SCIENCE! Actually I just felt the need to get something up here and I have a bunch of these links to get off my chest.

The Models Were Wildly Wrong about Reopening Too.

LOONY LOCKDOWN GOVERNORS MAKE A MEAL OF DEFINING WHAT A MEAL IS.

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record put it: Governor Cuomo Orders Restaurants To Put Pineapple On Their Pizza.

SPOILER: IT’S THE “PROGRESSIVE” LEFT THAT INSISTS THAT THE GOVERNMENT FORCE BIOMEDICAL RESEARCHERS TO USE TOTALLY UNSCIENTIFIC “RACIAL” CATEGORIES: Two Decades Ago, The FDA and NIH Mandated the Use of Race to Categorize Subjects and Report Results in Medical and Scientific Research They Oversee. It was a Huge Mistake.

Mayor: Health Officials Justify Mask Mandates For Political Reasons, Not Science

The land with no face masks: Holland’s top scientists say there’s no solid evidence coverings work and warn they could even damage the fight against Covid-19.

THE FEAR OF THE FEVER: how we are now living the authentic Victorian experience.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: All the COVID safety rules are little more than theater.

The Pandemic and Practical Wisdom

BAD SCIENCE DESTROYS ECONOMIES, LIVELIHOODS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES: Let me tell you a story. It’s about six passenger flights from Wuhan that led to an unprecedented global disaster.

AND that model was considerably saner than the one Colorado’s Paste Eating Polis STILL believes.

And I stand to pick up a few bucks tomorrow evening by winning wagers with a handful of individuals who SWORE back in April that the NFL would NEVER play this season.

Unrelated …. sad passing of Charlie Daniels.

More importantly there’s this: Two Americas: Risk-Tolerant vs Zero-Risk — Will One Ruin the Other?

Population of Ohio: roughly 11.7 million. Confirmed Covid cases: 91k. That’s 1 out of 128. That’s over a four month period. So currently there’s probably a 1 in 500 chance that any given person is shedding. I give 10 rides a day, mostly to solo passengers. That mean in a month I probably have ONE shedder in my car per month. I keep the windows open until the temp goes over 80, then I use the AC only when I actually have a passenger. My average ride is under 10 minutes long, although one or two rides over twenty minutes aren’t unusual in a day. Most infecting exposures have been in excess of 15 minutes.

So the odds of me having a shedder in my car who puts off enough of a viral load to survive the effective circulation of air, and deposits enough viral load that further survives the UV exposure to infect me is close enough to 0 that …. I ain’t worried.

Because it’s not Andromeda.

In other risk related news: FOLLOW THE SCIENCE AND LISTEN TO THE CDC! WAIT, NOT THAT SCIENCE! CDC director: Keeping schools closed poses greater health threat to children than reopening.

In American laboratories and universities, the spirit of Trofim Lysenko has suddenly been woke. Been awakened?

I’ve mentioned the unreproducability problem before: Red Flags Raised Over Chinese Research Published in Global Journals: Apparently fraudulent data in dozens of peer-reviewed articles spark fresh worries about ‘paper mills’ used by researchers under pressure to publish.

I’m peeling my mother and others off the ceiling on the reg: How COVID Control Freaks Cultivate America’s Culture Of Fear

Following the Science—Where? Medical evidence is not always clear, and it rarely mandates a clear policy direction.

A good friend of mine recently opined that he thought the NFL would not play this season. Taking a page from the brilliant Annie Duke I quoted Nathan Detroit (or was it Skye Masterson?) and said “For how much?” Being confronted with an actual choice he backed off of his rash statement and then made another one.

“I won’t bet on THAT but I’d have made a fortune betting on this Pandemic.”

I appreciate our friendship so I terminated the conversation then and there. He’s a Closer. A rather vehement one. And he has an impaired IS so I try to be understanding.

It turns out the numbers he would have wagered on were off by a factor of 24. But he’s ignoring the science. He’s just picking the numbers he WANTS to bet on. Not the ACTUAL wager. And even THOSE numbers are heavily skewed: “Few may have noticed that 42 percent of all COVID deaths in the US come from just three states—New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts. These three states account for nearly 56,000 of the nearly 133,000 deaths in the US, even though they represent just 10 percent of the population. If these three states are excluded, the US suddenly finds itself somewhere in between nations such as Luxembourg (176/1M) and Macedonia (166/1M), where some of the better fatality numbers in Europe are found.”

“Shut up” is NOT a scientific principle. I’ll start with that. A lot of aggregating follows. And I’ll start with the old Hollywood admonition that “Nobody know nuthin'”

Lockdowns Don’t Work THIS oughta fire ’em up

Coronavirus didn’t shut down the economy, government did.

Top-5 U.S. States in Deaths per Million of Population. ” All states under exclusive Republican control come in below the national mean. All 11 states (with DC) above the national mean are under exclusive Democratic control, or have a Democratic legislature, or a Democratic governor.” Maths is a science, is it not?

MASKS IN JANUARY MADE SOME SENSE, CONSIDERING WHAT WE KNEW THEN. CONSIDERING WHAT WE KNOW NOW? MASK WEARING IS DOOM-LARPING:  Your Mask Is Making You Meaner, Dumber, More Afraid & Less Safe.

“Listen to the experts” they say. Flashback: Licking Subway Poles “Probably Fine,” Says Expert.

Still, they shoulda kept Keven Williamson: THE ATLANTIC: Take the Shutdown Skeptics Seriously: This is not a straightforward battle between a pro-human and a pro-economy camp.

I JUST WANT TO REMIND ALL THOSE WHO WEREN’T PAYING ATTENTION THAT THE USSR BILLED ITSELF AS ‘SCIENTIFICALLY GOVERNED.” AT NO TIME DOES ‘SCIENTIFIC’ RULE BY ‘EXPERTS’ END WELL. EVER:  So Much for Specialists?

Stay safe, within your own personal risk factor analysis.

This should go without saying but so MANY people today seem to think they ARE scientists. And there’s this:

There are other ways to tell I’m not a scientist.

I wasn’t wrong about the coming Ice Age in the 70’s. Or about the acid rain or Ozone Holes killing us in the 80’s. In the 90’s I didn’t wrongly predict that long before now global warming would destroy us.

Nope. Not a scientist. (with an acknowledgement to Kurt Schlichter.