Very interesting. Thanks for that great reference to Reeder's work.
I started work at NASA-Goddard in 1980. At that time the climate modelers were working on a model that explained the triggering of ice ages ("global cooling"). Many of the modelers were contract personnel, hence their salaries had to come from research grants obtained by the principal investigator (PI). Others', civil servants' salaries, were paid out of annual appropriations enacted by Congress to cover the NASA budget. Already you can see how money figured in. In 1980, people seriously were fearing another ice age any minute. Then in that decade we entered a period of warming. Things started to look bad for the coming ice age.
In 1988, Washington DC had a miserable hot summer, worse than normal and that year Congress was unable to recess on schedule and many of the congressmen were held over in DC for the hot weather. People like James Hansen at Goddard Institute for Space Science (GISS) in NYC had been thinking maybe "global warming" was the actual threat, and managed to obtain a Congressional hearing on that topic that very summer. Hansen is on record gloating that he had the set point in the hearing room bumped a few degrees higher than normal, so that the congressmen could sit and sweat and fully experience "global warming". He made his point and the bandwagon henceforth was fueled by ample appropriations for research in global warming.
My own work was then in novel infrared sensors that could be used in imaging detector arrays. The big money, thanks to Hansen and others keeping everyone afraid we were all going to fry, was in earth viewing remote sensing. I had an instrument on STS-85 that successfully obtained infrared imagery of earth from Shuttle altitude. The funding for my part of that (some instrumental development, then part time another 9 years of image processing) was obtained by my PI from the flood of research dollars devoted to global warming. We focused on the infrared imagery of clouds, whose role in global warming was still uncertain. Our published papers always had ample reference to global climate as the reason for our interest and effort. We were on the funding bandwagon. (And our take was chicken feed compared to some. We did a lot of that work on a shoe string.) But I saw up close how it worked.
Since then, global warming has morphed into "climate change". That is so wonderfully vague. You just cannot fail to justify your research now. Warming? Ok, polar bears afloat. Bangladesh underwater. Deep ocean currents slowing down and causing the heating to run away and turn Earth into a half baked Venus. Increased heart damage in newborns. Cooling? Ok, crop failures, ice sheets obliterating NYS, etc. Whatever you want. But keep the panic enflamed and the dollars roll in to feed your grad students and pay your salary and give your University its cut for "administrative" costs.
Now it's medical panic. I see this as an even bigger bonanza, kept alive by all the racketeering you mention here. It all seems strangely familiar. This time the human race is being terrified and bullied into being test subjects in a giant experiment that enriches Pfizer and Moderna in the US. It's going to run its course but I wonder what will be left of us at that point. Will we be so mutated and crippled that we will end up maintained on meds from the same psychopaths that destroy us?
As a scientist myself (theoretical physicist) I've lost count of the number of times I've had to scratch my head in bafflement over this last 20 months or so.
It's easy to run foul of stats and make simple, stupid mistakes (did it myself recently - ignored the warnings of that paradoxical Mr Simpson - I can be an idiot). But some of the ridiculous assertions we've had passed off as "science" have been spectacular - and I don't mean that in a good way.
It's like we threw away all our previous knowledge and experience (our a priori positions) and just went with a ton of crappy associational studies and extremely dubious post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.
I wrote a somewhat sarcastic piece on the radical transformation of our scientific understanding wrought by covid
There are obvious absurdities everywhere (safe when seated - deadly dangerous when you go for a pee) - but it's more serious when those absurdities are present in the scientific literature - it has the official academic "seal of approval".
For those swayed by the number of degrees someone has I would say that a rectal thermometer also has lots of degrees - and you know what you can do with one of those!
Really appreciate this; I am not a scientist but have somehow held on to my natural curiosity and belief in the ability of my mind to grasp new things if I ask lots of questions, try hard, and not mind looking stupid now and then. I've noticed that the main difference between myself and people who are willing to blindly trust The Science is that once they encounter that "This doesn't make sense to me" wall, they'd prefer to look smart, and right now-- in public-- aligning with The Science is like siding with The Official and Authorized Smart People. I appreciate you chipping away at their absurd statements in a way even a non-scientist like me can understand, if I put a little effort into it.
My latest (Officially Stupid?) question relates to the news reports on omicron which state that it is very good at evading natural immunity, that known cases in the U.S. seem to be either vaccinated or prior infected, and that we still believe the best protection is to get vaccinated.
'Besides, if a combination of excellent typesetting and strangely unskeptical and unified pronouncement of "well run clinical trial" by the "science media" is all you need to trust a product injected into your body (or your child's), then I don't assume you'll have the independence of will to follow what comes next.'
This hurts. I feel seen.
To be fair I'm a bit downstream from the excellent typesetting and unified pronouncements. See those influenced people that influence the people I trust. That is it convinced the FDA, the CDC, who convinced the Doctors in my families, as well as the NYT, NPR, BBC, MSNB, CNN, and all other World Governments, the pro-Ivermectin is at least an adjunctive therapy Doctor I followed on Twitter (Dr. Osgood), our Pediatrician, and most importantly my Wife.
So my skepticism that didn't start until Delta chased us back into our bubble hasn't been able to muster enough conviction in me to overrule my much more successful wife, or my successful virologist father-in-law. At least it's given me an unhealthy obsession and painful cognitive dissonance. I like to think perhaps I'm growing and will come out of this more informed with better tools to be more critical.
Okay, this is probably really stupid and evidence of that cognitive bias from evolved cognition that makes our species draw causal conclusions when two things happen sequentially, but hearing Tulsi Gabbard warn that Molnupiravir is mutagenic, and hearing that Omicron's mutations are not those an evolutionary biologist would necessarily predict, makes me wonder if there is a relationship between the testing of Molnupiravir and Omicron. Wikipedia announces this about the drug "The international nonproprietary name of the drug was inspired by that of Thor's hammer, Mjölnir" Probably just drawing connections where none exist based on my general sense that something is freaking rotten on Gaia.
Great piece again. I love that there is a community that actively tries to unravel what is actually going on, not ignoring but actively engaging with the science that sits behind all the decision making.
That's the only way to go and it shows such a big contrast between the official science gods and those opposing its' ''GOD'' status. While they are trying to just create the feeling that all criticism is based on absurd attention seeking ex-scientists who either try to cause chaos or are nut jobs
I don't have the ability to actively criticize the science (except for the most obvious flaws) but I can on the other hand observe the discussion and who is being more transparent with their position and conclusions.
But I know this: we invented about the most complex product imaginable, tested it in a relative handful of people for a few months, a far shorter timetable than is typical for drug development. Now we are shoving it on every human we can reach – to prevent (or more accurately fail to prevent) an illness that is not particularly dangerous to most of them.“
Here's some food for thought. The official narrative gets determined by money. The vaccine industry has now more money than any other industry. What do you think will be "the truth" as long as they exist?
In August 2019, just four months before Covid hysteria began, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation agreed to invest $55 million in the shares of BioNTech - a company which had never released any products.
A little over two years later, these shares are now worth $990 million.
In 2019 Bill Gates said “NEXT YEAR” vaccines would be “one of the best buys.”
How did he know 2020 would be one of the best years to buy into vaccines?
On April 2nd 2020 he said, “Normalcy would only return when the entire global population is vaccinated.”
"COVID-19" is allegedly a strain of the flu. One cannot spread the flu virus if you have no symptoms. This is common sense that all doctors are taught in introductory classes in medical school.
And yet "COVID-19" breaks all the rules of virology and causes every illness known to man, is spread asymptomatically, and is constantly changing and can never be stopped.
Why?
Because a hand-picked “expert” on my television told me so.
Well done and exactly the reason why we need more eyes on these studies and more research, re-analyses, and articles from independent scientists who are simply looking for the truth.
Very curious paper, suggests that covid can be latent in the intestines. This would explain the explosion of covid cases immediately after vaccination, if the vaccines suppress immunity and the gut contains SARS-CoV-2. Also suggests that eliminating the virus with non-permanent vaccines is impossible: as the vaccines wane, you can get sick from latent virus. Geez...
"SARS-CoV-2 remained in intestinal tissue 6 months after nasopharyngeal clearance, suggesting latent infection. The second patient had a severe ischaemic colitis with perforation and SARS-CoV-2 was also identified in endothelial cells." -- https://bmcgastroenterol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12876-021-01905-3
I cant think critically and logically after watching the Austen powers clip and I cant read the screen anymore b/c Im tearing up laughing so hard. I loved those movies... thanks for all this great analysis. Giving us sane people hope.
You would think the disclosure of an ongoing "Replication Crisis" that affects basically every field of study would of put a damper on all that scientific arrogance, no?
This is just to say that I am very eagerly waiting for part II of your analysis here. This is something I feel I can send to a number of intelligent and rational but naive family members.
To me who lacks more than basic instructon in the natural sciences (social sciences and the humanities are my home turf) there is always a delicate dilemma concerning various claims by natural scientists:
How do I check their claims for truth?
Well, looking backwards through time, they were selfregulating until past the mid-eighteenhundreds or even early last century. And what a fluster-cluck that was, with radium laced toothpaste, heroin cough syrup, asbestos, and so on and so forth. Solution, fine in theory?
Governemental oversight. Impartial professionals checking the work of commercially employed scientists, that should work, right? Since they are governement employed, they lack other incentive than an objectively and impartially job done right, yes?
Well, no. Not because the idea is flawed as such, but because even governement must recruit from the same pool of talent a business. And that, even without lobbying and corruption and politicians being shaeholders and boardmembers (or is it the other way around?) means that everyone even if recruited from offerent backgrounds belong to the same communicating vessel.
How to solve this? You can't. The problem is a function of the process, not separate from it. At best, you can nudge the system by exposing it to competition. Unfortunately, capitalist corporate control of media removes that check. (And no, the socialist states weren't better in case you're too young to remember or never exeprienced socialism in practice.)
For the foreseeable future, we, as in western civilisation, are stuck in a rut of a economic-political system which can no longer change direction: it must be allowed to run its course to the end. As long as our leaders, be they elected, selected or part of the corporatist financial system called (laugh) "free market economy" had someone or something appointed The Enemy, that very fact held the game in check.
But since the mid-nineties, the spiel all over the West is that this is indeed a brave new world! Everyone is friend! Every culture, creed and race are really, actcherly one and the sam. Difference is only skin deep! The student of the ideas of history recognises this as the same madness of the intellectual (read: chattering parlour pinks) classes which strenoulsy in their naivitë woked to give the likes of Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin a free reign. "If we put up a hard front, we incite war" they would say. "Dialogue and trade and cultural exchange will unify the world" the cosmopolists of the day would say.
Well, no, because as with communism and pacifism and libertarianism, the idea only works if everyone simultaneously embraces it, honestly and fully.
And after that Hectoring diatribe I arrive at the start:
"The mistake was entering their labyrinth in the first place."
Well, yes, absolutely. Everyone who has worked with mentally ill persons knows that one. Never, ever, enter into the patients world view.
So how does that relate to the blogpost and this little essay it provoked?
Easy. Don't mistrust everything, that way lies madness. Trust but verify. Pfizer claims A, B and C. Allrighty, let's check. Aha, here is someone who sounds like an autority and their conclusion rhymes with my suspicion. Easy, cowboy. Trust, but verify. Watch the watchman who watches the watchmen, and let yourself be watched.
Clearest sign of a Big (or Noble) Lie is after all secrecy and that it cannot be checked.
peace out, or whatever the hip lingo of the day is,
Rikard, formely a teacher of the ideas of history (or was it the history of ideas, I forget)
Very interesting. Thanks for that great reference to Reeder's work.
I started work at NASA-Goddard in 1980. At that time the climate modelers were working on a model that explained the triggering of ice ages ("global cooling"). Many of the modelers were contract personnel, hence their salaries had to come from research grants obtained by the principal investigator (PI). Others', civil servants' salaries, were paid out of annual appropriations enacted by Congress to cover the NASA budget. Already you can see how money figured in. In 1980, people seriously were fearing another ice age any minute. Then in that decade we entered a period of warming. Things started to look bad for the coming ice age.
In 1988, Washington DC had a miserable hot summer, worse than normal and that year Congress was unable to recess on schedule and many of the congressmen were held over in DC for the hot weather. People like James Hansen at Goddard Institute for Space Science (GISS) in NYC had been thinking maybe "global warming" was the actual threat, and managed to obtain a Congressional hearing on that topic that very summer. Hansen is on record gloating that he had the set point in the hearing room bumped a few degrees higher than normal, so that the congressmen could sit and sweat and fully experience "global warming". He made his point and the bandwagon henceforth was fueled by ample appropriations for research in global warming.
My own work was then in novel infrared sensors that could be used in imaging detector arrays. The big money, thanks to Hansen and others keeping everyone afraid we were all going to fry, was in earth viewing remote sensing. I had an instrument on STS-85 that successfully obtained infrared imagery of earth from Shuttle altitude. The funding for my part of that (some instrumental development, then part time another 9 years of image processing) was obtained by my PI from the flood of research dollars devoted to global warming. We focused on the infrared imagery of clouds, whose role in global warming was still uncertain. Our published papers always had ample reference to global climate as the reason for our interest and effort. We were on the funding bandwagon. (And our take was chicken feed compared to some. We did a lot of that work on a shoe string.) But I saw up close how it worked.
Since then, global warming has morphed into "climate change". That is so wonderfully vague. You just cannot fail to justify your research now. Warming? Ok, polar bears afloat. Bangladesh underwater. Deep ocean currents slowing down and causing the heating to run away and turn Earth into a half baked Venus. Increased heart damage in newborns. Cooling? Ok, crop failures, ice sheets obliterating NYS, etc. Whatever you want. But keep the panic enflamed and the dollars roll in to feed your grad students and pay your salary and give your University its cut for "administrative" costs.
Now it's medical panic. I see this as an even bigger bonanza, kept alive by all the racketeering you mention here. It all seems strangely familiar. This time the human race is being terrified and bullied into being test subjects in a giant experiment that enriches Pfizer and Moderna in the US. It's going to run its course but I wonder what will be left of us at that point. Will we be so mutated and crippled that we will end up maintained on meds from the same psychopaths that destroy us?
Another excellent dissection.
As a scientist myself (theoretical physicist) I've lost count of the number of times I've had to scratch my head in bafflement over this last 20 months or so.
It's easy to run foul of stats and make simple, stupid mistakes (did it myself recently - ignored the warnings of that paradoxical Mr Simpson - I can be an idiot). But some of the ridiculous assertions we've had passed off as "science" have been spectacular - and I don't mean that in a good way.
It's like we threw away all our previous knowledge and experience (our a priori positions) and just went with a ton of crappy associational studies and extremely dubious post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.
I wrote a somewhat sarcastic piece on the radical transformation of our scientific understanding wrought by covid
https://rudolphrigger.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-covid
There are obvious absurdities everywhere (safe when seated - deadly dangerous when you go for a pee) - but it's more serious when those absurdities are present in the scientific literature - it has the official academic "seal of approval".
For those swayed by the number of degrees someone has I would say that a rectal thermometer also has lots of degrees - and you know what you can do with one of those!
Really appreciate this; I am not a scientist but have somehow held on to my natural curiosity and belief in the ability of my mind to grasp new things if I ask lots of questions, try hard, and not mind looking stupid now and then. I've noticed that the main difference between myself and people who are willing to blindly trust The Science is that once they encounter that "This doesn't make sense to me" wall, they'd prefer to look smart, and right now-- in public-- aligning with The Science is like siding with The Official and Authorized Smart People. I appreciate you chipping away at their absurd statements in a way even a non-scientist like me can understand, if I put a little effort into it.
My latest (Officially Stupid?) question relates to the news reports on omicron which state that it is very good at evading natural immunity, that known cases in the U.S. seem to be either vaccinated or prior infected, and that we still believe the best protection is to get vaccinated.
Familiar with Dr. Fleming? He put the "vax" efficacy at ca 1 per cent.
https://www.flemingmethod.com/event-2021
While the video is long, the PDF is concise.
'Besides, if a combination of excellent typesetting and strangely unskeptical and unified pronouncement of "well run clinical trial" by the "science media" is all you need to trust a product injected into your body (or your child's), then I don't assume you'll have the independence of will to follow what comes next.'
This hurts. I feel seen.
To be fair I'm a bit downstream from the excellent typesetting and unified pronouncements. See those influenced people that influence the people I trust. That is it convinced the FDA, the CDC, who convinced the Doctors in my families, as well as the NYT, NPR, BBC, MSNB, CNN, and all other World Governments, the pro-Ivermectin is at least an adjunctive therapy Doctor I followed on Twitter (Dr. Osgood), our Pediatrician, and most importantly my Wife.
So my skepticism that didn't start until Delta chased us back into our bubble hasn't been able to muster enough conviction in me to overrule my much more successful wife, or my successful virologist father-in-law. At least it's given me an unhealthy obsession and painful cognitive dissonance. I like to think perhaps I'm growing and will come out of this more informed with better tools to be more critical.
Okay, this is probably really stupid and evidence of that cognitive bias from evolved cognition that makes our species draw causal conclusions when two things happen sequentially, but hearing Tulsi Gabbard warn that Molnupiravir is mutagenic, and hearing that Omicron's mutations are not those an evolutionary biologist would necessarily predict, makes me wonder if there is a relationship between the testing of Molnupiravir and Omicron. Wikipedia announces this about the drug "The international nonproprietary name of the drug was inspired by that of Thor's hammer, Mjölnir" Probably just drawing connections where none exist based on my general sense that something is freaking rotten on Gaia.
Great piece again. I love that there is a community that actively tries to unravel what is actually going on, not ignoring but actively engaging with the science that sits behind all the decision making.
That's the only way to go and it shows such a big contrast between the official science gods and those opposing its' ''GOD'' status. While they are trying to just create the feeling that all criticism is based on absurd attention seeking ex-scientists who either try to cause chaos or are nut jobs
I don't have the ability to actively criticize the science (except for the most obvious flaws) but I can on the other hand observe the discussion and who is being more transparent with their position and conclusions.
Very good.
“Where this journey ends I do not know.
But I know this: we invented about the most complex product imaginable, tested it in a relative handful of people for a few months, a far shorter timetable than is typical for drug development. Now we are shoving it on every human we can reach – to prevent (or more accurately fail to prevent) an illness that is not particularly dangerous to most of them.“
Here's some food for thought. The official narrative gets determined by money. The vaccine industry has now more money than any other industry. What do you think will be "the truth" as long as they exist?
In August 2019, just four months before Covid hysteria began, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation agreed to invest $55 million in the shares of BioNTech - a company which had never released any products.
A little over two years later, these shares are now worth $990 million.
In 2019 Bill Gates said “NEXT YEAR” vaccines would be “one of the best buys.”
How did he know 2020 would be one of the best years to buy into vaccines?
On April 2nd 2020 he said, “Normalcy would only return when the entire global population is vaccinated.”
"COVID-19" is allegedly a strain of the flu. One cannot spread the flu virus if you have no symptoms. This is common sense that all doctors are taught in introductory classes in medical school.
And yet "COVID-19" breaks all the rules of virology and causes every illness known to man, is spread asymptomatically, and is constantly changing and can never be stopped.
Why?
Because a hand-picked “expert” on my television told me so.
Well done and exactly the reason why we need more eyes on these studies and more research, re-analyses, and articles from independent scientists who are simply looking for the truth.
Very curious paper, suggests that covid can be latent in the intestines. This would explain the explosion of covid cases immediately after vaccination, if the vaccines suppress immunity and the gut contains SARS-CoV-2. Also suggests that eliminating the virus with non-permanent vaccines is impossible: as the vaccines wane, you can get sick from latent virus. Geez...
"SARS-CoV-2 remained in intestinal tissue 6 months after nasopharyngeal clearance, suggesting latent infection. The second patient had a severe ischaemic colitis with perforation and SARS-CoV-2 was also identified in endothelial cells." -- https://bmcgastroenterol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12876-021-01905-3
I cant think critically and logically after watching the Austen powers clip and I cant read the screen anymore b/c Im tearing up laughing so hard. I loved those movies... thanks for all this great analysis. Giving us sane people hope.
You would think the disclosure of an ongoing "Replication Crisis" that affects basically every field of study would of put a damper on all that scientific arrogance, no?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Who am I kidding!? Damn the consequences!
FULL SPEED AHEAD!
I'm going to commit "The Initial State: Priors and Biases" and whip that out the next time a jabber-wokey confronts me. Great stuff, Matthew.
This is just to say that I am very eagerly waiting for part II of your analysis here. This is something I feel I can send to a number of intelligent and rational but naive family members.
To me who lacks more than basic instructon in the natural sciences (social sciences and the humanities are my home turf) there is always a delicate dilemma concerning various claims by natural scientists:
How do I check their claims for truth?
Well, looking backwards through time, they were selfregulating until past the mid-eighteenhundreds or even early last century. And what a fluster-cluck that was, with radium laced toothpaste, heroin cough syrup, asbestos, and so on and so forth. Solution, fine in theory?
Governemental oversight. Impartial professionals checking the work of commercially employed scientists, that should work, right? Since they are governement employed, they lack other incentive than an objectively and impartially job done right, yes?
Well, no. Not because the idea is flawed as such, but because even governement must recruit from the same pool of talent a business. And that, even without lobbying and corruption and politicians being shaeholders and boardmembers (or is it the other way around?) means that everyone even if recruited from offerent backgrounds belong to the same communicating vessel.
How to solve this? You can't. The problem is a function of the process, not separate from it. At best, you can nudge the system by exposing it to competition. Unfortunately, capitalist corporate control of media removes that check. (And no, the socialist states weren't better in case you're too young to remember or never exeprienced socialism in practice.)
For the foreseeable future, we, as in western civilisation, are stuck in a rut of a economic-political system which can no longer change direction: it must be allowed to run its course to the end. As long as our leaders, be they elected, selected or part of the corporatist financial system called (laugh) "free market economy" had someone or something appointed The Enemy, that very fact held the game in check.
But since the mid-nineties, the spiel all over the West is that this is indeed a brave new world! Everyone is friend! Every culture, creed and race are really, actcherly one and the sam. Difference is only skin deep! The student of the ideas of history recognises this as the same madness of the intellectual (read: chattering parlour pinks) classes which strenoulsy in their naivitë woked to give the likes of Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin a free reign. "If we put up a hard front, we incite war" they would say. "Dialogue and trade and cultural exchange will unify the world" the cosmopolists of the day would say.
Well, no, because as with communism and pacifism and libertarianism, the idea only works if everyone simultaneously embraces it, honestly and fully.
And after that Hectoring diatribe I arrive at the start:
"The mistake was entering their labyrinth in the first place."
Well, yes, absolutely. Everyone who has worked with mentally ill persons knows that one. Never, ever, enter into the patients world view.
So how does that relate to the blogpost and this little essay it provoked?
Easy. Don't mistrust everything, that way lies madness. Trust but verify. Pfizer claims A, B and C. Allrighty, let's check. Aha, here is someone who sounds like an autority and their conclusion rhymes with my suspicion. Easy, cowboy. Trust, but verify. Watch the watchman who watches the watchmen, and let yourself be watched.
Clearest sign of a Big (or Noble) Lie is after all secrecy and that it cannot be checked.
peace out, or whatever the hip lingo of the day is,
Rikard, formely a teacher of the ideas of history (or was it the history of ideas, I forget)