If you are wondering how the lockdown philosophy seems to have gripped conservative political leaders just as thoroughly as liberals, this article offers some great insights into how that happened. The author refers mostly to the British experience, but his observations would apply equally to most political jurisdictions on the planet.

“One of the most striking things about the past year has been the uniform and all but unquestioning embrace of the novel policy of lockdown by Government, opposition parties, and the mainstream media. Even as the number of fatalities, hospitalisations, and cases collapse, the Government remains religiously wedded to the sclerotic pace of its easing strategy and news bulletins continue to duckspeak calls to comply with the most illiberal restrictions ever imposed on British society, refusing to interrogate these restrictions’ costs. Those who question lockdown orthodoxy, be they distinguished scientists, civil liberties campaigners, or journalists beyond the print and televisual oligopolies, are denounced as ‘deniers’ and shut down.”

“Above all, the political class is unfamiliar with the scientific method. They understand ‘the science’ as a term of power they can deploy to shut down debates and win arguments, which has one ‘correct’ answer. They fail to recognise it as a process of investigation, determined by assumptions and inputs, which will often produce outlying results and whose purveyors can unintentionally mislead the uninitiated by the words they use to describe phenomena like percentage correlations.”

Not long ago, Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which downplayed many of the worst case scenarios for Covid and projected natural herd immunity by April. This article was widely shared via social media like Facebook, who reacted by unleashing the fact checking commissars. This latest WSJ article looks at how leftist social media outlets are doing their best to ensure that debate gives way to dogma.

“…the progressive health clerisy don’t like his projection because they worry it could lead to fewer virus restrictions. The horror! Health Feedback’s fact checkers disagree with the evidence Dr. Makary cites as well as how he interprets it. Fine. Scientists disagree all the time. Much of conventional health wisdom about red meat, sodium and cardiovascular risk is still fiercely debated.

The same goes for Covid-19. There’s still much we don’t understand about the virus and its transmission and immunity. Yet Facebook’s fact-checkers “cherry-pick,” to borrow their word, studies to support their own opinions, which they present as fact.”

“Scientists often disagree over how to interpret evidence. Debate is how ideas are tested and arguments are refined. But Facebook’s fact checkers are presenting their opinions as fact and seeking to silence other scientists whose views challenge their own.”

Experts puzzled by India’s dramatic drop in coronavirus cases

Do tell…

That success can’t be attributed to vaccinations since India only began administering shots in January — 

And yet they’re absolutely sure they still know what’s best for you. 

Via Richard Fernandez;

Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.
 
This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.
 
I don’t mean global warming. I’m talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.
 
Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.
 
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
 
All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.

More on this War Room episode, Fernandez segment begins about 26 minutes in.

…about 300 years ago, Sir Isaac Newton introduced the idea that all matter exists at points called particles. One hundred fifty years after that, James Clerk Maxwell introduced the electromagnetic wave – the underlying and often invisible form of magnetism, electricity and light. The particle served as the building block for mechanics and the wave for electromagnetism – and the public settled on the particle and the wave as the two building blocks of matter. Together, the particles and waves became the building blocks of all kinds of matter.

Follow the politics: I will say that the most difficult paper that my team (the New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab) and I have ever tried to publish was a paper on the topic of political motivations that underlie academic values of academics.

Oldest Human Fossils Outside Africa Push Back Our Timeline…Again

NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places.

h/t Chris