Free Republic

On Wednesday, the government put out disappointing inflation statistics that show that inflation has accelerated to four-tenths of a percent last month. But that number seems unrealistically low to me. In the numbers, bureaucrats claimed that gasoline prices only went up 1.7% last month, which would be only five cents per gallon. On the New York mercantile exchange, gasoline has risen from around $2.10 per gallon in early January to around $2.75 on March 31st; that is up 30% in three months. Crude oil has risen from around $72 at the end of the year, to $83 at the end...

This past Friday, Senator Charles Schumer of New York, the Democrat Majority Leader, and a Jew in the state with the largest Jewish population in this nation, called for the removal of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Though this is interference in democratic Israeli politics, the most disturbing aspect is the idea that underlies this demand. Earlier, President Joe Biden indicated that it was time for him to have a “come to Jesus” moment with Netanyahu. Though it's quite insulting to use this phrase with the Jewish leader of the Jewish State, again the most troubling aspect is the implication...

“There are three kinds of lies,” Mark Twain famously observed. “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” You already know that the government's published statistics are not trustworthy. Federal agencies have shifted methodologies over the years, making it hard to compare data sets. In economic modeling, there is a concept called “GIGO” — garbage in, garbage out. And what we have been seeing does seem like a lot of garbage. Then, the number-crunchers perform adjustments, do other kinds of syntheses, and make revisions to that data. A good case could be made that government data has been politicized, too, and some methodologies...

Dr. Wyner is a professor, statistician, and, oh, chair of the undergraduate program in statistics and data science. His specialty is probability models. He has worked with ESPN (Money Ball anyone?) and has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the very same NSF of which we've heard so much about the two last weeks. Dr. Wyner knows numbers.

“I’d describe it as catastrophic.” So said Food and Drug Administration commissioner Robert Califf in a recent series of tweets about a troubling but ignored problem: the major decline in life expectancy among young, working age people. In fact, the number of “unexpected or, ‘excess,’ deaths, which claimed 158,000 more Americans in the first nine months of 2023 than in the same period in 2019 … exceeds America’s combined losses from every war since Vietnam,” wrote The Hill last week. Some people want this problem to remain ignored, too. Just consider that “America’s chief health manager, the Centers for Disease...

I couldn't help but notice this rather interesting diagram.

The world’s population has doubled in size over the last 50 years.In 2022, we reached the mark of 8 billion living on Earth. According to UN estimates, by July 2023, all the people in the world numbered 8,045,311,447.In this map, Visual Capitalist's Nick Routley and Bruno Venditti use population estimates from the United Nations Population Division to illustrate the world’s population as if the Earth had only 1,000 people. Countries with a population of below 7.6 million did not make our cutoff to be visualized, but are included in overall calculations and listed below.Click here to view interactive version of...

Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America by Gary Kleck, 1991, 511 pages, published by Aldine De Gruter, New York. The softcover version was published by Routledge in 2017. Copies of Point Blank are available at ABEbooks and Amazon.com. Used hardcover copies are the least expensive at about $13. Point Blank has been on my reference shelf for about three decades. It is a valuable resource for everyone interested in firearms statistics and legislation. Gary Kleck’s book has large amounts of data, which is difficult to find with an Internet search. The book was published when the Internet was in...

Well, here I am minding my own business, working on a boring venture capital post, when here comes the Bureau of Labor Statistics announcement of October jobs data. The BLS has been working toward a Nobel prize for fiction writing all year, but you can only carry that so far. Maybe they figured that everyone is distracted by Ukraine and Israel or just the latest TikTok videos, but their house of cards can only be towered upward so far, and today’s announcement begins the downfall to reality. “Expectations” were for 180,000 new jobs, according to the survey of businesses. Reality...

Search... Trans women sex offenders in Canadian women's prisons stats are actually SHOCKING Chad Felix Greene Now that you mention it, there does seem to be a lot of stories featuring male sex offenders suddenly announcing they are transwomen and being transferred to women's prisons. Who knew it was so high though? 44 percent of trans-identified males in Canadian prisons are sex offenders https://t.co/W34vwKknRJ — Wesley Yang (@wesyang) September 22, 2023 Over half of those sex crimes, are against children. And 41% were killers 💔 And no, these are not female to male convicts. Some of these men raped and...

...Results: For 2020, NVDRS collected information on 64,388 fatal incidents involving 66,017 deaths that occurred in 48 states (46 states collecting statewide data, 35 California counties, and four Texas counties), and the District of Columbia. In addition, information was collected for 729 fatal incidents involving 790 deaths in Puerto Rico. Data for Puerto Rico were analyzed separately. Of the 66,017 deaths, the majority (58.4%) were suicides, followed by homicides (31.3%), deaths of undetermined intent (8.2%), legal intervention deaths (1.3%) (i.e., deaths caused by law enforcement and other persons with legal authority to use deadly force acting in the line of...

Perspective matters, but it’s not difficult to have one’s perspective skewed horribly. All that needs to happen is to have something presented often enough as a massive issue of epic scale and you’ll likely believe it to be so absent anyone showing otherwise. Take mass shootings, as an example. Sure, they’re awful, but many like to pretend they’re the biggest threat to life we have. We simply need to upend our entire lives, forfeit our rights, and anything else demanded because if not, our kids are going to be gunned down. Yet a report trying to pin mass shootings on...

It’s become virtually impossible to find reliable data or polling on gun violence these days. A new Kaiser Family Foundation report being shared by virtually every major media outlet this week offers us a good example of why. The headlines report that “1 in 5 adults” in the United States claim that a “family member” has been “killed” by a gun. And, let’s just say, that’s a highly dubious claim.There are 333 million people living in the United States, and somewhere around 259 million of them are over the age of 18. Twenty percent of those adults equals nearly 52...

Since 2015, the Washington Post has been carefully tracking fatal police shootings in the United States. Their database includes over 8,000 cases. If you ignore those where the race and/or sex of the victim are unknown, the demographic breakdown is as follows: • White males = 3,106 • Black males = 1,707 • Asian males = 121 • Native American males = 99 • White females = 192 • Black females = 58 • Asian females = 8 • Native American females = 6 There’s obviously a huge disparity between the sexes, which is evident in all four racial groups....

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published a jobs report yesterday [DATA LINK] that has stunned the professional financial class. However, those who have followed the BLS data assemblies were laughing – not surprised. Eventually, if this continues, the BLS pretzel logic will start using terms like “eleventy.” Throughout 2022, the BLS modified the underlying data they used to assemble their jobs reporting. The latest release shows that 517,000 jobs were gained in the labor market, despite every other economic indicator showing we are in an economy of contraction. The question becomes, why the disconnect? There are two surveys that...

Joe Biden’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that over a million jobs were created in the second quarter, a heartening statistic that no doubt helped the Democrats in November. But now, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve says that those million jobs were almost entirely fictitious: The Biden administration vastly overstated its estimate that employers created more than 1 million jobs in the second quarter of this year, claiming historic job growth when in fact hiring had stalled, according to a new estimate. Job growth was “essentially flat” in the second quarter with only 10,500 jobs added, the Federal Reserve Bank of...

There was a statistician who evaluated Trump/Biden election probabilities relationship to the state elections. I have not been able to find him or his work. Anyone have link?

Seventy-some researcher groups were given identical data, and asked to investigate an identical question. The groups did not communicate. Details are in the paper “Observing Many Researchers Using the Same Data and Hypothesis Reveals a Hidden Universe of Uncertainty“, by some enormous number of authors. As is the wont of sociologists, each group created several models, about 15 on average. There were 1,253 different models from the seventy groups Each was examined after the fact, and it was discovered no two models were the same.

Democrats are napping peacefully through the US-Mexico “border” crisis they engineered. Perhaps these data will snap them from their slumber: The US Department of Homeland Security reports that the Mexican cartels’ income from smuggling illegal migrants into America has soared from $500 million in 2018 to $13 billion this year — up 2,500%. ... Border Patrol agents apprehended 951,568 illegal immigrants during President Donald Trump’s final 19 months in office. In Biden’s first 19 months, Border Patrol encountered a staggering 3,588,877 illegals — up a sickening 377%. ... Fentanyl killed some 71,000 Americans in 2021, up 23% versus 2020. For...

According to the latest data, black Americans, who make up 13 percent of the population, comprised 60.4 percent of known murder offenders in 2021—a new record! ============================================== Steve Sailer @Steve_Sailer · Follow FBI announces: Blacks made up 60.4% of known murder offenders in 2021. That would be a new record for black dominance of murders, up from a record 56.5% black in 2020, although methodological snafus reduced police department participation this year. ================================================== We can argue until we’re blue in the face about why this is happening, but the data speaks for itself. Nothing can be done to solve this...