by Michael Thau
RedState.com
“The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.”
–Irish statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke, 1784.
***
Let’s try a little thought experiment.
Suppose that, after surveying 100 people, I discover 10 of them are left-handed.
The next day I survey 200 people and turn up 20 southpaws.
On each of the next 8 days, I survey 100 more people than the previous one. And the number of left-handers keeps increasing by 10.
Finally, suppose that I send a reporter the following graph (which is not the one mentioned in the title, you’ll find that further down) to use in a story headlined:
Number of Left-Handers Mysteriously Grows!
If all of that happened, two things would be obvious:
- My reporter accomplice and I would be perpetrating a hoax.
- You’d be an idiot to fall for it.
If we keep surveying more people for left-handedness, then, of course, we’ll keep finding more.
If for some bizarre reason you started suspecting that the number of left-handed people might be mysteriously rising, you wouldn’t care about the absolute number I find each day when you send me out to test your hypothesis.
What you’d want to know is the ratio of the number of left-handed people I discovered on any given day out of the total number I surveyed.
On the first day, it was 10/100 = 1/10.
On the second day, it was 20/200, which is still 1/10.
On the third day, it was 30/300, which, again, is equal to 1/10.
The ratio of those who, as it were, tested positive to the total number tested stayed at 1/10 every single day.
Hence, contrary to the scam my reporter friend and I were trying to run, the number of left-handed people didn’t increase at all.
I know, duh, right?
Except somehow, the very same scam has been successfully used to convince the American public that the U.S. suffered an enormous “second wave” of COVID-19 infections in July; which of course, in turn, was then used to justify the continued imposition of completely unprecedented and equally unnecessary restrictions on our liberty that make the taxes King George III leveled on our founding fathers look trivial by comparison.
We’re being forced to wear masks whenever we go out in public. To add insult to injury, they don’t even do anything to stop the spread of viruses.