NONE OF THESE TESTS IS AS GOOD AS PEOPLE WANT TO BELIEVE: Large-scale study finds genetic testing technology falsely detects very rare variants.
Archive for 2021
February 16, 2021
HOW IT STARTED: Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle.
—David Sirota, Salon, March 6, 2013.
How’s it’s ending: Bankrupted by Socialism, Venezuela Cedes Control of Companies.
—Bloomberg.com, Friday.
As they liked to say at Bloomberg whenever bad economic news befell former President Obama, “unexpectedly.”
MINIMUM WAGE MINIMIZES EMPLOYMENT: Fast-food workers demand that their jobs get automated. Or at least that’s how I read it.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Study: Drinking, smoking, drug use raises risk for premature heart disease.
A QUESTION FOR THE WOKE ROB REINER: I wonder where Rob thinks he is in the “regime of whiteness.”
LIFE IN DESANTIS’S FLORIDA: Time Travel to America.
Now comes word that Joe Biden has selected Levine to be his assistant secretary of health. According to USA Today, the nomination is historic since Levine will likely be the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
“Dr. Rachel Levine will bring the steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get people through this pandemic — no matter their zip code, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability — and meet the public health needs of our country in this critical moment and beyond,” Biden said in a statement. “She is a historic and deeply qualified choice to help lead our administration’s health efforts.”
Levine’s failed record in Pennsylvania proves otherwise, but why let facts get in the way of making identity politics history?
In contrast to Levine’s dismal performance, Florida officials elected to keep COVID patients out of nursing homes despite the possibility that doing so might stress the state’s hospital facilities. As it turned out, this was the right call. Florida’s most vulnerable citizens in nursing homes have been spared state-mandated exposure to COVID, and the state’s hospitals have maintained adequate patient capacity.
While Pennsylvania’s economy and people continue to suffer under lockdown, Florida — while requiring reasonable public health measures — is wide open for business. People here are free to patronize restaurants, bars, hotels, and enterprises of all types and sizes. This place is booming, and, once here, it doesn’t take long to realize just how unnatural, depressing, debilitating, and destructive life in lockdown has been.
I was there last month in Fort Myers to celebrate my aunt’s 100th birthday (she’s doing fantastic). Masks were required in stores such as Publix supermarkets. But restaurants and others shops were often mask optional. As Karol Markowicz wrote last month, “It’s a lie, though, that Floridians aren’t taking the novel coronavirus seriously. What they have done is discard the policies that don’t work, while retaining the ones that do.”
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE: New paper: Underlying ice layer seen in Martian gullies at LOW mid-latitudes.
NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Lulu the border collie just inherited $5 million and is living her best life.
WILL SHE LEARN TO CODE OR BUILD SOLAR PANELS? CNN Anchor Brooke Baldwin Announces Departure From Network.
We’ll always have this moment, though: ‘I’m Done:’ CNN’s Brooke Baldwin explodes after Clay Travis says he believes in “the First Amendment and boobs.”
14 ‘RED-DISTRICT DEMOCRATS’ WHO MAY BE DREADING VOTING FOR HR1: Trump either carried their district twice or at least once, and HR1 is stuffed to the gun-whales with voter registration and election procedure “reforms” that cast a permanent pall on the 2020 election. And much more that advances the progressive federalization of everything.
DAVID LEWIS SCHAEFER: Russia 1917, America 2021.
CONSPIRACIES HERE! CONSPIRACIES THERE! CONSPIRACIES EVERYWHERE! Want to know why so many folks across the ideological spectrum turn to conspiracies, just scan the political coverage bylines in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, USAT, etc. etc. When you keep telling people your highly slanted half of the story, don’t be surprised when people turn to alternative explanations.
BEER IS CIVILIZATION: Archaeologists uncover ancient beer brewery at Egypt funeral site.
JAMES MEIGS: Trust, But Verify, the Science.
But the people promoting transgender athletes aren’t really basing their views on science. They are expressing a value—that transgender people should be fully accepted—and then recruiting “science” to give that moral sentiment some extra weight. Values like tolerance are wonderful things, but they aren’t science. Science describes the world as it is, not as someone thinks it should be. Lately, some transgender advocates have gone beyond simply claiming science is on their side and have tried to bully scientists into agreement. Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage reveals how activists have worked to silence and banish medical experts whose research doesn’t support the latest transgender orthodoxy.
For all the administration’s talk about putting science first, on Biden’s first day in office, he signed an executive order on “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.” Fighting discrimination sounds great. But, as Shrier writes in the Wall Street Journal, the order means that virtually every public high school “must either allow biological boys who self-identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face administrative action from the Education Department.” Biology be damned.
Sometimes, scientists themselves succumb to the temptation to put advocacy ahead of accuracy. For over 30 years, a few climate scientists have sought prominent roles in the political debate over global warming. There’s nothing wrong with scientists talking to the public. But when they appear to be finessing their research in order to bolster their advocacy, science and advocacy both suffer. In one famous case, a batch of leaked emails showed several leading climate scientists discussing techniques to massage contradictory data. They seemed to be looking for a way to make a messy story appear simpler to the public. As John Tierney wrote in the New York Times at the time, the scientists “seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude—and ultimately undermine their own cause.” Blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds calls this phenomenon “the suicide of expertise.”
Public trust, once squandered, is hard to restore. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, polls showed widespread support for masks and lockdowns. People thought they were following the science. Then came the summer BLM protests. Suddenly, health officials started sounding positively blasé about the risks of thousands of strangers shouting together for hours. A group of over 1,200 health experts signed an open letter encouraging the protests, saying, “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue.” Millions of Americans got the message: People expressing the correct political opinions get a pass from COVID restrictions. Support for even reasonable precautions collapsed in many parts of the country.
Read the whole thing.
Related: From America’s Newspaper of Record: Democrats Vow To Follow The Science Of Whichever Union Donates The Most Money.
WHEN YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE ISN’T HARD ENOUGH: Texas power outages: How the largest energy-producing state in the US failed in freezing temperatures.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Use Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication for Self Defense.
GREEN NEW DEAL SNEAK PREVIEW: Texas’s ‘Nightmare’ Energy Situation Is a Warning to the Rest of America.
Exit quote: “Just last week, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott proudly accepted something called the Wind Leadership Award, given with gratitude by Tri Global Energy, a company getting rich from green energy. So it was all working great until the day it got cold outside. The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died.”
AN OBSERVATION FROM A READER: “The current US Government leadership feels the same way about January 6th as the CCP leadership felt about Tiananmen Square. They are taking lessons from how the CCP reacted to make sure it would never happen again in China, and using that as a model for how to have the same long-term effect in the US.”
ANOTHER TALKING POINT DEBUNKED: The Capitol riot’s ‘zip-tie guy’ appeared to take the plastic handcuffs from Capitol police, prosecutors say. “[A]ccording to the new filing, Munchel and his mother took the handcuffs from within the Capitol building — apparently to ensure the Capitol Police couldn’t use them on the insurrectionists — rather than bring them in when they initially breached the building.”
Earlier: The New York Times Retracts the Sicknick Story.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
