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It appears that some media have a new narrative after admitting that the Hunter Biden laptop is legitimate after all. According to Atlantic Magazine writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum, the story never did matter because it was just not interesting and “totally irrelevant” to her. Strangely, however, it once did. Applebaum pushed the false narrative as she was slamming others for publishing “Russian disinformation” and using the Hunter Biden story as an example. It only became uninteresting when it turned out to be true. The one convincing assertion, however, is that it was simply not viewed as “relevant.” What was clearly relevant for Twitter and most media outlets was the election of Joe Biden. Otherwise, as captured by Gaston de La Touche, it is a matter of sheer boredom.

Applebaum was at my alma mater, The University of Chicago, for the Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy conference on Wednesday.  The conference appeared largely an echo-chamber, a disappointing lineup for UChicago which is known to value a diversity of opinion. Applebaum slammed Fox and its viewers: “Those who live outside the Fox News bubble and intend to remain there do not, of course, need to learn any of this stuff.” (For the record, I work as a legal analyst at Fox).

That is when University of Chicago Student Daniel Schmidt delivered a haymaker after citing her dig:

“A poll, later after that, found that if voters knew about the content of the laptop, 16% of Joe Biden voters would have acted differently. ‘Do you think the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation, and what can we learn from that in ensuring that what we label as disinformation is truly disinformation, and not reality?”

Applebaum responded by saying that she really did not care if the laptop was legitimate because she did not find it interesting.

“My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is I think it’s totally irrelevant,” she said. “I mean, it’s not whether it’s disinformation… I didn’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be President of the United States.”

So, if the Biden family was engaged in selling access to foreign interests, it really has nothing to do with the President of the United States. It is not interesting that there are references to Joe Biden’s knowledge or involvement and possible benefitting from the millions passing through his son. It does not matter that Hunter is shown telling his daughter Naomi: “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years. It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike Pop [Joe], I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

It is all just so uninteresting.

Nevertheless, Applebaum did find it interesting that others are pushing “disinformation.” Russian disinformation has been a focus of her work and she has called for Facebook to stop those who “spread lies” and work to “undo the terrible damage done by Facebook and other forms of social media” by allowing people to speak freely on their sites.  Applebaum repeatedly objected to how “extreme-right television channels, then repeated and amplified in cyberspace, creating an alternative reality.” However, when the left killed a legitimate story before an election, that alternative reality is just not interesting.

It turns out, however, that there was relevance to the Hunter Biden scandal when the media was dismissing it as Russian disinformation. For example, in a column titled “The Science of Making Americans Hurt Their Own Country,” Applebaum was fixated on how everyone had to work to kill such stories like the Hunter Biden “saga.” Indeed, Applebaum chastised Americans for not being interested enough:

“Russian disinformation works because Americans allow it to work-and because those same Americans don’t care anymore about the harm they do to their country.

You can argue, of course, that these 2020 efforts don’t need to be taken so seriously, because they failed. Biden won. At least half the population did not believe the false accusations, or weren’t swayed by them. The Hunter Biden saga faded. But that misses the more insidious, longer-term effect of these kinds of games-or rather, the insidious, long-term effect of the behavior of the Americans who play them.”

Applebaum now insists that she never really “cared” about the story or whether a true story was suppressed by the media before the election. It seems that that is not disinformation. It is just uninteresting information.

I previously wrote a column on the one year anniversary of the Hunter Biden laptop story that marveled at the success of the Biden family in making the scandal vanish before that 2020 election. It was analogized to Houdini making his 10,000-pound elephant Jennie disappear in his act. The Biden trick, however, occurred live before an audience of millions.

The elephant was not hard to see. The trick worked because he knew people did not want to see it.

The key to the trick was involving the media in the original act so that reporters became invested in the illusion. It is like calling audience members to the stage to assist in the performance. Reporters have to insist that there was nothing to see or they have to admit to being part of the original deception. Indeed, previously writers like Applebaum accused those who saw an elephant of being dupes and liars.

Well now the elephant is back, Applebaum wants everyone to know that she was never really interested in elephants in the first place.

My goodness, Los Angeles is on a whole ‘nother level when it comes to leftist dystopia.

OUR RULING CLASS SEES CHINA AS A ROLE MODEL: A Warning From Shanghai. A new California bill threatens to strip doctors of their medical licenses for saying things the state doesn’t like. We don’t have to imagine what that would look like.

Remember when we were told that China was a model for the world in controlling Covid? Sure, as a totalitarian state, it was able to weld people inside their homes and monitor its citizens via drone. But many in the West believed that such measures were necessary. They argued that the abandonment of personal liberty was an appropriate way to fight a respiratory virus.

Now Shanghai is the model for the terrifying dangers of giving dictatorial powers to public health officials. The harrowing situation unfolding there is a testament to the folly of a virus containment strategy that relies on lockdown. For two weeks, the Chinese government has locked nearly 25 million people in their homes, forcibly separated children from their parents, killed family pets, and limited access to food and life-saving medical care—all to no avail. Covid cases are still rising, yet the delusion of suppressing Covid persists.

The repression isn’t a tool for achieving a worthwhile goal. The repression is the goal.

Hunter Biden knew he was working with associates who were high up in Chinese intelligence circles, according to a new report.

The report published Monday by Yahoo News delves into the connections between Hunter Biden and Patrick Ho, referred to as Patrick Ho Chi-ping in some reports concerning Ho’s 2018 bribery conviction that was linked to arms dealing and bribery in Africa.

Yahoo’s report is written by Michael Isikoff, its chief investigative correspondent, and Zach Dorfman, its national security correspondent. Both are veteran and respected journalists.

(Isikoff is probably best known as the reporter then working for Newseek who had the story in 1998 about independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation of then-President Bill Clinton and his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, but lost the scoop to the Drudge Report because Newsweek sat on it.)

Ho, who was a former Hong Kong government minister, and Ye Jianming, an energy tycoon who had links in his past to  China’s People’s Liberation Army, had formed a business partnership with Hunter Biden and James Biden, who is President Joe Biden’s brother.

In November 2017, Ho was arrested by FBI agents at New York’s JFK Airport as part of what Isikoff and Dorfman called “an audacious plot to dole out millions of dollars in bribes to African leaders in exchange for major energy contracts that appeared to advance Chinese government interests.”

Yahoo reported in 2018 that Ho’s first phone call after his arrest was to James Biden. He asked Biden to get him a lawyer.

According to the report published Monday, the infamous Hunter Biden laptop contained an audio recording from May 11, 2018, between Hunter Biden and a woman who has not been identified.

Hunter Biden complained about a reporter for the New York Times who was asking about Ho.

Read the Whole Article

The post Yahoo Confirms Huge Hunter Biden Story – Weapon Sales to Africa, Chinese Intel, $1M Retainer appeared first on LewRockwell.

QUESTION ASKED: Why Aren’t Democrats Dancing for Joy About Sky-High Gas Prices?

In the service of reducing carbon emissions, Democrats have long openly worked to raise the price of fossil fuel energy. They have done so by proposing carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes, higher leasing fees, and other measures to jack up costs so people burn less of it. This is why Barack Obama said, in answer to a related question about electricity, that his energy plan would make prices “necessarily skyrocket.” This is why Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna praised BP’s CEO less than six months ago for pledging to reduce oil and gas production by 40% by 2030. Reductions in oil production and rising gasoline prices are part of the Democrats’ agenda and the Paris climate agenda.

There’s even more to it than that. Over the past decade, the Democrats’ overt hostility toward fossil fuels has even driven companies in the industry to sideline production, purely for public relations purposes, while prioritizing meaningless, politically correct carbon emissions goals. How can Democrats suddenly feign outrage at their incredible success in influencing the industry?

Is it a mystery why Democrats aren’t doing a sack dance and celebrating the salvation of planet earth?

There’s the small matter of their political survival, of course. It would be unseemly — like doing a jig at an Irish funeral — to celebrate other people’s pain. And it would cost many Democrats who are secretly jubilant about high gas prices their political careers.

Instead, Democrats are pretending to look for a way to “ease consumers’ pain.”

Flashbacks:

In September of 2019, after CNN’s seven hour “climate change town hall,” Bryan Preston wrote, “Seriously, if you see all of the above — which is just a sample — and vote for any of these people for any office at any level, it’s on you. If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela.”

And as Kate of Small Dead Animals wrote after the CNN horror show, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking they don’t mean it.”

● Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?

● NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in lockstep call for higher gas taxes.

● 2008 L.A. Times headline: “The joy of $8 gas.”

Exit quote: “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”

In other words, Obama administration retreads are following the same playbook as the original Obama administration: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden:  As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”

Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.

Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned

Below is my column in The Hill on the recent “disinformation conference” held by leading democrats and media figures. It was a confab of the liberal politicians and journalists over how to deal with problems like Republicans, Fox News, roughly half of the voters and most television viewers. The solution for some seemed to be reeducation led by the media through even greater advocacy journalism and censorship.

This weekend MSNBC analyst John Heilemann and Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa) added their own suggestion for such reeducation. Dean agreed with Heilemann that Democrats “have to scare the crap out of [the Democratic base] and get them to come out. They can’t motivate them on the basis of hope or their pocketbooks or any of these accomplishments. They have to scare the crap out of them.”

Here is the column:

Tennessee Williams once lamented, “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.” That fear came to mind this week when former President Barack Obama called upon “our better angels” at the ironically named “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference at the University of Chicago.

The conference was a confab of media and political elite, gathered to discuss how to defeat their common demons: Republicans, Fox News, and apparently half of the electorate and most television viewers. In fact, the conference offered a chilling display of not just disinformation but delusion in dealing with current controversies.

It proved fascinating as the media and political elite openly worked through intractable problems like the backlash over burying the Hunter Biden scandal before the election. For that reason, it was particularly ironic that the conference was sponsored by The Atlantic magazine, which has been a source of some of the most criticized coverage.

One of the figures in special counsel John Durham’s ongoing investigation is Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer, who has been identified as “Reporter-2″ in Durham’s investigation of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. Foer allegedly sent an early draft of the article for review by operatives working with the Clinton campaign, according to Durham, and the campaign later used the article to spread a false story involving Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump campaign.

Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, declared this week that “only one party in the American system has currently given itself over so comprehensively to fantasists.” He further denounced “social media-Big Data” for not censoring such views. Apparently, the extensive censorship of conservatives by Big Tech is not sufficient because any access to such forums “makes it easier and easier to inject falsehoods into political discourse.”

The Chicago conference resembled a mainstream-media version of a car show, featuring new political-narrative models for eager buyers. One came from Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum, who joined CNN figures in denouncing conservative media. That’s when University of Chicago student Daniel Schmidt delivered a haymaker question:

“A poll, later after that, found that if voters knew about the content of the [Hunter Biden] laptop, 16 percent of Joe Biden voters would have acted differently. Do you think the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation, and what can we learn from that in ensuring that what we label as disinformation is truly disinformation, and not reality?”

Applebaum responded by saying that she really did not care if the laptop was legitimate because she did not find it “interesting”: “My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is I think it’s totally irrelevant. I mean, it’s not whether it’s disinformation … I didn’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States.”

It appears that laptop is no longer Russian disinformation. It is now just uninteresting or irrelevant, even though the president’s son may soon be indicted on this evidence.

Applebaum was one of those pushing the Russian disinformation claims in calling for censorship by Big Tech of conservatives. Back then, the Hunter Biden scandal was “relevant” as Russian disinformation. For example, in a column titled “The Science of Making Americans Hurt Their Own Country,” Applebaum praised the killing of the Hunter Biden “saga” and encouraged even greater efforts to control information for voters. She criticized those who “argue … that these 2020 efforts don’t need to be taken so seriously, because they failed.”

CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter also was confronted by a student, Christopher Phillips, who listed false stories run by CNN, from the Russia collusion stories to the Jesse Smollett case. Phillips then asked: “All the mistakes of the mainstream media and CNN, in particular, seem to magically all go in one direction. Are we expected to believe that this is all just some sort of random coincidence, or is there something else behind it?” Stelter responded dismissively that it was all just “a popular right-wing narrative” before returning to the narrative of the true demons on the right. Stelter has previously embraced censorship as part of a “harm reduction model” for media.

The conference was more about the demons than the angels of the mainstream media. The sense of frustration was palpable.

While pushing for greater private censorship, the conference adopted an almost clinical tenor of conservatives and Fox News-watchers being brainwashed or cognitively challenged. Yet, despite years of such attacks, Fox remains the most popular cable news network; it not only often doubles the viewership of its rivals, but more Democrats watch Fox than CNN. (For the record, I work as a Fox legal analyst. I previously worked for NBC, CBS and the BBC.)

Obama denounced “anger-based journalism” while promoting an advocacy-journalism model in which the media shape the news for citizens who supposedly need help to properly frame ideas. He and many other speakers highlighted a much-touted study by political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla. The study has been featured by the Washington Post and many of these same outlets for its conclusion that Fox News viewers change their views when exposed to “good” news sources like CNN.

Obama declared the study as hopeful since it showed “how easy it is to shift people’s views on issues by changing their media diet.”

But the study itself is a study in bias. The researchers at Berkeley and Yale only subjected Fox viewers to this type of re-educational viewing; they paid Fox viewers to watch CNN but did not do the opposite to see how CNN viewers changed their views after being exposed to Fox. Moreover, the study assumed as fact what would be viewed as a contested viewpoint. For example, they assert that “Fox News largely did not inform viewers of Trump’s failure to protect the U.S. from the COVID-19 outbreak, whereas CNN extensively did so. This is concerning for democratic accountability.”

In the end, the study found the change was often slight, with less than 10 percent shifts on most questions and short-lived results, as viewers returned to their original viewing preferences.

The “hopeful” message — that we just have to change what people watch in order to save democracy — is hardly a new idea. Just last year, some Democratic members of Congress sought to pressure cable companies to take Fox off the air.

There is another possibility: As Obama summons the “better angels” of the left, they might consider promoting free speech. After all, we once believed good ideas can prevail over bad ones in an open marketplace of ideas. Instead, this crusade to rid liberals of their demons would kill the most angelic part of who we are as a people.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.

A new study from North Carolina State University found Google's email service Gmail favored liberal candidates and suppressed conservative candidates in the 2020 election.

DANIEL SCHMIDT: Why Anne Applebaum Shot Down My Question.

This wasn’t meant to be a gotcha. Yet Applebaum gave a stupefyingly arrogant (and borderline incoherent) answer: “My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop,” she said, “is I think [it’s] totally irrelevant. I [mean], it’s not whether it’s disinformation, or I mean, I don’t think the—Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So, I didn’t—I don’t find it to be interesting. I mean, that would be my problem with that as a major news story.”

In 2020, two tech giants, Facebook and Twitter, had throttled the Post’s exposé on Hunter’s business dealings, which implicated one of two major-party presidential nominees, and the media had uncritically echoed the false assertion of 50 former ex-spies that this reporting was a Russian information operation. And yet here was Applebaum, nearly two years later at an event dedicated to combatting disinformation, claiming she didn’t find any of this to be “interesting.”

Nonsense. Back when the Hunter Files were a live crisis for the Biden camp, Applebaum published a lengthy essay in The Atlantic that aimed to discredit the reporter who broke the laptop story. So if she doesn’t find the story interesting, why did she—along with the entirety of the corporate media apparatus—dedicate so much time and effort to trying to legitimate censorship of the Post’s reporting?

Past performance is no guarantee of future results: Write 2,400 word essay in 2020, claim to be bored by Hunter’s laptop in 2022.

Related: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? FBI Ramps Up Social Media Surveillance Program Monitoring Americans.

Related: No Convictions in Whitmer ‘Kidnapping’ Case, Another Black Eye For the FBI.

CHINA HARVESTED ORGANS FROM LIVING PEOPLE, DOCTORS HELPED WITH EXECUTIONS, ISRAELI RESEARCHER CLAIMS: “Ethan Gutmann, a researcher and human rights activist…estimated that China murders at least 25,000 people each year in Xinjiang for their organs. He described fast tracks to move the organs in local airports, and crematoria built to dispose of the bodies. Customers for organs these days, he said, are mainly wealthy Chinese. However, he noted, there are also ‘organ tourists.’ They included Japanese, South Koreans and Muslims from the Gulf States who prefer ‘halal organs’ taken from Muslims like the Uighurs, he said. But despite the extensive evidence on organ trafficking in China, no ‘smoking gun’ has been found yet in the form of official documents that could prove the state is behind the illegal, immoral and profitable industry. Until now, apparently.”

By James D. Agresti April 8, 2022 Overview With one exception, every gold standard study of masks in community settings has failed to find that they slow the spread of contagious respiratory diseases. The outlier is a widely cited study run in Bangladesh during the Covid-19 pandemic, and some of its authors claim it proves that mask mandates “or strategies like handing out masks at churches and other public events—could save thousands of lives each day globally and hundreds each day in the United States.” In reality, the authors altered their study to exclude the data that could prove or disprove that very claim. This is a blatant violation of research ethics, and it biases the study to hide the harms of masks, which are far more common and serious than portrayed by governments and media outlets. Study Design The Bangladesh mask study, published by the journal Science in December 2021, was a “cluster-randomized controlled trial.” In plain language:

• randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are studies in which people are randomly assigned to receive or not receive a certain treatment, like wearing a mask. This allows the study to control for every possible confounding factor, something that “is not possible with any other study design.” Thus, clinical research guides call RCTs the “gold standard.”

• cluster RCTs involve giving “the same treatment” to people who interact with one another, whether it be households, villages, workplaces, etc. This is useful for studies on masks because the “prevention of one infection in an individual can prevent a chain of subsequent transmission” to others.

In short, the basic study design was ideally suited to determine if masks work, but as will be shown, the execution and interpretation are not. Excluding the Death Data As required by research ethics, the authors of the Bangladesh mask study published a pre-analysis plan explaining how their RCT would be conducted and what it would measure. Pre-analysis plans are a tool to prevent biased or dishonest researchers from changing the goal posts after results begin to pour in. Per the journal Epidemiological Reviews:

In designing the protocol of any clinical trial conducted today, there would be a requirement that the endpoints and case definitions be clearly laid out in advance. In fact, regulatory authorities hold the investigators to these predetermined endpoints to avoid what is sometimes termed “data dredging,” or looking for those outcomes for which significant differences would be found.

Likewise, an article from the World Bank’s Development Research Group explains that the primary reason for pre-analysis plans “is to avoid many of the issues associated with data mining and specification searching by setting out in advance exactly the specifications that will be run and with which variables.” The pre-analysis plan for the Bangladesh mask study states that it will measure “hospitalizations and mortality,” but these measures are completely absent from the study results. This is a flagrant breach of research ethics, and it obscures the only data that can objectively prove whether masks save or cost lives on net. Import of the Death Data To accurately measure the impact of masking or any other medical intervention on death, one has to measure actual deaths—not some other variable. This is because measuring whether masks prevent C-19 infections, as the Bangladesh study does, doesn’t measure how many people died from C-19 or any of the lethal risks of masks identified in medical journals, such as:

• cardio-pulmonary events.
• elevated CO2 inhalation, which can impair high-level brain functions and lead to fatal mistakes.
• social isolation, which can lead to drug abuse and suicide.
• heat, humidity, and other discomforts of wearing a mask, which can cause increased error rates and response times in situations where mental sharpness is vital to safety.

Only RCTs that measure deaths can capture the net effects of all such factors. That’s why medical journals call “all-cause mortality” in RCTs:

• “the most objective outcome” (Journal of Critical Care)
• “the most relevant outcome” (The Lancet Respiratory Medicine)
• “the most significant outcome” (JAMA Internal Medicine)
• “the most important outcome” (PLoS Medicine)
• “the most important outcome” (Journal of the National Medical Association)
• “the most important outcome” (International Journal of Cardiology)
• “a hard and important end point” (JAMA Internal Medicine)

Unlike other data which can be easily manipulated through statistical tampering, all-cause mortality in RCTs is straightforward and solid. If an RCT is large enough and properly conducted, a simple tally of all deaths among people who receive and don’t receive a treatment proves whether the treatment saves more lives than it takes. This gets more complicated for cluster RCTs, but it is still a clear-cut process. The Excuses Because the lead and final authors of a clinical study are most responsible for it, Just Facts asked Yale economics professors Jason Abaluck and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak why they flouted their pre-analysis plan to measure deaths. As documented in this full record of the email exchange, they gave counterfactual answers and then failed to reply after they painted themselves in a corner. In a key part of the exchange, Abaluck claimed:

Collecting mortality data would have required us to revisit every household at endline in order to survey them (we only collected blood from the small subset of households symptomatic during our study period). Given the nationwide lockdown that went into effect, another round of revisits would have been prohibitively expensive and complicated, and we prioritized the other outcome variables where we had much better hope of being statistically powered.

Directly quoting the authors’ working paper, Just Facts asked:

Given that your team was “able to collect follow-up symptom data” from “98%” of the individuals in the study, why would they need to “revisit every household at endline to survey them”?

Likewise, the working paper reveals that their study “surveyed all reachable participants about Covid-related symptoms” and then used the data to calculate that masks reduce the risk of “Covid-like symptoms.” During the very same surveys, they could have easily asked the participants if anyone in their household died. In fact, the authors may have done that, because they wouldn’t answer these questions:

Did you collect mortality data during any part of the study before the endline? If so, would you share it?

Just Facts asked those straightforward questions twice, but the authors did not reply. Other Issues Beyond excluding the death data, the authors engaged in other actions that reflect poorly on their integrity. One of the worst is touting their findings with far more certainty than warranted by the actual evidence. For example, some of the authors wrote a New York Times op-ed declaring that “masks work,” a claim undercut by the following facts from their own study:

• Their study’s “primary outcome,” a positive blood test for Covid-19 antibodies, found that less than 1% of the participants caught C-19, including 0.68% in villages where people were pressured to wear masks, and 0.76% in villages that were not. This is a total difference of 0.08 percentage points in a study of more than 300,000 people.

• Their paper lays down 4,000 words before it reveals the sampling margins of error in the results above, which show with 95% confidence that:
  • surgical masks reduced the relative risk of catching symptomatic C-19 by as much as 22% to not at all.
  • cloth masks reduced the risk of catching symptomatic C-19 by as much as 23% or increased the risk by as much as 8%.

• “Not statistically significant” is the common term used to describe study results that aren’t totally positive or totally negative throughout the full margin of error, like the results above. Yet, the authors skip this fact in their op-ed and bury it in their paper, writing at the end of an unrelated paragraph that it showed “no statistically significant effect for cloth masks.”

• Their analysis doesn’t quantify the uncertainty caused by the fact that they tested only 3%, or 10,790, of the study’s 342,126 participants. This sample may not reflect the other 97% because:
  • the study didn’t attempt to test people for Covid-19 unless the “owner of the household’s primary phone” admitted that a member of their household had symptoms like a fever, sore throat, fatigue, and headache.
  • 60% of the people who reportedly had symptoms did not submit to a Covid-19 test.

• Their analysis assumes that the following “mask promotion interventions” had no effects on the objectivity or willingness of participants to accurately report symptoms:
  • Making them watch “a brief video of notable public figures discussing why, how, and when to wear a mask.”
  • Sending them “twice-weekly text message reminders about the importance of mask-wearing.”
  • Asking them to make “a verbal commitment to be a mask-wearing household.”
  • Asking “them to place signage on doors that declares they are a mask-wearing household.”
  • Giving a “monetary incentive” of 190 U.S. dollars to “the village leader” if at least 75% of the village adults wore masks.

• Like their paper, their op-ed states that “people over age 50 benefited most, especially in communities where we distributed surgical masks,” but this “does not suggest that only older people need to wear masks, but rather that widespread community mask wearing reduces Covid-19 risk, especially for older people.” However, their pre-analysis plan to measure results for “each decade” of age ranges shows no statistically significant effects among people aged 18–29, 30–39, 40–49, and 70+. Furthermore, they excluded this breakdown from their paper and relegated it to a supplement.

• Their paper engages in the dishonest practice of data dredging by featuring results that were not included in their pre-analysis plan, like “imputing symptomatic-seroprevalence for missing blood draws.” This allows them to transform statistically insignificant results into significant ones.

• Their analysis uses complex analytic strategies like a “generalized linear model with a Poisson family and log-link function,” evoking these warnings from academic works:
  • “Manipulation of data involves subjecting data to multiple statistical techniques until one achieves the desired outcome.”
  • “A general principle of data analysis recommends using the most appropriate, yet simplest, statistical techniques in research so findings can be better understood, interpreted, and communicated.”
  • Statistical “malpractice typically occurs when complex analytical techniques are combined with large data sets. … Indeed, as a general rule, the better the science, the less the need for complex analysis….”

Summary Based on their study’s finding that “mask-wearing” was 13% in villages that were not pressured to wear masks and 42% in those that were, the authors extrapolated their results to claim that:

• “if everyone wore masks, the reductions in Covid-19 cases would most likely have been substantially larger.”
• “our best estimate is that every 600 people who wear surgical masks in public areas prevent an average of one death per year given recent death rates in the United States.”

Those claims are based on shaky statistics laced with absurd assumptions, and they fail to account for any of the lethal risks of masks. Worse still, simply counting the people who died in their study could settle this issue, or at the very least, define the outer boundaries of the effects of masks on death. Yet, the authors didn’t collect this easily obtained data as specified in their pre-analysis plan—or they are withholding it.

THIS IS FASCINATING: Miranda warnings in 1748?

Professor Oliver and his co-authors argue that Miranda v. Arizona was more a return to Framing-era interrogation practices than something entirely novel. Around the time of the Framing, he claims, the common law voluntariness test for the admission of confessions was much more restrictive than it became in the 20th century. In the Framing era, magistrates routinely gave legal warnings to a person about to be interrogated that he had a right to remain silent and that their evidence would be used against them. The warnings were thought necessary, Oliver argues, as a way to meet the very strict voluntariness rule then in place. Only when a person was told of his rights, the thinking went, could a subsequent statement be deemed truly voluntary.

This thinking will ring a bell to modern criminal procedure ears: It’s the basic theory of Miranda. What happened, Oliver argues, is that courts loosened the voluntariness test in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Warnings were then dropped, as they were no longer needed to make sure statements were voluntary. (Almost everything was voluntary under the new voluntariness test; who needs warnings?) But the new looser voluntariness test then led to brutal interrogation practices in the 20th century. And then the Warren Court, entirely unaware of this history, responded to those brutal interrogation practices by devising what it thought was a new idea for how to ensure the voluntariness of confessions: Introduce the requirements of legal warnings.

As Oliver tells it, Miranda inadvertently returned the law to something akin to what it was in the Framing era without actually realizing it.

Everything old is new again.

COAL MINE, MEET CANARY: Sri Lanka facing imminent threat of starvation, senior politician warns.

Sri Lanka is facing the imminent threat of starvation for its population of 22 million as the economic crisis in the country continues to worsen and food becomes increasingly scarce, a senior politician has warned.

Speaking in a debate in parliament, held against the backdrop of the worst financial crisis to hit the country since independence – and with anti-government protests spreading across the country – the speaker of the parliament, Mahinda Yapa Abeywardana, warned that this was “just the beginning”.

“The food, gas and electricity shortages will get worse. There will be very acute food shortages and starvation,” Abeywardana told the legislature.

The economic meltdown in Sri Lanka spiralled on Wednesday as the Sri Lankan rupee plunged to become the world’s worst-performing currency. Sovereign dollar bonds dropped to trade at deeply distressed levels, while the stock market fell a further 2%.

Over the past few months, Sri Lanka has been facing a dire financial crisis on multiple fronts, triggered partially by the impact of Covid-19, which battered the economy, as well as mounting foreign debts, rising inflation and economic mismanagement by the government, led by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

The country barely has any foreign currency reserves left, leading to dangerous shortages of food, gas and medicines as it is unable to import foreign goods, while people are enduring power blackouts of up to eight hours a day. The situation has pushed thousands out onto the streets in protest in recent days, calling for the resignation of the president.

Flashback: In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong.

Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.

The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.

Get woke, go broke.

Related: Looming food shortages the next ‘slow-moving disaster’ to hit world .

WAIT, THE RUSSIANS REALLY DID DIG TRENCHES NEAR CHERNOBYL? “I’m reminded of what a source who works at the plant told Reuters a few weeks ago about his conversation with Russian soldiers occupying the site. ‘When they were asked if they knew about the 1986 catastrophe, the explosion of the fourth block (of the Chernobyl plant), they did not have a clue. They had no idea what kind of a facility they were at,’ he said, claiming they were merely told that it was ‘critically important infrastructure.’ That seems absurd given Chernobyl’s infamy in the west, but is it so hard to believe that Russian twentysomethings wouldn’t have heard of it? Such episodes probably aren’t spoken of in history class or on state television. So how would they know? The military high command surely knew. They just didn’t care to tell them, it seems, possibly fearing that units would have refused to deploy there had they known where they were going.”

THE SEC NEEDS A SPECIAL COUNSEL INVESTIGATION: SEC Enforcement Staff Accessed Adjudicatory Documents in Midst of Administrative Proceedings.

SEC released a statement yesterday admitting that “administrative support personnel from Enforcement, who were responsible for maintaining Enforcement’s case files, accessed [restricted] Adjudication memoranda via the Office of the Secretary’s databases.” This self-described “control deficiency” is actually an outrageous breach of ethics—and possibly law—by SEC that illustrates why the Constitution forbids housing prosecutorial functions and adjudicatory functions in a single agency.

SEC filed in Cochran simultaneously with publishing the statement, so Ms. Cochran was not informed of SEC’s “control deficiency” when it was discovered. NCLA and Ms. Cochran were only made aware of the Commission’s breach when it was publicly disclosed. The Commission has known about this issue long enough to hire outside investigators, conduct an audit with “dozens of interviews,” and collect documents. Yet critical details, including who knew what and when, remain undisclosed. If this breach of ethics had occurred in private litigation or before a federal court, it would raise red flags. SEC claims “this access did not impact the actions taken by the staff investigating and prosecuting the cases or the Commission’s decision-making in the matters.” At present, there is no way to verify that this breach did not impact Ms. Cochran’s case. To make matters worse, SEC hired an outside firm that regularly does millions of dollars of business with the agency to investigate the scandal. Hiring a firm with a conflict of interest to investigate a conflict of interest hardly inspires confidence.

Restoring the “controls” that were disregarded here is not enough. As this breach has demonstrated, it would be impossible to monitor the internal controls at SEC sufficiently to guarantee that agency staff would not make the same error again. A computer correction of a purported “control deficiency” cannot repair the all-too-human impulse to abuse power, win at all costs, and share information inside an agency. Whatever controls are baked into the software, none of those can remedy the inherent problems that combining the enforcement and adjudication power inside an agency create.

Agencies that combine enforcement and adjudication — as many do — are unconstitutional. But convenient for the government.

A WORTHY CAUSE: Colorado Groomer School Charges $1,650 to Release FOIA Docs on Secret Transgender Closet. “Today, I’ve organized two fundraisers from which you can choose in order to raise this ridiculous fee and expose this school.”

Megan Fox has a GoFundMe here and a GiveSendGo here.

I contributed via GiveSendGo.

Update: Megan hit her goal this morning before most people had even left for work and is shutting down both fundraisers.

Thank you to everyone who contributed.

OH MY: Whistleblower who handed Hunter’s abandoned laptop to congressmen and DailyMail.com reveals he has 450 gigabytes of DELETED material including 80,000 images and videos – and has fled to Switzerland fearing retaliation from White House.

We have been discussing how schools have been dropping the use of standardized tests to achieve diversity goals in admissions. That trend continued this month with Cal State dropping standardized testing “to level the playing field” for minority students. I have long been a critic of this movement given the overwhelming evidence that these tests allow an objective measure of academic merit and have great predictive value on the performance of students. One school, however, has returned to standardized testing: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services Stuart Schmill announced that it would reverse its earlier decision to allow applicants to skip the tests. The university disclosed that

“Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT.”

The refusal to yield on its standards may prove to be the single most important institutional decision of MIT since its founding.

The MIT decision stands in stark contrast to the decision of the University of California system. Notably, academics in the California system came to the same conclusion as those at MIT: these tests not only have the greatest predictive value for performance but play an important role in the advancement of minority students. University of California President Janet Napolitano, however, overrode those conclusions.

Napolitano responded to such criticism with a Standardized Testing Task Force in 2019. Many people expected the task force to recommend the cessation of standardized testing. The task force did find that 59 percent of high school graduates were Latino, African-American or Native American but only 37 percent were admitted as UC freshman students. The Task Force did not find standardized testing to be unreliable or call for its abandonment, however.

Instead, its final report concluded that “At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, [University] GPA, and graduation.”

Not only that, it found: “Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007 … Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority Students (URMs), who are first generation, or whose families are low-income.” In other words, test scores remain the best indicator for continued performance in college.

That clearly was not the result Napolitano or some others wanted. So, she simply announced a cessation of the use of such scores in admissions. The system will go to a “test-blind” system until or unless it develops its own test.

Ending standardized testing will have a notable impact on legal challenges to the use of race in college admissions. Last November, Californians rejected a resolution to restore affirmative action in college admissions.

Universities will now have to chose between the MIT v. UC models. The pressure on administrators is considerable to make tests optional in the name of equity. Many academics are unwilling to face the personal costs of opposing such changes when they could be portrayed as racist or reactionary.

The choice could not be more impactful for universities. MIT has decided to stand by its institutional commitment to academic excellence. It is a profile of academic courage that has been missing at many institutions of higher education.

WE NEED NUCLEAR PLANTS TO POWER IT, THOUGH: 800-Volt EV Charging: The ​Other Palliative for Range Anxiety: Taking 18 minutes to charge to 80 percent makes top-up pit stops suddenly more palatable.

THE NYC HEALTH OFFICIAL “BIRTHING PEOPLE” VS “MOTHERS” DEBACLE.

Morse made a reference to “Black and Puerto Rican mothers,” but followed that up with “non-Hispanic White birthing people.” I suppose we’ll forgive her for capitalizing “white” in the context, even though that falls outside the boundaries of the AP Style Guide on racial capitalization. Some of her followers quickly jumped on her for the implication that Black and Hispanic pregnant women are “mothers” while pregnant white women are not.

Sensing trouble like a watchdog, the city Department of Health responded to a request for comment from the NY Post. They offered a correction and an apology. They said, “we apologize for inadvertently gendering Black and Puerto Rican birthing people.”

No, that’s not a joke. That’s what the DOH spokesperson felt required an apology. They had “inadvertently gendered” Black and Puerto Rican “birthing people.”

Update Newspeak Dictionaries accordingly, comrades.

COLORADO: Egregious bill criminalizes clerks checking election accuracy. “This bunker-busting election bomb is aimed at preemptively blowing up any future trouble-makers who, like Elbert County Clerk Dallas Schroeder and Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, have looked into what’s been happening inside the Dominion machines, and are now facing criminal charges for actually doing their jobs. Inquiring minds want to know: is the passage of this unprecedented secretary of state power play setting the stage for the manipulation of the 2022 elections?”

BAD: Gunmen posing as cops break down Texas man’s door in robbery, video shows. If police didn’t perform no-knock raids, this tactic would be less plausible.

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Did China just take out an NBA player? The case of Enes Kanter Freedom deserves at least as much attention as Colin Kaepernick.

THIS COULD BE INTERESTING: Elon Musk Takes 9.2% Stake in Twitter After Hinting at Shake-Up. “Elon Musk has taken a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc. to become the platform’s biggest shareholder, a week after hinting he might shake up the social media industry. . . . Musk, 50, polled his more than 80 million followers on Twitter last month, asking them whether the company adheres to the principles of free speech. After more than 70% said no, he asked whether a new platform was needed and said he was giving serious thought to starting his own.”

JACK DORSEY FEIGNS GUILT PANGS: Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Says He is “Partially to Blame” for the Destruction of Internet Today and Regrets It.

Co-founder Jack Dorsey made the social media app Twitter a household name. He also helped destroy free speech in the United States.

Jack Dorsey banned President Trump from the social media platform allegedly for ‘inciting violence’ but not the Taliban and Iranian leaders.

A whistleblower inside Twitter exposed and recorded CEO Jack Dorsey and sent Project Veritas the recording.

Project Veritas released a video of Jack Dorsey laying out the roadmap for future political censorship — censoring Trump was just the beginning.

“We are focused on one account [@realDonaldTrump] right now, but this is going to be much bigger than just one account, and it’s going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, and the next few weeks, and go on beyond the inauguration,” Dorsey said in a video recorded January 8, 2021.

Twitter also suspended the Gateway Pundit account indefinitely after we announced more videos of TCF Center fraud would be released in the coming days.

Questioning the fraudulent election will no longer be tolerated by the social media giant.

* * * * * * * *

Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO of Twitter last year.

Now, the former CEO said in his recent tweet that he is “partially to blame” for the current state of our internet today and claimed that he regrets it.

“The days of usenet, irc, the web…even email (w PGP)…were amazing. centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet. I realize I’m partially to blame, and regret it,” Dorsey said on his tweet.

Abandoning the decentralized Blogosphere for the walled gardens of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube was a huge mistake, particularly for conservatives. Somebody should write a book about the reasons why.

Related: Dorsey and Facebook COO stepping down from Walt Disney’s board.

The post FOIA Finds NIH Deleted Info From Wuhan Lab on CCP Virus Genetic Sequencing appeared first on The Bongino Report.

Yo, all this robot dog stuff is really starting to creep me out. Check out this video of a pup patrolling the streets of Shanghai City and barking out orders on Covid safety.

The post Sen. Sanders Proposes Insane 95% Business Tax appeared first on The Bongino Report.

So, wokeness has officially entered the medical field now: