mconradi

Telecoms lawyer

[Campaign Against Antisemitism @antisemitism]

“Contaminated with apartheid and Zionism.”

The anti-Israel mob have officially stopped pretending this isn’t about targeting Jews.

Stickers calling to boycott Israeli goods were placed on a box of matzah in Sainsbury’s in Clifton, Bristol. However, the manufacturer – Rakusen’s – is based in Yorkshire.

This is not a product from Israel. This is a British kosher manufacturer, based in the north of England. Any pretence of this being about Israel has dropped.

They simply saw kosher products in a supermarket and decided that it was fair game to vandalise.

In the 1930s, Nazi propaganda used analogies which compared Jews to parasites, in an effort to dehumanise them and to justify the cleansing of German society from what was perceived to be an unhygienic, contaminating threat. Boycotts of Jewish goods and businesses were also an attempt to rid society of Jews. These stickers echo those disturbing ideas.

We understand that the store manager was alerted and that a police investigation is currently underway.

The targeting of Jewish goods, which bear no connection to Israel, in the name of activism only does one thing: it targets Jews.

[Avi Roy @agingroy]

7,000 false positives per square millimeter. The culprit was the lab gloves.

University of Michigan researchers just upended a core assumption in microplastics science. Latex and nitrile gloves, worn by the scientists doing the measuring, shed stearate particles that look chemically identical to polyethylene. Standard infrared and Raman instruments can't tell them apart. The gloves were counting as plastic.

Seven glove types tested. All contaminated. The cheapest fix: switch to cleanroom gloves, which dropped false positives to around 100 per mm² vs. 7,000.

The "credit card per week" headline (5 grams, WWF/Newcastle 2019) has separate problems. A 2022 re-analysis found severe methodological errors in the original estimate. Actual measured intake is likely 100x lower.

None of this means microplastics are harmless. Last month's data on brain accumulation still stands. But the numbers driving the panic may have been measuring the scientists, not the environment.

Science catching its own errors is exactly how it's supposed to work.

[Hadley Freeman @HadleyFreeman]

An antisemite can’t bear the idea of Jews as victims. It’s why antisemites protested against Israel after October 7, before Israel had even responded - they had to demonise the victims. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge that today’s victims are Jews is showing who they really are

[Bo Wang @BoWang87]

Pancreatic cancer has one of the most suppressive tumor microenvironments in oncology.

But two pancreatic cancer results dropped today. Both matter.

1. BioNTech mRNA neoantigen vaccine: nearly all responders still alive at 6 years. 98% of induced T cells were de novo — the immune system learned to see a cancer it had always been blind to.

2. Daraxonrasib: 47% ORR, 92% disease control as first-line monotherapy. KRAS G12D, undruggable for 40 years, finally has a drug.

Different mechanisms. Same disease. Both working.

<13% of patients survive 5 years. That number is about to change.

great day for science! 🔥

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.

It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.

Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.

Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.

The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.

It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.

The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.

When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

[Sholto David @addictedtoigno1]

Now that I have finally been paid I made a video about the Dana-Farber legal case from my own perspective: https://t.co/nVI4OpZQfH

[Chris Ferguson 🇺🇸🎇🎆 @CJFerguson1111]

It is amazing just how much bad information and misimpression people have about data during this social media moral panic. Things I hear a lot:

1.) There’s a growing body of research finding at least a correlation between social media use and youth mental health. There isn’t in fact, quite the opposite: https://t.co/kGM1uxCQw9

2.) Cellphone bans in schools have produced measurable improvements for students (they haven’t as I’ve covered on my substack several times, see: https://t.co/HOQw8AuK3s). US standardized testing has continued on the same modest declining trajectory.

3.) Bullying has increased due to social media (according to National Center for Education Statistics, bullying in fact DECLINED during the social media age).

4.) Reducing social media time improves mental health in experiments (it does not…experiments are pretty flawed but, overall, show little evidence for improvements).

5.) Children had healthier childhoods prior to the high-tech age (they did not in fact. According to government statistics, the children who grew up in the 70s and 80s, had the highest suicide, violent crime, drug and alcohol use, teen pregnancy, school dropout, etc. rates. Today’s youth are, by contrast, doing far better…even the mental health stuff seems to be downstream of their parents’ mental health struggles, not something done by tech).

Be alert for these false statements. I see even a lot of critics of bans repeating them, but they are false and probably are only fueling the moral panic.

Of course, I heard most of this stuff during the video game era as well.

[mconradi @mconradi]

@hugorifkind https://t.co/rDkXJjNX7u

[Edward Luce @EdwardGLuce]

Strange situation where we await a statement from Iran to check whether there's any truth to what US president is saying.

[mconradi @mconradi]

@addictedtoigno1 Well done Sholto - this is really terrific and deserves a very wide audience.

[Sholto David @addictedtoigno1]

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Agrees to Pay $15 Million to Settle Fraud Allegations Related to Scientific Research Grants. The relator [Sholto David] will receive $2,625,000 under today’s settlement.
https://t.co/8o6zvTAGEU

[RES Leighton @leightonc]

Good to work with @senseaboutsci on this short vid:
Key questions on public spending - Ask your evidence https://t.co/Xk3CGMNszU

[mconradi @mconradi]

@GSpellchecker https://t.co/DVTulxh7C7

[habibi @habibi_uk]

Hi @wesstreeting, you recently expressed exasperation with the "miserable excuses" of the GMC when it comes to serious antisemitism cases. You've spoken up about the NHS itself too.

Well, how about some action? Here is a very nasty case. See Rahmeh Aladwan rage for... 1/5

[mconradi @mconradi]

@GSpellchecker was she arrested for tweets? or for public support for terrorism - in-person at rallies like thjis one? Seems to onlookers are much more likely to be encouraged to commit acts of violence themselves when they are amongst others hearing the same messages as opposed to online

[Gabriel Pogrund @Gabriel_Pogrund]

Just left synagogue briefly and read the news in detail. Sickening, surreal.

For as long as I recall a fact of Jewish life has been security duty: ordinary lay members standing outside shul to create a physical and psychological deterrent against events like this. One always wonders - as I did recently, standing in a high-vis vest after agreeing to a far-too-irregular shift on a Shabbat morning, and as my wife has done far more often - how necessary that presence is.

I was in Pittsburgh shortly after a white nationalist assassinated worshippers at a progressive synagogue, I've gone through what feels like military security to get into a shul in Sweden, I was in Paris days after a jihadist sought to murder shoppers at a kosher supermarket. And of course I've been in bomb shelters in the Holy Land.

Britain has always felt different - a place where people, mercifully, do not have to die for being born Jewish. It is, by most objective measures, one of the best, possibly the best, places in the world to be Jewish, now or at any time in history. Yet who could say the last few years have not challenged that? Who today could say it is not necessary for us to stand outside our synagogues, waiting for an event like this befall us, hoping but not quite knowing this day will pass like all the others.

I always find it remarkable that on the two occasions I've been to JW3 (London's Jewish community center) since  October 7, on every occasion, people driving down Finchley Road have hooted or screamed abuse at the queue of elderly folk shuffling in - I posted about both incidents out of some tiny sense of obligation, knowing they formed part of a bigger story, even if my Britishness, and Jewishness, both made me want to do the opposite, to ignore and suppress it.

Until recently, our High Holy Days machzor - or prayer book for Yom Kippur - had remained the same since the 70s - written largely by Germanic Jewish scholars in the immediate shadow of the Holocaust, full of words and poems trying to make sense of that event. Seeing footage of a body soaked in blood outside a shul in Manchester, it feels like the penumbra of that period hover over us a little more today. On Yom Kippur the customary greeting is "Gamar Chatima Tova" - in short, may you be inscribed in the book of life for the following year. Which is why this attack, on our holiest day, is such an unimaginable affront to Jewish life in our country.

[mconradi @mconradi]

@stephenpollard @GSpellchecker I agree. I noticed that you posted this and it’s meaningful.

[Creative Community for Peace @CCFPeace]

The sad reality for Jews worldwide.

Thank you to opera singer Sarah Callinan for shedding light on the growing antisemitism in the US and the heartbreaking level of security Jews need to attend their synagogues safely.

[mconradi @mconradi]

@thomasforth This is still a lie but in a different way. The Equiano cable does not land near Durham. In fact it does not land in the UK at all. https://t.co/5Cgj9pIEVJ

[mconradi @mconradi]

@fionamocatta @j4ppleby I endorse this post!!

[Gary B @garyb_pro]

Hilarious - "Zoe’s ‘wholefood’ supplement is ultra-processed"

https://t.co/NSA39d0ixd

"Writing in The Telegraph, Prof Spector has hit back at the “nonsense” decision and said the two ingredients in question were “culinary ingredients” and “beneficial for health”.

[mconradi @mconradi]

@portraitinflesh https://t.co/ceK4GS4jud

[mconradi @mconradi]

@portraitinflesh In this case he is actually - literally - correct. “South Africa's Black Economic Empowerment regulations require 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged groups for communication service providers” https://t.co/Sx6pe1juVV