“We are going to kill ourselves because of stupidity”

Listen to this man. He is not a crack pot. He is not a crank.

He is simply trying to tell you something: peer review is *not* what you think it is. It has been SOLD to you.

It has been holding your society’s scientific progress hostage since widely introduced about 50yrs ago. https://t.co/qc7Gi5guQW

— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) May 30, 2021

Real Science vs. "Science"

 

Even a Military-Enforced Quarantine Can’t Stop the Virus, Study Reveals

The Marines tested two groups of recruits.  One was in strict lockdown, mask-wearing, hand-washing, sanitizing everything constantly.  The other group lived the ordinary lives of Marines.  The result?  

Which is to say that the nonparticipants actually contracted the virus at a slightly lower rate than those who were under an extreme regime. Conversely, extreme enforcement of NPIs plus more frequent testing and isolation was associated with a greater degree of infection. 

Check the article for the details and the data.

An 11-year-old's proof of the existence of God.

The universe shouldn’t exist, according to science

“All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” Christian Smorra, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. 

Stop existing. Don't be a science denier.

HOUSE APPROVES BILL TO FORCE PUBLIC RELEASE OF EPA SCIENCE

WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Republicans are taking aim at the Environmental Protection Agency, targeting the way officials use science to develop new regulations.

A bill approved Wednesday by the GOP-controlled House would require that data used to support new regulations to protect human health and the environment be released to the public.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said "the days of 'trust me' science are over," adding that the House bill would restore confidence in the EPA's decision-making process.

Democrats approve of government agencies making rules based on data they want to keep secret from you.

The Democrats Won’t Autopsy Their Own Corpse

Now, you and rest of the unshaven she-beasts and spindly femboys could take this opportunity for reflection and introspection following the election instead of retreating to your campus safe spaces for vegan cookies and awkward hugs. You could try to figure out where you went wrong losing so many voters who you used to have sewn up. The idea is to figure out how you might be able to prevent similar results in the future. Some call it a “post-event analysis.” In the Army – for the goatee n’ scarf gang, that’s the one that fights on the ground – we call it an “after action review.” Coroners call it an “autopsy.”

And you’ll never, ever do it. Why? Because you are liberals and you already have your answers.

Everyone is racist.

Everyone is sexist.

Everyone is stupid.

Everyone but you, that is. You, the ones the racist, sexist, stupid people beat like a NFL player’s wife.

And speaking of the NFL, have you noticed how its own autopsy of its own dying ratings also seems to have a predetermined outcome, one that studiously avoids any unwelcome conclusions?

Oh, it’s too many ads.

Oh, it’s too many penalties.

Oh, it’s the election.

Anything missing? Anything significant to, say, the kind of people who used to like football? I dunno, maybe the NFL’s coddling of spoiled jerks who disrespect the flag?

...

And:

Yeah, I played the #Science card. Case closed. Who needs to even talk to the idiots who are clearly too stupid to understand that their role is to rubberstamp the political manifestations of liberal fads and urban mysticism. I mean, some of those people work in fracking and just don’t understand that despite the ever-growing series of “This is it, we’re doomed, we really, really mean it this time” milestones falling back in society’s collective rear-view mirror, the weather obsessions of blue city neurotics are much, much more important than them feeding their families.

Read the whole thing.

NASA's cultural and religious bigotry for all to see.

Watch: NASA’s chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt claims Texans won’t listen to ‘liberal, Jewish atheist from NYC’ about ‘global warming’

From the comments:

Shame on you Gavin. The people in texas are polite, intelligent, and perfectly capable of hearing the message. You're just a stereotyping bigot who can't relate to anyone who isnt a liberal Jewish atheist from New York.

The very real problem demonstrated by the empirical evidence Gavin IS that they don't believe the scientists. How about you dig down in and ask them WHY they dont trust you anymore. I dare you.

What a sad little man you are.

Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.

According to the newly published survey of geoscientists and engineers, merely 36 percent of respondents fit the “Comply with Kyoto” model. The scientists in this group “express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”

The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims. ...

Taken together, these four skeptical groups numerically blow away the 36 percent of scientists who believe global warming is human caused and a serious concern.

Read the whole thing.

How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop

The problem

“As a researcher, I’m not trying to produce misleading results,” says Nosek. “But I do have a stake in the outcome.” And that gives the mind excellent motivation to find what it is primed to find.

Read the whole thing.  As it applies to Global Warming, scientists who come up with alternatives to man-made warming are not apt to get any more government money and may even lose their jobs.

"Organic" Is The Latin Word For "Starve The World"

Earlier this year, the activist organization US Right to Know (USRTK), bankrolled largely by a $47,500 donation from the Organic Consumers Association, submitted Freedom of Information requests asking certain US academics for e-mails dating back to 2012. This was to ascertain whether their 'messaging' was being coordinating with 14 companies, including Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Dow and other biotechs, food industry trade groups and their communication firms. The academics had all contributed to an industry-backed website called GMOanswers.com and/or had spoken out against California's GM food labeling proposition. Over the summer, the activists broke their 'news'.

These headlines focused on Kevin Folta, a University of Florida researcher, because USRTK leaked his e-mails to three journalists. Two of them co-posted a PLOS blog (now removed), while the third wrote a front-page New York Times news story highlighting a $25,000 donation from Monsanto to Folta's institution. In both cases, the reporters cherry-picked sentences from several thousand e-mails, highlighting Folta's communications with Monsanto, often out of context, to insinuate that he is an industry shill--and thus presumably unfit to talk to the public.

Most worker ants are slackers

The science is settled.

To get a closer look at how these ants filled their time, researchers marked every member of five lab-based colonies with dots of colored paint. Over the course of 2 weeks, a high-definition camera recorded 5-minute segments of the ants in action six times a day, capturing their behavior (or lack thereof). Out of the “workers,” 71.9% were inactive at least half the time, and 25.1% were never seen working. A small fraction of the ants, just 2.6%, were always active during observation, the researchers wrote last month in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Previous studies have postulated that inactivity might be temporary, with ants working in shifts dictated by circadian rhythm. But the new results show that the lazy workers stay lazy no matter the time of day.

 

Pope’s encyclical on climate change reads like the Unabomber Manifesto

“The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same.”

Pure Kaczynski, yeah? The next sentence could easily be “So that’s why I moved to a cabin in the woods and started mailing bombs to scientists.” Let me give you another: Unabomber or Unapapa?

“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behaviour that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity. Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being.”

That one’s Ted - or have I switched them around?

Incredible: NOAA Gets Rid of 15 Year Hiatus In Global Warming Simply By Re-Weighting and "Adjusting" the Numbers

So this is how you do #Science.

There's a 15 year (actually 17 year) hiatus in warming when your theory and models predicted constant warming of this period.

#OldScience would say: Tweak your theory and models.

But #NewScience says: Tweak the data.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists have found a solution to the 15-year “pause” in global warming: They “adjusted” the hiatus in warming out of the temperature record.

Top scientists start to examine fiddled global warming figures

Has climate data been "adjusted" to correspond with the biases of man-made global warming advocatges?

Back in January and February, two items in this column attracted more than 42,000 comments to the Telegraph website from all over the world. The provocative headings given to them were “Climategate the sequel: how we are still being tricked by flawed data on global warming” and “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest scientific scandal”.

My cue for those pieces was the evidence multiplying from across the world that something very odd has been going on with those official surface temperature records, all of which ultimately rely on data compiled by NOAA’s GHCN. Careful analysts have come up with hundreds of examples of how the original data recorded by 3,000-odd weather stations has been “adjusted”, to exaggerate the degree to which the Earth has actually been warming. Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data justified.

So strong is the evidence that all this calls for proper investigation that my articles have now brought a heavyweight response.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry into just how far these manipulations of the data may have distorted our picture of what is really happening to global temperatures.

For example, this graph shows global warming. but the actual data has been "adjusted."

An adjusted graph from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies

This graph shows no global warming; in fact a slight cooling. The data have not been "adjusted."

The raw data in graph form

For this the GWPF panel is initially inviting input from all those analysts across the world who have already shown their expertise in comparing the originally recorded data with that finally published. In particular, they will be wanting to establish a full and accurate picture of just how much of the published record has been adjusted in a way which gives the impression that temperatures have been rising faster and further than was indicated by the raw measured data.

Already studies based on the US, Australia, New Zealand, the Arctic and South America have suggested that this is far too often the case.

But only when the full picture is in will it be possible to see just how far the scare over global warming has been driven by manipulation of figures accepted as reliable by the politicians who shape our energy policy, and much else besides. If the panel’s findings eventually confirm what we have seen so far, this really will be the “smoking gun”, in a scandal the scale and significance of which for all of us can scarcely be exaggerated.

Medical Science Doesn’t Support Official Rhetoric On Ebola

In early September, President Obama assured West Africans in a video address that the first defense against the spread of Ebola was to get the facts on the disease’s transmission right. The problem now facing the United States is that the president, with the support of healthcare officials, may have played loose with the science “facts,” luring many Americans—including healthcare workers at the Dallas Health Presbyterian Hospital initially at the center of the country’s Ebola threat, as well as the latest Ebola victim from New York City—into a false sense of security and increasing risks to themselves and to everyone who crossed their paths.

The science of Ebola has not been—and can’t be—fully congruent with the official Ebola rhetoric, which has suggested that key terms such as “symptoms,” “bodily fluids,” “contagion,” and “contact” are more fixed facts of science than they necessarily are. After the apparent facility with which Ebola was transmitted to nurses attending the Liberian-American Ebola patient in Dallas, many Americans have understandably lost confidence in official Ebola pronouncements ...

Read the whole thing.   Is this politics, stupidity, arrogance, incompetence, or hate?  As applied to the Obama administration , they are not mutually exclusive.


For example, just when are Ebola patients infectious?

Healthcare officials and media pundits have played “symptoms” as, again, tightly defined on-off switches: “When you have the identified symptom [at some ill-defined fever], you have Ebola and are contagious. When you don’t have the symptom, you can’t be contagious, even if you have been infected.” The New York Times reported the New York doctor checked his temperature twice a day, and when he showed a fever, he checked himself into the hospital where he was put in isolation. The doctor did what he should have, according to Doctors Without Borders in a comment to the New York Times: “Self-quarantine is neither warranted nor recommended when a person is not displaying Ebola-like symptoms.”

This suggests the doctor was only infectious when he identified his symptoms, at the time he took his temperature. Was it not possible for him to become infectious before he took his temperature, and was mingling with people on the streets of the city? Even if he had identified his symptom at the exact time he became infectious, could he have not been infectious a minute or an hour earlier? Contrary to official pronouncements, infectiousness and symptoms do not necessarily and always occur simultaneously. The long history of medical science, and common sense, suggest that some unknown count of victims are likely to be infectious some unknown amount of time before the symptoms are detected, because the active progression of the disease brings on the fever, not the other way around. This means Americans have good reason to be guarded when hearing absolute medical pronouncements on when people are infectious.

And about that 21 day observation period:

 The media continues to parrot official announcements that exposed people can be declared clear of the disease if after 21 days (the “maximum incubation period for the disease to develop,” according to the New York Times editors, and most other officials commenting on the issue), they do not show the elusive “symptoms”—as if science can, and does, pinpoint a clear demarcation in time after which exposed people can be, with virtual certainty, deemed clear of the disease, or are no longer able to transmit it to others. The process of science generally can identify (imperfectly) how likely people’s contagiousness varies with time from exposure. Typically, studies can identify something of a bell-shaped curve for the distribution of the days that people can show symptoms following their infection. In the case of Ebola, the CDC has determined that from the day of infection to ten or so days it, the count of people who exhibit symptoms rises with each passing day. The count of people exhibiting symptoms declines afterwards, perhaps approaching but never reaching zero. (That is, the “bell curve” for the distribution of when people exhibit symptoms may have a long right tail.)

According to a study from Drexel University, possibly12 percent of infected victims never show the fever symptom during the currently recommended 21-day quarantine period.

Scientists generally make a judgment call, picking a time period when contagiousness reaches an acceptably low level (medically and, sometimes, politically). This means that once the required time period has been reached, there is still likely to be some prospect, however remote, that a “small” but “acceptable” percentage of the infected people can still be symptomatic.

IOP: expecting consistency between models and observations is an “error”

You see, the Climate models are not supposed to agree with reality.

The publisher of Environmental Research Letters today took the bizarre position that expecting consistency between models and observations is an “error”.

The publisher stated that the rejected Bengtsson manuscript (which, as I understand it) had discussed the important problem of the discrepancy between models and observations had “contained errors”.

But what were the supposed “errors”? Bengtsson’s “error” appears to be the idea that models should be consistent with observations, an idea that the reviewer disputed.

The reviewer stated that IPCC ranges in AR4 and AR5 are “not directly comparable to observation based intervals”:

That's right: the global warming climate change climate disruption models should not reflect what's actually happening.  Got it?

You're being Gaslighted by the Clime Syndicate.

The lonely lives of scientists

Scientists create the world's first glow-in-the-dark PIGS after injecting them with jellyfish DNA

The technique was developed by reproductive scientists at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa's John A. Burns School of Medicine.
The same method was used to create the world's first glow-in-the-dark rabbits in Turkey earlier this year, where they are currently working to create a glowing sheep.

Race, Medicine, and Political Correctness

If a drug is found that's effective on black patients, but not on whites, (or vice versa) should it be approved?  You may be surprised by the answer.

But let us return to Dr. Zuger’s comments, made in the context of reviewing a book about a cardiac drug called BiDil, which was approved in the United States in 2005 specifically for black patients (although it can be prescribed off-label for anyone). Due to the lack of evidence of efficacy in early clinical trials, the drug, which is actually a combination of two proven cardiac medicines (the vasodilators hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate), had been rejected by the FDA nine years previously for approval for patients of all races. But because analysis of the data in various subgroups revealed a suggestion of benefit to black patients, another trial was performed on 1,050 self-identified black patients with severe heart failure who had already been treated with—but had not responded to—the best available therapy.

The results were so striking—43 percent reduction in mortality and 39 percent decrease in hospital visits among patients who received BiDil—

Find out what happened, and what some people thought about it.

Even in white collar crime, female crooks face a glass ceiling

From the Pew Research Center:

Female white-collar crooks face the same glass ceiling as their law-abiding peers in the corporate world: They typically hold inferior positions to men in the criminal conspiracies in which they are engaged, rarely lead a fraud ring and make significantly less money for their dirty deeds than their male accomplices.

No wonder so few women get mixed up in corporate fraud.

Steffensmeier and his team studied the involvement of women in recent corporate frauds using an unique database created by the federal government in the wake of the multi-billion dollar Enron scandal in 2001.

The data set includes 83 fraud cases involving 436 defendants that were initiated from 2002 through 2009 by the multi-agency federal Corporate Fraud Task Force. Individual case records included the names of defendants, characteristics of the company, the alleged scheme and the charges.

In all, they found that only 37 women were indicted in connection with these corporate frauds, or about 9% of all offenders.

Females in the conspiracy also occupied lower rungs of the corporate ladder—often in accounting or finance positions—and played similarly secondary roles in the conspiracy.

...These findings, the researchers argue, mirrors sex segregation and the marginalization if women in the overall labor market. “As a result, women are likely either excluded entirely from lucrative criminal conspiracies or are utilized in sex-typed ways,” they wrote.

Based on my personal observation the disparate impact is even more pronounced among races.

This is definitely an issue for the Department of Justice which should file a lawsuit under the disparate impact theory.