Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 167

[ecosophia]

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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

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.....

[ecosophia]

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.)

[(Anonymous)]

(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. :-) :-) :-) :-)

[(Anonymous)]

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.