Science
January 14, 2023 — John Hinderaker
One of the saddest aspects of the Left’s takeover of our institutions is what it has done to the scientific establishment. This is a big topic, but for now let’s stick to the Lancet, which once was one of the world’s most respected medical journals. Now, it is largely a joke, pushing hack politics–race, gender, climate change–instead of seriously advancing medical science. This degeneration long predates covid. In 2016, I
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January 3, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Oh goody, something new for The View and other fanatical leftists to worry about. Fans of statistical fallacies and other quantitative flim-flam will know that it is possible to demonstrate a correlation between storks and the birth rate, but social science has moved on to much more significant questions, such as “anti-wolf sentiment.” And especially anti-wolf sentiment among—wait for it!—the “far right.” A recent study from the Proceedings of the
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January 2, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Paul Ehrlich is alive — I thought that was news — and he is still predicting doom. He was among the featured experts on last night’s 60 Minutes segment “Scientists say planet in midst of sixth mass extinction, Earth’s wildlife running out of places to live” (video below). CBS’s Scott Pelley tracked him down: At the age of 90, biologist Paul Ehrlich may have lived long enough to see some
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October 25, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Nicholas Wade is the excellent former New York Times science reporter. I want to recommend his City Journal essay/review “Friends in viral places.” Wade takes up a new book on the origin of Covid-19 whose author he describes as “a well-regarded and widely published writer about viruses and natural history[.]” The review is educational and entertaining. Among other things, Wade indicts the author for shortchanging the lab-leak theory of the
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October 10, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Over at the University of Minnesota Medical School, one probably shouldn’t be seen with books such as Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon or Fan Shen’s memoir Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard. It might reflect an inclination to think for yourself and other such bourgeois indulgences. I’m thinking that they missed a few strokes at this year’s white-coat ceremony for new students. The video below is a
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October 10, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Last month Anthony Gockowski reported for Alpha News on the oath to “promote a culture of anti-racism” taken by incoming University of Minnesota Medical School students at their white-coat ceremony on August 19: White coats, the students said, are themselves a “symbol of power, prestige, and dominance.” Therefore, students will “strive to reclaim their identity as a symbol of responsibility, humility, and loving kindness.” “We commit to uprooting the legacy
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October 1, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Hurricane Ian is moving up the Atlantic seaboard and apparently passing into history. It was tremendously destructive as it hit the Gulf coast of Florida, and Democrats didn’t even wait for the hurricane to make landfall before politicizing it. Democrats hope Ian will bring down, or at least put a chink in the armor of, the heretofore invincible Ron DeSantis. But I am confused: didn’t we learn during Katrina that
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September 15, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Apparently there could be. Herewith the opening of an article just out in Nature magazine: The fraught quest to account for sex in biology research In 2016, pharmacologist Susan Howlett wrote up a study on how hormone levels during pregnancy affect heart function and sent it off to a journal. When the reviewers’ comments came back, two of the three had asked an unexpected question: where were the tissues from male
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August 14, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Given how the cultural left dislikes manliness as “toxic masculinity,” maybe we shouldn’t be surprised to find some social science behind wimpy liberalism. Behold: Testosterone Administration Induces A Red Shift in Democrats Paul Zak, Claremont Graduate University Abstract: We tested the fixity of political preferences of 136 healthy males during the 2011 U.S. presidential election season by administering synthetic testosterone or placebo to participants who had identified the strength of
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July 23, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Emina Melonic joins us again to amplify a number of key issues dilated recently by another friend of Power Line, Daniel McCarthy, writing in The Spectator: In a recent article in The Spectator, Daniel McCarthy reflects on some of the bioethical problems of our age: surrogacy and the frightening possibility of artificial wombs. He writes that “The technology [for artificial wombs] doesn’t exist yet, but there is already a market
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June 13, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Nothing so fully exposes the dream world of the left, in which good intentions and sentiments are thought sufficient to make reality bend to their will, than the enthusiasm for “re-imagining policing” that went along with the “Defund the Police” mania post-George Floyd. If we just “re-imagine” something, it will happen! We don’t even need to close our eyes and click our heels! And one of the leading ideas was
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May 9, 2022 — Steven Hayward
I think I have posted this chart before in a Geek in Pictures gallery, but it is worth breaking out on its own for a spotlight: Notice that back in the 1980s and early 1990s, “trust in science” was higher among Republicans than Democrats, but what accounts for the explosion in Democratic Party trust in science in the last two years? I suspect if Donald Trump had been re-elected, and
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February 6, 2022 — Steven Hayward
One of my heterodox positions on climate change is that many of our scientific efforts to improve our grasp of the earth’s climate system since it became a hot topic (no pun intended) back in the 1970s have actually moved our knowledge backwards. That is, we actually understand it less well than we did 40 years ago. This is especially true of the heart of the matter: the computer climate
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January 27, 2022 — Steven Hayward
When Democrats aren’t trying to keep children out of school and (not) learning online, or requiring them to wear masks when they’re (not) learning in crappy union-run public schools, they’re trying to warehouse them in government-run universal child care programs. Universal child care is one of the centerpieces of the Democrats’ BBB Bill (better known as “Biden’s Big Blunder”). Yet the people who scream “follow the science” never seem to
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January 24, 2022 — Scott Johnson
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
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January 14, 2022 — Scott Johnson
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
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December 22, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
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
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