Saturday, December 31, 2022
These are the principal features of cancer
Antibodies are studied more than other immune proteins for association with disease.
Friday, December 30, 2022
BkIEpX:1-25 The delights of Nature
Drive Nature off with a pitchfork, she’ll still press back,
And secretly burst in triumph through your sad disdain.
https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/HoraceEpistlesBkIEpX.php
Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret
et mala perrumpet furtim fastidia uictrix.
http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/latinlibrary/horace/epist1.html
expello
Thursday, December 29, 2022
Antiviral treatments lead to the rapid accrual of hundreds of SARS-CoV-2 mutations in immunocompromised patients
Within days of treatment, we detected a large number of low-frequency mutations in patients and that these new mutations could persist and, in some cases, were fixed in the virus population … This commonly used class of antivirals has the capability to supercharge SARS-CoV-2 evolution, and uncontrolled use may generate new variants with a transmission advantage that prolongs the pandemic and makes other therapeutics less effective.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.21.22283811v1
Molnupiravir plus usual care versus usual care alone as early treatment for adults with COVID-19 at increased risk of adverse outcomes (PANORAMIC): an open-label, platform-adaptive randomised controlled trial
Molnupiravir did not reduce the frequency of COVID-19-associated hospitalisations or death among high-risk vaccinated adults in the community.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)02597-1/fulltext
3 Common Long COVID Symptoms, Low-Cost Remedies Recommended by Doctors
In November, researchers from Yale Medical School published a case study showing guanfacine (used for treating blood pressure) and the antioxidant N-acetylcysteine (NAC) reduced the cognitive deficits (brain fog) associated with long COVID in eight out of 12 patients. According to the study authors, both substances may work together to reduce inflammation in the brain and spinal cord.
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
So hospitalization and death rates plummeting post-vaccine is…a really cool coincidence?
I'm 46, vaccinated, and have worked in a public high school all through the pandemic. I haven't had so much as a cold in 3 years, so I would say the vax and the masks do work. At least for me.
https://twitter.com/chrismartenson/status/1603385981075431426
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
Plato ... Some laws, it seems, exist for good people,
Plato
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.A paraphrase of a loose translation, and they’re both wrong. The paraphrase distorts the translation, the translation distorts Plato.
The loose translation runs:
Laws are made to instruct the good, and in the hope that there may be no need of them; also to control the bad, whose hardness of heart will not be hindered from crime.No suggestion there that laws aren’t currently needed for good people, and nothing about ‘finding a way around the laws’.-- Plato, Laws book 9, 880d-e, trans. Benjamin Jowett
Jowett’s no better, though. Plato didn’t actually say anything about not needing laws. He also wasn’t talking about ‘the bad’, but about people who haven’t had much education. Here’s what Plato actually wrote:
Νόμοι δέ, ὡς ἔοικεν, οἱ μὲν τῶν χρηστῶν ἀνθρώπων ἕνεκα γίγνονται, διδαχῆς χάριν τοῦ τίνα τρόπον ὁμιλοῦντες ἀλλήλοις ἂν φιλοφρόνως οἰκοῖεν, οἱ δὲ τῶν τὴν παιδείαν διαφυγόντων, ἀτεράμονι χρωμένων τινὶ φύσει καὶ μηδὲν τεγχθέντων ὥστε μὴ ἐπὶ πᾶσαν ἰέναι κάκην.An alternate translation in case there’s any doubt: Pangle (1980).
Some laws, it seems, exist for good people, for the sake of teaching how they may interact and live with one another amicably; others, for those who have avoided education, who have a rather stubborn character and haven’t had any softening to stop them from proceeding to every vice.-- Plato, Laws 880d-e (trans. by me)
Monday, December 26, 2022
Sunday, December 25, 2022
From ”Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, & Distributism” by Mark and Louise Zwick
“Maurin also visited the cooperatives and small enterprises in the South of France, which were developed on the economic ideas of Prince Peter Kropotkin. Interestingly, both Dorothy and Peter had studied Kropotkins books even before they met. Their ideas on economics were influenced by him.
Saturday, December 24, 2022
Friday, December 23, 2022
La Salsa Loca
Lonche GDL
Thursday, December 22, 2022
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Understanding Pope Francis: It’s the Moral Theology, Stupid Larry Chapp, Catholic Worker
Proportionalism denies that there are intrinsically evil acts and that the morality of an act can only be judged in the light of its outcomes or “consequences.”
Monday, December 19, 2022
Sunday, December 18, 2022
Chesterton on Distributism
- What's Wrong with the World (1910)
- Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays (1917)- Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)
- The Outline of Sanity (1926)
Saturday, December 17, 2022
Friday, December 16, 2022
Coffee and COVID on peer review
To celebrate the release from Twitter jail of Doctor McCullough, the most-cited and most censored covid doctor in the world, and Dr. Malone, the actual inventor of mRNA tech, I’m going to write a little about the so-called “peer-review” process. I have personal experience with the phenomenon, since I was forced to fight in court about studies that either were or weren’t peer-reviewed.
The whole process was a painful ordeal. What should a judge do with claims that studies are better or worse because of peer review? Is one mask study better because it IS peer-reviewed? Should another mask study be completely ignored because it WASN’T peer-reviewed?
For a long while, judges were mostly deferring to peer review. But did that make any sense?¹
On this blog I have often alleged there are many scientists who are not scientists at all, but prostitutes, white-coated pretenders servicing big government and big pharma, happily supplying studies to satisfy eager institutional customers’ needs; always for a fee, euphemistically called “grants,” which of course must be paid in advance.
I didn’t just read that somewhere. I watched it happen with my own eyes, in real time. There were zero covid mask studies when I started litigating the mandates. Then the studies started coming out. We carefully reviewed every single one. None of the real studies could get peer-reviewed. Only the garbage, fake pro-mask studies showed up peer-reviewed in the journals.
It was vexing.
You can’t believe how horrible most of the pro-mask studies were. Every time the NIH stuffed grant money into their mouths, fake scientists excreted another “study” purporting to “prove” that cut-up t-shirts somehow filtered a nanoscale virus and stopped transmission.
In one study that was widely feted in corporate media and used against me in court, the “scientists” took a styrofoam head, stuck a plastic tube in its mouth, jetted air through the tube, and then measured the air velocity coming out — with and without a cotton mask strapped onto the dummy head.
Because they found air velocity reduced with a cotton mask on, the scientists, employing a tortured chain of reasoning comparable to an excited teenager arguing for a later curfew, concluded that masks must also reduce covid spread BECAUSE the cotton mask reduced the amount of expelled air. (Two masks reduced it even more!)
The problem was, the moronic fakers only measured air velocity right in front of the dummy head. They ‘forgot’ to measure the air flowing UP, DOWN, and SIDEWAYS. They lied. The airflow wasn’t “reduced.” Of COURSE the air came out. It had to go somewhere! The masks didn’t ABSORB the air! In other words, the masks didn’t change the AMOUNT of air coming out; only its direction. And worse, masks didn’t even reduce the expelled air’s speed; although forward air velocity was reduced, the velocity to the sides, up and down was INCREASED when wearing a mask.
Masks actually INCREASE the spread of viral particulate. But it passed peer review!
Allegedly, peer-review is a quality certification process. Studies are ranked and rated whether they have been reviewed and blessed by an anonymous panel of scientists in the same discipline. That’s supposed to be how to tell if the study is any good. Recently, for example, the State of Florida studied its medical data, finding jabs increased myocarditis in young people under 40. Critics whined that Florida’s research project wasn’t peer-reviewed, and therefore it was useless.
Do the critics have a point?
Probably not, according to Lancet editor-in-chief Richard Horton, who in a brief flash of honesty said out loud what a lot of other scientists have been thinking for a long time. That is: peer review is not in fact a quality control; it is just a way for establishment scientists to police and enforce orthodox narratives.
Specifically, Dr. Horton wrote:
The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability—not the validity—of a new finding…We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.
In 2015, Dr. Horton even dared to criticize science itself, because the scientific literature — and he should know — has become UNRELIABLE:
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
But why? In 2014 — well before the pandemic — Editor-in-Chief Horton admitted that “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”
Isn’t that interesting. Who would have ever thought.
But HOW does the pharmaceutical industry launder false information through the journals? Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Marcia Angell was the Editor-in-Chief at the New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years. After twenty years of editing and publishing scientific papers, she has become deeply skeptical, not only about peer-review, but about the entire process of journals and even about “experts.” She said:
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
Read that again. The former chief editor of the New England Journal of Medicine said it is NO LONGER POSSIBLE TO RELY ON THE JUDGMENT OF EXPERTS.
She said it, not me. I’m just a lawyer.
But WHY is science broken? Dr. Marc Girard, a member of the editorial board of the journal ‘Medicine Veritas,’ explained that science is broken because of MONEY:
The reason for this disaster is too clear: the power of money. In academic institutions, the current dynamics of research is more favourable to the ability of getting grants—collecting money and spending it—than to scientific imagination or creativity.
The problem isn’t new, either. Back in 2005, Dr. John Ionnidis — an early and important member of Team Reality who experienced censorship and cancellation firsthand — said “Most scientific studies are wrong, and they are wrong because scientists are interested in funding and careers rather than truth… Claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”
It’s a club. A well-paid club.
The point is, all these criticisms of science and peer-review were well-known within the scientific community long before the pandemic hit. But those lying liars gaslit us, and told us WE were crazy for not blindly relying on their feckless, brokered opinions and judgments. Opinions and judgments which quickly turned out to be wildly wrong, not that any of them are admitting it.
In the words, or lyrics, of my favorite covid artist, Dr. Doctor McHonkHonk:
Science lies, mate
That what its’ always done, is doin’, and always will do
It’s more dangerous than any disease
Time to rise, eh?
I’d rather die while standing up than live on my knees
We’ve got to walk away now
It’s over.
I’m not happy about any of this. It’s not my new hobby to attack science or anything. But science needs to clean up its own house, and get out of our hair.
Anyway, Twitter is better now because the heterodox scientific voices are back. Much better.
Thursday, December 15, 2022
Monday, December 12, 2022
Saturday, December 10, 2022
Friday, December 9, 2022
Thursday, December 8, 2022
Wednesday, December 7, 2022
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Monday, December 5, 2022
The Murphy Grocery Store, (Farm to Market Road 544 and Murphy Road)
Painting in and around Wylie has been a neat experience. There’s still
much to paint, but when we first moved here there were just so many interesting
subjects… old barns, houses, and open countryside that no longer exists. I
loved painting that stuff. I’d stand by the side of the road and paint. It was
an important time for artistic growth. The Murphy Grocery Store, (Farm to
Market Road 544 and Murphy Road), where Lowe’s is now, was a favorite subject
because it represented a simpler, less corporate time. I’ve done three studio
paintings of the grocery store, all have sold. Two of them can still be seen;
one is in the Smith Library, the other in Murphy’s City Hall. I hear from
people periodically that want prints of the paintings because they stir up so many
childhood memories. The prints, too, have all sold, but the little store
remains a significant memory for those that lived here at that time.
https://www.pototschnik.com/my-story-part-3/
need (n.)
Middle English nede, from Old English nied (West Saxon), ned (Mercian) "what is required, wanted, or desired; necessity, compulsion, the constraint of unavoidable circumstances; duty; hardship, emergency, trouble, time of peril or distress; errand, business," originally "violence, force," from Proto-Germanic *nauthiz/*naudiz (source also of Old Saxon nod, Old Norse nauðr "distress, emergency, need," Old Frisian ned, "force, violence; danger, anxiety, fear; need," Middle Dutch, Dutch nood "need, want, distress, peril," Old High German not, German Not "need, distress, necessity, hardship," Gothic nauþs "need").
“Billions in Covid Aid Went to Hospitals That Didn’t Need It.”
Some of the large hospitals receiving covid funds dumped the money into long-term investment funds. Others spent the money on new facilities and expanded campuses.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/billions-in-covid-aid-went-to-hospitals-that-didnt-need-it-11670164570
Sunday, December 4, 2022
Dorothy Day Against all wars (1952)
Is it pride, presumtion, to think I have the spiritual capacity to use spiritual weapons in the face of the most gigantic tyranny the world has ever seen? Am I capable of enduring suffering, facing martyrdom? And alone?
Again the long loneliness to be faced.Saturday, December 3, 2022
SHOCK UPDATE Athena Strand missing updates — Girl’s body found in Texas after ‘FedEx driver Tanner Horner abducted her’ in Paradise
- 4:15pm Wednesday: Athena got off her school bus at her father’s home
- 6:40pm Wednesday: Athena’s stepmom called police to report her missing after searching for an hour...
https://www.the-sun.com/news/6823219/athena-strand-missing-updates-father-stepmom-parents-live/
Friday, December 2, 2022
12 Films on the Lives of Catholic Saints you can watch for FREE on YouTube The Australian Catholics Page
1. PADRE PIO