Science

A Covid origin conspiracy?

Featured image Nicholas Wade is the prominent science writer who worked at the New York Times for 30 years, the last 20 as science and health editor. His long May 2021 Medium essay examined the origin of Covid. The best critique I can find of Wade’s Medium essay is this Medika response. Now Wade returns to the subject in a City Journal column examining the recently disclosed emails that seem to lend »

Why did they suppress the lab-leak theory?

Featured image We have occasionally turned to science writer Matt Ridley for clarity and illumination. He brings both to the latest news about the lab-leak theory of the origin of Covid-19. His Spiked column asks “Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory?” Subhead: “In private, they said it was plausible. In public, they called it a conspiracy theory.” Ridley recounts: In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel »

Biden doesn’t follow the science, he cherry picks it [UPDATED]

Featured image A blatantly partisan report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis complains, among other things, that Donald Trump took some positions regarding the pandemic that were contrary to the advice of public health officials and other experts. In my view, this grievance was mostly untrue and, in cases where it had a foundation, isn’t damning. I also wrote that “I look forward to a House report from a »

Mr. Science balks

Featured image For a long time, I sympathized with Dr. Anthony Fauci. There he was, trying to deal with a pandemic caused by a virus no one knew much about. Sure, he was often wrong about pandemic-related matters, but so were plenty of others, on both sides of the political spectrum and in between, who opined on these subjects. Everyone was shooting in the dark. But at some point — possibly because »

Musk for the Win

Featured image I’ve long thought that the categorical criticism many conservatives have of Elon Musk and Tesla was overdone. The Tesla is a great product, and unlike the rest of Silicon Valley, Musk is actually trying to manufacture something tangible, and not just another app, or a fraudulent medical device.  My criticism of Musk was limited to the lavish government subsidies—especially the $7,500 tax credit that goes overwhelmingly to the rich and »

Our Scientific Overlords

Featured image • Headline, from Nature magazine this week: Money quote: “Politicians who are not trained in science should not meddle in our day-to-day business, or tell scientists what’s right or wrong.” This is exactly how we got Fauci funding “gain of function” research in China, and (apparently) experimenting in a gruesome fashion on dogs. • Reminder, from President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address: The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal »

Today in Leftist Absurdity

Featured image My old mentor Stan Evans (bio coming next spring!) liked to quip that “Whenever there is a pressing public policy issue, I want to know what celebrities think. It is important for our lawmakers to hear from Bono.” Behold CNN: But wait—there’s more! Scientific American offers us this commentary on the problematic aspects of Star Wars: The acronym “JEDI” has become a popular term for branding academic committees and labeling »

The panic pandemic

Featured image More than ten years ago, I think, the editors of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal asked me for a blurb to promote the magazine. I wrote a paragraph expressing my appreciation in the course of which I asked the question, “In the age of the Internet, how is it possible for a quarterly magazine to seem the most timely publication in the country?” (Hamlet: “‘Seems.’ madam? Nay, it is.”) Having »

The “Follow ‘the Science'” Clown Show

Featured image “Follow the science” has become one of the most tiresome clichés of our time. It didn’t begin with the climate hustle, and it won’t end with the government’s COVID power lust, which is doing more than the endless hyperbole of the climatistas to reveal to the public what a clown show “authoritative” science has become. The roots of this pretense stretch back to the Enlightenment and the rise of the narrow empiricism »

Down a black hole

Featured image The great Heather Mac Donald is not much given to humor in her documentation of the war on police or the derangement that pervades issues of race and gender on the left. However, her City Journal column “Down a black hole” takes us around a bend into a corner of the Twilight Zone that verges on the humorous: Physicists at MIT and SUNY Stony Brook recently announced findings that the »

The Declining Relevance of Legal Scholarship

Featured image It has been a long-running theme of mine that academic social science, which at its birth promised to bring “scientific” research to bear on solving practical human problems, is increasingly detached from the real world and of almost no use to the larger world. Partly this is because of defects or limitations of positivist social science, the overwhelming leftist bias of most academic social scientists, and the deliberate aloofness of »

Loose Ends (123)

Featured image • First of all, happy Groundhog Day: • Second of all, happy Groundhog Day. • Okay, enough with the jokes. Serious question: Who shot Ashli Babbitt? Usually after a law enforcement involved fatal shooting, we know the name of the officer within a day or two. But the officer who fired the fatal shot at Ashli Babbitt on January 6 has still not been publicly identified, even though news is »

Scenes from the Biden Regency

Featured image For 30 years or more, I’ve been pointing out that when you hear someone at an environmental group, such as the Sierra Club or NRDC, has the title “senior scientist,” you can usually assume the person is a lawyer. Hence this detail from a Northwestern University roundup of Biden’s climate science team jumps out: Some scientists have reservations about the new team, particularly about the need to stress climate reform. »

Mask this

Featured image Based on “the science,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is announcing another set of shutdown measures in yet another of his Joe Isuzu come-ons tonight. Coincidentally comes word of the long-awaited Danish mask study. It was finally published this morning. As expected, it found masks were generally not effective in protecting the wearer of the mask from infection by the Covid virus. This was the largest-ever randomized controlled trial to test »

When “science” follows the left

Featured image Vaping is an alternative to smoking. It’s a way in which nicotine addicts can access that drug without exposure to the harmful tars and chemicals in cigarettes that cause cancer, heart disease, and other maladies. It therefore presents the possibility of saving millions of lives. However, much of the left hates vaping. So it’s not surprising that “science” has been marshaled against it. Last year, the Journal of the American »

The Geek in Pictures

Featured image I’ve got a large backlog of interesting charts, graphs, and tables that I haven’t had a chance to offer up with analysis or commentary, so today I’m going to do a Friday Afternoon Chart Dump just for everyone’s edification. Most of these I’ll post without comment, because you can figure them out for yourselves. Or think of this perhaps as “The Geek in Pictures.” I’ll show myself out. Two more »

The Biggest Defect of the Left [with comment by Paul]

Featured image When asked to name the single greatest defect of the left, I usually answer quite narrowly: an inability to think in terms of tradeoffs. This is why liberals, owing to a Kantian-inspired disposition that favors intentions above consequences, tend always to utopianism, to the view that we if we just have good will and another tax increase, we can have the best yearbook ever! As Thomas Sowell likes to say, “There »