by David Young
Much has changed in science since the pandemic and much of it is change for the worse. The pandemic has highlighted the loss of credibility of the public health establishment and the often toxic nature of current public discourse. John Ioannidis stands out as perhaps the best example of a fine scientist who was smeared and denigrated mercilessly both online and in the literature. There was also a flood of fraudulent papers and badly flawed studies. This made claims that we should follow the “The Science” almost laughable, given the extremely poor quality of much of the science. The use of coercion was inexcusable when there was no rigorous basis for it.
John Ioannidis was perhaps the most famous victim of a broad ranging culture of censorship and suppression. As [1] summarizes:
“The aim of the present study is to explore the experiences and responses of highly ac- complished doctors and research scientists from different countries who have been targets of suppression and/or censorship following their publications and statements in relation to COVID-19 that challenge official views. Our findings point to the central role played by media organizations, and especially by information technology companies, in attempting to stifle debate over COVID-19 policy and measures. In the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position. In place of open and fair discussion, censorship and suppression of scientific dissent has deleterious and far-reaching implications for medicine, science, and public health.”
Epidemiology
One of the first things that became obvious to me during the pandemic was that viral epidemiology was a primitive science dominated by crude mechanistic explanations that lacked quantification. One article that led me to this conclusion was [2]. I reproduce a part of the abstract here.
“The epidemiology of influenza swarms with incongruities, incongruities exhaustively detailed by the late British epidemiologist, Edgar Hope-Simpson. He was the first to propose a parsimonious theory explaining why influenza is, as Gregg said,”seemingly unmindful of traditional infectious disease behavioral patterns. Recent discoveries indicate vitamin D upregulates the endogenous antibiotics of innate immunity and suggest that the incongruities explored by Hope-Simpson may be secondary to the epidemiology of vitamin D deficiency. We identify – and attempt to explain nine influenza conundrums:
• Why is influenza both seasonal and ubiquitous and where is the virus between epidemics?
• Why are the epidemics so explosive?
• Why do they end so abruptly?
• What explains the frequent coincidental timing of epidemics in countries of similar latitude?
• Why is the serial interval obscure?
• Why is the secondary attack rate so low?
• Why did epidemics in previous ages spread so rapidly, despite the lack of modern transport?
• Why does experimental inoculation of seronegative humans fail to cause illness in all the volunteers?
• Why has influenza mortality of the aged not declined as their vaccination rates increased?”
It is blindingly obvious that the spread of viral epidemics is riddled with unknowns, is a badly ill-posed problem and models will all be wrong, and mostly badly wrong. Yet modeling played a significant part in motivating the policy response to Covid19.
The Role of the Media in Spring 2020
The list of issues where pseudo-science was used to make decisions is long. Mask mandates, lockdowns, school closures, vaccination recommendations, vaccination requirements for employment or university attendance, and travel restrictions. The public was often bullied and/or manipulated into compliance based on fear and/or media generated panic. Early statistics on Covid cases and deaths were shown endlessly in the spring of 2020. These statistics seemed to imply that 10-15% of those who got Covid would die, often horribly. This was gravely misleading without stating that the case fatality rate is not meaningful when testing is scarce and that infection fatality rate estimates always go down (often dramatically) as an epidemic progresses because testing becomes more accurate and treatment methods improve.
The well known fact that the vast majority of those dying from Covid19 were already quite ill or elderly was systematically hidden. Scientists who said this were ridiculed by this same narrative driven media. The media in the US at least are little more than ideologically driven (and now partially state controlled) purveyors of carefully screened “information” backing the elites in the West and their preferred ideologies [3, 4] and the public is becoming more and more convinced that they cannot be trusted. The media was and is a full participant in the culture of censorship and cancellation described below. Often their “reporting” is based on a single anonymous leak whose reliability is unknown by readers and in some cases the reporters. Of course, leakers usually have a partisan purpose and like to leak selectively to give a biased picture and/or support their interests or those of their employer.
Marginalizing Expertise
A must read is [5]. “Imperatives like skepticism and disinterestedness are being junked to fuel political warfare that has nothing in common with scientific methodology.” Ioannidis carefully lays out in detail a sad history of abuses and indeed in some cases, outright fraud. Ioannidis published prolifically during the pandemic and endured a public caning by a mob of online trolls and even fellow scientists and politicians. His is not an isolated example. Scott Atlas, Jay Battacharya, Martin Kuhldorff and Marty Makary are four more academic scientists who received similar treatment. I believe that the response to Ioannidis was particularly harsh because of his sterling reputation for being totally non-political and his incredible accomplishments. Thus, the online mob and the public health establishment realized that discrediting him was critical to preserving their own credibility.
As it turns out, these tactics backfired on our “expert class” as shown by the public’s abysmal uptake on the new vaccines. Sanity has returned to some European countries such as Denmark, where they recommend that those who are under 50 and healthy need not take any more Covid vaccines. But in the US, the CDC is putting the new Covid19 vaccine on their recommended list of childhood vaccinations in spite of very strong evidence that the harms of this vaccine vastly outweigh the benefits in the children and young adults [6].
Now we have the ultimate irony, an economics professor asking for amnesty for the terrible decisions and epidemic of lying and disinformation during the pandemic [7]. I for one am unwilling to give them amnesty without a full confession, apologies, and changes of personnel in leadership positions.
Perhaps fed by the pandemic, a new and disturbing trend is the prevalence of “zombie” trials in which there is no evidence there is any real data underlying the results [8]. This is further evidence of how weak the peer review system has become. The idea that fraud is widespread in science has moved from the fringes to the pages of the BMJopinion [9]. Ioannidis [5] cites a couple of covid papers in leading journals that were essentially fraudulent. At least one of these was still being cited over a year later!!
A Culture of Censorship and Cancellation
My previous post at Climate, Etc. [10] provided some references for the sad state of science pre-Covid. Basically, the replication crisis was in full swing. That post pointed to the serious problems in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and offered some ideas for addressing them. Things have changed for the worse post-pandemic. Perhaps the most salient fact about the pandemic was how politicized the science became, just as with the AIDS epidemic. There was a remarkable coincidence between a desire to “stop” the epidemic by any means necessary (regardless of how many collateral causalities there were) and climate alarmism that seeks to control the climate by eliminating fossil fuels. The complete playbook that made climate science’s culture deteriorate was deployed to Covid science and epidemiology, making meaningful scientific debate virtually impossible [1]. As described out below, the Covid panic went well beyond the climate science playbook. [1] is long and very detailed and worth a full read.
“Creating a false consensus by censoring information and preventing scientific debates might lead scientists, and thus also policymakers, to sink into the ruling paradigm, causing them to ignore other, more effective options to cope with the crisis or perhaps even prevent it. Such a “consensus” leads to a narrow worldview, which impairs the public’s ability to make informed decisions and erodes public trust in medical science and in public health (Cernic 2018; Delborne 2016; Martin 2014, 2015; Vernon 2017).”
“Yet, there are three main differences [with previous instances of suppression]. First, when it comes to COVID-related knowledge, the censorship tactics used against dissenters are extreme and unprecedented in their intensiveness and extensiveness, with scientific journals, and academic and medical institutions taking an active and involved part in censoring critical voices. In fact, as one of our respondents indicates, even pre-print servers and academic social networking sites censor scientific papers that do not align with the mainstream narrative, and this seems to be a growing trend. Furthermore, what our respondents describe goes way beyond censorship, and includes a wide range of suppression methods intended to destroy their reputations and careers, solely because they dared to take a different position from that dictated by the medical establishment.”
As pointed out by Battacharya, this behavior is really analogous to the Middle Ages with ”The Science” being the new clerisy [11].
“We live in an age when a high public health bureaucrat can, without irony, announce to the world that if you criticize him, you are not simply criticizing a man. You are criticizing “The Science” itself. The irony in this idea of “science” as a set of sacred doctrines and beliefs is that the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us our modern definitions of scientific methodology, was a reaction against a religious clerisy that claimed for itself the sole ability to distinguish truth from untruth. The COVID-19 pandemic has apparently brought us full circle, with a public health clerisy having replaced the religious one as the singular source of unassailable truth.”
Collusion of The Deep State, Corporate Media, and Big Tech
The latest instantiation of this authoritarianism is the rise of a vast industry devoted to ferreting out and censoring “misinformation” and “disinformation” [12, 13]. The first piece is an excellent deep dive into the way the leaders of this complex view themselves. Of course, science often is the subject of these censors [14]. There is a large industry devoted to framing oneself as a “disinformation” expert, a category that is largely meaningless and has no well defined credentials. Just as there was competition over the last 30 years among non-scientists and political activists and a few activist scientists to hype climate catastrophes and sniff out and cancel the more realistic scientists, now political operatives, activists, the media and often the deep state and some scientists compete to see who can be in the forefront of rounding up the witches who spread “disinformation‘’ and burning them. This is just a new and much more pervasive form of Red baiting [13]. The Twitter Files [4] proved the existence of a broad collusion between the FBI, CIA, big tech, “disinformation” NGOs and corporate media to censor voices that appear to be suspicious of or contradict the “authorities,” with their often false and destructive narratives acting to deplatform these voices.
The range of issues and “information” that attracts their attention is quite broad. It extends even to ordinary Americans who were flagged as Russian trolls by the fraudulent Hamilton 68 dashboard, an oft cited source that was said to “prove” massive and consequential Russian interference in American elections.
This is detailed in [15]. This Taibbi Twitter files summary begins:
“Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud. The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork.”
This largely unsupported narrative of Russian interference peddled by the Clinton campaign, the deep state, and assorted so-called disinformation specialists is debunked by Seigel and Gerth [13, 16]. However, this narrative was supported by literally thousands of largely false corporate media “stories” for over 6 years, some of which received the Pulitzer prize. This is a striking example of the corruption of the corporate media. There have been very few retractions and no apologies that I am aware of. The media doubles down by refusing to cover these scandals and insisting they are nothing new. There is strong evidence that the US government is at least partially funding these “disinformation expert organizations” who sometimes do the data collection and screening for “disinformation” – really just another term for often true information or opinion that challenges the “legitimacy” of our “institutions.” This latter category is very vague and can be stretched to almost anything the disinformation expert doesn’t like. Perhaps it is no coincidence that these disinformation “expert” organizations present corporate and publicly funded media as least likely to spread disinformation.
In fact, there seems to be a revolving door between the US security state and the executive ranks at big tech companies and corporate media, making the collusion easy to set up and nurture. I believe that this Russian interference narrative is the most consequential disinformation and election interference campaign in American history outside of war time. [13, 15–17] Some activist scientists have chosen to wade into this morass and to participate in this Disinformation Industrial Complex, further undermining their credibility. This climate of fear and censorship is similar to what happened in the US during WWI, when debate was criminalized by the Sedition Act of 1918, really an amendment to the Espionage Act of 1917. This was totally unprecedented in American history. Even during the Civil War, with a few exceptions such as Maryland in 1861, the Constitution was in full force, and debate was often libelous and nasty. There was a very vigorous anti-war faction in the North and it was a full participant in the political process. In 1918, many opponents of the draft and the war were prosecuted simply for saying so. The demonization of Germany was as intense in the media as the media campaign currently directed against Russia.
The law was upheld by the Supreme Court. The Socialist Eugene Debs was prosecuted for opposing the War and was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He famously campaigned for President in 1920 from prison. President Harding commuted his sentence in 1921. There were a significant number of prosecutions under the Act, but most were offered clemency by 1920. It appears that Americans after the hysteria of war was over had a devotion to the Bill of Rights. The 1918 Sedition Act was repealed in December 1920. It is likely that the 1918 amendment would be held unconstitutional today. The 1917 law continues in effect and is used against leakers such as Snowdon and Assange, even though Assange merely did on a larger scale what hundreds of corporate media “journalists” do every day. Daniel Ellsberg was charged under it for leaking the Pentagon Papers. His case was dismissed after the plumbers broke into his psychiatrists office. But deep state leakers, who use the corporate media to spread “information” that supports their version of events and often do immensely more damage, almost always escape punishment.
It is not a coincidence that President Woodrow Wilson, a former President of Princeton University and an opponent of full participation of Blacks in American society and government, also wanted to replace the Constitution with the rule of the administrative state, i.e., the “experts.” This deeply un-American impulse didn’t die with Wilson but survives and flourishes today in the deep state and their allies and symbiotes in corporate media. The standards for using leaks in news stories have dramatically loosened over the decades since Watergate. And the sheer volume of leaks has grown almost certainly faster than the Federal agencies. Fortunately, America came to its senses and the 1918 Sedition Act amendments were repealed in 1920. Our recovery from our current culture of fear may not be so rapid.
What is disturbing is that some politicians and activists are quoting from outdated Supreme Court decisions to try to justify the current censorship collusion. According to the Supreme Court, it is a violation of the Constitution for the government to deputize a private organization to do what it cannot do. The Twitter Files prove that the Biden Administration is in massive violation.
Is the Internet the Proximate Cause?
Another must read is [18]. The subhead is “How the truth monopoly was broken up.” Their thesis is that the internet transformed modern society just as the printing press did in the 16th Century. What we are going through is our expert class panicking because their monopoly on “truth” has been broken. Just as the counter reformation led to bloody conflict, the new disinformation enforcers are going to generate a lot of conflict and lots of innocent people will suffer.
“We beg to differ. Fake news is not a perversion of the information society but a logical out- growth of it, a symptom of the decades-long devolution of the traditional authority for governing knowledge and communicating information. That authority has long been held by a small num- ber of institutions. When that kind of monopoly is no longer possible, truth itself must become contested.”
“This is treacherous terrain. The urge to insist on the integrity of the old order is widespread. Truth is truth, lies are lies, and established authorities must see to it that nobody blurs the two. But we also know from history that what seemed to be stable regimes of truth may collapse, and be replaced. If that is what is happening, then the challenge is to manage the transition, not to cling to the old order as it dissolves around us.”
This is a lesson that climate science should perhaps take seriously.
Simple Minded Ideas about Science are Wrong
For me, the whole concept of science as a system of understanding the universe whose practitioners are honest and sincere truth seekers, as Bertrand Russell for example portrayed in his writings, is not believable. My training in the 1970’s if anything re-inforced Russell’s version. I did learn something about chaos in graduate school, but I was not really fully aware once I joined industry that when we switched from linear potential flow and electromagnetics to the full potential equation with coupled integral boundary layer, the Euler equations, and the Navier Stokes equations that we were entering a totally different world. This world is one of ill-posed equations, multiple solutions, and bifurcations, and often high uncertainty. This is not something that is readily evident either from typical graduate school education or the literature. It must be said that climate and weather scientists do a better job on this point.
Many of the most important topics in scientific research have hit a wall that constrains further progress, and that wall is uncertainty, in many cases caused by nonlinearlity and chaos, particularly in complex systems. The world may never yield to the kind of deterministic quantified explanations that many desire.
Most traditional scientific methods are provably effective only for well-posed problems. Many of the most important problems are not well-posed. Yet we train graduate students mostly using simplified well- posed problems and the numerical methods suitable for them. I believe new theoretical paradigms and methods will be needed for complex systems. Up until roughly 2000, scientists counted on rapidly increasing computing power to enable solution of more challenging problems. The frontier is now probably not going to be expanded just with more powerful computers. The underlying ill-posed nature of many of the problems will come to the fore.
Popular culture and the political left in the US (and their institutions) have become infested with an almost childlike faith in “The Science.” Faith in “The Science” is really scientism because it can only exist either with the suspension of the critical faculties or with ignorance of the real issues. The media have chosen to foster this ignorance and simplistic thinking as a way to manipulate public opinion in favor of certain political and cultural narratives or in the case of covid a set of “scientific” narratives as the Twitter files prove [4, 14]. [14] is the Twitter thread dealing with Twitter’s collusion with the US government to censor often correct information about Covid19.
Scientists often collaborate with these media driven narratives because they think they will get more funding and public adulation if the narrative is believed. They may also reasonably fear being ostracized and damage to their careers. Readers of this blog are well aware that this became true in climate science a long time ago. Some unscrupulous scientists have chosen to continue to support narratives that are even contradicted by the IPCC reports, particularly about extreme weather events. Some activist climate scientists were also among the alarmist camp concerning Covid19.
Threats to Democracy
Many of the tactics of our Disinformation Industrial Complex are rationalized as being needed to combat threats to Democracy. In fact, this Complex is itself the real threat to Democracy. [19] In an excellent Tablet article in January of 2022 Ioannidis and Schippers [20] explain how democracy cannot function if the public is fed a constant diet of half truths and even disinformation with dissenting voices systematically excluded. This was written before the Twitter files showed that this culture is deeply systemic in our elite institutions including science itself.
“Some people, organizations, corporations, and lobbyists (or combinations thereof) saw this crisis [Covid19] as an opportunity to establish some version of a desired ideological utopia, which, in reality, benefited only a zealous minority confident in their “truth”, “science” or whatever name they used to legitimate blind dogmas.”
We can with confidence include the Federal government departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Defense to this list of organizations.
“The population at large would benefit more from scientific skepticism (which doesn’t require a Ph. D.) than from the purging of “bias” by spurious information purifiers.”
“Concern about the manipulation of power and influence has also been exacerbated by the performance of media and social media. It is critical in free, democratic societies that media never become a vessel for a single, state-sanctioned, official narrative at the expense of public debate and freedom of speech. The same applies for social media: Removing content considered “fake” or “false” in order to limit the ability of ordinary people to judge information for themselves only inflames polarization and distrust of the public sphere.”
“This is especially important in the realm of scientific debate. Anyone who believes that it’s possible to cleanse “science” of error through brute force censorship has no understanding of how science works or how accurate, unbiased evidence is accumulated in the first place. The idea of arbitrators who select what is correct and dismiss what is incorrect is the most alien possible concept to science. Without the ability to make errors or make (and improve on) inaccurate hypotheses, there is no science. The irony is that scientists understand (or at least should understand) and embrace (or at least should embrace) the fact that we all float in a sea of nonsense; it is the opportunist influencers and pundits, lacking in any understanding of the scientific method, who believe in the possibility of pure, unconflicted “truth.” ”
[20] appeared nearly a year before the Twitter files were published but was prescient in many ways. They conclude:
“As the pandemic ebbs, the years ahead will help determine whether we as democratic citizens and free people are still capable of making our own decisions, pursuing happiness, and refraining from harm, without falling prey to the authoritarian temptations that have felled democracies in the past.”
Conclusion
In the year since Ioannidis’ article, much has been revealed about how pervasive the Disinformation Industrial Complex is by the revelations in the Twitter files. A deep analysis tracing the rise of this Complex whose beginnings arose out of the War on Terror and how this Complex is applying the propaganda tools of that war inside America (They have brought the War on Terror to the United States) is [13]. It is a long read but is the result of 3 years of research. Just as troubling is the rise of an exceptionally censorious public culture in the USA and in other parts of the English-speaking world.
The politicization of science, the honing of the activists tools for cancellation of people they don’t like, and the involvement of government in collusion with big tech and media to control ”disinformation” [really just another euphemism for state control of media] [4], and finally the conversion of the FBI into a domestic version of the CIA have me personally concerned about the future of the English-speaking world.
I hope a critical mass of scientists and the public is finally waking up to the dangers this culture of fear and censorship poses. The danger for the elites is that they may alienate and attack so many people that their supporters become a minority. The power of modern media and social media to spread misinformation (in many cases originating with leaks from the US security state) with political motivations is immense and is indeed a growing part of the crisis. The pushback does however seem to be growing. There are now some free speech media such as Rumble, Locals, and Substack. It is possible to financially support bloggers, including Judith, using Patreon. Public polling shows a near collapse of trust in corporate media. It is indeed ironic that those who claim to be squashing existential threats to democracy, have themselves caused a climate of growing acceptance of intimidation and threats, political violence and serious violations of Federal law. If everything is an existential threat and words are violence, real violence can seem more and more to be justified.
Moderation note: This thread will be strictly monitored for relevance and civility.
References
[1] Yaffa Shir-Raz, Ety Elisha, Brian Martin, Natti Ronel, and Josh Guetzkow, “Censorship and suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics, Minerva (2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024- 022-09479-4.
[2] Cannell JJ, Zasloff M, Garland CF, Scragg R, Giovannucci E, “On the epidemiology of influenza,” Virol J 2008, 5: 10.1186/1743-422X-5-29.
[3] Bari Weiss https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
[4] Matt Taibbi, “Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary,” https://https://www.racknews/p/capsule-summaries-of-all-twitter
[5] John A. Ioannidis, “How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science”, Tablet, September 8,2021.
[6] Bardosh, A. Krug, E. Jamrozid, T. Lemmens, S. Keshavjee, V. Prasad, M. A. Makary, S. Baral, T. B. Hoeg, “COVID-19 vaccine boosters for young adults: a risk benefit assessment and ethical analysis of mandate policies at universities,” BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics, 2022.
[7] Emily Oster, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” The Atlantic, October 31,
[8] P. A. Ioannidis, “Hundreds of thousands of zombie randomised trials circulate among us,” Anaesthesia, Vol. 76, Issue 4, April 2021.
[9] Richard Smith, “Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?,” The BMJOpinion, July 5, 2021.
[10] David Young, ““Colorful fluid dynamics” and overconfidence in global climate models,” Climate , December 2,2022. https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/02/colorful-fluid-dynamics-and-overconfidence-in- global-climate-models/
[11] Jay Battacharia, “How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test,” Tablet Magazine, 10, 2023.
[12] Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse, “Inside the Censorship Industrial Complex,” Substack, April 13,1023. https://public.substack.com/p/inside-the-censorship-industrial?utm source=substack&utm medium=email#play$
[13] Jacob Seigel, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,” Tablet, March 28, 2023. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen- ways-looking-disinformation
[14] David Zweig, Twitter, 26,2022. https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607378386338340867
[15] Matthew Taibbi, https://www.racknews/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton
[16] Jeff Gerth, Columbia Journalism Review, Jan. 30, 2023, Parts 1-4. https://www.cjr.org/special report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php https://www.cjr.org/special report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-2.php https://www.cjr.org/special report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-3.php https://www.cjr.org/special report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-php
[17] Kyle Pope, Columbia Journalism Review, Jan. 30, 2023 https://www.cjr.org/special report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-ed-note.php
[18] Andrea Santelli and Daniel Sarewetz, “Reformation of the Church of Science”, The New Atlantis, Spring 2022,
[19] Vinay Prasad, “The Misinformation Police Strike Out,” Sensible Medicine on Substack, November 15,
[20] P. A. Ioannidis and M. C. Shippers “Saving Democracy From the Pandemic,” Tablet, January 23, 2022.
Part of the problem with “Trusting true Science” WRT the COVID Vaccine is that it isn’t.
Contrary to what Dr Fauci indicated during its introduction…
It doesn’t stop you from getting the disease…
It doesn’t stop you from spreading the disease…
It could give you Heart Troubles…
It could take your life anyway.
If the Polio vaccine didn’t protect you from getting AND spreading the disease it wouldn’t have been used on the population.
If the Smallpox vaccine didn’t protect you from getting AND spreading the disease it wouldn’t have been used on the population.
If the MMR vaccine didn’t protect you from getting AND spreading those diseases it wouldn’t have been used on the population.
If the HPV vaccine didn’t protect you from getting AND spreading the disease it wouldn’t have been used on the population.
The most you get from the COVID Vaccine is the possibility of not being hospitalized though you still might be anyway
Not a “vaccine” really, at least by the previously accepted definition.
And not “science” really, at least by the previously accepted definition.
The triple+ boosted are having worse outcomes when infected than the unvaxxed now. Never mind the unprecedented exponential rise in adverse events that happened with the introduction of the “vaccines”.
Nope!
They made that claim up when less deadly and much less infectious COVID variants showed up.
Even now, the media tries to portray every new COVID variant as more deadly than the original COVID-19 as funded by Fauci.
Actually the polio vaccine, specifically the oral version, doesn’t prevent virus shedding. When our children were vaccinated we were told to be careful when changing their dirty nappies as there could be active virus in the faeces. If the uptake of the measles virus is less than 95% then there are risks of outbreaks, as has happened in the not too distant past.
What all vaccines attempt to achieve is herd immunity, depending on the virulence and transmissibility of the pathogen this may need 95% immunisation or 80% immunisation.
No vaccine prevents infection as they are not sterilising, what they do do is prevent serious illness.
in fact there’s a train of thought that suggests sterilising vaccines are either unachievable or not a good thing.
This is to do with how and where vaccines work. Measles, rubella and influenza are all respiratory tract infections, polio is a gastrointestinal tract infection. These infection paths are protected by mucus, but if the viruses manage to circumvent this barrier, then the innate immune system responds and you develop a fever, perhaps loss of appetite, feeling absolute rubbish, perhaps runny nose, coughing, swollen glands, a series of symptoms that are called “flu like”. These typically occur 24-96 hours post infection. The innate system also triggers the adaptive immune response, and this is where the site of infection becomes important.
The part of the adaptive system that is most well known are antibodies, however these are not homogeneous, and go by the name immunoglobulin (Ig). There are several types, for immune response to pathogens these are IgM, IgA and IgG. Of these three IgA and IgG have specific areas where they form. IgG is found in the blood and IgA is found in the upper respiratory tract and the gastrointestinal tract. Any injected vaccine causes the production of IgG primarily. These antibodies last a few weeks at most, but are replaced by memory B and T cells.
If you are exposed to and infected by a pathogen that you’ve been vaccinated against then the adaptive response is within about 48 hours, but the pathogen has to infect you to trigger that response.
If you have cold or flu symptoms then you probably assume it’s a common cold, but it could be caused by the measles virus or the rubella virus, you wouldn’t know as the only definitive diagnosis of either of these is the disease specific rash which develops 4 – 7 days post infection. These viruses have not been eliminated from our environment. In fact polio virus is still found occasionally in sewage both in the USA and the U.K.
For further discussion on all things virus then TWIV on YouTube with Vincent Racianello is a good place to start.
CV19 was nature catching up with our ability to extend human life. Those that died were predominantly people who would have died earlier had they been born prior to about 1940. I to;d anyone who’d listen that lockdowns would cause more harm than good in the long run, as it turns out in the short term as well.
As far as the jag was concerned that was a decision you had to make weighing up the odds of your vulnerability against the risk of taking an injection based on a new and untried technology. But also taking into account that it’s not in a virus’ interest to kill all the host species or even a large percentage of it and normally they evolve into less deadly strains. One of the most successful viruses must be the common cold which infects millions every year and kills very few ensuring its survival and ability to evolve.
One of the side effects of pushing an untested technology, without explaining its limitations, which gets little or no coverage in the MSM, is the reluctance of people to have their children vaccinated against all the diseases you mentioned, and a few more like Diphtheria and Meningitis which are making a return in the UK and killing children and adults. A lot of fear of vaccination was kicked off by Wakefield and the MMR vaccine and autism which was another case of careful data and criteria selection along a well trodden path by the likes of Ancil Keys
Two observations, one specific to COVID and one general.
Re COVID. It has been known for many years that masking does not prevent influenza. COVID was another ‘similar’ respiratory virus. Fauci should have known from the beginning that masking would not help. It has been known for years that the most influenza vulnerable were elderly and immunocompromized. Same with COVID. It was clear from near the beginning that the experimental new mRNA ‘vaccine’ did not prevent disease, nor transmission, but did have significant side effects. So Fauci and Birx led the world down a known scientific rabbit hole.
Re ‘science’ in general, irrespective COVID, ‘climate’, or other, there are powerful financial incentives now to do what is NOT right. Government grants, celebrity internet status, position appointments… Nullius in Verba never was more important than now. For many other examples of supposedly scientific ‘corruption’, see the hundreds of examples in ebook ‘The Arts of Truth’. Even the book title is a subtle example of the opposite, explained in the preface.
Great Book by Bill Roorbach
Sex and money have screwed up truth from day 8.
Not necessarily in that order.
IIRC, Fauci FIRST said masks don’t do any good.
That has been conflated to him saying it (lying) so there would be masks available for the health care professionals.
Then he said any mask hels and double masks are even better.
Before government influenced DOW on their N95 mask specifications, DOW clearly spelled out that their masks did not effectively filter 2.5 micron or smaller particulates.
N95 masks are named 95 because they are capable of catching 95% by weight of dust particles larger than ‘2.5 micron particulate matter (pm)’.
Even with 10 micron and larger particulates, the N95 masks, which are made for humans to breathe through, are only capable of catching 95% by weight of the particles.
Virus particles smaller than 0.5 microns sail on through as if they were mosquitos passing through a chain link fence.
I learned this when I researched, pre-COVID, masks and filters for my wife, who when weaving raises clouds of fiber particles and for myself sawing/sanding wood items.
As you say: Money, celebrity and power are the problems. One solution would be laws which guaranty financial independence of scientific and higher educational institutions, one thing being to forbid donations of money with any sort of conditions attached, be it from government or private sources. Nominations in such institutions should also be decided by internal consultations within these institutions, forbidding any external influence, private or governmental, and where quality of research is determinant, and not “how much money does he/her bring in.”
Obama tried to have the internet regulated by the FCC, with the stalking horse of “net neutrality” as a rationale. Some in government had fond memories of the big three networks under the “Fairness Doctrine”, when very few had any idea of just how biased Walter Cronkite was.
Ideologues are relentless, so a combination of seducing and intimidating social media companies was instituted as an alternate path. The Twitter files show the method, but the companies showed little resistance.
“few had any idea of just how biased”
Because…
I have no idea of how old you are, or if you had any experience with broadcast media, or most newspapers, before about 1998.
Clinton almost had the Monica Lewinsky affair quashed, and had done so with the legacy media.
They all blew it.
As I recall, she did too. 😉
Winner. Have a cigar.
Clinton and then-Congress passed the 1996 Telecommuncations Act that allowed media companies to buy up all the media outlets in any given market. Independent newspapers and broadcast media were quickly bought up.
The result has been the destruction of the plethora of alternative voices reporting in the media. They all now speak with a single voice, and all the people once called journalists have gone right along.
The 1996 Act needs to be rescinded and the media monoploies need to be broken up, That alone would resolve a large part of the (dis)informational problem we face today.
I am 67, and from when I started paying attention to the media in the late 1960’s through the rise of the internet in the late 1990’s, mass media was fairly one note. Eliminating the Fairness Doctrine did create talk radio, but that was the middle 1980’s.
The Federal bureaucracy leaning on the very few major internet portals is currently much more important than local newspapers, which are moribund. Challenging DEI rules by pension fund managers is probably as important, as they are imposing political orthodoxy on corporate boards indirectly. De-facto boycotts by advertisers for political heresy is another issue, as the Left is much more dedicated to that tactic, Bud Light aside.
And now, they silenced Tucker Carlson
Tucker Carlson speech on Friday night:
“How many people break under the strain of the downward pressure of whatever this is that we are going through. We look with disdain and sadness as we see people you know become quislings, you see them revealed as cowards, you see them going along with the new new thing, it is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing, saying things you know they don’t believe because they want to keep their job.
Right-wing host Tucker Carlson to leave Fox News days after Dominion settlement
I’m not so sure they ‘silenced’ him rather he refused to be censored by them and quit. Rumor has it that they wouldn’t allow him to air a special he put together on J6.
Fox lost a billion in stock value with the move.
Fox News stock price is currently at $32.63 bid price level.
Last Fall on October 27th, 2022, Fox News stock ranged between $28 and $29 during the market day.
Back in March 16th 2020, Fox News stock price was cratered around $20.99 as the full impact of their calling the Presidency for Biden when a substantial number of states were still voting, finally hit them.
Perhaps, Fox News will panic over a small drop in market value.
When their stock price drops below $21 is when Fox News might pay attention.
There is more to the story and let’s not jump to conclusions.
In the Dominion lawsuit, several internal documents from Tucker were made public. Just to be clear, criticizing management or making the boss look like a fool is not a good career move.
“The population at large would benefit more from scientific skepticism” The topic requires a huge modern vs post-modern debate about the definition of truth. Who defines truth, {it’s independently discoverable to: nobody; anybody; everybody}
In the end “we” have to trust earlier or contemporary minds to make progress or constantly reinvent the wheel. Who can be trusted? The strange idea of science by consensus might be the least bad system if consensus weren’t so easily guided by the glib
You’re absolutely correct about consensus. Science or at least its theories were never meant to be immutable either.
Look to engineering, they don’t reinvent the wheel but they make it better, almost continually.
Yeah, so what is Truth?
The awareness of a Reality Control Knob has only come about in the modern era.
Or has it? The early philosophers were aware of the machinations of the PTB and then in the Elightenment even more so. This awareness spread with the information technology available – common language, the printing press, telegraph, radio, TV, Internet.
Nothing has changed.
The useful question is not, what is truth?
The useful question is, what is incorrect?
Two constants. Truth and change. Truth never changes and change never ceases.
When Pilate heard Jesus speak of “truth”, he asked (sarcastically), “What is truth?”
Nothing has changed.
The “inside joke” was that he was talking to it but failed to recognize/understand.
Re: earlier Halla question I was around for the monolithic media period and saw it fall apart on broadcast then rebuild on the Internet. I think “Nothing has changed” is an accurate statement in the philosophical context.. ie nobody has finally answered “What is truth?” in a way that people have accepted. Thus consensus and chatbots are steps toward improving the illusion.
Sea of doubtsDozens of papers linking high carbon dioxide to unsettling changes in fish behavior fall under suspicion.
When Philip Munday discussed his research on ocean acidification with more than 70 colleagues and students in a December 2020 Zoom meeting, he wasn’t just giving a confident overview of a decade’s worth of science. Munday, a marine ecologist at James Cook University (JCU), Townsville, was speaking to defend his scientific legacy.
Munday has co-authored more than 250 papers and drawn scores of aspiring scientists to Townsville, a mecca of marine biology on Australia’s northeastern coast. He is best known for pioneering work on the effects of the oceans’ changing chemistry on fish, part of it carried out with Danielle Dixson, a U.S. biologist who obtained her Ph.D. under Munday’s supervision in 2012 and has since become a successful lab head at the University of Delaware (UD), Lewes.
The Munday/Dixson papers were heavily pushed in the media to show how bad CO2 is and oceanwater and fishes are in danger of acidification.
Once the fraud made “public” it wasn’t public at all – nothing in the news, in the media…
Other/more details:
Star marine ecologist committed misconduct, university says
A major controversy in marine biology took a new twist last week when the University of Delaware (UD) found one of its star scientists guilty of research misconduct. The university has confirmed to Science that it has accepted an investigative panel’s conclusion that marine ecologist Danielle Dixson committed fabrication and falsification in work on fish behavior and coral reefs. The university is seeking the retraction of three of Dixson’s papers and “has notified the appropriate federal agencies,” a spokesperson says.
Maybe she was writing “her truth”.
I’d file the academic misconduct case under “you can’t have it both ways”.
Is there objective truth or isn’t there?
Do words have meanings?
One of the tenets of Marxism is to control the media and so far they have accomplished a good level of MSM control throughout the world. They’ve successfully and quietly gained ownership of the major news outlets over the past century and had it not been for the internet their goal would have been 100% complete by now. Musk understood their plan, made his own intrusion, and is bringing their deeds to light.
“the major news outlets“
How they silenced Sucharit Bhakdi, who in details described just at the beginning how bad the mRNA vacces will be, what possible side effects will happen and how the may happen.
What Bhakdi said and is reason for the proceedings was the vaccination program / and the Green Card system used in Israel and the Pfizer contract sharing al medical data of vaccinated:
Antisemitic German COVID-19 Conspiracy Theorist Will Face Incitement Charges After All
The date to appear to a judge was March 23.
The date was canceld without replacement.
I watched a number of Sucharit Bhakdi’s video presentations. Virtually every warning he issued came true.
A few outtakes and comments.
“viral epidemiology was a primitive science” Epidemiology is not a science at all. It is assumption-driven inference-generating statistical modeling.
Epidemiological models are not falsifiable, in the sense that no matter how a disease outbreak proceeds, the model of the outbreak cannot be falsified because the implicit (usually hidden) uncertainty bounds are so wide as to include all possible outcomes.
In the PubPeer debate after Propagation was published, a statistical modeler critic hotly and insistently rejected that an assumption-based probability distribution is not an accuracy metric.
“The list of issues where pseudo-science was used to make decisions is long. Mask mandates, lockdowns, school closures, vaccination recommendations, vaccination requirements for employment or university attendance, and travel restrictions.”
See Inglesby, et al., (2006) Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza All the actions you listed were known to be ineffective, from past experience, and recommended in 2006 to be excluded from responses to future viral pandemics. But the CDC knowingly did the opposite.
Early on in the Covid excresence, I emailed Thomas Inglesby, asking him to speak out. He didn’t reply. Then I saw Ingelsby was involved in the 2019 Event 201 participating making the destructive plans for responses he knew were wrong and had previously discouraged in peer-reviewed print.
How does that sort of ethical turn-about happen?
Only three links allowed per response. More to come.
Johns Hopkins got their tracking website up in a hurry, almost as if they just had to flip a switch.
Reality was different . They were building the plane while flying it
https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/210426-JHU-COVID-dashboard-oral-history
“…The list of issues where pseudo-science was used to make decisions is long…”
Tangential subject: Linear No Threshold modeling used by folks like the EPA to justify excessive regulation of things like PM2.5
Absolute junk science but forms the basis of regulatory initiatives.
The propaganda techniques which were successful for the climate crisis were scaled up for the COVID crisis. None of it is based on empirical science.
Behind it all is a power grab designed to subvert sovereignty to the will of corporate interests. The elite like the Chinese model of authoritarian control of information and markets. That is their end game. A feudal system where they own everything and we pay tribute for the right to exist if we comply.
The idiots on the left goose stepping in support of tyranny need to be called out for their naive complicity.
WW 3 is happening now as psychological warfare. Empirical data is being labelled as disinformation while blatant lies are presented as unquestionable fact.
There are hot pockets though (of war).
“Early statistics on Covid cases and deaths were shown endlessly in the spring of 2020. These statistics seemed to imply that 10-15% of those who got Covid would die, often horribly.”
That was the message purveyed. The reality was very different. The data in the chart are for August, 2020, about 9 months into the pandemic.
The horror stories were eocnomical with the truth from the very first, But one had to do independent research and analysis to discover the facts.
Chart source information:
Covid-19 data from: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Sex-Age-and-S/9bhg-hcku
Deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), pneumonia, and influenza reported to NCHS by sex and age group and state.
Updated August 5, 2020 Data Provided by National Center for Health Statistics
Population cohort data from: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2019/demo/age-and-sex/2019-age-sex-composition.html
xls Table 1. Population by Age and Sex: 2019 [<1.0 MB]
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/age-and-sex/2019/age-sex-composition/2019gender_table1.xlsx
For school-age people (5-24), the percent death rate from Covid-19 = Fraction of Covid-19 deaths * Population cohort percent) = (0.25*0.0134%) = 0.00335 %. That’s approximately 1 death per 29851 people.
Total COVID-19 cases: https://www.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases
August 9, 2020: CDC USA| Updated: Aug 9 2020 1:15PM
TOTAL CASES: 4,974,959 (Visible infection rate is about 10% of the case rate)
TOTAL DEATHS: 161,284
I remember a poll that showed that a large number of people (I think it was actually a majority) thought that the hospitalization toll from contracting covid was well over 50%.
“The well known fact that the vast majority of those dying from Covid19 were already quite ill or elderly was systematically hidden.”
It’s now a well-known fact that the majority those dying of Covid19 died because they were systematically denied effective early treatment.
Thorp, et al., (2022) “[W]we examine the path not taken: a handful of cheap, widely available, home-based therapies—ozone preconditioning, hydroxychloroquine, and light/vitamin treatment—which, had they been implemented early in the pandemic could have reduced morbidity and mortality by 80% or more.”
From the same article by Thorp:
“In an earlier series of papers, we established the existence of a complex body-wide energy field driven by aether, the all-encompassing energetic precursor substance first described by Aristotle nearly 2400 years ago [100-103]. The aether concept was rejected by physicists at the turn of the 20th century but in recent decades has been recognized to be indispensable in explaining a multitude of energy- related phenomena. We described three intertwined and interconvertible primary energy forms in living bodies: the magnetic, taking origin in the vascular system; the radiant, deriving from external sunlight, generated in the interstitial fluid space beneath the skin; and the dielectric, in play at the cellular and molecular level and mediated primarily by electro-ionic mechanisms.”
Might I sugest that if you want to be taken seriously then you need to rely on papers not written by crackpots. Or do you also believe that the aether exists and is responsible for people getting COVID-19?
I was nearly laughing out loud when I read…’complex body-wide energy field driven by aether, the all-encompassing energetic precursor substance first described by Aristotle..
the magnetic, taking origin in the vascular system;
the radiant, deriving from external sunlight, generated in the interstitial fluid space beneath the skin
the dielectric, in play at the cellular and molecular level
Its a complete crank
If you want to be taken seriously Izaak, I suggest you not discredit by misdirection.
One of my colleagues is an experimental physicist. He is presently working on bio-photons. He and his collaborator detect such photons being emitted during the early germinating of legumes and have published several papers on the phenomenon. So you’re a bit presumptuous to point and laugh at notions of bio-energetic phenomena.
If you’d looked further into Thorp’s thinking, you might have noticed that his “aether” is not very different from Heisenberg’s quantum foam — the flux of virtual particles that constitutes the substratum of the universe, produces the Casimir effect and are the reason black holes evaporate. You posted without researching.
You’re also not one to be disparaging crackpots, Izaak, given your views on CO2-driven climate.
How is this misdirection? The authors clearly know nothing about physics and are using words and phrases that make no sense. Can you explain this:
“The term ‘dielectric’ was coined in the mid-19th century by physicists to designate a set of properties observed in relation to externally applied electrical currents. While substances like copper or silver conduct electricity, and insulators like glass, oils or rubber repel it, dielectric substances, instead, undergo internal polarization, i.e., separation of positive and negative charges, which amounts to creation of an internal field, i.e., the dielectric field. Cells are tiny dielectric capacitors.
When a strong electrical potential is applied to ferrous objects like iron their nuclei resonate, realign internally, and expel intra-atomic magnetism giving rise to an external magnetic field. The same dynamics are at play in the cardiovascular system when a magnetic field is generated in the blood to produce the outward diastolic motion of the heart and arterial walls.
With dielectricity, on the other hand, force lines are directed inwardly and radially as seen during contraction of the ventricles. The dielectric, the primary energy field, lies at the aether boundary, i.e., the inertial plane, and, when activated, produces torque thereby inducing energy flow. In reality, magnetism arises from the dielectric and the two always coexist in a single conjoined and inseparable field.”
What does “the dielectric, primary energy field, lies at the aether boundary, i.e. the interial plane” mean? It is nothing more than a bunch of words strung together in a meaningless sentence.
But if you want to follow their advice to stick ozone up your arse to cure COVID19 then go ahead. As they say:
“Ozone is cheap and easily generated by passing oxygen across a voltage gradient simulating a lightning strike. Various routes of administration are employed: … rectal or vaginal insufflation of ozone gas”
Personally I am very happy taking mRNA vaccines which have proved to be safe and effective.
The issue at hand is medical practice. Your dismissive blather about physics is misdirection.
“Personally I am very happy taking mRNA vaccines which have proved to be safe and effective.”
Monumental nonsense and a possibly fatal delusion, Izaak.
Pat,
All of those quotes come from the supposed paper by Thorp et al that you referenced and so are clearly relevant since Thorp included them as support for their medical practice. So the question is why if most of the paper is complete nonsense should anybody believe the rest of it? Not to mention the fact that it is published in a pseudo scientific journal clearly lacking in a rigorous review process.
You provided not one substantively relevant objection, Izaak. Par for your course.
You, further, are “very happy taking mRNA vaccines which have proved to be safe and effective.” in reference to an mRNA shot that is not a vaccine, does not prevent the disease, and does not prevent transmission.
It causes adverse effects in about 15% of those injected including large increases in miscarriage and stillbirth, killed 1221 of about 40,000 test subjects and has, post-rollout, caused more deaths in the last two years than all vaccines over all time, combined.
And you tout it. Mortally delusional. Incapable of rational thought even when your own safety is at risk.
You’ve clearly no credibility to speak at all, on anything.
Pat,
The numbers you quote for adverse effects are wrong by multiple orders of magnitude as has been shown by multiple clinical trials. For example in Nature Communications:
“we show there is no significant increase in cardiac or all-cause mortality in the 12 weeks following COVID-19 vaccination compared to more than 12 weeks after any dose.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36494-0
There is similarly no evidence for increases in miscarriages and stillbirths. See for example the article in the New England Journal of Medicine
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2113891
Nor is there any evidence to support the claim that 1221 test subjects died. The report concerning the tests states that
“Two BNT162b2 recipients died (one from arteriosclerosis, one from cardiac arrest), as did four placebo recipients (two from unknown causes, one from hemorrhagic stroke, and one from myocardial infarction). No deaths were considered by the investigators to be related to the vaccine or placebo. No Covid-19–associated deaths were observed.” From
“Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine” NEJM 2020
Plus of course if the death rate from the vaccine was really that high do you not think that countries like NZ where over 90% of the population have received multiple does would have noticed a massive rise in the total number of deaths over the last couple of years?
But of course rather than accepting reports published in proper peer reviewed journals written by experts in the field you appear to prefer to believe in pseudo-science written by crackpots who believe in aether fields being responsible for diseases and published in non-peer reviewed pseudo-journals.
List and links of peer-reviewed papers discussing mRNA injection injuries.
How Bad is My Batch?
Deletion of mRNA death records by official government bodies.
Peer-reviewed fraud in Lancet and NEJM.
Believe what you like, Izaak, and good luck to you.
“the full potential equation with coupled integral boundary layer, the Euler equations, and the Navier Stokes equations that we were entering a totally different world. This world is one of ill-posed equations, multiple solutions, and bifurcations, and often high uncertainty. This is not something that is readily evident either from typical graduate school education or the literature. It must be said that climate and weather scientists do a better job on this point.”
Weather scientists, yes. Climate scientists (so-called), no. Both groups use heavily parameterized engineering models.
Weather scientists update their models several times a day with new data. These updates constrain predictions. But one can see the quick loss of focus in extrapolated hurricane tracks, where the arc of uncertainty becomes very large three days out.
Climate modelers cannot update their models with data from the future climate. Climate model predictions are useless.
The equations you discuss have been in use for decades in testing of flight surfaces. The parameterized numerical models are constrained by experimental results (wind tunnels, etc.). The models tuned by these results make reliable predictions between the experimental data points and within the calibration bounds — the specified operating range plus some safety margin.
There is no mystery in this. No good physicist or engineer will trust a prediction that is from a parameterized engineering model extrapolated well outside the tuning calibration bounds.
And yet, that’s exactly what climate modelers do and what the IPCC regularly touts. That sort of reckless behavior is not doing a better job in this point. It’s not science at all.
Climate modelers are not scientists. They do not deserve that honorific. Their work is fake science and has wrought death, ruination of lives, spoliation of the countryside, personal misery and fear, and the theft of trillions of dollars.
As an EE I have some experience with models. Predicting all the parameters possible from stray capacitance, magnetic coupling, device variation, parasitic oscillation, etc. is not an easy task. I have used antenna models with not great predictions. They all work to a certain extent, but change one thing and things you never thought of occur.
Climate models are not reality! I’ll say it again, climate models are not reality! Mototaka Nakamura in his book “Confessions of a climate scientist” makes this plain. Anyone who channels models as predictive needs to have their heads examined. They have never been correct and there is no expectation that they ever will be.
In order to maintain the fiction that CO2 “controls” the temperature they have bastardized the models to the point they can not concentrate on the largest factor, water and water vapor. Using temperature as a proxy to CO2 caused rises is also poor practice.
Many an UK engineer or scientist were warning about slipping standards in academia in the eighties and nineties as they saw promising projects defunded and poor quality research and vanity projects replace them. Dumbing down had started the rot and it hasn’t stopped yet with education becoming a business and not a perpetual search for excellence. The corrupt should never be allowed anywhere near public life or responsible office and yet our professions are full of them. We get what we deserve for having no self respect, conscience or desire to become individually better people rather than popular and richer.
SARS-CoV-2 being treated [sic] by vaccinations [sic], and climate change being treated by solar and wind power [sic] are just two sies of the same coin, similar examples of lunatics being allowed to run asylums and then held in high esteem by those of them who should never ever have been allowed near public office.
We should know that from simply glancing at the ill the UN’s WHO and IPCC have already done and are continuing to do. We must go after the liars and cheats and not allow their tales to make it seem that the truth tellers are the ones needing to be purged.
“In 2020, the overall 6-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time undergraduate students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree at 4-year degree-granting institutions in fall 2014 was 64 percent”
The link to [13] is broken. It should be:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation
David Young is speaking about the Covid-19 fiasco. And he is blaming the
media/industrial complex for destroying trust in science. But then he gives us example
after example of scientific thinking being destroyed by present-day scientists and
academicians. I think the latter is closer to the truth. What he is really speaking
about, whether he knows it or not, is the scientific counter-revolution of the 21st
century. What we see in the crackpot “climate science” being peddled to us now, as
detailed in this site, is what the whole world also saw in virology and vaccinology
and epidemiology with respect to the Covid-19 virus pandemic. And what we will
continue to see more and more of in the future.
And this is what the “climate” debate is really all about. It’s not about carbon
dioxide emissions or the greenhouse effect or climate or weather or warming (or
cooling) or more storms or more renewables or more air pollution — it’s about whether
science as a respected discipline will continue to thrive on this earth as a great
expression of the human mind into the future. Or will the leftist, pointy-headed
“humanities” professors who, in the last 60 years, took over Western institutions of
higher learning worldwide and transmogrified the science taught in them into a
disfigured caricature, succeed in their campaign to wipe out science so that their
precious fetishes can be taught unimpeded by scientific analysis for all time to come?
David Solan
You’re right, David.
The situation you describe is the Romantic Counter-Revolution against the Enlightenment and its rationalism and science. It’s been building since the late 18th century, attained critical penetration of the institutions since 1970, and has now reached its crescendo, smelling victory and frantic to finish the job.
Their utopian ideal is a society driven by fashionable irrationalism, where the most stupid self-serving political ideas can never be contradicted because there are no scientific or rational standards of thought.
Their victory is not assured. Mostly because they can’t help exposing themselves with their over-indulgence in villainy. The reactive opposition will self-organize. But the fight will be hard, no matter what.
‘The Long March Through the Institutions’ was a generations long strategy adopted and advanced by the Marxists (Gramsci) in the 1930 onward. It was slowed by the events around the time with some of the Frankfurt School devotees transferring their activities to California during the ‘hostilities’ of the WWII.
The progress towards totalitarian utopia gained speed post 1950 and has all but been accomplished in 2020.
We live in troubling times, don’t mention the BBC.
Intersectionality is nothing more than tribalism wrapped up in a self-declared moralism. Its advocates are self-assured that they wii be the “elites” than remain aloof and control all the tribes.
Nothing good comes out of tribalism. All the great civilizations relied on the cooperation of people working for a common goal. Tribes spend, and waste resources competing with other tribes. Our higher education institutions have become the high priests and will one day reap the consequences.
If all students are pushed toward STEM, STEM will suffer.
..meanwhile in Australia, we are still six months from Summer – but never too early to start cranking up the fear.
“Terrifying ‘hyperthreat’ coming for Australia as El Nino chance rises”
Climate change: NOAA El Nino signals danger for Australia as heatwaves sweep Asia | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site
sugar poisoning – sugar has destroyed the minds of the vast majority of everybody.
It is chemically induced dementia and it’s endemic.
And there is no escape even for folks who’ve worked it out because they have to live in a world where everybody else is irrationally fearful, forgetful, selfish, lazy and buck passing.
The paranoia brings on panic reactions – the victim ‘does the wrong thing’ in their fear-filled haste.
Pretty soon in whichever/whatever situation they’ll realise they’ve done The Wrong Thing so – they lie about it.
They pass the buck. Blame somebody or some thing else for why it went wrong
It is the irrational fear (paranoia coming from a slow/dull mind) that’s the real killer.
Because those who have ‘kept calm’ find themselves in a ‘Lord of the Flies‘ situation so in order just too get through the day, any day, every day, they have to ‘go with the flow’
That’s a nice way of looking at it: Sugar has switched off in our minds almost everything that it is ‘to be adult’
You *have* to join a gang/tribe/consensus just in order to get along.
Trouble is – there’s nothing else/left to eat on this planet, apart from sugar
Some times something else gets the blame, I have cut down my consumption of processed sugar gradually because I find I like ultra sweet things less and less. I gave up sugar in tea in the winter of 1963 when getting supplies of anything proved difficult so you had to make a choice in what you could carry sugar or bread and beans. I steer clear of “low fat” because it usually means high sugar.
Whether or not it’s done me any good is a completely different question.
“everybody else is irrationally fearful, forgetful, selfish, lazy and buck passing” Strike the word “else”?
Quantum powered AI fact checking delirium… invest now. Think people’s head are spinning now?!
Chatbot attempts to answer “What is truth?”
“Science” is doing its part in destroying its reputation. Once science education started emphasizing advocacy and post normal science, the loss of standing should be no surprise. With the new DEI trends, western science is going to self-implode.
Meanwhile, Russian, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean science are not following us down that rabbit hole. I imagine Indian science, isn’t either.
Just found on an education website:
“Note:
Hydrogen is the element with the lowest density in the periodic table and exists as a gas and osmium is the element with the highest density. Hydrogen is lighter than air, which is a mixture of gases like hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and oxygen.”
Interesting choice of “mixture of gases like”. Education. Sigh.
Great piece although he uses Disinformation Industrial complex instead of Censorship “”
Regarding climate science censorship is a better word.
Recommend reading up on Racket and Public substacks