Trump-Virus Death Toll

[ekauqodielak]

May 9th, 2020:

79,823 Americans officially dead from CV-19

www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

[ekauqodielak]

May 11th, 2020:

80,870 Americans officially dead from CV-19


Coronavirus Cases:
1,370,999


CLOSED CASES
337,780

Cases which had an outcome:

256,910 (76%)
Recovered / Discharged

80,870 (24%)
Deaths

[timmyb52]

Is this really about a virus and keeping us safe or an election?

[ekauqodielak]

May 13th, 2020:

83,973 Americans officially dead from CV-19

[ekauqodielak]

May 18th, 2020

90,993 Americans officially dead from CV-19

[timmyb52]

May 18, 2020 8:22:00 GMT -5 ekauqodielak said:

May 18th, 2020

90,993 Americans officially dead from CV-19

"Officially"...LOL!

Out of a population of 130 million people that isn't really much different than the flu.

Plus...more people are recovering...over those dying.

But yet the lying whore media only gives us the numbers of death over the number of recoveries which is greater.

"Official" CDC numbers of deaths from influenza from 2018-2019.


www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html


"CDC estimates that the burden of illness during the 2018–2019 season included an estimated 35.5 million people getting sick with influenza, 16.5 million people going to a health care provider for their illness, 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths from influenza."

Covid-19 is no worse than the flu...it has been weaponized and politicized by both parties with WE THE PEOPLE caught in the middle of their POWER games.

It is overhyped by media and politicians...it is fear based psychological mind control of the masses.

So...when flu season comes around...will we shut down,social distance and wear masks again in order to save 35,000 or more lives?

Or will you tell me that 35,000 lives mean nothing?

Is it really about safety or control?

Is this really about a virus or an election?

This...should be obvious.

[ekauqodielak]

May 22, 2020 23:52:03 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

May 18, 2020 8:22:00 GMT -5 ekauqodielak said:

May 18th, 2020

90,993 Americans officially dead from CV-19

"Officially"...LOL!

Out of a population of 130 million people that isn't really much different than the flu.

Plus...more people are recovering...over those dying.

But yet the lying whore media only gives us the numbers of death over the number of recoveries which is greater.

"Official" CDC numbers of deaths from influenza from 2018-2019.


www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html


"CDC estimates that the burden of illness during the 2018–2019 season included an estimated 35.5 million people getting sick with influenza, 16.5 million people going to a health care provider for their illness, 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths from influenza."

Covid-19 is no worse than the flu...it has been weaponized and politicized by both parties with WE THE PEOPLE caught in the middle of their POWER games.

It is overhyped by media and politicians...it is fear based psychological mind control of the masses.

So...when flu season comes around...will we shut down,social distance and wear masks again in order to save 35,000 or more lives?

Or will you tell me that 35,000 lives mean nothing?

Is it really about safety or control?

Is this really about a virus or an election?

This...should be obvious.

You're so wrong, it hurts. Go look up the actual yearly death stats, per state, for the flu. Not the estimates, the actual death count for the flu over, say, 3 years. Do a median. Now, compare that with the 3 month death tally for CV19 in those same states. 'Surplus deaths' are how they're being lumped, but you could sort by Cause of Death or Contributing Factor: CV19. You can do this same data logging with countries. You could do it with the whole planet. Other people have already done this and published this data in articles and studies you could easily find, but you won’t trust their findings because they don’t fit your bias. If you’re interested in the truth, just do the math. There’s no equivalence. You may dislike the facts, but you can't change the math. And, wittingly or otherwise, you're propagating an entirely false narrative.

[timmyb52]

May 23, 2020 0:51:22 GMT -5 ekauqodielak said:

May 22, 2020 23:52:03 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

"Officially"...LOL!

Out of a population of 130 million people that isn't really much different than the flu.

Plus...more people are recovering...over those dying.

But yet the lying whore media only gives us the numbers of death over the number of recoveries which is greater.

"Official" CDC numbers of deaths from influenza from 2018-2019.


www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html


"CDC estimates that the burden of illness during the 2018–2019 season included an estimated 35.5 million people getting sick with influenza, 16.5 million people going to a health care provider for their illness, 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths from influenza."

Covid-19 is no worse than the flu...it has been weaponized and politicized by both parties with WE THE PEOPLE caught in the middle of their POWER games.

It is overhyped by media and politicians...it is fear based psychological mind control of the masses.

So...when flu season comes around...will we shut down,social distance and wear masks again in order to save 35,000 or more lives?

Or will you tell me that 35,000 lives mean nothing?

Is it really about safety or control?

Is this really about a virus or an election?

This...should be obvious.

You're so wrong, it hurts. Go look up the actual yearly death stats, per state, for the flu. Not the estimates, the actual death count for the flu over, say, 3 years. Do a median. Now, compare that with the 3 month death tally for CV19 in those same states. 'Surplus deaths' are how they're being lumped, but you could sort by Cause of Death or Contributing Factor: CV19. You can do this same data logging with countries. You could do it with the whole planet. Other people have already done this and published this data in articles and studies you could easily find, but you won’t trust their findings because they don’t fit your bias. If you’re interested in the truth, just do the math. There’s no equivalence. You may dislike the facts, but you can't change the math. And, wittingly or otherwise, you're propagating an entirely false narrative.

K...you dissapoint me.

For someone who says he doesn't easily believe in black vs. white and good vs. evil narratives...it seems you do indded fall for the left vs. right narrative.

You spew leftist media/political talking points as if they wete gospel!

Your "death" numbers are miniscule...not that I am saying they are meaningless our that those who have died from Covid-19 don't matter.

But look at it realistically...the death numbets are weak...more people are recovering than dying.

Look at how many people die from the flu worldwide every year (250,000 to 500,000).

Now compare those numbers annually since the beginning of modern CDC reports and you will see plainly that Covid-19 is media/political fear based propaganda.

Is Covid-19 killing people? Yes it is...but it is not the "killer" they make it out to be!

Where are these media whores and politicians at when people are dying from annual Influenza,csncer,car acciddnts,heart disease,automobile accidents,etc?

They are nowhere to be found!

The media and politicians only care about an issue when it can be used to further their own politial goals and power!

K...please stop drinking the media and politicians propaganda kool-aid that only robs you of your own personal power and demands you to stay afraid and to live your life in fear!

Governments...nor politians can keep you safe...stop thinking they can.

[ekauqodielak]

May 23, 2020 17:11:59 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

K...you dissapoint me.

For someone who says he doesn't easily believe in black vs. white and good vs. evil narratives...it seems you do indded fall for the left vs. right narrative.

You spew leftist media/political talking points as if they wete gospel!

Your "death" numbers are miniscule...not that I am saying they are meaningless our that those who have died from Covid-19 don't matter.

But look at it realistically...the death numbets are weak...more people are recovering than dying.

Look at how many people die from the flu worldwide every year (250,000 to 500,000).

Now compare those numbers annually since the beginning of modern CDC reports and you will see plainly that Covid-19 is media/political fear based propaganda.

Is Covid-19 killing people? Yes it is...but it is not the "killer" they make it out to be!

Where are these media whores and politicians at when people are dying from annual Influenza,csncer,car acciddnts,heart disease,automobile accidents,etc?

They are nowhere to be found!

The media and politicians only care about an issue when it can be used to further their own politial goals and power!

K...please stop drinking the media and politicians propaganda kool-aid that only robs you of your own personal power and demands you to stay afraid and to live your life in fear!

Governments...nor politians can keep you safe...stop thinking they can.

I'm going to ask you, again: How is it that you are unable to differentiate between Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Clarence Thomas? It's not a rhetorical question. I'm asking you, specifically, to articulate what you conceive as being the same about these two people, besides their both being Supreme Court Judges. In parallel worlds, where the unrelentingly opposing case rulings these two have made were all decided according to their determinations, how would the results have been the same and, by that, I mean the actual effects on people's lives? Laws change lives.

Bothersiderism *is* propaganda. And my first encounter with it was with Ralph Nader, who convinced me, at 18, that there was no difference between stacking the courts with judges who resolutely side against civil rights and those who judge in favor of human equity. The lie of 'they're all corrupt' was packaged nicely, facts were buried inside shiny fictions, he had cool special guests at his Mad Sq Garden rally and I was naive and they were telling me what I wanted to hear: an easy explanation.

'Both sides are the same' is a premise that only functions in the abstract, held in a void, and divorced from all reality and repercussions. It's a premise that holds up to absolutely no scrutiny. It's a fucking bumper sticker. A stubbed toe is not a broken leg. 

There is a world of difference in the ethics and work done by Adam Schiff and Jim Jordan; one cut his teeth as a prosecutor taking down the mob, the other covered up sexual abuse of minors while he was a gym teacher. They're not just French and Chinese, they're fucking avocados and pink slime.

To claim a vote for H. Clinton would have been the same as a vote for D. Trump, is to assert a belief that Clinton would have, for instance, over-turned the EPA clean water rules, at the behest of corporate polluters, and would, currently, in the midst of a global plague, be fighting in court to over-turn the ACA, in the aim of revoking access to health care for tens of millions of middle and low income citizens for the benefit of insurance companies, as Trump has done and is doing; that's a laughable claim, but it's also an intellectually lazy position to take and serves a disingenuous argument that can only be made in bad faith.

Are you really still so blinded by this False Equivalence brainwashing, these flimsy fictions that even the fucking Bernie (Nader 2.0) Bros have admitted are garbage and the Moscow Keyboard Mercenaries have moved on from due to lack of persuasive edge? Or are you just clinging to it because you'd have to adjust your entire world view and that sounds intimidating and exhausting?

These talking points you're regurgitating, ad nauseam, like a needle stuck in a groove, are no different than those who believed Bush/Cheney/Powell about WMD or the PID '66 Hardliners. Both groups were spoonfed an invented a narrative and attempted to fix the facts to that narrative. Both proposals were conceived to hoodwink the public. Those who bought in, ignored and discarded inconvenient and obvious truths that conflicted with the falsely obtained 'conclusion', just like the death toll math that you could easily do, yourself, in an hour, but won't.

One way to make sure that you *never* find The Truth is to work a problem backward. You don't dig your heels in on an unproven possibility being the only and absolute answer before doing the investigation. You haven't even examined the crime scene. We're living in the crime scene. And you're painting the walls and ripping out the carpet instead of taking fingerprints or witness statements.

You're more than welcome to live in a lie that justifies, for you, your sense of emotional and practical impotence, this ginned up nightmarescape that comforts you by letting you off the hook, abdicating all personal responsibility for the state of the world and your life, a place where the powerlessness you *feel* is real not because you've simply failed at various endeavors and the nature of the universe is chaos, but because, like in a video game or the Bible, there's an omniscient, omnipotent Big Bad out to subjugate you. How could you possibly win against *that*, right? Better to not even try…which is, yet, another demoralizing Internet Research Agency talking point.

There are no Big Bads or superheroes, there are only imperfect individuals, some with much better ethics than others, making choices every day.

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

By Elizabeth Kolbert

February 20, 2017

The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight. Illustration by Gérard DuBois


In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.

Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.

As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.

“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”

A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. The students were handed packets of information about a pair of firefighters, Frank K. and George H. Frank’s bio noted that, among other things, he had a baby daughter and he liked to scuba dive. George had a small son and played golf. The packets also included the men’s responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. According to one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option. In the other version, Frank also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on report” by his supervisors several times. Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighter would have? The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from.

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments. One of the most famous of these was conducted, again, at Stanford. For this experiment, researchers rounded up a group of students who had opposing opinions about capital punishment. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on crime.

The students were asked to respond to two studies. One provided data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that called it into question. Both studies—you guessed it—were made up, and had been designed to present what were, objectively speaking, equally compelling statistics. The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.

In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems, along with their answer and the answer of another participant, who’d come to a different conclusion. Once again, they were given the chance to change their responses. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as someone else’s were actually their own, and vice versa. About half the participants realized what was going on. Among the other half, suddenly people became a lot more critical. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses that they’d earlier been satisfied with.

This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists. They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.

Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?

In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)

Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.

Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

“This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” Sloman and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.

Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”

One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring.

[ekauqodielak]

May 24th, 2020:

98,683 Americans officially dead from CV-19

[timmyb52]

May 24, 2020 3:07:48 GMT -5 ekauqodielak said:

May 23, 2020 17:11:59 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

K...you dissapoint me.

For someone who says he doesn't easily believe in black vs. white and good vs. evil narratives...it seems you do indded fall for the left vs. right narrative.

You spew leftist media/political talking points as if they wete gospel!

Your "death" numbers are miniscule...not that I am saying they are meaningless our that those who have died from Covid-19 don't matter.

But look at it realistically...the death numbets are weak...more people are recovering than dying.

Look at how many people die from the flu worldwide every year (250,000 to 500,000).

Now compare those numbers annually since the beginning of modern CDC reports and you will see plainly that Covid-19 is media/political fear based propaganda.

Is Covid-19 killing people? Yes it is...but it is not the "killer" they make it out to be!

Where are these media whores and politicians at when people are dying from annual Influenza,csncer,car acciddnts,heart disease,automobile accidents,etc?

They are nowhere to be found!

The media and politicians only care about an issue when it can be used to further their own politial goals and power!

K...please stop drinking the media and politicians propaganda kool-aid that only robs you of your own personal power and demands you to stay afraid and to live your life in fear!

Governments...nor politians can keep you safe...stop thinking they can.

I'm going to ask you, again: How is it that you are unable to differentiate between Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Clarence Thomas? It's not a rhetorical question. I'm asking you, specifically, to articulate what you conceive as being the same about these two people, besides their both being Supreme Court Judges. In parallel worlds, where the unrelentingly opposing case rulings these two have made were all decided according to their determinations, how would the results have been the same and, by that, I mean the actual effects on people's lives? Laws change lives.

Bothersiderism *is* propaganda. And my first encounter with it was with Ralph Nader, who convinced me, at 18, that there was no difference between stacking the courts with judges who resolutely side against civil rights and those who judge in favor of human equity. The lie of 'they're all corrupt' was packaged nicely, facts were buried inside shiny fictions, he had cool special guests at his Mad Sq Garden rally and I was naive and they were telling me what I wanted to hear: an easy explanation.

'Both sides are the same' is a premise that only functions in the abstract, held in a void, and divorced from all reality and repercussions. It's a premise that holds up to absolutely no scrutiny. It's a fucking bumper sticker. A stubbed toe is not a broken leg. 

There is a world of difference in the ethics and work done by Adam Schiff and Jim Jordan; one cut his teeth as a prosecutor taking down the mob, the other covered up sexual abuse of minors while he was a gym teacher. They're not just French and Chinese, they're fucking avocados and pink slime.

To claim a vote for H. Clinton would have been the same as a vote for D. Trump, is to assert a belief that Clinton would have, for instance, over-turned the EPA clean water rules, at the behest of corporate polluters, and would, currently, in the midst of a global plague, be fighting in court to over-turn the ACA, in the aim of revoking access to health care for tens of millions of middle and low income citizens for the benefit of insurance companies, as Trump has done and is doing; that's a laughable claim, but it's also an intellectually lazy position to take and serves a disingenuous argument that can only be made in bad faith.

Are you really still so blinded by this False Equivalence brainwashing, these flimsy fictions that even the fucking Bernie (Nader 2.0) Bros have admitted are garbage and the Moscow Keyboard Mercenaries have moved on from due to lack of persuasive edge? Or are you just clinging to it because you'd have to adjust your entire world view and that sounds intimidating and exhausting?

These talking points you're regurgitating, ad nauseam, like a needle stuck in a groove, are no different than those who believed Bush/Cheney/Powell about WMD or the PID '66 Hardliners. Both groups were spoonfed an invented a narrative and attempted to fix the facts to that narrative. Both proposals were conceived to hoodwink the public. Those who bought in, ignored and discarded inconvenient and obvious truths that conflicted with the falsely obtained 'conclusion', just like the death toll math that you could easily do, yourself, in an hour, but won't.

One way to make sure that you *never* find The Truth is to work a problem backward. You don't dig your heels in on an unproven possibility being the only and absolute answer before doing the investigation. You haven't even examined the crime scene. We're living in the crime scene. And you're painting the walls and ripping out the carpet instead of taking fingerprints or witness statements.

You're more than welcome to live in a lie that justifies, for you, your sense of emotional and practical impotence, this ginned up nightmarescape that comforts you by letting you off the hook, abdicating all personal responsibility for the state of the world and your life, a place where the powerlessness you *feel* is real not because you've simply failed at various endeavors and the nature of the universe is chaos, but because, like in a video game or the Bible, there's an omniscient, omnipotent Big Bad out to subjugate you. How could you possibly win against *that*, right? Better to not even try…which is, yet, another demoralizing Internet Research Agency talking point.

There are no Big Bads or superheroes, there are only imperfect individuals, some with much better ethics than others, making choices every day.

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

By Elizabeth Kolbert

February 20, 2017

The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight. Illustration by Gérard DuBois


In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.

Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.

As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.

“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”

A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. The students were handed packets of information about a pair of firefighters, Frank K. and George H. Frank’s bio noted that, among other things, he had a baby daughter and he liked to scuba dive. George had a small son and played golf. The packets also included the men’s responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. According to one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option. In the other version, Frank also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on report” by his supervisors several times. Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighter would have? The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from.

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments. One of the most famous of these was conducted, again, at Stanford. For this experiment, researchers rounded up a group of students who had opposing opinions about capital punishment. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on crime.

The students were asked to respond to two studies. One provided data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that called it into question. Both studies—you guessed it—were made up, and had been designed to present what were, objectively speaking, equally compelling statistics. The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.

In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems, along with their answer and the answer of another participant, who’d come to a different conclusion. Once again, they were given the chance to change their responses. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as someone else’s were actually their own, and vice versa. About half the participants realized what was going on. Among the other half, suddenly people became a lot more critical. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses that they’d earlier been satisfied with.

This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists. They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.

Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?

In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)

Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.

Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

“This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” Sloman and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.

Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”

One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring.

K...your posts and political statements appear to veer hard Left.

That is fine...and that is not what bothers me.

What really cranks my gears is that your dislike and hatred for Trump is so total and  all encompassing that you are unable or unwilling to see the crimes,lies and hypocrisy of those politicians you make excuses for and make out as morally superior?

How can someone claim to hate and despise lying and cheating in others...but yet fails to see it within ones own self or family member?

How come you can see the errors and falsehoods in Trump so clearly...but fail to see them within the Democrat Party?

Hillary/Obama and Biden are not without sin...and it is foolish to think so IMHO.

In fact...it will soon become very plain to all!

What will be said then I wonder? What excuse will lefties  trot out to try and cover- up the crimes and lies of their political messiahs?

But you see...it is all a script...a made for TV movie to fool us into thinking Republicans bad...Democrats good...Democrats bad...Republicans good.

The world will believe...want to believe..that Democrats are evil and Republicans are good.

Someone (The Left) has to appear to fall on its own sword in order to fool the masses.

But in reality...it is just a psy-op to fool us all into thinking that their was a real difference between Left and Right...but there never really was...it was made to just  look like it.

And so...The Left will rename itself,rebuild itself...but it will still in essence just be politicians once again playing the game of Left Vs. Right division.

Who cares about Ruth Ginsberg and Clarence Thomas?

They are products of corrupt Washington...both equal hypocrites and liars. There is  little to no real difference between them IMHO.

Do you really think Ruth cares for you more than Clarence does?

Or that Clarence loves and cares for you more than Ruth does?

How is it that you can so easily present articles that claim Trump is a lying criminal...but yet you fail to present articles that show Biden/Obama/Hillary are criminals also?

Politicians only care about power...nothing more!

Both the Left and Right are using...and continue to use this whole Covid-19 event as a political weapon in order to win an election.

It stinks!

They both are lying,manipulating and using deception to further their own political and personal goals and power.

They are two-sides of the same coin!

How is voting between the lesser of two evils making this country or the world any better?

Play the Left Vs. Right game all you want K...as for me...I refuse to be played!

Saying that my refusal to vote is also a refusal to take personal responsibility is pure bullcrap!

It is trying to "guilt" me into participating in a failed,broken and corrupt system.

My (and others) continued participation only perpetuates this broken system...it doesn't fix it in any way,shape or form...it continues to legitamize it!

Believing goverment and politicians care for you is self-delusional IMHO.

The game is rigged against me...my family and my friends.

How am I responsible for the actions or inactions of anyone other than myself?

When Trump lies and breaks the law...is that my fault...my responsibilty?

When Biden lies and breaks the law...is that also my fault...my responsibility?

Not mine! I didn't vote for any of them!

But YES...it is yours... when you have voted for them and their corrupt governmental system.

Politicians are liars...not problem solvers.

If it was the job of politicians to "fix" things...they wouldn't have a job. Over time everything would be "fixed" and there would be no reason anymore to have politicians.

No...the job of a politician is to ensure misery,woe and hopelessness...but especially division!

This benefits no one but themselves...and that is the way they like it.

Watching us sheep fight and choose sides over them.

Meanwhile...they sit back and laugh amongst themselves that their divisive tactics have worked again.

Fuck the Democrats and Fuck the Republicans...the Washington swamp only cares about itself...not you...nor me!

And that is how I will continue to believe until a real politician (or law enforcement agency) comes forward and truly exposes all the corruption and proves me wrong.

But I'm not holding my breath. You are free to believe in political saviors who will come and save you...that is fine...believe what you will.

Do I sound like a broken record K? Yes...but so do you! It is best for us to agree to disagree my friend.