Show Me the Data

 In this era of obfuscation and false narrative, there are two mantras that bear repeating:  Show Me the Data and Follow the Money.  (Unfortunately, “Show Me The Data has already been taken by someone as her Twitter handle or would have grabbed it).  If we were to follow just those two precepts, the nation would be in much, much better shape.   Taken together, they strip out narrative and partisanship, and imply a healthy level of skepticism.  Applied to policy, they will likely us you on the correct path, or at least help avoid costly blunders.

The first incredible blunder with the handling of data in recent years was the second Gulf War.  While information gathered through intelligence sources is often uncertain, the magnitude of this blunder was enormous.  Launched under the justification that Saddam Hussein had violated the cease fire (true) of the first Gulf War and was developing WMD (not true), the US launched a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, killed and maimed thousands of US service men and women, cost trillions of dollars and ended up empowering Iran at the end of the day.  All with scanty evidence that the assertion was, in fact, true.

Not to be outdone, our CDC, NIH and Anthony Fauci likewise reacted horrifically and imposed enormous costs on our country by not only misinterpreting data, but putting out false and sketchy data itself.  Even worse than was the case in the first Gulf War, social media served to either suppress or amplify evidence as it chose.  Individuals that spoke to the credibility of the Lab Leak Theory of COVID’s origin were banned from social media as were people that espoused the use of Ivermectin as a treatment.   We never really got an accurate figure of COVID deaths because the CDC obfuscated deaths “with COVID” and “from COVID.”   The CDC relentlessly pushed vaccines, even with little evidence of their efficacy and with no data on their long term adverse effects.  Government forced members of our armed forces out of service and forced children to be masked in school, doing terrible damage to our national security and the intellectual and emotional development of our children—with no benefit.  Now, life insurance companies are reporting a 40% increase in death rates among 18-49 year olds.  We are seeing evidence of increases in myocardia, and other maladies.  One of the nation’s top female athletes, Nelly Korda was recently hospitalized with blood clots.   Joe Biden, among others, contracted COVID despite being vaccinated a double boosted, yet the CDC had blathered last year that this was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”   As with the second Gulf War, the government manipulated the data to create a narrative that was extremely costly for the US, and unnecessarily so.

Then there was the narrative that the police were targeting blacks unjustly and shooting innocent, unarmed blacks systemically.    The trouble is that the data never matched the narrative.  Tucker Carlson did his homework and went through each incident of a police shooting of an unarmed black in the previous year and found only 2 situations where the shooting was unjustified and those were prosecuted.   When Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer in a careful study likewise found no disparity in the treatment of blacks by the Houston police department, however, he was “canceled” by Harvard with a trumped us sexual harassment charge (I will write more on that in a subsequent post).  This narrative is being used to justify “defunding the police” with catastrophic consequences for our cities.

Likewise, the Department of Justice claims that white supremacism remains a top security threat (especially at school board meetings).  Yet we see no actual evidence to support that assertion.

We have plenty of  smart and sophisticated people and analytical techniques available to use data to come to sound policy decisions for our society.  It’s time we start using them.