Gee, You Think

This is my shocked faceRather unsurprisingly, it appears that solar, wind, and hydro are way cheaper than carbon capture of fossil fuels.

Also, the technology for renewables is more mature, and less likely to be a source of rents for Wall Street ……… Oh, NOW I get it.

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, the global community must rapidly transition to renewable energy while also expanding carbon dioxide removal—technologies that literally pull this greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere. Both endeavors will be costly, but a new study strongly suggests the U.S. should prioritize investing in renewable energy over expensive, energy-intensive direct air capture schemes.

The findings, published Monday in Communications Sustainability, show that renewable energy is far more cost-effective than direct air capture—a growing carbon removal strategy—at reducing atmospheric carbon. Across nearly every U.S. region through 2050, money spent deploying wind or solar power will deliver a greater combined climate and public health benefit than if it is spent on direct air capture, according to the study.

Yes, but they present less opportunities for looting by the banksters.

No nice things for you, the Wall Street guy has a mistress he needs to buy coke for. 

Here About That Fluoridation Study

You may have heard of a meta-study that showed that fluoride in drinking water lowered IQs..

Rather unsurprisingly, the study is complete pants. 

It failed peer review multiple times, and they finally assembled a hand picked review committee, and then SELFpublished this as a monograph:

Federal toxicology researchers on Monday finally published a long-controversial analysis that claims to find a link between high levels of fluoride exposure and slightly lower IQs in children living in areas outside the US, mostly in China and India. As expected, it immediately drew yet more controversy.

The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, is a meta-analysis, a type of study that combines data from many different studies—in this case, mostly low-quality studies—to come up with new results. None of the data included in the analysis is from the US, and the fluoride levels examined are at least double the level recommended for municipal water in the US. In some places in the world, fluoride is naturally present in water, such as parts of China, and can reach concentrations several-fold higher than fluoridated water in the US.

The authors of the analysis are researchers at the National Toxicology Program at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. For context, this is the same federal research program that published a dubious analysis in 2016 suggesting that cell phones cause cancer in rats. The study underwent a suspicious peer-review process and contained questionable methods and statistics.

The new fluoride analysis shares similarities. NTP researchers have been working on the fluoride study since 2015 and submitted two drafts for peer review to an independent panel of experts at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2020 and 2021. The study failed its review both times. The National Academies' reviews found fault with the methods and statistical rigor of the analysis. Specifically, the reviews noted potential bias in the selection of the studies included in the analysis, inconsistent application of risk-of-bias criteria, lack of data transparency, insufficient evaluations of potential confounding, and flawed measures of neurodevelopmental outcomes, among other problems.

After the failing reviews, the NTP selected its own reviewers and self-published the study as a monograph in August.

And here is the money quote:

………

The study's primary meta-analysis only included 59 of the studies: 47 with a high risk of bias and 12 with a low risk. This analysis looked at standardized mean differences in children's IQ between higher and lower fluoride exposure groups. Of the 59 studies, 41 were from China.

Among the 47 studies with a high risk of bias, the pooled difference in mean IQ scores between the higher-exposure groups and lower-exposure groups was -0.52, suggesting that higher fluoride exposure lowered IQs. But, among the 12 studies at low risk for bias, the difference was slight overall, only -0.19. And of those 12 studies, eight found no link between fluoride exposure and IQ at all.

This study is General Jack Ripper raving about Russians attacking our purity of essence.

Here is a Surprise

Once again, the six conservative Supreme Court Justices are blithely accepting testimony from quack doctors.

The doctors have been dismissed by judges across the US as “conspiratorial”, “deeply biased”, “far off” and deserving “very little weight”.

But their testimonies were nonetheless submitted by the state of Tennessee in defense of an anti-trans law the US supreme court will consider in December, in one of the most important cases of the court’s session and among the most consequential LGBTQ+ rights cases in its history.

In US v Skrmetti, the court will weigh whether transgender youth have a constitutional right to access healthcare treatments endorsed by every major medical association in the country, who say the care improves patients’ mental health and reduces the suicide risks of vulnerable teens. The case originated with three trans youth and their parents who sued Tennessee last year over its ban on gender-affirming healthcare for minors, arguing the care was medically necessary and “life-saving”. The outcome could have profound implications for trans rights, bodily autonomy and the government’s authority over people’s private healthcare decisions.

If the court’s conservative supermajority upholds Tennessee’s ban, it would, in effect, be siding with doctors who, LGBTQ+ advocates and trans healthcare experts say, have repeatedly peddled misinformation and in some cases, espoused religious doctrine in the name of science. Six doctors who filed expert declarations for Tennessee have a history of advocating against trans healthcare, and five of them have previously been rebuked or discounted by judges due to their backgrounds.

Expect a 6-3 decision in favor of bigotry.

Also expect the justification to be an exercise in hypocrisy.

But It Does Not Effect Kids!

I am, of course, referring to Covid, and the claim the it does not effect children is a lie.

Children are getting sick once or twice a year, and prospect of long disabilities is mind boggling:

Since the COVID pandemic began, claims that the disease poses only minimal risk to children have spread widely, on the presumption that the lower rate of severe acute illness in kids tells the whole story. Notions that children are nearly immune to COVID and don’t need to be vaccinated have pervaded.

These ideas are wrong. People making such claims ignore the accumulating risk of long COVID, the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection, in children who may get infected once or twice a year. The condition may already have affected nearly six million kids in the U.S. Children need us to wake up to this serious threat. If we do, we can help our kids with a few straightforward and effective measures.

The spread of the mistaken idea that children have nothing to worry about has had some help from scientists. In 2023 the American Medical Association’s pediatrics journal published a study–which has since been retracted—reporting the rate of long COVID symptoms in kids was “strikingly low” at only 0.4 percent. The results were widely publicized as feel-good news, and helped rationalize the status quo, where kids are repeatedly exposed to SARS-COV-2 in underventilated schools and parents believe they will suffer no serious harm.

As an aside, even if this were true, the parents would be getting sick from their kids, and they would be suffering severe illness, disability, and possible death.

In January 2024, however, two scientists published a letter with me explaining why that study was invalid. Some of the errors made it hard to understand how the study survived peer review. For example, the authors claimed to report on long COVID using the 2021 World Health Organization definition, but didn’t properly account for the possibility of new onset and fluctuating or relapsing symptoms, even though that definition and the subsequently released 2023 pediatric one emphasize those attributes. Any child with four symptom-free weeks—even nonconsecutive ones—following confirmed infection was categorized by the study authors as not having long COVID.

In August, the authors of the study retracted it. They did not admit to the errors we raised. But they did admit to new errors, and said these mistakes meant they understated the rate of affected children.

This was deliberate Great Barrington declaration deception, just like the anti-masking humbuggery that was done at the Cochrane Review. 

In reality, the occurrence of Long Covid in youth is pretty firmly in the double digit percentages.

There is an entire extremely well-paid industry dedicated to peddling this anti-vax/anti-mask/anti-public health bullsh%$.

Billionaires who don't care that their workers die pay good money for this sort of crap.

No

Can Stanford Tell the Difference Between Scientific Fact and Fiction? Its Pandemic Conference Raises Doubts

—Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times

Stanford has been captured by conservatism and by its role as the birthplace of many tech bros, and as such, we find that its support for pseudoscience has been purchased by its reactionary and delusionary (and very rich) alumni.

The first two paragraphs tell you all you need to know:

On Oct. 4, Stanford University’s newly minted president, Jonathan Levin, opened an on-campus conference about pandemic policies by expressing the hope that the proceedings would “bring together people with different perspectives, engage in a day of discussion, and in that way, try to repair some of the rifts that opened during COVID.”

He was followed to the lectern by the conference organizer, Stanford public policy professor Jay Bhattacharya, who described the event’s goal as fostering “dialogue with one another rather than having a situation where the goal is to destroy people who disagree with you.”

Jay Bhattacharya is one of the prime movers behind the "Great Barrington Declaration" which said, "Just get everyone sick, it will be fine, and I want to go to the movies."

The Great Barrington crowd was wrong and dangerous and ignorant, and and remains wrong and dangerous and ignorant.

That Stanford's president gave his stamp of approval to a group of people whose scientific credibility ranks somewhere around that of flat-earthers is yet another sign that Stanford is overrated.

That F%$#ing Paper

This is a very well deserved take down of Pamela Paul's paean to Dr. Marty Makary in her latest New York Times OP/ED.

Dr. Makary has written a book bemoaning the tendencies of the so-called "Medical Establishment" to discard and suppress any argument that challenges the orthodoxy.

What she neglects to mention is that this doctor has been a proponent of the "Herd Immunity" strategy to address the Covid-19 pandemic, and has refused to acknowledge that he was deeply and disastrously wrong on:

Dear Ms. Paul,

I recently read your article title The Medical Establishment Closes Ranks, and Patients Feel the Effects. [link removed, I am not sending Pamela Paul  or the NYT clicks] Your article was an homage to a Dr. Marty Makary. I am very familiar with Dr. Makary. You had nice things to say about him and his calls for medical professionals to abandon incorrect positions. You wrote about children peanut allergies and said:

This avoidable tragedy is one of several episodes of medical authorities sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence that Marty Makary, a surgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, examines in his new book, “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.”…

While these mistakes are appalling, more worrisome are the enduring root causes of those errors. Medical journals and conferences regularly reject presentations and articles that overturn conventional wisdom, even when that wisdom is based on flimsy underlying data. For political or practical reasons consensus is often prized over dissenting opinions.

“We’re seeing science used as political propaganda,” Makary told me when I spoke to him by phone. But, he argues, mistakes can’t be freely corrected or updated unless researchers are encouraged to pursue alternative research.

You told your readers that Dr. Makary’s book would educate them about medical authorities sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence

That’s ironic.

Since 2021, there have been few better examples of someone sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence than Dr. Marty Makary himself. To pick one example amongst many, in February 2021, Dr. Makary authored the article We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April. Listen to what he had to say then.

………

All of this is just a small sample of some of Dr. Makary’s pandemic pronouncements. He spread gross misinformation about COVID’s risk to children, as well as the vaccine’s risk to them. He wrote error-filled articles with titled such as The Flimsy Evidence Behind the CDC’s Push to Vaccinate Children. In the interview below Dr. Makary says that natural immunity is 27 times better than vaccine immunity, even though natural immunity killed 1.2 million Americans. Meanwhile Jim Jordan spins conspiracies about the COVID’s origins. Just watch. I can give you volumes of such material.

And yet, I have never seen Dr. Makary acknowledge he was wrong about any of this. Maybe he does so in his book, but I’ve not seen him write an article titled I Was Wrong About Herd Immunity or Natural Immunity Wasn’t So Powerful After All or As It Turns Out, the Delta and Omicron Variants Mattered.

Incredibly, despite his track record, you depicted Dr, Makary as an exemplar of a brave medical truth-teller, a maverick with integrity, a rightful correction to those dastardly “medical authorities” who stick to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence.

You want to read the whole thing, but more generally it is a take-down of  how the New York Times appears determined to take the worst that the Ivy League produces, and make them the arbiters of acceptable discourse.

If you have a subscription to the Times, cancel it now.

They Only Did This Because They Got Caught

Academic publisher Wiley has shuttered 19 academic publications because they were so-called paper mills.

Short version is that they published bullsh%$ articles that the authors paid to be published to bump up their academic profiles.

US publishing house Wiley this week discontinued 19 scientific journals overseen by its Hindawi subsidiary, the center of a long-running scholarly publishing scandal.

In December 2023 Wiley announced it would stop using the Hindawi brand, acquired in 2021, following its decision in May 2023 to shut four of its journals "to mitigate against systematic manipulation of the publishing process."

Hindawi's journals were found to be publishing papers from paper mills – organizations or groups of individuals who try to subvert the academic publishing process for financial gain. Over the past two years, a Wiley spokesperson told The Register, the publisher has retracted more than 11,300 papers from its Hindawi portfolio.

As described in a Wiley-authored white paper published last December, "Tackling publication manipulation at scale: Hindawi’s journey and lessons for academic publishing," paper mills rely on various unethical practices – such as the use of AI in manuscript fabrication and image manipulations, and gaming the peer review process.


The Hindawi affair coincided with the departure of Wiley president and CEO Brian Napack in October, 2023. In its fiscal Q2 2024 earnings report [PDF] last December, Wiley admitted its $18 million decline in research publishing revenue was "mainly due to the Hindawi publishing disruption."

………

Academic publishers, however, appear to want the benefits of AI writing assistance without the downsides. Springer Nature, for example, last October launched Curie – an AI-powered writing assistant intended to help scientists whose first language is not English. Hence calls for better tools [PDF] to detect generative AI output – a call answered by recent efforts to improve AI content watermarking – which some researchers argue won't work.

A Wiley spokesperson characterized the decision to shut the 19 journals as part of its previously announced plan to integrate the Hindawi and Wiley portfolios, and distinct from the paper mill issue.

Yeah, sure.  It had nothing to do with the profits generated by publishing garbage articles for Wiley.

This is yet another example of how the profit motive poisons scientific study in all forms.

Short Taser International

Because California Governor Gavin Newsom has just signed a law making it illegal to list, "Excited Delirium," as cause of death.

For those of you who are not aware of this phony medical condition, it was invented at the request of Taser manufacturers in order for them to pretend to juries that their electric shock guns were not deadly weapons, and that tasing people repeatedly will not kill people.

Same goes for choke holds and putting your knee on people's necks.  Basically, it's a way to give juries an excuse to not convict cops who murder minorities.

California has become the first state to ban the use of “excited delirium” as a cause of death, prohibiting the pseudoscientific diagnosis that authorities have frequently cited to justify killings at the hands of law enforcement.

Excited delirium – a term rejected by major medical groups, including the American Medical Association – suggests that people can develop “superhuman strength” due to drug use. Medical examiners and coroners have argued that the condition caused victims of brutal police force to struggle and collapse from cardiac arrest, essentially excusing the role of officers who were holding them down, choking or suffocating them.

Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Sunday prohibiting the term from being recognized as valid diagnosis or cause of death. The bill comes as a national emergency physicians’ group is also considering disavowing the term.

The legislation was prompted by the 2020 death of Angelo Quinto, who lost consciousness while two Antioch officers knelt on his neck and back, with the death certificate citing “excited delirium syndrome”. Quinto was suffering a mental health crisis in his mother’s home.

Law enforcement officials, death investigators and first responders have disproportionately applied the term to Black victims and cited it in a number of high-profile cases in recent years across the country. One of the former Minneapolis officers who pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the murder of George Floyd was heard on video saying he was “concerned about excited delirium or whatever” as Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck.

The next step is to initiate criminal investigations on all deaths attributed to the phony condition, because I guarantee that most of those deaths involve cops doing something that they should not be doing.

Remember that Bogus Mask Metadata Study?

It turns out that the story is even worse that initial reports.

The short version:

• Lead author Tom Jefferson is a right wing hack who has been espousing junk science for years, and has been paid by the Brownstone institute, which is in turned funded by right wing billionaire and child labor enthusiast Jeffrey Tucker.
• Another author, John Conly, an anti-mask activists who has claimed that N-95s don't work and cause zits.
• Another author, Carl Heneghan was so toxic that his name was relegated to the acknowledgements.
• Elevating the randomized control trial over fully understanding and modeling the phenomenon.  (It's called engineering, bitches)

It's well worth the read.

The takeaway here is that meta studies, such those which are the only thing that Cochrane does, far from being a, "Gold standard," of science, are a petri dish for confirmation bias and bad science.

More Junk Criminal Science

The newly renamed Maryland Supreme Court has ruled that ruled that ballistics evidence is basically junk science.

They ruled that a so-called ballistics expert can rule a bullet of shell casing out, but not in, because they are wrong between 30% and 50% of the time. (Not much better than a coin flip)

In Maryland, firearms experts will no longer be allowed to testify that a specific gun fired a specific bullet, the state’s highest court ruled in an opinion published Tuesday.

Authored by Chief Justice Matthew J. Fader of the Supreme Court of Maryland, the opinion imposes limits in the courtroom on the practice known as firearm “tool mark” analysis. The forensic technique postulates that machines used to make guns leave tiny imperfections on their components, and that those components imprint unique marks on ammunition — composed of softer metal — when fired.

Until now, it was commonplace for firearms examiners — usually employed in police crime labs — to testify that a gun recovered by law enforcement fired bullets or used casings found at a crime scene, if they believed that to be true based on their observations under a microscope.

But four of seven justices on the state Supreme Court found that the scientific methodology is not reliable enough to allow examiners to testify that a particular gun fired a particular bullet. Examiners can, however, testify “that patterns and markings on bullets are consistent or inconsistent with those on bullets fired from a particular known firearm,” the opinion said.

………

With the opinion, Maryland becomes one of the nation’s first jurisdictions where an appellate court has recognized shortcomings in the forensic practice and imposed limits on its use in court.

Maneka Sinha, an associate professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law who studies forensic sciences, said the justices “came to the conclusion that scientists, academics and others seriously studying the discipline already have: that conclusions claiming they can say a specific gun fired a specific item of ammunition are simply unreliable.”

As to the studies, when said studies are not run by the the Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners (ATFE), the result are unreliable:

………

Leading off its criticism of assuming ballistics evidence is good evidence, the court cites a 2009 report by the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies of Science. That report said the standards created by the Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners (ATFE) were faulty because so much of what was assumed to be scientifically sound was little more than examiners’ subjective interpretations of marks found on bullets.

………

The government cites studies showing minuscule error rates by ATFE examiners, with one study showing a near-zero rate of false positives. But the court says these were tests controlled by the ATFE where examiners knew they were being tested and every test set included a test bullet fired by the test gun.

In “black box” studies (only two appear to meet this description), ATFE examiners fared much worse. Test sets did not always contain a match. Examiners didn’t know they were being tested. In those tests, the error rate was exponentially higher: more than a third of the matches were declared “inconclusive.” In the other test, positive results (i.e., supposed matches) varied as much as 15% between sets of examiners. Negative results (non-matches) varied nearly as much: 13-14% between sets of examiners over two rounds of testing.

Is being right 74-80% of the time the evidentiary standard in the US criminal justice system? Obviously, it shouldn’t be. But it has been because examiners routinely overstated the confidence of their findings and the US court system basically never bothered to wonder if the experts might be wrong.

There was a similar case to this a few years ago about fingerprints.  There is no consensus on the numbers of points of similarity.

If there is a field of study where tests should be double blind in all instances, it is forensic science.

The incentives are for getting convictions, not getting it right.

 

When Discussing the Lab Leak Theory, Remember,

"There is no lab leak theory," as Jonathan M. Katz so ably notes.

When you look at the various lab leak theories, which is that the there was an accidental leak of the virus, strengthened by gain of function experiments, from the Wuhan Institute of Technolgy, it turns out that there really is no coherent theory.

First, people conflate the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was about 15 km from the wet market, and the Chinese CDC lab, a few hundred meters from the wet market where the first 2 (at least) outbreaks occurred.

The thing is, if it did leak from the latter lab, it would have been a natural virus, because the CDC lab does not do gain of function tests.

Of course, that would not explain why the first TWO outbreaks (the first one did not "take") occurred at the wet market, as opposed to, for example the households of CCDC or WIT staff.

As an FYI, Mr. Katz, has some significant priors in reporting about disease outbreaks, as he is largely responsible for the revelation of the source of the introduction of Cholera to Haiti by UN troops.

It goes on from there:

………

Given that experience, you might think I’d have been among the first to buy into the allegations of the “lab leak” origin of COVID-19. Indeed, I’ve heard through the grapevine that some of my old Haiti cholera crew are buying the hype. But I’m not. At least not yet. That is because the lab leak is still missing the key element of the U.N. cholera story that made it more than just a bunch of rumors: an actual, coherent theory of the case that could be refuted or confirmed.

When you peel back the label, it seems “lab leak” is a jaunty alliteration that papers over a variety of wildly different, often mutually exclusive, ideas. It isn’t a theory but a bundle of loose hypotheses that contradict each another on basic facts: the nature of the virus in question, the timeline of introduction — even the identity of the lab at which the alleged leak occurred.

………

So first, let’s get something out of the way. A pair of incontrovertible facts underlies most of the lab leak narratives: SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, was first detected in the city of Wuhan. And there is at least one lab that studies coronaviruses in Wuhan.

But that is not a theory. It isn’t even a hypothesis. It’s just a vibe: two facts, possibly correlated, possibly not, that are a good jumping-off point for formulating a question. And, to be clear, it is a valid question! Though it is a question that has been asked, repeatedly.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal spurred the newest round of question-asking when it published a front-page story headlined: Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says.

………

I probably don’t have to tell you that was all bullshit. But I will anyway. For one, there is nothing in there about a “Chinese military biolab” in the WSJ story. In fact, the WSJ flatly refuted that entire line of speculation, noting: “the update reaffirmed an existing consensus … that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said.” 

………

The WSJ had no idea. The reporters did not actually see a copy of the five-page report; the unnamed officials who told them about it “declined to give details.” (FBI director Christopher Wray repeated his agency’s conclusion in a Fox News interview Tuesday, also refusing to provide details.) But CNN claims to have the goods:

Three sources told CNN that the Department of Energy’s shift was based in part on information about research being conducted at the Chinese Centers for Disease Control in Wuhan, China, which was studying a coronavirus variant around the time of the outbreak.

Take a closer look at the name of the lab in that quote. If you have been reading anything about the lab leak for the last three years, or even just looking at the pictures, you will no doubt recognize the name Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Well, it may interest you to know that the Chinese Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention] is not the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is, in fact, an entirely different institution — nine miles away, on the other side of Wuhan, across the Yangzi River. To put it in American terms: If the CCDC was near the White House, the WIV would be somewhere in Falls Church, Virginia.

………

As it happens, switching the lab at the center of the story would solve one big problem the lab leakers have been struggling with for three years: that the earliest known cluster of COVID cases was nowhere near the WIV. During the initial wave of unexplained pneumonia, doctors immediately identified the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, on the west side of Wuhan, as the common link. That was why, to the chagrin of investigators since, Chinese officials immediately closed and sanitized the market on January 1, 2020. Since then, evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey and his colleagues have provided even more detail for the case that the market was the “epicenter” of the pandemic. 

………

The irony is that the very DOE story Carlson was piggybacking off of fits better with the market being the first major site of contagion. That’s because, while the Huanan market was far from WIV, it was very close to the CCDC. So, points for the lab leakers, right?

Maybe, maybe not. While switching out the lab does solve the distance issue, it creates bigger problems for the lab leakers. That is because it would probably invalidate their most cherished idea: that the virus not only escaped from a lab, but was engineered in one.

The problem here is that, while WIV does have a history of doing potentially dangerous gain-of-function research, all indications are that the CCDC in Wuhan does not.………

………

Is the theory that the reported three sick WIV workers carried the virus to a nearby hospital? Or are they irrelevant, which is why they don’t even bear mentioning in the Republican House Intelligence report? How can Chan and Ridley — who wrote an entire book implicating the Wuhan Institute of Virology — shift seamlessly to offering evidence that a totally different facility was at fault? Does Carlson think the FBI and DOE are lying deep staters when they say COVID wasn’t a bioweapon, but telling the truth when they say — for apparently different reasons! — that they think it is most likely that it came from … some lab? Somewhere?

Contrast all of that to the parsimony of the market hypothesis: In a city of 11 million people, bigger than all five boroughs of New York City combined, the first known cases were clustered around a single market. That market housed caged mammals capable of contracting and spreading SARS-CoV-2: animals farmed in areas suspected of being a source of the virus. The samples taken from the surfaces on the area where the animals were housed tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Vendors and customers at the market got infected, they brought the virus home and to jobs elsewhere, and soon it spread across Wuhan, and then the world.

That story is not without holes: most notably, researchers haven’t yet produced the intermediary species needed for it to work. But it is coherent, clear, and more importantly, testable. (It also happens to be a story that resembles the way nearly every other viral epidemic in human history began, including the original SARS-CoV-1 in 2003.)

It's not just that there is little if any evidence of the outbreak originating from labs, it is that there are many conflicting lab leak theories, and none of them have little if any evidence backing them up.

This is Contemptible

It turns that cops and medical examiners are conspiring to use Sickle Cell Trait to excuse police misconduct.

Sickle Cell Trait is the heterozygous form of Sickle Cell Anemia, and it has a limited effect on people.  It is almost universally asymptomatic.

Nevertheless, because it is almost exclusively associated with Black people, cops and their enablers use it as an an excuse for beating people to death:

When they carried the body of a 32-year-old Black man named Lamont Perry out of the woods in Wadesboro, N.C., there were no protests over his sudden death in police custody.

No reporters camped at the scene. No lawyers filed suit.

Instead, the final mark in the ledger of Mr. Perry’s life was made by a state medical examiner who attributed his death in large part to sickle cell trait, a genetic characteristic that overwhelmingly occurs in Black people. The official word was that he had died by accident.

But the examiner’s determination belied certain facts about that night in October 2016, public records and interviews show. Accused of violating probation in a misdemeanor assault case, Mr. Perry was chased by parole and local police officers through the dark into a stand of trees, where only they could witness what happened next.

He had swelling of the brain, and a forensic investigator reported that he had an open fracture of his right leg. He was covered in dirt, and residents of a nearby housing complex told his family that when the officers emerged from the woods, their shoes and the bottoms of their pants were spattered in blood.

Yes, clearly this is a case of Sickle Cell Trait causing a broken leg, closed head trauma, and massive bleeding.

Mr. Perry’s case underscores how willing some American pathologists have been to rule in-custody deaths of Black people accidents or natural occurrences caused by sickle cell trait, which is carried by one in 13 Black Americans and is almost always benign. Those with the trait have only one of the two genes required for full-blown sickle cell disease, a painful and sometimes life-threatening condition that can deform red blood cells into crescent shapes that stick together and block blood flow.

………

The New York Times has found at least 46 other instances over the past 25 years in which medical examiners, law enforcement officials or defenders of accused officers pointed to the trait as a cause or major factor in deaths of Black people in custody. Fifteen such deaths have occurred since 2015.

In roughly two-thirds of the cases, the person who died had been forcefully restrained by the authorities, pepper-sprayed or shocked with stun guns. Scattered across 22 states and Puerto Rico, in big cities and small towns, the determinations on sickle cell trait often created enough doubt for officers to avert criminal or civil penalties, The Times found.

………

“You can’t put the blame on sickle cell trait when there is a knee on the neck or when there is a chokehold or the person is hogtied,” said Dr. Roger A. Mitchell Jr., the former chief medical examiner for the District of Columbia and now chairman of pathology at the Howard University College of Medicine. “You can’t say, ‘Well, he’s fragile.’ No, that becomes a homicide.”

I guess that we need to add, "Living while Black," to, "Driving while Black," to the list of offenses that the authorities find worthy of the death penalty.

About Bloody Time

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has finally bowed to reality and admitted that it can be transmitted as an aerosol, as opposed to just the larger droplets.

This has been obvious for months, but public health authorities have been steadfast in their opposition to this mode of transmission since the beginning of the pandemic.

It makes dealing effectively with the virus more difficult, but more effective than ignoring reality:

Federal health officials on Friday updated public guidance about how the coronavirus spreads, emphasizing that transmission occurs by inhaling very fine respiratory droplets and aerosolized particles, as well as through contact with sprayed droplets or touching contaminated hands to one’s mouth, nose or eyes.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now states explicitly — in large, bold lettering — that airborne virus can be inhaled even when one is more than six feet away from an infected individual. The new language, posted online, is a change from the agency’s previous position that most infections were acquired through “close contact, not airborne transmission.”

As the pandemic unfolded last year, infectious disease experts warned for months that both the C.D.C. and the World Health Organization were overlooking research that strongly suggested the coronavirus traveled aloft in small, airborne particles. Several scientists on Friday welcomed the agency’s scrapping of the term “close contact,” which they criticized as vague and said did not necessarily capture the nuances of aerosol transmission.

………

The new focus underscores the need for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue standards for employers to address potential hazards in the workplace, some experts said.

This is probably one reason that both WHO and the CDC have been loath to support airborne transmission: It requires more extensive, and more costly measures to deal with the problem.

………

The new information has significant implications for indoor environments, and workplaces in particular, Dr. Michaels said. Virus-laden particles “maintain their airborne properties for hours, and they accumulate in a room that doesn’t have good ventilation.”

Yet more cost and disruption, particularly for things like reopening schools.

Aggressive action, and not reopening too soon, are required to deal with this even with vaccine rates well above 50%, and it's going to be inconvenient as hell.

The Affluenza Defense

In the latest twist in the fraud case against disgraced former head of Theranos Elizabeth Holmes, it appears that she is bringing in a high priced psychologist in an attempt to get out from under the charges against her.

This is pretty clearly an Affluenza defense, "I'm to young, too pretty, and too white to go to jail."

She has a right to this defense, but the judge has made what is a routine ruling, that the prosecution has the right to conduct a psychological examination as well, and that they can tape her sessions, and if the prosecution is not playing to lose, a big if will a well connected white defendant, then they should be able blow this defense out of the water.

Holmes spending at least 5 years, and better yet a decade, behind bars is the singles best thing that should ever do for society:  Be an abject lesson to others who would rely on privilege to defraud people:

Elizabeth Holmes—the disgraced founder and ex-CEO of the now-defunct blood-testing startup, Theranos—may use a mental condition as a defense against a slew of federal fraud charges, according to a court document filed this week. Holmes and Theranos’ former president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were charged in June 2018 with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Federal prosecutors allege the pair—who were romantically involved during the alleged crimes—engaged in conspiracy to defraud Theranos investors out of more than $100 million and defraud doctors and patients into falsely believing the company’s faulty blood-testing technology could reliably perform accurate health tests with just drops of blood from a finger-prick.

According to the court document filed this week, Holmes—who is now being tried separately from Balwani—notified the court last December that she plans to submit “expert evidence relating to a mental disease or defect or any other mental condition” that has bearing on the issue of guilt. The expert providing such evidence was named in the document as psychologist Mindy Mechanic, of California State University, Fullerton.

According to Mechanic’s faculty website, she focuses on “psychosocial consequences of violence, trauma, and victimization with an emphasis on violence against women and other forms of interpersonal violence.” The site also notes that Mechanic “frequently provides expert testimony in complex legal cases involving interpersonal violence.”

The strategy here is clear, her legal team will assert that her former business partner, and former personal partner, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani is a darkly complected man of South Asian extraction, who worked some sort of "Voodoo" over an innocent white girl, and made her defraud stupid rich folks.

………

In response to Holmes’ plans to provide mental health evidence, federal prosecutors requested that they should also be able to examine Holmes’ mental state and provide their own psychiatric evidence in court as a fair rebuttal.

The judge in the case, US District Judge Edward Davila of the Northern District of California, agreed with the prosecutors. As such, he ordered Holmes to undergo up to 14 hours of psychological testing and psychiatric evaluation by two government-appointed doctors over the course of two consecutive days. Davila also ordered that the government’s evaluation of Holmes be recorded on video—over Holmes’ objections. 

It's nice that the judge made this ruling, and I really hope that the prosecution is serious about calling bullsh%$ on this strategy.

Professor Pangloss is Usually Wrong

Andrew McAfee, a "technologist" at MIT, wrote a book, More From Less showing that the US use of natural resources has declined even as its GDP has increased, implying that growth can continue unencumbered without any economic cost.

The problem with this is that his book studiously ignores the raw materials that go into imported goods, which refutes the hypothesis:

Scientists are increasingly concerned about the impact that excess industrial activity is having on our planet’s ecosystems. Our pursuit of perpetual economic growth is driving ever-increasing levels of material extraction, which is causing a wide range of ecological problems: deforestation, soil depletion, habitat loss, and species extinction. The crisis has become so severe that last year more than 11,000 scientists from over 150 countries published an article calling on governments to shift toward “post-growth” economic models, focusing on human well-being and ecological stability rather than constant expansion.

But some figures have rejected this idea and are rallying around a different narrative altogether. In a book published last October titled More From Less, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-based technologist Andrew McAfee argues that we can continue to grow global GDP indefinitely while reducing our ecological impact at the same time—and all without any structural, much less revolutionary, changes to the economy or society.

At the core of McAfee’s argument is his analysis of the U.S. economy. He claims that U.S. consumption of resources has remained steady or even declined since the 1980s, while GDP has continued to rise. In other words, the United States is “dematerializing,” thanks to increasingly efficient technology and a shift toward services. The same thing has been happening in other high-income nations, he says. This proves “green growth” can be achieved; rich countries are showing the way, and the rest of the world should follow suit.

………

There’s only one problem: McAfee’s argument is based on a fundamental accounting error. McAfee uses data on domestic material consumption, which tallies up the resources that a nation extracts and consumes each year. But this metric ignores a crucial piece of the puzzle. While it includes the imported goods a country consumes, it does not include the resources involved in extracting, producing, and transporting those goods. Because the United States and other rich countries have offshored so much of their production to poorer countries over the past 40 years, that side of resource use has been conveniently shifted off their books.

Oops.

They Just Can't Let a White Stanford Dropout Fail, Can They?

Bloomberg’s @mcbridesg asked @TimDraper if he’d back Elizabeth Holmes again:

“I’d back her as chief science officer, not CEO. Good question.” pic.twitter.com/DJqguX9wGA

— Sam Dean 🦅 (@SamAugustDean) March 8, 2019

Seriously?

She defrauded people out of billions on a scheme that could never have worked.

At the core of this scheme was her completely nonsensical pseudoscientific ideas.

And this guy things that she should be in charge of science at a startup?

That's like putting Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in charge of your evolutionary biology department.

Well, she has a career as a poster child for white privilege, I guess.

Meet the New Queen of Cornwall

Gotta lead with Monty Python

7 Year old Matilda Jones just pulled a great sword from Dozmary Pool in Cornwall, which is rumored where King Arthur received, and returned, the sword Excalibur.

If I understand the finer points of of British governance, and I probably don't, this means that she is now the ruler of Cornwall:

A seven-year-old school girl had a legendary holiday after pulling a giant four-foot sword from the Cornish Lake where Arthur threw Excalibur.

Matilda Jones was wading through water waist-deep at Dozmary Pool when she stumbled across the blade underwater.

According to local folklore, Dozmary Pool is the spot where King Arthur returned Excalibur after being fatally wounded in the Battle of Camlann.

'She was only waist deep when she said she could see a sword.

'I told her not to be silly and it was probably a bit of fencing, but when I looked down I realised it was a sword. It was just there laying flat on the bottom of the lake.

'The sword is 4ft long - exactly Matilda's height.'

Legend has it that King Arthur first received Excalibur from the Lady of Lake in Dozmary Pool after rowing out to receive it.

After being mortally wounded he asked to be taken there so he could return the sword to her.

After three attempts, his loyal follower Bedivere cast it into the water and the Lady of the Lake's arm rose to receive it.

If you look at the photos, I would argue that the sword is no older than 6 months old. Otherwise, the leather wrapping would have rotted away.

Additionally, it appears to be a cheap mass produced sword cut from sheet steel, there is no fuller (center groove), and the quillions (cross guards) appear to be made from rod and welded ball bearings.

Still a Queen of Cornwall wearing pink Crocs?  That would be truly epic.

What an Evil Little Sh%$!

I am referring, of course, to a Silicon Valley type, who have honed the little sh%$ to a fine edge.

Specifically, I am referring to to Peter Thiel, who is literally a vampire who wants to use the blood of the young to extend his lifespan.

The latest bit of evil is his funding "patently unethical" human experimentation, specifically testing a live virus vaccine without any regulatory oversight on the island of St. Kitts:

Heavyweight tech investor and FDA-critic Peter Thiel is among conservative funders and American researchers backing an offshore herpes vaccine trial that blatantly flouts US safety regulations, according to a Monday report by Kaiser Health News.

The vaccine—a live but weakened herpes virus—was first tested in a 17-person trial on the Caribbean Island of St. Kitts without federal oversight or the standard human safety requirement of an institutional review board (IRB) approval. Biomedical researchers and experts have sharply rebuked the lack of safety oversight and slammed the poor quality of the data collected, which has been rejected from scientific publication. However, investors and those running the trial say it is a direct challenge to what they see as innovation-stifling regulations by the Food and Drug Administration.

………

Madden, Thiel, and other investors have invested $7 million into the vaccine’s development, according to Rational Vaccines, the company orchestrating the trial. Though Thiel could not be reached for comment, he has been openly critical of the FDA’s review process. At one point, he claimed that the agency’s processes were so overbearing that “you would not be able to invent the polio vaccine today.”

The lead researcher behind the vaccine, William Halford, formerly of Southern Illinois University, made similar claims. In a positive university press release, Halford was quoted as saying: “Many of the virus vaccines we currently put in our kids—chickenpox, mumps, measles, and rubella—were developed using live-attenuated viruses in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s when the regulatory landscape was more relaxed… and they have worked remarkably well.”

He went on to suggest that the FDA has made “barriers too high” and that countries with less regulation were better for vaccine and drug development. “There are governments around the world that the WHO [World Health Organization] has approved for vaccine development,” he said. “We’re talking to those types of governments.”

………

Other researchers and experts strongly disagreed with Halford's stance and handling of a live, attenuated virus vaccine, which can cause infections in the uninfected or severe side-effects in those already infected. “What they’re doing is patently unethical,” Jonathan Zenilman, chief of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center’s Infectious Diseases Division, told KHN. “There’s a reason why researchers rely on these protections. People can die.”

Robert Califf, who served as FDA commissioner during the Obama era, agreed. “There’s a tradition of having oversight of human experimentation, and it exists for good reasons,” he said. “It may be legal to be doing it without oversight, but it’s wrong.”

………

A spokesperson for Southern Illinois University, one of the vaccine’s patent holders, said that the university has no legal responsibility to ensure proper safety protocols for the trial. However, after questions about the lack of IRB [Institutional Review Board] approval (a federal requirement), the spokesperson said that the university would “take this opportunity to review our internal processes to ensure we are following best practices.”

(emphasis mine)

In addition to the quality of the study being so poor that it was refused for publication, there are also reports of skin lesions from a study size of only 17 patients.

I would have thought that this would have merited a visit from the FDA, and possibly an FBI investigation for conspiracy, but it appears that the rules do not apply to rich people, which is an even bigger problem.

20,000 Cases to be Reversed in Massachusetts

Annie Dookhan, a chemist at Massachusetts' Hinton State Laboratory Institute, routinely falsified information for years, which means that something like 20,000 cases are likely to be dismissed:

More than 20,000 drug cases tied to a disgraced former state chemist appear headed for dismissal, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and public defenders said Tuesday as they combed through legal filings from local prosecutors in Massachusetts.

“We’re all overjoyed today at having what is, we think, the largest dismissal of criminal cases as a result of one case in the history of the United States of America,” said Carl Williams, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts, which has pressed for the dismissal of tainted cases.

It was the latest development in the yearslong story of Annie Dookhan, a chemist whose co-workers called her Superwoman because she worked so fast. But she was found to have mishandled drug samples, forged signatures and returned positive results on drugs she never bothered to test, and in 2013, she pleaded guilty to 27 counts, including obstruction of justice, perjury and tampering with evidence.

By then, the damage was done. Prosecutors and defenders around the state had already begun the imposing task of figuring out which convictions had been tainted by the failings. Early estimates rose above 40,000. Hundreds of people were released from prison.

In January, the state’s highest court ordered district attorneys to produce the lists of people they believe they could reprosecute, were a new trial permitted, and those whose cases they will dismiss. Those decisions were due on Tuesday.

On Tuesday afternoon, lawyers combed through spreadsheets inside an ornate courthouse here, and counted 21,587 likely dismissals. They had estimated that prosecutors would not vacate the convictions of 500 to 700 people.

Of course, people like racist Attorney General Jeff Session think that this is some sort of technicality that demoralizes law enforcement.

This is corruption, and the people around her knew that something was wrong, but because it favored prosecutors, law enforcement never paid attention.

This is why we need things like the exclusionary rule and meaningful and independent investigations of law enforcement misconduct.

This Is What Happens When Big Pharma Takes over Research

As a result of increased corporate funding of research, and the pressure to deliver the desired results that inevitably results, the majority of current medical research is garbage that cannot be reproduced:

Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests.

This is frustrating clinicians and drug developers who want solid foundations of pre-clinical research to build upon.

From his lab at the University of Virginia's Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies.

"The idea here is to take a bunch of experiments and to try and do the exact same thing to see if we can get the same results."

You could be forgiven for thinking that should be easy. Experiments are supposed to be replicable.

The authors should have done it themselves before publication, and all you have to do is read the methods section in the paper and follow the instructions.

Sadly nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth.

After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies' findings.

Two more proved inconclusive and in the fifth, the team completely failed to replicate the result.

"It's worrying because replication is supposed to be a hallmark of scientific integrity," says Dr Errington.

………


According to a survey published in the journal Nature last summer, more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments.

Marcus Munafo is one of them. Now professor of biological psychology at Bristol University, he almost gave up on a career in science when, as a PhD student, he failed to reproduce a textbook study on anxiety.

………

The problem, it turned out, was not with Marcus Munafo's science, but with the way the scientific literature had been "tidied up" to present a much clearer, more robust outcome.


………


"The issue of replication goes to the heart of the scientific process."

You said it.

The problem is that research has increasingly become a zero sum game in which corporate funders dictate results before the first experiment is fully designed.

It is a petri dish for corruption.