URLs du Jour

2021-12-17

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  • I think we're turning Japanese, I really think so. The 2021 edition of the Human Freedom Index is out, and (for many reasons) our country is underperforming.

    The countries that took the top 10 places, in order, were Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Canada and Finland (tied at 6), Australia, Sweden, and Luxembourg. Selected jurisdictions rank as follows: United Kingdom (14), Germany, Japan, and the United States (tied at 15), Taiwan (19), Chile (28), Hong Kong (30), South Korea (31), France (34), Argentina (74), South Africa (77), Brazil (78), Mexico (93), India (119), Nigeria (123), Russia (126), Turkey (139), China (150), Saudi Arabia (155), Iran (160), Venezuela (164), and Syria (165).

    (Bold added.) This is one of those studies that assign numeric scores on a multitude of categories, weighted to compute an overall number. So your own preferences might jiggle the rankings to get a different result.

    Still: outscored by Canada?!


  • Hey kids, what time is it? Well if you're Senator Karen… Elizabeth Warren Says It's Time to Destroy the Supreme Court. Charles C. W. Cooke rumbles:

    In the Boston Globe, Elizabeth Warren writes that she now supports destroying the Supreme Court:

    To restore balance and integrity to a broken institution, Congress must expand the Supreme Court by four or more seats.

    Some oppose the idea of court expansion. They have argued that expansion is “court-packing,” that it would start a never-ending cycle of adding justices to the bench, and that it would undermine the court’s integrity.

    They are wrong. And their concerns do not reflect the gravity of the Republican hijacking of the Supreme Court.

    Why “four or more”? Because Elizabeth Warren likes three of the current justices and dislikes six of the current justices (one of whom has been there for more than thirty years; two of whom have been there for more than 15 years), and because adding four or more new justices would ensure that the people she likes would have a majority.

    That’s it. That’s the case.

    Good grief, she's a menace.

    I would expect her enthusiasm for court packing will evaporate within a few nanoseconds following the 2022 elections.


  • Reminder: the FDA kills people. Reason's Ronald Bailey pleads: The FDA Should Immediately Approve Pfizer's Anti-COVID-19 Pill Paxlovid.

    Considering how fast the omicron variant is spreading through various European countries, it looks likely that the U.S. will experience a winter surge of COVID-19 infections. Vaccinations, especially booster shots, remain an effective first line of defense against the new variant. However, the bureaucrats at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have been dilatory about approving a second line of defense in the form of a new antiviral pill developed by Pfizer.

    The drugmaker is reporting today that clinical trials find that its Paxlovid pill "reduced risk of hospitalization or death by 89% (within three days of symptom onset) and 88% (within five days of symptom onset) compared to placebo; no deaths compared to placebo in non-hospitalized, high-risk adults with COVID-19." Paxlovid is a combination of the ritonavir protease HIV inhibitor and a new protease inhibitor that targets a specific enzyme that the coronavirus, including the omicron variant, needs to replicate and grow.

    Bailey reminds us that Covid deaths are running around 1200 per day. But the FDA bureaucrats apparently haven't done their Christmas shopping yet, so … "the agency has apparently not yet scheduled a meeting of its advisory committee to review Pfizer's EUA application."


  • I have no evidence disconfirming this assertion. Astral Codex Ten has a linguistic bone to pick: The Phrase "No Evidence" Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication. He compares news stories containing headline language like (from February 2020):

    No evidence of airborne coronavirus transmission - WHO official

    with ones like this from September 2021:

    There is no evidence 45,000 people died from vaccine-related complications

    and goes on to observe:

    You can see the problem. Science communicators are using the same term - “no evidence” - to mean:

    1. This thing is super plausible, and honestly very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet, so we can’t be sure.

    2. We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop repeating this easily debunked lie.

    This is utterly corrosive to anybody trusting science journalism. Imagine you are John Q. Public. You read “no evidence of human-to-human transmission of coronavirus”, and then a month later it turns out such transmission is common. You read “no evidence linking COVID to indoor dining”, and a month later your governor has to shut down indoor dining because of all the COVID it causes. You read “no hard evidence new COVID strain is more transmissible”, and a month later everything is in panic mode because it was more transmissible after all. And then you read “no evidence that 45,000 people died of vaccine-related complications”. Doesn’t sound very reassuring, does it?

    It's not just science communication. Exercise for the reader: Search Google News for "no evidence" and classify the stories you find according to the different usages described above.


Last Modified 2024-01-19 5:47 PM EDT