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Sometimes Randomized Controlled Trials are not the golden trophies of science that some say they are. (Like yesterday’s Ivermectin study). While some say that nothing less than an RCT will do, actually, sometimes it’s just silly to do one. And all RCT’s will wallow on the rocks of confirmation bias if they try to study something people already know the answer to.
For a long time there were no RCT studies showing benefits from parachutes — yet people continued to use them. It wasn’t until 2018 that a paper was finally published, surprisingly showing that there was no statistical difference in jumping with or without one from an average altitude of 4,000m.
This satirical paper makes real points about the flaws of the hallowed RCT’s:
It’s easy to design an RCT to show the opposite of the truth. Reading the abstract of a paper is rarely enough. Reading a news headline, even less so. Details are everything. RCT’s are not random if the test subjects have opinions and can self-select themselves out of the experiment.
These authors are black-belt professionals at medico-lingo. Those that appreciate the wit will want to read the whole thing rather than just the snippets below […]
Late last week a large prospective “study” showed that ivermectin was useless so it got headline reporting at the Wall Street Journal, unlike the other 80 controlled studies the newspaper ignored. This study is not even a peer reviewed paper, nor is it even news — The TOGETHER Trial announced results way back in August last year, but haven’t officially published the paper yet.
It’s a case of PR now, details later.
Thanks to the FLCCC we know some of the reasons the trial was never likely to succeed. And given that several groups involved in the trial were also big clients of Pfizer, it was a very convenient failure. Bear in mind, “fail” is relative — despite all the handicaps below, the Relative Risk of dying of Covid with low dose ivermectin was still 0.82 (0.44-1.52). Meaning they found a 20% lower mortality rate, but it wasn’t statistically significant when done with a low, late dose in the wrong way, with the wrong type of trial, with the wrong type of participants.
How to design a study to fail:
Click to enlarge.
Give the control group a head start. It helps to begin collecting data on […]
Tyre Extinguishers are vandals who skulk around at night and poke lentils in tyre valves to flatten tyres of evil SUV’s. It’s a new fashion in “climate activism” and it makes sense in a narcissistic pagan-religion kind of way. Those who do it are convinced they are smarter than everyone else, and their latest “plan” is to show you what nice, caring people they are by wasting your time and generally being thoughtless badgering bullies.
Naturally the cowards are anonymous, though they have a twitter account @T_Extinguishers.
Imagine the stress on the disabled, the sick, the missed medical appointments, children late for critical final year exams, and doctors who can’t get to work. Then there’s the damaged tyres that need replacing.
‘We will make it impossible to own an SUV in the world’s urban areas’
Eco-nuts used lentils to let down the tyres of Chelsea tractors because ‘air pollution is RACIST’
Tom Rawstorne for the DailyMail
And so it was that on Monday night a new front on the eco-war opened as a group calling themselves the Tyre Extinguishers launched a co-ordinated effort to deflate the tyres of as many SUVs […]
This is a thread for voters in South Australia to talk about today’s state election. After the Labor Party wrecked the electricity grid in South Australia, the Liberals appear to be set to lose after only one term. Please, locals or anyone with insight, tell us what is going on. I’ve only listened to 20 minutes of ABC radio in the last 3 months, but even 2000km away, I was informed of the Ambulance Ramping deaths, which now turn out to be exaggerated to the point of being misleading:
South Australian Labor will go to the polls having profited from an ambulance attack advertisement that was ruled inaccurate by the state’s Electoral Commissioner. (ECSA)
The fact that Labor kept running its ramping advertisements on Friday despite the ECSA ruling prompted one of the strongest outbursts from Treasurer Rob Lucas in a 40-year career which ends with his retirement on Saturday, labelling them “despicable lies”. “Labor’s campaign slogan should really be ‘Lie like your life depends on it’,” Mr Lucas said in the final statement of his career. — The Australian
No one seems to be asking the obvious question about Ambulance Ramping (which apparently is […]
The new (old) recipe for goodliness, and to save Ukraine now, is just like the climate change rules.
Thanks to The Putin Excuse, the IEA suggests we cut oil use, so we need to drive 10km per hour slower, go “car free” on Sundays, catch the bus, work from home, avoid business travel and share our car with strangers.
We’ll start right after you — Dr Fatih Birol — Executive Director of the IEA. We’re keen to hear how the 7th Annual Global Conference on Energy Efficiency in Denmark will become a Zoom call instead. Do send pics of your bus trips and ride-shares!
The IEA have already whipped out a handy Report called A 10 Point Plan to Cut Oil Use also known as, Let Them Eat Cake.
The report goes so far as to suggest that car driving be rationed so only odd or even number plates could drive each day.
As Marc Morano says: “Let’s simplify this: The proposed ‘solutions’ to climate change, COVID, and now the Russian war are all exactly the same — hammer the poor and middle class with more restrictions on travel, less freedom, and even more surrendering of power to unelected government […]
Death by committee has a whole new meaning.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency
Australians believe that their doctors are independent, because we have public and private medical systems and lots of “competition” between medical groups that appear to be run like businesses. What they don’t realize is that the bureaucrats entirely own the profession and it’s a monopoly from end to end. There is the illusion of freedom, but AHPRA suspends anyone who “holds the wrong views”. Once suspended a doctor is not permitted to practice, to write scripts, sometimes they are not even allowed to contact their patients.
AHPRA is not sacking doctors for bad patient outcomes, patient complaints, fraud or high risk medicine. For all the world it appears that the worst thing a doctor can do is suggest cheap solutions that get in the way of Medical Profits.
The government forcibly takes the money to fund Medicare from Australians but doesn’t let them have any choice about using those funds to talk to the doctor they prefer — only approved clone doctors. It’s communist medicine.
If there was a free market, Australians could opt out of Medicare and fund their own doctors.
The AHPRA […]
It’s was the last chance to save The Planet, but nevermind?
Get ready for the Great Reenergize-ment, we’ve reached a tipping point. Even the elite believers know a real threat when they see one. The ruling class, sitting on cushy taxpayer salaries, weren’t threatened by higher fuel prices and carbon taxes, but Russian missiles are another thing. Only a few months ago we had only “ten years til the next mass extinction”. Now, everything coal is good again, and years of pompous energy policies are on fire.
In normal times these would be monster headline backflips with mass protests in the streets from fifteen-year-old school-skippers.
Hat tip to NetZeroWatch
Germany to fire up mothballed coal power stations
By Matt Oliver, The Telegraph
One of Europe’s biggest energy companies is preparing to bring a string of German coal power stations out of retirement as part of efforts to wean the country off Russian gas.
These include plants that have been decommissioned, those that are scheduled to go off-grid this year and others that are currently kept on standby.
Robert Habeck, Scholz’s economy minister, has insisted there will be “no taboos”, throwing into […]
Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute has been sending warning signals for years that the push for intermittent energy in the west could have drastic geopolitical consequences. Here he explains how the conflict in the Ukraine has brought the drastic consequences upon us ahead of schedule.
Ukraine and the Great Energy Reset
Naivete about energy realities robbed the U.S. and its allies of important “soft power” options and helped finance Russia’s aggression. In the near term, our choices are limited, but continuing down the same energy path is a formula for yet more problems in the future.
The EU and the US over the past two decades spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates to replace oil, natural gas and coal. This brought the hydrocarbon share of all energy use down by two percentage points to 84 percent while burning wood still supplies more energy than all the world’s solar panels and oil still fuels nearly 97 percent of all the world’s transportation.
While the west spent a great deal of money to phase out coal and gas, without going nuclear, Russia and China pressed on to develop their coal and gas resources and nuclear […]
The good news is that the experts are very unhappy:
Today’s disappointing federal court decision undoes 20 years of climate litigation progress in Australia
The Conversation
The federal court today unanimously decided Federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley does not have a duty of care to protect young people from the harms of climate change.
The ruling overturns a previous landmark win by eight high school students, who sought to stop Ley approving a coal mine expansion in New South Wales.
The bad news is that these same experts can’t see how profoundly silly their reasoning is:
So why was Ley successful? The federal court’s 282-page judgment offers myriad reasons for why no duty should be imposed on the minister. But what emerges most clearly is the court’s view that it’s not their place to set policies on climate change. Instead, they say, it’s the job of our elected representatives in the federal government.
Well, do we live in a democracy or don’t we?
If only Jacqueline Peel and Rebekkah Markey-Towler could persuade us that coal is a killer, they wouldn’t need to go to court to force their opinions on […]
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai
By Jo Nova
Unusual rain in Australia started within days of the Hunga Tonga dust cloud travelling across the continent
On January 15th, Hunga Tonga launched a magma-powered thunderstorm that sent atmospheric shockwaves around the world. Ash, salt and particulates were carried through rising columns, right through the stratosphere, into the mesosphere and all the way up to 58 kilometers above Earth. For hours 400,000-odd lighting bolts zapped the airborne chemical soup.
The dust from Hunga-Tonga travelled West and reached Australia on Jan 18 – 20th. On Jan 21-22 flooding rain washed out the main railway line and roads in central Australia. Over the next few weeks, rains soaked the ground across parts of Queensland and New South Wales. By February 15th, the remnant volcanic dust that had circled the Earth and was back again creating rich red sunsets over Australia. A week or so after that, the rain bombs fell on South East Queensland, and travelled south through New South Wales to Sydney.
The big unknown is that the Hunga-Tonga volcano launched water vapor, salt and dust incredibly high — almost too high. The aerosols are far above the troposphere where rainfall originates and […]
Just in case people were thinking a few nuclear bombs don’t matter:
“…even a relatively “minor” exchange of nuclear weapons would wreck the planet’s climate in enormous and long-lasting ways.”
Despite sounding crazily disconnected from reality, Robinson Meyer is slightly less crazy than the cult people he’s trying to reach. Many “artists” and “climate concerned progressives” have leapt on the latest hot-fashion-in-activism (who could have seen that coming?) and they’re calling for a No Fly Zone over Ukraine. It’s like they believe that putting up a sign saying “Warplane Free” will stop the warplanes.
Meyer has figured out that a No Fly Zone might lead to World War III, and he’s trying warn the raptured throngs, that things might not work out so well. Naturally, he’s speaking in lingua-leftie. But how, exactly do you scare someone in a climate cult? Not with nuclear war, but with something catastro-double-awful-bad for the climate.
On Top of Everything Else, Nuclear War Would Be a Climate Problem
By Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic
Social media pundits are having a field day:
…
…
On the richter scale of climate porn, what’s the worst thing Meyer can […]
When the unvaccinated die of Covid they get turned into advertising material for Pfizer. But when people died in the weeks after after getting the vaccines, the companies, the institutions and the media did their utmost to hide it.
A group of doctors and researchers wanted the 326,000 pages of FDA data used to approve the Pfizer vaccine, but neither the FDA or Pfizer would give it them. So the doctors put in an FOIA, and again the FDA hid the data, so the doctors sued the FDA for withholding it.
Serving Big-Pharma with all the funds they can get…
But when pressed they said they needed 55 years to redact out all the juicy bits so “people couldn’t cherry pick” or something like that. When pushed, the FDA told the judge they really needed 75 years to provide it. This was the same FDA that supposedly read all those 326,000 pages in detail in just 108 days in order to speedily approve the vaccine “with the utmost of care”.
The intrepid doctors group calls itself the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency or PHMPT. And they are finally getting somewhere. In January a Texas Judge ordered […]
There is talk about Soviet funding for green groups to block shale gas fracking and coal mining. This is not a new thing.
[Indeed Jo wrote last week: Russian-linked groups donated to anti-frakking Green groups because they love the planet right?]
In case you were wondering why we have no nuclear power and why the sensible old-time conservation movement turned into a radical green monster, the late John Grover told the story in his book Struggle for Power (1980). This is a summary of the chapter on the birth of the anti-nuclear program under the guise of “respectable” consumer advocacy in the US and also the worldwide network of communist agencies and their fronts.
To summarize the summary:
In 1971 Ralph Nader, bankrolled by the Rockefeller network, began to work with the “Union of Concerned Scientists” to combine the efforts of environmental groups and public interest lawyers against nuclear power (NP). They worked on several fronts: Legal action to delay projects; Lobbying Congress and Government agencies; Propagandising the churches; Advertising directed at the general public.
Exaggerated dangers and innuendos of industry incompetence were widely accepted and the industry had no strategy to respond.
“To cut a long story […]
Russia says the US has bioweapon research labs in Ukraine, an outrageous claim that was instantly fact-checked to oblivion until Senator Marco Rubio stopped the show by asking a US official under oath: Does Ukraine have chemical and biological weapons?
Victoria Nuland, US Under Secretary of State, could have said “No” but instead she said:
Ukraine has Biological research facilities… which in fact we are quite concerned about — that Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of. So we are working with Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into Russian hands should they approach…
So not only is there some kind of research going on, but it’s so safe and fine that the US is worried the Russians might get it. And despite the Russians queuing for days in tanks at the border, no one thought to secure or destroy it?
Then the US official who hid secret labs and worries about what the Russians will do tells everyone that
“It’s classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they are planning to do themselves…”
I’m not sure whether to hope the US secures […]
Warwick McKibbin reckons Vladimir Putin might be the best thing that’s ever happened to the energy transition.
Speaking at The Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Tuesday, the economist, academic and former Reserve Bank board member argued that surging commodity prices caused by the war in Ukraine could force the urgent shift to clean energy to accelerate.
Really?
In the parallel universe Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute has been sending warning signals for years that the push for intermittent energy in the west could have drastic geopolitical consequences. Here he explains how the conflict in the Ukraine has brought the drastic consequences upon us ahead of schedule.
Naivete about energy realities robbed the U.S. and its allies of important “soft power” options and helped finance Russia’s aggression. In the near term, our choices are limited, but continuing down the same energy path is a formula for yet more problems in the future.
He notes that the EU and the US over the past two decades spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates to replace oil, natural gas and coal.
This brought the hydrocarbon share of all energy use down by two percentage points […]
…
8.7 out of 10 based on 10 ratings
The joke
Biden Sells Alaska Back To Russia So We Can Start Drilling For Oil There Again
Babylon Bee
ANCHORAGE, AK—The deliberate and premeditated invasion of Ukraine by brutal dictator Vladimir Putin has forced the US to reassess the importance of energy independence. With this new resolve, the Biden Administration has taken its first step toward increasing oil production for Americans by selling Alaska back to Russia so we can start drilling for oil there again.
Jen Psaki praised Biden’s brilliance in finding a solution that would prevent an energy crisis while also preventing new drilling on American land. She pointed out succinctly to journalists, “You see, it’s not American land anymore; it’s Russian land.”
The truth
Joe Biden needs to stop buying oil and gas from the Russian dictator, but rather than getting it from the US or Canada he’s talking to a dictator in Venezuela.
President Biden is scrambling to contain soaring oil prices, which closed at more than $123 a barrel on Monday. It speaks volumes about this Administration that it’s seeking help from Vladimir Putin’s client in Venezuela and our estranged Saudi allies rather than U.S. shale […]
All anybody wants is free choice about what they get injected with. Two days to go. Send it to your friends.
Let the Nurses, Doctors, Truck Drivers, Teachers and everyone who wants to work or travel be free to choose.
Australian Parliament Petition EN3886 – Cessation of vaccine mandates 9.5 out of 10 based on 65 ratings […]
It’s the Great Reset in Global Energy complacency
There is pandemonium on the markets and suddenly many nations want to be energy sufficient. It’s perhaps not The Great Reset than the collective-types were expecting?
The gas flows from Russia to the EU are sporadically tightening, and the Yamal-Europe line has been cut off. Gas in Europe is now trading at €340/MWh which is fully 22 times the long term average. Newcastle coal normally trades around $60 per ton, but now is over $400 USD.
A few days ago the former head of MI6 in the UK called for an immediate lifting of the frakking ban which was set to see concrete poured down the only two shale gas wells in England by March 15th. Thirty-five Tory MPs and four peers sent a letter to Boris demanding the same thing. Now even Boris Johnson is suggesting the Green targets could be relaxed, not just for Britain, but for all the West. He went so far as to suggest The West could give itself a “climate change pass” while we figure out how to get energy that isn’t Russian gas.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch
So much for the end of Fossil […]
A year ago, one man sold his soul.
People were dying, hospitals were overflowing, but even by January 2021 we already knew ivermectin could save three quarters of those who died. Randomized trials of 2,282 people showed that only 2% of people on ivermectin died, compared to nearly 10% of the hapless people who missed out, yet he picked the “missed out” path.
Everything pointed in the right direction. The result of the meta-study was highly significant (p=0.0002!), the risks were almost nothing, the outcome was extraordinary, the effect was dependent on the dose, and the blood markers of inflammation were also reduced, as we’d expect. Yet the conclusion of the same paper was that we needed larger trials before the results could even be reviewed. And this single line that contradicted nearly everything in the paper, was quoted everywhere to say the evidence was “inconclusive”.
This was from the same man who said Ivermectin was “the way forward” and that he would give ivermectin to his own brother. Then suddenly he flipped. !function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src=”https://rumble.com/embedJS/uy6ktw”+(arguments[1].video?’.’+arguments[1].video:”)+”/?url=”+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+”&args=”+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, “script”, “Rumble”);
Rumble(“play”, {“video”:”vttz4b”,”div”:”rumble_vttz4b”}); ….
A forensic analysis of that strange contradictory paper shows there were two or three other voices who influenced […]
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