ecosophia | Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 167

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Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 167

We are now in the fourth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary more than three years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health are anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; ~~public health authorities~~ government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; and the story continues to unfold.

So it's time for another open post. 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 and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. 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 wholly owned 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 plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. 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. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.

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Wow, over 100 NIH funded Alzheimers papers are completely fake

The researcher basically copy and pasted and made up scatter plots

He was considered a top 10 researcher before this and his papers were the backbone for our current understanding of Alzheimers

This is our science

https://nitter.poast.org/AlpacaAurelius/status/1845384030411469054#m

here is the link to the article in that post. it is from september:

Picture imperfect
Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion

https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion

It occurs to me that the next administration could cut federal spending and improve US science no end by the simple step of making any person who's had a research paper retracted for fraud ineligible for any further Federal grants. Right now there are tens of thousands of serial fraudsters in the sciences, whose only punishment for faking research is a slap on the wrist and a bad writeup on Retraction Watch.

There is a book called Republics and Reincarnation that had the idea of switching up how funding would be done.

Whoever came up with viable breakthroughs would be given a stipend, along with a cash payout, and an exception from most taxes.

And what percentage of university scientists would eligible for government funding after that lovely culling if the herd.....

If my two stints in university is anything to go by, precious few. Straightforward experimental fraud was rife at both the universities I attended.

That factor was instrumental in my decision to not pursue academics beyond a bachelor's degree. In graduate and post-graduate studies, students are expected to first learn what is known of the chosen subject, find some aspect of it wherein knowledge is weak, and then conduct research to help fill the gap - their thesis being then added to the knowlege base in that field of study. Plenty of students were going about it exactly that way, but they were not the ones getting really good grades. The best grades went to the ones who danced the academic two-step: first, shmooze around to suss out what their mentors and instructors believed or expected to be true; then fudge up the study so it looked like they were right. That deception was well under way when I was there 40 years ago, so I shudder to imagine what passes for 'fact' today in academia - especially on the topics of medicine and life sciences.....

Me too. I was encouraged by a professor in the history of ideas program I took to pursue a master's degree with a doctorate available if I did well -- and I got my BA magna cum laude, so I think I could have done well enough. The reason I decided against it was that I couldn't pursue the studies that interested me -- I would have had to kowtow to the existing orthodoxies in the field. So I finished up my BA, didn't attend the ceremony, and plunged into writing as an independent scholar.

(What would have been my doctoral dissertation got published anyway -- that's my translation of Gerard Thibault's Academie de l'Espee, a manual of swordfighting based on Pythagorean sacred geometry.)

(What would have been my doctoral dissertation got published anyway -- that's my translation of Gerard Thibault's Academie de l'Espee, a manual of swordfighting based on Pythagorean sacred geometry.)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Pretty sure I could add some cloves & Jack Daniels to sorghum and make a nice 'tonic' but as for what you mentioned above - way above my pay grade. :-) :-) :-) :-)

I think a lot of us have stories like this.

I dropped out of a graduate program when I realized that academic "research" work is just about finding the answers the funder wants, and/or which supports a pre-determined political agenda. In my short tenure as a grad student, I never encountered any overt fraud like totally making up data, but I constantly saw things like studies being structured to be more likely to yield desired results, data being cherry-picked and massaged to find the "correct" answer, and just general sloppiness. Truth is, most of the time you don't really have to make stuff up out of whole cloth to "prove" a desired conclusion; you just have to structure your data collection and fiddle with how you analyze and present it, and presto, you can get the "correct" answer.

If I learned important things from grad school, they were one, a much better understanding of how academic research serves to give a veneer of legitimacy to ideology; two, how funders control the academy; and three, myriad ways to lie with data without technically telling a lie.

This all proved very handy during covid, when I could read a news article on what the "science" said, and immediately spot numerous ways that the data claiming to support the narrative could have been manipulated to support a pre-determined conclusion and further an agenda. Grad school taught me that "studies say" and "according to experts" means nothing.

I have a half completed MA, and part way through realized I was going to get a very different answer from what my supervisor was expecting. When I told him, he said that "If fraud gives the answer that the people paying wants, no on will care. If the results turn out different, no one will care there was no fraud, they'll still find a reason to destroy it, and you."

He then coached me on how to massage my data...

Fifty years ago at a small state college I was pursuing a BSc in Biology. A requirement for graduation was completion and writeup on a research project. I chose to try to duplicate a study in one of our library’s science journals. Plowing through a bunch of studies, I selected one that fit my fancy: a study which sought to characterize the interaction between a native mouse and an introduced one, the hypothesis being that the non-native mouse was more aggressive and was displacing the native mouse from its habitat.

Many weeks were spent learning how better to do live trapping; I’d already done that in previous classes (awww, look at the cute Kangaroo rat! Oooh, Antelope Valley Ground Squirrel!) but now I needed to go full-out to trap enough mice to have a statistically-viable study. The non-native mice were pretty easy (Mus musculus, the common house mouse) as they are in predictable places near dwellings & trash, often at high concentrations (ewww!) But the native mice, White-footed Deer Mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) were much more challenging to find habitats where they hung out. I kept trapping Kangaroo rats! Setting the live traps was delicate, which is why I was getting K-rats (they’re a lot heavier.) Finding a good bait was a bit of a puzzle too; I started with cheese, but meh, deer mice don’t seem nearly as enthused over that as house mice. Peanut butter, and setting the traps to be on a finely-balaced hair trigger setting, finally started to yield some deer mice.

Maintaining 10 or so mice of each species in the bio lab was also quite the challenge. The end of the quarter was nearing; I was getting almost no sleep. Finally, I had enough healthy mice to start the experiments: place one of each species in a large cage, and note their interactions. The paper I had chosen to duplicate described notable aggressions of M. musculus towards the deer mice, which included jumping vertically (to appear big and strong?), and especially back-flips done as a display of energy and power.

So mouse 3 & mouse 12: an hour of them ignoring each other and sniffing around inside the cage. Mouse 2 and mouse 16: same as the previous pair. Next pair, same result. Next pair: SAME RESULT. I was not seeing ANY of the behaviours described in the paper I had chosen to duplicate!

Perhaps they were doing these rapid backflips so rapidly I was missing them? I was awfully tired. Yawn, what time is it, 3 AM! Aaack!

Several days of trials, with the same results. Now it was the end of the quarter. I released all the mice back into their habitats. Write a paper on… what? I felt like a complete failure.

In retrospect I had PLENTY for a good paper; it would have documented the large amount of work it took to trap and house ~20 wild mice, and the complete lack of interest they had in each other, thus calling into question the original paper. We called such fraudulent products “dry-labbing”, where someone made up numbers that looked plausible and which could yield statistically-significant results.

A week or so after the end of the quarter, my senior advisor was frantically trying to get me to write up my project, but I got a summer job in my field using my lab skills, working at a fruit dehydrator plant. One of the other lab techs quit, and now I was on 12-hour shifts seven days a week; the dehydrator was a 24 x 7 operation in the summer, and my boss was the only other tech. By the end of the summer, the farming company hired me on full-time as an assistant horticulturist, as good or better of a job as I would have had with my BSc. Thoughts of trying to finish my Bachelor’s faded into insignificance; the lack of same never really impacted me, as I was always one of those guys who would take on a crap job and boost myself up by doing.

The backflips were probably at the speed of light. You trapped Alien mice! :-) :-) :-)

Enjoyed your comment!

I witnessed data faking among some of the scientists at a startup back in Silicon Valley in the 90s. What an awful life. How can that feel satisfying? I guess if your focus is on achieving "power."

I'd also like to see some of them prosecuted for fraud. I'm pretty sure there is no "scientists exemption" from the laws that forbid fraud from anyone accepting money from the government...

That strikes me as a very good idea. If researchers who took federal grants and used them for fraudulent studies started facing prosecution, it would do a lot to improve the quality of research.

I get your point, but that thought doesn't sit real well with me. I have seen, and know personally, genuine researchers (professors) falsely accused of fraud, because they were on the wrong side of the Pharmaceutical Industry. Be careful what you wish for.

Monochrome Impudent Turtle

I'm not talking about mere accusations. I'm talking about people who've had papers retracted due to clearly evident fraud. I'd be entirely willing to see each case go through the courts, and only those actually convicted of defrauding the federal government by faking experiments formally barred from receiving grants.

Mind you, I'd also like to see the various laws that shelter Big Pharma from legal action gutted and replaced by laws with teeth. Any pharmaceutical company that defrauds consumers by selling a product they know to be harmful, or that doesn't have the benefits claimed for it, should be fined three times the total profit made on that product, and the executives who made the decision should get jail time.

I'm not either, the person I'm thinking of, was falsely accused by an anonymous whistleblower, which spurred an investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services. I sat in his living room as he practically in tears told us about it. (He was one of the professors on my husband PhD committee.) He hired a lawyer but didn't have the funds to continue with a legal defense. Many journals retracted his papers. His research directly contradicted the pharmaceutical companies interests. While it's always possible there was fraud, I just don't believe it. The corruption even in science is so rampant, the Pharmaceutical Industry has the clout to ruin people's careers who actively go against their interests.

I also personally know people who have there offices raided and temporarily seized by the FBI, because their business also went against the interests of the Pharmaceutical Industry.

Monochrome Impudent Turtle

Perhaps you have an alternative suggestion, then. The current situation is unsustainable; if the current tide of scientific fraud continues, the cultural consensus that supports paying for research out of public funds will shatter -- it's already cracking, and not just at the edges -- and we'll be back where we were in the 19th century, when the only people who carried out scientific research did it out of their own pockets. Do you have a proposal for cutting back on research fraud?

No, I don't have an alternative suggestion or solution, but the fact that I don't doesn't make my point or my experience any less valid.

I do think we may already be at the point where in many subject matter areas (not all areas) the only people who do real scientific research, have to do it out of their own pockets, which in most cases means it doesn't get done (though I know a few that do). Or alternatively they contort their conclusions, even though if you read the actual article it indicates otherwise. My thought is that it's probably worse to get institutional and academic support for science that's been bought by big corporate interests then it is to just let the system fall apart.

Monochrome Impudent Turtle

I think the problem here is the capture of systems of regulation by the new Magisterium. This does not give me insight in HOW to deal with it.

But if it is not so much the research that is flawed (although much of it is), but the systems (public and private) that fund it, produce it, and regulate it thoroughly captured and corrupt, then any punitive new regulations aimed only at researchers at the bottom of that feedtrough, will fulfill the functions of regulation everywhere. They will give the capturers of the regulatory system more weapons to aim at smallfry they find annoying, while continuing to be permissive towards those that feed the magisterium.

How does one fight a Magisterium... and win?

Not the OP, but given that the current system seems to have caused a lot of the corruption, led to some disastrous public policy (such as the horribly distorted food system in much of the Western World), and there were plenty of great scientists before (Newton, Galileo, Haley, Darwin, among others), maybe it's not worth trying to salvage at all.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2024-10-20 17:38 (UTC) - Expand

In the case I'm talking about above, the scientist had over 500 published articles and 28 were retracted for "questionable image manipulation". The "whistleblower" was an anonymous researcher in Japan.

In theory, I agree wholeheartedly.

In practice, however, the challenge would be to find some way that this goal could be accomplished without also breeding a whole new race of 'fact checkers' with monopolies on both the retraction of fraudulent research and the definition of fraud.

As I noted to the anon immediately above, that's why we have courts.

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