The Illinois House Redistricting Committee held its first hearing last week on new congressional and judicial subcircuit district maps at the Michael Bilandic Building in Chicago. Another half-dozen hearings were scheduled for the following seven days to redraw the maps, which have to be reconfigured after each decennial census.

Denis Rancourt, in familiar intellectually disciplined form, unmasks the substantial defects in the latest study mainstream media is lauding as ending the “masks-don't-work debate.” For science geeks, this analysis is riveting. For data lovers, this analysis is evidence-based and powerful not just in showing the specific flaws relative to the study's stated achievements, but as a case study itself for how so many white papers and studies are propped up rather than keeping to scientific methodology that has prevailed until now, jeopardizing trusted journals and peer-review processes essential to scientific integrity.

An important rule of medicine is that when you’ve properly treated the patient and they are still not improving, then you may have the wrong diagnosis. Furthermore, dogmatically persisting in the wrong diagnosis ultimately results in injury or death to the patient.  We are now nearly two years into the “pandemic” and all we have heard from our leaders is the monotonous drumbeat – social distance, wear masks, get vaccinated. In the beginning, they said that masks were dangerous and COVID-19 testing was key to ending the pandemic. Now, municipalities seek to muzzle us all and testing is becoming difficult to find.

Every so often there seems to be a test of the public’s will to check its obedience. As children in once meaningful classes in public school (when I was a kid), we were always taught how the Chinese, for example, could change collective policy overnight because the population did as it was told. That’s why it accepted the "one-child-per-family" rule almost overnight and by edict. This despite the fact that the Chinese people love children to an extreme. This is the sort of fealty you can expect from a vassal state. And it works. The Chinese people do as they are told.