Dissident Veteran For Peace

I complain about the routine dishonesty of mainstream and Left media outlets because they are my main sources of news and commentary. However, I have zero illusions about the routine accuracy and integrity of Right media outlets.

A case in point is a recent article by Jordan Davidson on the site of The Federalist titled: "Major Study Finds Masks Don't Reduce COVID-19 Infection Rates". In the body of Davidson's article it is claimed: "A high-quality, large-scale Danish study finds no evidence that wearing a face mask significantly minimizes people's risk of contracting COVID-19." 

However, right in the Danish article's abstract the authors, Bundgaard et al., state: "Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection."

Davidson writes: 

After a month, 42 of the mask-wearers in the study (1.8 percent) were infected with the virus while 53 of the non-mask-wearers (2.1. percent) were infected with the virus. Statistically, this is not a significant difference between the two groups, suggesting these infection differences were a product of chance, say the study authors.

Echoing similar misinformation from the New York Times, Davidson again misleads her readers by misrepresenting the meaning and importance of a lack of statistical significance.* In fact, Bundgaard et al. use the word "chance" exactly nowhere in their article. They actually describe their findings as "inconclusive" rather than attributable to mere "chance".

In the "Discussion" section of the Bundgaard et al. article it says:

The findings ... should not be used to conclude that a recommendation for everyone to wear masks in the community would not be effective in reducing SARS-CoV-2 infections, because the trial did not test the role of masks in source control of SARS-CoV-2 infection. [emphasis added]

In other words, Davidson did exactly what the authors said she shouldn't do based on their work.

In the "Discussion" the authors again note that one of several limitations of their study was that it made "no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others." In other words, the study offers no evidence about whether masks do or don't prevent COVID-19 infected mask wearers from infecting other people.

Moreover, as Bundgaard et al. indicate in their "Intervention" section, they were testing the effects of "no mask recommendation" versus "a recommendation to wear a mask". They were not testing masks or mask wearing per se. Also, only "46% of participants wore the mask as recommended" but Bundgaard et al. did not exclude from their results people in the mask recommendation group who were "predominantly" but not fully compliant with the mask recommendation. Only the 7% whose compliance was characterized as "not as recommended" were excluded.

In short, the Danish study says what pretty much any sensible person already realized—masks alone are not a silver bullet but there is evidence that they do help reduce the spread of COVID-19 from infected people to non-infected mask wearers.

Liar, manipulators, and incompetents working in the media depend upon the fact that most people will never question their reporting or never question it enough to do their own research. It also bears remembering that reporters and editors are also fallible humans—not every error or falsehood reported is deliberate. In any case, when it comes to important matters never blindly trust a media outlet (or a politician) to be accurate or honest.

###

* A note on "statistical significance": Davidson is not alone in botching the reporting on "statistical significance" the Danish authors do it, too. In 2019's, "Moving to a World Beyond 'p < 0.05' " the editors of the journal of the American Statistical Association write:

... it is time to stop using the term "statistically significant" entirely. Nor should variants such as "significantly different," "p < 0.05," and "nonsignificant" survive, whether expressed in words, by asterisks in a table, or in some other way.

Regardless of whether it was ever useful, a declaration of "statistical significance" has today become meaningless. Made broadly known by Fisher's use of the phrase (1925), Edgeworth's (1885) original intention for statistical significance was simply as a tool to indicate when a result warrants further scrutiny. But that idea has been irretrievably lost. Statistical significance was never meant to imply scientific importance, and the confusion of the two was decried soon after its widespread use (Boring 1919). Yet a full century later the confusion persists.

They also offer this guidance:

• Don't base your conclusions solely on whether an association or effect was found to be "statistically significant" (i.e., the p-value passed some arbitrary threshold such as p < 0.05).
• Don't believe that an association or effect exists just because it was statistically significant.
• Don't believe that an association or effect is absent just because it was not statistically significant.
• Don't believe that your p-value gives the probability that chance alone produced the observed association or effect or the probability that your test hypothesis is true.
• Don't conclude anything about scientific or practical importance based on statistical significance (or lack thereof).

Labels: COVID-19, critical thinking, health, media, science, statistics

# posted by VFPDissident @ 11/18/2020 10:10:00 PM 2 comments

The first election I remember with any clarity is the 1976 race between Ford and Carter. Since then I've participated in every presidential election, including two where I served as a precinct officer.

Over and over, every four years, I've heard people say: "This is the most consequential election of our life time" or words to that effect. I was never convinced that was true until this year. The American corporate media have never been known for rigid devotion to the full truth and political neutrality but they seldom engaged in such sustained blatantly and overtly dishonest reporting as followed the 2016 election of Donald Trump. 

The media's usual modus operandi was to manipulate people through omission, de-emphasis, and spin. For example, in 2011, Barack Obama became the first known US president to order the assassination of an American citizen "without due process of law". In actuality, the Obama administration fought successfully in court to ensure there would be no due process for US citizens on its "kill list".

These facts should have been blared relentlessly in headlines along with critical op-eds until Obama was successfully impeached. To be sure, there was media coverage of these outrages but nothing commensurate with the gravity of the offenses or even approaching the outrage ginned up by the media's blatantly false characterization of Trump's 2017 remarks regarding violent protests in Charlottesville. To this day, most Americans I speak with about it have little or no idea about Obama's assassination of American citizens not to mention his unapologetic killings of thousands of non-citizens, including hundreds of children.

However, this year's election was the culmination of four years of an unprecedented, near-complete decoupling from truth except when it supported the narrative. In some ways this started with Black Lives Matter and was fanned by Obama but it increased by orders of magnitude when Trump was elected. Since then we've been subjected to an emotionally and ideologically driven outpouring of hate and, often, blatant lies.

In all my life, I've never seen the mainstream media, academia, and the entertainment industry join in such sustained lockstep to villify and remove an American president and to demonize the people who put him in office. There's no conclusive evidence this will end when Trump is gone.

The naked, unrestrained quest for power and domination by any means of the Democrats and their allies is frightening. Few useful lies are too incredible to report and few inconvenient truths are so important that they can't be denied, misrepresented, or ignored. Unfortunately, many Americans uncritically rely on the mainstream media and are too busy, too lazy, or too indoctrinated to thoughtfully question what they are told, let alone what they are not told or allowed to view, hear, and judge for themselves.

A case in point is today's press conference with RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, Trump campaign adviser Kayleigh McEnany, and campaign General Counsel Matt Morgan. These three spoke for over 20 minutes on concerns about the election practices in some states and the lawsuits filed to deal with them.

McDaniel said, from Michigan alone, the campaign had 131 affidavits and over 2,800 incident reports concerning election irregularities. McEnany alleged that 682,479 ballots were counted in Allegheny County—where Philadelphia Pittsburgh is located—where no Republican poll watchers were permitted to observe the canvassing.

I'm not going to go through all the claims put forth, you can watch the press conference and make up your own mind. However, McDaniel was correct when she stated: "If the shoe were on the other foot. If it were this close the other way. If president Trump was in the lead in all these states ... the media would be screaming, 'This isn't over, the race isn't over, we need more time to count and make sure it's right.' But because it's Biden and a very slight lead the media demands the race is over and there's nothing to see here."

And, in fact, there has been a virtual corporate media blackout of the press conference today. Fox News started to show it and then quickly decided to censor it. The Washington Post covered the Fox News censorship but not the substance of the press conference. On their flagship afternoon news program National Public Radio has a nearly two-minute long segment the Bidens' dogs' new Twitter account but nothing about the allegations raised in the press conference. In fact, NPR apparently hasn't covered anything White House Press Secretary McEnany has said since Oct. 28.

If you truly care about technically free and fair elections in an admittedly flawed political system the time is now to step up against the Democrats and the media's potential, if unlikely, coup-in-the-making. Do it for your country and yourself, do it out of respect for the ideals of freedom of information and representative democracy. Tell your friends and family what is happening. Tell your political representatives that you want all credible allegations of electoral error and impropriety fully and transparently investigated.

See also:

• Anointing Biden & Election Irregularity Allegations I
• Anointing Biden & Election Irregularity Allegations III

Labels: critical thinking, Democrats, media, National Public Radio, Obama, politics, Trump, voting

# posted by VFPDissident @ 11/09/2020 09:09:00 PM 1 comments

'You shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead nor make any tattoo marks on yourselves: I am the LORD. - Leviticus 19:28 (NASB)

From now on let no one cause trouble for me, for I bear on my body the brand-marks of Jesus. -Galatians 6:17 (NASB)

In the Septuagint (Vetus Testementum Graece LXX Tischendorf 1856), the phrase "tattoo marks" in Lev. 19:28 above appears as γράμματα στικτὰ, which is transliterated as grammata stikta. Liddell and Scott indicate tattoo is indeed the correct translation.

In the Greek New Testament (Novum Testamentum Graece Nestle-Aland 28th ed. 2012), the phrase "the brand-marks" in Gal. 6:17 above appears as στίγματα. It is transliterated as stigmata and, according to Danker's The Concise Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (UChicago Pr., 2009), is defined as an "indelible graphic mark made on the body".

Lucian of Samosata's (born 120 A.D.) De Dea Syria is another ancient Greek text that mentions tattooing. Section 59 of that work says: "στίζονται δὲ πάντες, οἱ μὲν ἐς καρπούς, οἱ δὲ ἐς αὐχένας: καὶ ἀπὸ τοῦδε ἅπαντες Ἀσσύριοι στιγματηφορέουσιν". Strong translates this passage as: "They all tattoo [στίζονται] themselves—some on the hands and some on the neck—and so it comes that all the Assyrians bear stigmata [στιγματηφορέουσιν]."

The Coptic church of Egypt is believed to have been established around 50 A.D. Copts have long used tattoos with distinctive Christian motifs, sometimes to their peril. According to Carswell, as quoted in Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt by Febe Armanios (Oxford UP, 2011; p. 208, n. 145) Syrian, Armenian, and Ethiopian Christians also followed this practice.

Coptic tattoo design print from John Carswell's Coptic Tattoo Designs, 2nd ed. (American Univ. of Beirut, 1958) via http://www.crosscrucifix.com/glossaryhome.htm

Labels: art and literature, Christianity, culture, history

# posted by VFPDissident @ 11/09/2020 02:35:00 AM 0 comments

Around noon yesterday, the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets anointed Joe Biden as the "president-elect". Consistent with a plan Axios described on Nov. 3, Biden publicly assumed the mantle of leadership that same day.

Yesterday, I also searched the New York Times archive. As it turns out, they didn't refer to George W. Bush as the "president-elect" until December 13, 2000, the day of Al Gore's concession speech.

Yet, in 2020, despite the fact that the incumbent president has not conceded defeat and has made allegations of voting irregularities that he says he will litigate the mainstream media has already declared the election decided and settled. This comes less than four days after Election Day, following a highly unusual and hotly contested election, and before a single state has certified their election results.

I doubt that Trump's campaign will be able to muster evidence of election irregularities substantial enough to overturn the presumptive Biden victory. I am inclined to believe that he actually lost the election due to his unpopularity, not error or fraud. However, there appears to be enough anecdotal evidence of election errors and fraud (see e.g. here and here and here) to warrant targeted, thorough, and transparent investigations.

Nevertheless, true to form and in stark contrast to their reporting on canvassing problems in 2000, the mainstream media has repeatedly asserted there are no problems with the elections results. They may be right but this is a continuation of their unprincipled sabotage of the Trump presidency since before his inauguration. There were plenty of legitimate reasons to oppose Trump—I did and still do—but the media was not content stick with those and with honest reporting.

If the allegations of election problems are demonstrably false then why not demonstrate their falsehood with evidence instead of bare assertions repeated incessantly? If the claims are false then a proper investigation would, to most people, strengthen confidence in the integrity of the process and results. Of course, that presumes people value such integrity above their preferred outcome.

And sure, there are some people who will never believe that Trump lost in a technically free and fair election but why the rush to anoint Biden? Why not wait until the states certify enough results to give the winner 270 electoral college votes?

And why take the wholly unprecedented step of censoring the POTUS on radio and television when he spoke on Thursday? TV and radio are the primary or only sources of news for many. Here's the speech that your corporate media guardians did not want you to see or hear in order to make up your own mind.

See also:

• Lessons of the 2020 Election
• Anointing Biden & Election Irregularity Allegations II

Labels: Biden, media, politics, Ralph Nader, Trump, voting

# posted by VFPDissident @ 11/08/2020 08:22:00 PM 0 comments

Donald J. Trump has endured more than four years of constant public drubbing by most of the mainstream media, academia, and the entertainment industry. Trump survived the bogus Russiagate conspiracy and a failed impeachment related to Biden family dealings in Ukraine. A significant number of establishment Republicans betrayed their party to publicly campaign for Biden. Biden has collected far more campaign money ($1,380.1 million vs. $863.6 million) than Trump.

In many ways Trump's presidency has been an incoherent mess marked by numerous self-inflicted wounds, including but not limited to, bad policies and inept policy implementation. Yet, despite all this and during the worst pandemic in 100 years and the worst economy in 90 years, Trump once again defied the pollsters and pundits to mount a strong challenge to the presidential nominee of Democratic Party. It looks like Republicans will hold the Senate and cut the Democratic majority in the House to single digits. Meanwhile, in solid blue California voters soundly rejected an attempt by political elites to remove an anti-discrimination clause from the state constitution.

This all begs the question: Will Democratic (or Republican) elites learn the right lessons from the 2016 and 2020 elections and resolve to work "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty"? Nah.

See also:

• Anointing Biden & Election Irregularity Allegations I
• "Tucker Carlson: A Vote for President Trump Is a Vote Against America's Ruling Class" by Joey Pietro for The Western Journal
  
• "Ketman And The Left's Problem" by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative

Labels: Biden, COVID-19, media, politics, race, Russia, Trump, Tucker Carlson, voting

# posted by VFPDissident @ 11/04/2020 07:14:00 PM 0 comments

Labels: communism, economics, humor, politics, Remy, video

# posted by VFPDissident @ 11/03/2020 09:57:00 PM 0 comments

Labels: COVID-19, health, medicine, science, statistics

# posted by VFPDissident @ 11/02/2020 08:18:00 PM 0 comments

Thanks to a fawning, largely uncritical media and a feckless, gullible public, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York was able to falsely position himself this year as the COVID-19 anti-Trump. In May, The Guardian published an op-ed titled "Andrew Cuomo is no hero. He's to blame for New York's coronavirus catastrophe". The authors noted:

Andrew Cuomo may be the most popular politician in the country. His approval ratings have hit all-time highs thanks to his Covid-19 response. Some Democrats have discussed him as a possible replacement for Joe Biden, due to Biden’s perceived weakness as a nominee. And there have even been some unfortunate tributes to Cuomo’s alleged sex appeal.

All of which is bizarre, because Cuomo should be one of the most loathed officials in America right now. ProPublica recently released a report outlining catastrophic missteps by Cuomo and the New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, which probably resulted in many thousands of needless coronavirus cases ...

Federal failures played a role, of course, but this tragedy was absolutely due, in part, to decisions by the governor.

Nevertheless image triumphed once again over reality, as The Atlantic put it last August: 

The opening night of the Democrats’ virtual convention was the beginning of a coronation for Joe Biden, but it was also a victory march for Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor and a supposed hero of the coronavirus pandemic. “For all the pain and all the tears, our way worked,” Cuomo declared in his five-minute speech. “And it was beautiful.”

“Beautiful” is an odd way to describe a virus that has killed more than 25,000 New Yorkers, or about 15 percent of the total number of Americans who have died from COVID-19. But Cuomo has long been a curious leader for Democrats to hold up as an emblem of successful leadership during the pandemic: He has somehow presided over the worst and deadliest coronavirus outbreak in the country while eluding the widespread criticism that has surrounded both President Donald Trump and New York City’s Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio.

Earlier today I had bizarre conversation about one of Cuomo's many failures. In 2015, the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law (TFLL), its members appointed by Cuomo, released its "2015 Ventilator Allocation Guidelines".

The TFLL estimated that during the "peak week" of a severe "1918-like" pandemic scenario the state would have a ventilator shortfall of 15,783 units (p. 30). Instead of urging the state's leaders to come up with a plan to close the shortfall of ventilators and trained personnel to operate them the TFLL accepted a shortage of life-saving equipment as a fait accompli. The TFLL was focused on rationing ventilators without any analysis of whether the shortage could be ameliorated through advance preparation. Cuomo implicitly, if not explicitly, agreed he could live with the projected shortage and the deaths that would entail.

Their solution, then, was to create a triage plan that, by design, likely consigned hundreds, if not thousands, of patients to a needless death when the pandemic arrived this year. When I pointed out this to my friend she defended Cuomo asserting there was little or nothing he could have done differently. I replied he could have said: This is unacceptable, we need to figure out how to close this gap. She claimed, "That's not how government works." I'll never understand why some people make excuses for corrupt and/or inept politicians.

In 1984, the governor's father, Mario Cuomo, who was then himself governor of New York, gave one of his best known speeches at the Democratic national convention. His vision of government included the idea that people should be "protected in those moments when they would not be able to protect themselves." Andrew Cuomo echoed this notion when, in 2017, he asserted of the subway "crisis": "There is no time for delay and there is no tolerance for a lack of commitment on this issue ... The fundamental responsibility of government is to respond in a timely and effective way when people need help."

If Cuomo's TFLL could identify the problem then they could also have come up with a better solution. Moreover, Cuomo could have demanded one. No, he can't magically conjure ventilators or the money to buy them but experts have been predicting a serious viral pandemic for years. Cuomo (and governors and legislators across the country) had the ability and responsibility to ensure his state was better prepared for it.

Instead in March, Cuomo lied or betrayed a profound ignorance. As Colin Kalmbacher at Law & Crime wrote:

On Wednesday morning, during his quotidian Coronavirus press briefing, the three-term Democratic governor told an easily verifiable falsehood about New York’s state of health.

“No one has these ventilators and no one ever anticipated a situation where you would need this number of ventilators to deal with a public health emergency,” Cuomo said–explaining the Empire State’s recent move toward rationing the highly in-demand medical devices.

“So we have purchased everything that can be purchased,” he added. “We’re now in a situation where we’re trying to accelerate production of these ventilators, and a ventilator is a complicated piece of equipment.”

But Cuomo’s claim that “no one ever anticipated” the “number of ventilators to deal with a public health emergency” is directly undercut by a report from New York State itself–under his own administration–released halfway into Cuomo’s second term in office.

Like Cuomo, the New York State Commissioner of Health he appointed, Howard A. Zucker, was also given to uttering falsehoods. In a letter accompanying the TFLL's report he claimed: "Protecting the health and well-being of New Yorkers is a core objective of the Department of Health." So, Zucker knew about the anticipated ventilator shortage and the "death panel" solution to deal with it. 

Yet, in March of this year, Newsday reported: 

"I always felt if you can improve the life of others — whether an individual or many — you should," he [Zucker] said in an interview. "I learned practicing clinical medicine that I have to do everything possible ... it's our role in society."

"But I never expected this kind of situation," he said of the coronavirus threat."

Zucker has mostly flown under the radar compared to his boss but his COVID-19 performance prompted one editorial titled: "New York health chief Howard Zucker: Call him Dr. Death".

By April, Cuomo was throwing tens of millions of dollars around to try to buy ventilators at elevated prices from people who often couldn't deliver. If instead, he had ordered 15,783 ventilators in 2015 when his Task Force released its report then the state would likely have had a stockpile on hand during the COVID-19 crisis for less than 0.14% of the state's 2015-16 disbursements.

For the calculation above, I used a 2020 ventilator retail price via ProPublica of $12,495 per unit. I have no doubt that price is actually significantly higher than a competitive bidding process in 2015 would have obtained. If the state had spread the acquisition out over five years then the cost would have been less than 0.03% of the annual budget.

In any event, it seems both unsurprising and clear that few high-profile politicians of either major party actually concern themselves much with the victims of COVID-19, whom they largely regard as superannuated drags on the economy or otherwise disposable people. They don't say this out loud but their policies speak volumes. Instead of taking effective steps to save lives and safely re-open the economy, Democrats blame Trump, Republicans blame China (or engage in various forms of denial) and, in the meantime, the US has the largest COVID-19 death toll and one of the highest per capita COVID-19 death rates in the world.

Labels: Biden, COVID-19, Democrats, government, health, media, medicine, politics, science, Trump

# posted by VFPDissident @ 11/01/2020 06:55:00 PM 0 comments