Francesc Rodríguez Tous

[Benjamin Ryan @benryanwriter]

No, the Data Hasn't Shown that 'Transgenderism Is Effectively Over,' as Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog Trumpeted

🧵⬇️An academic, @epkaufm, just went mega-viral on X thanks to his false presumption that a recent rapid rise and fall in reported nonbinary identification demonstrated a comparable trend for trans identities.

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

Happy Birthday Margaret Thatcher!

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2025 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth” with one half to Mokyr “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress” and the other half jointly to Aghion and Howitt “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction.”

#NobelPrize

[Hanno Lustig @HannoLustig]

Not so much to be proud of. There is very little innovation in the EU. The EU is at risk of gradually becoming a large museum that foreigners visit to remind themselves of how societies that were once super innovative and created immense wealth and prosperity can gradually stagnate, crushed by the weight of all sorts of rules and regulations, designed by insiders to protect their rents.

[Prof Jeffrey S Morris @jsm2334]

If ACIP wants to build public confidence, they must do better than this.

At the meeting, a “gotcha” question was put to the Pfizer representative about a single secondary endpoint from one Pfizer covid vaccine pregnancy trial—buried in table 26 on page 94 of a 2,102-page report with hundreds of tables and thousands of outcomes.

The post that followed insinuated that the randomized trial showed vaccine harm in the form of birth defects, while ignoring the basic fact that these defects occurred long before the women were vaccinated.

The trial protocol shows women were vaccinated at 24–34 weeks gestation (https://t.co/l03MrdBKOO)— well after most defects would have formed, typically at conception or during weeks 4–10.

The eight cases in the vaccine group (vs. two in placebo) are detailed in table 26, page 94 of this 2,102-page report (https://t.co/oOPtTkkP2l).

The birth defects for the Pfizer group are atrial septal defect (4–6 wks), congenital rubella syndrome (maternal infection, wks 4–10), DiGeorge syndrome (present at conception), microcephaly (early onset), mucopolysaccharidosis (genetic, at conception), polydactyly (4–8 wks), syndactyly (6–8 wks), and trisomy 21 (present from fertilization).

Why would the chair of ACIP make a public post implying that this trial showed significant vaccine harm, and suggest Pfizer was concealing results simply because they couldn’t provide a detailed answer on the spot at the meeting?

And why post this long afterward, when it was obvious from the protocol that these birth defects arose well before vaccination—a fact any national vaccine leader, especially the chair of ACIP, should recognize immediately?

If ACIP hopes to convince the public that it is serious about rigorous scientific evaluation, its leaders must rise above “gotcha” social media posts that misrepresent clinical trial results and risk feeding anti-vaccine narratives.

[Geoff Shullenberger @g_shullenberger]

Viewpoint epistemology, MAGA edition:

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

cato institute analysis of murders by political ideology since 1975, excluding 9/11

[Film Updates @FilmUpdates]

Scarlett Johansson pays tribute to Robert Redford:

"Bob Redford cast me in ‘The Horse Whisperer’ when I was 11 years old. Every day before each scene, he would take the time to sit with me and walk me through all of the beats that led my character up until that particular point in the story. Bob taught me what acting could be, and it was from his generosity and patience that I was inspired to pursue the possibilities of the craft."

[Morgan Freeman @morgan_freeman]

There are certain people you know that you’re going to click with. After working with Robert Redford on Brubaker in 1980, we instantly became friends. Working with him again in An Unfinished Life was a dream come true.

Rest peacefully, my friend.

[Nick Clairmont @NickClairmont1]

Maybe the most perfect example of how journalistic bias operates I’ve ever come across. Here is how the New York Times words its description of Cat Stevens’s comments on Salman Rushdie today:

[Thomas Chatterton Williams @thomaschattwill]

JD Vance goes to Munich and the United Kingdom to lecture Europeans on free speech and then addresses Americans asking them to inform on each other. The hypocrisy is the point.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

This notion that Tyler Robinson was radicalized by one semester of college classes when most courses were not even in person requires a bit more evidence

[Rotimi Adeoye @_rotimia]

I’m happy you’ve had a change of heart, I think you should apologize for this?

[Jeffrey Sachs @JeffreyASachs]

An Israeli dance prof is suing UC Berekley for allegedly discriminating against her on the basis of her nationality. Having taught at the dance department before, she was encouraged in the summer 2023 to apply for renewal.

This is what the chair said a few months later.

[Nico Perrino @NicoPerrino]

Campus censorship is about to get a whole lot worse.

The Trump administration, picking up where the Biden administration left off, is attempting to do two very unconstitutional things:

1) Resurrect the dead doctrine of "group libel" to effectively prohibit hate speech.

2) Advance a new, "cumulative" theory of harassment, whereby individual instances of protected speech, spoken by different speakers to different audiences, can amount to unlawful harassment.

When colleges stand up to these theories in court, they win. But how many of them will be willing to put millions of dollars worth of federal funding on the line to do so?

[Jerome Adams @JeromeAdamsMD]

I’ve tried to be objective & non-alarmist in response to current HHS actions – but quite frankly this move is going to cost lives. mRNA technology has uses that go far beyond vaccines… and the vaccine they helped develop in record time is credited with saving millions. 🤯

[Kareem Rifai 🌐 @KareemRifai]

The D in DSA is silent.

[The Free Press @TheFP]

“Forget about how this impacts people like the CEO and his mistress, garden-variety sinners who, through a combination of terrible luck and atrocious judgment, will be famous, and hated, for the rest of their lives. You don’t have to feel sorry for them (although I admit, I kind of do; there are literal mass murderers who enjoy more anonymity and less opprobrium than these two). If there’s a truly compelling reason not to normalize shaming as a global, always-on public spectator sport, it’s not that it degrades the humanity of the shamed; it’s not even the trite ‘who among us has not canoodled at a Coldplay concert with his sidepiece’ justification. It’s simply this: When we take joy in the distress and ruination of other people, we make monsters of ourselves.” —@KatRosenfield

[Alice @AliceFromQueens]

These newly popular accounts pushing pro-Hitler WW2 revisionism are—to anyone with a basic grasp of the history—so obviously f-ing stupid that it’s tempting to stay out of the weeds and just mock them.

It’s much more valuable to do what Cooke masterfully does here.