By The Numbers - part the ninety second

You want to know who's responsible for political violence? Well, Thomas B. Edsell has gathered the numbers. To the surprise of no one with a brain, it's the MAGAnauts.

He lists many, many studies. The Right Wingnuts come out on top. By a mile. But this is how he writes the punchline:

At 7 p.m. on Sept. 10, the day Kirk was killed, Laura Loomer posted on X:

Charlie Kirk's death will not be in vain. I will be spending my night making everyone I find online who celebrates his death Famous, so prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death. I'm going to make you wish you never opened your mouth.

If Trump, Vance, Miller and Loomer have their way, America will take another step toward becoming a McCarthyite state with the ever-present danger that your colleagues and friends will report your offhand quick-reaction social media posts to government authorities.

As terrible as the killing of Charlie Kirk was, this way of honoring it is repellent.

Just what Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don wants: to out do Kim, Putin, Erdogan, and the rest. And slurping up lots of Bongo Bucks for him and his. It's not just an autocracy, it's a kleptocracy. Buy one for yourself today!!

I Told You So - 15 September 2025

What a monument to Tax Day!! Some Right Wingnut psychopath on Fox said the following

Brian Kilmeade, a longtime host on Fox News, apologized on Sunday for comments he made on a broadcast last week in which he proposed killing mentally ill homeless people by "involuntary lethal injection."

"Just kill 'em," he said.

I guess that doesn't apply to Right Wingnut sociopaths?

If you believe he's really sorry, I've got some nicely naturally watered farm land in Arizona at a good price. You can grow lots of soybeans.

mRNA - New Kid on the Block

Whilst doing a bit of letting my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Googles, I came across this piece by Derek Lowe from 2023. I don't recall if I was a consumer of his writings back then. But it does qualify as a strong fuck you to the RFK crowd. To put it another way: the RFK crowd treats mRNA compounds (not just vaccines) like your average small-molecule drug - Dr. Frankenstein cobbled it together in a beaker in his lab.

mRNA has been in humans forever. It just wasn't until 1960 that the scientists found out it existed. Never before made, my ass. You can't make a vaccine in short order, my ass. 60 years, or thereabouts.

This is a key discovery in getting mRNA vaccine technology to work, and the research along these lines, which had already been going on for years before the coronavirus pandemic, is absolutely a reason why we had effective vaccines available so quickly.

And, just so no one forgets: Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don's OWS had nothing to do with it.

I Told You So - 8 September 2025

Not for nuthin, but AI (as currently implemented) is horseshit. You've read such here a few times before. But... now an AI veteran, is proposing (not for the first time) that the current approach can't work. I could have told you that. Wait... I did.

The current strategy of merely making A.I. bigger is deeply flawed — scientifically, economically and politically. Many things, from regulation to research strategy, must be rethought. One of the keys to this may be training and developing A.I. in ways inspired by the cognitive sciences.

IOW, what we learned in high school: GIGO.

Large language models, which power systems like GPT-5, are nothing more than souped-up statistical regurgitation machines, so they will continue to stumble into problems around truth, hallucinations and reasoning. Scaling would not bring us to the holy grail of A.G.I.

Ah. Another I told you so moment. GIGO. Again. A massive correlation matrix of shit. Way to go Bros.

The government has let A.I. companies lead a charmed life, with almost zero regulation. It now ought to enact legislation that addresses costs and harms unfairly offloaded onto the public — from misinformation to deepfakes, A.I. slop content, cybercrime, copyright infringement, mental health and energy usage.

And, now another I told you so moment: make 'em pay for their externalities. That'll cut into the profit. If there ever is any. (the link has a bunch more links in this sentence; way too lazy to C&P here.)

The cognitive sciences (including psychology, child development, philosophy of mind and linguistics) teach us that intelligence is about more than mere statistical mimicry and suggest three promising ideas for developing A.I. that is reliable enough to be trustworthy, with a much richer intelligence.

He goes on to describe those three ideas. You should read him up. But... I will crow that, taken together, they amount to a RDBMS of ground facts to constrain the correlation matrix. There. I said it. Again. His second idea is nearly explicit:

But as cognitive scientists like Steven Pinker, Elizabeth Spelke and me have emphasized, the human mind is born with some core knowledge of the world that sets us up to grasp more complex concepts.

QED Like any good maths proof.

A Few Stats

By now you've heard about the August Jobs Report. And that it shit the bed. Surprise, surprise. It's even worse than the report that got Dr. McEntarfer fired from BLS. This report was worse. Way worser.

Ok. We all know it was Sleepy Joe's fault. All of it.

But, just so ya know, Here's the report. Some news organs give you more than the top-line results. Most don't give the number that really matters. As you likely do know: this report, and most government stats, are derived from sampling. No government is going to pay for monthly census data. Yikes.

The thing about sampling: it has errors. Census can, too, but that's another episode. Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don and his merry band of fascists bitch and moan when the Damn Gummint data doesn't support their rhetoric. When you're a rabid right wingnut, that happens a lot.

Now, if you go through the report's tables, you'll see all the disaggregated numbers. What you won't see are confidence intervals for each number. What you can find is this

Statistics based on the household and establishment surveys are subject to both sampling and nonsampling error. When a sample, rather than the entire population, is surveyed, there is a chance that the sample estimates may differ from the true population values they represent. The component of this difference that occurs because samples differ by chance is known as sampling error, and its variability is measured by the standard error of the estimate. There is about a 90-percent chance, or level of confidence, that an estimate based on a sample will differ by no more than 1.6 standard errors from the true population value because of sampling error. BLS analyses are generally conducted at the 90-percent level of confidence.

Of some note: typical stat analysis uses 95% CI. Why use 90%? Because the CI is wider. Why is that a good thing? Because the purpose of the CI is to set the interval in which the sample estimate is 'guaranteed' to contain the true population value; for 90% of samples. Sort of. So, the wider the interval, the greater the chance the estimate and true population value will co-exist in that interval. But that also means that the sample estimate can vary over a wide range and still be 'signficant'. CI and stat sig are widely and wildly misused.

So, what do we have for the Jobs Report

For example, the confidence interval for the monthly change in total nonfarm employment from the establishment survey is on the order of plus or minus 136,000. Suppose the estimate of nonfarm employment increases by 50,000 from one month to the next. The 90-percent confidence interval on the monthly change would range from -86,000 to +186,000 (50,000 +/- 136,000). These figures do not mean that the sample results are off by these magnitudes, but rather that there is about a 90-percent chance that the true over-the-month change lies within this interval. Since this range includes values of less than zero, we could not say with confidence that nonfarm employment had, in fact, increased that month. If, however, the reported nonfarm employment rise was 250,000, then all of the values within the 90-percent confidence interval would be greater than zero. In this case, it is likely (at least a 90-percent chance) that nonfarm employment had, in fact, risen that month. At an unemployment rate of around 6.0 percent, the 90-percent confidence interval for the monthly change in unemployment as measured by the household survey is about +/- 300,000, and for the monthly change in the unemployment rate it is about +/- 0.2 percentage point.
[my emphasis]

As you see from the text, SE swamps reported change in employment. Frequently. And so it is for August.

The Greatest Threat - part the seventeenth

If we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any.
-- Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don/2020 on the problem with collecting Covid-19 data. Today, he's got his Office of Data Integrity to deal with such unAmerican activities.

You can be sure that VoA, what's left of it, won't be telling us about the climate change satellites about to be destroyed. Those days are over.

The two satellites provide precise global measurements of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that is warming the world. The data has been used in climate reports issued by both the United States and the United Nations and has been an important resource for other countries as they assess ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Without funding to operate them, the two missions are at risk of going offline along with three older missions — known as Terra, Aqua, and Aura — that are also still producing valuable climate and weather data. Another imperiled mission that monitors the atmosphere, Sage III, has been attached to the International Space Station since 2017.

A satellite can be decommissioned in a number of ways. The youngest missions potentially affected by the president's proposed budget cuts, OCO 3 and SAGE 3, would likely just be turned off, since they are on the space station.

It's easy to call "hoax" if there's no data to expose the lie. A very Trumpian way. The only way.

Stupid is as Stupid Does - part the sixth

Remember this tracing from 2020? It's now X, and closed so I can't see it (you can if you twit I guess), but back then, as twitter, this was an interactive tracing of covid from Florida beach locations to the (mostly) East Coast. Correlation was about as close to 100% as one might expect. Covid went where the beach crowd came from. DeSantis didn't care.

The Fla. surgeon general has gone all batshit crazy, as we should have expected. A quick search reminds that prior to 1909/1914, bad drugs were just commodities. "The damn gummint can't tell me what I can put in my body!! It's my body, God damn it!!"

How long before Fla. makes all opiates and narcotics and psychedelics legal? I mean the inverse is logically correct? Eh?

Don't take your ass to Fla. Not if you want to MAHA. All them preventable diseases will go ever where.