tomo,
Statins are efficacious enough at lowering cholesterol readings, but the benefits in health and longevity aren't evident. And the amounts of money involved don't make for unbiased research.

About ten years ago I had an e-discussion on statins with my nephew. He was about to graduate in medicine, and there had been a recent furore about an anti-statins item in a TV science show. I asked him for evidence of how good statins were and he sent me this paper (as a pdf).

Hmmm. That's the right paper, but layout is completely different, which may have served to obscure things somewhat.

Looking at the table "Analysis 1.6, Number of Fatal CVD Events" on p49, just look at the placebo group mortality figures as a proportion in the larger studies:

  MEGA 18/3966 .0045
  JUPITER 30/8901 .0034
  WOSCOPS 297/3293 .0901

So the placebo participants in WOSCOPS are ~30x more likely to die than those in JUPITER. Just how do you combine studies with such hugely different participants? I don't know, but they've decided to weight WOSCOPS at 83.6%, even though JUPITER is the largest study.

Then you look at the RR confidence intervals in the rightmost column and see that the confidence intervals for the largest two, MEGA and JUPITER, include the possibility that the statins actually *increased* the risk of mortality. WOSCOPS is the *only* large study where the confidence interval is entirely on the "good" side.

That they weight the smallest of the large studies *so* heavily, and it just happens to paint the rosiest picture of benefits of statins, looks mighty tendentious to me.

October 7 anniversary has Brendan O'Neill being interviewed on his own show, for a change. In the talk he mentioned his being interviewed by Joe Rogan a while back. I tracked that one down and listened to it too.

The first was perfectly listenable, though a little sycophantic. The Rogan interview was very long, with two thirds preaching to the choir (wokeness, trans, etc.), then both of them dug in disagreeing about Israel's actions since the Hamas atrocities. All politely done, but neither seemed to gain an inch.

My leanings were with O'Neill. I've heard a few back-and-forths on Israel's actions in Gaza. The two sides are basically: Hamas started it, and Israel must end it; and No, Israel started it, and everything stems from 1948. The latter makes little sense to me. After 76 years of this bitter repression, the best strategy is to invade Israel, butcher, rape, terrorise and take hostages from amongst the civilians?

Strikes me that doesn't make for justice. Far more likely it was calculated deliberately to *infuriate* the Israelis. Has Hamas's strategy all along been for Israel's reprisals to be "disproportionate" (etc.), and to drive a wedge between Israel and the USA? I'd like to have heard that line of reasoning put to Rogan. And to the Palestinian people. Yes, the immediate cause of their suffering is Israel, but the deeper architect is living quite comfortably in Qatar.

Mentioned in Jo Nova comments was that the Daily Mail has apologised to a couple of "statin denier" doctors. Would be nice to see the tide ebb on statins. Also linked was a substack article on cholesterol which I found agreeable.

The parent substack seems a bit on the fringe. E.g. complaining about the Totalitarian Health Laws Proposed For Northern Ireland. As discussed here during the COVID capers, public health *needs* draconian powers, not much point getting worked up about them. It's the abuse (or incompetent use) of those powers that should have serious consequences.

John Anderson's conversation with (retired) General Cross was pretty listenable, but no particular eye-openers. Comments to the video complain about the ads. I don't see them with my setup; probably not worth persevering if they're that bad.

ABC Radio's recent Law Report did have some worthwhile insights. He's interviewing a strongly unionist lawyer, working for an activist law firm — hardly an endearing intro. — and I wasn't all that sympathetic to some of his examples, but I warmed to him on one point in particular: that so-called codes of practice, DEI policies, etc., are more than moral posturing; they can be quite handy for corporations as a pretext for getting rid of inconvenient staff (no need for dismissal procedures if there's a Twitter storm, or whatever). As he put it:

...we don't want to position corporations as the moral abiter of — pretty much anything ...

Still don't agree with him on lots of things, but I liked his stance on freedom of speech. It was a good interview.

Listened to Brendan O'Neill's interview with Ruy Teixeira on the state of play in the US election. Nicely cynical. Surprised me that he said he'd probably be voting for Harris, but that it wasn't much more than a coin-toss. What he didn't mention (hadn't previously occurred to me either) was that the coin toss choice makes itself: Heads-Harris, Tails-Trump.

Not quite as apt as when Australia's federal election was between Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten: MT (he certainly was) and BS (he certainly did).

Jo Nova is on the case today of Miliband's plan to use flywheels to store electrical energy.

On a completely different topic, I've just discovered the Torque Test Channel on YouTube. Lots of scientific testing of spanners and the like, and many popular beliefs being tested.

Good to see Steve McIntyre is still cutting through the crap. Pity there's no activity at Climate Audit. I guess moderating the comments was onerous, so he leaves that to Twitter.

Post Office ongoing coverups:

We take any allegations of wrongdoing extremely seriously through our established processes and procedures.

From comments at Jo Nova's, I see that EVs are soon to be paying the congestion charge. So much for the honeymoon.

That fellow's rants are quite enjoyable. For example, his trip from Cornwall to Northhampton in a Citroen C4E.

I'm sure BEVs will stay with us, but there are going to be a fair number of dead branches on the evolutionary tree: the bigger the vehicle, the worse. eScooters and skateboards, fine; Tesla Semi, not so great.

Also at Jo Nova's was a little dog with a typical little dog's sense of proportion.