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TAR. FEATHERS. Government Cameras Hidden on Private Property? Welcome to Open Fields.

Seated at his kitchen table, finishing off the remains of a Saturday breakfast, Hunter Hollingsworth’s world was rocked by footsteps on his front porch and pounding at the door, punctuated by an aggressive order: “Open up or we’ll kick the door down.”

Surrounded on all sides of his house, and the driveway blocked, Hollingsworth was the target of approximately 10 federal and state wildlife officials packing pistols, shotguns and rifles. And what was Hollingsworth’s crime? Drugs, armed robbery, assault, money laundering? Not quite.

Months prior, in 2018, the Tennessee landowner removed a game camera secretly strapped to a tree on his private land by wildlife officials in order to monitor his activity without apparent sanction or probable cause. Repeat: Hollingsworth’s residence was searched by U.S. government and state officials, dressed to the nines in assault gear, seeking to regain possession of a trail camera—the precise camera they had surreptitiously placed on his private acreage after sneaking onto his property at night, loading the camera with active SD and SIM cards, and zip-tying the device roughly 10’ high up a tree—all without a warrant.

This is a physical trespass, and any claim that the “open fields” doctrine should apply here is absurd.

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Trudeau government overpaid $100 MILLION for ventilators, gifted contract to former Liberal MP.

YEAH. IT’S LIKE THAT:  Pass Fail.

2013 Nobel Prize winning Stanford Biophysicist Michael Levitt has been disinvited from a bio-design conference, because other speakers threatened to quit rather than share a stage with a Covid-19 heretic.

This is the third installment in Reason's four-part documentary series titled "Cypherpunks Write Code." Watch part 1 and part 2.

In 1977, a team of cryptographers at MIT made an astonishing discovery: a mathematical system for encrypting secret messages so powerful that it had the potential to make government spying effectively impossible.

Before the MIT team could publish a description of how this system worked, the National Security Agency (NSA) made it known that doing so could be considered a federal crime. The 1976 Arms Export Control Act (AECA) made it illegal to distribute munitions in other countries without a license, including cryptography. The penalty for violating AECA was up to 10 years in prison or a fine of up to one million dollars.

It was the beginning of the "crypto wars"—the legal and public relations battle between the intelligence community and privacy activists over the rights of citizens to use end-to-end encryption. Many of those who were involved in the crypto wars were associated with the "cypherpunk movement," a community of hackers, hobbyists, and computer scientists, which the mathematician Eric Hughes once described as "cryptography activists."

The crypto wars continue to this day: On October 11, 2020, U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr issued a joint statement with officials from six other countries that implored tech companies not to use strong end-to-end encryption in their products so that law enforcement agencies can access the communications of their customers.

The government's stance traces back to World War II, when Allied code-breakers helped secure victory by deciphering secret messages sent by the Axis powers. "And that is the origin of the regulations that said, 'This is munition, this is an item of war,'" civil liberties activist John Gilmore told Reason. "And the problem was that they didn't really take freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, academic freedom, into account in that."

In 1977, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which was planning to hold a conference on cryptography at Cornell University, received a letter from an NSA employee posing as a concerned citizen, who wrote that the U.S. government considered these mathematical systems "modern weapons technologies" and that distributing them was a federal crime. The letter caused widespread alarm in the cryptography community.

In 1977, the computer scientist Mark S. Miller was a 20-year-old student at Yale. Like many future cypherpunks, he read about the breakthrough at MIT in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column published in Scientific American. The article laid out the astounding details of what"RSA," as it was called after its co-discoverers, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, made possible. Gardner omitted the technical details, but he offered his readers the opportunity to mail in a self-addressed stamped envelope to get a full description. The authors received 7,000 requests for the memo but didn't end up distributing the paper because of the NSA's threats.

"I decided quite literally that they are going to classify this over my dead body," Miller recalls. He traveled to MIT and got his hands on the unpublished paper describing how RSA worked. Then he went to "a variety of different copy shops, so I wasn't making lots of copies in any one place" and mailed them anonymously "to home and hobbyist computer organizations and magazines all across the country."

"I gave copies of the paper to some select friends of mine," Miller told Reason, "and I told them, 'if I disappear, make sure this gets out.'"

The following year, the RSA paper was published in Communications of the A.C.M. "And the world has been on a different course ever since it got published," says Miller.

But the crypto wars were just getting started. By the early 1990s, after the launch of the commercial internet and the web, RSA and public-key cryptography were no longer a rarified topic; they were privacy salvation. Internet users could use RSA to fully disguise their online activities from government spies. This sent the intelligence community once again scrambling to stop the dissemination of this powerful tool.

In 1991, a software developer named Phil Zimmermann released the first relatively easy-to-use, messaging system with end-to-end encryption, which was called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP. So the U.S. Justice Department launched a three-year criminal investigation of Zimmermann on the grounds that by making his software accessible outside the country, he could be guilty of exporting weapons.

The NSA made the public case that Zimmermann's software would be used by child molesters and criminals. "PGP, they say, is out there to protect freedom fighters in Latvia," Stewart A. Baker, the NSA's general counsel, remarked during a panel discussion at the 1994 Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy. "But the fact is, the only use that has come to the attention of law enforcement agencies is a guy who was using PGP so the police could not tell what little boys he had seduced over the 'net."

"Child pornographers, terrorists, money launderers, take your pick—these are the people who will be invoked as the bringers of death and destruction," Tim May, a former Intel physicist and co-founder of the cypherpunk movement, told Reason. "It's true" that these individuals would make use of end-to-end encryption, May conceded, "but all technologies have had bad effects. Telephones led to extortion, death threats, bomb threats, kidnapping cases. Uncontrolled publishing of books could allow satanic books to appear."

In his 1994 essay "The Cyphernomicon," May referred to terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers as "The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse." This fearmongering was the government's main playbook for how "privacy and anonymity [could] be attacked."

The cypherpunks argued that although PGP was encryption software, it was protected by the First Amendment because under the hood it was just a written series of instructions to be carried out by a machine.

The economist and entrepreneur Phil Salin was one of the first to argue this point in an influential 1991 essay titled "Freedom of Speech in Software." Salin wrote that "[r]estraint on freedom of expression of software writers is anathema in a free society and a violation of the First Amendment."

"Encryption can't be controlled whether or not it's powerful or has impacts on the government because it's free speech," says Gilmore, a co-founder of both the cypherpunk movement and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In the 1990s, he risked going to jail in his campaign to force the government to acknowledge that regulating encryption violated the First Amendment.

"We basically had a community of a thousand people scattered around who were all trying different ideas on how to get around the government to get encryption to the masses," Gilmore recalls.

The Clinton administration noted in a 1995 background congressional briefing that "Americans have no constitutional right to choose their own method of encryption" and pushed for legislation that would require companies to build in a mechanism for law enforcement agencies to break in.

"We're in favor of strong encryption, robust encryption," then FBI Director
Louis J. Freeh said at a May 11, 1995, Senate hearing. "We just want to make sure we have a trap door and a key under some judge's authority where we can get there if somebody is planning a crime."

The cypherpunks looked for ways to undercut the government's case by pointing out the similarities between encryption software and other forms of protected speech. While under federal investigation for making his software available for download outside the U.S., to prove a point Zimmermann convinced MIT press to mirror his action in the analog world, by printing out the PGP source code, adding a binding, and shipping it to European bookstores.

"MIT was at that time like three times as old as NSA, and it's at least as large a player in the national security community," says the cryptographer Whitfield Diffie, who co-discovered the concept of public-key cryptography on which RSA is based. 'It's one thing to try to go and step on little Phil Zimmermann; it's quite another thing to go after MIT."

"The government knew if they went to court to suppress the publication of a book from a university that they would lose and they would lose in a hurry," Gilmore recalls.

"There were people who actually got encryption code tattooed on their bodies and then started asking, 'Can I go to a foreign country?,'" Gilmore says. "We printed up T-shirts that had encryption code on them and submitted them to the government office of munitions control…'Can we publish this T-shirt?' Ultimately, they never answered that query because they realized to say 'no' would be to invite a lawsuit they would lose and so the best answer was no answer at all."

In 1996, the Justice Department announced that it wouldn't pursue criminal charges against Phil Zimmermann and major legal victories came in two separate federal court decisions, which found that encryption is protected by the First Amendment.

"The crypto wars is still ongoing," says Gilmore. "What we won in the first rounds was the right to publish it and the right to put it in mass-market software, but what we didn't actually do is deploy it in mass-market software. Now there are major companies building serious encryption into their products, and we're getting a lot of pushback from the government about this."

In the early 90s, at the same time that Gilmore was fighting his legal battle for freedom of speech in software, the cypherpunks were exploring cryptography's potential in the context of collapsing political borders and the rise of liberal democracy. Part four in Reason's series, "Cypherpunks Write Code," will look at how those dreams turned to disillusionment, and the rebirth of the cypherpunk movement after the invention of bitcoin.

Written, shot, edited, narrated, and graphics by Jim Epstein; opening and closing graphics and Mark S. Miller/RSA graphics by Lex Villena; audio production by Ian Keyser; archival research by Regan Taylor; feature image by Lex Villena.

Music: "Crossing the Threshold—Ghostpocalypse" and "Darkest Child" by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license;  "High Flight" by Michele Nobler licensed from Artlist; "modum" by Kai Engel used under Creative Commons.

Photos: Photo 44356598 © Konstantin Kamenetskiy—Dreamstime.com; Photo 55458936 © Jelena  Ivanovic—Dreamstime.com; Photo 21952682 © Martin Haas—Dreamstime.com; Photo 143489196 © Chalermpon Poungpeth—Dreamstime.com; ID 118842101 © Andrey Golubtsov | Dreamstime.com; Freeh and Clinton, Mark Reinstein/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Freeh and Clinton, Ron Sachs—CNP/Newscom; WhatsApp Founders, Peter DaSilva/Polaris/Newscom; Bill Barr and Trump: CNP/AdMedia/Newscom; MIT, DEWITT/SIPA/Newscom; John Gilmore photos by Quinn Norton, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic; Bill Clinton in Oval Office, Robert McNeely/SIPA/Newscom; Bill Clinton, White House/SIPA/Newscom; Louis J. Freeh and Bill Clinton, Ron Sachs—CNP/Newscom; James Comey, KEVIN DIETSCH/UPI/Newscom; Bobby Inmann, Dennis Brack / DanitaDelimont.com "Danita Delimont Photography"/Newscom; John Gilmore, Paul Kitagaki Jr./ZUMA Press/Newscom; Berlin Wall, Associated Press.

BREAK THEM UP: Chrome won’t clear your Google and YouTube data — even if you tell it to. “Browser retains site data in defiance of privacy settings.”

JIM TREACHER: In New Biden Ad, Michigan Millionaire Claims Trump Is Killing His Nightclub.

My first thought when I saw this ad was: Bro, you live in Ann Arbor. Which is in Michigan. A Democrat-led city in a Democrat-led state. Under Gretchen Whitmer’s iron fist, you Michiganders are subject to the strictest lockdown in the country. Yet somehow your plight is the fault of the Republicans? Even a blind pig can do better than that.

But it’s even more dishonest than I thought. With Biden, it usually is. Collin Anderson, Washington Free Beacon:

The struggling Michigan bar owner at the center of a Joe Biden campaign ad is actually a wealthy tech investor whose startup was seeded by a large family inheritance.

The ad, which the Biden campaign released Thursday, identifies Michigan entrepreneur Joe Malcoun as co-owner of the Blind Pig, a bar and live music venue in Ann Arbor, Mich…

According to a 2018 interview with local NBC affiliate Click on Detroit, Malcoun became a well-known “angel investor” in local tech startups after receiving a large inheritance from his wife’s late grandfather roughly a decade ago. He described the inheritance as “almost like winning the lottery…”

Malcoun has also repeatedly praised Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s (D.) coronavirus response, saying she “is doing it right” in an April tweet.

So, millionaire tech investor Joe Malcoun is blaming Trump because Whitmer’s lockdown is ruining the small business he runs as a hobby. That seems a bit dishonest, no matter who you’re voting for or why.

The Biden campaign has pulled the ad, but here’s a copy of it; I’ve downloaded the video in case this one gets, as Jeffrey Toobin would say, yanked:

I don’t usually tweet campaign ads but the Biden “Blind Pig” ad is really good. As a early millennial, I thought the use of The Pixies and Beastie Boys music in the ad was tremendous.pic.twitter.com/CU4xkD83TR

— Matt Soffer (@matthewsoffer) October 18, 2020

Note the use of the Beastie Boys’ classic thrash-metal song “Sabotage*” in the ad, which having since been (again, as Toobin would say) pulled, is a classic case of “self-sabotage” by the surviving Beasties, who have now politicized a body of work that had plenty of followers on the sides of the aisle. (Including Treacher himself.)

* Recorded so long ago, as Treacher notes at the first link, it was back “when Joe was a mere 51 years young.”

STREISAND EFFECT: NY Post’s exposé on Hunter Biden soars online despite social media censorship.

Meanwhile, at the Galactic Empire’s News Hologram of Record:

I’m going to have to give Jack Dorsey a pass on that one. As the Washington Post reported in 2015: The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified.

FOX NEWS HOST BACKS BIDEN SURROGATE INTO CORNER OVER HUNTER BIDEN STORIES, FORCING HER TO MAKE ADMISSION: “Shockingly, [Biden campaign surrogate Jenna] Arnold then admitted, ‘I think that’s fair. I don’t think anybody is saying they are inauthentic.’”

FARTHER, PLEASE: Tesla battery researcher shows new test results pointing to batteries lasting over 2 million miles.

Last year I spent a couple of months working as a physician in a geriatric hospital, i.e. a hospital that specializes in taking care of elderly people. One thing that struck me particularly was the large number of medications each patient was on. I don’t think it would be much of an exaggeration to say that the average patient had ten or more medications that they were taking on a daily basis.

This condition, of taking many different medications, is known as polypharmacy. It is a big problem. And a growing problem. In the US, 31% of older adults were taking 5 or more medications per year in 2006. Five years later, that number had increased to 36% . In a Swedish population study, 17% of adults were taking five or more drugs per day in 2006. This had increased to 19% in 2014. Among people over 90 years old, 80% were taking five or more drugs per day.

But, you might say, surely they needed those drugs? After all, they were prescribed the drugs by a doctor for a reason. And older people generally have more underlying conditions, and therefore need more drugs.

All of this is true, to a point, but the reality is more complicated. The first problem concerns how scientific studies of drugs are carried out. Most of the time, studies look at a group that has a single condition, for example heart disease, and exclude people with co-morbidities like lung disease or diabetes. Additionally, studies usually exclude people over a certain age.

These two things together mean that there is very little data on what happens when you give medications to people with several underlying conditions, and there is also very little data on what happens when you give medications to the elderly. So, on balance, we often don’t know whether we’re helping or harming the patient. We extrapolate from data that really applies to a different patient – a younger, healthier patient.

The second problem is that studies on medications are generally done in patients with functioning kidneys and a functioning liver. The kidneys and liver are the organs that metabolize and excrete drugs from the body. If people have kidney disease or liver disease, they will not be able to metabolize and excrete medications as effectively as healthy people, which means there is an increased risk of getting toxic levels of the medication in the body. And while a doctor might check a patient’s kidney function when putting them on a medication, there is often no follow-up to ensure that the medication is still appropriate as their kidney function inevitably declines with age.

The third problem is that patients, and especially elderly patients, see lots of different doctors. And one doctor usually doesn’t want to stop a medication that another doctor has started. The reason for this is that the second doctor generally doesn’t have full information on why the drug was started, and so doesn’t want to take the patient off a medication that they might “need”. This leads to patients accumulating medications over their years of life.

When I look in patient charts, it’s not uncommon for them to be taking medications that they’ve been taking for ten or more years. Oftentimes, these drugs have since fallen out of favor because new data has come to light showing that the harms outweigh the benefits. Often, the patients themselves have no idea why they’re taking a drug, they just keep taking it obediently because at some point a doctor told them they should be on it.

One example of this phenomenon is baby aspirin (low dose aspirin). A lot of older adults without any underlying heart conditions take this drug to prevent heart attacks, even though evidence that has come out in recent years has shown that the harms clearly outweigh the benefits. As a doctor, it’s often impossible to find the original chart explaining why the patient was put on a drug, especially if they were put on it several years ago. So you keep them on it, because that’s easier than taking the “risk” of taking them off the drug.

The fourth problem is that there are very few studies looking at what happens when you take combinations of drugs, even though that is commonly the reality. There are plenty of dangerous synergies that happen when people are taking multiple drugs. I’ll give two examples:

A lot of elderly people have atrial fibrillation. This is a disorder of the heart that is connected with an increased risk of stroke. You can decrease the risk by taking a blood thinner, like warfarin (a.k.a. coumadin). The problem is that lots of people with atrial fibrillation also have anxiety issues, and so they are put on sertraline (a.k.a zoloft). On it’s own, sertraline has a very mild anti-coagulant effect, but in combination with other drugs there can be a significantly increased risk of bleeding. Say the patient also has some joint pain, and so they are also prescribed paracetamol (a.k.a. tylenol, acetaminophen). On it’s own, paracetamol has no effect on bleeding risk, but in combination with warfarin there is a significantly increased risk of bleeding.

Each of these three drugs on its own might be ok, but in combination, there is a heavily increased risk of bleeding. This can take the form of an intracranial hemorrhage, or a bleeding stomach ulcer, which can both be rapidly fatal. And in reality, drugs are used in combination more often than not. There are few if any studies showing at which point different combinations become more harmful than helpful.

Here’s another example: Many elderly people take one or more blood pressure medications. These decrease the body’s ability to regulate the flow of blood to the brain, and so slightly increase the risk of fainting and falling. Many elderly people also have trouble sleeping, for which they are often prescribed bensodiazepines. Benzos make you a bit groggy, and thereby also increase your risk of falling, especially if you have to get up to pee in the middle of the night (as many older people do). On top of this, many older people have pain issues for which they are prescribed opioids, which also increase the risk of falling. Each of these drugs on their own might not be too bad, but taken together they heavily increase the risk of falls, which are a leading cause of death and disability in the elderly.

Not only is there not a lot of research on these dangerous synergies, but doctors are often unaware of them. I am willing to bet that most doctors don’t know that it’s a bad idea to combine warfarin and paracetamol, since that is a combination I see frequently in patients. Obviously, the more drugs you’re taking, the bigger the risk of dangerous interactions. Like I wrote above, it’s not uncommon for elderly people to be taking ten drugs or more. I don’t even want to think about how many dangerous interactions they are being exposed to with those kinds of cocktails.

There is another problem, which contributes to polypharmacy, and that is that many drugs are hard to stop once you start. Opioids (like oxycontin) and bensodiazepines (like valium) are the most obvious examples – both are highly addictive. Other drugs, like proton pump inhibitors (for example omeprazole), that are used to treat gastritis and acid reflux, are hard to stop because the body tries to compensate for the fact that its ability to produce stomach acid is blocked, so the moment you take the pedal off the brakes, the body overcompensates and produces lots of stomach acid, and the patient gets more symptoms than ever. Rather than wait these symptoms out, many people go straight back on the proton pump inhibitor, and stay on it for life.

The problem of polypharmacy has been getting increasing attention in recent years, especially among physicians specializing in treating the elderly population. The proposed solution to the problem is deprescribing, which is, simply put, the opposite of prescribing. Instead of adding to the list of medications a patient takes, you remove drugs.

A meta-analysis was published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology in 2016 seeking to quantify the extent to which deprescribing can decrease mortality. It included 10 randomized controlled trials with a total of 3,151 patients. The average age of the patients was 74 years. The average follow-up period was 10 years, and the authors reported no conflicts of interest.

One oddity about this review was that it included both interventions in which patients actually had the number of drugs they were taking decreased (8 trials with a total of 1,906 patients), and also interventions where health care providers were educated about the benefits of deprescribing, and how to go about it (2 trials with a total of 1,245 patients). To me, the first is a deprescribing intervention, and the second is an educational intervention, and it’s very weird to put both together under the umbrella of a deprescribing intervention.

Luckily, the two types of intervention were analyzed separately in terms of effect on mortality, so we have that information. But they were lumped together in all other analyses (for example when looking at quality of life, or when determining if the effect size varies between age groups), so unfortunately, we don’t have access to that information.

Why is this a problem? Because it’s pretty obvious that an indirect intervention where you’re talking to doctors about deprescribing is going to have a much weaker effect than a direct intervention where you’re actually deprescribing drugs from patients. So any analysis which lumps together education about deprescribing with actual deprescribing interventions is going to show a weaker effect than is actually there. I’ve tried to understand what the investigators were thinking, but can’t come up with a good answer. The only thing I can come up with that makes any sense was that they wanted the review to fail to find benefit. But more likely they just weren’t thinking things through properly.

Anyway, let’s look at the results.

When looking at the overall results for the ten randomized studies, there was an 18% reduction in the odds of dying. However the difference was not statistically significant. But, like I said, this overall result includes the studies which were only educating health care providers about deprescribing.

So let’s look instead at what the results were when only studies that actually implemented deprescribing in patients directly are included. Overall, in that situation, there was a 38% reduction in the odds of dying over the ten year follow-up period! That difference was highly statistically significant.

For the sake of completeness, we will look also at what the results are if we just take the studies that educated health care providers. In that scenario, there was a 20% increase in the odds of dying. However, the increase was not statistically significant. Basically, teaching stuff to doctors either does nothing at all, or makes them more likely to kill their patients!

So what can we conclude from all this?

Deprescribing has a big impact on mortality. A 38% reduction in the odds of death is pretty huge. Especially since all you have to do to get that benefit is take fewer pills. For comparison, statins decrease the odds of death by 14% according to a meta-analysis by the Cochrane collaboration, and statins are often sold as a hugely life saving intervention. Well, the effect of deprescribing is almost three times as big.

On the other hand, just teaching doctors about deprescribing does not seem to work. To me, this makes perfect sense. Most doctors are working under significant time constraints, and so do not have the time to go through patients medication lists in detail, to decide which medications can safely be removed. Additionally, doctors face an unrelenting barrage of lobbying from pharmaceutical companies to prescribe more medications, not less.

So, the best thing you can do as an individual patient is to get educated about your medications, and to avoid being put on too many medications in the first place. Always ask your doctor why you are being put on a certain medication, what the size of the benefit that can be expected is, what potential harms there are, and how long you’re supposed to take the drug. If you’re not satisfied with the answers you get, it is perfectly within your rights to say no. It is also perfectly within your rights to say that you want to go home and do some research before deciding whether to take the drug or not. This is especially important when it comes to drugs that you are supposed to take continuously for the rest of your life, and drugs that are hard to stop once your start.

The simple fact is that a drug might well be beneficial when given on its own, but harmful when combined with several other drugs. I have a hypothesis that, on balance, when the number of drugs you take goes beyond five, the negative effects of each additional drug start to outweigh the positive effects, and that the negative effects increase exponentially with each additional drug, as the risk of interactions and dangerous synergies increases.

It is well known among doctors and nurses who care for patients in the last days and weeks of life that their symptoms often improve when the decision is taken to stop giving life prolonging treatment, and they are taken off most of their meds.

Here’s an idea for a randomized controlled trial that I would love to see done: Take a group of elderly patients who are all on 10+ drugs. Rank the drugs based on how important you think they are for each patient. In the intervention group, get rid of all drugs except the five that you have rated as most important (obviously you would have to replace the drugs you’ve gotten rid of with placebos, in order to maintain blinding). The control group continues on as before. See how many are alive in each group five years later.

My guess is that the intervention group would live significantly longer, with a significantly higher quality of life, than the control group. No pharmaceutical company would ever fund that study, for obvious reasons. It would need to be funded by the government, or by a philanthropist. So if you have several million dollars lying around and want to make a huge contribution to human health… You’re welcome for the idea.

You might also enjoy my article about whether statins save lives or my article about how aggressively high blood pressure should be managed.

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The post Deprescribing: the most important health intervention you’ve never heard of? appeared first on Sebastian Rushworth M.D..

I can’t even keep up with the news anymore. Yesterday morning everybody was all stunned to learn that “sexual preference” had suddenly turned into homophobic hate speech because Amy Coney Barrett used it (even though we’ve got clips of democrats and gay rights orgs and publications using it up until now without issue) but within hours of that straw grasping bullshit getting tossed out by the dumbest senator in America, many of my liberal acquaintances were gas lighting everyone that the term had always been hateful AND THEY EVEN HURRIED AND EDITED THE DICTIONARY.

You’d think that the left changing the dictionary definition to make a commonly used term into oppressive hate speech (within 24 hours of the narrative deciding it must be!) would be the most Orwellian thing we’d see that day. But nope. Not even close!

Then some truly heinous shit drops about Crackhead McStripperbang (the artist formerly known as Hunter Biden). October Surprise! From what I’ve seen so far, it looks really really sketchy. And also hilarious, judging by all the crack pipe pics and goofy ass self-incriminating e-mails.

Didn’t anybody ever tell you Rule Number One of Doing Crimes, Joe Biden? NEVER COUNT ON A CRACKHEAD!

But anyways, Joe Biden potentially doing sleazy shit isn’t the point of this post. Because the really Orwellian thing was what came next, when the big soulless social media megacorps tried to squash the story in the most ham fisted way imaginable.

They didn’t just squash the story. They squashed the story and then bragged about it in public. They declared the story to be “harmful” (as in harmful to the election prospects of their chosen candidate). And they cited some bullshit reasons about why they couldn’t share this story, even though they were happy to ignore all those same rules repeatedly whenever it was a breaking story that hurt Trump.

Supposedly they can’t allow the sharing of a story that makes Biden look bad because the information was “leaked”… except they were gleefully sharing Trump’s leaked tax info last week, and before that Russia Collusion nonsense wasn’t so much a leak as a high pressure lawn sprinkler. That was totally okay.

Of course, prog apologists were quick to dismiss the New York Post as fake news, even though it’s the fourth biggest circulating newspaper in America, and these same sites have zero problem sharing painfully obvious fabricated bullshit from crap sites as long as it agrees with lefty orthodoxy. And even then the Post could be total trash, but that’s still Hunter Biden there smoking crack on camera and influence peddling while talking about getting a cut for Pop. (as in Joe Biden, not Corn Pop, gotta clarify because there’s a lot of guys called Pop in this saga).

That would be bad enough, but then it got extra stupid! So while these evil media empires are pretending that they are unbiased and merely trying to “curate the truth”, they banned the White House Press Secretary! They stopped sitting US senators from sharing news articles. Then they banned the president’s reelection campaign nineteen days before an election!

If social media had banned Obama’s press secretary, and then stopped Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer from sharing articles from the New York Times, and then shut down the Obama campaign page nineteen days before his election against Mitt Romney, everyone would have lost their fucking minds. And rightfully so! Because that kind of blatant manipulation of information is evil.

If I put that into a thriller my editor would tell me it was too far fetched. Nobody would buy into such mustache twirling villainy, even if I was writing cyberpunk dystopia.

But Correia, they are private companies and you are usually against meddling in the affairs of private companies, you big hypocrite! Yeah, usually I am, but this is also something new, the likes of which mankind has never seen before, with these entities being the primary exchange of information for BILLIONS of people, so it’s kind of hard to put this thing which didn’t exist before into historical context. Facebook has no real competitors, and it has something like 2.7 billion regular users. With the flick of a switch it can stop a third of the Earth’s population from seeing whatever it doesn’t want them to see. Humanity has never had that before.

That’s real fucking power right there.

Now, unlike most people on the internet, I am not compelled to pretend to be a lawyer who just got my law degree from the University of Internet. Communications law is not my area, and I’m not going to be a Dunning-Krugerand talking about section 230 or whatever.

However, what I do know is that this is some seriously dangerous bullshit, and if we keep going down this road it is going to lead to some very bad ends. Freedom of speech functionally ceases to exist when both sides speak, but only one side is heard. If social media is a forum, then it needs to be an actual forum. If it is functionally a propaganda arm of the DNC, then so be it, but it can’t keep pretending to be something its not, while mindfucking the populace.

They are subpoenaing the Twitter CEO to come testify before congress but I expect that to be another utterly useless clown show where dummies ask dumb questions about something they don’t understand to some clever asshole who is just going to lie.

Like most liberty minded people, I have a reflexive dislike for government regulation of the free market. If the government can screw something up, it will. However I doubt I’ll feel that strongly about the sanctity of the free market as I’m being starved to death in a re-education gulag, after conservatives were stupid enough to let a tiny group of control freak statists have absolute power over the whole country’s speech and information.

What we’ve got right now with a handful of organizations having a monopoly over news and knowledge is stupid, getting stupider, and going to end extremely badly.

I don’t give a shit if you are liberal or conservative, the idea of some entity like Google determining what mankind is allowed to know or not know should terrify the shit out of you. Free speech becomes a meaningless concept if only approved speech is ever seen. And if you are cheering this shit on because right now it is helping your team score points against the other team, you are fool. Because once they have that power it is only a matter of time until one of your beliefs ends up on the naughty list too.

(note, that’s not an issue for Kool Aid drinking progs, because they don’t actually have any beliefs beyond GET POWER. It took them less than 24 hours to change “sexual preference” to a bad thing in the dictionary)

The only good thing about this situation is that even though Facebook and Twitter are trying to monopolize the flow of information, they are still bad at it. This week’s attempt at shutting down the New York Post’s expose will probably go down as the biggest Streisand Effect in history. Their painfully obvious censorship will make far more people pay attention and lend credence to the report. Because after all, they wouldn’t try this hard to squish it, if there wasn’t some meat to it.

However, just because they are currently bad at being evil, doesn’t mean that what they are doing isn’t evil. They’re going to get better and better at controlling what you do and do not see. They will learn from their failures and be craftier next time.They are clearly trying to manipulate all of us, and though they sucked at shutting down this story, how many other times have they gotten away with it? How many times have these people hidden something important from you and you don’t even know it?

They decide what the narrative is. They decide what you learn and what you don’t. What do most of us do when we want to learn about a topic? We plug it into a search engine and read the results. Only they control the search engines. They write the wikis. They determine the truth, and then slide those fish hooks into your brain. Reality becomes whatever they say it is, and if you disagree and say that wasn’t how it was, they’ll just pretend that you’re crazy and it’s always been that way.

Information is power, and this tiny insular group holds power over the minds of the people so great that it would make emperors and god-kings weep with envy.

And if you find yourself thinking that I’m exaggerating the danger here, these fuckers just changed the DICTIONARY twenty four hours after it became convenient just to smear a judge. They are downright fucking brazen about it.

Is there any life left in the cholesterol hypothesis (a.k.a. the lipid hypothesis)? Is there anything left for serious scientists to cling to or is time for its mouldering corpse to end up on the trash heap of medical history, alongside lobotomy, bloodletting and the theory of the four humors? I was asked this question by a reader of this blog recently, and as it happens, a systematic review was recently published in Evidence Based Medicine (my favorite medical journal, mainly because it is edited by the brilliant Dr. Carl Heneghan) that definitively answers this question, so I thought it would be interesting to go through what the evidence says together.

As many readers will be aware, the cholesterol hypothesis is the idea that cardiovascular disease is caused by high levels of cholesterol in the blood stream. The hypothesis harks back to the early part of the twentieth century, when a Russian researcher named Nikolai Anitschkow fed a cholesterol rich diet to rabbits and found that they developed atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries, the process which in the long run leads to cardiovascular disease). Of course, rabbits and humans are very different species, with very different dietary preferences. Rabbits, being herbivores, normally have very little cholesterol in their diets, while humans, being omnivores, generally consume quite a bit of cholesterol. Regardless, the data was suggestive, and led to the hypothesis being formulated.

In the 1940’s and 1950’s an American researcher named Ancel Keys carried out a number of studies which supposedly showed a correlation between cholesterol intake and heart disease in humans. The most famous of these was the “Seven Countries Study”, which was an observational study carried out in, as the name implies, seven different countries, and which found that people in countries with a high intake of saturated fat had high blood levels of cholesterol, and were much more likely to develop heart disease than people in countries with a low intake of saturated fat. This lead to the hypothesis that saturated fat intake leads to high blood cholesterol levels which leads to atherosclerosis which leads to cardiovascular disease and premature death.

As we’ve discussed before, observational studies cannot draw any conclusions about causation, they can only show correlation. And there is also a question why these seven specific countries were chosen (the reader will be aware that there are in fact closer to two hundred countries) – they certainly weren’t chosen at random. If the populations in a study aren’t chosen at random, that creates a significant risk of cherry picking of data (and makes it impossible for the researchers carrying out a study to refute that accusation).

In spite of these limitations, the cholesterol hypothesis became heavily hyped, leading to official dietary recommendations around the world, which are still very much unchanged, that recommend low intakes of saturated fat and cholesterol, and of foods rich in these substances, such as red meat.

The hypothesis also resulted in pharmaceutical companies investing huge sums in research to find a drug that would lower cholesterol levels in the blood. A number of drugs were discovered, but unfortunately, although they could lower cholesterol levels, none of them seemed to have any effect on mortality. People were dying at the same rate even with these drugs, sometimes even at higher rates. That was the first hit against the cholesterol hypothesis.

Then came statins, and everything changed. Statins are molecules that in nature are produced by certain types of fungi. Among other biological functions that aren’t completely understood, they inhibit an enzyme called HMG-CoA-reductase. This enzyme is central to the body’s ability to produce cholesterol. When it is blocked, cells are unable to produce their own cholesterol and have to find it from elsewhere. This causes them to express receptors on their surfaces that allow them to suck up cholesterol from the blood stream. This effect is most noticeable in the liver, since the liver is the body’s main cholesterol factory, and is the organ primarily responsible for recycling the molecules that transport cholesterol in the blood stream (cholesterol is a vital part of cell membranes so all cells in the body have the capacity to produce their own cholesterol). Since cholesterol is hoovered up from the blood stream, the cholesterol level in the blood drops. Yay!

The reason I say everything changed with statins is that they actually seemed to work. For the first time a drug had been discovered that lowered cholesterol and that also seemed to decrease mortality. Ancel Keys seemed to have been vindicated. Anyone suggesting that the cholesterol hypothesis was dead in the water was derided as a nut.

Now, as time has gone by, the cholesterol hypothesis has actually grown more complex, which is why doctors don’t really talk about cholesterol so much any more. Instead they talk about LDL, which stands for Low Density Lipoprotein. LDL is a transport molecule that is used to transport cholesterol in the blood stream (cholesterol is a lipid and as such is not soluble in blood, so it needs to be transported in a special transport molecule). This is important, because in the updated version of the hypothesis, it’s not the cholesterol itself that’s bad, it’s the LDL. Basically, the idea is that LDL that’s moving around in the body can become oxidized. Oxidized LDL can get stuck in artery walls, and start an inflammatory process that leads to atherosclerosis. So what statins actually do is cause the liver to hoover up LDL molecules from the blood stream, which prevents them from becoming oxidized in the tissues and causing atherosclerosis.

Now, unfortunately for the pharmaceutical companies, there are patent laws, which mean that after a couple of decades, their drugs go off-patent and they are no longer able to make big profits. Which is why they have developed newer types of cholesterol lowering drugs. There is ezetimibe, which works by inhibiting the uptake of cholesterol from the intestine. Most recently there are the PCSK9-inhibitors, which increase the liver’s uptake of LDL by preventing it from recycling the LDL-receptors on its surface, which results in more receptors on the surface and therefore a higher uptake of LDL from the blood stream.

Since there has been such widespread agreement that the cholesterol hypothesis is true, and that drugs that lower LDL also lower heart disease, cardiologists’ organizations around the world have set targets for LDL levels in the blood stream. For example, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiologists have set a target LDL reduction of 50% for people at high risk of cardiovascular disease, and 30% for people at moderate risk. Basically, people at high or moderate risk should be started on one cholesterol lowering drug, and if this drug doesn’t have a big enough effect on their LDL levels, then a second drug should be added. If enough effect still isn’t seen, then a third drug can be added, and so on until the target is reached.

Clearly, if the cholesterol hypothesis is true, then the amount of benefit seen from lowering LDL should stand in direct proportion to the amount by which LDL is lowered, right? Anything else would be illogical.

This brings us nicely to the recent systematic review in Evidence Based Medicine. The review looked at all randomized controlled trials involving either a statin, ezetimibe, or a PCSK-9 inhibitor, in which data was provided on both the level of LDL-reduction and mortality, and in which the treatment period was at least one year. The authors declared no conflicts of interest and received no outside funding in order to carry out the review.

In total, 35 trials were included in the review, with the smallest trial containing 249 participants, and the largest trial containing 27,564 participants. The total number of participants across all the trials was over 230,000. 29 of the 35 trials had over 1,000 participants. Basically, these were for the most part large, high quality studies. That should certainly be enough data to tell us definitively whether the cholesterol hypothesis is dead or alive.

The trials were sorted based on whether they were treating people with moderate risk of cardiovascular disease or people with high risk, and then further grouped based on whether the participants on average met the official American LDL targets (at least a 30% reduction in LDL for people with moderate risk, and at least a 50% reduction for people with high risk).

Here’s what they found:

Of the 13 trials that successfully met the LDL targets, only one was able to find a beneficial effect on mortality. Of the 22 trials that did not meet the LDL targets, four reported a mortality benefit. So, overall, only 5 out of 35 trials were able to find a mortality benefit, and four of those that did find a benefit did not lower LDL to the target level.

Furthermore, some trials that saw significant LDL reductions (over 50%) were not able to show any effect on mortality, while other trials in which LDL only dropped by 11-15% did see a significant effect on mortality. Basically, less LDL-lowering actually seemed to be better in terms of mortality than more LDL-lowering.

So, what can we conclude?

Firstly, yes, the cholesterol hypothesis is dead, dead, dead. There is no correlation between effect on LDL and effect on mortality. Anyone who still chooses to cling to the cholesterol hypothesis in spite of this is consciously refusing to see what a vast amount of high quality scientific evidence is putting right in front of their eyes.

Secondly, as an interesting aside, only 5 out of 35 trials found a mortality benefit, which means that 30 out of 35 did not find any benefit. And yet somehow statins are one of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. Personally, if I look at an entire evidence base consisting of 35 trials, with a total of 230,000 patients, and 30 of those trials, with 195,000 people, fail to find a mortality benefit, then that’s going to make me think the treatment doesn’t work. At least not if the point of the treatment is to make people live longer.

So what are the practical implications for you as a patient? As I mentioned in an earlier article, there is no point getting your cholesterol levels tested, because they tell you nothing about your risk of cardiovascular disease. If you are already on a cholesterol lowering drug, and intend to continue for whatever reason, there is no point doing annual check-ups of your cholesterol levels, because there is no correlation between how much the drug lowers those levels and your risk of future cardiovascular events. And there is certainly no point in trying to reach a “target” LDL level.

You might also enjoy my article about whether it makes sense to treat high blood pressure aggressively, or my article about whether salt is bad for your health.

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The post Is the cholesterol hypothesis dead? appeared first on Sebastian Rushworth M.D..

NO. DOJ formalizes request for encryption back-doors.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY:

The DNC-MSM will of course let Biden get away with this. As Stephen Miller wrote last month in Spectator USA, “So why the tepid treatment of Biden by the media? It must go beyond simple bias or personal animosity for the current President. For almost four years now, journalists have shamed their colleagues and themselves over what I will call the ‘but her emails’ dilemma. Those who reported dutifully on the ill-timed federal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server and spillage of classified information have been cast out and shunted away from the journalist cool kids’ table…The journalist who asks the question that makes Uncle Joe stroke out at the podium would be treated as a professional leper. No book deals. No CNN or MSNBC contributor contracts. No cocktail parties.”

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

 

SEEN ON FACEBOOK:

I almost wish Trump would tweet this out. . .

THE BABYLON BEE SAVAGES ANDREW CUOMO: Man Who Believes He’s On The Right Side Of History Announces Crackdown On The Jews.

U.S. intelligence officials say newly declassified CIA referral on Russian intercept just one of several red flares spies sent the FBI on Russia collusion narrative.

MIDDLE EAST PEACE: Saudis to Palestinians: Stop being losers and cut a deal — or else.

RADICAL LEFT’S TIDES CENTER GOT $170MILLION IN FEDERAL GRANTS: This story today is yet another illustration of why The Washington Free Beacon’s Joe Schoffstall is a must-follow journalist.

WHAT HAS CAPITALISM EVER DONE FOR POOR PEOPLE?

Nunes says that the intelligence community is overrun by Obama/Clinton loyalists who withheld the truth from Congress

LEBRON JAMES AND HOLLYWOOD WERE UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: 15 Percent of Tibet’s Population Transferred to Chinese Training Centers as Mass Labor Program Expands.

Unavailable because they won’t say anything that might offend their Chinese paymasters.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Party That Wants To Run Your Healthcare Roots For Political Opponent To Die.

HMM: Drink coffee after breakfast, not before, for better metabolic control.

WHERE’S THE PORK? Open The Books maps $2.3 Trillion – yes, that’s T-as-in-Trillion – in wasteful federal spending in just the years 2017-19.

THE LATEST FROM PROJECT VERITAS: Ilhan Omar Connected Cash-For-Ballots Voter Fraud Scheme Corrupts Elections: ‘These Here Are All Absentee Ballots…Look…My Car Is Full…” ‘Money Is The King Of Everything.’

The post Study: Vitamin D Reduces Infection, Mortality in Coronavirus Patients appeared first on The Bongino Report.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER? Super-efficient USPS delivers a letter in Michigan 100 years after it was mailed.

TRUMP’S GET-OUT-THE-VOTE EFFORT ENTERS A NEW PHASE: Some Protests Against Police Brutality Take a More Confrontational Approach: The protests are moving into white residential neighborhoods, where activists demand that people choose a side.

“It went from a peaceful march, calling out the names, to all of a sudden, bang, ‘How dare you fly the American flag?’” said Mr. Moses, who is Black and runs a nonprofit group in the Portland, Ore., area. “They said take it down. They wouldn’t leave. They said they’re going to come back and burn the house down.”

Mr. Moses and others blocked the demonstrators and told them to leave.

“We don’t go around terrorizing folks to try and force them to do something they don’t want to do,” said Mr. Moses, whose nonprofit group provides support for local homeless people. “I’m a veteran. I’m for these liberties.”

Nearly four months after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, some protesters against police brutality are taking a more confrontational — and personal — approach. The marches in Portland are increasingly moving to residential and largely white neighborhoods, where demonstrators with bullhorns shout for people to come “out of your house and into the street” and demonstrate their support.

These more aggressive protests target ordinary people going about their lives, especially those who decline to demonstrate allegiance to the cause. That includes a diner in Washington who refused to raise her fist to show support for Black Lives Matter, or, in several cities, confused drivers who happened upon the protests. . . .

A small free literature selection was set up on the grass and overseen by three people in ski masks. It was a popular offering, and people crowded around, craning to see the pamphlets.

Titles included “Why Break Windows”; “I Want To Kill Cops Until I’m Dead”; “Piece Now, Peace Later: An Anarchist Introduction to Firearms”; “In Defense of Smashing Cameras”; and “Three-Way Fight: Revolutionary Anti-Fascism and Armed Self Defense.” . . .

Neighbors in impressive Craftsman-style homes pulled down their shades and turned off their lights, though many could be seen peering out of dark windows. One woman stepped out of an expansive home looking angry; upon seeing the crowd, she quickly retreated indoors. A few young couples stood in their doorways. A Black woman driving past honked and cheered.

One white man stepped onto his patio clapping and hollering in support of the passing march. The group called for him to join. He smiled and waved them on, still clapping. They began to chant that he was spineless. He looked worried. But the march moved along, and he went back into his house.

“You’ll never sleep tight, we do this every night,” the protesters chanted.

This isn’t protest, this is domestic terrorism.