All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
I know it’s a weakness of mine. I do enjoy listening to this intelligent, honest woman with a wonderful German accent lambast these fake scientists for wasting time, money and lives in a racket that must be shut down. And not just in physics. All of the academic disciplines that produce nothing useful but are subsidized by our money to the tune of billions and billions of dollars must be defunded.
Kudos to Sabine for saying it out loud.
Trump says he wants the drug companies to release all their COVID vaccine data.
“It is very important that the Drug Companies justify the success of their various Covid Drugs. Many people think they are a miracle that saved Millions of lives. Others disagree! With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW. I have been shown information from Pfizer, and others, that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not??? They go off to the next “hunt” and let everyone rip themselves apart, including Bobby Kennedy Jr. and CDC, trying to figure out the success or failure of the Drug Companies Covid work. They show me GREAT numbers and results, but they don’t seem to be showing them to many others. I want them to show them NOW, to CDC and the public, and clear up this MESS, one way or the other!!! I hope OPERATION WARP SPEED was as “BRILLIANT” as many say it was. If not, we all want to know about it, and why??? Thank you for your attention to this very important matter! President DJT”
So, of course this is “Trump Talk” so you have to parse it into normal English but it seems like he is saying he wants all the info released and that is within the purview of the FDA to demand so shouldn’t RFK Jr. have that authority already? Well, let’s see how this pans out. I’d love to know the honest ruth about the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines. I’m sure millions would too.
Five years after the height of the COVID masquerade the New York Times finally allows at least the outlines of the true story to show up in its opinion page. Even in this article the author bends over backward to pretend that the liars had the best intentions. But it’s so blatantly clear by the actions of the authorities that they were hiding a disgusting truth. Wuhan was the source of the virus and the United States funded the research that created it.
We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives
If for no other reason I hope RFK Jr has the foresight to shut down the funding on all these types of frankensteinian experiments. Creating pathogens that have the potential to infect billions and then depending on the fail safe protocols of a third rate research laboratory to save you from a mishap is worse than stupid. It’s war crime grade irresponsible.
But let’s face facts, this is not health research. These are CIA bio-weapons labs. And for all we’ll ever know they released it on purpose to take advantage politically of the ensuing chaos. Our own government is full of sociopaths that have no qualms about wreaking havoc on our lives through fear and violence. And they wonder why we fear and hate them more than the Russians and the Chinese.
DOGE, cut off their cash. It may save all our lives.
A few days ago I linked to a video by Sabine Hossenfelder who shared a letter from a colleague warning her not to expose the fact that most academic research papers in particle physics were useless nonsense.
Now she’s followed up that video with one with her thoughts on what will happen when an administration that wants to reduce waste in government starts looking closely at what kinds of research are being funded in the hard sciences. And that’s before we even get to the nonsense that the social sciences call research.
Now Sabine is far from a conservative. She’s a moderate climate change advocate and several other progressive ideas. But she seems to be a realist when it comes to the nonsense being funded in academic research centers.
She advocates for corporate research for anything that will have commercial applications and only sees government funding for things like defense applications and a very small set of other areas.
I agree with her. Government funding of academic research has become a feeding trough for bad science. It has created bloated university faculties doing useless research that benefits no one but the faculty and even they are dissatisfied because they know they’re frauds.
I can’t wait until Musk and DOGE gets to the NSF and the health research funding agencies. It should be a mighty bloodbath. And that will change the universities too, for the better. They’ll be poorer and smaller in the short term but they’ll be healthier and more useful in the long run.
Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in particle physics. She gave up academic physics when she discovered that it made raising her children impossible. For the last number of years, she has become a YouTube popularizer of science. Many of her videos are interesting and entertaining. I don’t find myself agreeing with every conclusion she draws but her talks are thought-provoking and often compelling.
In the above linked video, Sabine reads a letter from a colleague in answer to a journal paper she wrote seven years ago casting doubt on the validity and value of much of modern scientific research in general but specifically in what she calls research into the foundations of physics (particle physics). In this letter she received from a colleague it is admitted that much of “research” done by academic physicists is worthless. But that it supports thousands of physicists who otherwise would be unable to support themselves and their families through their educational background in physics.
In other words, because they are “scientists” they deserve to be supported by the government regardless of whether their work has any value to anyone. Sabine spends most of the video attacking this mindset and declaring this academic fraud a severe danger to the whole enterprise of modern science.
In my opinion she’s absolutely correct. And she is far from the only one admitting that academia (and to a large extent corporate research) have been getting less and less result from steadily more and more scientists. And why is this? Probably the top reason is falling standards at the universities. Colleges have become mills stamping out more and more degree holders in scientific fields. But the caliber of these graduates is decreasing. A good place to look for the reason for this is affirmative action. Universities now award more degrees to woman than to men. If you allow for the discrepancy between male and female skills in math and science, you can infer that standards have been reduced to accommodate more women in these fields.
And all of this is happening just as DOGE is examining government programs to uncover waste and corruption. Well, if Musk’s people were smart, they would look for whistle-blowers in all of the various NSF and other science funding entities and determine just how much of the research that is funded by the government is poorly done or even worthless. I think they’ll find that the ratio of bad to good is close to 10:1.
During the Cold War an emphasis on scientific and engineering research was needed to “win” the arms race and the space race and every other technical challenge that we made up in our minds about beating the russkies. Well, we won and we can stop worrying about the race and start worrying about our tax dollars being thrown away on worthless research. Being a particle physicist should be the occupation for a very few highly gifted mathematical geniuses that can add to the store of human knowledge about an incredibly esoteric scientific field. It isn’t the place for thousands of mediocre minds who’ve burrowed into a university payroll by checking a DEI box or two. Likewise, the United States government shouldn’t be paying for research in pure and applied science if the results don’t provide value to some worthwhile project. Injecting mice or rats with cocaine to see what aberrant behavior they will demonstrate is not something the United States government should pay for or even allow.
Not everyone is Einstein, Watson or Crick. But at the very least the people who are paid US tax dollars to do science must be intelligent and competent enough to earn that money. Currently, the great majority of academic (and corporate) researchers are neither of those things. I hope that DOGE makes it one of their priorities to whittle down government research grants by a factor of ten. That will be a good start. It will save us billions of dollars and change the way the universities do business.
I was reading an article by two doofuses named Peter Watts and Daniel Brooks. Watts is a science fiction writer and I think Brooks is a biologist in academia.
Here’s a sample:
“We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.”
And this is the optimist of the pair. The other guy is cheering on the collapse because he wants to clear the path for the few deserving humans to restart human life solidly in the pre-industrial era. He kind of equates his role in all this as something like Hari Seldon in Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” stories. Gee, I wonder if I can try out for the part of the Mule?
Apparently civilizational collapse is settled science.
Who knew?
You know, if I were a young person being fed this line from kindergarten to grad school I might be as crazy as the Zoomers appear to be.
So, the world is coming to an end and even the climate warriors say it can’t be fixed. Okay, then maybe they’ll just shut up now and let us live out our lives while the world burns. But of course, as every supposed end of the world date passes without, you know, the world ending, they just screech louder and become even more annoying. Now the dimwits are gluing their bodies to roadways and destroying works of art.
So far normal people have reacted by dragging these human traffic cones off the road, sometimes by their feet and comically, sometimes by their hair. But you wonder when the first of these activists will become a road pizza. I’ve watched a lot of these road block videos and I’m waiting for the motorists to start bringing zip ties and pepper spray to these events and tie them to a light pole and mace these clowns good. I think they richly deserve it.
For their civil disobedience, if I were the judge I’d sentence them to one year without electric power and all the things associated with modern life; clean water, refrigerated food and hygiene. I’d let them rot in a hovel and subsist on putrid food washed down with water from the nearest rain puddle.
Look, the world isn’t going to end in 2040 or 2050, just as it didn’t end in 2024 as predicted twenty years before that. We should be so lucky to see this clown show end! Why shouldn’t a world that wants Joe Biden to be its leader collapse? Collapse would be the reasonable response to such a wholly stupid system. But it won’t end. We all need the exercise too much to just roll over and die.
There’s an even chance that I will still be around in 2050. And if I do, I may go hobbling around looking for Watts and Brooks and if they’re still alive I might just punch them both in the nose and tell them to apologize to the world for being so stupid.
THE END IS NIGH, REPENT!!!!!! But can you give me a lift to the highway blockade? It’s pretty far by bike.
But now we have a much better understanding, not only of how COVID got loose but also why its origin was hidden.
“It was always a lie; one of the most consequential lies of the 21st century. Like all great lies it perfectly inverted the truth: the evidence supporting natural spillover has always been thin. Conversely, the evidence pointing to a lab leak has always been compelling and has grown substantially more persuasive with time.”
And the quoted article concludes that the lies were made for four different reasons:
In a just world, people in the first three groups should go to prison for lying about the origin of a disaster that had such horrific economic impact. The fourth group should be mocked incessantly and any of them in the media industry should lose their jobs.
But this isn’t a just world. It’s just the world.
Not satisfied with inventing a diabetes drug that makes healthy women lose a little weight, the pharma companies are now looking for a drug that mimics the benefits of exercise.
Various approaches are being pursued. One hormone that has shown promise is irisin.
“In 2012, scientists discovered a hormone called irisin that is released by muscles during exercise – a messenger chemical that communicates with various parts of the body. In November 2023, Wrann and her colleagues demonstrated that irisin can reach the brain and clear the toxic amyloid plaques involved in Alzheimer’s disease, a big breakthrough in understanding how exercise helps shield the brain from dementia.”
It is also believed to modulate bone growth and density and prevent loss of muscle mass.
But of course, why take a careful, reasonable subject for pharmaceutical investigation when instead you can just go Vlad the Impaler on it.
“Because scientists are still unsure which exercise hormones are the most beneficial, the ExPlas trial is taking a broad approach. Injecting blood plasma from people who exercise regularly is a simple way of transferring all these potentially beneficial hormones to patients. “The Norwegian idea is to take the plasma as the drug and give it to those who need it,” says Wrann.”
Well, sure. Let’s drain the blood out of the young and use it to keep the centenarians alive forever. I can just see it. Nancy Pelosi spends some fraction of her hundreds of millions of dollars of ill-gotten insider trading gains to have the blood of virgins pumped into her. While she’s at it why not give her a skin transplant from some poor young woman who “accidentally” dies while participating in a beauty contest on Jeffrey Epstein’s Fantasy Island now under new CIA-mediated management.
I think we’ve reached terminal stupid. And I say this as one of the dumbest people I know. All these physiological and metabolic studies keep demonstrating that doing natural things like getting enough sleep and exercising moderately or even just taking a walk produce all these incredible benefits that surpass by orders of magnitude the benefits of all these pharmaceuticals and without the side effects. They pump people, even children, with psycho-active drugs to combat the depression that is caused by the horrible lifestyles we’ve created but don’t care that the drugs make people zombies.
We sit around watching tiny screens and don’t talk to each other or walk with each other and certainly don’t go out and play sports or even get together for a meal. At least going to the gym or your basement and doing some calisthenics and going for a walk in a park three times a week won’t have the side effect of increasing your desire to commit suicide.
The FDA is a rogue government agency. Instead of policing the pharma companies it is their co-conspirator. A new agency needs to be created with the mandate to review the drug safety and efficacy records for the last fifty years and eliminate all of the really harmful medicines that exist. And while they’re at it they could contract out studies with teaching hospitals to test out non-pharmaceutical regimens for various medical conditions. And they could concentrate on the effects of diet and exercise on human beings. The AMA should also be forced to police its membership who should spend some reasonable amount of their busy day convincing their patients to get off their fat butts and stagger around the office park at lunch hour instead of going down to Taco Bell for another three thousand calorie lunch.
Now I’m twice as guilty as the next guy. But I at least admit it’s my own damn fault. And I have it from the highest sources in the pharma industry that many of the miracle drugs that are supposed to counteract the ravages of our diet and exercise malpractice do more harm than good.
If the smart boys in the labs ever did figure out a pill that kept us young and fit forever without horrific side effects, I’d be the first one in line to get my dose. But they won’t. That’s not how the universe works. Things like the endocrine and immune systems in our bodies are so much more complex than what we’ve so far deciphered and each component mediates so many separate responses that the tinkering that biologists and pharmacologists do is closer to voodoo than science. Maybe after artificial intelligence has had a century to stew in human biology, we might see some progress. But all of us will be long gone. So, get out the weights and put down the chimichanga and forget about the magic bullet.
The baby boomers want to be young and cool forever. Their time is running out. What they should be doing is figuring out how to exit with at least a little bit of class.
If The Findings Detract, You Must Retract | Jukka Savolainen https://t.co/25aJdMqkAe
— Quillette (@Quillette) June 18, 2023
“In 2020, five psychologists asked the editors of PNAS to retract their study of racial bias in police shootings. PNAS, which stands for the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, is one of the most prestigious multidisciplinary journals in the world. Retraction is an outcome no scholar wishes to experience because it signifies a serious research error and, as such, entails considerable reputational damage.”
Was it because of they made up data or because their calculations were wrong. Nope.
“Some observers have suggested that the retraction was politically motivated. The study, which showed no evidence of racial bias in police shootings, had been used in political debates in ways that challenged calls for radical police reform; calls that had grown louder in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Heather Mac Donald, a research fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, claimed the article was retracted because she had cited it in a congressional hearing and in essays published in the Wall Street Journal and other right-leaning media outlets. Others denied this claim. Most importantly, Dr. Joseph Cesario, the senior author of the retracted article wrote, in response to Ms. Mac Donald, “We retracted the paper because we overstepped with the inferences we made from our data.” In other words, he maintained the reason was not political but motivated by purely scientific considerations.”
The narrative must be maintained at all costs, even if it means loss of credibility of some of the hive workers.
The truth? What is truth? Is your truth my truth?
Hah!
Truer words were never written.
🤡 🌎
Censorship ≠ Science pic.twitter.com/dQeU4HAq65
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) April 29, 2023