In Search of the Truth

In Search of the Truth

In this extremely political and polarized world, when we read a newspaper or magazine or watch a news report on TV or on cable TV, those of us who are concerned with the actual truth, rather than a biased version of the truth, really need to know the filter through which we are receiving the content.  It does not take a media expert professional to quickly determine that the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, are consistently biased toward the left side of politics.  Similarly, it is readily evident that the Wall Street Journal, National Review and Fox News is slanted to the right side of politics.  Quick surveys of the headlines and chyrons from these sources reaffirms these conclusions

But what about the Associated Press, Reuters, and the myriad other news sources out there?  What is their bias, if any?  What about Google as an online search engine, and Wikipedia as a reference source?  Can we straight-away believe content from these sources?

After years of searching and use, I have found that the media bias fact checking web site is an excellent source for determining the bias of nearly all of the media news sources.  The service has been available since 2015, and has improved with time.  I use this service particularly, when I find an obscure news source that I have not seen before, and have found them to be very accurate in their appraisals of media sources.

This is the link:   https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

Opening the “Methodology” link provides a lot of information on how they rate media outlets.  A search function is provided to look up a specific media outlet, and links are provided for lists of various gradations of media bias.

Turning to online methods, Google searches have been shown to slant the searcher toward left oriented topics, and Wikipedia is similarly slanted left.  An alternate, unbiased search engine with a strange name is “Duckduckgo”, which also does not track your searches.  An alternative to Wikipedia is “Infogalactica”.  An alternative to the Chrome or Edge web browsers is “Bravo”.  Personally, I have found these latter to somewhat pedestrian compared to the more popular, (but left slanted) ones.  If I am really researching something like the truth behind the Russia collusion investigation, I can find very little that is honest in the conventional biased coverage.  In that case, I’ll use Bravo as a web browser, Duckduckgo as a search engine, and Infogalactica as a reference source.  I have tried this.  You would be amazed at the difference that the lack of a leftish bias makes.

Ray Gruszecki

May 16, 2020

Liberty or Safety?

Liberty or Safety?

Benjamin Franklin’s original quote was “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

We are now in a continuing dialogue, which, it seems like almost everything of importance in our country, has become partisan.  Should we open the country and risk more lives being lost to the continuing pandemic, or should we remain shut in and risk economic disaster, not to say loss of lives from continued confinement?

The political left has taken what they deem the “safe” position – keep the country shut down until the danger from Covid-19 passes, or until a vaccine is available, or, coincidentally, until after the presidential election, and Trump is defeated for the dire economic consequences of the country’s economy being shut down.  Leftist extremists, like Governor Whitmer of Michigan, have imposed draconian, totalitarian executive rules, in defiance of Michigan’s legislature, worthy of the worst dictators.  “Narcing” and police action against joggers, park-goers and swimmers is encouraged.  Other states have taken less drastic steps, but still restrict freedoms that are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, for the sake of what they define as “safety”.  The overarching theme of what some deem to be fascist moves by leftist governors is the classic old liberal saw, “we know what’s best for you and your well-being”, so acquiesce to whatever rules we impose, obey our dicta by sheltering in place and keep the country shut down.

The right-wing view is that “all of these rules infringe on our freedoms and liberties which are guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights”.  “It should be up to us how much risk we are willing to assume by leaving confinement and opening up the country”.  Again, the extreme here is corrupting peaceful assemblies and demonstrations by brandishing swastika type signs and carrying AR-15’s.  Responsible opposition takes the form of a Dallas hair salon owner risking jail to oppose a dictatorial district court judge, to Elon Musk opening his Tesla plant in defiance of another dictatorial leftist California shutdown rule.  

There will always be extremes and bad actors on both sides of any issue, particularly one as charged as this one.  No matter what guidance the Trump administration and their scientific and medical advisers propose, and what the governors of the states, impose, there will be loud yowls and editorials, particularly against Trump and any republican governors who have made decisions.  Democrats, of course, will be given a pass, or afforded gobs of praise.  Such is the overwhelming leftist bias of most of our mainstream media. (Wall Street Journal, National Review, Fox News and a few others thankfully excepted).

For most of us in our Covid-19 mandated ovine pens, we are slowly starting to return to some degree of normalcy.  We might be able to get a haircut or visit a beauty salon.  Maybe have a “socially distanced” sit-down meal at a restaurant?  For those of us that are lucky enough to be working at “essential” jobs, some of us are “telecommuting”.  Others are working in hospitals or food supply or defense or health-oriented industries.  30 million Americans are currently unemployed, with some being kept whole (or nearly so), by government financial assistance, which is sporadic and not always timely.   What is so sad to see are the long lines at food banks all over the country.  This is reminiscent of the old socialist and communist regimes of Soviet Russia and China and third world countries, in the twentieth century.

Because of the contagious and virulent and transmissible nature of this novel corona virus, nearly all of the world’s experts told us to mitigate the spread by essentially shutting down virtually all social and economic activity.  We have responsibly (and some say, ovinely), done this for two months now, and it is clearly evident, even to the most vigorous left-wing democrat, that we cannot continue the shutdown, or the world may never recover.  We need to open back up, if necessary, safely, cautiously, in stages as outlined by the federal government scientific and medical advisers.  We need to protect our elderly population, since the virus makes this demographic the highest risk.  But we have to open up, and to be aware that the virus will continue, no matter what we do, until we find a vaccine or vaccines to stop it.

In the last national crisis, when terrorists destroyed the twin towers in Manhattan, we downplayed our partisan politics and were all Americans for a while, in the aftermath.  Would it not be great be during this national emergency pandemic, if we could set aside the “hate Trump” and socialist rhetoric and congressional actions on the one side, and put down our AR-15’s and anti-government symbols on the other side, and all of us, be Americans again?

Ray Gruszecki

May 16, 2014

Killing Life

Killing Life

It is certainly a truism that the Corona virus plague is not only causing difficulties for everyone, people are dying from it.  Responses to these deaths, over 70,000 in the U.S. in early  May, are met with horror in some quarters, with calls to keep the country locked down on the one hand, and on the other hand, reminders that “conventional” flu, driving a car, and many other things we do are as just as dangerous as this virus is, or more so..

Both sides forget the most massive plague in human existence; a plague that dwarfs Covid-19, that dwarfs HIV/AIDS, that dwarfs car fatalities, that makes firearms deaths miniscule by comparison, that in fact kills more than all of the pandemics in recent history.  That plague is the legal killing of unborn and nearly born babies.  That plague is “abortion”.  Abortion has killed more than 46 million helpless infants in the U.S. since 1970, and kills over 600,000 per year  Makes the Corona virus look sort of puny, doesn’t it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_United_States

Abortion is killing helpless life.  It is not a euphemism like “reproductive health”, or “women’s rights”, or “sexual health”, or “removing an unwanted biomass”, or “my body, my choice”.  It is killing the life that science (not religion) tells us starts with the zygote, which contains all of the new being’s DNA, which forms when the egg divides.  Killing the innocent result of extraneous human actions can only be deemed as immoral.

Killing innocent life is legal in this country and in much of the world.  Efforts to curtail some of the more gruesome aspects of abortion purveyor “Planned Parenthood”, like trading in human baby cells and body parts, are met with loud howls of protest from our increasingly Godless, secular left wing.  https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/05/court-hearing-planned-parenthood-employee-admits-trafficking-baby-body-parts/

Remember the Kavanaugh SCOTUS confirmation hearings?  A whole slanderous scenario was concocted by Dianne Feinstein and other congressional leftists and their media allies, to literally crucify Judge Brett Kavanaugh because he was thought to harbor legal opinions that might have been critical of abortion.  The confirmation hearings were made lurid by the irresponsible and fawning left wing media, and all we were exposed to for months were accusations about the “serial rapist”, Judge Kavanaugh.  But the real reason the left went after him with such a vengeance, is the chance that he may have held anti-abortion views.

There may be medically and sociologically valid reasons for aborting a birth, including rape and incest, malformities, etc.  But even in these cases, the unborn child has no input into how it got there.  So, we kill it to assuage our own consternation and guilt at the situation, not because the fetus presents any danger to society.

Roe v Wade drew on the 14^th amendment to define a woman’s right to abortion, but abortion may be restricted by the individual states to varying degrees.  This has created a patchwork of state laws concerning abortion.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States_by_state.

The debate around abortion continues, with heated arguments, and sometimes, violence, from both sides.  The left is locked into die-hard support of abortion, claiming that 70% of the country condones it.  The right, and many religious groups are against it, and working to repeal the laws supporting abortion.  Society waxes and wanes between liberal and more conservative mind sets.  The observation is that we inexorably trend to the more liberal left with time, so one can posit that the killing of life is not yet done in this country.  It may be interrupted at times, but never fully stopped.

Ray Gruszecki

May 5, 2020

Tracking the Corona Virus Data

Tracking the Corona Virus Data

I’ve been tracking the corona virus data for my own use, with my own spread sheets, since March 12^th, when we had 1282 cases and 37 deaths in the country.  As of May 4^th, we have 1,191,014 cases, and 68,679 deaths. 

The data sources that I’ve been using are the New York Times “World-o-meter” daily updates of cases and deaths down to a granularity of counties in the U.S.  I’ve found that this NYT daily compendium includes data from several other sources such as CDC, Johns Hopkins, Bloomberg, NPR and others.  For modelling data references, I’ve used the Bill Gates funded Washington University, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) models that Drs. Brix and Fauci use in the White House briefings.  I have also used published historical data for both “normal” flu seasons, and other pandemics/epidemics in the twentieth century.

At first, I did not observe any of the “flattening” of the world, country, state or county curves that I was tracking.  Cases and deaths just kept increasing.  They were not tapering off at all.  Then, I got some ideas from watching NY Governor Cuomo talk about required hospital beds for the New York City Metropolitan area.  Cuomo’s statisticians were using three day rolling averages to identify this trend.

In early April, I started looking at changes each day of the last three day’s average cases and deaths, and the “flattening” was becoming apparent.  Not a nice, continuous, flattening of the plot.  There were peaks and valleys, but a decreasing trend could be observed, for the world, for the country, and for more granular entities.

This trend continues.  It is really apparent for New York State, the epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S., with the largest concentration of cases and deaths in the New York City Metropolitan area.  The flattening of the three-day rolling average is also apparent for Massachusetts, Texas, and other states and individual counties, but still with substantial “spikes” at times.

Along with many others, I have questioned whether we should have shut down the whole country, (and in fact most of the world) for this corona virus.  I have read and heard the contrarian opinions of eminent doctors from Alabama and Bakersfield, California, make very compelling points about the shut downs. (It does not assuage the abounding conspiracy theories when the big technology companies like Youtube, remove the Bakersfield doctors’ presentation because it does not fit current government thinking).

But try as I may to debunk shutting down the world for a virus, I have to conclude that indeed this virus is extremely contagious, extremely deadly, and that literally, many millions would have died world-wide if we had not listened to the epidemiological experts and curtailed human activity.  It may not have been done as quickly, or as efficiently as it should have been, but I believe that world leaders acted in the best interests of their people, as best they could, with the knowledge they had at the time.

A comparison of Sweden, who did not shut down their economy, with Norway, Denmark and Finland, who shut down, along with most of the rest of the world, clearly shows how taking mitigating steps decreases the spread of the virus.  Data is as of the end of April.

There will always be recriminations and “Monday morning quarterbacking”, to second guess shutdown and startup decisions.  In the U.S., with rampant “Trump-phobia”, no matter what the president did or does is acceptable to the rabid leftist mob.  (And yes, those epithets are well deserved, in light of the leftists’ continuing deceit and hypocrisy).

In looking at these numbers daily, it becomes apparent that this virus is still claiming a lot of lives, both is the U.S., and world-wide.  It flares up suddenly in spots where there is any human activity, pointing up how contagious and deadly it really is, particularly for us older folks.  There may have been some over-reaction to the virus at first, and now, the issue of reopening the country and economy seems to have become politicized, rather than approached with some degree of national cohesion, rationality and dignity.

On a positive note, some therapeutics like Gilead’s Remdesivir have shown promise in mitigating the disease, and there are upwards of seven clinical trials of vaccines against Covid-19, with some experts saying that we might have a working vaccine by the end of the year.

In the meantime, more people will die, no matter what we do.  Obviously, we cannot keep the whole country, and the whole world, shut down long term.  People will also die with this option.  Again, a phased and cautious and mitigated reopening of life in general, seems to be what most states and countries are doing.  There will always be outliers, and we can only hope that these will not prove to be too disruptive.

Ray Gruszecki

May 4, 2020