By Joe Baker
CDC's phony gun statistics
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a typical feel-good government agency in that its name implies it does something it does not do, and in fact, it does just the opposite of what its name implies.
The CDC does not control diseases. Nor does it prevent them. Nor can it, if pressed, provide any actual evidence that it has controlled or prevented a disease. What it does do is give cover for pharmaceuticals to kill on average 106,000 people per year (that's 1.06 million a decade). And it rakes in millions of dollars annually while doing so.
What the CDC does do well is lie and dissemble. So it's not surprising that we learn the CDC is creating phony statistics to be used as fodder for the anti-gun crowd — including those who have a direct impact on U.S. policy through their status as "nonpartisan experts."
The CDC reports that there is a steady rise underway in the number of people killed or injured by guns (although I'm still waiting to see a single instance of a gun getting up and doing anything to anyone). The agency's most recent study shows that between 2015 and 2016, the number of Americans injured nonfatally by a firearm jumped 37 percent — from 85,000 to more than 116,000. It was the largest single-year increase recorded in more than 15 years, according to fivethirtyeight.com.
But data collected by others — like independent public health and criminal justice agencies — show no such uptrend, and in fact show just the opposite. And even the CDC flags its own gun death data with an asterisk, indicating it should be treated as "unstable and potentially unreliable." But the asterisk gets missed or ignored by people looking for any anti-gun fodder.
As fivethirtyeight.com explains, the agency's 2016 estimate of gun injuries is more uncertain than nearly every other type of injury it tracks. Even its estimates of BB gun injuries are more reliable than its calculations for the number of Americans wounded by actual guns.
That's because the CDC uses computer modeling and estimates from data collected from the Consumer Product Safety Commission. In other words, it makes them up out of thin air, much like it does annual flu deaths. And it is skewed because the numbers come primarily from hospitals in high-density urban areas where the gun deaths per capita are grossly out of whack with the rest of the country.
From fivethirtyeight.com:
| Over a dozen public health researchers reviewed The Trace and FiveThirtyEight's analysis and said that the inaccuracy of the CDC gun injury data has serious implications for the national-level understanding of gun violence. "No one should trust the CDC's nonfatal firearm injury point estimates," said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. But many researchers have trusted these numbers, or at least referenced them. Since 2010, at least 50 academic articles have cited the CDC's gun injury estimates. Last year, for example, the American Journal of Epidemiology published a paper that used CDC data to conclude that there was a "hidden epidemic of firearm injury." "For those of us who are doing this kind of research, it's disconcerting," said Priscillia Hunt, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. "With the CDC, there's this general assumption that they are reliable and have good data." Hunt herself cited the estimates in the introduction of a policy paper she published last year. |
And therein lies the danger of this government-sponsored fake news, which is really just anti-gun propaganda.
Yahoo's alternate reality
As the U.S. Senate rolled (or roiled) toward a vote on whether Brett Kavanaugh would be confirmed as associate justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, Yahoo tried one last time to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of wobbly Republican voters this week with a story titled, Brett Kavanaugh vote: the two scenarios that could make or break Trump's legacy.
According to Yahoo's expert analysis, if Kavanaugh is confirmed, women are going to "punish Republican candidates" in November's midterms. If Kavanaugh is not confirmed, Trump will be viewed as a failure and will have to nominate a more "moderate" candidate who "can get bipartisan support" next year, and it's for that reason the process of nominating Kavanaugh has been "rushed."
Both claims are poppycock. The only women who are going to try and "punish Republican candidates" if Kavanaugh is confirmed are those leftist, man-hating feminazis and right- and left-coast statist bedwetters who were already out to "punish" Republican candidates. Anyone paying attention to the women in flyover country will hear that they are absolutely disgusted and appalled by the Democrats' character assassination of Kavanaugh and the damage it's done to his wife and daughters.
And the trope that Kavanaugh's nomination is "rushed" is spurious nonsense. Through 2017, the average length of time to confirm a nominee from the day of his nomination was 25 days. As Bob Livingston told you last month, there weren't even confirmation hearings held for the nation's first 100-plus years. That didn't start until 1939.
But the process has grown ever longer over the years. John G. Roberts was an outlier. His confirmation took just 19 days. Ruth Bader Ginsburg's took 50. Sonia Sotomayor's took 66 days. Stephen G. Breyer's process took 74. Samuel Alito's was 82; Elena Kagan's was 87. Clarence Thomas' took 99. Kavanaugh's nomination is at 95 days, by my count. There's been no rush, and anyone who says it's rushed is lying to you.
Yahoo's second alternate reality
Apparently continuing to lose its mind over Kavanaugh, Yahoo took a video clip from an interview with Senator Lindsey Graham and made it seem as if he was disparaging Christine Blasey Ford, the Democrat operative or pawn (not sure which, just yet) who fabricated the story that Kavanaugh had tried to rape her when she was 15.
While reminding the interviewer how those in the Bill Clinton orbit treated people who Clinton actually tried to sexually assault, Graham quoted Democrat operative James Carville, the serpentheaded degenerate who said of Paula Jones, "This is what you get when you go through a trailer park with a hundred dollar bill."
After about 30 minutes of massive Twitter backlash, Yahoo deleted the tweet. The fake news organization then followed it up with another saying it did not accurately reflect the context of Graham's quote.
Yahoo's social media editor is evidently a master at understatement.
Another waitress, another (phony?) racist note
We have told you in this space about several examples in which a restaurant server waiting on a table of whites was left with no tip and a nasty note indicating that the reason no tip was left was because they hated non-whites. Each of those have turned out to be false.
Well, here's another. And while it hasn't yet proven to be false, I would bet a sack of donuts it turns out to be, if I were of the betting sort. As it is, I'll just eat the sack of donuts while I watch the story unfold.
Jasmine Brewer waits tables for Applebee's in Radcliff, Kentucky. As she told the story to WDRB.com, one fine day last week she waited on a table of four who came into the establishment. But it became clear pretty quickly that something was amiss.
"I asked him how they was doing, went through my little rundown," she said, demonstrating her ability to speak in Ebonics but not English.
"As I was talking to them, they barely said anything to me," Brewer said. "They didn't want to tell me their drinks. They didn't want to tell me their food. One person ordered for the whole table."
She kept it professional WDRB.com says, and brought the food to the group in a timely manner. But, when those customers walked out the doors, and Brewer went to look for a tip, there was no money on the table.
"Instead of a tip, I got a note saying 'we don't tip black people,'" Brewer said.
The message was "upsetting" to her, so she texted her mother to tell her about the experience. Her mom did what any mom would do in this situation; she put it on Facebook.
No doubt the radical leftists and social justice warriors (but I'm being redundant) are asking themselves why the good Jasmine would make up a story like this. Well, Wave 3 news may have the answer. She's getting hundreds of dollars — including $500 from one Father Jim Sichko – from people upset by her plight.
Something about Brewer's story doesn't pass the smell test. Particularly the part about them not wanting to tell her what they wanted to eat and drink. And racists don't call black people "black people." They use a word that rhymes with trigger; like colored. So I'm going to call this fake news.
But here's something politically incorrect that Ms. Brewer won't tell you, but it's something you can verify if you talk to people who have waited tables for any length of time and they are honest, at least in Alabama.
Servers by the dozens have told me for years that the overwhelming majority of black diners don't tip. And it doesn't matter whether their server is white or black. And servers white and black have a code for each other for when a group of blacks comes into the restaurant so they can try and avoid having to serve them. They call them Canadians.
So much for the blue wave
We have heard ad nauseum over the last year or so from the propaganda media that Democrat politicians are going to wax the floor with Republicans in the coming midterms. It's going to be such a banner year for Democrats in the November midterms that Democrats are going to control the House and possibly the Senate and Donald Trump and Kavanaugh will both be impeached, the media and Democrat politicians say.
And for a while the polls — the same ones, I add, that said without a doubt that Hillary would be president — showed a heavy Democrat enthusiasm factor indicating a midterm Republican thumping might be in the offing.
But Democrat politicians did what Democrat politicians are wont to do. They overplayed their hand. In the wake of the high-tech lynching of Kavanaugh, Republican voters are now fired up. NPR just published a poll showing the enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans has disappeared. It's down to 2 points from 10 in favor of the Democrats, which is a statistical tie.
It also means Republicans hold the edge because such polls are always skewed Democrat by 5 to 10 points. It's also telling that several red state Democrats up for reelection in states Trump carried have gone underwater in recent polls.
I'd bet a sack of donuts the Republicans are going to gain Senate seats and hold their own in the House, but I've already eaten them all.
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