patrick.net

https://twitter.com/bfcarlson/status/1622940924564107265?ref_src=patrick.net

In the last interview of his life (1996), astronomer Carl Sagan gave an uncannily prescient warning of the dangers that arise when you cannot ask skeptical scientific questions of those in authority. Watch and ask yourself: was he right?

https://palexander.substack.com/p/6-foot-social-distancing-rule-that

6-foot social distancing rule that near destroyed our daily lives, closed businesses, & was just horrendous, well, I spoke to Redfield about this at HHS, told me basically they made it up, NO science

I never faulted Redfield, to me a God fearing man, good man, we had a good work relationship but he was weak and could not handle the malfeasants undercutting Trump (or him) at CDC

Dr. Scott Gottlieb (prior FDA commissioner) went on media and said it was made up, to verify what I had said openly. It was made up.

Patrick says

https://twitter.com/bfcarlson/status/1622940924564107265?ref_src=patrick.net

In the last interview of his life (1996), astronomer Carl Sagan gave an uncannily prescient warning of the dangers that arise when you cannot ask skeptical scientific questions of those in authority. Watch and ask yourself: was he right?

Outstanding clip - thanks for this. Well, I guess he was right. This also means that Tyson, who constantly refers to Sagan as his mentor, has betrayed his legacy and ignored his warning. I wonder what Druyan thinks of Tyson at this stage, or was Sagan just spouting bullshit?

EDIT: If anyone is the current skeptic on PatNet, it's @richwicks. Hell, this forum was started by a housing skeptic. Sagan, Jefferson, et. al, agree that while sometimes vociferous disagreement results, that's not a reason to cancel or ignore skeptics. It is, rather, the true meaning of diversity - the Diversity of Ideas, the crucible, where truth is forged. Skeptics are trying to keep us honest.

Patrick says

https://nitter.pussthecat.org/Not_the_Bee/status/1593027147907878912

ZUBY:
ZubyMusic
Nov 16
What was the silliest, least scientific 'pandemic' policy?

Tons of good answers.

Notice how the officers neither are keeping six feet, nor are they masked. Hard to tell from the photo, but it looks to me like they are having a good laugh at the absurdity of it all.

stereotomy says

This also means that Tyson, who constantly refers to Sagan as his mentor, has betrayed his legacy and ignored his warning.

Tyson is no dummy, but it's famous because he's black, not because he's some genius physicist. He's an adequate physicist, but hardly a genius one.

It's our media that makes people famous and popular, none of it is ever earned. Stephen Hawking was over-rated, VASTLY, but he had done more contribution to science than Tyson. The next important physicist or scientist of some sort, is going to prove that the Big Bang theory is incorrect. I think that's inevitable at this point. It's called the "Crisis in Cosmology", and probably, very likely, the Big Bang didn't happen. We may be in an eternal universe, which is just as fucking inexplicable as the Big Bang is. Red Shift, for example, may not be due to a universal expansion. Maybe it's move red due to gravitation. Who knows? It's over my head, but I can tell you, there's a LOT of problems with the Big Bang theory. Current models are incorrect, for certain, maybe they just have to be tweaked, but maybe, they are fundamentally wrong, and that's where the evidence is increasingly pointing to.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/kitten-corner-testable-predictions/comment/15785884

The method of 21st century science is thus:

1. determine the premise to be proven

2. collect data

3. any data points that do not support the premise are declared outliers and removed

4. restate premise as absolute fact

5. collect payment

6. shout down anyone who questions the absolute fact as a denier and anti-science, misinformation and disinformation and take appropriate action to silence them

https://slaynews.com/news/harvard-leader-scholar-honesty-caught-fabricating-multiple-studies/

Harvard’s ‘Leading Scholar’ on ‘Honesty’ Caught Fabricating ‘Multiple Studies’

Harvard’s “leading scholar” on behavioral psychology has been caught fabricating “multiple studies,” including the findings in a famous major study on “honesty.”

“Reverberations” are going through the academic community after evidence emerged showing that Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School fabricated results in “multiple studies,” according to a report from the New York Times.

The report asserts that the field of behavioral science, an area of research often seen with much “skepticism” from other scientists, “may have sustained its most serious blow yet” over the revelations about Gino’s studies.

One of these was a famous study on honesty conducted in 2012.

The results of the study have “been cited hundreds of times by other scholars” since. ...

richwicks says

It's over my head, but I can tell you, there's a LOT of problems with the Big Bang theory. Current models are incorrect, for certain, maybe they just have to be tweaked, but maybe, they are fundamentally wrong, and that's where the evidence is increasingly pointing to.

Frankly I think quantum theory is bunk.

As foe the big bang, if you start with the premise that the universe is expanding and run it backwards as matter and space get compressed towads a singularity, the laws of physics as we understand them break down.

First many universal "constants" probably are not in reality constant but perceived as such given the space and time we exist in.

Second if space time is a fabric that can be stretched then it can also "bunch up" which would explain things such as the Plank length. There is only so much you can compress matter before the current physical model of the universe breaks down.

I wish I were better at math... but much beyond special relativity gets beyond me. I've seen the Schrodinger Wave equation and understand what it represents conceptually but I don't have the math chops to properly apply it in any meaningful way.

GreaterNYCDude says

Frankly I think quantum theory is bunk.

OK - there's a lot of bullshit about it, questions designed to confuse the student. For example "observation effects outcome". This implies if you look at it PASSIVELY you change the outcome. That's not what happens.

To observe something you need to hit it with something. At the macro level it's light, which DOES (slightly) affect an object, but not in any way you can measure. To observe something at the atomic level, you need to hit it with an electron, and that does effect it. It would be like if you were in a weightless dark void, and there was a billiard ball bouncing around, but the only thing you were given to find out where the billiard ball was, was a shotgun that shot out 1000's of small tiny rubber pellets, and to see where those pellets ended up.

Hitting the billiard ball changes the direction and momentum of it.

I hate the descriptions in physics. They are designed to confuse.

Quantum effects ARE REAL, an electron can jump from one point in space to another, this is certain. It's a problem with computer chips. An electron isn't like a billiard ball, it's a weird standing wave of some sort and it's "position" isn't really at a point in space. The best we can do is give it a probability of where it "is", but it's spread all over the place.

GreaterNYCDude says

As for the big bang, if you start with the premise that the universe is expanding and run it backwards as matter and space get compressed towads a singularity, the laws of physics as we understand them break down.

Yeah, I know what George LeMaitre's idea was, the problem is "the crisis in cosmology":

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+crisis+in+cosmology

I found out about it with Eric Lerner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2HIU1QB24k

That's like a random video and a 4th in a series.

Basically, if the Big Bang DID happen, models don't agree with observation. There's a ton of videos on it. Some better than others. Basically, predictions of early matter don't agree with observation. That's the big problem with it, in my knowledge, which is limited.

GreaterNYCDude says

First many universal "constants" probably are not in reality constant but perceived as such given the space and time we exist in.

Could be.

GreaterNYCDude says

Second if space time is a fabric that can be stretched then it can also "bunch up" which would explain things such as the Plank length. There is only so much you can compress matter before the current physical model of the universe breaks down.

I won't speculate on this. There is this concept there is this sort of fabric to the universe, but I think it's kind of a holdover of "ether". We just don't know. I'm conformable with ignorance. It SEEMS to be like a membrane that is being stretched out, and if there was a ripple travelling through it, it would get longer and longer as it was being stretched - like red shift. Like a rubber membrane - you give if a poke, and immediately start stretching it out? The wavelength would get longer as well.

Wait.. I need think about that. If you pull a guitar string, and draw it tighter, the frequency goes up, not down. Red Shift is a reduction of frequency. That's an idea. Maybe it's not analogous. But I've never thought of that but I am thinking in terms of Newtonian Mechanics, maybe this doesn't apply in Relativity.

GreaterNYCDude says

I wish I were better at math... but much beyond special relativity gets beyond me. I've seen the Schrodinger Wave equation and understand what it represents conceptually but I don't have the math chops to properly apply it in any meaningful way.

Well, at one point, I could solve it for the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom.

I don't think there is enough information at our level to understand what the fuck is going on. It's like an amoeba that is as intelligent as we are, trying to understand gravity when the amoeba only can exist in a fluid - good luck!

I think overall comprehension is FAR beyond humanity.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/mysterious-monday-july-31-2023-c

The hyphenated PRESIDENT of one of the most respected research giants in the country, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, announced his resignation effective August 1st, after a panel reviewing several of his peer-reviewed scientific papers found the top scientist had manipulated or falsified data to get the results he was looking for.

Even worse, the review panel found that questions about Marc’s made-up research cropped up as early as 2001, and then again in the early 2010s, in 2015 and 2016, and in March 2021, but nobody ever took any action, and the fake scientist wound up running one of the top scientific research institutions in the world.

I know it seems weird, but that’s Science!

The panel’s report concluded that the falsification of study results under Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s control “spanned labs at three separate institutions.” It identified a lab culture where Tessier-Lavigne “tended to reward the ‘winners’ — who could generate favorable results — and punish the ‘losers,’” the honest students who were unable or struggled to generate “helpful” data for him. ...

You could say that the system worked; Marc was forced to resign from his institutional position. But if it weren’t for the dogged work of the Stanford Daily, which relentlessly pounded away at the story for years, Marc would be happily running one of the most influential research institutions in the world.

Marc got away with his fake studies for over 20 years. How many other bad studies have promoted fakers into management of leading institutions?

The Stanford Daily is run by students! Students accomplished this.

Patrick says

The Stanford Daily is run by students! Students accomplished this.

The famous 2018 Cornell Food Prof busted

http://retractiondatabase.org/(X(1)S(ll31ceb4btar0pwmkmgazxtg))/RetractionSearch.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1#?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport%3d1%26auth%3dWansink%252c%2bBrian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wansink#Cornell's_investigation

One of his all time mis-representations was "debunking" the Joy of Cooking and blaming it for America's Obesity crisis. He did this by carefully selecting recipes, and by fudging the serving size by counting "the whole cake" as a single serving, or by ignoring common meals like Chicken Soup and instead highlighting less frequently used recipes, like Gumbo.

"Scientific" dictatorship? No, more like religion, where you are mandated to believe a dogma and no questioning or scientific analysis is allowed. Covid censorship and Global Warming are examples.

Science is Mockingbird, especially anything that can be regarded as 'soft science' aka psychology etc.

Along with everything else, the Global Elites, according to the Nazi model, try to sequester 'true science' to a small elite and keep it secret for themselves. Science for 'public consumption', including a good bit of university 'science', are manipulated consumer science, or just disinformation and distraction. We have just enough science to be good servants for their social models and to execute engineering. NASA has given us movies while keeping their real science and scientists cloistered in secret projects.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/handwashers-saturday-august-19-2023

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a thoughtful essay this week titled, “We Need Scientific Dissidents Now More Than Ever.” The sub-headline added, “The early artificial consensus around Covid’s origins is a wake-up call.”

We seem to be living in two worlds. Also this week, USA Today published a scathing diatribe against pandemic-era covid and jab misinformation on social media, headlined “Among those spreading medical misinformation during the pandemic: 52 doctors.”

So which is it? Do we need scientific dissidents now more than ever? Or do we need to put a cap in those 52 heterodox doctors?

USA Today’s article was reporting on a new “study” posted on the JAMA Open Network, titled “Communication of COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media by Physicians in the US.” They defined misinformation as anything varying from CDC pandemic-era guidance.

Because slavish, unthinking adherence to vacillating, politically-driven government propaganda is just what we want in a healthcare system.

The researchers, if you can call them that, “found” that a core group of 52 doctors were responsible for “most” of the non-CDC-approved misinformation. The major themes they identified included: (1) disputing jab safety and effectiveness, (2) promoting “medical treatments” without “scientific evidence” or FDA approval (i.e., ivermectin), (3) disputing that masks can prevent catching covid, and (4) an “catchall” category including things like “unsubstantiated claims virus origin, government lies, and other conspiracy theories.”

In their conclusion, the study’s authors recommended considering taking legal and professional action against these devilish misinformation superspreaders, to teach them a lesson and make sure only government-approved scientific information gets to the public. Legal and professional action against the doctors is, of course, already well underway, mooting their big point.

May they find themselves on the other side of the censorship microscope at some point. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

In contrast, the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education seemed to be making the exact opposite point. It began by telling the shameful story of heroic Vienna medical resident Ignaz Semmelweis, who in 1846 famously ran a test in the charitable childcare clinic where he worked, by asking doctors to wash their hands before working with patients. Patient deaths immediately fell by 90 percent.

In other words, Semmelweis was the guy who figured out hand washing. It was a big deal.

For that remarkable discovery, Mr. Semmelweis was made a doctor, promoted to the Academy of Sciences, and awarded the 1847 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Haha, just kidding! Actually, Semmelweis was ridiculed by the doctors, fired from his Vienna hospital, made a pariah and professionally unemployable, and driven out of Vienna entirely, persona non grata. He died broke in Hungary, in a psychiatric hospital, after suffering a severe beating by asylum guards.

I’m not sure if it would have been any comfort to him, but Mr. Semmelweis’ experience minted a term, the “Semmelweis reflex.” The article quoted intellectual and author Timothy Leary’s definition: the Semmelweis reflex is “mob behavior found among primates and larval hominids on undeveloped planets, in which a discovery of important scientific fact is punished.”

USA Today’s researchers seem to be quite familiar with the Semmelweis reflex, just not in a good way.

The article continued by describing the revolting story of how during the 1960’s and 70’s, the scientific community identified fat — and not sugar, the real culprit — as the cause of plummeting American cardiac health. Since it turns out that it was a sugar lobbying group that single-handedly pulled off the coup, establishing incorrect scientific consensus as dogma for decades, harming who knows how many Americans, the Chronicle’s article observed:

Sometimes, a scientific consensus is established because vested interests have diligently and purposefully transformed a situation of profound uncertainty into one in which there appears to be overwhelming evidence for what becomes the consensus view. When a scientific consensus emerges via this accelerated process, the role of the scientific dissident is not, like Semmelweis, to carry out revolutionary science. The dissident’s role is to provide a check against epistemically detrimental and artificial consensus formation. Nevertheless, the challenges faced are similar. Never has this accelerated process unfolded with such success, and such fury, as in the case of the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

In its final paragraph, the Chronicle’s article landed on a vastly important point, a point the USA Today study researchers should be strongly encouraged to ponder. Here’s how the Chronicle put it:

The world isn’t simple, what the evidence shows isn’t always clear, and things are not always as they seem. So we owe the Semmelweisses of the world a debt of gratitude — for their diligence and their courage. This doesn’t mean we should believe every heterodox thinker that comes along. But it means we should strongly resist the urge to punish them, to censor them, to call them racist, and to evaluate their claims by, in Stewart’s words, “litmus-testing each other for our political allegiances.”

In other words, heterodox thinkers are an essential and necessary part of the scientific process. They serve as a check on consensus thinking, forcing the consensus to justify and prove their preferred hypothesis and not just sit around in an echo chamber of contented mutual agreement. Heterodox scientists also check government overreach — and how much better off would we have been, had there been more than only 52 such thinkers during the pandemic?

In other words, instead of running pseudo-scientific studies and USA Today articles condemning them, we should be thanking those 52 heterodox doctors.

Finally, the two groups of scholars — The Chronicle’s editors and the study researchers — evidence the battle lines between the establishment (CDC is gospel) brownshirts and the anti-establishment (heterodox thinking is good) counter-revolutionaries.

https://johnwaters.substack.com/p/podcast-the-accelerating-creep-of

‘By virtue of not having acquired a certain set of letters after my name, there are certain areas of the world that are closed off to me. And I must therefore be obedient, not just to the scientists themselves, but to the power structure which they inform.’ ...

Once, the culture of Western Civilisation had at its core a form of wisdom that was transcendent of specialisation and capable of sifting and synthesising between the diagnostics and prescriptions of multiple disciplines. Now, more than three centuries after the dawning of the Enlightenment, we find ourselves at the mercy of a multiplicity of myopic specialisms, each of which may command the power and authority of the state in mandating its findings and pronouncements. ...

‘One of the things that is quite staggering about this culture is that there is a shadowing of knowledge. All knowledge is veiled, because it is the prerogative and the property of particular experts, and they alone have the entitlement to explain it. It really is a going back to the darkest days. The churches were once accused of obscurantism in relation to science. Well, this is a similar situation — far worse, I would say — because it’s happening at a far more basic level, so that people no longer consider themselves qualified to speak about anything in relation to certain areas and those areas are expanding exponentially all the time, as they’re being colonised by these new experts.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/remarkably-consistent-tuesday-september

Before we start, let’s check in on the evolution of the mandatory pro-vaccine statement required for a study to survive peer-review. Spoiler: it’s getting watered down. Here’s how this peer-reviewed study phrased the obligatory endorsement:

The SARS-CoV-2 spike mRNA vaccines have been found to be safe in international studies involving hundreds of thousands of individuals (1–4), although very rare cases of adverse events have been subsequently reported.

One imagines with relish the twenty-one authors debating the precise wording of that sentence at great length. And, haha! First, they completely dropped the word “effective.” Sayonara! And even the word “safe” has been diluted; rather than just saying jabs are safe, as if it were common knowledge, these authors merely noted that “international studies” found the jabs to be safe.

In other words, they said it was safe. Don’t blame us.

https://wmbriggs.substack.com/p/end-all-formal-science-journals-and

All of these papers are held up, waved frenetically in our faces by hersterics and rulers who chant “Research shows we must trust The Science!”

End it. Formal publishing is not just useless, it’s downright harmful. And there is no need of it.

Science began with highly intelligent men writing letters to each other, and showing the copies around. A fine practice.

It kept the noise to a minimum. Formal publishing is now almost entirely noise. There are more than 8 million papers published a year now, a number going up and up and up. Nobody reads them. Why should they? They are almost all useless. Nearly all exist because, and only because, academics must publish or perish. Must.

If we eliminated formal publications, much of this persiflage would dry up, and our best and brightest would be able to concentrate on their own work, and not be harassed with “peer review” requests.

The only people who have respect for peer review are those who have never experienced it. As I always say, there is no surer enforcer of banal tepid watery content than peer review. Nothing better ensconces error and mandates Consensus. I cannot say it better than Alan Savory, who recognized peer review is academia and not science.

One might think that publishing is about pushing an agenda and giving the potentially false agenda propaganda credibility. Could it be a form of paid advertising?

The corruption by Globalist Covid Fraud of the medical journals, medical schools, medical organizations, peer reviewers, etc. put the spotlight on that.

Patrick says

Nothing better ensconces error

https://www.enago.com/academy/chasing-the-p-value-statistical-significance-and-the-perils-of-p-hacking/

https://twitter.com/MythinformedMKE/status/1686005316939345921

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/ms-diversity-tuesday-october-3-2023

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.