Atlanta, GA

April 22, 2025

“By doubting we come to enquiry, and by enquiry we pursue the truth.”

- Pierre Abélard

Happy “Earth Day”!

We’ve reached another secular holy day we’re browbeaten to observe. But as we give it a look, let’s be sure to do so with open eyes.

Recent years have resurrected a rhetorical cudgel historically used to silence dissent.

Througho…

Read more

Atlanta, GA

March 9, 2025

We didn’t used to need governments to tell us the time. For millennia the sun did it for us, enabling our ancestors to get thru the day.

Medieval clocks added some precision. But their main "improvement” (if we want to call it that) on the ancient sundial was they enabled us to tell time at night.

Not that many people cared. In tho…

Read more

November 17, 2024

“It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know that just ain’t so.”

Mark Twain 

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."

Leo Tolstoy

“Heart disease has nothing to do with eating saturated fat, nor does it have anything to do with cholesterol in the bloodstream.”

Dr Malcom Kendrick

Among the lazy assumptions of recent years is that “Science” is “Truth.” 

But science isn’t truth. It’s a quest for truth.

Or, rather, it’s a search for error…an ongoing effort to uncover contradiction and find flaws.

Science seeks a single sunrise in the west. It need find only one failure for a hypothesis to be falsified, and for the scientific method to have done its job.

Disguised Statisticians

As Richard Feynman said, and as we were repeatedly reminded the last several years,

“It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period."

Yet modern practitioners of “the Science” would view an occidental dawn not as a falsification, but as a “paradox”… a “breakthrough case”…an exception that proves their predetermined rule.

The last few years proved that many “scientists” are little more than disguised statisticians or suborned charlatans. They’re paid by the State to defend a preconceived canon, with “research” lending credence to a lucrative cause.

From their government perch or university nest, too many of them molest numbers to craft a conclusion…and hide inconvenient results they don’t want others to see. Like Court economists or Regime historians, they’re captured lackeys of a corrupt caste.

For more than a century, government has used “science” as a lever to impose its rule. But it’s mostly a sham.

As when OSHA claimed credit for reducing workplace injuries, or the Civil Rights Act was lauded for reducing discrimination, improvements were already well underway before the State took action and claimed credit (as Thomas Sowell showed, years of positive trajectories in workplace safety and black advancement actually began to decelerate after these laws were passed).

The Main Driver of Longer Life

Scientific advancement was no different. Government had little to do with it. Historically, most worthwhile innovation came from inventors and entrepreneurs experimenting in the workshop or succeeding in the market.

Scientists in a lab are often skeptical or dismissive of new ideas (as, to some degree, they should be). They usually adopt (and accept praise for) discoveries only after industrial practitioners prove they work. Once scientists see the train on the track, they grab a shovel and pretend they supplied the coal.

Most modern medical advances came not from men in white coats mixing chemicals or staring into microscopes, but from diggers, drillers, and engineers harnessing hydrocarbons to deliver electricity, enhance sanitation, and enable innovation that thwarts illness and lengthens lives.

These advances also enabled improved remedies and better surgical techniques. The coal, oil, gas, and uranium our rulers disparage are the reasons infant mortality, infectious disease, and climate-related deaths have plummeted over the last century.

Improved hygiene was the primary driver of reduced disease. Certain vaccines and medical advances played a part. But they couldn’t have occurred without the hydrocarbon energy many who rule us want to eradicate.

Grift and Graft

Unfortunately, these pests infest our sustenance too.

Recently, over a glass of high altitude Argentine Malbec, I read that the U.S. government is set to revise its “recommendations” on how much we should drink. As always, the “guidelines” will get more restrictive.

After their destructive dietary recommendations and recent covid carnage, you’d think our “public health” hacks would exchange their white coats for sackcloth and find remote monasteries to seek penance. Instead, they keep anointing each other with holy oil, while excommunicating dissidents who doubt their dogma.

Not that some people shouldn’t drink less. Maybe they should. Who am I to say? Who is anyone, aside from personal acquaintances of presumed alcoholics? Certainly not the US government.

Like mist on iron, that engrossing entity corrodes anything it touches. As it should remain removed from education or religion, the State should stay separate from science.

State-funded “Science”…whether “climate”,  medicine, nutrition, or economics…is thoroughly compromised and incurably corrupt. Indeed, most of it isn’t science at all. It’s politics…that is to say, grift and graft.

Which makes sense. It’s almost entirely funded by government agencies (or their corporate sponsors) that only compensate conclusions corroborating an a priori “consensus.” With few exceptions, only research that validates the preferred perspective will be financed or published.

Government support of Big Farm, Food, and Pharma (and vice versa) makes this obvious. But so does its opposition to little farms, alternative medicine, or the ongoing assault on regional ranchers.

Why would they do this? What benefit do they derive from assaulting local suppliers of beneficial food? And why conscript a phony “scientific consensus” to enforce their restrictions?

“A Control-Freak Thing”

As Dr Malcolm Kendrick aptly put it:

“Medical scientists (an oxymoron if ever there was one), have a long and distinguished history of grabbing entirely the wrong end of the stick, closing their eyes tightly shut, holding on grimly and refusing to listen to anybody else.”

In recent decades, this seems inarguable. But the propensity for the medical profession to be wildly wrong has a long lineage. Kendrick continues:

“The list of stupid, damaging and plain wrong things that doctors have been taught over the years makes rather depressing reading. It has certainly depressed me from time to time. We can all be wrong. Even me. But for some reason, the medical hierarchy is exceptionally reluctant to admit their mistakes. I think it's a control-freak thing.”

As we learned during covid, this isn’t unusual. In fiat-funded “science”, anything that deviates from the a priori proclamation isn’t discarded, but becomes a “paradox”… what “the experts” might call a “breakthrough case.” 

Fraudulent “Experiment”

The cholesterol hypothesis has paradoxes all over the place. France, India, Russia, Native Americans, even aboriginal Australians, have heart disease. 

In some instances it correlates with cholesterol. In most it doesn’t. But the accepted story has been a great way to sell statins.

It’s rare to read a funny book about heart disease. But I suppose it’s possible when the hypothesis discussed is such a joke.

With welcome doses of condescending snark, Kendrick’s The Great Cholesterol Con ridicules and refutes the “cholesterol hypothesis” that’s prevailed since Ancel Keys conducted his “Seven Country Study.”

In this fraudulent “experiment”, Keys selected seven countries where heart disease correlated with saturated fat consumption. As Kendrick notes, he could’ve chosen seven different countries and reached the opposite conclusion. The correlation is random…which is to say, nonexistent.

Nutrition Pseudoscience

Keys had connections to tobacco companies and sellers of seed oil (perhaps the prime culprit of heart disease, cancer, and chronic ailments). He persuaded Proctor & Gamble to donate $1.8M (1950 dollars) to the American Heart Association, which compliantly claimed Crisco was a safe substitute for butter, lard, and other “lethal” fats. 

Keys convinced Dwight Eisenhower’s physician that the four-pack-a-day president’s 1955 heart attack was caused by saturated fat rather than smoking (as a tobacco company stooge, Keys hid the data that implicated cigarettes). He urged Harvard to adopt his weird ideas, from which came the nutrition pseudoscience that afflicts us today.

Keys’s “findings” informed the cataclysmic “food pyramid”. A blatant boondoggle for agricultural interests, this nutritional abomination extolled grains, exalted oils, excused sugars, disparaged dairy, denigrated eggs, vilified animal fats, praised plants, and maligned meat. 

By frightening people from healthy food in favor of processed sludge and industrial waste, the deranged ramblings of Ancel Keys have arguably killed more people than any miscreant this side of Karl Marx. 

Keys did for “public health” roughly what Keynes did for economics, or the Japanese to Nanking. It’s no coincidence that obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer all accelerated after Keys came along.

Cholesterol and Cardiovascular Disease

Much of this catastrophe was based on the “diet-heart hypothesis”, Keys’s unsubstantiated theory that cholesterol is a killer.

There’s no basis for attributing heart disease to high cholesterol, “bad” cholesterol, or diets hefty with red meat and eggs. The Framingham Study showed this years ago, as did others in Austria, Ireland, Sweden, and elsewhere. More than 90% of dietary cholesterol isn’t even absorbed by the body.

No studies show that high cholesterol causes heart disease. At best they show association, tho’ often tied by a slender thread. But plenty imply low cholesterol…and particularly low LDL…is linked to reduced life expectancy and higher all-cause mortality. 

There’s ample evidence high cholesterol helps prevent heart attack in older cohorts, and that it has no effect on female heart health at any age. If anything, increased cholesterol reduces risk of stroke.

The National Cholesterol Education Program under the NIH helps establish LDL guidelines, almost always revising them lower to capture millions more Americans in the “high cholesterol” net. The idea seems to be to set standards so low that everyone is “sick”, and must be treated.

Such shenanigans sound familiar. But is the most popular prescription sensible? 

Most studies on statins exclude total mortality data, which is the most important information and the easiest to measure. Maybe because that data undermines the sponsors of the study. To quote Kendrick in his book, Doctoring Data:

“The National Cholesterol Education Programme (NCEP) has been tasked by the National Institutes of Health to develop guidelines [everyone uses] for treating cholesterol levels. Excluding the chair (who was by law prohibited from having financial conflicts of interest), the other 8 members on average were on the payroll of 6 statin manufacturers.”

In short, statins can lower cholesterol. But they don’t affect total mortality (or, to the extent they do, it’s detrimental). Independent studies show statins have minimal impact prolonging male lives and none saving those of women. But they make those of the people who push them much cushier.

Statins rank among the most lucrative, and harmful, of all pharmaceuticals. Regardless the legitimate science about these over-prescribed pills, the Medical-complex has decided they’re “essential” to our health. As “A Midwestern Doctor” put it, “physicians who don’t push them are financially penalized. Patients who don’t take them are as well (through life insurance premiums).”

I’m not a medical doctor or a government scientist (which is itself a worthy credential). But I’m able to interpret data and read charts.

What they suggest is we shouldn’t reflexively toss pills at this problem. Instead, we’re better off ditching sugar and seed oil, and eating eggs and ribeye to our heart’s content.

Despite what we’ve been taught, it will be.

JD

March 10, 2024

We didn’t used to need governments to tell us the time. Throughout the millennia, the sun did it for us, enabling our ancestors to get thru the day.

Medieval clocks added some precision. But their main "improvement” (if we want to call it that) on the ancient sundial was they enabled us to tell time at night.

Not that many people cared. In those days, most people were wise (and tired) enough to use darkness as a signal to sleep.

It wasn’t till the 19th century…when time-pieces proliferated…that businesses, households, and personal pockets began acquiring clocks. And becoming slaves to them.

Around the world, each town kept its own time, based off the moment the sun was directly overhead. Brooklyn ran ahead of New York. It was a slightly earlier in Ostia than in Rome. Oakland ate breakfast a few minutes before San Francisco ordered coffee.

Zones of Time

It wasn’t till human locomotion outpaced Apollo’s chariot that the patchwork of times became a problem. That happened when the trains arrived. But it was tough to keep them on time. For anyone to know when that was, the railroads needed a schedule.

To enable coordination among local patchworks of minutes, competing lines agreed on zones of time…based loosely on the position of the sun. Most government officials were beholden to the industry, and went along.

But train time was a lie, which was patently obvious to any idiot under the sun. Despite being told it was noon, the average person knew his shadow was too long. Something wasn’t right. Yet there was no hole to which he could retreat.

“Progress” had arrived. Rather than establish a “universal time” (like GMT) from which to set schedules while leaving local time to sit comfortably in the sun, government-backed railroad monopolies inflicted the top-down time zones we endure today.

These were agreed upon in 1889, and given force of federal law in 1918. As a result, the time we tell by ignoring nature remains…like flickering shadows on Plato’s cave…a pale reflection of unrelenting reality, further distorted by biannual changing of erroneous clocks.

“Sunshine Protection”

Last night, as happens each year, our hour was taken. As is their wont, a lot of legislators don’t want to give it back.

Even when government does the right thing, it does the wrong thing. A couple years ago, the Senate voted to repeal the ridiculous ritual of adjusting clocks. But it did so by keeping the wrong time.

Standard Time – denoted as such because it more closely follows our natural rhythms and the solar cycle – would’ve disappeared. Or, more accurately…as with the local hours from an earlier age…it’d still be there. But, like advice from a Carmelite nun to a street corner pimp, we’d simply have ignored it…and suffered the consequences.

Fortunately, the “Sunshine Protection Act” withered in the House, proving that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The act doesn’t “protect” sunshine. But it does blow it - up the same place politicians usually breathe.

The notion that an act of Congress can “protect sunshine” is as ludicrous as the concept that passing laws can control the weather.

But now, like a Spring allergy, it’s back. Assuming the House and president agree with the bill the Senate passed….“Daylight Savings Time” would become permanent.

As with most legislation, the only thing dumber than the name is the stupidity of the idea. The biannual time change needs to go. But the solar clock needs to stay.

Our sense of reality is already too warped, and time is among the least of the distortions. But its a potent symptom of endemic delusion. At this moment, where I write, the time I’m told is almost two hours ahead of where the sun actually sits.

Atlanta lies at the western edge of the Eastern Time Zone, so our local clock always outpaces the stubborn sun. But “Daylight Savings” compounds the problem. Early this morning, as if to assert it isn’t wrong enough, our government placed an additional hour between ourselves and the sun.

(If you want to know how wrong time is where you are, you can check this link).

Indulging Fantasies

Now, once again, some US senators want to make this perversion permanent.

This isn’t the first effort to enforce this farce. Congress imposed perennial “Daylight Savings” in 1974, but abandoned the two-year experiment even before it was set to expire. As children stood at dark bus stops and circadian rhythms became confused, people realized they hated the unnatural attempt to monkey with time.

If this latest effort passes, Arizona and Hawaii will be the only states where the clocks are (somewhat) correct. All others will permanently pretend to be part of the time zone immediately to their east (some, like the New England states, probably should be).

But this isn’t surprising. We live in a world that’s filled with phoniness to indulge our fantasies. Don’t like how light it is at 6p? Just pretend it’s 7p! If nothing else, Happy Hour will start that much sooner.

Sounds great. But why stop there? Why not move the clocks up a couple additional hours to get even “more daylight”? Then we could go sailing after dinner or play golf till midnight.

And time isn’t the only constraint we could casually cast aside. We can distort or dispense with lots of limits to improve our world.

In the funhouse mirror of our make-believe culture, we could merely wish away or redefine whatever we don’t like. Why confine ourselves to natural laws and scientific constraints?

We already pretend we can change the “climate”, that men are women, and that fewer freedoms will efface a virus. In a fake world without real constraints, artificial expedients are endless.

For instance, what’s the point of additional daylight if the weather’s awful? Let’s pass a law that all thermometers constantly display 70 degrees so we can enjoy comfortable temperatures all year round.

And if we’re going to be out and about in our newfound bliss, weather and light aren’t the only appearances that must improve. To trim some fat and make ourselves taller, let’s add some ounces to a pound and remove a few inches from a foot. That’ll lengthen our legs and lighten our load.

Screwing with Everything

We have financial fables too. Crank economists convince us we can create real money from thin air. If you can make up the money, you can control everything…at least if you’re one of the ones who gets it first.

Time, as they say, is money. But money is also time. And as with time, when you mess with the money, you screw with everything.

Money is not merely a store of value and a unit of account. It’s also a communication mechanism. Like the sun passing overhead, it speaks as it moves…informing where things stand and where we should go. At least until the government gets in the way, and clouds things up.

Yet each day, like every coin, has two sides. We think we’d enjoy the sun setting after dinner. But will we like it rising a couple hours before lunch? Will we want to begin each day in the middle of nature’s night? Is it healthy to do so? Do we even care?

And do we really want the sun, like a humorless hall monitor, watching over us so deep into the day? A setting sun is a signal. Time to retreat home from a hectic day…perhaps to open a window in the summer, or light a fire in the winter. We lift our feet, pour some wine, and loosen our limbs. We relax, and let our hair down.

These natural inclinations are less instinctive with a solar schoolmarm standing over us. She has her place. But it’s in the morning, to roust us awake and get us going. We don’t need an intrusive day hanging around at night, when we gather at the table or round the hearth, to talk about it behind its back.

From ancient sundials to atomic clocks, devices to track time are intended to tell the truth. Now, as night follows day, comes an all-knowing US Congress to legislate another lie.

Many Americans, envisioning an extra hour of evening light, are cheering the deception. It’s easier to see the light than to envision the dark. But no matter how much they finagle their clocks, they’ll get both…and perhaps more of each than they think they’d prefer.

Next week, on the Vernal Equinox, they’ll come in equal measure. Around the world, the solar scale will stand in balance. But the more we try to tip it toward us, the greater the chance we all fall off.

JD

August 20, 2023

Since at least the Enlightenment, and perhaps back to Bacon, the wolf of politics has disguised itself as a sheep of science. It fleeces its putative shepherds by cloaking its commands in th…

Read more

April 22, 2023

Happy “Earth Day”!

We’ve reached another secular holy day we’re all browbeaten to observe. But as we give it a look, let’s be sure to do so with open eyes.

Recent years have resurrected a rhetorical cudgel historically used to silence dissent.

Throughout history, and particularly since the “Progressive” Era, sanctimonious busybodi…

Read more

March 20, 2022

Well, I guess we’re never getting that hour back.

Even when government does the right thing, it does the wrong thing. Last week, the Senate voted to remove the ridiculous ritual of adjusting clocks. But it did so by keeping the wrong time.

Starting next year….assuming the House and president agree with the bill the Senate passed….“Daylight Savings Time” becomes permanent.

Standard Time – denoted as such because it follows our natural rhythms and the solar cycle – would disappear. Or, more accurately, it’d still be there. But, like eternal advice from a Carmelite nun to a street corner pimp, we’d simply ignore it…and suffer the consequences.

This isn’t the first effort to enforce this farce. Congress imposed perennial “Daylight Savings” in 1974, but abandoned the two-year experiment even before it was set to expire. As children stood at dark bus stops and circadian rhythms became confused, people realized they hated the unnatural attempt to monkey with time.

If this latest effort passes, Arizona and Hawaii will be the only states where the clocks are correct. All others will permanently pretend to be part of the time zone immediately to their east (some, like the New England states, probably should be).

But this isn’t surprising. We live in a world that’s filled with phoniness to indulge our fantasies. Don’t like how light it is at 6p? Just pretend it’s 7p! If nothing else, Happy Hour will start that much sooner.

Sounds great. But why stop there? Why not move the clocks up a couple additional hours to get even “more daylight”? Then we could go sailing after dinner or play golf till midnight.

And time isn’t the only constraint we could casually cast aside. We can distort or dispense with lots of limits to improve our world.

In the funhouse mirror of our make-believe culture, we could merely wish away or redefine whatever we don’t like. Why confine ourselves to natural laws and scientific constraints?

We already pretend we can change the “climate”, that men are women, and that fewer freedoms will efface a virus. In a fake world without real constraints, artificial expedients are endless.

For instance, what’s the point of additional daylight if the weather’s awful? Let’s pass a law that all thermometers constantly display 70 degrees so we can enjoy comfortable temperatures all year round.

And if we’re going to be out and about in our newfound bliss, weather and light aren’t the only appearances that must improve. To trim some fat and make ourselves taller, let’s add some ounces to a pound and remove a few inches from a foot. That’ll lengthen our legs and lighten our load.

We have financial fables too. Crank economists convince us we can create real money from thin air. And if you can make up the money, you can control everything…at least if you’re one of the ones who gets it first.

Time, as they say, is money. But money is also time. And as with time, when you mess with the money, you screw with everything.

Money is not merely a store of value and a unit of account. It’s also a communication mechanism. Like the sun passing overhead, it speaks as it moves…informing where things stand and where we should go. At least until the government gets in the way, and clouds things up.

Yet each day, like every coin, has two sides. We think we’d enjoy the sun setting after dinner. But will we like it rising a couple hours before lunch? Will we want to begin each day in the middle of nature’s night? Is it healthy to do so? Do we even care?

And do we really want the sun, like a humorless hall monitor, watching over us so deep into the day? A setting sun is a signal. Time to retreat home from a hectic day…perhaps to open a window in the summer, or light a fire in the winter. We lift our feet, pour some wine, and loosen our limbs. We relax, and let our hair down.

These natural inclinations are less instinctive with a solar schoolmarm standing over us. She has her place. But it’s in the morning, to roust us awake and get us going. We don’t need an intrusive day hanging around at night, when we gather at the table or round the hearth, to talk about it behind its back.

From ancient sundials to atomic clocks, devices to track time are intended to tell the truth. Now, as night follows day, comes an all-knowing US Congress to legislate another lie.

Many Americans, envisioning an extra hour of evening light, are cheering the deception. It’s easier to see the light than to envision the dark. But no matter how much they finagle their clocks, they’ll get both…and perhaps more of each than they think they’d prefer.

But today, on the Vernal Equinox, they’ll come in equal measure. Around the world, the solar scale stands in balance. But the more we try to tip it toward us, the greater the chance we all fall off.

JD

March 26, 2022

Since at least the Enlightenment, and perhaps back to Bacon, the wolf of politics has disguised itself as a sheep of science. It fleeces its putative shepherds by cloaking its commands in the wool of “Reason”.

After the French Revolution, the exaltation of the “expert” replaced the preeminence of the priest. Particularly in the …

Read more

March 20, 2022

Well, I guess we’re never getting that hour back.

Even when government does the right thing, it does the wrong thing. Last week, the Senate voted to remove the ridiculous ritual of adjusting clocks. But it did so by keeping the wrong time.

Starting next year….assuming the House and president agree with the bill the Senate passed……

Read more

December 20, 2021

Recent years have resurrected a rhetorical cudgel that’s often used to silence dissent.

Throughout history, and particularly since the “Progressive” Era, sanctimonious busybodies claimed the mantle of “science” as an impenetrable shield from potential debate. 

It’s self-righteous sophistry, albeit alarmingly effective and distu…

Read more

June 6, 2021

Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don’t know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields. 

– Thomas Sowell

Finally…a year too late…the masks are coming off. 

That’s go…

Read more

December 16, 2020

After all this time, and all we’ve been thru, you’d think a little curiosity would be called for, and some humility in order.

We read a couple days ago that the coronavirus has barely affected Africa, and caused no deaths in Cambodia. Not no deaths today…or last week…or last month. No deaths at all. Ever.

How can that be? Will …

Read more