Most clinical trials don't report results to FDA, and the FDA does nothing about it

This should be huge news. These authors estimate that as much as ~60% of all clinical trials, whose results are required by law to be reported to the FDA, aren’t. And even though the FDA can fine these companies and research labs, they just… don’t.

…

…

Source: https://twitter.com/bengoldacre/status/121...

Proof the big corporate media care more about outrage than analysis

These major corporations could hire people who study politics as a science for a living, who are trained to teach it, and are about as objective as it gets. They know what they’re talking about, can explain the complexities, and won’t intentionally spin things (at least not nearly as often).

Instead, our largest, most influential television news companies choose to hire political operatives, with less knowledge, and greater incentive to lie. They’re poisoning our politics, because that’s supposedly what’s best for their profits.

Source: https://twitter.com/JasminMuj/status/12200...

"NASA Animates World Path of Smoke and Aerosols from Australian Fires"

The images are wild. So much of Australia burned, that the smoke will likely “make at least one full circuit around the globe, returning once again to the skies over Australia.”

NASA:

The fires in Australia are not just causing devastation locally. The unprecedented conditions that include searing heat combined with historic dryness, have led to the formation of an unusually large number of pyrocumulonimbus (pyrCbs) events. PyroCbs are essentially fire-induced thunderstorms. They are triggered by the uplift of ash, smoke, and burning material via super-heated updrafts. As these materials cool, clouds are formed that behave like traditional thunderstorms but without the accompanying precipitation.

PyroCb events provide a pathway for smoke to reach the stratosphere more than 10 miles (16 km) in altitude. Once in the stratosphere, the smoke can travel thousands of miles from its source, affecting atmospheric conditions globally. The effects of those events -- whether the smoke provides a net atmospheric cooling or warming, what happens to underlying clouds, etc.) -- is currently the subject of intense study.

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/...

"How Not to be Stupid" →

Shane Parrish, interviewing Adam Robinson:

…When it comes to overloading our cognitive brains, the seven factors are: being outside of your circle of competence, stress, rushing or urgency, fixation on an outcome, information overload, being in a group where social cohesion comes into play, and being in the presence of an “authority.” Acting alone any of these are powerful enough, but together they dramatically increase the odds you are unaware that you’ve been cognitively compromised.

Here’s a good list of factors that cause mistakes. Note that a lot of them are often outside our immediate control!

And one that’s particularly relevant to news analysis is “in the presence of an authority, or being an authority.” A veeeeery common problem I see among “experts” is when they step outside their area of expertise but still think they know the answers. We all trick ourselves into thinking that because we are really good at one thing (and therefore very “smart”), our opinions must be just as valid on other topics (even though we know we’re not nearly as informed on them). One way to catch to yourself is noticing when you start using absolute statements, instead of describing the complexity or nuance of a situation.

21st Century "Divide and Conquer"

This is the hashtag:

Political disagreements are being "weaponized" by unscrupulous political operatives through the use of auto-posting bots on social media. They flood a hashtag, making it look like a lot of people don't like someone. That hashtag rises on the "Trending" charts. That fake consensus then tricks people into feeling more hostile than they otherwise would, and it lowers the barriers to spread hate, polluting connections real people have with each other.

In this case, it looks like there's a current botnet campaign that's trying to worsen whatever bad blood exists between Sanders and Warren supporters, similar to how Russian operatives created spambots that endlessly harassed Clinton (and Sanders) supporters during the 2015/2016 primary (the "Bernie Bros" pejorative was created in part by this--a 2017 analysis found that the most prolific pro-Bernie/anti-Clinton accounts on Twitter turned out to be Russian bots). When you see something enraging, take a moment to chill and ask whether the source and the message are real.

We need to remain skeptical of what we see on social media when it's something that gets our blood pumping about political opponents, whether that's a trending harassment hashtag or it's an article from a news source we haven't heard of before. If it sounds too horrible to be true, there's a good chance it's fake news created to divide us. Not always(!), but often.

There are good reasons not to agree (and even REALLY not like) someone in politics, and if we care about democratic rule we need to have a lot more conversations with each other about why do and don't support people running for office. But we need to be careful not to be taken advantage of by bad actors. Keep an open mind. And remain skeptical.

"Trump’s Tariffs Are Raising Prices and Slashing Employment"

"Prices" and "Employment" aren't the whole picture, but Trump himself promised his trade "deals" would be a huge boost to the US economy and manufacturing. Now we're billions in the hole and having to bail out our farmers on top of that.

Kevin Drum, in Mother Jones:

If this study holds up, it means that Trump’s trade war is (a) costing American families about $1000 per year, (b) cratering employment in the affected sectors, (c) sending producer prices up, and (d) putting hundreds of American farmers face to face with bankruptcy…

Source: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/201...

"The Christmas Even Confessions of Chuck Todd"

This is elite media failure, summarized. As Jay Rosen points out in detail, Chuck Todd, NBC's political director, had been completely taken in by the GOP's near-total hypocrisy when it comes to the truth, and only now begins to understand he's been hoodwinked for years.

Ultimately, perhaps, it's all about money: the big ad-supported media, which are now mostly owned by billionaires, chase "gotcha" moments over long-term analysis that might question too much (like why life expectancy is declining for all but the super rich, in the wealthiest country in history, for the first time in nearly a hundred years). At the most basic level, though, it shows fatal flaws in what many journalism schools have taught as good practice, especially the idea that both "sides" need to be given equal coverage, even when there's only one that's right and/or the other constantly lies.

Assuming that all politicians are trying their best to speak the truth is an incredibly privileged assumption. These people have clearly never experienced the extreme media distortion in authoritarian countries. That’s where we’re headed, and they either learn how to counter the endless stream of bullshit from “conservative” “news” sources and spokespeople, or they’re just mouthpieces for it.

Source: http://pressthink.org/2019/12/the-christma...

"The booming stock market shows America is diseased"

The stock market is endlessly talked about in financial news, but it means very little for how well most Americans are doing.

Ryan Cooper, in The Week:

…If we break the population into 10 groups (or deciles) based on how much stock they own, as Matt Bruenig does with the Survey of Consumer Finances of 2013, we find that the top decile accounts for 86.8 percent of all stocks. The next decile owns 9.5 percent, the third 2.8 percent, and the rest little or nothing.

In other words, the richest 10 percent of Americans own a giant super-majority of the stock market…

…

Stock markets, meanwhile, are supposed to "intermediate" between savers and borrowers — channeling investment to the best performing and most promising companies. But as Doug Henwood writes in his book Wall Street, it does not work like this at all. In reality, the stock market is a political-economic control mechanism. As Matt Stoller writes in his book Goliath, Wall Street raiders have continually pressured well-run corporations with low debt, high investment budgets, or high wages to cut costs and vomit forth profits for shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. Indeed, by buying a controlling share of stock with borrowed money, hostile takeover specialists can put the debt on the company's own books — thus effectively buying the company with its own assets and money.

Now, it wasn't always this way. In the post-Second World War generation, there were strong unions at most big corporations, which could protest or strike to defend their share of the corporate surplus. High top tax rates also made it less fruitful to try to grab down as much income as possible. But those days are long gone now. The fraction of GDP going to labor has fallen sharply since the 1980s, while the fraction going to corporate profits has increased sharply, and the share of income and wealth taken up by the very rich has skyrocketed.

This brings us to the deeper problem with an economy geared above all to goose stock prices. The broader economy, including all these public corporations, is still based on mass production and consumption. It follows that as inequality grows, the economy will sag and slow, because rich people disproportionately save their income rather than spend it, usually by buying financial assets like stocks. So as the financial markets are swamped by a tidal wave of profits, those stocks in turn become ever-more divorced from the health of the underlying corporate enterprise. The result is a marked tendency towards financial bubbles, as oceans of money slosh here and there looking for safe returns that can't exist because the mass public has little disposable income which would justify fresh investment in real enterprises.

…

The stock market is surging under Trump largely because of the massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich that Republicans passed in 2017. Contrary to their promises, corporations spent most of the windfall not on investment, but on dividends and share buybacks which fueled gains in the market. Wages, meanwhile, are up slightly, but not anywhere nearly as much as stocks. Overall growth is also weak. This means the stock boom is built on sand…

Source: https://theweek.com/articles/886198/boomin...