How about New York governor Cuomo packing nursing homes with COVID patients, which resulted in thousands of deaths? Now that we have channelled Neanderthal man anyway, does he have an opinion on that?
Medicine
Claim: Neanderthal protein may reduce COVID-19’s severity
Neanderthal man gets smarter and more socially acceptable every time he crosses our radar. At one time, the story would have been: A COVID-like illness wiped him out.
Michael Egnor: From a medical perspective, “consciousness” adds nothing to the description of mental states
In his view, “ “Consciousness ” is a meaningless term that too often misleads us, and it shouldn’t be used in medicine, neuroscience, or philosophy: “Consciousness” is a very vague term and, ultimately, I don’t think it has any useful meaning at all, apart from other categories such as sensation, perception, imagination, reason etc. Aristotle Read More…
Candace Owens interviews Dr Stella Immanuel and dynamics of hope (yes, JVL, it’s back to answering the “never let a crisis go to waste”/ “inevitable crisis of Capitalism” Marxist revolutionary strategy)
Yes, Marxist ideology pivots on the idea of mounting crises of Capitalism opening the door to socialist transformation. (Where, yes, pandemics obviously count as do incidents of police brutality or anything else that can be used to hang the failure of Capitalism and/or Christendom crisis template on.) Back in the ’30’s, Stalin thought THE Crisis Read More…
Coronavirus lives in a world full of tricksters and does a lot of that itself
Nature is full of information and, while these viruses and cells don’t think, something in them does.
Can we grow human brains in a dish?
Zeiger: These brain-like entities lack some very important neurological cell types that would make them truly “brains.” But many wonder whether we can make brains with human-like consciousness in a dish. Unfortunately, some conflate the mind with the brain and consciousness with brain activity, which creates confusion …
Darwinists hold forth on COVID-19. Aw, ya knew…
PNAS’s Darwin rubbish is neither knowledge nor wisdom. It’s just Politically Correct Darwin rubbish. All it demonstrates is that science is in a rut.
Surgisphere scandal results in change in editorial practices at The Lancet
At The Scientist: “Like Malički, Watson and other researchers note that the changes don’t address larger, more general issues highlighted by Surgisphere’s papers, including journals’ reluctance to push authors to share data and code for published studies, and an overall lack of transparency in how papers are reviewed before and after publication. “
Will respect for science survive the polarization of our era?
Alternatively, it may become possible to have a discussion about what, exactly, science is. For example, in the case of the ATP turbine, “Natural selection did it” has the same explicit explanatory value as “God did it.” But natural selection is somehow science and God is not. Why? How?
The smog is beginning to clear around hydroxychloroquine
Revealing the way politics has invaded science all the way down, according to Norman Doidge. There’s a good chance that, even though most people don’t directly say it, the reputation of “science” will never recover from this episode. People will disbelieve politely but thoroughly.
The Frontline Doctors put some “plausible” mechanisms for Hydroxychloroquine on the table
In their July 28 seminar, the Frontline Doctors Group led by Dr Simone Gold, have put some plausible mechanisms for HCQ based cocktails on the table. These were noted on in an augmentation to an earlier post, but deserve headlining in their own right: Dr Frieden OP: >>I have found at Bit Chute, a July Read More…
Dr Thomas Frieden, formerly Director of the US CDC, 2017 in NEJM, on the need to go beyond placebo-controlled studies as “gold standard”
One of the key steps in dismissing evidence of efficacy of hydroxychloroquine-based cocktails in treating early stageCovid-19 for patients in vulnerable groups on an outpatient basis is the use of the premise that such evidence is of low quality as it does not match the “gold standard” of placebo-controlled, randomised tests (often. RCT’s). However, observations Read More…
Prof Risch answers critics:
It’s worth headlining from the CV19 thread: Jerry, 579: >>Dr. Risch strikes back. https://washex.am/2DFxdij Hydroxychloroquine works in high-risk patients, and saying otherwise is dangerous As of Wednesday, some 165,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19. I have made the case in the American Journal of Epidemiology and in Newsweek that people who Read More…
Some CV-19 data (for reference)
I note, from OWID, today August 13. First, case fatality rate vs population’s median age, though this is oldish data now . . . however exceptionally poor management by the US — an obvious implied thesis — should have been obvious even then: Next, case fatality rate overall — a metric dependent on degree of Read More…
On the trajectory of Covid-19 (and similar diseases)
As a FYI, we need to understand the pattern of such diseases, so courtesy Yandex Image search (Google did an obvious results suppression): This leads to the simplified U/L trajectory description. If a vulnerable patient catches, things tend to get worse over several days, potentially leading to a crisis from immunity system over-reaction and/or secondary Read More…