Christmas 2024

Some good news in the Madry family this week, with our daughter giving birth to a baby girl. Our first granddaughter. Seeing these beautiful infants makes one think about what life is all about. We have to spare a thought for those children born in the many war-torn countries of the world.

It’s been some time since my last post, just before the US election I think.

It’s been fascinating to watch the hysteria of the legacy media and celebrities that immediately followed the resounding result. That settled down with the realisation that democracy would actually continue. Then the hysteria rose again with the selection of various administrative picks. RFK Jnr as head of HHS would cause children to die from measles as they did in Samoa in 2019. One welcome pick is Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya as head of NIH. He visited Australia during the pandemic in September 2022. A small group of people in Sydney went to hear him talk at NSW parliament house. We got there a bit early and he was standing around by himself waiting. We went up to him to say hello. He came across as a genuine character. We had a laugh with him being called a fringe epidemiologist, according to the idiots that were running the NIH at the time.

He will now be in charge of the 48 Billion dollar NIH budget. Who would have thought?

COVID analysis work has been progressing. With Christmas so close it doesn’t seem right to report with bad news. With the most recent Australian mortality statistics released in November for data up to August there is nothing to be pleased with. The excess is still running high, not able to be explained by COVID.

Health Satisfaction

I have a few things that caught my interest in recent weeks. A website I follow is statista. This site collates data of all sorts from countries around the world and provides this as a service and certain data is available free. They do really effective graphics. A few days ago I came across the following infographic found here:

Description

This chart shows the share of respondents who say they have been satisfied/very satisfied with their health in the last year (in %).

It’s worth noting here that this data does not necessarily mean that the inhabitants of South Korea are in worse health than those of Nigeria, for example, but that perceptions of health may differ. This survey does not offer a look at the level of health of the population, but a glimpse of how people in different countries perceive their general state of health.

So this seemed interesting, Nigeria are highly satisfied and South Korea not at all. I wonder what variables might correlate with this outcome? Risking looking like a conspiracy theorist I went to Our World in Data for COVID vaccinations. I got the data for the countries in the infographic. Here’s what I found for percentage of population in each country with primary course completed:

and boosters administered:

Hmm. It seems that as one thing increases (along the horizontal axis) that health satisfaction decreases (on the vertical axis). It’s hard to understand why countries like South Korea and Sweden with good health systems should lead to people not being satisfied with their health.

Of course, this could be a correlation caused by what is known as a hidden variable, like the example of Nobel prizes and chocolate consumption. In that case the wealth of a nation is a hidden variable leading to more Nobel prizes. The graphs above show a negative correlation. Perhaps more wealth means lower satisfaction? But then USA goes against that trend.

Enough said on this.

Healthy Foods

Another website I follow is called Stat. I started following this at the start of the pandemic to get up to date information. However, it has turned out to be very disappointing in its reporting. It is a site that is pharma funded.

This article caught my attention:

What? Apparently salmon and nuts are now considered “healthy”, according to the FDA. Just as well we are guided by the FDA with regards to our health. Who would have thought salmon and nuts are healthy?

RFK Jnr gets a mention in the Stat article. Perhaps this is a sign of a wakeup call for the FDA?

It reminds me in 2022 when a US University found that Lucky Charms cereal was healthier than ground beef. From the Google AI search result:

According to the Tufts Food Compass, a nutrient profiling system that ranks foods on a scale of 1 to 100, Lucky Charms are healthier than ground beef:

• Tufts Food Compass

Ranks foods based on their healthful and harmful effects, considering things like nutrients, ingredients, and processing characteristics.

• Ranking

Lucky Charms are ranked higher than ground beef, more than twice as healthy as beef, and better for you than a baked potato or cooked green peas.

When this nonsense went viral on social media a Reuters fact check however said that the claim lacked context. Ah ha that’s what we ordinary people need, ie context.

There are morons at the highest levels.

UFOs

More morons now. The objects flying around in the sky over New Jersey has been a talking point amongst friends I have caught up with before Christmas. Jimmy Dore does a piece on the saga.

At around 11 minutes there’s a fun bit where they riff on a quote from White House Press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who says they are “working with folk on the ground”. Comedienne Stef says well that’s the problem, the folk are on the ground and these things are in the air...

In the technology leader of the world no-one apparently knows where these UFOs or UAPs come from! Some are the size of a car. One claim from a government official was that there was an Iranian mother ship off the coast of the US and releasing them. One official said that we know they are unmanned. What? They don’t know what they are, but they know UFOs the size of a car are unmanned.

You know some of the officials are lying by the signal that their mouths are open. From The Hill:

National security communications adviser John Kirby who reiterated Monday there is no indication the recent drone sightings pose a risk to public safety.

Later on Monday, a joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense indicated that, after looking into “the technical data and tips from concerned citizens, we assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones.”

Oh well these aren’t the drones you are looking for.

Sunday

I was a guest on Father Dave’s Sunday service today. The Gospel reading was Luke 1: 39-55. Known as the song of Mary it is the longest continuous passage by a female in the New Testament which was something I didn’t know. Reverend Joy gives a wonderful sermon about the passage (about 5 minutes long at 47 min 40 in the youtube)

Final Thoughts

I have several articles queued up. I was looking at my computer directory where I put my substack articles. I have a directory for each article and they are all under one directory. I noticed recently that when I started writing on substack that I named the top level directory “substack article”, ie the singular version. At the time I thought I would write one article. It was on my analysis of COVID infection data from the UK mid 2021 that showed that COVID vaccination made you more likely to be infected. I thought there would only be one article needed.

I’m grateful for you sticking with me. There’s still a long way to go.

God Bless to you and your families this Christmas.