Category Archives: Political Commentary

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Justice

8 Comments

The Justice Department has dropped the case against Michael Flynn.

The next question is whether anyone will be punished for this. Only Durham’s team (and probably Barr) know the answer to that. Also, kudos to the tenacity of Sidney Powell.

[Update a few minutes later]

More from the AP. Note the anti-Trump spin.

[Update a while later]

Here’s how the hacks at AP describe Sidney Powell: “a conservative commentator and outspoken critic of Mueller’s investigation .”

They apparently didn’t think that it was worth noting that she was a former assistant U.S. Attorney at the Department of Justice, back in the days when it lived up to its name somewhat better.

[Saturday-morning update]

John Solomon: The dirty dozen revelations that sunk Mueller’s case against Flynn.

[Bumped]

[Update a while later]

Jim Jordan has a very pithy op-ed.

Business, Economics, Health, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Ferguson’s Imperial Model

15 Comments

A code review.

Good lord.

This reminds me an awful lot of the code that was leaked from CRU. S**t climate coding has done a lot of economic damage, but nowhere near as rapidly as this has, with tens of thousands of deaths to boot.

[Update a few minutes later]

A devastating conclusion:

All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one.

On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves.

Same with climate modeling. Get it out of the universities. Particularly Penn State.

[Update a while later]

What Ferguson’s booty call tells us about our “elites.”

[Friday-afternoon update]

The model that panicked the world was junk.