The 3-shirts guy?
Huh?
Bannon is fond of the layered look.
Individual 1 says the results of the election may take years to be resolved. I guess he’ll just stick around in the White House till then.
round up the usual suspects, then prepare for the next wave of chirohomeopuncture
So it’s possible that Hillary Clinton is actually President.
Fauci’s basic position is that he can only tell anyone what the safest course of action is, vis-a-vis not contracting Coronavirus. He doesn’t speak for anything else and that it’s on others to decide whether there are other concerns in the world which should also be considered, when deciding government policy.
Likewise, someone like Mnuchin only cares about the economy and can only give advice about the economy.
Fauci says don’t go anywhere, wear a mask, wash your hands, etc. Mnuchin says go to work, send your kids to school. These are both, respectively, the correct answer if your only concern in life was that one thing that the person was answering questions about. Fauci is giving the best answer about how to not get sick (if that’s worth doing) and Mnuchin is giving the best answer about how to save the economy (if that’s worth doing).
In an ideal world, you would have a person in charge who can hear advice from two different people, on two different subjects, and form a plan that might straddle both and blend them in a sensical way. To date, the President has been unable to do that and he just lets Fauci go out telling everyone that everyone is going to die if they leave their home, and he lets Mnuchin go out and tell everyone that they need to pretend like the virus doesn’t exist, and the economy will die if they stay home. Having both of those messages coming out as the official word of the White House, at the same time, is horrific and both tells us that Trump is completely incompetent and has no idea what is going on.
I read Atlas’s letter on The Hill a couple of months ago and it was one of the few things that wasn’t taking an absolutist view on one subject or another and uses genuine numbers.
If Barack Obama was President, he would also not be an expert on epidemics and yet he would still be asked to be the central point of management on the Pandemic as someone who we trust to balance all of the different issues in life. And we would all be fine with him doing that, despite not being an expert in epidemics, because we would trust that he’s listening to experts across all fields - health, economic, military, etc. and that we trust him to take the numbers he’s given, try to come up with ideas to balance concerns, bounce those ideas back off the experts, and form a unified goal between them all.
Atlas’s view is that of someone doing that sort of job - i.e. the job of the President, taking a balanced approach to all concerns, not just one.
If Atlas is given full power to do as he will and, as he goes forward, thinks that his unified strategy across the different concerns is unassailably correct and he will hold that view despite all evidence showing him to be wrong, as he starts to lead us down that path - then we should be concerned.
As it is, we don’t know whether he’ll actually have any power to dictate policy. If not, then he’s simply a voice for a different approach, among the throng. That’s no horrible thing. There is not just one way to skin a cat. And if he is given full power then, for all we know, he will change course if his approach doesn’t prove to work as hoped.
But I did read his letter that he wrote to The Hill a couple of months ago and every number he gave was factual. They’re the same numbers we had out of South Korea in March.
Coronavirus is difficult for people because, on the one hand, it’s barely fatal and on the other hand, run rampant in would kill more people than most things in history. That sort of thing breaks almost everyone’s brain - and definitely everyone who doesn’t understand statistics.
I saw a guy, for example, who claimed that Covid-19 had a 2% fatality rate among healthy people. That number is way too high and yet he was still saying, “You should go out and act normal. It’s only a 2% fatality rate! You’re completely safe!” At 2%, we’re talking 6 million deaths - which is Holocaust territory - before even including what must be a higher fatality rate for non-healthy people.
If you tell someone that they have a 2% chance of survival, they’ll think they’re safe. If you tell them that they’ll die if they roll snake eyes, then they’ll refuse to roll - despite that the odds are about 2%. Snake eyes are likely but 2% isn’t.
And likewise, if you tell someone that Covid-19 will kill 100,000 people in the USA, they’ll go bonkers telling you that everyone and their mother is going to fall over dead if they don’t lock themselves in a sterilized bunker with filtered air systems, even though we’re talking a statistical anomaly in deaths that year which might not even be noticeable on a graph because it would be offset by fewer deaths being attributed to heart disease, diabetes, respiratory distress, etc. that year.
Covid-19’s greatest evolutionary advantage isn’t just that it’s unrecognizable to our immune system. The numbers that it generates just happen to fit in a place that humans, almost universally, are horrible. A small percentage that equates to a large whole number shouldn’t be possible, or brains think, and it breaks us into two camps of stupidity.
The correct person for this job is a statistitian, not a doctor, but Atlas seems to have a natural understanding. That puts him into a miniscule minority.
And, as it is known, the definition of “sanity” is the state of the normal, most average person. That person does not understand statistics - ergo, Atlas is a loon. May he be forced to walk the plank.
I disagree. Atlas will be nothing more than a mouthpiece for what Trump wants, which is what benefits Trump and to hell with anyone else.
Atlas is anti-lockdown and pro “get back to normal”, nevermind that the ONLY countries that have gotten this under control are the ones that locked down hard and followed up with public health measures like contact tracing and tracking.
Do you think a public health expert like Fauci doesn’t understand statistics? That field is all about statistics. People don’t like what Fauci is telling them, but instead of considering that a public health expert might know better than them they go doctor-shopping for someone to tell them what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear.
You mean this letter from 22 April, right?
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-in-stop-the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation
Check out the first sentence:
Aye; sure seems like he has an uncanny ability to suss things out.
The numbers may be factual but his opinions are not and sometimes his opinion, like the one that started his letter, are not supported by the facts.
You mean like Trump, right? Trump thinks he has a “natural understanding” of things; he thinks he understands the disease better than the experts. I’m not persuaded by such a claim, especially when the available evidence indicates differently.
Dr. Atlas is only being brought onboard because Trump thinks he will say things that Trump likes to hear such as “Trump is right; do what he says”. He’s not an infectious disease expert, he’s not a public policy expert, and he has no background in government. The quality that got him any attention at all is echoing Trump, and we don’t need any more of that IMO because that has gotten more than 173,128 Americans killed.
True but only to a point. Fauci is at least an expert epidemiologist. Mnuchin is not an expert economist. Euphemistically, his economic track record is ‘mixed’. Nearly all reputable economists, i.e. not of the talking-head TV variety, agree that the best way to save the economy is to contain the virus.
And that’s the problem. It is not possible to partition the two. A balanced view would not be to “balance” an expert opinion with a non-expert opinion, especially a non-expert opinion that happens to align with one’s own biases. Yet that’s what we’ve continuously been doing for most of a year now.
And relying on Atlas is more of the same - relying on somebody whose non-expert opinion happens to align with Trump’s own biases. The devil can quote statistics to his own purposes as well.
If so, What the Fuck is wrong with her??
And this is what it leads to:
“Listening To Experts Is An Elitist Approach”
We’ve been balancing expertise with idiocy for several years now with predictably terrible results. Yet we continue to do so because we’d collectively rather hear comfortaing lies than hard truths and because Trump is too insecure to ever admit personal failings.
Hell, it’s 40 years old, but this quote by the good doctor is more true today than ever before:
Newsweek: “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, January 21, 1980, p. 19. There is a link after that line on the page, that shows a scanned image of the page of the magazine.
Ha ha, like 1980 was forty years ago. You guys and your elitist ‘facts.’
Surely not the same Newsweek that says Kamala Harris is not a citizen?
It’s hard to believe that isn’t an Onion article; check this out:
Dude… you are their voice. That’s why you got elected. By the voters. To be their voice. How do you not know that?
Next:
Well, okay… so you’re against allowing a small number of fearful people to set policy; that was pretty clear. Please, continue, Sen. Thayn.
Okay… wait. Now you’re the one who’s fearful of something and you’re trying to set policy.
Do these people even listen to themselves? They make no fucking sense; how did they get elected?
Exactly. I’m sure I can find a mathematician who will accept a large government contract to confrim my statement that 1980 was only 20 years ago.
I was born in '80, don’t remind me.
They became Editorialweek about a dozen years ago but didn’t bother changing the masthead.
“I want to make the post office great again” – we’ve seen your pathetic attempts at making America great again.
Meanwhile…