Posts Tagged ‘datechguy's magnificent seven’

Biased media has gone from annoying to dangerous

Posted: September 14, 2019 by ng36b in media
Tags: ,
Hurricane Dorian predictions, from ABC News, https://s.abcnews.com/images/US/FloridaSpaghetti_hpEmbed_16x9_992.jpg

It’s like some people just want to watch the world burn. And by watch, I mean set it on fire themselves and then sit back and smugly gaze at their destruction.

The latest sad example of this is the controversy over Hurricane Dorian’s track. Dorian was a particularly nasty storm. It was big, had strong winds, and was driving into a variety of high and low pressure regions that altered its path, in some cases by hundreds of miles. So when President Trump tweets out that the hurricane is bearing down on Alabama, he’s attempting to ensure that every state is prepared.

He’s not wrong for being concerned. Here’s NOAA’s prediction at 5 pm from 29 August:

“The guidance envelope has nudged southward this cycle, with the ECMWF and HMON along the southern side, and the GFS bracketing the northern side. There has also been an increase in
along-track spread or speed differences with day 5 positions among the dynamical models ranging from near the northwestern Bahamas to the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. This appears to be the result of differences in the models’ depiction of the strength or lack thereof of the western portion of the ridge by day 5.”

NOAA Website, https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2019/DORIAN.shtml?

Read the rest of historical data here: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2019/DORIAN.shtml?

You’ll find lots of times the models “diverge” a lot. Would you want to be caught flat-footed if the storm diverges?

If Trump used old data and put out bad gouge to the state of Alabama, then ask yourself: does it matter? Was it a bad thing to be prepared for the worst? Is it worth tearing him down over? And if he hadn’t done it and the hurricane had turned that way, would he be criticized for not preparing?

The last part that gets me is this sort of non-controversy spreads around the world. News sources in Norway are jumping on this and calling it a fake weather forecast:

“In VG’s editorial, Per Olav Ødegård stated that “good economic times are Donald Trump’s best card in the election campaign. But the economy can also be his Achilles heel”. Ødegård commented that Donald Trump depends on good economic growth in the United States for his re-election campaign. Kenneth Lund and Terje Erikstad shared the same opinion in two pieces in Dagens Næringsliv published on the same day. Erikstad further speculated that “when Donald Trump is willing to fake a weather forecast, will he also fake economic statistics?”

Yup, this model looks fake:

Or the one at the top of the page.

President Trump does plenty of controversial things, but let’s stop pretending that being concerned for the welfare of a state in the path of a hurricane is somehow contentious.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Report From Louisiana Extra! Governor’s Election Heats Up with Miraculous Budget Surplus

Posted: September 14, 2019 by Pat Austin in elections, politics, primaries, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , ,

Editor’s Note (DTG): While going through posts for the writers payday I found this post at the old blog in draft. For some reason it didn’t go up at the old blog, likely do to link issues. After reading it I’ve deemed it good enough to put up and pay for it, so slightly later than expected here via the last big of grief the old GoDaddy hosting site can give us is an election report from Pat Austin originally dated Sept 14th

The Washington Post has designated the Louisiana governor’s race as one of the top five governor’s races to watch in 2019-20.

John Bel Edwards has fairly high approval ratings (mid 50s) and is fairly adept at playing both sides of the line. He signed one of the strictest abortion bills in the country and he oversaw a massive Medicaid expansion. He probably feels fairly safe with the teacher vote because his paltry $1000-a-year raise allows him to say he gave the teachers their first raise in many years.

All in all, I think Edwards feels pretty safe.

His two Republican challengers, Eddie Rispone and Ralph Abraham, are splitting the Republican vote and it’s entirely possible that Edwards can stay comfy in his leather chair without having to worry about a runoff election. Should one of those two Republicans drop out, it might be a different story, but nobody is talking about that.

Adding more fuel to the gubernatorial debate stage will be the fact that now the governor’s office has miraculously discovered a budget surplus:

“Louisiana likely will have a $500 million budget surplus for the most recent fiscal year, significantly more than the $300 million initially thought, Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration said Friday, setting off a new round of debate in the governor’s race over the state’s financial situation.

“Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne told lawmakers in a joint budget hearing that the larger surplus will allow the state to pay for “dramatic needs” in infrastructure, including a $14 billion backlog in road and bridge projects, and the Edwards administration cast the news as proof the state has emerged from years of uncertainty with a stable budget.”

Louis Gurvitch at The Hayride would like to remind everyone of the facts: Here are the plain facts: “Taxes are way up, the state’s oil and gas industry is being destroyed by lawsuits and over-regulation, and Louisiana’s percentage increase in government spending is the highest in the nation! Don’t even bother to ask about the government reforms we were promised…”

Gurvitch speaks the truth. I love Louisiana, but we are not attracting new business with the excessive tax burden we have in this state, and we are indeed over-run by trial lawyers.

The primary is October 12. We will see then if Edwards stands alone or if he will go to a runoff.

Links:
https://beta.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/06/top-governors-races/?noredirect=on

https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/politics/elections/article_284b8438-d4b5-11e9-a813-375cc60d6770.html

Trump’s Immigration Plan is Working

Posted: September 10, 2019 by chrisharper in immigration
Tags: , ,

In their continuing policy of ignoring good news about the Trump administration, the mainstream media failed to note the significant decrease in the number of illegals crossing the Mexican border.

The Border Patrol arrested about 72,000 people who tried to sneak across in July — a reduction of almost half compared with the peak of two months ago.

That means that the policy of forcing Mexico to handle more immigrants from Central America has worked well.

Mexico has 26,000 troops deployed to focus on immigration. More than 10,000 of
those are on its southern border with its Central American neighbors, and more than 15,000 others are up north.

Mexico also agreed to expand its cooperation with the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocol, a policy of taking asylum seekers from Central America who cross Mexican territory and sending them back to Mexico to wait for their cases to be heard in U.S. immigration courts.

Customs and Border Protection said some 30,000 migrants have been returned to Mexico under the protocol. Border cities that were so overwhelmed that they declared states of emergency are getting back to normal, with drops of 70% or more in the regions of El Paso, Texas, and Yuma,
Arizona.

The cooperation between the United States and Mexico also means that the number of people being held at the border has dropped dramatically.

While border facilities had more than 19,000 people in custody at one point in June, there were about less than 5,000 last week.

As the Democrats prepare for their debate this week, it’s worth noting that DaTimes and NPR’s most recent polling shows that 67 percent of Americans do NOT favor an open border with Mexico. Twenty-seven percent favor an open border, with 6 percent having no opinion.

If there’s any indication that the Democrats and the media are out of step with the rest of the country, immigration is an example of just how much they both don’t get it.

This Just In: Trump is Right on China

Posted: September 3, 2019 by chrisharper in Always look at the bright side of Trump
Tags: , , , , ,

A trifecta of anti-Trump organizations—DaTimes, DaPost, and the Council on Foreign Relations—has endorsed the president’s policy on China.

As I have noted in the past, China has used government support illegally to dump cheap exports to the United States. Moreover, President Xi has claimed the South China Sea, one of the richest waterways in the world, as his own. His Belt and Road Initiative is intended to open up markets on nearly every continent. And then there’s Hong Kong.

“China can’t join all the right international clubs and go on playing by its own rules. It can’t make some trade ‘deal’ and then not be held fully accountable, relying on the infinite global capacity to turn a blind eye to its predations,” Roger Cohen writes in DaTimes.

“The president’s statement linking a trade deal and the Hong Kong demonstrations — ‘It would be very hard to deal if they do violence. I mean, if it’s another Tiananmen Square, it’s — I think it’s a very hard thing to do if there’s violence’ — was perhaps his finest hour.”

In DaPost, a Chinese dissident goes even further.

“[A]s someone who has spent years with the knife edge of the Chinese Communist Party bearing down on my throat for my human rights work, I know that the president is on to something. Tariffs and economic threats may be blunt tools, but they are the kind of aggressive tactics necessary to get the attention of the CCP regime, which respects only power and money. It’s not just about ‘winning,’ as the president sometimes puts it, and it’s not simply about trade: It’s about justice, and doing what’s right for ordinary Chinese and American people,” writes Chen Guangcheng, a professor at Catholic University.

The Council on Foreign Relations gives Trump a B+ on his China policy, noting that “his administration has taken the lead in awakening the United States to the growing threat that China poses to U.S. vital national interests and democratic values.”
Although the trade war will cost almost every American some amount of cash depending on the electronics, textiles, and shoes we buy, I think the policy will save us a great deal of money in the long run. And with DaTimes, DaPost, and the Council actually praising Trump, we may finally have something that conservatives and liberals can finally agree upon.

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