At least -- unlike you -- I don't spend my time supporting a governor who manipulates and leaks data to support a twisted "herd immunity" political narrative. DeSantis office ‘leaks’ Florida records to fuel COVID-19 death ‘conspiracy’ https://www.tampabay.com/news/healt...te-records-to-fuel-covid-19-death-conspiracy/ Let's once again take a look at what you view as proper sources of "data" and "information". Your go-to source for information are Florida COVID conspiracy bloggers; Jennifer Cabrera and Kyle Lamb. When they are not creating irrational nonsense in their blog called "Rational Ground" they are tweeting complete fabrications and conspiracy crap. Let's take a look at a response to one of your many previous posts using these characters' tweets as the source. With Jennifer Cabrera -- I don't know what is worse -- her continual fake narrative and misrepresentation of numbers she pushes, her conspiracy nonsense, her "a vaccine is not needed" nonsense, her "people who say we shouldn’t have kids in-person in school are the flat earthers of our day" insanity, her continually support for the demons sperm doctor who peddles HCQ, or her 5G crap causes COVID crap. Of course since this is your go-to source for the COVID information you promote we can implicitly assume that you must agree with everything she pushes. Sadly --as outlined in the article above -- DeSantis saw it fit to provide Jennifer Cabrera in to review non-public state data (which Florida refuses to share with university medical researchers) so she could create anti-lockdown, "COVID is harmless" propaganda. Once Jennifer, the COVID denier advocate, published her complete nonsense - DeSantis' spokesperson and his allies pushed the nonsense on their Twitter accounts and in state announcements. Naturally the other COVID denier blogger, Kyle Lamb, whose background is running a sports podcast network dedicated to the Ohio State Buckeyes (he couldn't even chose a Florida based team, eh) has now been hired to work on COVID data analysis for DeSantis. What a fine replacement for a woman with a PhD and extensive statistical and GIS mapping experience.
What's amusing is you post tin-foil hat memes in one thread, only to hop over to another thread and post tin-foil hat theories in another. OH, and when you bold font a post, it makes it more true! The GWB narrative - attack and discredit the source, never the data.
DeSantis is picking some real "winners" DeSantis’ latest hire for data team: Uber-driving, COVID-conspiracy sports blogger https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article247081417.html When Gov. Ron DeSantis needed to hire a data analyst, his staff picked a little-known Ohio sports blogger and Uber driver whose only relevant experience is spreading harmful conspiracy theories about COVID-19 on the Internet. In his own words, Kyle Lamb of Columbus, Ohio, has few qualifications for the job at the state’s Office of Policy and Budget, which pays $40,000 per year. “Fact is, I’m not an ‘expert.’ I’m not a doctor, epidemiologist, virologist or scientist,” Lamb wrote on a website for a subscribers-only podcast he hosts about the coronavirus. “I also don’t need to be. Experts don’t have all the answers, and we’ve learned that the hard way.” Plucked from the obscurity of the blogosphere, Lamb, 40, broadcasts his lack of scientific training in his theories about the pandemic. In frequent posts on Twitter and sports message boards, Lamb has said that masks don’t prevent the coronavirus from spreading; that lockdowns are ineffective; that hydroxychloroquine, a drug touted by President Donald Trump, can treat the virus; that COVID-19, which he said might be part of a Chinese “biowar,” is not more deadly than the flu; and that the virus isn’t dangerous for children to contract. All of those claims have been impeached by scientific evidence. “I have no qualms about being a ‘sports guy’ moonlighting as a COVID-19 analyst,” Lamb wrote on his podcast website. In Twitter DMs obtained by the Miami Herald, Lamb said he began studying the virus in January and that his “livelihood” as an Uber driver was “based on society maintaining some level of restrained normalcy.” Then, on Nov. 6, he tweeted that he had “officially accepted an offer to go work for Gov. Ron DeSantis ... doing data analysis on several fronts for them including but not limited to COVID-19 research and other projects.” Fred Piccolo, a spokesman for DeSantis, said that Lamb would not work in the governor’s suite or focus “exclusively” on COVID-19, and that any analysis he does would pass “through about 10 hands” before it gets to DeSantis. Piccolo did not say when Lamb will start what he called an “entry-level” job. “It’s not a COVID-19 hire,” Piccolo said. Lamb did not respond to requests for comment. Sports writers from Ohio were floored the governor would hire Lamb for any position, calling the blogger “unhinged,” a “crackpot” and an “amateur, basement epidemiologist” in interviews with the Herald. None of that stopped DeSantis, who has downplayed the virus’ severity and rolled back restrictions that epidemiologists say help keep people safe, from bringing him to Tallahassee. Lamb has consistently praised DeSantis’ pandemic policies on social media and cheered along as the governor has refused to issue a statewide mask mandate, said that young people are at “incredibly low” risk from the coronavirus, and secured one million doses of hydroxychloroquine for Florida hospitals. Although the drugs came free of charge to the state, some 980,000 doses of the drug went unused for weeks after their shipment. And late last month, someone at the Capitol leaked COVID-19 death certificates to a blogger at a website where Lamb has frequently written, even as the Florida Department of Health won’t release those same public records to academics and journalists. Lamb’s colleague, Jennifer Cabrera, used the records to write a post that falsely suggested the health department was overcounting the number of COVID-19 deaths. Vish Viswanath, a professor of health communication at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the theories advanced by Lamb are “laughable.” “It’s extremely disconcerting that you appoint somebody that has very limited technical qualifications and has made his agenda very clear,” Viswanath said. “At the end of the day, the price will be paid by the residents of Florida to these steps. So my question is, what is the end game here? Who is going to benefit from this?” Still, he said he was “not completely taken aback” by the fact that DeSantis hired an untrained blogger to do COVID-19 data analysis because Florida has repeatedly gone against the scientific consensus throughout the course of the pandemic. The Herald/Times requested Lamb’s application materials, but the governor’s office has not yet provided them. It did provide a job description showing that much of Lamb’s role will involve helping the governor’s team craft DeSantis’ budget and legislative proposals. While Lamb was able to get hired at the Capitol, he sometimes struggled to find work as a sports reporter, according to other writers. Jeff Svoboda ran an Ohio sports blog in 2013 when he says Lamb, a frequent poster on Ohio State University college football message boards, approached him for a staff job. The answer was no. “He just seemed like another Internet weirdo. He’d been around the [Ohio State sports] ecosystem for a long time,” Svoboda said. “It just seemed like if no one before us would hire him, there was a reason. ... He’s a crackpot, frankly. [But] his Twitter University graduate degree is paying dividends.” FROM COLUMBUS TO THE CAPITOL It’s not clear how or why DeSantis hired Lamb. “I don’t know exactly who first spotted him,” said Piccolo, who often cites the blog Lamb wrote for while explaining the governor’s pandemic policies on Twitter.“But he’s done some work for the online publications, the blogs, that do this kind of data analysis.” Last week, Piccolo said that DeSantis first heard of Cabrera, who published the misleading post about COVID-19 deaths, on Twitter. Kyle Lamb, a newly hired data analyst for the office of Gov. Ron DeSantis, confused his ‘x’ and ‘y’ axes on a chart he made about the coronavirus. TwitterCOURTESY One clue to Lamb’s surprising ascent may lie in Fox News, which like Twitter has been a catalyst for misinformation throughout the pandemic. In July, a guest on Laura Ingraham’s show referenced Lamb by name, calling him “a really good researcher on this [coronavirus] stuff.” The guest cited a tweet by Lamb that claimed one Ohio resident had tested positive for the virus 15 times and that the state had counted each test as a separate result, inflating its overall numbers. Ohio’s health department said the tweet was false. Lamb later deleted it. (He has also deleted dozens of other tweets and online posts that ended up being proven wrong, according to a review of his Internet activity.) Lamb’s Twitter following has more than doubled to nearly 24,000 people since the Fox News mention, according to Social Blade, a social media analytics website. DeSantis appears on Fox frequently and is an avid Twitter user. By all accounts, Lamb had limited success as a sports writer in Ohio. He bounced around from podcasts to blogs, working for sites dedicated to Ohio State University football, including Buckeye Grove, Land of Ten and Eleven Warriors, and in at least one instance left under acrimonious circumstances, according to other sports writers. He gained some Twitter prominence in late 2018 when he began defending former OSU football coach Urban Meyer, a two-time national champion with the Florida Gators, for his handling of a scandal involving an assistant coach accused of abusing his then-wife. “Kyle was a nobody, really,” said Gus Vogel, a fellow sports blogger from Ohio. “He had his own little podcast. But he turned himself into an authority on everything from NCAA laws to domestic violence cases. This is a reoccurring theme with Kyle: He thinks he’s an expert on everything.” Vogel said that he believes Lamb latched onto COVID conspiracy theories as a way to protect his own income. Lockdowns and social distancing led to college football nearly being canceled and ride-sharing taking a nose-dive. “His only source of income is Uber driving and Ohio State football,” Vogel said. Others who know Lamb from Ohio expressed shock that he will now work for the governor of the nation’s third-biggest state. “Do not trust Kyle Lamb. Do not take him seriously. He is an amateur, basement epidemiologist who likes to badmouth science,” said Ryan Donnelly, who worked with Lamb at an Ohio sports website in 2018. “He has no idea what he’s doing. He’s a rank conspiracy theorist who loves the attention.” “I was absolutely stunned when he got hired to work at the statehouse,” said D.J. Byrnes, a former Ohio sports blogger and Democratic candidate for a seat in Ohio’s state Legislature who clashed with Lamb on social media. “For what? To sweep stairs. Because that’s all he’s qualified to do.” State Republican lawmakers said they were not familiar with Lamb, but said they trusted DeSantis to do the right thing on the coronavirus. “I don’t know what the governor has this gentleman doing, but I certainly don’t believe that there is anything that is not above board, 100 percent,” Senate President Wilton Simpson said. ‘ON ALL THAT IS HOLY’ On social media, Lamb’s critics have accused him of embracing other dangerous conspiracy theories. Lamb has denied those allegations and the Herald could find no independent proof that he has expressed those views. Reporters did, however, uncover a post from an Ohio State University sports messaging board where he claimed that United Nations troops were taking over a fairgrounds in Ohio. “I promise you on all that is holy this is not made up,” Lamb wrote in March of this year. “On Tuesday, two different friends said they heard from people that swore up and down they spotted UN troops at the Delaware County fairgrounds. I wrestled all night with whether to bring this to anyone’s attention because it seemed nutty but two different people saw the same thing so who am I to say it’s not true?” Conspiracy theories have always been a part of daily life, from witch hunts to the Red Scare, according to Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who studies disinformation. Those theories become especially dangerous when politicians start to repeat them and allow them to influence government policy, Uscinski said. “If you are a Republican who lives in Florida, you’re going to listen to things the Republican governor says,” he said. “He’s not going to get you to jump off a bridge, It’s not a cult following. But if he says ‘X, Y or Z’ about policy, Republicans who trust him are going to listen.” Uscinski’s research has shown that 29% of Americans believe the threat of COVID-19 was exaggerated to damage Trump and 31% think the virus was intentionally created and spread to hurt people. Like other conspiracy theorists, Lamb has been consistently wrong on the pandemic. On March 26, Lamb responded to a tweet by Gov. Mike DeWine warning Ohioans of a deadly coronavirus surge. “We could be seeing 6,000 to 8,000 new cases a day,” the Republican governor said. “The more we can push that surge off, the better hospitals can prepare their systems.” Lamb responded indignantly: “You want the public to believe Ohio, with ⅕ the population as Italy and only ⅓ the density, will have the same number (or more) of daily cases? Sir, this is flatly stupid.” On Tuesday, Ohio reported more than 6,500 new cases after the state’s chief medical officer warned of an “unprecedented spike” in hospital admissions.
DeSantis goes full fringe, fighting his own health experts and American democracy https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opi...0201110-tfgdjbvlaje5newv2odzv575ba-story.html Late last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis went on Fox News and suggested that GOP legislators in states where Joe Biden won should maybe override their citizens' votes and just declare Donald Trump the winner anyway. It was like listening to a third-world dictator … if the dictator fawned over Laura Ingraham and the third world was Tallahassee. The next day, the Miami Herald revealed that DeSantis’ office had enlisted a conservative blogger to try to downplay the Florida’s COVID-19 death count — and discredit the state’s own data. Because why listen to health experts during a health crisis when you can get a blogger with 12,000 Twitter followers to say something else? Put these things together, and it has become clear: Florida’s governor has gone full fringe. No more Mr. Sane Guy. No more acting like facts and democracy matter. DeSantis has gone all-in on extremism. If those examples weren’t enough, the Herald also revealed Wednesday that DeSantis' approach to dealing with COVID-19 basically mirrors another fringe idea — “herd immunity,” which basically accepts the risk of a large portion of otherwise-healthy population getting infected as long as you try to protect the vulnerable. Experts say the idea is dangerously errant. “We have to look that square in the eye and say it’s nonsense,” Dr. Anthony Fauci recently toldABC News. “This idea that we have the power to protect the vulnerable is total nonsense because history has shown that’s not the case.” The head of the Johns Hopkins' health security division went even further, saying that, if Florida goes full-bore on the herd-immunity theory, “extraordinary numbers of people are going to die from this illness before immunity is achieved in the population.” As someone who writes a lot about politics, it’s tempting to dismiss some of DeSantis’ latest acts as just more basic partisanship — a Republican governor taking shots at Democrats and Democratic ideas. But there is nothing basic about a governor suggesting that legislators override American voters. That’s not a conservative value. It’s not even an American one. (More at above url)
From the article: As someone who writes a lot about politics, No way! You mean the author of this article is politically aligned against the governor? Holy shit what an epiphany!
Why don't you just get back to following and re-posting COVID information from your favorite bloggers; Jennifer Cabrera and Kyle Lamb.
"Full Fringe Florida" "Fuller Fringe Illinois" "Moderately Fringy North Carolina Fringe-a-sauras Rex Wisconsin And so on, and so on. But....DeSantis.
If they post something of worth, I will consider doing so, and gladly. Although I don't remember Kyle Lamb...did I post something from Kyle Lamb before? I might have - can you show me which post was from Kyle Lamb?
GWB? Did I post something from Kyle Lamb? I mean, if he's my favorite blogger I'd have lots of stuff from him, right? Or is this with the 5G claim and the claim on Demon Sperm that you said I support?
Your buddy pushing the "Rational Ground" nonsense whose authors make you so happy..... has now made the Washington Post. Are you actually making the case that this clown Kyle Lamb has any qualifications whatsoever for a Data Analyst job? Normally you at least act in a manner with some intelligence and integrity --- are you truly telling us that you find nothing wrong with the DeSantis administration hiring this guy to do COVID data analysis? Florida Gov. DeSantis’s new data analyst: An anti-mask sports blogger pushing coronavirus conspiracies https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/11/11/kyle-lamb-data-florida-coronavirus-desantis/ When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) needed a new mind to join the state’s team of data analysts, many of whom have been working to monitor the coronavirus pandemic, he turned to an unlikely candidate. Last week, Kyle Lamb, a little-known sports blogger who moonlights as an anti-masker, announced he had been hired to do data analysis, “including but not limited to Covid-19 research,” for the governor of Florida. Lamb, 40, is not a data scientist by trade or training. In his own words, he is “not an ‘expert.’” His public statements about the pandemic have frequently contradicted advice from public health officials, and he has dedicated much of his coronavirus commentary to undermining experts. Yet Lamb, who has been cited on Fox News for his coronavirus-related tweets, will join a team that monitors coronavirus outbreaks in a state that has seen at least 852,174 cases and 17,460 deaths since the start of the pandemic. In the past week, the number of covid-19 cases has risen in Florida, and hospitalizations jumped by more than 20 percent. Ryan Donnelly, a former sportswriter who worked with Lamb at a sports publication in 2018, told The Washington Post in a Twitter direct message that the podcast host has no background in data analysis or epidemiology. “He is totally unfit for the role and appears to have been hired because he enjoyed posting charts and graphs on Twitter and offering misleading analysis alongside them,” Donnelly told The Post. Lamb did not immediately return a request for comment late Tuesday. While it’s unclear how the governor’s office came to its decision to hire Lamb, they may have spotted his work in a conservative blog that has promoted an unsubstantiated claim that Florida had overcounted covid-19 deaths, which has been previously cited by DeSantis’s spokespeople. DeSantis has often downplayed the severity of the pandemic and pushed to reopen businesses and schools in the state, even in the early weeks of the pandemic. DeSantis’s office did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment, but a spokesman told the Miami Herald that Lamb’s work would pass “through about 10 hands” before reaching the governor’s desk. “It’s not a covid-19 hire,” DeSantis spokesman Fred Piccolo told the Herald. Lamb’s former colleagues in the Ohio sports world, where he previously worked as a blogger and podcast host, have characterized him in interviews with the Herald and Tampa Bay Times as “a nobody,” “an amateur,” an “Internet weirdo,” and a “crackpot.” The only education listed on his LinkedIn profile is a one-year stint at the Ohio Center for Broadcasting from 2000 to 2001. The blogger found a modicum of prominence in Ohio when he was covering domestic violence allegations against former Ohio State assistant football coach Zach Smith. Donnelly described Lamb as a “mouthpiece for Zach Smith” who published attacks against the coach’s ex-wife, Courtney Smith, after she filed a restraining order and accused Smith of throwing her against a wall while she was pregnant. (OSU fired Smith in 2018 and he later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct; he was sentenced to spend 20 days in jail after violating his ex-wife’s restraining order in December.) But Lamb gained most of his large Twitter following when he began posting colorful spreadsheets and graphs generated in Excel as communities across the United States went into shutdowns because of the pandemic. Donnelly described many of Lamb’s covid-19 posts as “conspiracy theories and half-baked crackpot data” that were “constantly being proven wrong.” Experts have taken issue with Lamb’s data analysis. A University of Florida professor retweeted several instances where Lamb appeared to make a clumsy error, including switching the axes of a graph showing new covid-19 cases in Ohio and creating messy spreadsheets that defied basic data organization principals. “I am hyperventilating into my mask at the thought of this person being part of @GovRonDeSantis COVID data analysis team,” Emilio M. Bruna, a professor of tropical ecology and Latin American studies at the University of Florida, tweeted Tuesday. Bruna decried the poor analysis in another tweet picking apart one of Lamb’s coronavirus charts: “We’re all going to die,” he wrote. The Ohio Department of Health debunked at least one claim Lamb made about the state’s coronavirus test numbers being inflated, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported in July. Lamb later deleted his inaccurate tweet. Lamb appears to work as an Uber driver and has had a smattering of sports-related podcast gigs over the years, according to his LinkedIn page. He has not been shy about his lack of credentials, work experience or formal education in medicine, epidemiology or public health. “I’m not a doctor, epidemiologist, virologist or scientist,” Lamb wrote in the Patreon bio for his covid-19 podcast, “Beyond the Fold,” which has 43 patrons. “Experts don’t have all the answers.” “My job isn’t to study the virus itself or tell you how to protect yourself, your children or your family,” Lamb continued. “However, I will tell you what the data says about risk and I’ll provide all the context I possibly can.” In his latest podcast episode, which aired on Election Day, Lamb argued that global “elites” were using the pandemic as an excuse to strip away private property rights. “This is not a conspiracy. This is not a hoax.” Lamb said at the outset of his Election Day broadcast, which was filled with unsubstantiated claims. “I’m not saying that the virus does not exist. I’m not saying that it was preplanned. It could have been, but I’m not saying that it is because there is no evidence that it was.” For those who have known Lamb in Ohio, his new job has come as a shock. “The idea that he is being put anywhere near the halls of power is so concerning,” Donnelly told The Post. “Everything he’s pulled at has been proven incorrect and misguided time and time again.”