I see wonderful things

The incredible coordination of a mesmerizing bird behavior known as murmuration.pic.twitter.com/yLOlhqCiX2

— Wonder of Science (@wonderofscience) September 27, 2023

 

Offbeat Humor

The father made a bet with his little daughter saying, "I can wipe the water off the floor without you hitting me with the fork in your hand." pic.twitter.com/VVJQ5IUocw

— Enezator (@Enezator) September 28, 2023

 

A story so absurd it can't be true but none-the-less appears to be true.

From FBI and CDC Slammed for “Dropping the Ball” on Illegal California Biolab Run by Chinese by Leslie Eastman.  The subheading is The lab was run by a Chinese man, Jesse Zhu, and was paid millions of dollars by China while experiments were being conducted at the Reedley facility.

The substance of the report is that China, directly or indirectly, has been running a biolab in the US without compliance or oversight of the necessary regulating authorities.

As a jaundiced reader of news there is a disturbing symmetry.  We now seem to be at the point of determining that Covid-19 was human created in the poorly regulated or supervised Wuhan lab in China via a program of investments by the NHI and other US health agencies to conduct gain-of-function virus research which was either forbidden or prohibitively regulated in the US.  And the poor procedural control at the Wuhan Lab seems to have led to the escape of the Covid-19 virus.

OK.  We (or some American actors) did that to China.  Now, Eastman is reporting that it seems like the Chinese are doing exactly the same thing to us.  Really.  Could that possibly be true?  And if true, could it possibly be true (as opposed to the consequence of contingent emergent order?)

I have seen nothing on this in the mainstream media.  Eastman reports:

Legal Insurrection readers may recall that this summer, I reported on a warehouse in Reedley, California had been the site of a massive remediation project and investigation after it was discovered to be an illegal, unlicensed laboratory full of lab mice, infectious agent samples, medical waste, and hazardous materials.

There were over 20 different infectious agents that this company was working with, ostensibly for the development of diagnostic kits. The pathogens included herpes, HIV, chlamydia, coronavirus, and hepatitis.

When that report was given, there were limited details on the entire suite of pathogens, and just how connected that laboratory was to China. The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party did its own investigation.

The 40-page report was a chilling account on the revealing serious gaps in monitoring the nature and safety of biological research, which is a serious threat to both national and global security. The Select Committee investigation also concluded the lab had very close ties to China.

The lab contained deadlier pathogens (e.g., Ebola) than the original press accounts suggested.  The lab was run by a Chinese man named Jesse Zhu, and was paid millions of dollars by the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) while experiments were being conducted at the Reedley facility

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is probably better able to conduct a thorough investigation than the mainstream media but it of course is inescapably tarred by the political process.  

Read Eastman's report.  It is damning of the FBI and CDC if true.  It seems impossible to believe.  But the evidence also seems reasonably strong if only there were more enterprises interested, investigating and reporting.

And if everything in the Select Committee report is true, we are still left with this bizarre symmetry of the US and China each running bio-labs in the other's countries, either at the margin of the regulatory law or at the margin of operational effectiveness.  Or both.  

There are truths to be discovered regardless of our convictions.

Back after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, there were, within a month, multiple stories from mainstream media of a dramatic increase in racism crimes.  Mainstream media journalist, to a person, were convinced that Trump was a racist, that his supporters were racists, and that his election was essentially a green light to naturally racist Americans to display their savagery racism.  Of course, racist attacks would increase.

From an ideological convictions perspective, that all made perfect and logical sense.  From an empirical perspective, not so much.

The most complete crime reporting data comes from the Department of Justice, primarily via the FBI.  And their data is incomplete, noisy, tardy, and unreliable.  You can sort of pick up long term trends over time but you have to be exceptionally careful about how much reliance you put on that data.

The FBI receives its data from police departments and sheriffs offices from around the nation.  They are not compelled to participate.  In 2022, only 69% of law enforcement officers participated and that was up a large amount from prior years.  The saving grace is that it tends to be the largest law enforcement offices which participate so that more than 69% of crime is covered but it does highlight one of the major statistical chinks in the data set.

Another is that the data is gathered by those local law enforcement offices.  Yes, the FBI has extensive forms and definitions and instructions, but the degree to which the data is accurately collected and reported is debated.  

And even when the data is accurately collected and reported, it is often still incomplete because citizens often do not report crimes for a whole variety of reasons.  

And hate crimes are the most notoriously malleable crimes reported because they are not objectively determined.  An interracial mugging occurs.  It is a criminal act (of theft).  Is it a hate crime?  Well that depends on a lot of factors that have to be interpreted.  What words were used?  What symbolism was invoked?  How explicit was the communication?  Even in the best of times and under the best of circumstances, hate crime data is extremely noisy from a statistical perspective.  It is hard to get reliable signals.  

And those are just the biggest issues.

These issues are reasonably well known to virtually anyone who has been reading newspapers and news magazines for more than a few years.  It is a known issue.  

The consequence is that anyone reporting a near term increase or change in a crime trend is virtually certainly being deceptive or simply misreporting.  

So all the reports of a steep increase in hate crimes in the weeks immediately following the 2016 election?  It was easily known by anyone paying attention in past years that there had been no reported increase in such crime because there was simply no such data to report.  The FBI Uniform Crime Report comes out annually, many months after the beginning of the calendar year.  

So what were the mainstream media journalists reporting if the data was not even available to support their bald assertions?  And how were they reporting it.  Typical mainstream media dereliction of professional standards.  

Unnamed sources.  Weasel words.  Anecdotes.  Cherry picking.  Strategic sourcing.  

Find a city where there had been some sort of statistical anomaly (there are always anomalies in an average), report on that as representative of what is happening.  Find a police chief trying to drum up pressure to increase the police budget who would be happy to talk about a perceived (though undocumented) increase in hate crimes.  Quote a sympathetic academic who is happy to blur the distinction between what is empirically observed versus what might be logically expected.  Bolster the academic's assertions by interviewing a couple of unnamed crime reporters in other big cities, Et Voila!  You have your increase in hate crime statistics owing to the election of Trump without there ever being a change in underlying crime patterns and without the bother of actual data or analysis.  

That was what happened after the election of Trump.  It was right out there in the open for anyone to reading critically and objectively.  Mainstream media reporters said there was a real increase in hate crimes owing to the election of Donald Trump and it was never a real thing.  It was what they logically expected based on their ideological beliefs and partisan biases but it was never based in reality.

That was easy to see.

We have had a harder one going on post-Covid.  We have known since the beginning that virtually every public health decision in the US from March of 2020 onwards was both wrong in terms of past policy and experience, wrong in actual outcomes, and either absent any empirical foundation or via an ignoring of the empirical data which did exist.

All that was denied by the establishment and the clerisy and the mainstream media at the time, hence the strident claims of disinformation campaigns and the desperate attempts to suspend civil rights (especially freedom of speech).  

In the past 12 months, it has become increasingly well documented that the charges by the empirical skeptics were true all along.  The trials were poorly designed, faulty, too small, and terminated too early to support the deployment of the experimental vaccines.  All the established public health protocols were ignored.  Civil rights were suspended.  Masks were enforced.  Schools were closed.  Public spaces were closed.  All of it known to be wrong and inconsistent with history, existing norms, and established evidence.

But it happened anyway and now the cost and consequences are slowly being acknowledged.

But what were the consequences.  

Once you have such demonstrably bad actors, it is reasonable to accuse them of anything.  But they should be indicted for no more than is real.  

For me, the two major open issues are 1) whether the Experimental Use Authorization of mRNA vaccines cause an excess of myocardial infarctions among young men and 2) whether Long Covid is real.

I have might strong doubts about the second, but I am seeing better and better studies but so far they also seem relative inconclusive.  Clearly there are advocating populations (among patients, doctors, and public health experts) who want it to be true, but whether Long Covid is real remains unclear to me and I am skeptical.

The myocardial infarctions among young men has been even harder to tell.

It was reported relatively early and relatively frequently.  Too frequently for it too have been true (see Trump hate crime reporting).  Yes, the instances of young athletes dropping dead from heart attacks were real.  But was it a trend line dramatically above the norm?  The claims were in advance of any possible reliable reported data.

The challenge is also similar to hate crimes in being such a rare event.  The number of hate crimes as a percentage of all crimes is de minimis.  Though there are occasional real hate crimes.  The number of mortal heart attacks among healthy young men as a percentage of all deaths in a year are also de minimis.  Though there are occasional real deaths by heart attack among healthy young men.  

Was there an increase and was the increase due to the EUA mRNA vaccines, as opposed, for example, to the sudden imposition of a substantially more sedentary life style for a prolonged period?

We couldn't know early on.  And because such deaths are uncommon, tragic, and attention-grabbing, they are especially prone to the frequency illusion.  

For me, the jury has been out.  The EUA mRNA was criminally and coercively enforced on populations below 60 without adequate evidence about its effectiveness or safety.  And while excess young male heart attacks have been extensively claimed, the underlying data has appeared to be substantially anecdotal.

Sudden Cardiac Death in College Athletes by John Mandrola goes some ways to tilting the field towards this having been an illusory claim.  The subheading is A recent paper on the incidence and causes of death in NCAA athletes over the past two decades made me Stop and Think about making causal connections from anecdotes.

I had thoughts. Maybe you did too.

There were just so many media reports of cardiac arrest in athletes.

This is a column about two things—a medical problem (cardiac arrest) and the way our brains work.

During the pandemic we learned that the vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 could cause myocarditis—or inflammation of the heart. Young males had the highest risk of this adverse effect.

This was neither a welcome finding nor was it a common adverse effect. But it was real. Everyone now agrees. Also well known—from old data—was that myocarditis is a cause of cardiac arrest during sport.

So. When media reports during the pandemic told the dramatic stories of athletes having cardiac arrest, my brain started making causal connections…between a) the fact that most athletes had to take a mRNA vaccine, b) the vaccine could cause myocarditis, a cause of cardiac arrest, c) young athletes, mostly male, had the highest risk of vaccine-related-myocarditis, and d) there sure seemed to be a lot of these media reports.

The cardiac arrest of the famous Danish football star Christian Eriksen added a mental glue to these connections. His cardiac arrest occurred months after the vaccine was released in 2021. There was initial speculation that he had received a vaccine. The director of the team then said that Eriksen was not vaccinated. He is now back playing professional football—with an ICD.

Maybe it was my curated news feeds, but I saw media report after media report of athletes having cardiac arrest. I started to think. Well. That seems like some-thing is going on.

The problem with media reports is that anecdotes do not sum up to data. And now we have some systematic data.

Indeed.  Mandrola is a doctor but you don't have to be a doctor to see the issue with Covid-19 heart attack reporting.  Just as you don't have to be a criminologist to see the issue with reporting increased hate crimes.  Just as you don't have to be a climatologist to see the issue with reporting weather events as evidence of climate change.

These are empirical rationalist mental hygiene issues, not expertise with embedded deep knowledge issues.  If you see hard claims early in a fast breaking story involving rare or poorly defined events for which there is infrequent data collection or transparency, then you can be reasonably certain that the reports are unreliable.  Especially if there are parties with material financial or status rewards involved in the issue.  The claims may end up being true, false or some point in between but they are opinions, not factually grounded reporting.  Regardless of the issue and its consequentiality.  

All you have to do is recognize the pattern, you don't have to know much about the underlying technical  issue itself.  

Read Mandrola's piece for the emerging evidence why the young men dying of heart attacks reporting might have been substantially the consequence of motivated reasoning and the frequency illusion.  And also why the issue is not yet resolved.  The new evidence is strongly suggestive that there has been no post-vaccine change in the base rate of young male deaths from heart attack.  But we still don't have the complete picture.  The strong claims will probably need to wait for another few good studies over the next few years before we can have strong confidence.

For the time being though, we have more basis for being skeptical about the claims of a dramatic increase in young male heart attacks.

Regardless, the public health authorities still made virtually all the wrong decisions, at virtually step of the crisis, for virtually all the wrong reasons.  

Data Talks

This map shows all earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 4.0 over the last 20 years. The map by @pythonmaps is coloured according to the magnitude of the earthquake. pic.twitter.com/reAT0gjL21

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) September 28, 2023

 

Sir Galahad Discovering the Grail, 1895 by Edwin Austin Abbe

Sir Galahad Discovering the Grail, 1895 by Edwin Austin Abbe

Click to enlarge.

History

Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria posing as a mummy in Cairo, Egypt, 1894. pic.twitter.com/HeDNDGhzJr

— Archaeology & Art (@archaeologyart) September 28, 2023

 

An Insight

I don't get how people fall for the "intergenerational trauma" meme when up until ten minutes ago every human lived on the edge of death, where disease, predation, violence, and cannibalism were commonplace.

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) September 29, 2023

 

The Great Revealing begins to transition to the Great Admission phase

Over the past ten years, I have referred to the serial revelations that the fads and obsessions of the clerisy are mistaken and dangerous as the Great Revealing.  We are apparently moving now into an era of Great Admissions.  We are beginning to see it with Great Admissions that the clerisy and State were dreadfully wrong (as was documented even at the time) in terms of Covid-19.  There are an increasing number of semi-confessional research papers, books and experts coming forward regarding the same pattern of mistaken beliefs with regard to Anthropogenic Global Warming.  We might be seeing it with the January 6th convictions (though a little too soon to tell.)

Not fast enough, but reassuring to see that there is robustness in the epistemic system.

Here is the most recent one - The Startling Evidence on Learning Loss Is In from the editorial board of the New York Times no less, the insider Bible for the clerisy.  That mandatory school closure would be materially detrimental to students, that it would harm the most educational vulnerable the most, and that the school closures would have no material impact on student or societal health in terms of the spread or mortality of Covid was documented on historical and evidentiary grounds from the very beginning.  It was entirely ideology based decision-making rather than evidence-based decision making and ideological decision making backed by state coercion and punishment for non-compliance.

In the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress sent $190 billion in aid to schools, stipulating that 20 percent of the funds had to be used for reversing learning setbacks. At the time, educators knew that the impact on how children learn would be significant, but the extent was not yet known.

The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.

These learning losses will remain unaddressed when the federal money runs out in 2024. Economists are predicting that this generation, with such a significant educational gap, will experience diminished lifetime earnings and become a significant drag on the economy. But education administrators and elected officials who should be mobilizing the country against this threat are not.

There's the admission.  But the faith-based belief of the clerisy remains unshaken no matter how wrong they are.  While the article acknowledges that school closures was a bad policy choice, it fails to acknowledge that 1) the NYT fully supported the education establishment and their pursuit of school closure, 2) that all the criticisms and evidence against the policies were extant at the time of the policy decisions, and, 3) that the NYT derided informed criticism at the time as deranged conspiracy theories.  

Perhaps most astonishing in this Great Admission (partial though it is), is from the comment section.  The most upvoted comment by far (with 2,000 votes compared to 1,100 votes for the next most popular) is:

 

Upstate Guy

Albany, NY

Nov. 18

I’m a science teacher with urban HS and MS experience. The learning loss and gap predate the pandemic, it just accelerated it. The roots of our problems are actually easy to recognize:

1) In a bizarre quest for equity, we aren’t allowed to suspend black or brown students because the State says they are suspended too often. The kids know this and thus do whatever they want. They literally run the school. I was hit by a shoe in the hallway this week. I asked the student why she threw it and she replied, “Because I can.” 

2) To protect their own jobs, school officials juke the state about academic performance, attendance and graduation rates. Students are not held back for failing a grade. Summer school is academically useless. My 8th grade students are 4-6 years below grade according to their NWEA test scores and my observations. Yet I’m ordered to teach 8th grade curriculum to them. How engaged are students who can’t even read the material? How does it affect their mental health to be humiliated day after day because they lack basic skills to engage the material? For example, none of my 8th graders can read the analog clock on the classroom wall.

These issues can be solved with much smaller student:teacher ratios and truly rigorous standards. Kids can’t be promoted until they have mastered the material. Poor behavior must have consequences.

Raising children without consequences is producing a generation of antisocial young adults, without drive, discipline or knowledge.

New York Times readers are hardly a hotbed of reactionary, capitalist, Republican, fascists.  As demonstrated by the next most popular comments which could largely have been written by Rand Weingarten, head of the teachers unions.  The readers acknowledge the problem of underperforming students but congeal around our not spending enough on education, too large classes, bad parenting, celebrity culture, insufficient value attached to the profession of teaching, and the competitiveness of the capitalist system.  

From the beginning we have known that school closures would make no difference in health outcomes and that has proven true.  We have known that the education and child development consequences would be material and exponential the longer the schools were closed.   We have known that the damages would be in terms of lost academic ground, lost social development, and non-covid 19 health complications.

All of which have been proven to be true.  

We also know that there are tried and proven tactics for addressing the lost ground and disarray.  We need to revert to those approaches which have worked in the past and which work elsewhere.  Direct instruction.  Phonics.  Rote memorization.  Direct, impartial and transparent progress reporting.  Classroom management effectiveness.  Prompt, impartial and reliable discipline system.  Parental involvement.

On these tried, tested, and effective technics, the New York Times readers are in sharp opposition.  They want their Social Justice and their educational effectiveness too.  But this is one of those goal trade-off challenges which the real world glories.  If you can only have one or the other, which would you choose.  The number one comment supported by the readers suggests that the readers want educational effectiveness.  The subsequent comments indicate that other readers are not yet ready to let go of Social Justice as the primary objective.

I see wonderful things

Jubilee Synagogue, also known as the Jerusalem Synagogue, is a synagogue in Prague, Czech Republic. It was built in 1906 and designed by Austrian architect Wilhelm Stiassny in Moorish Revival form with Art Nouveau decoration. pic.twitter.com/1bn9F1bb6H

— ArtNouveauDeco (@NouveauDeco) September 26, 2023