patrick.net

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by Alyssia Finley titled, “How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Corrupt Science.”

You don’t say.

The piece begins describing how last month, to his great credit, respected climate scientist and director of Berkeley’s Breakthrough Institute, Patrick Brown, publicly admitted that he’d censored one of his own studies to remove facts tending to disprove the current climate theory, so as to improve his odds of getting published.

Specifically, in an essay for the Free Press, Brown confessed that he’d left out “key aspects other than climate change” from his paper about the cause of California’s wildfires, because the omitted details would “dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.”

Nature’s editor, Magdalena Skipper, lied and denied that the journal has any preferred narrative. But she also didn’t invite Brown to add back the omitted data, either.

Next the op-ed cited a September 11th, 2023 paper published in the JAMA Network titled “Peer Review and Scientific Publication at a Crossroads.” The researchers described a burgeoning crisis in peer review, explaining that the ‘academic papers game’ is getting infested with all kinds of cheating, and wrote:

Many stakeholders try to profit from or influence the scientific literature in ways that do not necessarily serve science or enhance its benefits to society. The number of science journal titles and articles is steadily increasing; many millions of scientists coauthor scientific papers, and perverse reward systems do not help improve the quality of this burgeoning corpus.
In addition, deceptive, rogue actors, such as predatory and pirate publishers, fake reviewers, and paper mills continue to threaten the integrity of peer review and scientific publication.
Even outright fraud may be becoming more common—or may simply be recognized and reported more frequently than before.

This op-ed isn’t the first criticism of the so-called “peer review” process, which some top scientists have long argued has become hopelessly compromised, and captured by pharma interests. The biggest problem, and threat to all our well being, a problem which became painfully obvious during the pandemic, is that government actors dangle grant money in front of unethical whitecoats to obtain fake studies supporting the officials’ preferred policy narratives. Even worse, they all conspire to prevent inconveniently-contradictory papers from ever being published in the first place.

But that’s Science! So shut up! What do you know? I bet you don’t even have a white lab coat.

"Kayfabe," a concept from professional wrestling where staged events are presented as real, offers a lens to understand how societal systems, from economics to politics, have similarly evolved to blend reality with orchestrated deception, challenging our ability to discern truth. ...

"You spat directly in my face and told me not only that it was raining but that I was a crazy person for thinking that you spat directly in my face." ...
"You cannot trust Harvard or Nature... the CDC or the NIH." ...
"You've got people running around who are calling themselves scholars who publish in scholarly journals and sit in scholarly seats, and you can tell what they're saying is completely wrong." ...

“Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated.”

It’s amazing that someone can have this level of insight in 2011 yet miss the biggest Kayfabe show when it turned up on his doorstep. I guess he was in good company with the likes of Chomsky and Klein to name just two. I’m grateful he now sounds more like a sane person again. ...

If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling's insiders as "Kayfabe".

Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called "a promotion") sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which "breaks Kayfabe" is called "shooting" to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called "working".

Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. ...

Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated. Wrestling's system of lies has recently become so intricate that wrestlers have occasionally found themselves engaging in real life adultery following exactly behind the introduction of a fictitious adulterous plot twist in a Kayfabe back-story. Eventually, even Kayfabe itself became a victim of its own success as it grew to a level of deceit that could not be maintained when the wrestling world collided with outside regulators exercising oversight over major sporting events.

At the point Kayfabe was forced to own up to the fact that professional wrestling contained no sport whatsoever, it did more than avoid being regulated and taxed into oblivion. Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off of the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.

Doctors Censored And Gagged From Truth Telling

How essential post-approval pharmacovigilance was undermined by our government

“There is no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice, and any promotion of anti-vaccination claims including on social media, and advertising may be subject to regulatory action.” - Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) gag order 9 March 2021.

This reckless gag order has since been rescinded (called “superseded”) but it is too late.

Alison says: “This censorship is a threat to public health as it interrupts the drug safety reporting system”. This is undeniably true.

“Doctors were silenced as of 9 March 2021 with a gag order issued by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) and the Medical Boards. All medical professionals were threatened with disciplinary action if they raised concerns about the products. A website was set up to snitch on any who did.” ...

In addition, it is now widely known that governments used security agencies in concert with social media companies to track down and silence health professionals who dared to tell the truth of their experiences. This action deliberately undermined the traditional system of voluntary post-approval pharmacovigilance which has been fundamental in identifying safety issues for approved drugs and has led to the proper withdrawal of more than 100 dangerous drugs on safety grounds worldwide in the last couple decades alone. Thalidomide was a prime example in the 1960s. Without voluntary post-approval reporting of the horrendous effects of thalidomide, many more lives would have been lost and many more serious disabilities would have occurred. It is incomprehensible that governments actively sought to undermine the long established post-approval pharmacovigilance system which is fundamental in order to keep us safe. There is no valid excuse for this dereliction of duty. Shame on them all.

In the name of fostering diversity, hiring at STEM departments is increasingly done on the basis of identity, it being far more important to showcase Women of Colour Doing Science than to actually do science. The result of course is that the junior faculties of most science departments are now filled with half-smart ideologues more skilled at telling the diversity committee what it wants to hear (and of course, very skilled at being themselves diverse) than they are at long division. But then, since most research is fake, it doesn’t matter very much how skilled the researchers are at faking it. ...

Some think that the universities can be saved. There are valiant efforts to do so: to force hiring committees to stop requiring ‘diversity statements’ in faculty job applications; to force universities to adopt codes guaranteeing academic freedom and respect for freedom of speech; to force the resignations of professors caught in the most egregious academic fraud; even to close the most obviously polluted departments, gender studies being an egregious example.

This is noble, but a bit like trying to defibrillate a man who has just been shot in the chest. It isn’t so much a medical intervention as one of the stages of grief.

For centuries, “truth” was delegated to the ruling institutions of the time, and hence truth was simply the narrative which conformed to their interests. Then, during the enlightenment period a new idea emerged—that truth could be determined empirically through experimentation and data.

This in turn gave birth to the scientific revolution, and while not perfect (as vested interests would still try to make their “narrative” be truth irrespective of what the scientific data showed), scientific inquiry began shaping the direction of Western Culture, and in a rocky fashion gradually moved society forward, giving us many of the benefits we take for granted today.

Sadly however, the tendency of ruling interests to want to monopolize the truth never went away and we’ve watched a curious phenomenon emerge where science, riding on the social credit earned by the success of its revolutionary discoveries, has gradually transformed into something not that different from a state religion. Given that science was originally meant to be a way to move beyond truth being monopolized by the dogmatic institutions which ran society, it is quite tragic that science has become one as well.

As a result, science has more and more become the practice of “trusting scientific experts” and not being allowed to question their interpretations of the data—or even see it. This is very different from what science was originally intended to be—the collective endeavor of scientists around the world to put forth ideas and have the ones that stand up to scrutiny become the generally accepted standard. ...

Epstein was a moron and was ultimately disposable. Whether or not he’s still alive, as some believe, he’s all done as an international man of mystery and security-state blackmail procurer. But we can reasonably wonder: was science co-opted by the security state in 2005 using grotesque blackmail schemes? Did the spooks shift their other tech assets toward bio-sciences? Like Bill Gates? Is Bill now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA and working on vaccines and genetically modified mosquitos for the intelligence community?

I heard Epstein was not very smart, and not terribly good with people.

... The antivirals series documented why we mistrust big journals and their articles, which, in some cases, are thinly veiled adverts for one or more products. ...

The better it sounds, the more likely it is to be too good to be true. Big journals are a specialised media business. We have abundant examples of that fact, but Tamiflu's rise is perhaps the best-documented example.

A modestly performing drug with central nervous system toxicity was pedalled through ghostwritten selected data via mega journals. Journal article “authors” had never seen the whole datasets, and few, if any, had participated in the analysis or editing of the articles. To this day, 60% of the randomised data have never been seen in public...

But, but, but - it’s a peer reviewed scientific journal! They would never write click bait! Well, they just did. And not “just”, they have been doing this for a long time, as long as this particular genre has been funded by the military-industrial Pandemic Preparedness Racket. And, just like the celebrity gossip magazines in the checkout aisles, they recycle the same fake stories over and over again, with different characters, locations, accessories and pets.

And you buy them every time.

Because THIS TIME, it has a pangolin and a brain infection in it.

There must be some seasonality to these informational campaigns, too, because LAST TIME the same brouhaha was all over media almost exactly a year ago. Do you remember the bombshell story from Project Veritas about Pfizer mutating viruses? And here is the Boston University 80% mouse killer story from The Fear Porn Magazine Winter 2023 Edition, debunked:

Boston University made an 80% mouse killer SarsCov mutant very recently. Besides provoking a number of great memes, it managed to not produce an apocalyptic lab leak and so did not wipe out Boston University itself (oh well, maybe next time). Why, you may ask? It was a 80% lethal strain! Of a novel mutated virus from the lab! It was even published in a peer reviewed journal, so it must be true! There were great takedowns of that BS from BU which I won’t republish now, but here is a short synopsis - PhDs played with soups of “viruses” that they thought might be more deadly because awesome computer models told them so. Nothing transmissible from animal to animal was made and 8/10 mice were euthanized because in the opinion of the investigators they were going to die anyway. Actually, the truth is simpler than this - the PhDs need to eat, they didn’t want to hunt for food or grow it, and so they submitted a grant application to the church of NIH using the prayerful keywords that the NIH likes (killer, zoonotic, viruses, pandemic preparedness), and the NIH gave them money for a couple of months. The PhDs bought food and paid rent. Some mice were sacrificed at the altar of the church of NIH. The end.

Anyone who has dared commit the mortal sin of research over the past few years, or even the venial sin of inquiry, has undoubtedly slammed into the sneering wall of derision erected by the phalanx of Indoctrinated pawns deployed in defense of their Party abusers.

”Do you have a degree? In this specific subject? From what university?”

”You haven’t gotten accreditation from a Party-approved source?”

”Are you employed in that field? Are you an expert?”

”Why won’t you just listen to the experts?”

The sneering wall of derision cries out in a million voices, legion, a tower of babbling incredulity and condescension, but for those who can hear the past the empty roar, a single, droning, insect cry emerges from behind the cacophony:

”Shut. Up.”

Over and over and over again.

”Shut. Up. Shut. Up. Shut. Up. Shut. Up. Shut. Up. Shut. Up. Shut. Up. Shut. Up.”

The message has no end, and no beginning, and vibrates into a mindless mantra, an insatiable gestalt plague of semantic satiation. It is as monotonous in its form as it is in its function: to assimilate.