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Johns Hopkins surgeon says 'science should have no gag rules' after Twitter censorship

the johns hopkins hospital
A surgeon at Johns Hopkins University 's hospital slammed top medical officials on Tuesday, saying that "science should have no gag rules" after the latest round of the Twitter Files revealed that the White House pressured the platform to censor "misinformation."

Dr. Marty Makary said that censorship during the COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected science, as the medical field saw a drop in public trust after Twitter suppressed tweets that included "misinformation" about the COVID-19 pandemic, even when Twitter users shared information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"That's unfortunately the state of repair that we need to engage in. I think public health officials look really bad for this. The public needs an apology," Makary told Fox News.

Comment: More on Dr. Marty Makary:


Chart Pie

Increases in mortality during Covid were small relative to pre-existing differences across Europe

map of europe
Back in March of last year, I pointed out that Covid's impact on mortality had been small relative to pre-existing differences across Europe. In other words: increases in mortality within European countries were smaller than the differences that existed between them before Covid arrived.

At the time, I relied on a crude measure of mortality: number of deaths per 100 people aged 65+. We can now observe the same pattern using the latest data on life expectancy.

Life expectancy in a particular year is defined as the number of years a person born in that year could be expected to live if he or she experienced the current age-specific mortality rates (at each age 0, 1, 2, etc.) during the course of her life. It is therefore closely related to the age-standardised mortality rate.

Comment: See also:


Eye 1

Hunting for Russians: How a Ukrainian law firm runs a campaign targeting ordinary people in Western Europe

protesters EU summit brussels
© AP Photo/Olivier MatthysProtestors hold signs and chant during a demonstration outside of an EU summit in Brussels, Friday, Oct. 21, 2022.
The Lviv-based lawyers promise to 'solve the issue' of the 'rashist' presence.

Boutique Ukrainian law firm T&M has launched an appalling new service allowing residents of Western European countries to "cleanse Europe of rashists," a reference to the derogatory neologism used by officials in Kiev, which combines the words "Russian" and "fascist."

Titled "give in charge rashist" (apparently a bad translation of the Ukrainian title "turn in a rashist"), the webportal invites visitors who are "tired of potential invaders living near you" to "let us know and we will try to solve this issue in the legal field."

Comment: See also:


Bad Guys

Ukrainian MP fakes 'victim' of Russian strike

Lesia Vasilenko posted a photo of a boy from a 2013 book cover
© Screenshot Twitter / @lesiavasylenko
Lesia Vasilenko posted a photo of a boy from a 2013 book cover

A Ukrainian lawmaker has shared a fake photo and a purported story of "Marc, 8 yo" with her 330,000 followers on her English-language Twitter feed on Tuesday. Lesia Vasilenko, a Ukrainian MP from the Golos (Voice) Party, who has a background in law and human rights campaigning, posted a photo of a sad-looking, dirt-covered boy, claiming that he is an eight-year-old named Mark, who "just survived" a Russian artillery strike.

The photo is nowhere close to being new and does not appear to have any relation to Ukraine. The 2013 Spanish-language edition of the book 'The Misremembered Man' by Irish novelist Christina McKenna featured the very same picture on the cover, skeptics pointed out. At the time of writing, the tweet remained live, though Twitter had added a notice about its questionable veracity.

Comment: See also:


Arrow Down

Germany's ZDF public television suggests bathing once a week would be beneficial

Private daily showers to become a luxury for the privileged and wealthy in Germany?

"What if we showered/bathed only once a week?"

Shower Once a Week!
© Image cropped from ZDF kugelzwei.You won’t shower any more, and you’ll be happy, German ZDF broadcaster suggests.
What the BBC is to Great Britain, are what the WDR and ARD public broadcasting are to Germany in terms of television and radio presence.

Just some weeks ago, the Instagram site of WDR kugelzwei presented some tips that save heat and energy for citizens to consider: showering only once a week.

Heart - Black

Rogan guest goes viral after exposing "subhuman" and "appalling" cobalt mining conditions in Congo

Kara
© screenshotSiddharth Kara
There is one part to the "green" EV revolution that we have written about - but that no one else is talking about: the incessant need for cobalt and the "appalling" way that the battery metal is mined and produced.

After a recent Joe Rogan podcast that went out to the viral host's 40 million plus listeners, we're hopeful that dialogue may finally start to take place.

Siddharth Kara, who is a Harvard visiting professor and also the author of Cobalt Red: How The Blood of The Congo Powers Our Lives took to the podcast last week with comments about cobalt mining that already have more than a million listens.

He told Rogan that there's no such thing as "clean cobalt" and that the term was "all marketing," according to a wrap up of the podcast by the NY Post. He noted that the level of suffering of Congolese people working in cobalt mines was "astounding", the report says.
"I've never seen [a cobalt mine that did not rely on child labor or slavery] and I've been to almost all the major industrial cobalt mines."
Yet, modern demand for cobalt doesn't look like it's going to slow down any time soon. "Cobalt is in every single lithium, rechargeable battery manufactured in the world today," Kara said to Rogan.

Magic Wand

NHS spends more than £8.2m on 'woke warriors' in diversity jobs

NHS protest
© york.ac.uk
Ministers urged to 'get a grip and ensure that funds are directed towards front-line roles as inclusion posts 'consume ever more resources'

NHS trusts are spending more than £8.2 million a year on diversity and inclusion jobs, The Telegraph can reveal.

The figures, revealed through Freedom of Information requests, relate to just 70 of the 125 acute hospital trusts across England - suggesting the scale of the spending could be far higher.

It comes after job adverts posted by 16 trusts in one month alone revealed they would cost the taxpayer more than £700,000 annually.

The new data show that in 2022, the 70 trusts are employing 187 people in equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) roles - almost three per employer. In total, the 187 jobs are costing the NHS up to £8,220,783 a year.

It comes after the NHS warned it was facing a £7 billion funding shortfall and could be forced to cut services due to rising inflation and the cost of this year's pay award.

Comment: Diagnosis: 'Infectious Mesmerization'


Black Magic

UK: One-third of Tavistock's 'transgender' clinic's child victims were autistic

autistic children transgender lgbt flag
© Tyrone Siu/Reuters
Per Spectrum News:
"People who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth are three to six times as likely to be autistic as cisgender people are, according to the largest study yet to examine the connection. Gender-diverse people are also more likely to report autism traits and to suspect they have undiagnosed autism."
In the middle of a meandering treatise on the explosion in "transgender" youths in the UK, The Guardian dropped a little nugget that should have been the lede:
"The Cass report stated that approximately one-third of children and young people being referred to the Tavistock had autism or other types of neurodiversity."
(Tavistock was a UK government-run "affirmative care" clinic that was so reckless in its child-transing practices that it was forced to shut down following an independent audit of its activities, which included a 20-fold increase in referrals of "trans youth" in a ten-year period.)

Cult

Just Stop Oil eco-zealots arrested up to SEVEN times each during month of road-block chaos in London

Just stop oil protest block traffic london
© Getty ImagesThe smugness of the brainwashed: A Just Stop Oil protester is arrested by police after blocking the road at the junction of Cannon Street and Queen Victoria Street in London on October 27
Just Stop Oil protesters were arrested up to seven times each during a month of road-blocking chaos in London this year.

Some members of the eco-zealot group, which brought the capital the roads around it to a standstill, were arrested multiple times this autumn as part of their uproarious demonstrations. Official figures show that of the 755 people arrested between October 1 and November 4, 155 were detained by police more than once - just over one in five.

The Metropolitan Police has said those arrested are not able to be charged quickly as officers have to trawl through CCTV and take statements from witnesses before the matter goes through the courts.

Comment: More on the destructive antics of the eco-lunatics:



But occasionally some facts break through in a thoroughly satisfying manner:






Arrow Down

This asteroid impact simulator lets you destroy the world

A web app from Neal.Fun is a choose-your-own-adventure for planetary annihilation.
Impact Site
© Screenshot: Gizmodo/Neal.FunI aimed a 1,500-foot iron asteroid traveling at 38,000 miles per hour with a 45-degree impact angle at Gizmodo’s office in Midtown, Manhattan.
Hundreds of thousands of asteroids lurk in our solar system, and while space agencies track many of them, there's always the chance that one will suddenly appear on a collision course with Earth. A new app on the website Neal.fun demonstrates what could happen if one smacked into any part of the planet.

Neal Agarwal developed Asteroid Simulator to show the potentially extreme local effects of different kinds of asteroids. The first step is to pick your asteroid, with choices of iron, stone, carbon, and gold, or even an icy comet. The asteroid's diameter can be set up to 1 mile (1.6 kilometers); its speed can be anywhere from 1,000 to 250,000 miles per hour; and the impact angle can be set up to 90 degrees. Once you select a strike location on a global map, prepare for chaos.