medicine

Scattershooting 230128

January 28, 2023 by tornado Leave a Comment

Happy new year! Several topics have cropped up of late, not demanding a full-form entry, so I’ll resurrect an old category for a 2023 kickoff encore. As usual, topics are highlighted, so you can skip what doesn’t interest you.

Scattershooting while wondering why so many otherwise intelligent ignoranti fall for obvious, textbook conformist cult tactics employed by purveyors of the secular “social justice” ideology…

AMAZING DALLAS FIREWORKS SHOW on NEW YEAR’S NIGHT: Several times, when not setting them off myself, I’d go up Reunion Tower to watch Trinity River fireworks shows and assorted pyros doing their thing around town on July 4 & New Year’s. Now they’re launched from the tower, with lighted drones in formation as accompaniment. Spectacular! I ought to go see and shoot this sometime.

‘TWITTER FILES” REPERCUSSIONS and SO-CALLED PANDEMIC “MISINFORMATION”: Over the past couple months, several independent journalists, with the full cooperation of current Twitter owner Elon Musk, have exposed a hardline left-wing censorship agenda of Twitter users and linked content, by the corporation, in collusion with high-level government bureaucracy (mainly but not entirely FBI). This includes labeling pandemic content, by licensed medical doctors and scientists, as “misinformation”. This also includes information from peer-reviewed studies that was flagged or relegated to sight unseen. Yesterday’s ”conspiracy theories” sometimes do become today’s news. They affirm comments I made to some folks many months ago about non-expert bots and poorly educated basement dwellers—censoring posts from real-life scientists and physicians in fields such as immunology, epidemiology, virology, and general medical practice. Some low-wage tech contractor in the Philippines, nor high-level company executives without medical degrees, have no business censoring degreed, licensed physicians on medical topics! Yet these were the tactics social media employed to limit what you were being told about a crisis situation to Big Brother’s official Party line—even when the line clearly was flawed then or turned very wrong later. Thank God for watchdogs, gadflies and leakers — even if it’s the new owner dishing it out on prior management at great cost to himself.

MATURITY, SELF-RESTRAINT AND DISCIPLINE ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Speaking of Twitter, a libertarian I follow there, Curtis Scoon, posted these wise words: “I don’t want to be the person on social media who has something controversial to say about every headline just for attention. It’s definitely close to being an ambulance chasing personal injury attorney.” (My words now) …or virtue signaling to either spectral extreme. I have huge respect for such self-discipline & maturity. I aim the same. Not every topic needs instant opinion from every person. I’ve expressed my extended thoughts on this before, in this space, with, “Silence is Not Complicity nor Agreement.” I’ll comment on the issues of my choosing, at the time and place of my choice (and nobody else’s). The context was “hot takes” on the Tyre Nichols incident in Memphis. There’s more to it, but next is what I’ll say for now, in this medium of my choice:

DISTILLING the TYRE NICHOLS KILLING to the SIMPLE PLAIN TRUTH: Often, videos like the Tyre Nichols police-brutality footage from Memphis (which I won’t post here) miss crucial “before” context. In this specific case, I don’t think such context matters. I’m having a hard time imagining what “context” would justify treating any handcuffed man with such relentless, 5-on-1 savagery — basically 5 strong dudes tossing the guy back and forth between each other like a medicine ball and taking turns slugging him full force. No excuse for that, whatsoever. Even if he had violently resisted before being restrained (and that info wasn’t available from the video I saw)…once handcuffed, that’s that. His wrists are locked together with steel, behind his back, and he can’t use his arms. That was basically a gang-beating of a helpless man, in this case the gang being cops. These now ex-cops have been charged with murder and official abuse. The justice system is working as it should here. Unfortunately, this incident is being spun every which way and twisted like taffy by people with bigger social agendas. What it is, plain and simple, is homicide, and any and all who commit homicide (including cops on duty, regardless of how they look) must be held responsible.

COMMON GOTCHA AGAINST ECONOMIC LIBERTARIANISM ISN’T a GOTCHA AFTER ALL: I had to laugh recently at a stupid meme some airheaded male celebrity sent out, thinking it was a “gotcha”. The meme implied libertarians are hypocrites because Ayn Rand accepted her Social Security checks. Clearly this wasn’t the product of a critical thinker, or much of a thinker at all. You see, those checks were her money anyway, extorted from her for years before in taxes. So she had no reason (and neither do you) to feel at all guilty about getting some of it back. Too bad she, and you, couldn’t have just kept it in the first place, instead of being forced to process it through a massive, inefficient, distant, detached bureaucracy that skims so much off. And I’m still waiting in futility for anyone, anywhere, to show me where personal entitlement spending of any sort is an enumerated Federal power in the literal, black-and-white words of our Constitution.

DO YOU HAVE STUDENT LOANS? PAY THEM. This entry is brought to you by tough love from a fellow (former) debt holder. And not just any ex-student, but one from poverty: first-generation college graduate here, raised inner-city poor in Dallas with no air conditioning, who remembers with razor-sharp clarity the sounds of wailing sirens and the feel of roaches crawling up sweaty legs many summer nights. There’s not a college student anywhere in this land who has a thing new to say to me about being “economically disadvantaged”. I arrived at university with assets valued in two digits, not counting a beater car that was worth maybe $200, no parental aid whatsoever, and scholarships for which I had busted my tail, but were still woefully insufficient. I left grad school with even less: $16 to my name, and five figures in student loans. Inflation-adjusted, they match magnitudes from many sob stories I hear today. I paid off every last one in under 10 years by working rotating shifts, in a real career, for which my major of choice was chosen specifically to prepare me, using something called foresight and something else called sacrifice. Hint: my major wasn’t “gender studies” or similar useless bullshit. Unless one was targeted by illegally predatory lending, which I do oppose, I have a very hard time feeling sorry for anyone who demands that government (in other words, all of us but not him or her self) pay off debts he/she voluntarily chose to accrue. There’s a word for that, and it’s “freeloading”. My message, therefore, is clear: Yes, it is a loan. Pay it back. I’ve been there. I did, and I’m nothing special. So can you. Make better choices.

THE FED, BRETTON WOODS, GOLD STANDARD, and the RISE of CHINA: Finally, here’s a provocative, yet deeply historically informed, long-form essay by the aforementioned Curtis Scoon on how the Federal Reserve came to be, and its relationship with both American decline and the rise of Red Commie China as an economic and military power. I don’t necessarily buy into every detail he posits, but there’s a lot of basic truth here. This is well worth 15 minutes of time to read carefully and consider critically.

Heavy Blow to Scientific Credibility

July 29, 2022 by tornado Leave a Comment

The entire theory (and research thereon) that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by “amyloid beta” protein plaques, which has been around since a widely publicized and seminal 2006 paper, now teeters on the brink of implosion, or at least deep and major reworking. A six-month Science magazine-supported investigation reveals “doctored” (pun not intended, but fits) medical imaging of the sufferers’ brains. Those images appeared inside that first paper, other papers by the same authors, and on down through more papers by others that used the original work and data as a foundation.

Many tens of millions of dollars of research, across 16 years of elapsed time, is at risk, thanks to irreproducibility and perhaps outright tampering. That risk includes waste of a lot of taxpayer funding. If these images contain bogus alterations (in effect, unethically altering data to fit hypotheses), as independent analysis hired by Science magazine have affirmed, this could become the greatest scientific scandal of our time, and that’s saying something.

Science (the profession), and medical science in particular, are having a tough time reputationally right now — most of it not deserved, but some of it well-earned, unfortunately. Science (the profession) doesn’t need any more body blows to credibility. The great majority of scientists are honest and ethical. I know many in meteorology and other geosciences, and even a few in medicine. Scientists absolutely should be held to utmost high ethical standards. Still, as with any profession, human nature can infest science with bad actors too — some of whom are smart enough to get away with it, at least for awhile.

Yes, science is self-correcting, but the time for that with this topic was *before* publication, during peer review — or at the very latest, independent reproduction shortly after with retractions…but not 16 years and countless research time and money later. Better late than never in exposing potential misconduct, of course — but this has a uniquely foul stench due to the broad impact. It’s not some obscure work with an audience of ten, investigating the electrical conductivity of a piece of tree bark in Tasmania. Instead this is a horrid disease that impacts millions of people, now and future, with enormous social and economic cost, and most of us know someone(s) affected.

As a (non-medical) scientist and photographer, who is also a journal editor, I care about experimental and data reproducibility, photographic & science ethics, as well as waste of taxpayers’ research funding. I’ve also lost friends and colleagues to Alzheimer’s disease. That all makes this revelation rather infuriating.

Please read the full, long-form article (linked here again) for the full story. Here is an excerpt:

If Schrag’s doubts are correct, Lesné’s findings were an elaborate mirage.

Schrag, who had not publicly revealed his role as a whistleblower until this article, avoids the word “fraud” in his critiques of Lesné’s work and the Cassava-related studies and does not claim to have proved misconduct. That would require access to original, complete, unpublished images and in some cases raw numerical data. “I focus on what we can see in the published images, and describe them as red flags, not final conclusions,” he says. “The data should speak for itself.”

A 6-month investigation by Science provided strong support for Schrag’s suspicions and raised questions about Lesné’s research. A leading independent image analyst and several top Alzheimer’s researchers—including George Perry of the University of Texas, San Antonio, and John Forsayeth of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—reviewed most of Schrag’s findings at Science’s request. They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné’s papers. Some look like “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.

The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” says Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant. “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”

Trump’s Serious Diagnosis as a Test of Your Humanity

October 2, 2020 by tornado Leave a Comment

A litmus test of someone’s humanity is whether they celebrate another’s suffering. Even in my limited sampling of less than half an hour, it’s clear a lot of people on social media are failing that test today.

In case you’ve been under a rock or detached from news for 24 hours, several people who were at the Rose Garden event for Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination have come down with the Wuhan-originated (factual statement!) coronavirus. This includes President Trump and Melania, the First Lady. Also infected: presidential adviser Hope Hicks (the spreader?), Kellyanne Conway, RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, Sens. Mike Lee and Thom Tillis, Rev. Ron Jenkins (President of Notre Dame University, where Barrett matriculated), and a few others. So far, VP Mike Pence has tested negative, with no word on Barrett. Since this disease skews its harm toward the old, chances are somebody from this group will have serious problems. I hope not, but hope isn’t scientifically falsifiable virology.

Disagreements with someone’s policies (and I certainly have some with this president’s, but that’s irrelevant) don’t justify being glad somebody is sick with potentially deadly virus. This is a serious disease for anyone, much less a 77-year-old out-of-shape male. That’s among the highest-risk profiles. This truly could kill or permanently maim him, and it’s no laughing matter.

I would say the same if Biden caught this disease and “conservatives” celebrated. Given recent contacts, Biden just might; so in case he does, refer to this same post as well. It applies equally.

There is no valid rationalization for wishing personal misery on someone because you don’t like their governance policies or think they’re a rotten person. There’s also no such thing as Karma. The virus doesn’t care about political affiliation nor your opinion thereof.

I’m not just talking about the obvious hate ghouls you can easily find on Twitter overtly wishing suffering and death on someone else. [There are *thousands*…I am not kidding. It’s not hard to find them right now if you try just a little.] At least the overt haters reveal who they are openly and with brutal honesty. I can respect that (and report it), even as I strongly disapprove of their behavior.

Perhaps more pathetic are the implicit, passive-aggressive expressions from people who preach often about kindness and “empathy”. It’s especially disappointing to see a few self-professed Christians cheering this on, albeit tacitly in a lame attempt to put a smiley veneer over their real sentiments, but who have referred to the President as a horrible person.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Heard of that? We’ve all been guilty at some point, including me; regardless, that reminder is sorely needed now for a lot of people. In general terms, it is possible to disagree with somebody and disapprove their sinful *behavior*, without hating them as people or wishing grave misery on them. Try it.

Another character test is if you are willing to pray for Trump despite your disagreements with him. Can you? I won’t know, and don’t need to. However, God knows, and that’s who really matters in all this.

What I told my Facebook “friends” (and I don’t accept requests from people I don’t know and haven’t met) is: “If you’re the sort who will revel in another’s suffering, I should ‘unfriend’ you, but won’t. Why? Because you need to be watched…closely.” So if you know someone behaving this way, keep an eye on them, for real; something pathological and perhaps demonic could be at work.