RUSH: I want to go back to this story from the Washington Examiner, ’cause I have a companion story that goes with it. I mean, the two people that did these stories didn’t realize they are companion stories.
And wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t print the second page so I can’t tell you who… Here. Let’s see. April… This is April 13. Let me find something real quick here, folks. My computer will enable this. I just have to go back to last night. I gotta find it. If I’m gonna use this, I gotta tell you who the hell wrote it.
Okay, let me see where I am here. Oh! Getting close. Getting close. Here we go. Here we go. All right. It’s PJ Media, Sarah Hoyt. All right. So here’s the first piece: “Top Coronavirus Forecaster Warns of ‘Rebound’ if Country Reopens May 1.” This is the guy who’s never been right. None of them have, but this guy’s model is used more than anybody else’s. This is Chris Murray, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
His model has never been right. His range of death now at the top is 61,000; at the low end, 26,000 — and I don’t care what anybody says, every one of these models has factored in social distancing from the beginning. They didn’t add it later. They added it after the first projection of 2.2 million. Then they added social distancing.
They’re trying to get away with saying that they’ve been wrong because they weren’t factoring social distancing. They were. They have been from the get-go. That matters. They have been wrong even with that modifier — and, by the way, it may sound mean to you. I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just telling you, these people haven’t been right.
They haven’t been right about anything yet. Like the climate change models have not been right about anything yet. “The creator of a top U.S. coronavirus model,” who has yet to be right, “warned of a resurgence if social distancing guidelines around the country are eased on May 1. … The model overseen by Murray was used by the White House to predict at the end of March between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths in the United States from the virus, with mitigation.”
And then they revised it, and they used 100,000 to 240,000 to tell us last week was gonna be the apocalypse or the peak. And it wasn’t that bad. They haven’t been close to being right yet, and yet they all still have credibility. It’s a modern tech marvel. They still have credibility, and they have yet to be right. You know what I want to know?
I once — a while ago — suggested, “Bring these modelers to the briefing and let us see the data that they’re using. Let us see what they’re inputting. Let us see the charts. Let us see how they’re arriving at these numbers.” We’re smart enough to follow along. I’d like to know the assumptions that are being used to create the models. I don’t care about their opinions on policy.
I don’t care whether Chris Murray thinks that we can’t reopen on May 1st ’cause there might be a rebound. His models haven’t been right, so how does he know this? Again, folks, I’m not trying to sound mean and disrespectful to these people. Everybody’s trying their best here. But trying your best, like Churchill said, doesn’t matter. You have to do what’s necessary.
We are relying on people who haven’t been right, and now we’re turning to them for policy questions after they haven’t been right in their area of expertise. I don’t really care about Mr. Murray’s opinion on matters of policy whether we reopen or not in case of rebound. Their job is to make accurate projections, predictions.
And when they don’t pan out, they should tell us where the errors were on are — and that should be the end of it. Now, here’s the companion story. Again, it comes from Sarah Hoyt. It’s really a great point too. It comes from Sarah Hoyt at PJ Media, and the title of her piece is, “Modeling COVID-19 and the Lies of Multiculturalism.”
Her point is that these models are treating every human being as identical, every human being as the same. We’re not factoring culture into these models. The models are not factoring culture ’cause they can’t. The models have to assume that everybody is gonna behave identically.
That’s a scary thought because that is a model for socialism and communism governments, that with the use of force, they can require everybody to behave identically — and if you don’t, then you go to reeducation camp or something worse. And that is not a scare tactic, and that is not an exaggeration.
Remember the Chinese Olympics from some years ago, Mr. Snerdley? Remember the opening ceremony and everybody was marveling at the beauty and the synchronization and how marvelously it all came off. And I told everybody it scared me because not one of those people looked any different than anybody else.
Every Chinese person in that opening ceremony dressed identically, made up identically, hair was identical; it was scary. We were looking at mass sameness. And that’s how the synchronization was achieved. Of course, massive practicing and massive penalties if people screwed up during practice.
So let me give you a couple of pull quotes. “The Imperial College of London model that terrified our largely scientifically illiterate politicos and therefore killed the world economy, like every other model that tries to model human behavior, assumed a spherical cow of uniform density in a frictionless vacuum.”
Meaning nobody would push back, nobody would object, everybody would follow instructions, everybody would do exactly the same — and that never happens. We are not the same. We are not equal. We never will be equal. There is no sameness. There is only forced sameness, which is very punitive.
The Imperial College of London model, yet to be right, terrified our largely scientifically illiterate politicians. Meaning, here came the predictions, 2.2 million, then 240,000, they got scared to death and implemented immediate policy, immediate, without even questioning it. They killed the economy. It took three weeks. It’s so scary, it took three weeks to destroy three years of a roaring economy.
Does that not scare the heck out of you? Three weeks of a stand-down order. “Unfortunately, we have willfully” — another pull quote from Sarah Hoyt’s piece — “Unfortunately, we have willfully and on purpose, over the course of the last 50 years, blinded ourselves to one of the most important factors when modeling disease in human populations: culture. We have taught our kids in school that culture is food and clothing.”
Like Nike. You’re culturally hip if you have the right shoes, culturally hip if you eat the right stuff, cultural hip if you go to the right places. Sometimes language can be culture, but not always. “But that culture is inherently the same underneath those trappings. That is what’s assumed by those models, and it is enough of a lie to be a d*mned lie.”
Now, this is a tough case to make. And Sarah Hoyt does a great job in the piece, a very long piece. We will link to it at RushLimbaugh.com. It was published yesterday. But I want to try here because her point is that we get these models projecting how many people are gonna get sick, how many people are gonna die, assuming everybody’s identical, everybody’s the same, gonna behave the same.
“However, culture is the most important – or should be the most important – in modeling the spread of any disease in a human population. Next and almost equal to it should be the physical home of that culture: where do the people live? How dense is the population? How much air do they share? The models for how bad COVID-19 would be, and the measures for mitigating its spread, all, without exception, ignore these factors.”
We assume everybody must live in New York. Everybody must live the dense populations. In other words, there’s no state of Washington model for Texas. Well, there might be, but it doesn’t get used and it’s overshadowed and overused by the nationwide model.
Now, she makes it clear. “I don’t think,” she writes, “COVID-19 is a hoax. … I do think it has got really bad ‘in clusters.’ I also think if you go and look at the clusters, you’ll find that there are reasons why it got exceptionally bad there, but not anywhere else.” Like why is it not bad West Virginia? Why is it not nearly as bad in California as it is in New York? Why is it not nearly as bad originally in the state of Washington as it is elsewhere? Where are there places where it isn’t really bad at all? Is that of no interest to anybody? Or do we sweep that under the rug in order to protect the integrity of the models?
And that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re sweeping the good areas under the rug and not even looking at it with curiosity. It’s akin to the Democrats not even caring to understand who Trump voters are, not even trying to understand why they like Trump. They’re just gonna try to impugn and laugh at ’em and make fun of ’em no matter what. Why isn’t there a serious study and interest in why parts of this country are unaffected, relatively unaffected, compared to the areas where there are massive numbers of cases?
“If you go and look at the clusters, you’ll find that there are reasons why it got exceptionally bad there, but not anywhere else. And it was never going to get as bad anywhere else.” It wasn’t gonna get as bad in West Virginia as it’s in New York. It’s never gonna happen. Why? “The measures should have been taken specifically in those places, without the ruinous cost of crashing the economy.”
In other words, because we’re treating everybody the same and everything the same, we’re treating the economy as a one-size-fits-all, we’re shutting everything down even in places where it was not necessary. Another pull quote from Sarah Hoyt in this piece: “For instance, my friend in Albany, Georgia, tells me he assumes part of the reason it got so bad in his neighborhood (the worst per capita in the U.S. last I looked) is that ‘we are the touchiest, most social people I know,’ i.e., there is a lot of touching and hugging. At a guess, this is the reason it got so bad in Italy, too, but not nearly as bad in Germany, where, frankly, people aren’t that touchy/feely/huggy.”
Did you know that? I didn’t know that about Germany. I didn’t know that. I know in Italy they can’t keep their hands off each other. It’s why George Clooney has a place there. I didn’t know that about Albany, Georgia, which is her point.
“The other thing is that I remember – lost in the flurry of early news – that Spain’s first response to this was the nationalizing of its health care system. Which means that before this ’emergency,’ Spain had (as to an extent even we do) parallel public and private health systems. At the onset of the epidemic, the private health care system was folded into the public. Not only would this have caused the usual difficulty of socialized medicine … but it would also undoubtedly have caused confusion, disorganization, and general mess as many different hierarchies were folded into an overarching one.”
We’ll link to it at RushLimbaugh.com. The segment has come to an end, but it’s a really great point about how the models, not only are they wrong and haven’t been right, they’re not even set up to quantify one of the big, important facts, aspects of American life, and that’s differing cultural behaviors.