Even More and More Lies My President Told Me.

                   Even More and More Lies my President Told Me (and you and all of us!)

        Unlike my earlier “lies…etc.” posts, all the prevarications discussed today came from one 40 minute interview ( I prefer the term “burst of bull flatus”) which Trump was stupid enough to do and allow to be broadcast on HBO (Axios filmed it on July 28 and it aired on HBO Aug. 3). I say stupid enough because, if one watches it on HBO, there is no Faux News talking head to explain why the lies are really not lies or a Kellyanne Conway to “walk the statement back” and explain that it is was really not her moronic employer meant to say.

       I’ll start with one of the worst simply because it is vintage Trumpian dog whistle pandering to his White Supremacist base.

"Police have killed white people. In a larger number, police have killed white people."

        This is a vintage Trump deception, generally intended as a defense of the (factual) charge that cops shoot unarmed Blacks at an inordinately large rate. In the absence of context, the statement is true. It is also a favorite claim of the “anti-BLM” folks and is even cited occasionally by Black conservatives. It is actually vintage “ad speak,” in that you never get the contextual data which proves the lie. It’s like the large “40% more flavor” statement on a “new and better” dog food, without the rest of the story which is, “40% more flavor” than what? (cardboard or something else equally bland? You get the picture)

       The context here is everything. While the raw data is accurate, the statistic, as quoted is meaningless.What gives meaning here is the fact that Black people account for just under 13% of all Americans, while 60.4 % self-identify as “White.”  By this metric, if these heinous miscarriages of justice were “color blind”, we should expect to see about 4.6 times as many Whites killed as Blacks. Statistically, that is far from the truth.

       In 2019, 403 white people were shot and killed by police in the line of duty, compared with 250 Black people, according to the Washington Post tally from law enforcement sources. But as the real numbers indicate, the rate at which Black Americans are killed by police is significantly higher. The total number of fatal LEO involved shootings in 2019 was 653. If lethal force had been administered evenly, one would expect just 85, or so, of those deaths to be Black individuals. Reality shows that almost three times that number were killed than their proportion of society should indicate. In truth, I’m not sure Trump even understands the depth of the deception here.

"You can test too much, read the manuals… read the books."

        Of course, Trump is referring to CoVid19 testing here and attempting to defend the real statistic which, as today’s (8/5/2020) news shows, is that the US leads the world in Coronavirus deaths by a sizeable margin with over 155,000. We are just short of 5 million confirmed cases, with about 60,000 new cases repeated daily.

        So where are the lies here? First, “What manuals?”  This from the man who never reads his daily security briefs. I thought this was merely a preference, but as I saw him struggle last night with words like “Yosemite,” (mispronouncing it twice in two attempts) I realize he just doesn’t read well. Trump here is doing what he does so often, which is to make a vague reference to a generic source, the objective of which is to shift blame to a shadowy “them,”  rather than leave it where it should reside.

        The carping about testing is primarily a ruse to divert attention from the fact that Americans, especially Trump’s power base of deplorables, augmented by equally deplorable Fundamentalist Evangelicals who apparently think Covid can be “blown away,” are responsible for the rapid surge in positive cases. One quick daily news example, AP reported: A South Dakota “Christian Youth Summer camp,” requiring apparently little or no concession to the virus, has 96 positives (so far) out of just over 300 attendees. OR The woman in St. Louis who pepper sprayed pizza restaurant employees who asked her to leave because she refused to wear a mask. When the Cheetoh in Chief shills for false cures and eschews the use of a mask for months on end and his sycophants follow suit, it is predictable.

        Of course, none of this is due to Trump’s criminal negligence or abysmal failure to lead, while discrediting actual skilled medical authorities. First, it was due to “The terrible testing rule the Obama administration left us” (Trump, March 4: I just want to add, if I might — and to go a little bit further — the Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing.”  This is/was pure hogwash, but typical of Trump “Obama shaming.”  But now, it’s “that damned testing!”

        "You don’t know" that South Korea had 300 deaths, "and they have spikes."

        To keep this to manageable size, I’ll end with just one more of the many bullshit Trumpian statements from the interview. It begins with a favorite Trump tactic – the implication that he possesses information to which the rest of us aren’t privy, so we should believe it because he says it.  In the case of Covid19 data, Johns Hopkins and others have, from before Trump even really understood the problem, tracked world data and had it available to anyone who cared to look. The “you don’t know” line is meant to make the observer believe that what follows is true and significant.  Neither is categorically true or, moreover, remotely significant true in this case.

       As of today, and as shown for more than 5 months of daily updated data, South Korea’s Covid involvement is available at the click of a mouse. South Korea has (as of today, 8/5/2020) 14,456 confirmed cases and just 302 deaths. That is a death rate per case of .02%. The current US rate of deaths per case is over .03%, so referring to Korea in a negative is ludicrous.

 And since you know I like real data, here’s some Trump “overlooked.”

                                                S Korea                 US 

Population:                             51.6 mil               328 mil

Pop. dens. per square mi.      1366/mi                92/mi

Pop. dens. largest city           42,000!                 27,013    

Ratio of population         328 mil/51.6 mil     US 6.3 times pop         

Number of cases:                  14,466                   4,772,027

Number of deaths:                 302                        156,840   

        Summing up the extrapolations from these real (as in today) figures we see some real eye openers. The first is that the only fair way to evaluate how effectively the virus is being dealt with is to compare apples to apples. So, taking the ration of populations of the US and S Korea, one fact which leaps out is that South Koreans are packed much more closely in the largest city (Seoul), and in fact in the entire nation, with a national population density of  14 times higher than the US. This is partially offset by the fact that we (US) have a lot of wide open and empty space, so comparing population ratios is a far better way to evaluate the data. On that basis the US has 6.3 times as many souls as S. Korea, so we can apply that ratio to S. Korea’s data to legitimately compare how our two nations are doing in combatting Covid.

        Simply put, if I multiply S. Korean numbers by the 6.3 X  population ratio, if both nations are combatting this pandemic equally well, the S. Korean numbers multiplied by 6.3 should equal or at least be close to US numbers.

       Doing the simple math analysis described above reveals a vastly different result. If we and South Korea were having the same success rate, adjusted for population difference, South Korea would have about the same number of deaths (in the vicinity of 156,000), however that number is only 6.3 X 302, or 1903!  Likewise, the number of cases S. Korea would have should be about the same as the US at almost 5 million.  In truth, however, applying the ratio 6.3 X 14,466 yields just 91,136!  

        Reduced to plain language, even with accounting for the difference in population, S. Korea is still doing 52 times better in controlling the number of cases and 82 times better in limiting the deaths from these cases. Like all statistics there are caveats. For these numbers there are several we have to acknowledge. First, the lifestyles of many Americans, from diet to fitness to racial predispositions have an effect on the number of deaths, although not the number of cases. More important, and this is why Trump should have never opened his mouth re: S. Korea, is the fact that as a national policy and as a people, they have responded with leadership and taken sound medical advice to successfully minimize the inevitable  effects of this global pandemic.

         There have been a large number of variables regarding this unprecedented plague which were difficult to analyze and control. Donald Trump and his cohort of science naysayers have failed at the one which was absolutely controllable. If Trump had stressed masks and distancing from the beginning and believed those who touted their necessity, there was high probability that his followers would have complied.  He failed to lead, placing the economy above human lives. Predictably, his more doctrinally slavish political sycophants, such as our moronic Florida governor, have followed suit. The nation is paying the price in blood.