ToeNeon

“The stock market is the only place where when stuff goes on sale everyone gets angry…”

[Rob Alberts @robertjalberts]

@LeftwaffenWatch This one wins the day. You can't make this stuff up. @Cambridge_Uni is beyond parody. It's a mental asylum.

https://t.co/Kv93vobWOc

[memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus]

Here’s a speech she gave a while back. Again I keep pointing back to the same post because it’s all down to who they believe has agency. Black people are failing because of systems that rob their agency. She says as much in the speech. It’s because the alternative explanation for these figures transforms the conversation from white people are evil, into black people are failures.

[Charles Murray @charlesmurray]

I had no idea the invention of the word "racism" was so recent.

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

You could use a life expectancy chart to see when communism fell

[Jerry Coyne @Evolutionistrue]

The Arday Saga: a gift that never stops giving. Yes, they'll certainly have to pull the book.

[John Stossel @JohnStossel]

Four years ago, I interviewed a woman whose home was seized over unpaid taxes.

But her house was worth $286K MORE than what she owed.

The Supreme Court now says that's unconstitutional.

Yet she still hasn’t gotten her money back:

[Jeffery Mead @the_jefferymead]

The goof troop.

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong on the battlefield if the Iranians can take this position with a straight face.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Two Obama and Biden Appellate Court Judges just voted against the desperately needed Military Center, required for the National Security of Washington, D.C., and our Country, itself...

[America @america]

The U.S. Senate voted on a motion to invoke cloture on a bill that would add a Voter ID requirement for elections.

Every single Democrat voted against it.

America deserves secure elections.

[Joe Lonsdale @JTLonsdale]

The Iranian government, Abdul, and Zohran all spend money on bot networks to pretend they are more popular - and that people detest their opponents.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

The main question this raises for me is whether David is daft or whether he's lying. It's at least one or the other.

Let's go through what David's said and why he's completely wrong and how, as a result, he's spreading misinformation.

In the Rogan clip, David said "Sudden blindness. It's called NAION, which is now twice as more prevalent because of the GLP-1 drugs.... Sudden blindness has doubled seemingly because these meds [referring to GLP-1RAs]."

To support this claim, David must provide data showing that the population rate of "sudden blindness" (and perhaps just NAION) has doubled.

Does he? No. What he links, instead, is a study that compares small groups of people at one particular ophthalmology clinic who were taking GLP-1RAs to those taking either other diabetes medications or other obesity medications. He also linked a press release on a conference presentation to a similarly-weak analysis.

Can you grasp the difference between what he should've linked and what he did link?

He linked non-causal comparisons of groups that are very different from the general population, but he should've linked EHR or alternative monitoring-based prevalence estimates, like what I pulled.

Now, if we take David's linked studies seriously, then the actual rate of NAION in society should be well beyond the actually diagnosed rate. The actual rate is 2-10 per 100,000. In one of the studies he linked, it's almost 2% of the diabetics on non-GLP-1RA medication and almost 9% on GLP-1RAs. Given the number of Americans who have used GLP-1RAs by now, you should know many people who went blind. But you do not, because these studies don't apply to the general population.

I pointed this out before in a post linked in the thread that David is replying to, meaning that in addition to being daft, a liar, or both, he's also not circumspected, because his specific links were already shown to lead to absurd conclusions. In fact, the result was also shown to not hold up when the analysis is done in large, population-representative samples with better controls: https://t.co/xb4h50sMSE

My conclusions subsequently replicated again: https://t.co/dwNY3I4CVB

And again: https://t.co/ft6BWN7qxp

David's only holds up in weak studies with small samples, poor controls, and results that imply that HUGE portions of the population should've already gone blind -- and they have not, so they are obviously wrong.

This is part of what I was getting at in the thread: we can sanity check these studies. If they imply that there should be an epidemic of blindness, we can look to see in descriptive data if there is such an epidemic. Since there is not, we know the studies are flawed in one or more ways that prevent generalizing from them.

Get it? David didn't.

Instead, he decided to go on one of the most popular podcasts and fail to even describe his referenced studies correctly.

David's "sudden blindness" remark was actually fortuitous for me, because using all forms of acute blindness, we have enough power to detect a trend lately, if there's been one. There hasn't, as I noted. Looking at NAION specifically, we're left with a different conclusion: there's not enough power to detect a doubling (there is more than enough to detect what David's cited studies imply though!). The numbers have not drifted at all with age controlled (they're nonsignificantly down), which means that there's not even a reason to suspect the incidence is up.

That also means there's not a reason for David to have said what he did. He just yapped without underlying data to support what he said, and data actually contradicting it.

David's comment started ironically, by accusing me of having a financial conflict of interest. Ironically, he has a financial conflict of interest, in that he is developing a therapy that he believes will help with this issue that isn't actually an issue. So, he's financially incentivized to play it up, even though doing so is lying and is harmful because it gets patients to avoid good drugs on the basis of alleged side effects that would, at most, be extremely rare, and are more likely not present at all.

So, is David dumb? Is he lying? Or is he a bad actor? Of course, he can be all of the above.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

@KanekoaTheGreat It's a lie.

https://t.co/LS07A9BEwR

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

@davidasinclair You know you're the one with the financial conflict of interest, right? And your linked studies have literally nothing to do with what you've said. Citing them only proves you can't read studies.

https://t.co/x2J8cIcML1

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

This is a lie. People go on Rogan and just say things that are not true, and they get away with it.

In TriNetX, adding all sudden/acute vision loss, the incidence for ages 45-54 in 2016 vs. 2023 is down 1.5%; for 55-64, up 0.9%; for ≥65, up 10.7% (-0.1% age-controlled).

[Eli Steele @Hebro_Steele]

"Ferguson is often thought of as an isolated event, something that happened way back when. I recently had to explain what happened in Ferguson to several eighteen year olds who had never heard of the shooting, because they were six years old when it happened. But Ferguson is not an isolated event. In many ways, it is the beginning, or the key escalation, in the long running culture war that is now sixty years old, and its repercussions are felt to this day. Would the stunning response sanitizing the Hamas of October 7 as freedom fighters have been possible without how Ferguson changed the landscape? Likely not. Or it wouldn’t have been as successful. Ferguson was the launch of Black Lives Matter, the elevation of liberation ideology and the red-green axis that rolls stronger today than ever. And it all began on Canfield Drive with the dead body of Michael Brown lying on that scorching pavement that August afternoon and this weekend is the twelfth anniversary."

Full article below.

[Atelier Missor @AtelierMissor_]

In a few days, Prometheus will stand 50 ft tall, holding high the torch of the West.

Starbase, Texas.

[Atelier Missor @AtelierMissor_]

Honored to have crafted these bronze statues for Freedom Plaza in Washington DC.

[Atelier Missor @AtelierMissor_]

Modern Paris was largely built in just 17 years. It was a civilization-scale mission, backed by the full force of the state.

Today, with modern technology, a small group of men could build cities that surpass it in splendor.

All we need is the will to dream of eternity.

We also need welders, structural engineers, and investors.

DM us if you want to walk by our side in this endeavor.

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

I fixed the statement for him.

“Everyone hates mobile phone companies, our dead zones and scammy billing and crappy customer service. I have no idea how we are going to compete with Starlink because we can’t build satellites or launch rockets—and it will just work so people won’t even need customer service.

“But maybe we can flip TMo to PE and milk the revenue for a few more years while they haven’t built it all out yet.

“In unrelated news my LinkedIn is updated and DM are open.”