The Importance of Foundational Principles

From Maya Forstater's article, "On Gender-critical disputes."

Helen Joyce comes up with really good allegories and mental models at the rate of about one a week. But the one that I keep coming back to is one she told me the first time I met her, when I was still scrambling to keep my job at CGD, and trying to understand how it was that my smart and normally convivial colleagues had succumbed to repeating and enforcing irrational, circular nonsense.

1=0

Helen (a mathematician by training) said that pretending that human beings can change sex is like saying 1=0, and that the rules and laws we use for sense-making and decision-making are like a series of interconnected equations. When the 1=0 untruth proliferates through them it breaks things: single-sex becomes mixed-sex, fair becomes unfair, truth becomes lie. It works like kryptonite on safeguards, and causes organisations to operate in direct opposition to their purpose. People who need or want to remain inside those institutions create layers of argument (which may be impenetrable even to themselves) in order to protect the untruth and avoid being cast out.

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Action in the Absence of Evidence: The Case of Compelled Masking and COVID

The Cochrane Review recently declared that there is no evidence supporting the use of masks to prevent COVID. Dr. Vinay Prasad took that Review seriously and uses this finding as an example of a commonly occurring dysfunction in modern public health:

In medicine, when we give therapies without RCT support, at least we know our limitations. We spend time with patients counseling them about the pros and cons. We don’t straight up lie to patients, and say this drug will lower your risk of death 85% (without good data that is true). Kiss them on the forehead and say “shhhh question time is over”, “why don’t you trust me. TrUSt DoCTorS. We don’t want the mis-information police to come get you.”

No, we are honest about what we don’t know. And furthermore, as much as possible, we design and conduct RCTs to reduce our uncertainty. Some of us are more conservative than others, and refrain, in so far as is possible, from prescribing unproven costly drug combinations knowing the unknown risks may exceed unknown benefits. But even the most exuberant prescribers tell patients, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t know for sure this will work”

And yet, public health is actively engaged in a campaign of lies. Cochrane reviewed masking RCTs and it is profoundly negative. In response has been a steady stream of excuses that frankly are inconsistent with how we interpret evidence.

In Public Health, the US government (CDC and NIAID) and WHO literally ran ZERO trials of community masking— for 3 years— while recommending it AGAINST pre-pandemic guidance based on NO NEW data, and then incorporated it into future guidelines. All they while they denied the data from dozens of RCTs. If you did that to a patient, they would remove your license.

Furthermore, if anything, Public Health has a greater obligation to generate data than the cancer doctor. Our interventions are done with the consent of the person, often someone dying. Each day, they feel their body weaken. Our patients are willing to take risks, after all they know what happens if you do nothing.

Public health is for average people. Many are healthy. We impose upon these people and promise them we can make them better off. We need the very best evidence before boosting a 20 year old man who had 3 doses and covid twice, and yet we get worse evidence than a drug for a terminally ill penta-refractory cancer patient. It’s entirely backwards.

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The Main Reasons the US and Russia are Risking Nuclear War

Why is the U.S. risking what Joe Biden has termed nuclear armageddon . .

Cui bono? Dwight Eisenhauer had the answer:

More from the video notes:

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address, known for its warnings about the growing power of the "military-industrial complex," was nearly two years in the making. This Inside the Vaults video short follows newly discovered papers revealing that Eisenhower was deeply involved in crafting the speech, which was to become one of the most famous in American history. The papers were discovered by the family of Eisenhower speechwriter Malcolm Moos and donated to the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. Eisenhower Library director Karl Weissenbach and presidential historian and Foundation for the National Archives board member Michael Beschloss discuss the evolution of the speech.

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“White Supremacy” and Concept Creep

Wilfred Reilly points out one of the many recent examples of concept creep. According to the laptop class, the meaning of "White Supremacy" barely resembles what it meant only a few years ago.

Here are other examples: Dangerous Conversion Therapy Woman. Man. Phobia Healthy Vaccine Science Freedom Pandemic Insurrection Vaccine Racism and Racist Gain of Function Public health expert Gender Misinformation Left Wing and Right Wing, Liberal and Conservative Peaceful Violence Fact-Checker Truth Equality Fascist Conspiracy Theory Safe & Safety Trusted Freedom Infrastructure Progressive Fact Anti-vaxxer Inclusion Diversity News Reporting Tolerance

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On the Importance of Computer Backups – My iMac Adventure Co-Starring Time Machine and Dropbox Professional

My iMac is now fully restored. Hundreds of files started disappearing in many folders. I restored a few missing files and they disappeared again in the next few hours. These spontaneous mass deletions were happening for 2 days before I noticed it. An anti-virus program said no viruses. An apple rep and a friend who repairs Apple computers said beware of problems stemming from the use of iCloud Drive. I am using auto-update on OS, but the latest (Ventura 13.2) hadn't kicked in yet..

Bottom line is that I am perfectly good now and the problem has stopped. I rotate 3 separate external drives for my backups. I also put all of my data into Dropbox Professional which has an excellent "rewind" feature that comes with diagnostic charts that let you see where and when activity is happening, also allowing selective or global restore. To make sure there were no remaining vestiges of the problem, I ended up tearing down my machine to bare metal and building it back with brand new OS, manually updating the most recent safe-seeming backup, then restoring 2.5TB of data. Then the tedious task of installing and configuring a dozen apps. I also disabled iCloud Drive. Take-aways: A) Big problems can occasionally happen even with an Apple computer. B) This was a major problem and I was prepared with ample backups, C) Dropbox Professional is worth every penny, and D) Constantly back up your computer with Time Machine, an incredibly sophisticated and easy to use program!

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