ecosophia | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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."

Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 167

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