen, the ship neatly vanished into a gradually thinning aura. Neither man was watching,

and

The star cruiser appeared quickly, a sudden point of light, then a highly distorted image of a ship, trailed by a thousand house of mirrors reflections strung back into space-time. Then, just as suddenly, and with no apparent logic, a perfect little star cruiser was visible alone against the field of stars. Despite his predicament, Warner couldn’t help wondering how much of what he just saw was the result of the viewsys’s inadequate attempts to create a sensible image out of unknown inputs, and how much was “really” taking place. The question was nonsense, he reminded himself.

It’s a little bit like MiniTrue: somebody had to decide what is the important information, and arrange to have the ‘unimportant’ information filtered out.

Next, my beloved and I married 35 years ago on May 30; our older daughter married 2 years ago on May 30; our middle son married May 29th last year. Younger daughter married Jan 8 this year – but we let her and her husband come anyway. Joint anniversary celebration. Because 3 of our kids married over an 18 month period, it is now a running joke to remind our 18 year old son that he doesn’t need to get married anytime soon, it’s OK.

We, our 18 year old son, and our older daughter, her husband, and their 7 month old daughter are already here; the others are due in Friday morning and staying through Sunday. A rip-roaring anniversary hoedown! Elder son-in-law found a nice big cabin for us all.

It’s nice to have a family where everyone gets along. Anyway, we had lunch and a walk yesterday at White Pine Lake, a reservoir in Arnold. I walked to the dam and back:

The dam spillway

The creek flowing away from the dam.

And here’s the view from the back porch, where I sit typing this.

Temperature is sensory-deprivation-tank perfect: I was falling asleep earlier, sitting on the back porch, in shorts. Ideal.

Next next, our house is scheduled to hit the market tomorrow, if all things go well., with open houses this weekend. St. Joseph, please pray for us, that the Father may prosper the work of our hands to His glory! Meaning, of course, that we get a good offer soon, and find a good place to buy.

Starting next Tuesday, we will be staying in another very dear furnished rental in Auburn, and spending our time house hunting like mad. Not gonna look at the markets, no siree, not me, not one bit… AAAGH!

Interesting times.

The End of the Middle Ages

Prepping for the last lecture class before we start reviews and head into finals. Looking at the stuff I prepared last year, I can barely remember doing it. Probably something to do with the physical and emotional exhaustion from moving, and the continued attention demanded by the endless steps needed to get our house finally on the market. (target date: 5/26.)

Here’s a brief snippet.

Edward Peters, Britannica online

This, from Britannica, a source I use cautiously if at all. Here, the writer, describes the triumphal revisionism of the Renaissance writers, who so badly wanted to tout themselves as the best and the brightest that they ignored reality when needed. I’ve long wondered how scholars writing sometimes literally in the shadows of the great medieval churches, could not see how preposterous their claims of *obvious* superiority were. Example:

A nice church. I’d take it, Buuuut….

Clearly better than this? I think not. And I’m not even going with the High Gothic stuff here, which is the greatest architecture the world has ever seen.

Reports of the death of the Middle Ages have been somewhat exaggerated. What’s really been overblown are the achievements of the Renaissance:

The next (and, as it proved, final), steps taken in this direction (physics of motion – ed)  were the accomplishments of the last and greatest of the medieval scientists, Nicole Oresme (1325 – 1382). …devoted much of his effort to science and mathematics. He invented graphs, one of the few mathematical discoveries since antiquity which are familiar to every reader of the newspapers. He was the first to perform calculations involving probability. He had a good grasp of the relativity of motion, and argued correctly that there was no way to distinguish by observation between the theory then held that the heavens revolve around the earth once a day, and the theory that the heavens are at rest and the earth spins once a day. 

Then everything came to a stop. Given the scientific and mathematical works of Descartes and Galileo, but no chronological information, one might suppose the authors were students of Oresme. Galileo’s work on moving bodies is the next step after Oresme’s physics; Cartesian geometry follows immediately on Oresme’s work on graphs. But we know that the actual chronological gap was 250 years, during which nothing whatever happened in these fields. Nor did any thing of importance occur in any other branches of science in the two centuries between Oresme and Copernicus. 

James Franklin, Honorary Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New South Wales

Then, yea, there’s that.

There’s a bunch more, but now I’ve gotta go do class. Yes, I inflict this stuff on 15 year olds. Toughens them up.

End of Eras

Home stretch, as it were, of emptying our home. 27 years of stuff. Confusing thoughts and feelings about all this. But let’s not wallow in nostalgia! Or, at least, not just wallow in nostalgia…

First, the weather. As all 20 long-time readers may be aware, I’ve used this data set to track local rainfall for the last several years.

top of the page.

Our local flood control district has 32 automated rain gages set up across the county, and put up this web page with near real time automatic updates as shown. Over the past 4 or 5 years, I decided to use these numbers to get a more general idea of local rainfall, rather than just using the one local gage for Concord, CA, that seems to provide the go-to numbers for the press.

As discussed in previous posts, these numbers are both beautiful and flawed. Beautiful, in that they provide a real-world snapshot of rainfall over a couple of hundred square miles updated every 15 minutes. But, as a note on the page says:

The District does not warranty, guarantee, or certify the accuracy of the rainfall data. The data accuracy and availability can be compromised due to equipment failure, power loss, equipment defects, loss of calibration, or internet/radio communication equipment failure of equipment provided by others.

This disclaimer is on top of the inaccuracy built into the round numbers used as average annual rainfall totals per gage. Since accurate annual averages are of little use to the Flood Control District, it’s obvious they just took a guess and stuck with it. So, for example, the Ygnacio Valley Fire, Concord, station has an annual average of 17.00 inches. Exactly. They have been tracking rainfall at this station for 43 years; the annual average has not changed over the 5 or so years I have been watching it. And so on, for most of the gages.

Since the annual per gage averages are numbers I use in my fancy-pants spreadsheet to estimate total rainfall as a percentage of average, all my numbers have at least this built-in error. I also watch (this is all for my own weird obsessive amusement) how many stations hit or exceed their annual averages, and by how much. Thus, this year so far, as of this morning – and it happens to be raining at the moment, so this will change – 21 out of 32 stations have gotten at least 80% of their annual averages, while 16 have hit 90%, 7 reached 100% and 1 has even exceeded 125%.

This is where it gets stupid. Or stupider. The Mount Diablo Peak station has, in every year I’ve tracked it, had both the highest rainfall and the greatest amount and percentage over average. This year, it shows over 130% of annual average. There are several other stations that have, in terms of percentage of annual average, consistently run way ahead of the other stations. On the other hand, the Kregor Peak, Clayton, station shows under 50% of its annual average this year – and it is maybe a couple miles, and visible from, the Mount Diablo Peak station. And a number of other stations similarly have fallen ‘behind’ the overall averages each year I’ve watched them.

Such consistent inconsistencies call my whole project into doubt. I don’t blame the Flood Control District in the slightest – all they want to know is how much rain is falling how fast and where, so that they can warn people that the creek’s gonna rise. My whole project makes little sense in that context; the ‘errors’ I’m spotting, that throw my numbers into chaos, simply don’t matter much if at all to the Flood Control District.

Nail in the coffin: this year, 5 or 6 of the stations have failed more often than not to report any usable numbers. Either blank cells, or data that fails the sniff test. That Ygnacio Valley Fire, Concord, station mentioned above happens to be the one physically closest to our home. Today, it shows no rainfall at all for the last several days, while 4″ deep puddles have been forming on our patio. So, not believable.

In order to use the data in my fancy-pants spreadsheet, I have to clean it up by removing stations with bad data. Since not all stations are created equal – annual average rainfall varies from 11″ to 33.50″, in addition to the inconsistencies mentioned above – it matters which stations one removes. Removing any stations because you don’t like the data is bad science. I think we’ve reached a point where even I can’t convince myself my analysis proves anything.

That said, we’ve reached 92% of annual average rainfall! Woohoo!

Next, we had to tell our 94 year old neighbor of 27 years that we’re moving out. This old gentleman has watched our kids grow up, and has put up with our dumb former dog, and just been a great all-around neighbor. He’s the kind of guy who will keep an eye on the whole neighborhood in a friendly way, and even go have a talk with any neighbor who is maybe not being quite neighborly enough. Best neighbor we’ve ever had.

He was pretty emotional, as were we. In the last few years, his dearly beloved wife died, he had a fall and broke bones, and finally, after decades where he seemed to have hit about 60 and just stayed there, he is finally showing his age. He’s almost house-ridden these days, with trips to the doctor and daily walks with caregivers his only outside activates. This, for a man who was forever puttering in the garden and driving himself to church and so on. Please remember him in your prayers.

Next, had my pianos moved yesterday. The upright from the 1890s is sitting in storage; I bit the bullet and had my 1927 Steinway sent in for restringing. Too expensive! But now seemed the time. So, for the rest of my life, at least, there will be a truly fine piano to play in my home.

Finally, this same neighbor has 4 sons but no daughters. He fell hard for our younger daughter, who was born while we lived here. He got to see her grow up from infancy. She became, I think, the daughter he never had. Plus, she’s a cutie and the sweetest kid, and was always kind to him. Well, this daughter of ours, married just short of 4 months, is now expecting her first child. Due in November. Very hard to get my head around.

The gravitational shift of having one granddaughter living 60 miles away was huge; adding a second grandchild makes it totally irresistible. When we move, we plan to be much nearer to both.

House is almost empty; the Insane Brick Project is about 50 bricks from completion; the house will look and be in better shape than it ever was while we lived here; POD in the front drive being loaded up; a storage unit packed to the roof. While a Friday departure date seems to have been a little optimistic, we should be gone gone by Monday. 30+ years in the area, 27 in the same parish. All over.

How to Lie with Data

It was Chesterton, I think, who said: No lie is more dangerous than when it is very nearly true. Propaganda is much more about very nearly telling the truth than about out and out lies. The big lies, the ones repeated over and over until they have beaten down the weak, are usually built upon small half truths. But even the most dedicated propagandist tells the truth much of the time – just not the whole truth.

So we hear that, finally, CDC officials have acknowledged that 43% Covid hospitalizations are *with* not *for* Covid; and that in 75% of Covid deaths the deceased had 4 or more ‘comorbidities’.

Statements such as these should cause a sane person not to trust anything the CDC says. Why is this being mentioned now, when those of us capable of looking at the data could have told- and did tell! – you the same thing back in March of 2020? So one is left playing Kremlinology, trying to suss out why we are being told this now, when one was labelled a terrorist for mentioning it a month ago?

Tedious but necessary background. Looking at any old actuarial mortality table for the US, we see the following pattern: almost everybody lives to be at least 50, then, between ages 50 and 100, almost everybody dies. Before about age 80, most Americans are dead. Between 50 and 80, a little less than half of all Americans die; the other little less than half die between 80 and 100. (Or so – only a comparatively tiny number make it past 100.)

From age 1 to 50, comparatively few people die. Leading causes of death in this age range are accidents, murders, suicides, plus some number of people who just drew a bad hand, and were sickly or caught some nasty disease. But taken all together, less than 8% of men and 4.5% of women don’t make it to 50. By comparison, a mere 15 years later, at age 65, 20% of all American males are dead – it took 50 years to kill off the first 8%, and only 15 to kill off the next 12%. The death rate accelerates from there. A 50 year old man runs only about a .5% chance of death that year; a 90 year old man has a 16% chance of death that year.

This should be common sense. Certainly, we are much more surprised and saddened when somebody under 50 dies; when somebody over 80 dies, it is, or should be, no shock at all.

Keeping this all in mind, let’s talk about ‘comorbidities’. I have 2 comorbidities – I’m fat, and have high blood pressure. Eventually – sooner rather than later, as I’m 63 years old – these health problems are likely to catch up with me and could even kill me. But short term, like over the next 5 to 10 years, probably not, but there’s certainly no guarantee. So my comorbidities are a cause for concern (and action! working on it!), but they are not, so far, interfering with my day to day life.

Now let’s talk about the population where most of the attributed Coved deaths take place: those in nursing homes and hospitals. Such people also have comorbidities, usually a lot of them. But here’s the difference, what is being lied about through omission: the comorbidities of nursing home prisoners HAS destroyed their ability to function. Their health is so poor that they are put in special places where others can care for their most basic needs.

Comorbidities among nursing home incarcerees typically include such things as cancer, renal failure, heart problems, severe respiratory problems. The CDC rules don’t allow ‘old age’ as a cause of death, so, when an old person whose body is failing in a hundred ways finally passes on, the doctor is forced to put something, or some short list of somethings, as the cause of death. Prior to the Covid panic, heart failure and pneumonia were top causes.

In this environment, where a large number of people are awaiting death, and where any old cold or flu is likely to push them over the edge, we add Covid. AND we put in very loose guidelines for a Covid diagnosis, AND we financially incent people to care for Covid patients, AND we remove all independent oversight (visitors) – well, it turns out an awful lot of people, with comorbiditeis like lung cancer and congestive heart failure are all the sudden showing up as Covid deaths.

While it is refreshing to see the CDC talking about comorbidities at all, it would be much more honest (yeah, like that’s gonna happen) to talk about where these people are dying – namely, nursing homes and hospitals. In a nursing home? You’re not long for this world,* Covid or not; not in a nursing home or otherwise very ill? Covid is no worry at all, no more than a cold or flu.

*with the usual caveat that those in dementia care sometimes live years until the decay of their bodies catches up with the decay of their minds. But those in for basic bodily sickness are unlikely to last for more than a year or so, usually much less.

Predictions from Last Year, and for This Year

William Briggs, Statistician to the Stars, asks every year for his readers to make predictions, then, early the next year, scores those predictions. I play along and then promptly forget them until reminded the following year when Briggs publishes the results.

His rules:

1. Number your predictions, using numbers, like this.
2. Limit your predictions to 5, a number less than 6 or more.
3. No sports.
4. Be specific and provide a way to verify your projections.
5. Attach a probability word if you are less than certain.
6. Verified predictions of our coming Doom will receive very little weight unless they are quite specific.

Here are mine for 2021, with Brigg’s comments after the quotation, and my comments in bold italics after that:

My 2021 predictions:

1. “By year end, the state will begin to take away the children of those who fail to comply with ‘public health’ orders, for the kids protection.” This indeed happened, but in isolated cases, usually divorces. Will pick up this year.

2. “A cold war will grow between the schools and those parents who (finally) see what the schools teach.” This happened, you terrorists. Will get worse.

3. “The lockdown it simply too intoxicating to ever end. A new strain will be ‘discovered’, CHILDREN ARE DYING!!!” Yes, twice over. Bingo.

4. “Websites such as this will either be simply eliminated, or, if small enough, shadow-banned.” We are shadow-banned in at least several universities, as anons have written to say.

5. “The election fraud stands, but something else – the inevitable power struggle among the victors, the sudden, unexpected collapse of China, somebody key breaking ranks, enough people starting to actively resist…” Not quite. I don’t remember exactly what I was predicting here – more chaos than we got, something like that. Maybe this year.

Here are mine for 2022:

1. 2022 is the year the Branch Covidians are phased out and the Greta Fan Club takes over: more and more controls are enforced and less and less freedoms allowed, but the alleged cause gradually switches from fauxvid to Climate Change ™.
2. Similarly, our all but mandated social scores, currently based on ‘vax’ status, will come to include some sort of carbon score or suchlike.
3. “The rich” discover that they are not homogenous. The unending power struggles among our betters increase as saner heads try to reign things in. The Soroses and Buffetts of the world may have enough wealth in enough areas to ride out almost anything, but some people who imagine they are wealthy are going to discover they aren’t. Some rich people, for example, have much of their wealth in shipping or airlines. They are not as happy with the direction of things as are the more satanic vermin like Soros, whose fortune is based on currency manipulation. This one is likely complicated to verify, but can be read between the lines when certain industries push back against the control mechanisms.
4. Public school attendance falls sharply. Private schools boom even as laws and regulations are enforced against them. Conflicts move from school board meetings into the actual schools. (Again, could be hard to verify, as the only reporting will frame the parents as ‘terrorists’ if it gets reported at all.)
5. Prayers that the pope speedily comes to enjoy his eternal reward will increase in frequency and fervor, but he will hang on for another year.

You heard it here first! Maybe.

Obsessing About Weather: Acting Normally (for me)

Let’s take ourselves on wings of nostalgia as it were and try to help ourselves forget, perhaps, for a while, our drab wretched lives: Let us return to a subject written about here before the world lost its mind. All 12 longtime readers might recall my neurotic obsession interest in California weather. My interest was at first piqued by the incessant harping on and doomsday predictions over what, when looked at objectively, was just typical California weather. Namely: precipitation varies a lot from year to year here in the Golden State. Most years, we get less than average rainfall. Some years, we get a lot more than average rainfall. That’s the pattern evident in the data since there has data to look at.

So, a few years in a row of below average rainfall is not a drought. In any decade, you might get 5, 6, 7 years of below average rainfall, sometimes in a row. Such a pattern seems to simply be the way weather works here on the West Coast, at least since the last glacial maximum ended 10,000 years ago. The existence of California’s extensive system of reservoirs and canals testifies that at some point, some Californians understood that this is the pattern – and built a lot of reservoirs in an attempt to even it out a bit. That these reservoirs are sometimes near empty is a feature, not a bug. If they were always full, that would mean that precipitation around the state was always orderly and consistent. If they were always full, we wouldn’t need them.

Similarly, the three major rivers in the L.A. basin have been turned into concrete lined storm channels. 100 years ago, Angelinos got tired of having their city washed away about every decade, and so made sure the water from the occasional epic storm had somewhere to go. Most years, there will be more skateboarders than water in those channels. But once in a while…

Calling ‘average’ ‘normal’, so that mundane variation become, not ‘below average’, but ‘abnormal’ simply adds to the atmosphere of panic.

So: for the last year, we’ve been hearing about how California had sunk into an unprecedented drought since the epic rain year of 2016/2017 when, you may recall, 200%+ of average rainfall and snowpack nearly washed out the Oroville Dam. the state’s largest reservoir. That ended the then current unprecedented ‘drought’. Before that, the 2005/2006 epic rain year ended another unprecedented drought. And so on, back through the decades. As one remarkably sane meteorologist put it. there are only a few storms between drought and plenty in California.

How are we doing this year? Glad you asked. According to my crazy spread sheet*:

The at a glance summary section of my spreadsheet. The “gages over %” numbers show how many of the 32 total gages have reached the various arbitrary milestones. I’m just amusing myself.

The real accuracy here is probably more in the range of 10 percentage points, rather than the displayed 1/100th of a percentage point -but where’s the fun in that? So, despite the faux accuracy above, we’re really more like something between 70 and 80% of the season average as of today.

Any still here and not drifting into a coma may be interested in the overall pattern of rainfall over time in Contra Costa County, which I’ve determined from other datasets:

Again, while it would be easy (I do it all the time) to come up with a bunch of reasons why it’s wrong to do the math this way, and wrong to mix data from different sets, and so on, it’s also reciprocally hard to come up with any reasons the number would be very off – a bunch of different people calculating rainfall over many years and over a fairly contained and consistent area are not likely to get significantly different results.

The rain season here stretches from July through the following June. The seasonal pattern is something like this: On average, about 16% of total rainfall falls from July through November; about 10% falls in April, May, and June. The other 74% falls in December, January, February, and March.

Using the above as a baseline, as of the end of December, we get on average about 35% of our season total rainfall. This year, we’re at over 200% of expected average rainfall to date so far, and about 75% of the average seasonal total – with the bulk of the rainy season still to come. The Sierra snowpack, the melting of which following summer replenishes many reservoirs, is in a similar state: about 150% of average to date, about 50% of seasonal average.

So, we can stop worrying about the drought for now? Well – no. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for the rain and snow to just – stop. A near or completely dry month or two or three, even the peak months, happens regularly. It would be a little unusual if, after a very rainy first half of the season, we got a very dry second half – but hardly unprecedented.

Isn’t this all fascinating? No?

The table is set for a nice 200% year, which would shut up the drought doomsayers for a while, at least. Yet, alas, even only 100% isn’t a sure bet at this point. I’ll keep y’all posted.

*The Contra Costa County Flood Control District maintains a set of 32 rain gages spread across the county. These gages are meant to track current rainfall against a set of “critical antecedent conditions” so as to allow predictions of flooding. The tables on the web page are automatically updated every 15 minutes, allowing the obsessive attentive observer to watch the rainfall spread out across the county in almost real time. These gages are situated at various altitudes and terrain, so that the experts at the CCC Flood Control District can see where the water is piling up and where it will go. I misuse these gages to measure broad rainfall totals, doing a series of logically and mathematically dubious sums and calculations in order to arrive at the magic number you see above – EXACTLY 76.93% of expected seasonal rainfall has, well, fallen so far. Riiiight. Summing up rainfall and averages across a range of gages and then dividing to get percentages – not strictly scientific. I also do averages of averages, which also has its shortcomings. BUT – I tell myself – the situation is such that these iffy methods are probably roughly right. I’m not applying for grant money are trying to whip up some panic here – I just like taking a stab at a broader measure of rainfall.