cumboy round 2

Almost unbelievably to add to yesterday’s pantomime, I am delighted to reveal a second round of even more extremely online Cummings blog stupidity since his surreal rose garden press conference last night. After Cummings claimed yesterday that he had done a lot of "superforecasting" of coronavirus "over the last few years" at the start of a public address that he gave, somebody decided to verify this by checking some of the edit history of his blog. Due to his own truly deranged sense of hubristic pride, they were obviously highly skeptical about his claims that he had been warning about the dangers of a pandemic "for years", specifically in a blog post that he initially wrote in March 2019 about biolabs. 

This is where we start entering territory so pathetically hilarious that even Armando Ianucci would be genuinely embarrassed to write anything this contrived. Apparently, The technologically illiterate chicken brain decided that he would be able to create some proof for these assertions by posthumously inserting several mentions of "coronavirus" to his stupid blog, which nobody even reads, at some point in the last few weeks. The good Sir "Learn-To-Code" is so clueless about how the internet works that he did not seem to realise that there is an extremely well-known website that saves old versions of any simple HTML-style blog web page so that it is possible to see the edit history and what exactly has been changed between versions and at what date.

A sleuthing data scientist named "Jens Wiechers" (please show him your appreciation) has now done just that so that we can see at roughly which dates our budding wannabe steve jobs decided to include these ominous covid warnings with the benefit of perfect hindsight. 

Cassandra, this ain't.

Here is a hyperlinked cache of what his blog has looked like in its various iterations throughout 2020. Apparently at some point before the third of May this year, he changed several cursory mentions around general biology and Ebola to include specific mentions of "SARS", "Coronavirus" and "Chinese laboratories" to posts that waffled more generally about epidemiology.
https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20200409151643/20200503060009/https://dominiccummings.com/2019/03/04/the-most-secure-bio-labs-routinely-make-errors-that-could-cause-a-global-pandemic-are-about-to-re-start-experiments-on-pathogens-engineered-to-make-them-mammalian-airborne-transmissible/

All of this is still largely inconsequential and totally meaningless, but it is still extremely amusing in giving the measure of a man so in love with his own ginormous, heaving, brain that he is willing to do something with next to no benefit just to be able to convince himself of how smart he is.

It is unfortunately not possible to know the exact timeline of this edit history down to the individual day. But it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the thought of what exactly the loving father who has spent a news cycle mawkishly explaining himself was actually doing in Durham. While it is probably more scandalous to be running around coughing on bluebells at a castle and generally acting as a highly contagious disease vector, it is also unlikely that in his off time the good husband Dominic was lovingly nursing the good Baroness Wakefield back to health with some chicken soup.

Instead lets take some joy from the image that while his wife lay sick in bed with Corona, 
this 48 year old manchild was likely in the next room ignoring her, hunched over his keyboard, furiously tapping away while coughing up half a lung, and desperately trying to edit his old blog posts to make him seem like some sort of epidemiological nostradamus. Like I said, nowhere near enough hay has been made of just how unbelievably stupid this ridiculous "online tech guru" really is.

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