Have I Ever Told You About Preconceptual Science?

By Rich Kozlovich

 

My now passed friend Dr. Jay Lehr was at Princeton when Einstein was there, and he told me when Einstein first came to Princeton he delivered a series of lectures, and I think it was seven, but five for sure.  He said at the first couple of those lectures you couldn't buy or steal a seat in that room it was so packed, but by the last lecture there were plenty of seats.  

 

I was a bit surprised and asked why.  He said a lot of these people, many of whom were among the smartest people in the world, didn't have a clue what he was talking about, and clearly they didn't dare suggest is was Einstein who didn't know what he was talking about.  Can you imagine what that must have done to their egos?

 

Over the course of my almost 78 years respect for science has gone from the top of Mt. Everest to the toilet, and for good reason.   During and right after WWII science exposed the world to the atom bomb, sputnik, men to the moon, and amazing medical advances at disease prevention.  And as a result some scientist could look up from his microscope, or turn from his blackboard with all sorts of gibberish only they and their peers understood, and mumble out incomprehensible babble almost no one would understand, but everyone would be sure to believe.   And it might be true, and it might not.

 

As my friend Mike Shaw noted:   

 

Science, once indistinguishable from a search for truth—has become fatally corrupted by academia in a rapacious search for dollars.

 

With all the scientific jargon, and arrogant ivory tower isolation, we just didn't know any better, but time and truth are on the same side, and before now we just didn't know scientific integrity has always been a serious issue.

 

Evolution was at the heart of much of it, and was the greatest scientific fraud ever perpetrated on humanity, until global warming, and this fraudulent coronavirus pandemic, and worse yet, the shots they forced on much of humanity they fraudulently called "vaccines".  The negative health consequences as a result of these vaccination mandates of are world wide, and will continue for decades.

 

Let's try and get this once and for all. Government grant money has made

 

Nothing has changed, and in point of fact it's getting worse, and will get far worse in the coming years because now any nitwit, or group of nitwits with computers and a "twitter" account can force science to reject anything they don't like. Nitwits are now part of the peer review process.  The article about the study in question went on to say:

On January 4th, the paper "Meta-analysis: On average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average," was accepted to the journal. That same day, the abstract was published with the notice that the "final, formatted version of the article will be published soon".

Apparently the average IQ for college undergraduates has dropped, and a lot from "around 120 to 102, just slightly above the average of 100."  Let's  not delude ourselves, that's huge, and apparently it's true.  The authors went on to point out the ranks attending college is no longer from the higher IQ members of society, and as a result, "academic standards and curricula might have to be adjusted."  After what we've seen at Harvard, does anyone doubt that?

Well, this set up a fire storm of protest because they really didn't like the author's "tone".  It was demeaning, and lacked sensitivity, and criticized the peer reviewers for not finding fault with their paper, including the Frontiers in Psychology handling editor.  

The editor  of that journal, Eddy Davelaar, overrode all that and attempted to refute the evidence presented, and he did so....... with his opinions.......and has refused to respond to challenges over his actions and his opinions.  

But none of that changes the fact these young academics are dumber than ever, and are no longer required to perform mentally challenging tasks.  Academia is more about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion than it is with honest education, that teaches critical thinking, versus Critical Race Theory.

Diversity without accomplishment is philosophy without form and incompetence without consequence.  Unfortunately, as with all these schemes, humanity pays the penalty, and in the future the consequences are going to be dramatic.  Negatively dramatic.  

One more thing, this whole Preconceptual claptrap mentality doesn't just apply to science.  It works for economics also. 

The Happiness Plateau

By Rich Kozlovich

 

On March 9th Arden Dier published a piece entitled, $75K Yearly Income Where Happiness Plateaus? There's More to It,  with the subtitle "$75K Yearly Income Where Happiness Plateaus? There's More to It" saying:

Study suggests only the unhappiest 20% see emotional well-being flatline after $100K. Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman has admitted his influential study from a decade ago—suggesting happiness increases with household income only up to $75,000—didn't get it right. The question of whether money can buy happiness has been much debated since Kahneman's 2010 research with fellow Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton. In 2021, University of Pennsylvania happiness researcher Matthew Killingsworth published a study indicating there was actually no limit to the amount of money that boosted happiness. Hoping for a final answer, Kahneman and Killingsworth teamed up for a new study and found that for most people, Killingsworth's findings ring true.

The truth of the matter is, I think these studies are a load of horsepucky.  Time and circumstances change all the parameters, they always have and they always will, so they're always going to have to come back and admit they were wrong, and why.

There's a book out there entitled "Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It", which I found to be enlightening, and boring, as my eyes have to tendency to roll back into by head reading too many charts and statistics.  But one thing came clear to me, the happiness quotient is ignored by political leaders, and I can explain why.  They don't have a clue!  The reason for that is happiness is as difficult to define as defining "fair".  What's fair?  Who wrote the Book of Fair?  No one, and it's been my observation that fair is usually defined by who's ox is being gored.  And that's pretty much the same for happiness.

After reading that book, I concluded Machiavelli had the answer in his book The Prince, (which should be required reading starting in junior high school) published in 1532, where he outlines there are only two groups in the world.  The privileged and the masses.  The privileged only want to maintain, or expand, their privileges, and the masses just want security.  Individuals within those groups will have varying wants, but for both classes happiness is predicated on those two criteria.

Having owned a pest control company, I became involved in my industry's affairs serving as an officer of four trade associations in Ohio, and President of two of them. One of my associates once said I was "an enigma" to him. I answered, I'm easy to understand. I don't want money, power, position, privilege, or prestige, I just want what's right.  A nationally prominent scientist friend of mine told me once he always wanted to be important, to be someone, and he was, and he was amazing. I said I never wanted to be anyone, I just wanted to have a nice life, and I only got into these things because I didn't like being pushed around. It's the Serbian in me.

Happiness for the two of us, who were very much alike in many ways, was very different. Time and circumstance change our parameters. He wanted to be more prominent, and I wanted to be less prominent, so trying to find the "plateau" for happiness is in my opinion nothing more than academic welfare. It doesn't exist as a permanent equation.

Time and circumstance will change those parameters, but Machiavelli understood this one all important fact. If neither the privileged or the masses, as groups, are threatened as a group, governments are safe from both the privileged and the masses. Assuring their positions in life, the government can then reach in and pluck out any troublesome individual from the respective group and the group will not only remain silent, they will find justification for such action. And we've been seeing that currently.

When one or both groups feel threatened as a group, governments fall, and we're seeing talk of that now.  It's the first time in my 76 years I've seen the phrase, "America is in an existential crisis", touted more and more often, and with supporting evidence.  

As for these kinds of studies; I consider them academic welfare, since the parameters will change as circumstances change, and they'll have to do another study to apology for the errors of the last study.

Never Ending Crises and the Ban on DDT

By Rich Kozlovich

I’m a newsie. I love history, I love the news, I love the way history plays into the events taking place daily. I love the fact that I can understand the why’s and where for’s of what is happening because of my lifelong interest in history.  I find the patterns of life play out over and over again as everything is cyclical.   I find that I love talking about it to those who are also interested, and I love explaining those why’s and where for’s and the historical foundation for all that exists today. 

Over these many years I've noticed a pattern of activity that I find sort of fascinating. Scares will ebb and flow, but never really go away.  Not only do these activists not want a crisis to go to waste, they don't want crises to ever end.

Even after an issue has been raised and dealt with it is clear activists keep these issues on the back burner for future reference, as if everyone will forget what the facts actually were. And to some extent they're right, because there will always be a new crop of young misinformed and uninformed potential acolytes they can gull into the green movement especially via these propaganda factories we call universities. Young people in search of some sense of worth who's minds are still easily molded, easily coerced by the need to belong, and searching for something in which they can believe, a clear failure of religion in America, are lured into these radical secular cults.

As a result, environmentalism, which is in reality a scion of socialism, has become today’s secular religion, thus, these young believes are susceptible to the Kyrie Eleison of environmentalism.  They soon become intellectually and philosophically drunk drinking the Kool Aid and breathing the fumes from the fever swamps of environmentalism, filling them with arrogance and a sense of self-righteous indignation at the rest of the world that no amount of valid scientific information or rational observation can cure.  We now call it the Church of Wokeness.  The left is like rust, it never sleeps and it keeps turning itself into an angel of light. 

I keep hearing all sorts of claims by activists and government grant chasing “scientists” that chemicals (especially pesticides) cause cancer, autism, low sperm count and a host of other unproven scares. This has been particularly true of DDT. More outrageous claims have been made against DDT than almost any product that has ever been developed, with the possible exception of bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates. Do chemicals really cause a drop in sperm count? We can answer with a resounding NO!  

In 2011 the American Council on Science and Health cited a study that clearly demonstrated that fact:

“the 1992 study by a group of Danish researchers that claimed sperm counts declined by 50 percent worldwide from 1938 to 1991”, was wrong! They point out that the study was “heavily criticized for its many flaws, methodological problems, and biases” at the time. “We know that the so-called decline in sperm count is just another myth promulgated by the ‘our stolen future’ crowd who say that environmental chemicals lead to infertility in men,” says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. “But now we have proof that’s simply not true.”

This leads us back to DDT, which was banned by the first administrator of the EPA, Bill Ruckelshaus, in 1972. And yes, it was a ban. It is true that there were exceptions written into the ban, and yes, it is true that this ban in the U.S. was not incumbent on other nations, and yes it is true that it was not a worldwide ban, "at least on paper". However, so much economic pressure was placed on countries that didn’t ban it outright that it became a de facto ban in all but a few nations.

Lower sperm count was one of the claims, and yet the generation of parents who were most heavily exposed to DDT were the parents of the baby boomers, the largest generation of kids to ever come into existence.  At the end of WWII the world's population was approximately two billion people, and it took thousands of years to accomplish that.  In a little over 75 years the world's population soared to just under eight billion people.  So much for chemicals and low sperm counts, and DDT isn't the only chemical to which they make that claim. 

But time is the great leveler of truth.

I've followed this issue from the beginning and I knew the problem the EPA was having, and tried to ignore.  In 1996 when the Food Quality Protection Act was passed the bill contained a provision requiring the EPA to identify chemicals that were hormonally active agents (HAAs), commonly known as Endocrine Disruptors (ED) .  The problem with that was the ability to separate the ED potential of synthetic chemicals versus those which are naturally occurring.   That was the rub in 1996 and still is.   In his book "The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About- Because They Helped Cause Them", Iain Murray states:

"The entire theory that industrialization is causing severe endocrine disruption falls completely apart when exposures to naturally occurring endocrine modulators are taken into account. Plants naturally produce endocrine modulators called "phytoestrogens" to which human being are expose at levels that are thousands and sometimes millions of time higher than those of synthetic chemicals. Humans consume these chemicals every day without adverse effects some even contend these chemicals promote good health."

He goes on to say:

"Laboratory experiments have shown that there are so-called "endocrine disruptors" present in forty-three different foods common in the human diet, including corn, garlic, pineapple, potatoes, and wheat. Most amusingly, soybean, that product so beloved by liberal environmentalists, is a particularly potent source of phytoestrogens"....."it appears that on average human beings consume just over 100 micrograms of estrogen equivalents a day from natural sources. Compare that to the amount of industrial chemical amount of 2.5 micrograms."

He also notes:

"As it turns out phytoestrogens are actually much more potent than the chemicals that act like estrogens. Our friend DDT, for instance, has a relative potency to natural estrogen of 0.000001, meaning it takes one million molecules to have the same impact of one molecule of real estrogen."

Most studies are filled with weasel word and phrases. Then there are the “conclusions in search of data” studies, much like the Hungarian studies of Trajan and Kemeny published in 1969. Using only 3 ppm in the food per day this dose was fed to five generations of inbred Balb/c mice. They claimed a higher incidence of leukemia in the test subjects over the control animals. They also claimed they started with a leukemia free strain, yet there were incidents of leukemia in the controls.

So what was disturbing about this study? Other researchers working with comparable dosages with animals of any species or strain showed no incidences of cancer of any type. The skepticism warranted an investigation into this puzzle.

Although everyone agreed something went wrong in their study they couldn’t definitely point out what went wrong.  However it was shown that there were design problems in the study and there was a possibility of aflatoxin (an absolutely known carcinogen) contaminated food.

Modern studies seem to have much the same problem. Conclusions in search of data! The question I keep asking is this. If DDT was banned for scientific reasons that were obvious, factual and could be replicated, then why have they been studying it since 1972 to prove that it does all the things they claimed it did? Answer?  Because they didn't have one iota of honest research to prove their claims.

Millions have been spent on studies that have been conclusions in search of data. The mere fact so much has been spent after the ban to prove the ban on DDT was proper is a good indicator that everyone, and I mean everyone, on both sides of this issue, know the science was lacking, what was presented was weak or as in the case with Rachel Carson, invalid, and the decision to ban DDT was a political one.

The real problem with the ban on DDT isn't the fact that we lost DDT. Why? Technically it didn’t matter (at least in the developed world) because we had a large arsenal of products to defend society’s health, food and property.

Philosophically it was devastating because it became the basis for all that has come into being since then. All those tools have come under attack, and as a result we have lost important chemistry. First it was the chlorinated hydrocarbons, then it was the organophosphates and carbamates and now the pyrethroids and rodenticides are under attack. 

But it doesn't end there.  The ban created an emotional, almost hysterical mindset, to create oversight bureaucracies, that were filled with activists and quickly became out of control creating regulations regarding the the , the Endangered Species Act, just to name a few.  Often times working in collusion with activist groups in "sue and settle" schemes to allow the courts to give them powers the Congress never intended.  

All of this goes back to the foundational thinking with ban on DDT. 

That ban laid the foundation for the emotional, financial and legislative foundation for the power these various sects of leftism, the environmental movement merely being one of them, to create an unending list of crises to disrupt the nation.  All with the goal of getting the people to turn all power over to these radicals, all in the name of safety and good health, allowing them to impose a tyrannical worldwide system of governance on the nation and the world.  The ban on DDT needs to be overturned for that reason alone.  

Let's try and understand this.  DDT isn't a dead issue.  It's a foundational issue.   

You may wish to view,

'Propaganda': Experts rip CDC study claiming vax offers stronger protection than natural immunity

The new study contradicts a much larger Israeli study this summer. 

By Greg Piper

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published an "early release" study last week that uses a highly curated population to purportedly show that mRNA-vaccinated people have a much lower rate of reinfection by COVID-19 than naturally immune people, contradicting a much larger Israeli study this summer.

The CDC study concludes: "All eligible persons should be vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as possible, including unvaccinated persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2."

The study analyzed "COVID-19-like-illness hospitalizations among adults" across nine states from January through Sept. 2. Because public health authorities portrayed vaccination as the best way to avoid hospitalization, it's less likely that vaccinated people would seek hospitalization, thus hiding their breakthrough infections relative to the naturally immune........To Read More....

 

EPA’s Totalitarian Frontal Assault on America

Duggan Flanakin

Biden-Harris Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan is clearly on a mission. He has “bold aspirations, and a long to-do list,” says The Washington Post. But to succeed, the Post acknowledges, he must “help the EPA get its groove back.” As Reagan put it, “We’ve got a lot of work to do, starting with rebuilding staff morale and getting all our staff back to feeling as if they matter, their voices matter.” 

Regan says his job is “to restore the scientific integrity and the utilization of data, of facts, as we move forward, and make some very important decisions.” His second goal is to increase “cooperation” between the EPA and its “subordinate” state environmental agencies. EPA will dictate; states will fall in line. 

A big step toward that goal was extending a Memorandum of Agreement between the EPA, the Environmental Council of the States, and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. According to Regan, “EPA is committed to building on the values of transparency, respect, and an open dialogue that are the cornerstone of a successful partnership with the states.” As EPA defines the terms.

An Obama-appointed federal judge just restored the EPA’s use of “secret science” in formulating regulations that businesses and industries must follow just because the EPA says so – with “scientific evidence” that cannot be cross-examined. U.S. District Judge Brian Morris (in Great Falls, Montana) took just hours before vacating the Trump EPA rule that would have ended this Star Chamber style rule. 

For decades, the EPA relied on unreviewable studies to impose draconian restrictions on businesses and industries, and thus on the U.S. economy. Trump wanted to bring true transparency to the process. Opponents claimed the Trump secret science” rule would block the use of critical public health studies kept secret supposedly to protect the identities of trial participants – which of course was not the case. 

As Trump EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler explained, the “secret science” rule in no way blocked previous “secret” studies; rather, it created tiers in which preference is given to studies with public data. Peer reviewers looking at a study’s raw data did not need to know any of the subject’s names, so no patient confidentiality was at risk. Moreover, in most cases, a review of basic methods, statistics and results is sufficient to determine if they actually support the study’s conclusion. Wheeler also noted: 

“Too often Congress shirks its responsibility and defers important decisions to regulatory agencies. These regulators then invoke science to justify their actions, often without letting the public study the underlying data. Part of transparency is making sure the public knows what the agency bases its decisions on.”

Now the Biden-Harris EPA has revived its old policy based on a failed 2015 (Obama-Biden) rulemaking that twists the Clean Air Act language in an effort to destroy auto racing as a sport in the USA. 

The EPA claims modifying a vehicle previously certified for street driving for use as a competition-only racecar is unlawful even for vehicles that are trailered and never driven on public roads again. This policy seeks to end a 50-year-old American tradition. It has no precedent; even California exempts racing vehicles from regulation. 

Not only does the EPA claim it is illegal to convert a vehicle for racing by modifying its emission system; it claims manufacturing, selling or installing race parts for such vehicles is likewise unlawful. It’s even said enforcement actions against high performance parts – including superchargers, tuners and exhaust systems – will now be a top priority. 

This policy constitutes a direct assault on the nation’s 1,300 racetracks, tens of thousands of participants and vehicle owners, and millions of racing fans nationwide. It is also a death blow to retail sales of racing products, a $2 billion a year industry. The move appears to be part of the Obama-Biden-Harris EPA strategy to rid the planet (or at least the USA) of internal combustion engines by taking away the romance of the racecar. 

To try to thwart this EPA power grab, the Specialty Equipment Market Association has filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in a lawsuit filed by Gear Box Z, Inc. challenging the racecar conversion ban. The industry group is also supporting the Recognizing the Protection of Motorsports Act (RPM Act), which reaffirms the legality of converting street vehicles into race-only vehicles and confirms the legitimacy of producing, marketing and installing racing equipment. 

They should prevail. But with today’s courts, do even the most specific laws still matter?

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial says the Biden-Harris EPA has a secret plan to force massive CO2 emissions reductions under the Clean Air Act, using ozone as its vehicle of choice. “Plan B” is the fallback strategy to be implemented once it is clear that even the Democrat-controlled Congress will not enact economy-killing anti-fossil fuel legislation. The ultimate goal is total fossil fuel eradication. 

Under Plan B, EPA will reset the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for ground-level ozone to zero – way below natural levels that Mother Nature herself emits! The “science” is based on a questionable 2017 study from Harvard’s T. C. Chan School of Public Health, which claims there is no safe level of ozone in the atmosphere. How do you prosecute Mother Nature? 

Plan B responds to the failure of the Obama-Biden Clean Power Plan, which was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. It reflects former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s blunt admission that it is technically infeasible and even legally questionable to regulate CO2 as a “criteria pollutant” under the Clean Air Act. 

The simple reasons are fundamental. CO2 is what humans and animals exhale. It is what plants inhale to support photosynthesis and produce the oxygen that most life on Planet Earth requires to exist. It does not cause asthma or other diseases. CO2 emissions generated in a locality cannot be measured reliably and certainly cannot be reduced within the 10-year timetable for criteria pollutants. CO2 is not a pollutant. 

Using ozone and the NAAQS to regulate CO2 is reportedly the brainchild of Joe Goffman, whom the Biden-Harris Administration has installed as principal deputy assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. Goffman, a chief architect of the Obama era Clean Power Plan, is known as EPA’s “law whisperer.” His specialty is “teaching old laws to do new tricks.” 

Goffman’s plan was jump-started on January 19, 2021, when 16 Democratic state attorneys-general filed a legal challenge to the EPA’s recently reauthorized ozone NAAQS. Their one-paragraph sue-and-settle lawsuit claims the standards are “unlawful, arbitrary and capricious and therefore must be vacated.” 

The Trump EPA in December 2020 had retained the ozone NAAQS at levels set in 2015 by the Obama-Biden Administration. That action marked only the second time since the 1970 Clean Air Act was enacted that EPA completed its ozone NAAQS review within the mandatory 5-year timeframe. 

As the Wall Street Journal explains, Democratic AGs, green groups and top Biden environmental regulators intend to impose the Green New Deal on states through backdoor regulations, because they know they can’t get it through the front door of Congress, even this sycophantic Congress. 

Under this nefarious scheme – which could be imposed this year without any “open dialogue” in Congress – every state would be forever out of compliance, JunkScience.com director Steve Milloy emphasizes. It is simply impossible to eliminate natural background levels of ozone. But this action would give EPA effective and arbitrary control over the entire economy, especially fossil fuel use.

Giving unelected bureaucrats and a like-minded political cabal “effective and arbitrary control” over the entire U.S. economy creates a dictatorship of faceless and nameless totalitarians whose diktats the political class can claim they are powerless to upend. This is where America is headed, unless we stop these power-crazed autocrats.

BLM and Covid: Dissecting a Questionable Study

David Cole  February 16, 2021

“Scientists” don’t impress me. I’m the progeny of one of the best of ’em, and I know how the sausage is made. A smart enough “scientist” can finesse any study to reflect a predetermined conclusion. Scientists go where the grant money is. And they go where the government and corporate jobs are. And nowadays, in the Cancellation Age, they go where the lynch mob demands.

I’m not saying that all scientists are bought and paid for; I’m just saying that they’re more likely to be tempted into corruption than a roofer or bricklayer or whore, all of whom have a relationship with customers where poor results are immediate and obvious and unlikely to be explained away by fancy verbiage.

Now, before I get to the meat of this week’s column, a brief diversion, just to put an even finer point on what’s to come. Back in the early 1990s, U.S. cities were experiencing an unprecedented wave of violent youth crime. Reluctant to blame the epidemic on certain demographic populations, “scientists” and assorted experts soon caught on that the best way to get an op-ed on the topic in a major newspaper was to pen a “study” pinning the violence on movies and TV shows.

An analysis of aggressive behavior in ghetto kids from broken homes? No takers. “Hollywood is hypmotizing our children into committing murder”? Hello, New York Times!

In 1994 I was invited by a Hollywood libertarian group to speak on the subject. On the face of it, the “violent media” crusade had problems. If violent movies or cartoons “make” otherwise normal kids violent, Japan would have the highest youth crime rate in the world. But I wanted to go beyond that, and pick apart some of the specific studies that were at the time being widely cited in the press.........To Read More.....

Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence

AIER Staff – December 19, 2020

 

The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion. 

The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control. 

Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes.

The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and “nonpharmaceutical interventions” account for the difference between the fictionalized vs. the real outcome. The anti-lockdown studies, on the other hand, are evidence-based, robust, and thorough, grappling with the data we have (with all its flaws) and looking at the results in light of controls on the population.

Much of the following list has been put together by data engineer Ivor Cummins, who has waged a year-long educational effort to upend intellectual support for lockdowns. AIER has added its own and the summaries. The upshot is that the virus is going to do as viruses do, same as always in the history of infectious disease. We have extremely limited control over them, and that which we do have is bound up with time and place. Fear, panic, and coercion are not ideal strategies for managing viruses. Intelligence and medical therapeutics fare much better. 

(These studies are focused only on lockdown and their relationship to virus control. They do not get into the myriad associated issues that have vexed the world such as mask mandates, PCR-testing issues, death misclassification problem, or any particular issues associated with travel restrictions, restaurant closures, and hundreds of other particulars about which whole libraries will be written in the future.) 

1. “A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes”.....
2. “Was Germany’s Corona Lockdown Necessary?””.....
3. “Estimation of the current development of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Germany”.....
4. Did COVID-19 infections decline before UK lockdown?.....
5. “Comment on Flaxman et al. (2020): The illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe”.....
6. Professor Ben Israel’s Analysis of virus transmission......
7. “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 in Europe: a quasi-experimental study”.....
8. “Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic”.....
9. “Trajectory of COVID-19 epidemic in Europe”.....
10. “Effect of school closures on mortality from coronavirus disease 2019: old and new predictions”.....
11. “Modeling social distancing strategies to prevent SARS-CoV2 spread in Israel- A Cost-effectiveness analysis”.....
12. Too Little of a Good Thing A Paradox of Moderate Infection Control,.....
13. “Smart Thinking, Lockdown and COVID-19: Implications for Public Policy”.....
14. “SARS-CoV-2 waves in Europe: A 2-stratum SEIRS model solution”.....
15. “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison”.....
16. ”Four Stylized Facts about COVID-19” (alt-link).....
17. “How does Belarus have one of the lowest death rates in Europe?.....
18. “Association between living with children and outcomes from COVID-19: an OpenSAFELY cohort study of 12 million adults in England””.....
19. “Exploring inter-country coronavirus mortality“.....
20. “Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation”.....
21. “States with the Fewest Coronavirus Restrictions”.....
22. The Mystery of Taiwan: .....
    
23. “Predicting the Trajectory of Any COVID19 Epidemic From the Best Straight Line”  .....
    
24. “Government mandated lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths: implications for evaluating the stringent New Zealand response”.....
25. “Lockdowns and Closures vs COVID – 19: COVID Wins”..............
26. “Effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19: A Tale of Three Models”...........
27. “Assessing Mandatory Stay‐at‐Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID‐19” ...........”
28. “Lockdown Effects on Sars-CoV-2 Transmission – The evidence from Northern Jutland”................
29.  “A First Literature Review: Lockdowns Only Had a Small Effect on COVID-19”.............

To Read More.....

The False Science of Feminism

The data is in: women aren’t happy. 

Scott Yenor

During the society-wide experiment we’ve been conducting for the last 50 years, a new kind of woman has arisen. This new woman is more independent, seemingly more confident, less motherly, more athletic, and more promiscuous. Which raises the question: is she also happier and more fulfilled?............

In fact, studies show that there are actually two kinds of women: careerists (about a quarter of women) and women who would either like to balance working with family life or focus exclusively on family (the remaining 75%). Many more women doctors and lawyers work or would rather work part-time. Polls from 2013 and 2015 show that most mothers with children under 18 would rather work part-time or not work at all if they could swing it............

Despite increases in womanly promiscuity, women are less interested in casual sex than men are and women are more likely to think sex belongs in enduring relationships. Women who act like men in this regard are much less likely to be happy............

Feminists made arguments about why society should embrace the vision of a new woman. That vision has, in some ways, come about, but it has proven less satisfying than advertised.........The inadequacies of feminism are widely felt, though seldom articulated. The public teaching throughout the Western world holds up the career-oriented, liberated woman—the Independent Woman—as the honorable portrait of womanly fulfillment and happiness. This public teaching conflicts with what many women want..........To Read More.....

My Take - Interesting article with interesting points, but with far too much verbiage, with too much waffling and in the end, he's in effect saying:  "I don't know the answer, so we need more studies".  His real answer? Academia needs more grant money.  I call it academic welfare, so here.....let me help everyone and save money  

Women are not men, and both men and women have biological imperatives they want to act on.  Most women don't really want to be like men.  Real women prefer John Wayne type men who respect them, care for them, and protect them.   Real women do not want to be treated the way men treat other men.  Because if the day ever comes when men stop recognizing their biological role as protectors of women and children, they'll be exploited more than the current philosophical clabber already has, which is bad enough to the point it's destroying our society.  

Real women prefer being the glue that holds the family together than being the second, or even first, income provider, it's a biological imperative.  Is that a generalization?  Yes, but so what?  Generalizations aren’t supposed to be about individuals and individuals aren't the basis for generalizations, but generalizations reflect social paradigms that make up the structure of societies, even when those structures are under attack, and those structures are what individuals have to live with.  

It has been said that knowledge is power but, politically, power trumps knowledge, philosophy trumps fact and emotion trumps intelligence. In the day-to-day world, biology trumps all of them.  Biology is king!

Feminism is nothing more than another tenet of leftist philosophy designed to undermine the structure of America's Judaic/Christian foundation in order to destroy us with our own values.   The Communist Takeover Of America - 45 Declared Goals

 If you don’t like my use of the term, “real women” or if you disagree with my conclusions: I don’t care.  Your wrong.  Get over it!   

A Look At Mixed Methods Research

September 7, 2020 By Michael D. Shaw @ HealthNewsDigest.COM

In last week’s article, which covered some alternative voices on COVID-19, I said that randomized clinical trials have long been considered the gold standard in determining which drugs to bring to market, even though the sad legacy of failed and withdrawn pharmaceuticals should give one some pause. As former CDC director Tom Frieden noted in 2017:

“Despite their strengths, RCTs have substantial limitations. They can be very expensive to run. They can take many years to complete, and even then may not last long enough to assess the long-term effect of an intervention such as vaccine immunity, or to detect rare or long-term adverse effects. Findings from RCTs may not be valid beyond the study population–a trial that included a high-risk population in order to maximize the possibility of detecting an effect, for example, may not be relevant to a low-risk population. RCTs may not be practical for population-wide interventions and often aren’t relevant for urgent health issues such as infectious disease outbreaks, for which public health decisions must be made quickly.”

He goes on to cite the case of the nasal spray flu vaccine. RCTs suggested that this vaccine was superior to flu shots, at least for some populations. However, later results, from observational studies, showed that the spray was not effective, after all. To put it bluntly, the RCTs were an epic failure. Data from the 2015-2016 season showed that the spray only offered protection 3% of the time, as opposed to 63% with the shot.

Perhaps, the fixation with RCTs stems from the focus of the hard sciences to be, well, “hard.” That is, quantitative analysis of a situation is considered to be superior to qualitative observations. It was William Thomson, aka Lord Kelvin who famously said, in part “[W]hen you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”

Sometimes, though, we forget that the beginnings of nearly all scientific research stem from a simple qualitative observation, for which a hypothesis is formed, and is then tested by experiment. Professor John Creswell lays out the advantages and limitations of quantitative and qualitative research…
Quantitative: Advantages—suitable for large groups; efficient data analysis; people like numbers. Limitations—impersonal, dry; little understanding of context of participants; largely researcher driven.

Qualitative: Advantages—obtain detailed perspectives on fewer people and hear their voices; built from views of participants; people like stories. Limitations—Soft data; smaller groups; highly interpretive; minimizes researcher’s expertise.

As it happens, Creswell is a leading proponent and early adopter of Mixed Methods Research. The term is defined in one of his papers as:

“[A]n emergent methodology of research that advances the systematic integration, or ‘mixing,’ of quantitative and qualitative data within a single investigation or sustained program of inquiry. The basic premise of this methodology is that such integration permits a more complete and synergistic utilization of data than do separate quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis.”

Mixed methods research originated in the social sciences and over the past few years has expanded into the health sciences. While the detailed techniques are beyond the scope of this article, a paper co-authored by Creswell lists some reasons for using mixed methods in health science…

1. Researchers may seek to view problems from multiple perspectives to enhance and enrich the meaning of a singular perspective. They also may want to contextualize information, to take a macro picture of a system (e.g., a hospital) and add in information about individuals (e.g., working at different levels in the hospital).
2. Merging of quantitative and qualitative data can develop a more complete understanding of a problem.
3. Quantitative and qualitative databases can build on one another. When a quantitative phase follows a qualitative phase, the intent of the investigator may be to develop a survey instrument, an intervention, or a program informed by qualitative findings. When the quantitative phase is followed by the qualitative phase, the intent may be to help determine the best participants with which to follow up or to explain the mechanism behind the quantitative results.

Further reasons for using mixed methods are available in this article, recommended by Creswell.
Imagine how much more we could learn about potential drug side effects, for example, if RCT participants were interviewed in a qualitative, open-ended sense, by a real person–rather than solely replying to a paint-by-numbers checklist as would be provided in a typical quantitative-only study.

Here’s a great qualitative question to be answered by the sponsors of the RCT (the pharmaceutical company): How is this drug any better than the current generic? Excluded answer:

“Because it’s new and proprietary, and we can charge way more for this one.”