The entire idea of Warhammer 40K was to create a universe so incredibly filled with authoritarianism and horrible ways to die that you won't have to think about which character is the good guy and just get lost in its aesthetics, and it's getting lapped by the American presidency
— Gorilla Warfare (@MenshevikM) May 4, 2020
Let’s just tell them the virus is cancelled!
Look, it’s mostly the darkies and ‘essential workers’ who’ll die — those guys weren’t voting for us anyway. Our own base will believe whatever we tell them, as long as it means they can have their unlimited Chik-Fil-A iced tea refills and Applebee’s salad bar again. And the lamestream Fake News, including the NYTimes and Politico‘s Chris Cillizza, will be only too happy to applaud our ‘savvy’ and pretend the Dems would’ve done the same or worse…
The thing about the virus is that it cannot be mindfucked by political trickery because it does not even possess a brain. https://t.co/CKrN048B8y
— Starfish Who Had Fun For An Hour (@IRHotTakes) May 4, 2020
… The document predicts a sharp increase in both cases and deaths beginning about May 14, according to a copy shared with The Washington Post. The forecast stops at June 1, but shows both daily cases and deaths on an upward trajectory at that point.
The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disavowed the report, although the slides carry the CDC’s logo. The creator of the model said the numbers are unfinished projections shown to the CDC as a work in progress…
One federal official said the data was presented at a recent briefing for the National Response Coordination Center, a part of FEMA, which coordinates federal support during major incidents and emergencies. The official, who was not authorized to discuss internal government briefings, spoke on the condition of anonymity.
It was not immediately clear whether the projections, which also carry the logos of the departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, are based on ramped- up testing, the attempt to reopen some states, the time lag between a rise in cases and deaths or some combination of those factors…
The forecast is at odds with remarks made Sunday evening by Trump, who said the United States could eventually suffer as many as 100,000 deaths. At 3,000 deaths per day and rising, the national total would quickly outstrip that number if the new report is correct.
A senior White House official said the document would not change the White House planning on reopening.
White House officials have been relying on other models to make decisions on reopening, including the IHME model and a “cubic model” prepared by Trump adviser and economist Kevin Hassett and the Council of Economic Advisers.
On Monday, however, the IHME model — widely used by states and heavily relied upon in the past by the White House — also revised its deaths significantly upward to reflect the reopenings in several states.
The IHME model — created by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington — is now estimating that the United States will reach nearly 135,000 deaths by August 1. That number is significantly higher than its mid-April estimate of 60,308 deaths…
We knew it was gonna be a crucial six months, even if we could never have predicted quite *how* crucial.
We really came to this point. I thought Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico was appalling, but this is a scale of evil and incompetence that is difficult to process.
— T.K. of AAK! (@AskAKorean) May 4, 2020
Peale
FFS. On May 14 deaths will stop? My guess is that they’ll just stop allowing anyone to report on things to Fox.
WaterGirl
This is too appalling for words.
lahke
I know that this isn’t the point of the (truly appalling) post, but the use of “darkies” takes me back a bit. It took us until she was 90 years old to break my grandmother (born in 1893) of using that phrase and substituting “colored people,” but here it is again.
Chris T.
It’s the Baghdad Bob approach. “There are no Covid-19 deaths in the US! Those people you see collapsing around you … uhh … uhh … they’re just fainting in awe at the greatness of Trump!”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
this redoubles my determination to see Joe Biden’s Senate office archives
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Well I am damn glad the shelter in place here is tell Jun 1.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Does anybody else think the IMHE model is bullshit?
mrmoshpotato
@Peale: The virus will get tired and just go away I guess. Great googly moogly what a bunch of fuckmooks to borrow one of Mr. Simon’s excellent insults.
The Thin Black Duke
BIDEN 2020: Before Trump Kills Us All.
mrmoshpotato
@Chris T.: They’re resting – eternally.
Seriously, fuck this bastard administration.
dexwood
Monsters. Ghouls. Traitors. The dollar sign, perhaps, is the new Swastika.
dmsilev
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Yes. It’s fundamentally a curve-fit which assumes that the rate at which the death toll will decrease must be the same as the rate it initially increased (ie the curve is symmetrical). That’s a bad assumption, and the modelers have been frantically tweaking their setup to account for how the actual trends have ended up without much luck. The models that start with trying to model underlying effects seem to be more robust.
rikyrah
rikyrah
It is not incompetence.
it is evil.??
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@rikyrah: I am curious to see how Grim, who I always thought was a smart reporter when he was at the Huffington Post, but that’s a lot o words to read about a bunch of very unlikable people
As of Saturday, Jeremy Scahill was still ranting about Nancy Pelosi’s ice cream
Kent
Rachel talked about it today. They are revising their estimates of the level of social distancing in this country and doubling their projected death counts. To the 135,000 range by august.
I don’t think it is bullshit. I think their projection of the level of social distancing turned out to be way too optimistic. Models are only as good as their assumptions.
Another Scott
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): They’re upfront about the parameters they use (4, IIRC), what it’s based on, and the way they were going to adjust it as more data became available. It’s a very simple model based on Wuhan’s experiences (IIRC). Since almost no other country has implemented China’s dramatic lockdown once they had a big outbreak, it’s not surprising that the IHME model is very optimistic. Especially for the USA.
They’re not just making crap up, but their model is very limited.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
DAVID ANDERSON
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): me
Peale
@rikyrah: There is no Democrat civil war. Democrats are all behind Biden. Like we’re not fighting about him. These other people? I don’t know who they are but they aren’t part of the party and they aren’t really all that civil either.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): @Kent: and she said that 135K number assumed greatly increased testing and tracking. I haven’t heard about any realistic plans for tracking, and if you think we’re seeing a lot of Gasden flags now….
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The IHME model is being used by the White House’s coronavirus task force in ways that it wasn’t intended to be used. Additionally the folks at the IHME have been slow to revise the model to changes in actual events. So for the past several weeks it was lagging and now with the recent revision it has jumped in a different direction.
What you need to remember is all models are imperfect and, as a result, often wrong. The question is whether the model you’re using for a specific purpose is acceptable for what you’re applying it to and is therefore not wrong right now. Especially when you’re dealing with a social behavioral problem and for all that SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 are a medical and scientific problem, the pandemic itself is a social behavioral problem. You have to be able to account for how leaders will behave, what decisions will be made and how they will be implemented, and then how everyone will respond. Once you bring humans into the mix, you get a lot more uncertainty. Because, as my former professor and now senior colleague and friend M. Leanne Brown always said “people are squishy”.
Adam L Silverman
@rikyrah: It’s actually somewhere between irredentism and a classic insurgency using guerrilla tactics.
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Maybe Scahill is lactose intolerant?
mrmoshpotato
Ages, I tell you!
Snarki, child of Loki
“Trump White House Has A Cunning Plan”
Nah. Trump is super-stupid compared to Baldric.
mrmoshpotato
@rikyrah: They should just punch each other in the junk. And then throw themselves into the ocean.
John S.
@Adam L Silverman: Or as my philosophy teacher always said, “Communism is a fantastic system – until you introduce people into it.”
Adam L Silverman
@DAVID ANDERSON: OOOOOO! David Anderson graces us with his presence after 10 PM. It’s like Anderson on Insurance After Dark!
sukabi
@rikyrah: it’s both. The incompetence is the drumpf crews state of being, they’re all a bunch of failsons. They also happen to be evil, sociopathy and greed are their first and only state.
Adam L Silverman
@John S.: Pretty much. Marx was a very good diagnostician. The problem is that his prescription is almost always guaranteed to kill the patient.
Cheryl Rofer
@dmsilev: Nate Silver agrees!
rikyrah
@mrmoshpotato:
Saw that yesterday???
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Adam L Silverman: Yes, Marx was correct about the instability in Capitalism. Just destroying and replacing it with, something…don’t ask about the details, doesn’t work.
rikyrah
@Adam L Silverman:
?????
MisterForkbeard
@Cheryl Rofer: Sonofa…
Redshift
@Snarki, child of Loki:
Baldric is smart enough to know he’s stupid. Trump can’t even manage that.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@MisterForkbeard: Why is this a surprise; ask your self what is the dumbest, more pathetically lazy and transparent thing the Trump admin can do and they are sure to do it.
It’s hard to believe someone gets out of bed in the morning thinking “how can I screw up today?” but there it is.
Anne Laurie
@rikyrah: ‘Democratic Civil War’, my saggy white arse.
We’re a big-tent party besieged on both sides, by the official Republican party and the horseshoe anybody-but-those-bougie-liberals DSA ‘progressives’… both of them cheered on by the Media Village Idiots, such as for instance Politico.
Redshift
@Peale:
There is a “Democrat civil war” in exactly the same sense as there is great conflict over stay-at-home orders, in that in one side there’s a small loud group that has delusions that the masses agree with them, and in the other side there is a large majority who wouldn’t even know there’s a conflict if not for the outsized coverage given to the small loud group.
danielx
@Adam L Silverman:
Truth. Read someplace once that Marxism as an actual political/economic operating system was a complete failure, but Marxism works just fine as an analytical tool.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: Not that Kevin Hassett is a good economist, but it tells you just how shitty an economist he is to build and rely on a model made in Excel?
Adam L Silverman
@rikyrah: Rated Balloon Juice-MA for graphic language, graphic language that describes graphic violence, and adult situations.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
The national punditry has a narrative that there is a ‘progressive wing’ of the Democratic Party that is in conflict with a ‘moderate wing’, and they stick to that narrative like glue. It’s bullshit. Our divisions fall on completely different lines, which is why Warren’s voters did not go to Sanders when she dropped out. Meanwhile, the assholes attacking Biden now are not Democrats, never vote Democrat, and most likely would not have voted Democrat if Sanders was nominated.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I wonder if Trump is jealous of that jagoff in Brazil over who can be King Death in this pandemic, Brazil is now #2 after the US deaths per day.
rp
Anyone read Lyz lenz’s garbage op ed on Biden?
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
dmsilev
@Cheryl Rofer: That’s the White House alleged ‘cubic’ model. The IHME model, for all its faults, isn’t anywhere near that stupid. It doesn’t, for starters, predict that the death rate will become sharply negative after May 15.
(yes, zombies. Did anyone really think we’d escape this without zombies?)
Adam L Silverman
@danielx: Some of the most compelling and empirically valid, provided you can get criticalists that have good methodological training, analyses and assessments of political, social, and economic issues come from the criticalists. Who all have tenure and live in the suburbs and have 401ks with a good match from their universities. It is far easier to be the intellectual vanguard of the proletariat if you’ve got a 3 bedroom, 2 and 1/2 bath house in a nice neighborhood with 2 cars and disposable income!
The real problem with Marx’s prescription is that even in the places where he thought the revolution could occur – Germany or the US – scarcity still hasn’t been eliminated. And in the place where the experiment was first run, Russia, all they had was scarcity. The only two things they had a surplus of in 1917 was hemophiliac nobles and starving peasants.
mrmoshpotato
@rikyrah: Buddy of mine pointed out the rope around the monkey’s neck, so it wasn’t a kidnapping-by-monkey apparently.
Feathers
@Adam L Silverman: Tools of analysis are not revealers of truth. This was the best takeaway from my yearlong course on literary theory. Namely that you can do all the post-modernist Marxist slicing and dicing that you want, but that you have to remember that it is meaningless compared to what exists in the real world.
Mary G
You knew this would be the strategy the minute it became apparent that black, brown, old, disabled, and incarcerated people were way more likely to die. Getting rid of us is a feature, not a bug in Republicans’ world. Half the time I am not at all sure it won’t work, especially if good treatments are developed and made available with the 33% copay that’s standard in Medicare Part D plans.
Drug companies will give assistance to the squeaky wheels like me, who can pass the paperwork obstacle course and threaten to go to the media after getting denied three times.
mrmoshpotato
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I remember in high school history class learning that the revolutions go on until you reach “pure communism.” What “pure communism” is was never defined.
Redshift
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I actually met Grim at Marcy Wheeler’s book party, I think, and he interviewed me for a short piece about the FDL commenter community in Politico. (Woo, I’m famous!)
He seemed like an okay guy, a little too willing to write the kind of piece Politico wanted (in general, not in my case), so I wouldn’t necessarily call him a good journalist, but not bad.
Because of that, I ended up on his newsletter list as he migrated to The Intercept and became a rabid Berner, sending nonstop stories about the establishment screwing over Bernie and the perfect proposals from The Squad that were being squashed by Nancy Pelosi to serve big money. I held on until a few weeks ago and finally unsubscribed. It may have been the Tara Reade thing, or something else, I don’t remember.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: We have a model that assumes some collective social behavior being used as an excuse to avoid that very behavior. The model is destroying its own predictions.
Achrachno
@Adam L Silverman: I think we should consider democracy. The present system is about as bad as Marx’s scheme, whatever that was supposed to be.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@rp:
I see it being retweeted, endorsed and mocked, but I don’t know who she is. I wonder if she wrote it before or after the AP story from a year ago where Reade said, very clearly and apparently unprompted, that Joe Biden wasn’t the kind of person she now says Joe Biden is.
Fair Economist
Pretty sure the IMHE model was just revised to allow the possibility of slower post-peak decreases than observed in Wuhan. Previously it assumed all epidemic would decay at the Wuhan rate, which is ridiculous.
It’s just a blind curve-fitting model with no recognition of policy or epidemiological parameters other than observed cases and deaths.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Ice cream?
What’s that about?
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: Entropy is a bitch!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Redshift:
interesting, I didn’t know he was with Politico. And I would bet that was in the Vande Hei era, when I’m sure the pressure to be right-brodeorist was considerable (I think Politico has improved since JVH and Mike Allen left)
John Revolta
@mrmoshpotato: Well, the State withers away, see, and they take and drown it in a bathtub…………no, wait……….
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Nancy Pelosi did a remote hit with one the late night shows, one of the Jimmys, as Letterman used to say, and she made a joke about how she copes with social isolation with ice cream, and showed off a fancy freezer packed with fancy ice cream. Scahill and a number of Rose Twitters went nuts about “that’s why trump won!”. Scahill banged on about for a couple of days. Her Justice Democrat primary challenger unironically tweeted out a picture of himself heating up leftovers to show how a real revolutionary eats.
danielx
@Adam L Silverman:
You can build (some) models in Excel, just like you can (eventually) cut down an oak tree with a Swiss Army knife. There are a lot better tools around; I’ve used SPSS and SAS and they were much better for model development and data analysis.
Feathers
@mrmoshpotato: A good way to think of Marxist theoretical analysis is as the opposite of Plato/Aristole/Augustine/Christianity. Namely, Christian thought holds that the suffering of mankind on earth does not matter, because we will reach the perfection of heaven after death. Marx said bullshit to that. Any illusions you have that life on earth is good are worthless if suffering exists (AKA false consciousness). The problem with this is that there is, and always will be, suffering. So you just get into an vicious circle where everything is terrible and can never not be terrible, as long as humans are involved.
That said, looking at something to see who is hurting and why, is a great way to look at a problem to see what is going on. Or in a literary text, to see what is being ignored, how does the work reflect the real world and why are the differences important?
Brantl
I think considering his intellectual stature, that should be “Death Imp”.
Bill Arnold
The Aztec were lightweights compared to D.J. Trump and his soulless minions, and their empire fell[1].
Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital (Lizzie WadeJun. 21, 2018 , 2:00 PM)
D.J. Trump fears a similar fate, and mass “sacrifice”, of us, is the fix He has Chosen for Himself. (Seriously, the contemporary theology supportative of these moves is nasty.)
[1] Glossing over some interesting history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Aztec_Empire
Adam L Silverman
@danielx: I’m aware.
TriassicSands
Corrected for accuracy, although any number up to 7+ billion could probably be inserted. The only reason Trump would care about the number of deaths would be when it started to cut into his profits. If the number got out of hand, he’d just invest in crematoriums (or crematoria, if you prefer), body bags, etc.
BigJimSlade
Not this again. Wash, rinse and restate every 3 months… the Friedman Unit rides again.
Cheryl Rofer
@Adam L Silverman: It didn’t even occur to me that they were talking about Excel!
Cheryl Rofer
@dmsilev:
Exactly
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Karen Tumulty, Peter Beinart and Andrew Kaczynski wrote this script for Fredo to follow
BigJimSlade
@Snarki, child of Loki: Baldrick!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsXKS8Nyu8Q
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: It is hard to fathom being that galactically bad at one’s profession.
trollhattan
3,000 dead. Per day. Because incompetence and bullheadedness.
Town I was born in had about 2,000, today has fewer than 1,000. Round up two such towns per day to feed Trump’s coronavirus response strategy. The kicker: my old town is in Rep. Steve King’s district. You first, sir, head of the line is reserved for you.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I see. nihilist version of mustard on cheeseburger.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Fair Economist:
@dmsilev:
Have to say I agree with you two
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The think I love about this, what does the White House have to do with these Shelter In Place orders? They are all at the state level. Of course it doesn’t change their plans since it’s fantasy football anyway.
Uncle Cosmo
FFS, I’m going to keep calling you “HiHo” Silverman until you stop making arrogantly stupid comments like this.
I used MS-Excel to advantage many times during my working career as an applied mathematician/statistician and math modeler. It has its limitations (and its advantages) like any other piece of software, & informative mathematical models may be readily constructed, exercised and fiddled with using it, so long as the modeler understands those limitations.
I also spent several years doing that sort of work for a group of research economists, and TBH, I no longer trust the vast majority of them to look out the window & tell me if it’s raining. If there’s a problem with Hassett’s modeling, nine gets you ten the cause is that he has no fucking clue about what he thinks he’s doing.
Jado
@mrmoshpotato:
They’re pining for the fjords!!