In the case of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, most of the deaths occurred during the second wave of the disease that occurred towards the end of that year and it was feared that the current pandemic might follow a similar pattern. That fear may be coming true. This graph tracks the number of new confirmed cases per week in the US for the current pandemic.
You may recall that I would post the contents of the emails that I would get from the Trump campaign where they would appeal to me as one of his greatest supporters, someone he depended upon to advise him, even offering to pay for me to go to Washington, DC to meet with him. They would also ask me to send in money or to purchase some cheesy merchandise.
It struck me that I have not received any emails for some time. This surprises me because such fundraising campaigns are relentless and do not stop even when you ask them to.
Have they finally figured out that I am not the greater supporter they thought I was?
Oh well, that’s too bad. Those emails were always good for a laugh.
As more details emerge of the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, and put her on ‘trial’ for her crime of imposing restrictive pandemic mandates that infringe upon the god-given rights of red-blooded Merkins, it appears that the plotters were, to put it gently, not the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree.
[Read more…]
One thing that we should all know by now is to never believe the accounts given by political leaders about major events. They always embellish and even flat out lie to put themselves in the best possible light. You have to wait until the actual records are revealed much later to find out what really happened.The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 is one such event which is often portrayed as the time when the world got closest to nuclear war.
[Read more…]
A man from Texas was convinced that the coronavirus was a hoax and hosted family gatherings that violated the guidelines. You can anticipate what happened. Fourteen of his family members, including him, got infected and two of them died. He too was hospitalized. He now regrets his behavior, saying that he feels like drunk driver who killed members of his own family and he cautions others against acting like him.
[Read more…]
You can see the talk that I gave two days ago here.
I talk for the first 25 minutes and the next 45 minutes are a Q/A with the audience.
As the election gets closer, people tend to increasingly look for indicators as to what the result might be. This has become more of an art form since the failure of polls to predict Trump’s win in 2016 has made people wary of opinion polls. This problem of polling uncertainty may be accentuated this year because the intensity of the hostility generated by Trump may have resulted in people being more circumspect in revealing their views to pollsters.
Polls should not be totally discounted however. One thing that has surprised me is that although this election season has been extremely turbulent, as might be expected with a volatile president who behaves impulsively resulting in one headline-making event after another, since around mid-June the polling has been remarkably stable, even more so than in previous years, as can be seen in this timeline of the predictions of the Economist model that factors into account both polls and the so-called fundamentals of the economy, such as economic and demographic data.
[Read more…]
It is just three weeks before the election on Tuesday, November 3. It is by now pretty obvious that Trump and the Republican Party see their future electoral chances depend not on expanding their base of support beyond that of white and older and more well-to-do people from rural areas but instead on suppressing the vote from every other group. So we see all manner of hurdles thrown up to discourage voter registration and voting that seek to make it disproportionately harder to vote for people who live in areas whom they do not see as likely supporters.
[Read more…]
I occasionally hear reporters and commentators (usually in politics) in the US speak of someone being “on the back foot” by which they mean on the defensive. This always takes me by surprise since, although it is an idiom that I am familiar with, it comes from cricket, a game that few Americans have even the faintest idea about.
Its origins lie in the fact that a cricket batter who steps forward to meet the oncoming ball (i.e., plays it “on the front foot”) is seen as being aggressive, advancing to meet the attacker (the bowler) and taking greater risks since they are reducing the time available to decide how to play the shot. Here is Joe Root, the cricket captain for England, demonstrating one front foot shot.
[Read more…]
