I woke up this morning really pissed off that I had to write this thread because a senior guy who doesn’t like me very much just happened to write this article about things I was tweeting about and in the process downplayed homophobia and got the story wrong 😡

I’m pissed also at everyone who read that blog entry and walked away thinking, “oh he sounds like a good guy who has been unfairly maligned who should have a space telescope named after him.” Excuse me, what?
Most of you would never been foolish enough in 2021 to say such a thing about a man who sanctioned institutional anti-Black racism but you think that’s an ok message to send to queer people, including Black queer people?
And he’s gonna get away with it too. No matter what I say, that blog entry will keep making the rounds and people will believe it even though it hasn’t been through a formal edit and fact check process.
Next time Hakeem should maybe send me an email rather than write vague, unprofessional personal attacks like: "astrophysicist who propagated unsubstantiated false information as if it were true without performing proper scientific rigor to investigate its veracity"
I should say that I have had Hakeem blocked on twitter for a couple of years and I actually really don’t want to go into why, but the Hitler was a good guy joke at the last NSBP meeting I attended was gross
I want to be clear that I interpret that blog entry as the leader of a professional society and a senior scientist going out of his way to:
- justify historic homophobia
- attack a junior queer Black woman professor for being angry about homophobia because ...he doesn’t like her
Hakeem and I once had a procedural disagreement during an NSBP business meeting in 2011 when I was a first year postdoc and *10 years later* he is writing poorly researched articles that are basically hit pieces on me, and I am fucking tired
Any astronomers who have seen the piece in circulation should speak up with their chest to people who are posting it about both its factual problems and its moral failings

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global health policy in 2020 has centered around NPI's (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like distancing, masks, school closures

these have been sold as a way to stop infection as though this were science.

this was never true and that fact was known and knowable.

let's look.


above is the plot of social restriction and NPI vs total death per million. there is 0 R2. this means that the variables play no role in explaining one another.

we can see this same relationship between NPI and all cause deaths.

this is devastating to the case for NPI.


clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but a total lack of correlation IS proof that there was no material causality.

barring massive and implausible coincidence, it's essentially impossible to cause something and not correlate to it, especially 51 times.

this would seem to pose some very serious questions for those claiming that lockdowns work, those basing policy upon them, and those claiming this is the side of science.

there is no science here nor any data. this is the febrile imaginings of discredited modelers.

this has been clear and obvious from all over the world since the beginning and had been proven so clearly by may that it's hard to imagine anyone who is actually conversant with the data still believing in these responses.

everyone got the same R
This is a piece I've been thinking about for a long time. One of the most dominant policy ideas in Washington is that policy should, always and everywhere, move parents into paid labor. But what if that's wrong?

My reporting here convinced me that there's no large effect in either direction on labor force participation from child allowances. Canada has a bigger one than either Romney or Biden are considering, and more labor force participation among women.

But what if that wasn't true?

Forcing parents into low-wage, often exploitative, jobs by threatening them and their children with poverty may be counted as a success by some policymakers, but it’s a sign of a society that doesn’t value the most essential forms of labor.

The problem is in the very language we use. If I left my job as a New York Times columnist to care for my 2-year-old son, I’d be described as leaving the labor force. But as much as I adore him, there is no doubt I’d be working harder. I wouldn't have stopped working!

I tried to render conservative objections here fairly. I appreciate that @swinshi talked with me, and I'm sorry I couldn't include everything he said. I'll say I believe I used his strongest arguments, not more speculative ones, in the piece.

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