Puerto Rico Ping! Please Freepmail me if you want on or off the list.
Posted on 06/02/2018 5:09:33 AM PDT by cll
Ever since Hurricane Maria hit, there was one thing that the left wanted. And it wanted it now.
More dead Puerto Ricans.
The low death toll undermined efforts by the media to transform the hurricane into a Trump scandal. It made a mockery of Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz warning about genocide before sending her aide over to the nearest t-shirt printing shop, miraculously left standing, to print up another slogan shirt for CNN.
The media spread urban legends of morgues packed with thousands of corpses. But they never materialized. Congressional Democrats demanded an investigation to expose the full death toll.
The ‘Deathers’ weren’t satisfied with the official death toll of 64 dead.
Now Harvard has delivered. "Hurricane Maria killed more than 4,600 in Puerto Rico, not 64," USA Today blares. "A New Study Says Nearly 6,000 Died In Puerto Rico," BuzzFeed shouts. "Puerto Rico's Hurricane Maria Death Toll Could Exceed 4,000," the New York Times reports slightly more cautiously.
4,000, 4,600 or 6,000. Which is it?
This is what comes of a media monopoly that thinks fact checks are only for Republicans.
“Hurricane Maria: 4,645 Died In Puerto Rico From Storm In 2017,” NPR claims. That’s more specific. It’s also the number that Mayor Cruz is wearing on her hat.
Except that the margin of error is “plus or minus 3,852.” That’s a sizable margin. Maybe 793 people or 8,498 people died. It’s hard to find room on a hat for all those numbers. And where do they come from?
Did researchers from the hallowed halls of Harvard actually count graves and assemble a list of all the people who died in Hurricane Maria?
Come on. That’s too much work. So the Harvard researchers took it easy.
Instead they surveyed 3,299 random Puerto Rican households, used the survey results to generate a death rate of 14.3 per 1,000 between September 20, the date the hurricane hit, and December 31.
That’s over 100 days after the hurricane hit.
Then they compared those numbers to the same period in 2016 and produced 4,645 deaths.
This is not a verified list of deaths due to Hurricane Maria. It’s a pile of conjectures, assumptions and statistical bunny hops. It also leapfrogs Puerto Rico’s actual review being conducted by George Washington University researchers under a GWU dean that will review actual death certificates.
‘Deathers’ insist that death certificates are not meaningful. Their own numbers take into account anyone who might have died indirectly due to the impact of the hurricane. Power failures. Communications outages. Roads being washed out. But we can’t actually know whether an ill person would have died if the hurricane hadn’t hit. Or if any amount of infrastructure would have made it possible for the entire island to maintain power when being hit by a hurricane. Probably not.
New York City has some of the densest infrastructure in the world, but after Hurricane Sandy hit it still took months to restore power to some residents.
The official death toll, sneered at by the media, counts the number of people actually killed by the hurricane. The ‘Deathers’ want to count everyone who might have possibly lived otherwise.
But we’ll never know.
The Harvard study rejects birth certificates but compares its survey generated death rate to “official vital-statistics data for 2016” and then it “calculated excess deaths in Puerto Rico.”
I'll admit that I got caught up in the emotion of the issue, as I was there during and after the hurricane. We do know that many people died as a result of lack of medical facilities, but to blame it on anyone but the local PR government is a stretch.
Anyone who believes anything coming out of Harvard, or any other Ivy League school, likely believes in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny as well.
The Washington Post modulates itself, surprisingly. I posted their first sensationalist article on the subject.
A lot of folks are still without power down there.
But hey, isn’t this what the Clinton Foundation — or the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Foundation — is all about?
They held a big fundraiser in NYC May 24. I bet the funds will ALL go to help restore power in P.R.!!
Puerto Rico Ping! Please Freepmail me if you want on or off the list.
The Left needs bodies to advance their agenda ... be it bodies in schools or pretend bodies in PR.
Meanwhile killing Country Music fans gets a yawn from them.
Courtesy ping. I got caught up in the hoopla. I should have checked my emotional attachment to the issue.
Original estimates were it set power restoration back 10 weeks. It was far longer than that and it's still incomplete.
Democrats tried to impugn and ridicule the company by saying there were only two employees.
Whitefish are contractors. They hire on a need for job basis.
Liberals took control of the narrative as seen in the Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitefish_Energy#Hurricane_Maria_controversy
This makes more sense:) And I expect I would have reacted much as you did after reading the WaPo piece. It’s not the same to BE in a catastrophe as it is to examine and reflect on it later.. Emotions? They remind me I’m alive.
Guess I missed the Harvard study on deaths in Haiti after the hurricane. Wonder why?
How big an emergency aid package did Trump propose, and Congress authorize, to patch up Puerto Rico? $20 billion?
And, during the immediate post-hurricane period, didn’t Puerto Rican truck drivers strike for higher pay while aid materiel from the US sat at the docks?
No wonder Trump got frustrated and said, “They want us to do everything for them.”
I agree. Whitefish got power to my home in 40 days, and I live on the opposite end of the island from where power is generated.
“And, during the immediate post-hurricane period, didn’t Puerto Rican truck drivers strike for higher pay while aid materiel from the US sat at the docks?”
That was fake news. That never actually happened.
PR is a beautiful island, full of shitty people.
In no way are they a net benefit to the US.
“And, during the immediate post-hurricane period, didn’t Puerto Rican truck drivers strike for higher pay while aid materiel from the US sat at the docks?”
Why yes they did.
They took heed of Rahm Emanuels “never let a crisis go to waste” theory.
Just more proof that unions are evil entities.
“No wonder Trump got frustrated and said, “They want us to do everything for them.”
Just like their democrat brethren in NOLA after Katrina.
A local fellow took his two dump trucks to NO after Katrina to help with the clean up.
After a week he got disgusted and moved over to Biloxi.
He said the people he saw in NO were waiting for someone else to do everything while the people in Biloxi rolled up their sleeves, got out the tools and went to work.
When I read the Harvard report, I wondered why there was no coverage of mass funerals weeks after the storm.
Re trucking slow-down/strike:
I’ve read stories on both sides. All of the liberal fact-check.org or Boston Globe type outlets say its fake news.
The Teamsters Union put out a major PR (no pun intended here) effort to say there was no strike, and they were volunteering drivers and help. I could see why they would say that, whether or not it were the case.
But, I’ve found counter-stories saying that while there was no formally declared strike, there was considerable foot-dragging and attempts to profiteer through temporary higher wages.
I can’t say for sure either way. On the other hand, this is the same Puerto Rico which raised billions over the years for infrastructure and grafted it all away, leaving the electricity distribution more vulnerable to the storm than had it been repaired. It’s reputed to be governed in a very corrupt fashion.
Gee, thanks. I live there.
I run a company in Puerto Rico and our drivers are Teamsters. They all showed up to work, except one whose house was flooded and another who lives in the boonies and was trapped by blocked roads. That’s what happened to most everybody here. Everybody on the island was affected and many if not most had issues to deal with at home. Once the initial chaos was sorted out (in a couple of days), everybody showed up to work and they worked hard.
By all means, explain how PR is a net benefit to the US.
I live close to Allentown and Reading PA, probably as many PR’s here as where you are...(not really)
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