Author: Barry Arrington

The comments to the original Pass me a Corona! post are closed. Additional comments on that topic should be posted below. I will start this post with PaV’s last comments to the prior post [i.e., everything that follows is PaV, not Barry]. Today the paywall for a Spectator USA article has been lifted. The article Read More…

In bygone days the news media enjoyed a great deal of prestige and was trusted by nearly everyone.  Walter Cronkite was called “the most trusted man in America.”  Those days are gone.* A poll last week indicated that the news media are viewed least favorably of 16 major institutions.  It is no wonder.  Vicious partisanship Read More…

The comment edit function. We listen. HT to our wonderful webmaster.

Here is a story from US News about German’s COVID-19 death rate that demonstrates how one should hesitate to draw conclusions from the face of a statistic.  First, some basic math.  The death rate for COVID-19 (indeed any rate) is based on a fraction.  We all learned in grammar school that fractions have two parts:  Read More…

Our interlocutors in the comment thread to Leading Scientist Walks Back Doomsday Claim suggest that the doomsday scientist (Neil Ferguson) who panicked the world did not walk back his claims. They say his new statement is the same as his old statement, so “there is nothing to see here; move along.” Let’s test that claim. Read More…

The Scientist who panicked the world with predictions of up to 2.2 million American deaths now says “never mind.” See here.

I do not think of myself as an optimist. I am way more Eeyore than Pollyanna. Recently, however, I declared there was reason to trust China’s “no new cases” data out of Wuhan. Maybe I was wrong. A friend points me to this article. “EBC News, a Taiwan cable news network, broadcast two such photographs Read More…

Are the numbers from Wuhan too good to be true? Or has the medical community missed that elephant sitting in the corner? This article explores the question. Since the lockdown occurred later than it should have, travellers attending the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations transmitted the infection wherever they went. Most countries have focussed on Read More…

I am using this website as a resource for working out my position on COVID 19. Thank you to everyone who has participated including those who push back at me. The dialectic in play on this site has been very helpful to me and I hope it has been helpful to other participants and to Read More…

This short read on the balance between shutting down the economy and efforts to fight COVID 19 seems right to me. Yes, continue suppression for another couple weeks. But use this time to prepare for a shift to mitigation, meaning the resumption of normalcy for most Americans. We simply can’t go on living like this Read More…

JVL: If we take the CFR for COVID-19 to be 2% . . . it’s a low estimate . . . in order to exceed Barry‘s limit* of 200,000 deaths in the US there would have to be over 10 million cases in the US. Wikipedia says the 2019 estimated population of the US is Read More…

JStanley’s comment here put me in mind of this photograph I took in a Xian market some years ago.

As is his wont, national treasure Upright Biped took materialist Bob O’H to school: Bob @ 63, we can replicate the process without having to resort to adding anything immaterial” Is that right Bob? Okay, let us make you the Director of a research team with unlimited personnel, unlimited time, and unlimited funding. And let Read More…

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Think about this the next Read More…

Some years ago I spent a couple of weeks in Malindi, Kenya.  Early the first morning of my stay, I walked down to the shore to watch the sun rise over the Indian Ocean.  As I stood on the beach taking in the breathtaking beauty, a steady stream of men, most barefoot, ran by.  They Read More…