Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 48

[ecosophia]

The pandemic has been scrubbed from the front pages at this point and replaced by a different hysteria du jour, but the semi-open posts  I've hosted here on the Covid-19 narrative, the inadequately tested experimental drugs for it, the rising toll of side effects from those drugs, and the whole cascading mess surrounding these things have continued to field a steady stream of comments, so I'm opening yet another space for discussion. The rules are the same as before: 

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here. 
 
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue. 

4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

With that said, as articles flood the media insisting that anything that doesn't begin with the letter V must be responsible for the sudden surge of people unexpectedly dropping dead, the floor is open for discussion.     

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I just had the most hit-me-over-the-head-with-a-frying-pan moment. In a casual conversation with a bunch of academics (PhD's and PhD wanna be's) the conversation turned toward their work and how they make other's ideas their own.

How can I be 56 years old and never knew that in the ranks of of intelligentsia in this country, the goal is to copy other's work? That thought was like a splash of cold water to the face.

Then the frying pan hit.

The same class of PhD's and PhD wanna be's are in the science's too and chances are they are copying other's work too without really arguing against the premises of it. They are a bunch of "yes men" in the classic corporate sense. There's no push for the truth. Maybe sometimes they trip over it.

And our government listens to these academics to make policy decisions. Academics who copy without questioning or debate. No wonder the covid response is fracked.

[(Anonymous)]

I remember back in the 80s when Robert Gallo copied Luc Montagnier’s work, “discovering” HIV and then pretending it was his own original discovery. It seemed pretty fake to me back then, but I had no idea such a practice was systemic.

[scotlyn]

There was also the double-take that Nobel Prize winning inventor of the redoubtable PCR tests, Kary Mullis, claimed he made when he tried to find a reliable substantiation to reference in a footnote for the sentence "HIV causes AIDS" in a paper he was writing... and carefully read the four Gallo papers and found that they did not (to his eyes) prove the case sufficiently to support the phrase... and yet, when he started asking around his colleagues, "HIV causes AIDS" was just one of those things that everybody knows... except when you are the stickler who wants to be able to show WHY everybody CAN know this.

Here is a review of Gallo's evidence by a contemporary skeptic, Dr Valendar Turner, of the Perth Group, carefully combing through the methods that Gallo's team claim to have followed, and finding they fall short somewhat short of a proper virus finding...


http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/vtevidence.htm

Montagnier, too

[(Anonymous)]

Some years after Luc Montagnier discovered HIV, he expressed doubts as to whether it was truly the unique cause of AIDS. This to my mind is the thinking of a scientist with integrity, to cast doubts on the importance or centrality of his own discovery. He was savagely attacked for it; the medico-scientific establishment was already heavily committed to the HIV narrative.

It appears to me that in scientific institutions we have a form of entryism. Individual scientists with brilliance and integrity over many generations build a body of knowledge sufficient to justify the creation of institutions; then a horde of entryists infiltrate those, gravitate to power positions and take the first opportunity to abuse their authority for their own corrupt purposes and ruin the credibility of science.

[(Anonymous)]

Life makes a lot more sense when you realize that every hierarchy (government, corporate, academic, whatever) strongly selects for people whose primary and perhaps only skills are self-promotion, bullying, and blame-avoidance.

Sawdust

[(Anonymous)]

You don't provide enough detail to make it clear what is meant. A scholar certainly should learn from others' work and incorporate their new ideas, methods, and findings into one's own work. That's different from stealing their work a la Rosalind Franklin and taking credit for it, which is condemned, but does still happen. Everyone reinventing the wheel in private is not a recipe for productivity.

But there is also, in many fields, huge pressure to accept hypotheses that are popular in US science culture and to refrain from investigating hypotheses that are unpopular. If you generate results that undercut the beliefs of VIPs or the interests of big corporations, and manage to publish them, your chance of getting funded in the future, and therefore of keeping employed, plummet. So most scientists in these fields are not exactly copying, but are trying to make progress only within the boundaries of acceptable investigation that those around them have set.

Aside from big-money fields, like medicine, these may tend to be fields whose subjects are emotionally salient, e.g., anthropology or aspects of physics, that I know of. For those who read JMG's Weird of Hali series, you may have thought it was a little over-the-top in Voyage to Hyperborea that mainstream anthropologists refused even to admit the existence of pre-Ice Age pottery from Greenland. But go to Google Scholar and look up "Cerutti Mastodon," and you will discover that it is entirely realistic! Or the six-million-year-old bipedal hominin footprints from ... Crete. Both of these are well documented, yet took many years to be published and continue to receive vituperative abuse. Facts that do not fit the reigning paradigm are still "damned", in Charles Fort's term.

[(Anonymous)]

That stuff about the Cerutti Mastodon and the six million year old footprints will likely be the coolest thing I encounter all day today.