Guest “How many non sequiturs can fit in two paragraphs?” by David Middleton
Non sequitur?
Definition of non sequitur
1: an inference (see INFERENCE sense 1) that does not follow from the premises (see PREMISE entry 1 sense 1)specifically: a fallacy resulting from a simple conversion of a universal affirmative (see AFFIRMATIVE entry 1 sense 3) proposition or from the transposition of a condition and its consequent (see CONSEQUENT entry 1 sense 1)
2: a statement (such as a response) that does not follow logically from or is not clearly related to anything previously saidWe were talking about the new restaurant when she threw in some non sequitur about her dog.
Did You Know?
In Latin, non sequitur means “it does not follow.”
Merriam-Webster
How many non sequiturs can fit in two paragraphs?
Focus on the last two quoted paragraphs:
Pelosi: ‘Mother Earth Is Angry — She’s Telling Us with Hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, Fires in the West’
by JEFF POOR 10 Sep 2020
Thursday on MSNBC’s “The Reidout,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) attributed the wildfires plaguing her state and hurricanes that have batter the Gulf Coast to so-called climate change.
According to Pelosi, the natural disasters were a sign that “Mother Earth is angry.”
[…]
“Here we are, on the eve of 9/11, the 19th anniversary of 9/11, as we are filled with sadness, continued to be filled with sadness about those who lost their lives at that time and since from consequences of 9/11,” Pelosi said. “That was going to be our focus this week. We have these fires in California, and in the West, 16 people have died in Washington, Oregon, and California, including a firefighter and a 1-year-old baby. We — our firefighters have been so, very, very courageous.”
“Now, we’re, again, breaking records. Mother Earth is angry,” she continued. “She’s telling us — whether – she’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is, that climate crisis is real and has an impact. I hear — I came over the weekend back to Washington. It was unhealthy and smoky, that was how they described the air then. Now, it has gotten much worse, and I’m hearing regularly on the ongoing from my constituents about the concern they have about the fires and the air quality, the loss of life, and over 34 million acres burned. That’s an historic number. Again, sadness over 9/11 complicated by our concern about the fires, at the same time as we’re dealing with a coronavirus and finding out that the president of the United States didn’t address it in the serious way that it needed to be addressed early on.”
Breitbart
How many non sequiturs?
These items do “not follow” from preceding statements:
- Linking 9/11 to “fires in California, and in the West.”
- Linking “16 people have died in Washington, Oregon, and California, including a firefighter and a 1-year-old baby. We — our firefighters have been so, very, very courageous” (or anything) to “Now, we’re, again, breaking records.”
- Linking “Now, we’re, again, breaking records” (or anything) to “Mother Earth is angry.”
- Linking “She’s telling us” with “hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is” (or anything)… Although “whatever it is” is often cited as evidence for Gorebal Warming.
- Linking “sadness over 9/11” to “concern about the fires” to “dealing with a coronavirus”… A serial non sequitur.
- And the mother of all non sequitur fallacies… Linking “Here we are, on the eve of 9/11, the 19th anniversary of 9/11” to President Trump “didn’t address it in the serious way that it needed to be addressed early on.”
I had to read the passage several times to figure out what President Trump “didn’t address it in the serious way that it needed to be addressed early on.”
- 9/11? No. That lack of addressing was from 1995 to September 10, 2001.
- The “climate crisis”? It doesn’t exist.
It must be the Communist Chinese virus that she thinks President Trump “didn’t address it in the serious way that it needed to be addressed early on.”
Addressing the virus “early on”
President Trump, January 31, 2020
Proclamation on Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus
HEALTHCARE
Issued on: January 31, 2020
The United States has confirmed cases of individuals who have a severe acute respiratory illness caused by a novel (new) coronavirus (“2019-nCoV”) (“the virus”) first detected in Wuhan, Hubei Province, People’s Republic of China (“China”). The virus was discovered in China in December 2019. As of January 31, 2020, Chinese health officials have reported approximately 10,000 confirmed cases of 2019-nCoV in China, more than the number of confirmed cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) during its 2003 outbreak. An additional 114 cases have been confirmed across 22 other countries; in several of these cases, the infected individuals had not visited China. More than 200 people have died from the virus, all in China.
[…]
NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including sections 212(f) and 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) and 1185(a), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, hereby find that the unrestricted entry into the United States of persons described in section 1 of this proclamation would, except as provided for in section 2 of this proclamation, be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and that their entry should be subject to certain restrictions, limitations, and exceptions. I therefore hereby proclaim the following:
Section 1. Suspension and Limitation on Entry. The entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of all aliens who were physically present within the People’s Republic of China, excluding the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau, during the 14-day period preceding their entry or attempted entry into the United States is hereby suspended and limited subject to section 2 of this proclamation.
[…]
The White House
Nancy Pelosi, February 24, 2020
Addressing the virus in a “serious way”
You can’t get much more serious than having one of the lowest case fatality rates in the civilized world…
Achieving one of the lowest case fatality rates while suffering less economic impact than most other western “democracies” might be one way to get more serious…
The Q2 2020 decline in US GDP was the largest on record, equivalent to a -32.9% annual decline – This made headline news.
The current forecast for Q3 2020 (+30.8%) would be the largest quarterly economic expansion since World War II – This won’t be mentioned by the lamestream media.
I suppose President Trump could have encouraged the states to lock their economies down even more tightly, but it doesn’t appear the the self-inflicted economic damage had any effect on the fatality rate.
“Mother Earth is angry”
This is an improvement over 8 years ago, when “Mother Earth” was dying…
If “Mother Earth” is angry now, she must have bee royally p!$$ed off in 1930.
NIFC states that pre-1983 data were not as well-documented as subsequent years. However, 2020 is very well-documented…
| 2020 (1/1/20 – 9/11/20) | Fires: 41,794 | Acres: 5,496,248 |
On the other hand, Nancy Pelosi is full of schist…
It was unhealthy and smoky, that was how they described the air then. Now, it has gotten much worse, and I’m hearing regularly on the ongoing from my constituents about the concern they have about the fires and the air quality, the loss of life, and over 34 million acres burned.
Breitbart
9/11
As I was writing this, it dawned on me that my ridicule of Nancy Pelosi’s trivialization of 9/11 might, in some way, also trivialize 9/11. This was not my intention.
Not a day goes my when I don’t thank God for the Thin Red Line and the Thin Blue Line.
Friday at 07:00 I departed for a delivery at the Corvette plant in Bowling Green, KY. My route is I-69 south to I-465 south to I-65 south. It was a dreary morning.
On I-69 at two overpasses as I approached the junction with I-465 there were people out on the overpasses waving their flags. I gave them good blasts on the big horn as I passed under them. Then on I-465 south I pass a pickup truck with “Black Lives Matter” and “Dump the Turd Nov. 3rd” written with what appeared to be white shoe polish on the back of the cab and window.
Perfect example of how divided this nations people are.
What is so special about this? A politician is per definintion a non sequitur. A sparkling sequence of short circuits. Such stuff as ruinous dreams are made on. The very essence of politics is precisely that burst of disconnected vote-winning phrases. Heaven help us all if a politician becomes logical and consistent.
until now i always thought that americans are mostly religious, believing in the existence of an elderly gentleman called ‘god’ who controls all the affairs of the entire universe down to the smallest detail.
Now I am astonished to hear that a high priestess of the movement of the ‘Democrats’ adheres to a natural religion, which is actually only suspected in peoples completely cut off from civilization and the real world. of such peoples the ‘Mother Earth’ aka ‘Gaya’ is worshipped and sacrificed to her.
This reminds me of a other priestess of the IPCC (Insane Party of Climate Clowns) Mrs. Christiana Figueres, who said at the opening of the meeting in cancun
“the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you — because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools. Excellencies, the goddess Ixchel would probably tell you that a tapestry is the result of the skilful interlacing of many threads,”
Now another young woman from Sweden runs around the world preaching ‘repentance’.
as a convinced pastafari and follower of the church of the flying spaghetti monster i slowly start to have doubts if my god can protect me from these women. I live in germany and also there rules a woman who absolutely wants to change the world…i am afraid…you know, german angst…
Actually Pelosi quoted the Roman Catholoc Pope’s Encyclical, see below. That was written by German citizen Dr. John Schellnhuber CBE, former head of the Potsdam Climate Institute. He was dubbed CBE by the Queen personally in 2004 at the Berlin Embassy. He is well known at WUWT.
Figueres needs to check her historiography – the Spanish conqueror, Hernán Cortés, tells us about another place in Acalan where unmarried young women were sacrificed to a goddess in whom “they had much faith and hope”, possibly again Ix Chel.
These pagan gods were often cannibals, an unreasonable table habit, even for a mad tea-party.
“tea-party” being Alice’s Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, of course….
Worth repeating GK Chesterton”When people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing.They believe in anything. ” As a practising Catholic I am scandalized by the pope’ s stance on climate change.
As far as I know Pelosi is very Catholic, as is Joe Biden. Biden, although a number of parishes have banned him from receiving communion due to his support for abortion, points to his faith as the basis for his commitment to returning to a dark age. On his campaign website, (JoeBiden.com) he cites Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ for instructing him on his approach to climate change.
And now we have Pelosi directly quoting Laudato Si, Pope Francis’s Encyclical, a paean to Gaia.
Amusingly, that Encyclical was actually written by Sir John Schellnhuber, CBE, Commander of the British Empire.
No kidding, it looks like the Dems are already British subjects. So Britain has recovered half of the US.
There must be a decisive electoral majority in November, or the US becomes , again, a colony of a new British Empire. Will a republic of the people, by the people, for the people, all the people survive the pervasive onslaught?
Amen! And that’s from a Brit.Well a Scot,actually!
It always comes back to the “evil” British with you LaRouch loonies.
Rud,
That CFR plot diminishes your credibility. CFR is primarily controlled by historical testing capacity development, as I am sure you already know.
There are 156 countries in the world with populations over one million. Of all of these countries, only 8 of them today have a recorded COVID-19 population fatality rate which is higher than the USA – 3 countries in Europe and 5 in South America. This is not something to be bragging about.
Rud?
The infection rate is also controlled by testing capacity.
David,
My apologies for attributing your misleading diagram to Rud. I managed to cross-thread.
“The infection rate is controlled by testing capacity.”
No, not exactly. The infection rate is controlled by the actual spread of the disease, and is generally not known with any accuracy. The testing capacity controls only the number of positive cases recorded by RT-PCR – which is often less than 10% of actual infections, to judge from serological studies. A high Case Fatality Rate cannot be simply translated into a high Infection Fatality Rate, since it often just indicates a relatively low testing capacity, and vice versa. Hence a low CFR does not mean that a country is managing well, and a high CFR does not mean that it is managing badly, apart from having had relatively poor testing capacity in place.
Population Fatality Rate, on the other hand, gives a more unambiguous indication of which countries are faring well or badly. On this measure, the USA is 9th from the bottom out of 156 countries.
Horst schist.
USA: 600/1,000,000 = 0.0006 = 0.06%… 99.4% of the population didn’t die with ChiCom-19.
Germany: 140/1,000,000 = 0.00014 = 0.014%… 99.86% of the population didn’t die with ChiCom-19.
A statistically insignificant difference, just like the CFR difference between the US and Germany…
The standard libtard would cite Germany as a nation that handled ChiCom-19 far better than the Trump administration.
David,
You are throwing out more red herrings here than a Chinese fishing boat.
The graph that you include above of PFR vs Q2 GDP change is not so much schist as fubarite. It is a complete digression from the point I am making. It is also uninterpretable. It has multiple problems, starting with massive censoring of data which is what yields a misleading impression of possible correlation. There are 69 countries (44%) with recorded PFR values below 20/million and 99 countries (63%) with recorded PFR values below 40/million. If included, they would produce a dark carpet of points spread across the bottom of this graph, so where are they? The relatively few countries selected from this low PFR class are massively overweighted to Far East nations with best-in-class performance in test, track and trace and who managed to limit the deceleration of their economies – a dense cluster in the lower RH quadrant. On the other hand 11 of the 15 countries in the worst performing (high PFR) decile and who also introduced draconian lockdowns have been selected; these define a more diffuse cluster in the upper left quadrant.
The GDP measure itself on the x-axis is highly problematic given (a) the large and highly variable level of government borrowing to mitigate GDP loss which is not accounted for here in any shape or form, and (b) that it offers no discrimination/distinction between countries which have self-immolated by policy prescription (like full extended lockdown), countries which have suffered consequential losses independent of their own policy choices (eg oil producers, resource exploitation and tourist countries) and countries where large infection rates have directly damaged the economy via disruption rather than policy interventions (non-pharmaceutical or pharmaceutical). Drawing any inferences at all from these censored data is highly questionable without meta-analysis.
Moving to your second red-herring – the USA and Germany PFR data. Firstly, you have a minor arithmetical error or a typo. You should have written “99.94% of the [USA] population did’nt die with Chi-com 19”. However, the more important error which you make is your declaration that the difference between the USA and Germany PFRs is a statistically insignificant difference. (!) Say wha? (!) This is simply false. I suggest that you apply a statistical test to compare the two proportions. There are several ways of doing it, but they will all find that the difference in PFRs is highly significant at very low p value. (The most conventional method yields a Z-value for t-test on comparison of two proportions of 167!) No tricks needed. This arises simply from the enormous size of the populations “sampled” – each Bernoulli trial is “dead or not dead so far” on a sample of the entire populations of the USA and Germany.
So in this instance your “standard libtard” would be correct to cite Germany as a nation that handled ChiCom-19 better than the Trump administration, in fact, about 4 times better using PFR as a measure.
The above distractions do not change the main point of my first message – that CFR is a useless measure of comparative performance between countries.
Having dispensed of the two red herrings, I simply repeat that the USA is currently 9th worse in the world out of 156 countries using PFR as a measure, and that CFR is so confounded by testing capacity that it is useless as a key performance indicator of anything other than testing capacity.
In many poor countries, people in remote villages who die, are just buried with no testing done.
Trying to directly compare medical statistics between any two countries without controling for the many differences between medical systems and even how statistics are gathered is a fools errand. Though there are a lot of fools who insist on trying.
MarkW,
I agree that the data is inconsistent and highly suspect, but this applies to all of the data, including the CFR data used by David in his graph. The main point I am making is that a comparison of CFR’s tells us nothing about relative performance between countries, apart from some second order indications related to testing capacity It would continue to tell us nothing even if the data were consistent and all 100% reliable. It is quite simply a terrible measure to use.
Link, please. Providing no data diminishes your credibility.
Try https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Here are the only countries with populations greater than one million and PFR’s higher than the USA:-
Brazil, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Belgium, Spain, UK
Does Nancy Pelosi have enough introspection to reason that maybe “Mother Earth” is angry at HER??
“Mother Earth is angry”
I have always said that warmuniusm is a paganism. Personifying a ball of rock is pure paganism. QED.
It is a religion. A primitive religion, and a bad one.
Surely she meant to say
“Mother Earth is hungry”
Must feed her. I have some ideas.
We are living in a divided country and can’t even decide on what divided means. “United we stand, divided we fall”. Keep up with the petty nonsensical and we will fall beyond the threshold and be doomed. Nothing more than another failed attempt at a free society in the history of the world.
And this human shaming soundbyte is just proof that instead of messages of healing and pulling us toward each other, all we get are more messages to divide us further. And it’s not just on this either…
Regardless of which party you subscribe to or none at all, we need to start reaching out and stop the insanity of further division. Zealotry and extremes lie like minefields in this us or them mentality. We are still allowed to disagree but at some point in a disagreement, there is common ground. I don’t see common ground at all. We’ve had 2 major disasters sweep our nation, a derecho that displaced people and decimated 10M+ acres of crops and a hurricane destroying homes, businesses and economies already wrecked by a pandemic response. Where is the US that is first in line to help out without being asked or begged to do so? Where is the US that existed in that Thank You letter from Canada, which poignantly illustrated how we as a people are always there to help our fellow humans on this Earth to rebuild, send aide if needed, help where warranted and all without an obligation to a political party to do so. Where is my country? Blindsided by the bickering on TV between TV personalities in a war for views and all the while the US burns itself to the ground bitching about how makeup is used or when to get their hair done.
Yes she is and she is burning YOUR state to the ground.
“Mother Earth is angry”…
Was this from a superstitious ignorant savage with no conception, no knowledge of the Universe and its laws that Man has so far discovered? Yes. Yes, it was.
Who voted for this clown? And why?
I thought Fancy Nancy played a Roman Catholic, at least on TV.
Hypocrisy thy name is Nancy!
I wonder will California voters will actually care to express their opinion in November about the obvious diverting of collective blame by the elected representatives for their lack of responsible stewardship during their administrations and reject the use of superstition by politicians to play victim.
They say the best trick the Devil played was to convince people that he doesn’t exist.
The best trick ‘Mother Earth’ played was to convince people that she does exist.
But you need to be retarded lefty to fall for both ruses.
Nancy is the poster child for BOTOX poisoning. Mother Nature is mad at her forehead.
In almost all cases, Democrats act VERY weird on TV. It seems that most of them can’t act in both natural and well behaved way:
– either they are hysterical (“I reclaim my time” by Auntie Maxine)
– either they are act robotic like a very bad actor with a lame script (bland “I reclaim my time” in Barr “hearing”, moronically repeated, showing lack of personal thoughts as well as lack of persona)
– acting hyper nervous (Nancy Pelosi)
– full, non natural happiness, as if drugged (almost all elected Dems or DNC people when on Fox News)
– arrogant, smug, almost possessed by a demon (Peter Strzok)
– anti Trump interviewed person so crazy the interviewer urges a commercial break (E. Jean “rape is sexy” Carroll)
The counter example Tulsi Gabbard: she always act like normal person. Who is not on drugs. I don’t agree with all of what she says, but she doesn’t seem to come from another planet.
I had to read the passage several times to figure out what President Trump “didn’t address it in the serious way that it needed to be addressed early on.”
•9/11? No. That lack of addressing was from 1995 to September 10, 2001.
•The “climate crisis”? It doesn’t exist.
Well Trump wasn’t President in 2001 (or in the years prior), so just how he was supposed to address it early on is a mystery.
As for the so-called climate crisis, He did address it early on: He declare we were getting out of the Paris boondoggle. He said he’d exit it when he ran for president. Shortly after being sworn in, he said we were exiting (effectively we were out the moment Trump was sworn in, officially we’d have to wait until the process was completed – though technically, as Congress never ratified it the argument could be made we were never really in it) . The very day that the accord allowed for him for file the paperwork for formally exiting it, he did. And come the day after election day we’re officially out per the rules of the Accord, regardless of who wins the election. Dementia Joe (or whomever is pulling his strings) vows to bring us back in if elected. Just one more reason to re-elect Trump.
I know–let’s triple the carbon tax in California and use proceeds for higher teacher salaries and free stuff.