Until They Do
“The numbers don’t lie.”
That’s the statement regurgitated over and over again by a local Atlanta TV station when it comes to coronavirus data.
They say “the numbers don’t lie” to tell people that the ever-increasing number of those infected with coronavirus and those who have died from it should be trusted and should be taken seriously.
“The numbers don’t lie,” they say.
Except that they do.
This is one of those BS statements that people love to make. It’s like saying “you can’t fake” whatever it is you want people to buy into. “You can’t fake steak.” “You can’t fake the crunch of fruit.”
Bull! You can fake anything. There’s a bakery that can bake a cake to look like a cheeseburger, or a T-bone steak, and visually it’s indistinguishable from the real thing until you cut into it. Burger King is making a killing off the “Impossible Whopper” which uses plant-based fake meat that you really can’t differentiate from the sight, smell, or taste of the real thing. “Imitation crabmeat” is actually fish, not crab. Back in 2016, the New York Times reported that a lot of the fish that we bought and/or were served wasn’t what we thought it was.
How many times have we heard people exaggerate their credentials? How many times have we heard people claim to be something that they’re not?
The CNBC series “American Greed” focused one episode on a woman who claimed to be an accountant. She lived in a prestigious house in California’s Orange County. She showed off her degree from Pepperdine. She lived a seemingly beautiful life with plenty of clients seeking her fiscal management skills.
Except it was all a lie. She faked everything. She never attended Pepperdine. She has no degree. It was a fake piece of paper framed on her office wall. She didn’t own her expensive house like she claimed she did; she rented it. And she wasn’t even an accountant. She was a fertilizer saleswoman. She literally sold crap! And she pilfered her “clients” out of over a million dollars all to support her “Orange County” lifestyle.
The sad truth is that numbers *do* lie.
Remember Enron? Twenty years ago, the big energy-mongering corporation constantly reported big money because their executives were able to play fast and loose with the numbers. They shuffled debt and pretended it was revenue and they claimed huge stinking profits when in reality they were just sinking themselves further and further into debt. But they were able to get away with it because they had help from a major accounting firm whose job was to supposedly “verify” that the numbers were true, even though they weren’t.
Think about it! Enron executives made the numbers lie, and their accomplices in the major accounting firm certified the lie and claimed it was the truth. And they were able to get away with it over and over again until they just couldn’t do it anymore, and then it destroyed the whole business and put thousands of people out of work.
We’ve been hearing about unemployment in 2020, especially as the global pandemic have ruined economies around the world. But the numbers that we hear about who is unemployed in America are not honest or accurate, and this is something that has been going on for a long time. Long before we elected a career con-artist to the White House.
The unemployment figures we hear in America only account for those who get unemployment assistance. Not those who apply for that assistance but have not yet been approved, not those whose claims have been rejected, and not for those whose assistance has run out. All of those people may still be out of work, still looking for work, but they do not count as being “unemployed”. Also, if you cut the number of weeks covered by that assistance, of course you’re going to see the unemployment numbers drop dramatically. That’s not because the economy is getting better. It’s because those in government are intentionally gaming the numbers and making things worse for people.
Even the numbers attributed to the COVID-19 global pandemic – the very ones that we are being told by a certain Atlanta TV station that “don’t lie” – are not accurate.
The number of people who contracted coronavirus is inaccurate because we really don’t know how many people have it. Testing for the virus in America has been so badly and negligently mismanaged that we will never really know how many people in America have or even had the virus. We’re learning that some people who died of blood clots or heart attacks or strokes early in the year, especially those not in their senior years, may have actually died because of the effects of the coronavirus in their systems. But we only learned that after the fact, and only after people requested an autopsy to actually look for the coronavirus. And we’re still not doing mass testing because insurance providers refuse to cover it and hospitals refuse to administer it unless people are suspected of having it. Sort of like trying to find out if the boat is sinking but waiting until it’s already taking on water.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the involvement of a certain orange-skinned narcissist in the White House and his death cult followers in their repeated denials of the seriousness of the global pandemic and his efforts to - in his own words - “slow down” or even prevent testing for everyone except for himself and his inner circle. Not to mention his directives to send all related data from hospitals to his cronies instead of to the Centers for Disease Control. So, like Enron did two decades ago, they can play fast and loose with the numbers, and there would be nobody to challenge them.
Let’s get brutally honest here... contrary to what people say, numbers *can* lie. Numbers *do* lie, especially in the hands of known liars and con-artists. In fact, numbers are the grifter’s greatest tool. They give the illusion of legitimacy while camouflaging their criminal activities. Look at Enron. Look at the “Orange County” con-woman and the rest of the criminals seen in CNBC’s “American Greed”. They all use numbers and our gullibility to trust those numbers without question to take advantage of us for their own gain.
I’m not saying that we should ignore the COVID-19 numbers. Quite the contrary. Until we have some kind of verification that cannot be influenced or compromised by those in the White House, we should accept the numbers as they are, but with the suspicion that they could be far worse. The people in the White House have every reason to lie about those numbers, and not one reason at all for telling the truth.
The death-cult leader says “it is what it is”. This commentator has a better saying when it comes to COVID numbers: “Better safe than sorry.”
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