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All doctors (and probably most non-doctors) have heard of Burkitt’s lymphoma, a type of cancer found primarily in children living in malaria-endemic areas in Africa. Denis Burkitt was the first person to describe the disease, and also the first person to propose that there was an environmental cause (now known to be simultaneous infection by both malaria and Epstein-Barr virus).

Most doctors probably don’t know … Read more

The post Does a high fibre diet prevent disease? appeared first on Sebastian Rushworth M.D..

COUNTER-NARRATIVE: Study: Political violence, not climate change, to blame for rising hunger in Africa.

A cancer researcher once involved in a federal research integrity probe has repeatedly been denied funding and other sources of income, according to his attorney, who blamed our coverage of the case for the scientist’s continuing woes and asked us to remove a post.   [Please see an update on this post.] Our coverage of the … Continue reading Attorney asks Retraction Watch to remove post because client has lost out on opportunities

Assistant principal admitted black children were stuck with a worse teacher to keep them together in school.

‘SMACKS OF HYPOCRISY:’ Alberta officials slam White House for demanding more OPEC oil after cancelling Keystone XL.

Why is Joe Biden supporting conflict oil instead of ethical oil?

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WAR ON SCIENCE: UPDATE: UW Madison’s $50k rock removal dismissed expert opinion against students’ claims.

Enough to make every human on the planet a billionaire.

Calls into question the trespassing and related non-violent crimes charged against defendants like Cuoy Griffin.

The post Jan 6 Prosecutors admit to possession of “images of officers hugging or fist-bumping rioters, posing for photos with rioters, and moving bike racks” first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

  Twelve year-old Abhimanyu Mishra and his head coach and fellow grandmaster Arun Prasad discuss the difficult journey towards securing the historic achievement.    

HOW MANY MORE CUOMOS SHIELDED BY THE ELITE? Kylee Zempel, writing today for The Federalist, is asking that rather relevant question, which makes sense, given the Clinton, Weiner, Epstein scandals:

“Tuesday’s resignation signals it’s the end of the road for Cuomo — for now. But if the media can sit and twiddle its thumbs — or worse, kiss keister and perform comedy sketches with giant Q-Tips — while thousands of elderly folks die in New York nursing homes and women in the double digits tell of a gropey governor’s disgusting habits, we must ask: How many other Andrew Cuomos is the media covering for?”

WHY ANDREW CUOMO HAD TO GO:

What CNN, MSNBC, and their party, the Democrats, won’t discuss is their genuflection last year before Andrew Cuomo’s press conferences. He’s a smart talker, no doubt, and they gobbled it up. Cuomo even won Emmy Awards for his performances, perhaps because Michael Avenatti was indisposed. What these news organizations didn’t do was investigate the medical disaster that was actually happening in New York state nursing homes while they were drooling at Cuomo’s press conferences. CNN went even further. They allowed the governor’s brother, Chris, who has a prime-time show on the network, to act as a political fanboy, turning his program into a nightly advertisement for his brother. Letitia James’s report reveals that Chris later worked as a clandestine political adviser to his brother while still on-air at CNN. At any other network, Chris might want to get his résumé ready. At CNN, who knows?

Here’s something else that should bother all journalists: if 11 people came forward to AG Letitia James to testify about Gov. Cuomo’s harassment, plus at least two more since the report was issued, isn’t it highly likely that journalists in the tight-knit political world of Albany already knew about the problem before it surfaced publicly? Isn’t it likely that they kept silent because the governor was from their favored party and because they feared retaliation if they spoke out? Put differently, when journalists fail to do their job and are already marked down as political partisans, perhaps the two are connected.

Here’s another question we should ponder: would Albany Democrats have pushed Cuomo out of office if his successor would have been a Republican? That was the problem faced by Virginia Democrats after they quickly condemned Gov. Ralph Northam for a blackface photograph, only to find his lieutenant governor, another Democrat, also facing serious #MeToo problems. That meant Northam’s removal could pass the office to a Republican. Upon that unhappy discovery, Democrats began saying that they’d been too hasty in seeking to remove Northam. He was able to wait it out.

Cuomo took Northam’s survival strategy as a model. But the differences were too stark. The evidence against Northam was much weaker and older than the evidence against Cuomo. Equally important, the consequences for his political party would have been much worse. Once Virginia’s black political leaders, all Democrats, decided Northam’s blackface offense was tolerable, under the (current political) circumstances, he could survive. No such luck for Cuomo.

Related: Valerie Jarrett Claims Cuomo Worried Her in 2014. She’s Praised Him For Years On Twitter.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Academia’s hostility to intellectual diversity suffers a courtroom setback.

The university’s contempt for the district court’s order in the BLinC case indicates that the university officials felt their political high-mindedness entitled them to disregard the law in order to enforce conformity to progressive opinions that hardly need such buttressing on today’s intellectually monochrome campuses. The 8th Circuit concluded:

“What the University did here was clearly unconstitutional. It targeted religious groups for differential treatment under the Human Rights Policy — while carving out exemptions and ignoring other violative groups with missions they presumably supported. The University and individual defendants turned a blind eye to decades of First Amendment jurisprudence or they proceeded full speed ahead knowing they were violating the law. Either way, qualified immunity provides no safe haven.”

So, they can be sued. And they will be. Which should be an educational experience for them, and a teachable moment for the many others like them in today’s academia.

Make them pay.

Part one of this series was on government incentives.  Part two of this series was originally going to be "managing to the wrong metrics," and we will still get to that topic in part 3.  But as I wrote that piece, it occurred to me that perhaps an even larger issue is not just working from the wrong data, but working from no data at all.

While it would be easy to attribute the "feelz before facts" bias to things like post-modernist thought, in actuality it is older than civilization.    I am pretty sure that panicked, emotional stories about Native American attacks on 19th century settlers grossly exceeded actual such events had we had good statistics (just as panicked, emotional stores of barbarian attacks on 4th century Roman settlers probably similarly exceeded actual cases).

More recently, the global warming debate has been home to many good examples of this effect.  Rising global temperatures are fairly easy to show on a chart, and while the compilation of these statistics is fraught with problems, it is generally unassailable that the data trends up.  Where things really go downhill is in the supposed knock-on effects of rising global temperatures (eg hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, etc).

The media coverage of these issues is absolutely dominated with feelz over facts -- a good example being hurricanes.  Media coverage of every hurricane is full of panicked articles that this particular hurricane is a demonstration of climate change.  Beyond being a great example of how the media often tries to claim a trend from a single data point, the amazing part is that long data sets of hurricane frequency and, even better, total cyclonic energy in such storms, are readily available...  and NEVER published.  This data consistently shows no upward long-term trend in hurricane activity or strength, but such data is deprecated in comparison to fear of the individual hurricanes themselves.

We have seen this exact same kind of thing, with fear and anecdote trumping actual data, from the very beginning of COVID.  For example:

• One single panicked tweet or interview of some random hospital nurse** will create a stampede of stories that hospitals are all full and that if you get sick you will likely get turned away and die.  What these stories never include is either a) real data on hospital bed occupancy in the area being reported on or b) any background how hospitals can and routinely do flex ICU bed capacity or c) any background on how this happens even in many flu seasons and is not a unique COVID marker (eg here, here, here, here).
• Some person will claim so weird long-COVID reaction without any statistics or background on how a) many respiratory diseases have odd longer-lasting effects or b) at what rates these occur or c) how most of these are eventually debunked a few months later (remember the whole young athlete heart thing?).
• A story will feature a person dying at 30 to try to scare people that this is not just killing old people without a) any context of pre-existing conditions in that person or b) without any data on the microscopic overall fatality rate for this age group and how unusual this case actually is.

My wife tends to be susceptible to this panic stuff because a) she actually still trusts the media and b) she tends to be one of those people who will always jump to the worst case scenario.   It is just incredibly frustrating to watch the media push her buttons and make her fearful when no rational basis exists to be scared.  And the hard part is that for rational people to bat this stuff down, it is like playing whack-a-mole.  At some point it just becomes tedious and exhausting to keep responding every day to a new batch of fact-free BS (irritatingly wrapped into a self-righteous mantle of "following the science.")

I remember a Teaching Company lecture course on German propaganda in the 1930's.  The professor Thomas Childers (I would recommend any of his courses) compared the messaging to a wheel.  They would try a message, and for those that this message did not work for they would turn the wheel a bit and get a new message.  And they would do this constantly until no opponent could reasonably knock them all down.

** Postscript.  This sort of gets back to the first post in this series on incentives, but one might wonder why some front-line healthcare worker would go to the media with dramatic stories that are untrue.  Various political sites that are skeptical of the stores have assumed these folks are political in some way with a political mission, but that does not have to be true.  Let me tell a story.

Back in the early 1990's I was on a jury in Dallas.  This was at the tail end of the incredible child molestation and day care panic, where Janet Reno and others using her "Miami Method" put scores of people in jail based on absurd, literally unbelievable stories generated by young children at the urging of prosecutors.    Our jury's case was a dad accused by the babysitter of molestation of his daughter.

The facts were absurd.  The molestation event supposedly occurred in a quasi-public place;  there was no physical or other evidence;  the "victim" recanted earlier stories told to aggressive prosecutors and testified for her dad;  no one actually witnessed anything.  We returned a not guilty verdict in barely an hour.

We can guess the prosecutors were motivated both by sincere belief that they were doing God's work as well as desire to emulate other prosecutors who had jump-started their career by recently making headline-grabbing molestation prosecutions (Janet Reno actually having jumped all the way to US AG, as an example).  But why the heck did the baby-sitter start all this?  It turns out that this was actually pretty clear from cross-examination by a very good defense lawyer.  She had seen another baby-sitter get on the Oprah TV show for accusing a father of molestation, and she wanted the same chance to meet Oprah and get her 15 minutes of fame.  Seriously, the whole family's life was shattered for years because she wanted to be on Oprah.  Never over-estimate anyone's motives, I guess.

Universal vaccination strategy is "bad science and badly needs a reboot."

THIS IS NOT HOW SCIENCE IS DONE: NPR, of all sources, reports the placebo groups of the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials were essentially dissolved after the vaccines received experimental approval from the FDA.

All of those who received a placebo were given the opportunity to get the real shot and virtually all did so. That pretty effectively ended the trials with no way to compare what happened to those in the two respective groups. Strictly coincidental, right?

“YES, HE WAS INFECTED IN THE LAB!” New E-Mails Confirm Origin of Chinese Lab Director’s Infection.

ALIENS: Two Weird Red Rocks Live in The Asteroid Belt, And They Don’t Belong There.

NAVY COULD RETURN TO USING PHOTOS FOR PROMOTIONS: “The Navy could include service photos in promotion packages again after data suggested minorities are less likely to be selected blindly in some situations by promotion review boards, the service’s chief of personnel said Tuesday… [Marine Brig. Gen. A.T. Williamson said,] ‘There are elements of the photo that are…very helpful for us. I think that we may find that we may have disadvantaged individuals by removing those photos from the boards.'”

I kept waiting for the twist that would tell me that this isn’t what it looks like, but it never came.

Could criticism of government science be outlawed? A science journal paper appears to have equated Republican attempts to fire Dr. Fauci with physical intimidation and NAZI oppression of science, and appears to urge that criticism of scientists be considered a hate crime.

The Biden Administration took a little discussed but significant action this month in dropping a lawsuit against the University of Vermont Medical Center for allegedly forcing pro-life nurses to participate in abortions. It is not clear if the Biden Administration believes that pro-life nurses can be forced to participate in procedures that they consider to be immoral. However, it is clear that they are not willing to protect those religious views in this important action despite the faith-based claims under federal law. Indeed, the nurse believed the procedure constitute murder of the unborn and the Trump Administration agreed that she should be able to decline.

According to the prior findings letter,  the medical center refused the request of the nurse to excuse herself from the abortion procedure. Other nurses were all allegedly forced to help despite such objections. There was no evidence that the Center could not accommodate the religious objectors by using other nurses.

During the Trump Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)  asked the DOJ to investigate the matter as a civil rights violation. However, Biden Secretary Xavier Becerra asked for the investigation and lawsuit to be terminated.

The HHS told Fox News:

After a detailed evaluation of the underlying legal theory used to issue a referral to the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services withdrew the original referral and requested DOJ dismiss the suit against the University of Vermont Medical Center, a request which was granted.

In line with this, HHS removed the Notice of Violation issued against UVMCC last Friday. HHS continues to evaluate the underlying facts of the matter and notified all the parties about its actions last Friday.

That says virtually nothing. It is particularly glaring in light of the prior findings. The prior Administration found:

UVMMC forced the nurse complainant to assist in an abortion against the nurse’s religious or moral objection. The nurse had expressed an objection for many years and was included in a list of objectors, but UVMMC knowingly assigned the nurse to an abortion procedure. The nurse was not told the procedure was an abortion until the nurse walked into the room, when the doctor—knowing the nurse objected to assisting in abortions—told the nurse, “Don’t hate me.” The nurse again objected, and other staff were present who could have taken the nurse’s place, but the nurse was required to assist with the abortion anyway. If the nurse had not done so, the nurse reasonably feared UVMMC would fire or report the nurse to licensing authorities.

The prior referral was based on the view that this violated the the Church Amendments by forcing employees to participate in abortions against their moral or religious objections. 42 U.S.C. § 300a-7(c)(1) of the Church Amendments which state:

“(c)Discrimination prohibition

(1)No entity which receives a grant, contract, loan, or loan guarantee under the Public Health Service Act [42 U.S.C. 201 et seq.], the Community Mental Health Centers Act [42 U.S.C. 2689 et seq.], or the Developmental Disabilities Services and Facilities Construction Act [42 U.S.C. 6000 et seq.] after June 18, 1973, may—

(A) discriminate in the employment, promotion, or termination of employment of any physician or other health care personnel, or

(B) discriminate in the extension of staff or other privileges to any physician or other health care personnel, because he performed or assisted in the performance of a lawful sterilization procedure or abortion, because he refused to perform or assist in the performance of such a procedure or abortion on the grounds that his performance or assistance in the performance of the procedure or abortion would be contrary to his religious beliefs or moral convictions, or because of his religious beliefs or moral convictions respecting sterilization procedures or abortions.”

The Center received $1.6 million in federal aide in the prior three years.

HHS did not explain the basis for the withdrawal and just said it was “continuing to evaluate” the situation. The Biden Administration needs to be more clear on the government’s positions on religious objections. These nurses deserve better than a perfunctory, conclusory statement when they feel they are being forced to choose between the jobs and their faith.

What is interesting is that the Biden Administration is planning on the controversial step withholding federal funds from hospitals and other institutions that do not impose a mandatory vaccine requirement. However, it is dropping an enforcement action to withhold funds to protect religious objections to participating in abortions.

 

HMM: Texas Rangers May Be Investigating Witness Tampering Allegation Against Travis County’s DA in Austin Protest Shooting Case.

AUSTIN STAR POLICE DETECTIVE ACCUSES DA JOSE GARZA’S OFFICE OF CRIMINAL WITNESS TAMPERING IN HIGH-PROFILE CASE.

SHOCKER: Johns Hopkins Professor Says COVID Infection Provides More Immunity Than Vaccines. “A doctor and professor with Johns Hopkins University said in a recent television appearance that, contrary to the official government narrative, those who actually catch the coronavirus and recover are approximately seven times more immune from future infections than those who receive a vaccine.”

People with natural immunity are also less likely to transmit the disease should they be reinfected than people who have been vaccinated.

I Am Deleting All Content After 48 Hours   SOURCE   Today, I have the most important announcement in the quarter of a century history of this newsletter. My goal and passion has always been about supporting you and helping you take control of your health. I am beyond thrilled that there are tens of […]

ROGER SIMON: To Save America, Run for School Board.

Forget Congress, the Senate, or whatever glamorous position you ever fantasized about or not, even president of the United States, if you want to have a serious impact from your work, if, as they say, you want to make a difference, to change this country for the good in the short and long term, run for your local school board.

You would be saving America from turning into the bleakest, socialist-communist state imaginable because that is what our current educational system, K-12, is designed to do and, sadly, has been successful in doing, literally for decades—and it’s only getting worse.

You would in the process also be a true revolutionary in the tradition of the Founders of our country in bringing back truth, justice, and the American way to our children and our children’s children.

Someone’s gotta do it—the hour is late. But you, dear reader, can save us, especially if we band together—and there are plenty of us to do it.

Please consider running for the school board to radically change a highly-corrupt and evil leftwing educational system, which has crossed the border into child abuse.

It’s both necessary and fun to point out the errors of the DNC-MSM, but education reform should be the ultimate focus: The End of the Long March. “Remember those halcyon days when our biggest concerns were Howard Zinn textbooks and mainstream media bias? The left is long past that. Victory begets victory, and they feel no pressing need to shore up their wins. Now they’re gunning to control the guns—and not necessarily in the way you think.”

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IF YOU LIKE YOUR VITAMIN D, YOU CAN KEEP YOUR VITAMIN D: While they scare you with “variants,” Congress wants to make dietary supplements prescription only. A reader emails: “Sen. Richard Durbin has been trying for years to make dietary supplements available only by a doctor’s prescription, which will have the practical effect of making them far less available and far more expensive. In the past he’s failed, so this time he’s trying to bury his ban deeply inside the gigantic “infrastructure” bill being considered by Congress. If he succeeds, many normal and beneficial dietary supplements such as high-dose vitamin D are going to become difficult or impossible for most adults in the U.S. to obtain.”

There’s a petition here.