Day 854: COVID Karate Kids

The bad cat deals the covidocracy a one-two punch with posts about the fakery that was martial arts before kickboxing—that is, the fakery that was epidemiology before bad cats on the Internet pooled their statistical chops, and the morass of confirmation bias that is public health even today.

From the former post (why public health "experts" never want to fight "the amateurs": what kung fu theater can teach us about public health):

from SAGE to the CDC, the UW to the NIH, it’s been complete and total woo-woo. their models did not just fail, they were so bad they were non-deterministic and could not even replicate their own results.

they rode in on big white woo-woo horses laden with credentials and made bold claims of their prowess and prescience. they legitimately had no idea they were not world champ top of the game stone cold epi-killahs. they had never been outside. it was 15 years of patty cake training to get ready for the gold medal round in olympic boxing.

total misses on swine flu and zika and dengue and “ebola comes to america” had been largely ignored.

they had no idea that they were, in reality, stunningly, embarrassingly bad at this.

and suddenly they were in the big leagues and got knocked out in the first round in front of everyone because they did not know any better than to jump in a ring for which they were unqualified. all their predictions were wrong, their recommendations false and ill advised. it was just jumping around and tossing out jargon and mathiness as though it implied knowing how to fight a disease.

and we watched this kung-fu theater die in real time.

And the latter post (we've reached the "we're not even going to pretend to prove this works, just do as you're told" stage of the pandemic: watch as the messaging shifts once more):

and that’s the stage of public health we are reaching, because they have lost the debate, been trounced on the data, and been caught lying and making up studies over and over but they are still sure they are experts (and there is no safe path down off the tiger onto which they have climbed in any event).

they are not going to change their minds nor in all likelihood can they without internal psychological crisis. imagine the psychic baggage of realizing that you just architected the most damaging and least effective public health response in human history while endlessly grandstanding about your knowledge and insight.

yowsa.

Yowsa, indeed.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a sixth of a percentage point today.