Health research is based on trust. Health professionals and journal editors reading the results of a clinical trial assume that the trial happened and that the results were honestly reported. But about 20% of the time, said Ben Mol, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash Health, they would be wrong. As I’ve been concerned about research fraud for 40 years, I wasn’t that surprised as many would be by this figure, but it led me to think that the time may have come to stop assuming that research actually happened and is honestly reported, and assume that the research is fraudulent until there is some evidence to support it having happened and been honestly reported. The Cochrane Collaboration, which purveys “trusted information,” has now taken a step in that direction.
[…]
We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary.
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July 27th, 2021 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
 July 25th, 2021 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
[The scientific establishment has always had a tendency] “to turn into a church, enforcing obedience to the latest dogma and expelling heretics and blasphemers.” July 24th, 2021 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Democracy is just another way of deciding who gets to control the available means of collective coercion. Democracy has nothing whatsoever to do with civil liberty, albeit the two get conflated all the time. There is nothing particularly uplifting or sacred or morally superior about democracy, it is just better than most of the alternatives when it comes to deciding when a given cunt has outstayed his welcome in the halls of power. As my chum Guy Herbert likes to say “democracy makes a fine brake but a terrible steering wheel.” What any system needs is some form of constitutionalism, something that places certain things beyond politics (US Bill of Rights is a nice example, to the extent it still works, which it kinda sorta still does in some ways). There needs to be some form of framework that limits what state power is even allowed to do, regardless of which arsehole is in charge this year. That was why Tony Blair was such a profound calamity, as he essentially destroyed British notions of constitutional limits on state power. Everything is now up for grabs. July 23rd, 2021 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Then do we give them back their freedom? Not at all. Then we move the goalposts, making freedom conditional on more and more people getting the vaccine. Until we make it to so-called ‘Freedom Day’, a month later than originally planned, and Boris Johnson chooses then to tell young people that their freedom to do the things they enjoy will be dependent on receiving a vaccine. A vaccine that uses experimental technology and was rushed through trials without waiting for the full safety data (trials which will never now conclude as the control groups have been vaccinated). A vaccine, or rather vaccines, which the authorities now acknowledge increase the risk of dangerous blood clotting and heart conditions, particularly in younger people. Vaccines for which there are now more reports of fatalities in the U.S. than all other vaccines put together for the past 30 years. – Will Jones writing about The Great Betrayal July 21st, 2021 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The path from… “All we want is to be free to love” to… “Bake the cake or go to jail, motherfcker!” is becoming quicker and more direct. July 19th, 2021 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
[Overheard on a train in UK] Passenger 1: “Have you seen what’s happening in South Africa? The authorities have let order completely break down. It’s getting so bad even BBC is starting to show coverage.” Passenger 2: “Yeah, it’s terrible, Natal is starting to look like Portland. July 18th, 2021 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is quite interesting, Tucker Carlson reading Darryl Cooper’s thread on twitter. Same video on YouTube if you have technical issues. But it is unwise to rely on YouTube for entirely political reasons, hence the BitChute upload ‘just in case’. July 15th, 2021 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you… that the communist BLM organisation supports the Communist Cuban government’s repression of protests. July 15th, 2021 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
At least her blasphemy law would be religiously inclusive. She namechecked Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Ram, Buddha and Guru Nanak as some figures whose dignity should also be protected, concluding: ‘When striking the careful balance to protect such emotional harms, can there and should there be a hierarchy of sentiments?’ So there we have it – a British MP in 2021 wondering out loud if people should be punished for disrespecting gods, messiahs, gurus and prophets. It goes without saying that if Shah were ever to succeed in this, it would be curtains for free speech any more than it already is: free speech was, after all, built on the right to blaspheme. July 12th, 2021 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some governments have also set up detention centres for international travellers entering into their countries, where they are forced to quarantine at their own expense while they wait for the results of their covid-19 tests. Shockingly, in early June 2021, the provincial government in Ontario, Canada, went so far as to announce that residents in long-term care homes would soon be permitted to engage in “close physical contact, including handholding” and “brief hugs” with visitors when both parties are fully immunized. Unfortunately, instead of criticizing this state of affairs, the mainstream media and major social media platforms are fully on board. They have turned out to be willing collaborators of the governments in these matters by glorifying their oppressive and punitive measures, censuring critical viewpoints, and fostering a culture of surveillance, all while spreading fear. They have also been ceaselessly promoting the injection of experimental vaccines as the only solution that will bring totalitarian lockdown measures to an end. July 6th, 2021 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yet in many ways, Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world, albeit in an unexpected form: in the worldview of those progressives who typically see “proto-fascism” lurking on the Right. Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today. Indeed, Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. In the West, for example, the “Great Reset,” introduced by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, proposes an expanded welfare state and an economy that transcends the market for the greater goal of serving racial and gender “equity”, as well as saving the planet. July 5th, 2021 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
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