Dumb Energy: Tilting at Windmills

re: dumb energy

Green is the new brown.

Windmills kill (birds especially, perhaps whales). Windmills also scar vast areas of land or water, as I can attest to driving through the western US. All that might be OK if they made sense, which they do not.

The Inadequacy of Wind Power

by Wade Elllison, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford

...energy of the wind is that of the moving air.... such energy is 1⁄2Mv^2, where M is the mass of air and v the speed. The mass of air reaching each square metre of the area swept by the turbine blade in a second is M = ρv, where ρ is the density of air: about 1.2 kg per cubic metre. So, the maximum power that the turbine can deliver is 1⁄2ρv^3 watts per square metre.

If the wind speed is 10 metres per second (about 20 mph) the power is 600 watts per square metre at 100% efficiency.2 That means to deliver the same power as Hinkley Point C (3200 million watts) by wind would require 5.5 million square metres of turbine swept area – that should be quite unacceptable to those who care about birds and to other environmentalists.

But the performance of wind is much worse than that, as a look at the simple formula shows. Because the power carried by the wind depends on the third power of the wind speed, if the wind drops to half speed, the power available drops by a factor of 8. Almost worse, if the wind speed doubles, the power delivered goes up 8 times, and as a result the turbine has to be turned off for its own protection.

...Batteries 20 million times larger are never going to be available and storage batteries will never make good the failure of offshore wind farms, even for a week. And the wind can drop for longer periods than that.

...With general energy shortages, the war in Europe, high prices and the likelihood of failures in electricity supply, many popular scientific presumptions underlying energy policy should be questioned. Wind power fails on every count.

WIND: “Hinkley Point C” is a 3.3 GW nuclear power plant—reliable, green, compact, it keeps the lights on 24X365. Nuclear power is the only non-fantasy energy solution for humanity.

Here in California, the propaganda on “savings” from green power and impending end-of-humanity doom are at hysterical levels. The lies about “savings” rely on consumers not actually checking their power bill, ignoring the steep costs involved (cost is 50% to 75% higher than claimed and ignores massively unaffordable conversion costs).

Unlike my rich green-virtue-signalling neighbors, neither I nor most Californians can afford an $60K Tesla with $5K high-amp home charger along with $24K solar installation, $5K breaker box upgrade, $30K electric heating conversion, $6K heat-pump water heater, $3K stove replacement, etc. The cost is vastly more than, for example, a incredibly efficient and clean 1.5L gas-engine car along with natural gas heating. And that electric car is rarely driven far enough to even break even on its outrageous energy cost (twice that of a conventional car), making it a net loser. And then 5-7 years in, a $20K battery pack replacement.

'Green' is a massive browning of quality of life, bank accounts, and the environment. Anyone who actually cares about the future should be putting all their efforts into "Gen 4" nuclear power solutions.

Electrification increases fossil fuel usage

To heat air or water for homes, the most efficient approach is to burn natural gas in the home, capturing 98% of the energy as hot air or hot water. The morons running California tell us we should instead burn natural gas in a power plant at a 40% loss of thermal energy in order to convert that gas into electricity, losing additional energy in transmission, in order to heat air/water within homes. This approach is going to increase the burning of natural gas by 67% for heating (via electricity) air and water in the home, sending both electric and gas rates soaring in the winter, when solar and wind are worth jack shit.

Baseline load

The sun does not shine at night and the wind rarely blows. This effectively means power that doubles or triples in cost, because all those fossil fuel plants are required when the 'green' sources are unavailable. And even when available, grid instability is a major technical problem due to gyrating energy production by those 'green' sources.

See also: Dumb Energy, by Normal Rogers @AMAZON.

Bad News: They Finally Did a Meta-Analysis of All of Science, and It Turns Out It’s Not Significant

re: Anon MD

Anon MD writes:

I never thought I would suggest using an xkcd on your blog, but today is the day!

WIND: get your annual (profit) booster.

xkcd: Meta Analysis

Conspiracy Theorists Reasonable People with Bullshit Detectors

Consumer Reports: Your Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

re: heavy metals
re: Certificate of Analysis for Food Supplements: Never Ingest a Product Without Checking Toxin Levels)

This article below piqued my interest as part of my search to eliminate sources of lead (Pb) from my diet (having no other risk factors it has to be diet).

My blood lead level had spiked at the end of 2022 to an unhealthy level (14.6 mcg/dL) and has since come down to 8.4 mcg/dL and I will retest again soon. Mild poisoning is around 45.

The article below piqued my interest as part of my search to eliminate sources of lead from my diet (having no other risk factors it has to be diet).

Background

Heavy metals are thought to have a dose-response relationship with no safe level, and body functions degraded proportionally.

Just about everything you eat or drink has some trace amounts of lead/arsenic/cadmium in it. Chocolate and tea tend to be high in lead and cadmium, rice can be very high in arsenic, and some supplements might have troublesome levels of lead or other metals.

“Organically grown” tells you nothing about the risk.

Lead levels are of particular importance for children and pregnant or breast feeding women, with small bodies also growing fast at highest risk of permanent damage.

Your Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

2021-11-09

... We  looked at 126 individual products from national and private-label brands, such as Great Value (Walmart), La Flor, McCormick, Penzeys, Spice Islands, and Trader Joe's. Read more about how CR tested herbs and spices (PDF). 

Roughly one-third of the tested products, 40 in total, had high enough levels of arsenic, lead, and cadmium combined, on average, to pose a health concern for children when regularly consumed in typical serving sizes. Most raised concern for adults, too.

For two herbs, thyme and oregano, all the products we tested had levels that CR experts say are concerning.

In 31 products, levels of lead were so high that they exceeded the maximum amount anyone should have in a day, according to CR's experts.

Also troubling: There was no single predictor of which products contained higher levels of heavy metals—for example, brand name didn't matter, and neither did "organic" or "packed in USA" claims.

The good news? Many products performed well in the tests. In seven of the 15 types of herbs and spices tested, all the brands had heavy metal levels below our thresholds for concern...

...for certain spices, just one serving—¾ teaspoon or more—per day leaves little room for heavy metal exposure from other sources. For example, CR's previous testing found that some brands of fruit juice, baby food, and rice contain troubling amounts of heavy metals.

...CR's tests, however, demonstrate that it is possible for herb and spice companies to limit heavy metals in their products. "About two-thirds of the spices we tested did not have concerning levels of heavy metals," Akinleye says. "So we know spices don't have to have worrisome amounts of lead or arsenic or any other heavy metal."

WIND: this is one of those areas that raises a red flag, but where it is difficult to impossible to for most of us to gauge risk. Heavy or regular use of some spices could be a concern, but how to assess risk when numbers are generally hidden from you? What of processed foods, which may also contain herbs and spices?

The FDA has standards for most things, which many argue are high enough to cause harm eg in baby food, juices, etc. But with spices, there are no standards to protect you. And it’s a difficult area; usage once a week is very different than daily.

It can be difficult to find objective information on heavy metal risks, even by inquiring. For example, my favorite tea brand refuses to provide figures on heavy metals in their tea. If the concern is serious, about your only choice is to seek out the rare brand that does test and publish their product. That’s a major undertaking across all the products you might consume.

Cholesterol/Statin Claims: Science or Self-Serving Propaganda?

re: ethics in medicine
re: Medical Industrial Complex

Don’t take your medical advice from a photographer and engineer (me). Trust your doctor. After all, the past few years have shown us the incredibly high ethical and intellectual standards of science and medicine, right? And Americans are getting healthier and healthier too, right?

In the context of my double century training, I once asked a cardiologist friend what effect a statin had on athletes. His response captures it perfectly:

Hope that your competitors are taking them.

And that’s ignoring brain fog and diabetes and a host of other issues, all minimized and rationalized-away by mainstream medicine—see for example nasty statin side effects rationalized-away in real-time in this interview, and a shocking lack of discussion of the only endpoint that matters*.

* I like Huberman’s podcasts, but one-sided perspectives are problematic. For too many they are persuasive, yet in truth they lack credibility because the essential competing viewpoint is totally absent. In that particular podcast, Huberman not only fails to ask the right questions, but deferentially accepts every claim made going so far as to sign up for statin treatment. And... the two are friends. And Attia has a direct financial stake in his claims via his bespoke medical practice and the need to justify his practices. These are not small issues. The credibility of both men suffers—Huberman by lack of knowledge/preparation and his failure to ask even one probing question on cholesterol/statins and his highly deferential manner and de facto endorsement in real time. Attia in his “settled science” perspective, his use of analogy (smoking) vs evidence, and the financial interests of his bespoke medical practice. Unacceptable.

Side effects? If one is unpleasant, another should be fine!

Side effects, some clinical and some subclinical with subtle and not so subtle loss of function*, all cheerfully dismissed by overworked practicing physicians, who must follow SOC or suffer the consequences.

Do you ever wonder what incentive harried physicians have to pay attention to anything but obvious issues, the ones that cannot be easily ignored? Negative incentive. Let alone establishing benefit for an individual patient. Ditto for all medications. That is our system.

Ya gotta take that statin the rest of your life, though 99/100 people will never see a benefit and the benefit is at best dubious for that 1/100. Since side-effect X is not tolerable, we’ll switch to another statin variant, and if nothing obvious shows up, you’re so much better-off for taking it the rest of your life. Really? That is Standard of Care. Feckless.

* See Lipitor® Thief of Memory, by MD Duane Graveline @AMAZON.

Epidemiology to treat individuals

To treat an individual based on epidemiological statistics is a serious intellectual error. Also the basis for modern medicine. We don’t see that as acceptable in law enforcement, but it’s fine in medicine?

Medicine assumes we can treat individuals based on epidemiological data and large studies in which individuality is eliminated. Yet virtually everything biological has variation, most coarsely among male/female but mainly as huge variance among individuals.

Thus when it comes to cholesterol, the nail that stands up gets hammered down. In the face of a total lack of insight into any individual’s particular physiology. Get out that risk calculator!

Corrupt science is not science

Consider the following passage from an MD interacting with another MD:

He advocates a wider use of cholesterol-lowering statin medications than I do, and he started to cite the literature about why I should be taking more cholesterol-lowering medicine than I already was. I asked him if he had read the studies underlying that literature, and of course he had. I then asked him if he understood that the endpoint of many of those studies wasn’t really appropriate to determine the benefit of statins, and he acknowledged there was some debate about that. Finally, I asked if he was aware that when peer-reviewed articles are published in medical journals—even the most reputable medical journals—the peer reviewers don’t have access to the actual data from the clinical trials being reviewed. And he answered, somewhat meekly, that yes, he was aware of that.

In other words, he was aware that his recommendation that I increase my use of statin drugs was based entirely on incompletely vetted commercially-sponsored and largely commercially-influenced medical journal articles....

And that’s from an MD already taking a statin and accepting that it has some benefit! One has to wonder if his condition wasn’t promoted by a statin.

The fact is that much of “settled medicine” is bad science, bad logic, and most of all: groupthink stemming from follow the money. If not outright intellectual fraud.

Cholesterol and statin deceptions

xkcd: Meta Analysis

I cannot possibly call out all the misleading claims and outright lies about statins and cholesterol. Nor am I claiming certainty. But science is about rigor and logic, and that is the antithesis of what is going on with cholesterol and statins.

• No causal evidence has ever been shown. The hypothesis has been overhauled and changed so many times with so many ridiculous variations that one cannot help but marvel at the tenacity of its proponents.
• Just as many people with low cholesterol have heart attacks as those with high cholesterol. People with very low cholesterol have even more. Why is that?
• No study has EVER shown that women benefit from statins.
• No study has EVER shown that men benefit from statins, excepting the next point, which is exceptionally weak.
• Higher cholesterol correlates increasingly strongly with increased longevity the older you get. Yet we treat the elderly to lower it. Are we killing people and degrading them overall?
• The ONLY group that ever has shown a (tiny) benefit from statins is men under 65 who have already had a heart attack. This “benefit” probably stems from a mild anti-inflammatory effect and has nothing to do with cholesterol, but no one really knows. Probably there are lifestyle interventions vastly more effective, so the whole thing is ridiculous.
• Statins double and might triple the risk of diabetes, a far more serious issue than some non-existent theoretical “benefit” with the persuasion trickery of risk reduction of 25% based on tiny absolute numbers.
• The NNT (number needed to treat) is astronomically high (see points above), incurring massive financial costs and untold costs from side effects, including quality of life.
• If LDL cholesterol ("apo B") is causal, there must be a dose-response relationship. Yet no credible dose-response causal relationship has been demonstrated. And someone with very high cholesterol for decades can have a zero coronary artery calcium score, zero ischemia, zero clinical anything. The idea that a dose-response relationship comes with wild exceptions (no response whatsoever) is ridiculous, a scientific having your cake and eating it too.
• The Big Lie leads to feckless care: doctors keep trying to force statins on my mother (80's, cholesterol high 200's into 300's and off-the-chart triglycerides for decades) in spite of zero calcium in her heart and zero clinical or even subclinical evidence of anything—ever. Same asshole-doctor behavior with my wife, also having zero atherosclerosis. With zero evidence ever shown for benefit to women and negative benefit for anyone her age, this kind of malpractice is nonetheless widepread. The hands of death and destruction, courtesy of SoC.
• Studies on statins are invariably weak, requiring relative risk to look good based on small numbers over short time frames. They are cut short to hide issues, ignore and minimize side effects, do not study cohorts to which they are applied, data is not made public, papers are ghostwritten by the pharma companies, unsupportive studies were/are terminated or not published, etc.
• Low cholesterol might be associated with violent crime.

The human body is not stupid; it regulates everything according to its needs. Which includes more when under duress, adjusting for dietary intake, etc.

Yet modern medicine assumes the body is somehow badly designed, and needs help with pharmacological intervention. Perhaps formula instead of breast milk, or toxic grains or seed oils we never evolved to eat, or trans fats (Oleo) instead of butter, smoking is good for you, and much more. The destructive hubris of the medical profession over the last 70 years should be self evident. Is this the case for statins, and if so, how bad are they? It remains to be seen, but if they are so great, why only worsening heart disease? Statins have had decades now to show all their benefits. Yet things are only worse.

Cholesterol is one of the most critical substances in the body necessary for everything from cell structure/repair to every hormone. We were told for decades to avoid high-cholesterol foods such as eggs (now debunked). We’re still told that the body creates “too much” cholesterol, and that needs fixing with drugs. The meta message is that your body physiology is defective and needs help, pharmacological help.

When a doctor opining on heart health initiates a conversation on cholesterol with an analogy on smoking instead of logical and factual rigor around endpoints on heart disease, it shows a self-deception that likely stems from cognitive commitments causing cognitive dissonance requiring rationalization. And when such a high-end comprehensive lifestyle care doctor ($$$$$) touts statins as being great based on settled science (“the evidence is very clear”), studiously avoids even mentioning competing theories, not once discussing treatment outcomes from statins, ignoring elephants in the room like "apo A", signs up for “saturated fat = BAD”), works around a high level of side effects as a matter of course while discounting all but common ones, etc... it sure looks likean intellectual blindness stemming from follow the money.

America’s Broken Health Care: Diagnosis and Prescription

re: cholesterol and statins
re: Medical Industrial Complex

Why is America so sick and getting sicker?

America’s Broken Health Care: Diagnosis and Prescription

February 2023, by John Abramson MD, MSc, Author of Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It @AMAZON

I developed a serious cardiac arrhythmia, ventricular tachycardia, seven years ago...

On the good side, I was fortunate to have the attention of two world-class doctors who spent six hours, one going inside my heart, the other coming through my chest wall to the outside of my heart, to map electrically the aberrant signals in my heart and to ablate them. Since then, I’ve not had a problem. 

On the bad side, two days after the procedure, I was in the intensive care unit when a cardiologist came by on rounds. He advocates a wider use of cholesterol-lowering statin medications than I do, and he started to cite the literature about why I should be taking more cholesterol-lowering medicine than I already was. I asked him if he had read the studies underlying that literature, and of course he had. I then asked him if he understood that the endpoint of many of those studies wasn’t really appropriate to determine the benefit of statins, and he acknowledged there was some debate about that. Finally, I asked if he was aware that when peer-reviewed articles are published in medical journals—even the most reputable medical journals—the peer reviewers don’t have access to the actual data from the clinical trials being reviewed. And he answered, somewhat meekly, that yes, he was aware of that.

In other words, he was aware that his recommendation that I increase my use of statin drugs was based entirely on incompletely vetted commercially-sponsored and largely commercially-influenced medical journal articles. This gets to the heart of the problem of the commercial takeover of the medical knowledge that doctors believe in and implement. 

But before continuing that thought, let me step back and explain why I begin from the assumption that U.S. health care is on the wrong track.

...

WIND: imagine you had such heart issues and were told you had better be on a statin forever thereafter. How many people would have the faintest clue of what a poor idea that is? That is, all the evidence suggests that statins are one huge gaslighting and psyops operation, with the evidence showing essentially zero benefit (infinite NNT) with all the nasty side effects up to and including triple the risk of diabetes mellitus.

Recommended: The Clot Thickens, by Dr Malcom Kendrick @AMAZON.

When it comes to a doctor like Peter Attia making tons of money from his high-end medical practice, none of the right questions are asked, not by him and not by Huberman—really sad to such stuff presented emphatically as “settled science” and completely lacking in assessing outcomes, the only thing that matters (besides the side effects). It’s a startling example of cognitive commitments leaving no room in the mind for doubt.

The evidence for the cholesterol hypothesis of atherosclerosis is swiss-cheesed with cognitive commitments, cognitive dissonance, and a dismal grade of “science” dominated by follow the money. Seventy years or so have failed to establish any causal link, with a constantly-changing series of claims, coupled with intentionally not studying key aspects (as just one example, the the role lipoprotein A, which is not amenable to Big Pharma meds). Competing theories are not just not studied, and anyone raising them becomes a pariah. There is nothing even science-like about the whole sordid affair.

BTW, compare the quality writing and reasoning above to the word salad and DEI/CRT civilization-destroying vomit spewing from disgraced Stanford Medicine (with a very few exceptions such as Jay Bhattacharya). The difference could not be more striking.

Dropping life expectancy, out-of-control costs, usurpation of science, the Medical-Industrial Complex...

The article continues:

An easy way to gauge the health of a country, and to compare the health of a country with that of other countries, is to look at average life expectancy... life expectancy in the U.S. has fallen further and further behind....

By 2019, prior to COVID, life expectancy in the U.S. had fallen relative to that in the other countries so much that 500,000 Americans were dying each year in excess of the death rates of the citizens of those other countries...

Now combine this with the fact that we in the U.S. are paying an enormous excess over those other countries on health care...

Which means that our health care system is broken and needs fixing.

Prior to leaving office in 1961, President Eisenhower famously warned the nation about what he called the “military-industrial complex.” I suggest that we now have a medical-industrial complex that is sucking America’s wealth away from the other things that will make us healthier and create better lives for the American people.

Ask yourself, what ought to be the primary goal of American health care? To my mind it is this: to maintain and improve individual and population health most effectively and efficiently. And if that is correct, there are two critical questions we all need to ask: (1) Why are we failing so miserably to achieve this goal? and (2) Why are doctors and other health care professionals willing to go along with this dysfunctional system?

One of the fundamental reasons for the disparity between the health of Americans and the health of people in other wealthy developed countries is that our medical-industrial complex has taken control over what doctors and the public accept as medical knowledge. This is something that has evolved over time.

Back in 1981... Derek Bok, the president of Harvard University, said in Harvard Magazine that year that the university’s reliance on industry funding for research was causing “an uneasy sense that programs to exploit [i.e., make money from] technological development are likely to confuse the university’s central commitment to the pursuit of knowledge.”...

Along the same lines, a 1982 article in the journal Science, “The Academic-Industrial Complex,” pointed out that universities that had been pursuing knowledge for its social and scientific value had been suddenly drawn into the marketplace and were pursuing knowledge for commercial value. We today have grown accustomed to an environment where it’s normal for professors at medical schools to have commercial relationships. But it wasn’t always that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way in the future.

...In litigation involving Pfizer—although Pfizer is no different than other drug companies in this respect—internal Pfizer documents stated in stark language that “Pfizer-sponsored studies belong to Pfizer, not to any individual,” and that the “Purpose of data [from those studies] is to support, directly or indirectly, marketing of our product.” Not to ensure that the drugs will make people healthier or improve quality of life—or to ensure that they will do no harm—but to support the company’s marketing...

... In 24 percent of clinical trial agreements, the sponsor (meaning the drug company) “may include its own statistical analysis in manuscripts [i.e., journal articles].” And even more outrageously, 50 percent of clinical trial agreements allow the sponsor to “write up the results for publication and the investigators may review the manuscript and suggest revisions.” In other words, 50 percent of the contracts that academic medical centers make with drug companies allow the drug companies to ghostwrite the articles. The researchers who are the named authors of the articles have the right to suggest revisions but not to make actual corrections or edits. This is not academic freedom. Nor is it an arrangement in which medical science is going to serve the interest of the American people.

...It is irresponsible for medical journals not to require transparency from the drug companies—but it makes perfect business sense when we understand their financial dependence on those companies.

...

WIND: follow the money; the amounts are huge. I am not optimistic about a fix. Powerful interests have tentacles everywhere.

This sums it up well:

We in the U.S. are spending 96 percent of our biomedical research money on medical drugs and devices, and only four percent on how to make the population healthier and how to deliver health care more efficiently and effectively. Put another way, the U.S. spends $116 billion on researching new drugs and devices—which comprise only 13 percent of total health care costs—but only $5 billion on research concerning the remaining 87 percent of health care costs. Why? Because the drug companies’ job is to maximize the money they return to their investors, and the highest return on research investment is not going to be from studying and promoting healthy diets and lifestyles. The money is in selling drugs and devices. This leads to a tremendous epidemiological imbalance in the information coming down to doctors. 

...In the case of Trulicity, it turns out that you have to treat 327 people for approximately three years in order to prevent one non-fatal heart event. And treating just those 327 people over that time period would cost the public $2.7 million. Wouldn’t knowing these numbers make a difference to a doctor deciding whether to prescribe the drug? Or to a patient deciding whether to request the drug? And this is leaving aside the possible negative side effects—and the “number needed to harm” for each of them—which clinical trials often fail to monitor and more often fail to report in journal articles.

...Big Pharma is comprised of for-profit companies. The job of for-profit companies is to maximize returns to their investors. Accusing drug companies of being greedy is like accusing zebras of having stripes. They are doing their job, and we’re not going to change them...

Are there any Credible Scientific Journals Remaining?

re: Jay Bhattycharya

Has much of science really become a branch of politics?

Jay Bhattycharya MD, PhD of Stanford...

2023-03-21

I'm hard pressed to think of a better way to destroy the trust of (about half or more) of the public in our scientific institutions than to have these institutions openly display their political biases.

WIND: “Openly”? One half has lost trust, the other remains unaware of the structural defects in the brains of scientists so undermined in algorithmic integrity that they feel free to mix politics with science—that’s 100% destruction.

Put simply, if an intellect lacks the integrity and objectivity to consider viewpoints in one field, it cannot and will not remain objective in other fields. Because it is a structural defect in the thinking process, not a one-off issue.

Has Nature perhaps provided a public service by disabusing us of an illusion, by abusing the prestige of science to comment on non-science? Pulling the curtain aside just enough to show the sausage being made?

Better that “experts as the science”, in their arrogant hubris, show their dirty laundry so that in the long term the scientific method retains credibility.

The reason that the scientific method exists, and why it takes decades or longer to produce reliable findings, is that “science” and scientists are highly unreliable in the short term. Short term scientific truth is not a thing.

Only a long term scientific method eventually filters out the false and gets better bearings on the truth. It’s why a century later, scientists are still validating Einstein’s hypotheses, in a field that is as far from politics as most. That drawn-out process is the only reason science has any authority at all. Though simple physical science over history could be much more rapid eg “X can do Y” and is provable by using it to engineer a useful outcome. Engineering is the ultimate proof.

Using the mantle of scientific objectivity to endorse a political candidate while being hoaxed and unaware of it shows a level of self-unawareness, a structural lack of judgment and objectivity that will contaminate every judgment on every topic.

When dozens of hoaxes fool “objective” scientists, when the vast majority of scientists and doctors got everything wrong about COVID, when science is mostly about funding eg follow the money, when science in most every field is influenced or dominated by politics, when some of the most vicious social doctrines are infiltrating science, you can be sure that scientists are among the most rationalization-prone gullible suckers on the planet.

State of Stanford Medicine affirms health equity, diversity and inclusion as core to strategic planning

Medicine is doomed.

State of Stanford Medicine affirms health equity, diversity and inclusion as core to strategic planning

2023-03-21

Stanford Medicine leaders reaffirmed their focus on health equity, diversity and inclusion at the March 7 State of Stanford Medicine address, unveiling an ambitious plan to refresh the integrated strategic plan through 2030 with an emphasis on continuing to implement the Commission on Justice and Equity’s recommendations.

...

WIND: do I get fewer “points” over at Stanford by being white and male as has already been put into place in some institutions?

Stanford is not a one-off—it’s a mass idiocy-hysteria. Now the only doctors that can be trained in most all medical schools have to be woke broken-brain civilization-destroying losers intent on dragging humanity into a cesspool or self-hate. Or if they enter without those “qualifications”, they will have to imbibe them.

Race relations are poisoned by DEI, CRT, ESG, with injustice-collecting a civilization-destroying recipe for failure in every aspect of life. These racist assholes at Stanford and their ilk are trying to doom us all to a dismal future. There ought to be a list of everyone signed up for this shit, so patients can avoid their psychosis.

One system works for everyone with its rules that create value in life, and the other (the shit being pushed above) is all about injustice collecting/destroying/tribalism and generally doing nothing useful in life.

To dismantle systemic racism, start by staunching the bloody gaping wound in plain sight: the government school teacher’s unions (and now universities too), which doom millions of children to a dismal future via direct intellectual destruction, and tell you that you should have no choice in the matter. Such as colossal waste of human potential. Crimes against humanity, by government taxes and school-prison requirements.

Victor Davis Hanson: What Happened To Stanford?

2023-03-19

Stanford was once one of the world’s great universities. It birthed Silicon Valley in its prime. And along with its nearby twin and rival, UC Berkeley, its brilliant researchers, and teachers helped fuel the mid-20th-century California miracle. That was then. But like the descent of California, now something has gone terribly wrong with the university.

...

WIND: as a Stanford graduate, I now loathe my ontemptible alma mater. A steady drumbeat anti-intellectual destruction is now the hallmark of Stanford. The downhill trend started way back in the mid-1990's and the place is now a sewer of the worst of humanity.

In Science, Things do not “work” Unless the Evidence Can be Consistently and Repeatedly Shown to Support the Claim

re: COVID and ethics in medicine
re: psyop and gaslighting and mass hysteria
re: Vinay Prasad MD

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.

An MD writes in reference to the substack article by Vinay Prasad below, which critiques Physical Interventions to Interrupt or Reduce the Spread of Respiratory Viruses.

Anon MD writes:

The acronyms EBM and RCT stand for Evidence-Based Medicine and Random Clinical Trial. These continue to be the gold standards for what we should adopt or abandon in medicine. Behind these are a large group of statistical interpretations , with rankings as to quality of data, size of study, and surety of conclusions, among other things.

All of this stuff can and sadly does get manipulated by people, docs, researchers, politicians, etc to try and influence a policy or behavior or treatment protocol based on this stuff.

xkcd: Meta Analysis

The data on masking has gotten so intertwined and obscured by political agendas from all directions that its hard to objectively figure anything out anymore. Frankly I think we now have better solid info on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine than we do on masking.

I am a firm believer in RCTs, and RCTs for much more than medicine. But there’s always some jerk who wants to put their finger on the scales and someone who will refuse the evidence of even a statistically perfect and controlled RCT. Politicians I think are the worst, but there are many many other groups fighting for second place.

It seems so simple. Do the RCT, share the results in an open forum and if the assumption is disproved, abandon and move on. Ha! Like that is ever going to routinely happen. No one trusts anyone anymore, politicians and those with an axe to grind must always be right, and government institutions all routinely lie for their institutional benefit (and have done so since government was invented).

What we need are Shroedinger politicians who can be both right and wrong on both sides of an issue at the same time. If you do the mathematical logic analysis you can show that no matter what they will always be right. That should make them happy and sure to be elected.

God help the rest of us.

...I thought a lot about what I said and I do think the research process more in the US than anywhere else has become corrupted by those with power and a financial stake. Add on top of that the concept that lies and BS are protected free speech under the Constitution and there is no integrity left. My parents were scientists and I grew up in that world. The federal government more than any other payer funded open research regardless of the potential outcome. Pretty much the only directed research was military. As the years have passed, the government a) wants positive results only, b) only wants positive results in the topics congress is interested in, and c) if they had their way all research would be funded by private enterprise rather than taxpayer dollars. 

Segue to today and that’s what we’ve got. Yes, Big Pharma and Big Ag fund research. But if a thread shows something that doesn’t prove their monied supposition, or even worse, totally disproves it, that research will never see the light of day and the researchers and their teams are all constrained under watertight NDAs that threaten their livelihood if not very existence if they so much as fart the wrong way. About the only time something will wiggle its way out is if there is a lawsuit and the discovery involves volumes of seemingly useless material that gets scanned by a smart junior attorney with time on their hands and finds an ill-advised or thought-to-be private Post-It note or email thread. Either that or someone spills the beans on their deathbed 50 years after the fact.

WIND: this communication above caught my special attention in light of recent communication a COVID front-line physician who dismisses the Cochrane study.

The viewpoint difference between doctors is striking. And some still think studies they read in ideological journals like Nature are credible—as if their is some impartial judgment on submitted articles—nothing works that way.

The Cochrane Mask Fiasco

2023-03-15, by Vinay Prasad. Emphasis added.

A Cochrane Report Tells the Truth, But Many Are not Ready to Hear It

Recently, Cochrane & the internet has blown up over the Physical Interventions to Interrupt or Reduce the Spread of Respiratory Viruses report — specifically the masks portion— and it has already become another riving chapter in the EBM history books. Here, I walk you through the play by play, and leave you with a 5 take home lessons.

The latest update of the Cochrane Report came out on Jan 30, 2023. The first author is Tom Jefferson, who has worked on this protocol since 2006 (remember… 2006). Cochrane, once again, examined all the randomized trials of masking, and came to 2 main conclusions. Let me quote them.

“Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness (9 studies; 276,917 people); and probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVID confirmed by a laboratory test“

And

“More high‐quality RCTs are needed to evaluate the most effective strategies to implement successful physical interventions in practice, both on a small scale and at a population level. It is very unfortunate that more rigorous planning, effort and funding was not provided during the current COVID‐19 pandemic towards high‐quality RCTs of the basic public health measures.”

(emphasis mine)

In my words:

1. the best data fails to show a benefit, and 
2. we needed more trials. Too bad you all (CDC, WHO, and NIAID) f*&D that up. If that sounds familiar, it is because I said that: here and here and here and hereand here, pretty much all damn pandemic, I was a broken record and said just that, over and over.

How did I come to the same conclusion as Cochrane?

Because anyone worth their salt in EBM would reach that same conclusion. It is basic critical appraisal and reading. I even published my own review, which is one of those links above.

After the report came out, the criticism was immediate. Mask advocates claimed that the report did not prove masks don’t work, but just failed to find benefit. They said a large confidence interval meant that masks could work.  The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The problem with this argument was that this is a new standard— just for masks. I pointed out that medicine often abandons practices if RCTs fail to find benefit, even as the lower bound of the 95% CI is compatible with values that would constitute benefit. I show that here and here. Using 2 disparate examples. 

Tom Jefferson himself gave an interview. In that interview he dropped this bombshell:

“In early 2020, when the pandemic was ramping up, we had just updated our Cochrane review ready to publish…but Cochrane held it up for 7 months before it was finally published in November 2020.” He added: [WIND: ovvious signs of inappropriate machinations]

...In other words, it is clear, Cochrane leadership was meddling with the Cochrane review. The unspoken message was clear: They did not want people saying masks lack evidence.

...

In conclusion, Cochrane’s EIC has disgraced herself, mask advocated sabotaged the conduct of RCTs now claim they wanted more, and Tom Jefferson might be one of the last principled scientists around. Now read the actual review and learn some EBM.

WIND: I stand by my position that I asserted more than two years ago after first recommending masks, until solid repeatable evidence shows otherwise: masks as worn by the public were and are ineffective.

Further, I hypothesize that under some circumstances (hyper common!), the filthy and/or inappropriately handled and/or reused and/or poorly-fitted masks might increase transmission. That is not supported by any evidence yet, but the real-world mask usage I saw makes it my default operating assmption.

The whole “it’s for your own good” approach to science has killed millions, and I am talking about science before COVID. Human nature never changes, and institutions seem only to decline in integrity.

Jonathan Turley: “True Stories … Could Fuel Hesitancy”: Stanford Project Worked to Censor Even True Stories on Social Media

re: COVID and ethics in medicine
re: psyop and gaslighting and mass hysteria
re: Jonathan Turley

Sigh.

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.

Jonathan Turley: “True Stories … Could Fuel Hesitancy”: Stanford Project Worked to Censor Even True Stories on Social Media

2023-03-19, by legal scholar Jonathan Turley. Emphasis added.

xkcd: Meta Analysis

The latest Twitter Files revealed a breathtaking effort from Stanford’s Virality Project to censor even true stories. After all, the project insisted “true stories … could fuel hesitancy” over taking the vaccine or other measures. The effort included suppressing stories that we now know are legitimate such as natural immunity defenses, the exaggerated value of masks, and questions over vaccine efficacy in preventing second illnesses. The work of the Virality Project to censor even true stories should result in the severance of any connection with Stanford University.

We have learned of an ever-expanding coalition of groups working with the government and social media to target and censor Americans, including government-funded organizations.

However, the new files are chilling in the details allegedly showing how the Virality Project labeled even true stories as “anti-vaccine” and, therefore, subject to censorship. These files would suggest that the Project eagerly worked to limit free speech and suppress alternative scientific viewpoints.

...

WIND: sigh... all you need to know about the past three years and the people who permanently damaged the crediblility of medicine, experts, etc. Whether gaslighting you in a massive psyops campaign or engaging in destructive ad-hominem, the folks at Stanford represent everything that went wrong. Minds in shackles will never move humanity forward.

Despite HPV Vaccine, Cervical Cancer Rates Keep Rising

re: ethics in medicine
re: vaccination
re: follow the money

re: gaslighting and psyop

It does make one wonder whether the increasing number of vaccinations is a boon or a concern. The law of unintended consequences argues against trying too hard to fix too many things.

Despite HPV Vaccine, Cervical Cancer Rates Keep Rising

2023-03-18

It was hailed as a breakthrough that would slash levels of this deadly disease, but 17 years later there is a ‘troubling spike,’ despite 80% being ‘protected.’ Regardless, here’s the medical gaslighting technique they’re using to fool the public.

• More than 200 strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) have been identified, and about 40 of them can cause cancer, including cervical, penile, oral, vaginal, vulvar and anal cancer. Of these, cervical cancer is the most common type of HPV-related cancer in the U.S.
• The first HPV vaccine, Gardasil, was licensed in 2006. The vaccine was hailed as a breakthrough that would slash cervical cancer rates, but in the real world, it has largely failed to deliver. The original vaccine contained four HPV strains. The latest version contains nine
• Since 2006, cancers associated with the four HPV strains included in the original quadrivalent vaccine have declined by 88% among 14- to 19-year-olds and 81% among women aged 20 to 24
• However, when looking at cervical cancer in general, there’s now a “troubling spike” in rates. Between 2001 and 2018, cervical cancer rates have increased by 1.3% per year. The primary cause for this continued rise appears to be because cancers associated with non-vaccine strains are going up.
• Evidence suggests HPV vaccination makes women more susceptible than their nonvaccinated peers to HPV genotypes not covered by the vaccine. So, essentially, women who got the vaccine have traded one risk for another

More than 200 strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) have been identified, and about 40 of them can cause cancer, including cervical, penile, oral, vaginal, vulvar and anal cancer. Of these, cervical cancer is the most common type of HPV-related cancer in the U.S. Some strains are also responsible for genital warts.

...

HPV Vax Has Failed Miserably to Reduce Cervical Cancer Rates

... Now, almost 17 years after the vaccine was introduced, there is a “troubling spike” in cervical cancer rates,[5] despite vaccination rates as high as 80%[6] (although rates vary widely between gender and ethnic groups. In 2019, 73% of female teenagers had received one dose and 57% had received both doses in the series).[7] As reported in the December 2022 issue of the International Journal of Gynecological Cancer:....

Cancers Associated With Vaccine Strains Have Declined

...Since 2006, cancers associated with the four HPV strains included in the original quadrivalent vaccine have declined by 88% among 14- to 19-year-olds and 81% among women aged 20 to 24.[9] Aside from the fact that only 14 cases of cervical cancer a year were occurring in females aged 15 to 19 before the vaccine[10] (meaning an 88% drop isn’t all that impressive), the drop may not be all due to the vaccine, as rates have also declined among unvaccinated women.

...

Serious Adverse Reactions Are Still Downplayed

While the medical establishment maintains that Gardasil is safe and has few side effects, a significant number of young girls and boys have been seriously injured over the years. Serious adverse reactions reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in relation to Gardasil include but are not limited to the following:[19]

• Anaphylaxis
• Guillain-Barre Syndrome
• Transverse myelitis (inflammation of the spinal cord)
• Pancreatitis
• Venous thromboembolic events (blood clots)
• Autoimmune initiated motor neuron disease (a neurodegenerative disease that causes rapidly progressive muscle weakness)
• Multiple sclerosis (MS)
• Sudden death

All of these side effects are acknowledged by the FDA[20] and are included in Gardasil’s labeling. In addition to these, the Gardasil vaccine insert also lists:[21]

• Blood and lymphatic system disorders such as autoimmune hemolytic anemia, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura and lymphadenopathy
• Pulmonary embolus
• Arthralgia and myalgia (musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders)
• Nervous system disorders such as acute disseminated encephalomyelitis

Safety Signal Detected for Premature Ovarian Insufficiency

According to a study[22] published in July 2020, VAERS data mining also revealed a disproportionate number of reports of premature ovarian insufficiency (POI) and related problems, including amenorrhea (absence of menstruation), irregular menses, increased follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and premature menopause.

...

Merck Accused of Fraud in Gardasil Safety Testing

There are other reasons to be suspicious of Gardasil’s safety as well. According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Merck committed fraud in its safety testing by:

• Testing Gardasil against a toxic placebo, and
• Hiding a 2.3% incidence of autoimmune disease occurring within seven months of vaccination

Aluminum Can Trigger Debilitating Health Problems

The use of aluminum (AAHS) in Gardasil, and its disastrous health effects, was also brought up in a January 2019 court case (Jennifer Robi vs. Merck and Kaiser Permanente). Kennedy was one of the expert witnesses in this trial. As reported by the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) at the time:...

...Finally, Merck’s own data showed that administering the Gardasil vaccine to girls who had previous exposure to HPV actually raised their risk of developing precancerous lesions (or worse) by almost 45%.”

For even more details on how Merck rigged its Gardasil trials, see my 2018 article, “Shocking Flaws in Gardasil Trial Design Prevents Safety Assessment,” republished on LewRockwell.com.

WIND: sounds like the COVID jab farce—fraud, misrepresentation, effects that show up early for a few people as horrible life-destroying issues, and later for others.

We had our 3 daughters vaccinated, Gardasil I think. It feels awful as a parent to wonder if doing so might have harmed them.

Perhaps my 2nd daughter developed auto-immune because of the Merck vaccine. She had never had any health issues until around that time—absolutely perfect prior. And no family history of it.

Exercise More Effective for Depression and Anxiety Than Medication?

re: ethics in medicine

re: How to Know You Triggered Your Critic Into Cognitive Dissonance, Save Yourself Time in Emails, etc

Is it true? I say so, based on my own observations for 30 years. Mood is always better after a good bike ride, no exceptions.

The Epoch Times: Exercise More Effective for Depression and Anxiety Than Medication: Study

Effective in all cases? Almost certainly not, and since depression can undermine motivation. But setting aside such things, there is surely a very large population for which exercise is a vastly better option, and one which carries numerous other benefits, and no side effects.

Ethics in medicine

With tens of millions of Big Pharma drug prescriptions written for depression and anxiety in the USA, one has to ask as a critical ethical question: how many doctors are advising indeed demanding exercise instead and first. What percentage, exactly? And what does failure to make such efforts say about the ethics of doctors who operate that way?

Makes one wonder...

Critical Psychiatry, by Peter C Gøtzsche

My book describes what is wrong with the psychiatry textbooks used by students of medicine, psychology and psychiatry. I read the five most used textbooks in Denmark and uncovered a litany of misleading and erroneous statements about the causes of mental health disorders, if they are genetic, if they can be detected in a brain scan, if they are caused by a chemical imbalance, if psychiatric diagnoses are reliable, and what the benefits and harms are of psychiatric drugs and electroshocks. Much of what is claimed amounts to scientific dishonesty. I also describe fraud and serious manipulations with the data in often cited research. I conclude that biological psychiatry has not led to anything of use, and that psychiatry as a medical specialty is so harmful that it should be disbanded.

WIND: scope of the last claim? . It would be great to see someone with brutal honesty like Jordan Peterson address these claims.

Parents Need to Know: Are Your Children Over-Vaccinated?

re: ethics in medicine
re: vaccination

re: Despite HPV Vaccine, Cervical Cancer Rates Keep Rising

I support many vaccinations. Certain ones it is foolish to skip (polio, MMR, and some others). Others vaccines I have serious reservations about (the flu vaccine scam in particular, and a few others, based on risk/benefit dubiousness).

Is this fear-mongering, or a legitimate concern?

See also: Did the FDA rush to license Pfizer's covid vaccine to enable vaccine mandates?

The Epoch Times: Parents Need to Know: Are Your Children Over-Vaccinated?

2023-03-16. Emphasis added.

Scientists link rise in type 1 juvenile diabetes to over vaccination

...According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), childhood vaccinations prevent at least four million deaths worldwide every year. This is why the CDC recommends such a large number of vaccines for American children, starting with a vaccine against hepatitis B, a sexually transmitted disease, that is recommended for all newborns during the first hours of life.

...Currently, the following fourteen vaccinations are recommended for children from birth through 18 years of age:

Hepatitis B: 3 doses
Rotavirus: 3-4 doses (depending on the brand)
DTaP (diphtheria, pertussis, & tetanus): 5 doses; then another dose of Tdap at age 11
Hib (haemophilus influenzae type b): 3-4 doses (depending on the brand)
PCV (pneumococcal disease): 4 doses
Polio: 4 doses
COVID-19: number of doses depends on the child’s age and type of vaccine given
Flu: 1-2 doses every year
MMR (measles, mumps, & rubella): 2 doses
Chickenpox: 2 doses
Hepatitis A: 2 doses
HPV (human papillomavirus): 2-3 doses
MenACWY (meningococcal disease): 1-2 doses
MenB (meningococcal disease): 2-3 doses

Although school administrators tell parents that vaccines are “mandatory” for school inclusion, different states require different vaccines for children to attend school and every state in the United States allows for medical exemptions.

...The number of vaccinations currently recommended has more than quadrupled since the 1970s... At the same time, children’s health in the United States has seen a marked decline. While these trends may or may not be related, many parents have started to question whether their children really need this many vaccinations this early in their lives in order to stay safe and healthy.

Many parents have started to wonder: Could over-vaccination be contributing to some of the health problems they are seeing in their children?

....experts are also questioning whether certain vaccine ingredients (pdf)—including aluminum and polysorbate 80—are safe.

... Over-vaccination may be a primary cause of autoimmune problems, including diabetes in both children and adults... Such data suggests a dose-response relationship, which in turn suggests causation.

...
Scientists who prove that popular and profitable pharmaceutical products can cause harm risk losing their livelihood as well as their standing in the scientific community...

WIND: I’m not taking a position on the claims here as being true or untrue, but I do think that legitimate concerns are being raised. “Too much of a good thing” is a solid organizing principle in many aspects of life. That might apply here, particularly jabbing a tiny body with multiple vaccines within minutes, for no demonstrated need of immediate necessity.

Is “first do no harm” still a thing today? And doesn’t it require a robust level of scientific certainty? And how can there be certainty when vaccines are never tested in combination?

Moreover, there are toxins in vaccines, and some people react to toxins. Dying from a peanut crumb is a real thing for some, and reactions to toxins is surely a real thing for some.

Bottom line: the hypothesis of vaccine harm is not crazy, but entirely justified. And it applies not only to each and every vaccine separately, especially when given together, but never tested together.

The right operating principle is to take all such concerns very seriously. Otherwise, parents may very reasonably say “you cannot be trusted” and not vaccinate at all. And that’s not good for anyone. Trust is the only consideration for a decision, and trust has to be earned, with a single violation wiping out dozens of 'earns'.

BTW, might refusing some vaccinations be a powerful tool to obtain a homeschooling dispensation from education Kommisars so as to avoid government schools aka school-prison de factor founts of systemic racism? There is an implied gun to parents heads—I personally have recieved more than one letter advsising me that I could be fined and jailed (I am not fucking joking!) because of a few days of absence of my hostage (child) from school.

Yet the medical industry as structured today is repeatedly proving itself unworthy of trust, especially with COVID. The operating principle that individuals should be presumed innocent until proven guilty but the government assumed guilty until proven innocent should be apparent to any non-NPC. Does guilty-until-proven-innocent now apply to the medical industrial complex? IMO, the industry has earned that status.

The damage from COVID shenanigans is incalculable at this point; for an educated nerd like myself to have lost trust in the medical profession is saying something (and I am far from alone, and many doctors are similarly dismayed). I don’t see a path forward in which I would regain trust in it in my lifetime. And I expect woke doctors to become the norm, since most medical schools are now admitting and training not on competence, but on DEI and CRT and similar society-destroying victimization mindsets. Choosing the 2nd rate, and then degrading their competence with that evil crap.

Assembly line medicine

As for prevented deaths worldwide cited by the CDC, that figure is surely vastly lower in the USA, and it is propaganda, by failing to provide proper context for the USA and substituting irrelevant exaggerative context (worldwide).

Why would a vaccine against hepatitis B (sexually transmitted!!) be given at birth? When I asked for the Hep B jab in my vaccine-favoring days about 20 years ago, my doctor rightly questioned my justification for it, even asking if I was homosexual. Yet now we jab newborns?

I still vividly remember my bubbly/happy newborn daughter crying and in pain from being jabbed right after birth with 3 or 4 shots, a callously inappropriate disruption of a joyous moment. But hey, the nurse has a schedule. That I remember it so vividly should be evidence enough of its situational inappropriateness. And I now consider it medical battery because there never informed consent, meaning a form to sign passed off as a formality is not informing. A routine for the convenience of arrogant cocksure doctors with no skin in the game. Making a beautiful new body a repository for whatever toxins the vaccine contains, all dumped in one fell swoop. Maybe that’s why she developed auto-immune at 14, and maybe not... no one can say. But in hindsight, the cocksure presumptuousness of it all is unsettling.

Consdier that (a) vaccines are not tested in combination or frequency, (b) some vaccines are notably higher risk and with much less general applicability. The risks can fairly be assumed to rise dramatically by combinatorial and frequency effects.

It does make you wonder if some vaccines are more of a scam and harm than a benefit...

COVID-19 Vaccines Safety and Effectiveness: Gaslighting and Pysops with Scientific Basis of a Logical Fallacy

re: COVID
re: ethics in medicine
re: follow the money
re: psyop and gaslighting and mass hysteria

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.

re: How to Know You Triggered Your Critic Into Cognitive Dissonance, Save Yourself Time in Emails, etc

Apparently it is now safe, even as a government official, to now speak the truth one has always known (see the quote).

The Epoch Times: COVID-19 Vaccines Can Cause ‘Permanent Disabilities,’ Says German Health Minister VACCINES

2023-03-16. Emphasis added.

Germany’s Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, who once claimed that COVID-19 vaccination is free of side effects, admitted last week that he was wrong, saying adverse reactions occur at a rate of one in 10,000 doses and can cause “severe disabilities.”

...

WIND: how many serious injuries? Will we ever know? Three years of suppression (see below) and the destruction of control groups leaves ample room for explaining-away things.

When it comes to government, guilt should be assumed, until proven innocent. History shows that no rational person can assume otherwise.

But the numbers are a sideshow, because when government force is used (aggressive coercion up to and including de facto home arrest as in many countries)... that should be considered by any ethical person for what it is: medical battery.

The 'violent woke' pieces of shit at my disgusting alma mater Stanford University did not and do not care about your life or health. In such an environment of psyops and gaslighting and venemous hostility, anyone who claims the Jab is “safe and effective” is out of touch with reality.

Medical science too often rests on logical fallacy

I know from personal experience that doctors do NOT report even SERIOUS life-changing events eg my nerve damage from Metronidazole, from which I still suffer 8 years later. Panicked emails from readers around the world suffering the same fate proved to me that I was hardly an outlier.

The COVID jab “safe and effective” claim is a gaslighting psyop based on a logical fallacy: absence of proof is proof of absence, which rests on making minimal (if any) efforts to look for issues, falsifying or not collecting the data, ignoring or dismissing it as coincidence when found, and most effective of all: harrasing/firing/intimidating those who dare to raise issues. And with disbanded control groups, plausible deniability is now the “science”.

How would we know how many Jab injuries, when looking for / reporting them was/is grounds for personal destruction?

* psyop = psychological operation eg the shit that the CIA does to influence the public, and now here domestically since it became legal again under Obama.

Physician Assistant Fired for Reporting COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events to VAERS

2023-03-18. Emphasis added.

For her efforts to report injuries to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) and to educate others in her hospital system on doing the same, Physician Assistant Deborah Conrad said she was labeled an anti-vaxxer and fired from her job.

...“I was then told that by doing VAERS reports and even discussing VAERS that it was an admission that the vaccines were unsafe, so it’s contributing to vaccine hesitancy,” Conrad said.

From there, it became a “very hostile environment” that compelled her to seek legal counsel, who wrote letters to the Department of Health, the CDC, and the FDA.

“No one cared,” Conrad said. “Finally, I had had it. It was so unethical; I couldn’t take it anymore. These VAERS reports are critical to assuring these vaccines are safe for us all. I could no longer be a part of a system that is lying to the American people.”

Conrad decided to become a whistleblower, telling her story on Del Bigtree’s The Highwire, knowing, she said, that it would cost her job.

“I couldn’t remain silent, even if it meant losing my career and everything I worked for,” she said. “I was fired a few weeks later and walked out like a criminal in front of all my peers.”

...

WIND: the title is a conclusion and that is unacceptable from a news outlet. Yet all the “news” outlets do it and the worst of them contradict the title with the body of the article. Here at least the article supports the claim of the title.

It doesn’t matter what proportion of the claimaint’s allegations are true (caused by the Jab); the real story is the aggressively hostile and unethical environment which destroys the careers of anyone speaking out*.

No rational person could doubt that it was repeated in every medical center in the land. You had to be out of your fucking mind (or very brave) to buck the COVID narrative or the safety and effectiveness of the Jab—you’d be fired and labeled and anti-vaxxer, “denier”, etc. Those that did suffered severely for it.

There can be no “facts” about safety when such an environment existed and still exists. You are were and are being gaslit on the “safe and effective” claims, which are nothing more than a logical fallacy: absence of proof is proof of absence <=== FALSE.

Sometimes the absence of proof is just sloppy work. Sometimes it is actually absent. But too often the absence of proof is the willful failure or willful incompetence to look for issues, But in the case of COVID, it involved active aggression including ( in some countries) threats up to and including criminal charges. Yet we are supposed to believe that the “science” has it all taken care of. There is no science possible in an environment of hostility and fear.

* And not just COVID; any controversial big-money research area eg climate “science” are all fertile ground for bad actors. Follow the money.

COVID Tropes: We Were Never in it Together

re: COVID
re: ethics in medicine
re: follow the money

re: How to Know You Triggered Your Critic Into Cognitive Dissonance, Save Yourself Time in Emails, etc

The theme I keep noting each and every time someone expresses indignation at what I’ve writen in this blog is always the same.

That is, rationalizations justifying coercive force, with the distinguishing characteristic being this: the viewpoint of whose livelihoods remained intact during COVID tyranny is strikingly different than those who were kneecapped by overwhelming government edicts.

See also: Did the FDA rush to license Pfizer's covid vaccine to enable vaccine mandates?

Brownstone Institute: Bonfire of the Covid Vanities

2023-03-14. Emphasis added.

Remember the mega-hit book The Bonfire of the Vanities? While a work of fiction, the book shone a harsh light on the all-too-real world of lies, corruption, and hypocrisy in high places.. the Covid regime was replete with rot, from taped-up basketball nets and masked toddlers to vaccine passports and…

ome of the slogans were carefully crafted by governments, while others sprang from the weeds of social media. They all drew from the same playbook, capitalizing on fear and using emotional manipulation to activate people’s guilt circuits. They served as thought-stopping mantras that precluded honest communication about the pandemic.

Two weeks to flatten the curve. ... Anyone remember what happened when the two weeks were up? ...

Stay home, save lives. This sanctimonious and bossy slogan sent the message that mental health didn’t count, livelihoods didn’t count, arts and culture didn’t count, religious communion didn’t count, and the dreams people had spent years pursuing didn’t count. The only thing that counted was preserving metabolic life—or at least, pretending we were doing that.

Follow the science. “Follow the science” makes no sense. Science is information. It tells you what is, not what to do about it. That depends on our values: ....Whose rights are paramount?...

We’re all in this together. ...Was the worker delivering DoorDash orders in the same boat as the Netflix-and-chill couples perfecting new sourdough recipes during lockdown? Was the event planner who lost a 10-year business in the same boat as the Amazon shareholders? Was the foreign student stuck in a low-ceilinged apartment in the same boat as the well-connected mom who hired a power tutor for her kids?

Muh freedumb. ....Without freedom, we have nothing resembling a life. Pandemic or not, freedom needs a place at the discussion table.

Mask it or casket. Hyperbole much? The glib phrase was designed to frighten, rather than inform...

The virus doesn’t discriminate. ... risk of serious harm from the virus was orders of magnitude higher in certain groups, especially the old and frail. Experts downplayed this sharp risk gradient, plunging everyone into an abyss of fear.

Can’t do X if you’re dead. ...the slogan doesn’t stand up to logical scrutiny. It sets an actual scenario (restriction on an activity) against an improbable counterfactual (dying if the restriction is lifted)...

Listen to the experts. OK, but which experts? The scientists that governments allowed to speak? What about the scientists with hundreds of citations in prestigious journals but divergent views... Some of the sharpest insights about Covid have come from people outside of science. We ignore them at our own peril.

My mask protects you, your mask protects me. More naked emotional manipulation... if you don’t mask, you’re a bad person...

Pandemic of the unvaccinated. ...by now we all know that vaccinated people both catch and transmit Covid. What’s more, a Danish meta-analysis was unable to find credible evidence that mRNA vaccines reduced mortality, leaving statisticians with the unenviable job of torturing the data in subgroup analyses...

You may be done with Covid, but Covid isn’t done with you. ...Of course Covid isn’t done with us. Neither is the common cold or the flu. Neither are thunderstorms and volcanoes and earthquakes and a thousand other forces of nature...

Stay safe. ...verbal equivalent of touching wood—a knee-jerk utterance to ward off the evil eye. It always reminded me of the “praise be” muttered by the handmaids...

WIND: of all these, “we’re all in this together” grates most harshly to me. A slogan to suppress those whose lives/dreams/hopes were wantonly crushed by government force from rising up in droves, in sharp juxtaposition vs the lives of those ended up sailing through, if not profiting handsomely as the stock market soared.

Logical Fallacies in Medical Reporting eg 'Correlation is not Causation': “Sleeping Pills Increase Risk of Dementia”

re: The Epoch Times
re: correlation is not causation

I’ve decided to ride my bicycle and drive my car while naked from now on, because 99.9999% of car+bike accidents involve people wearing clothes.

...

The claim below might be true. But it would be hard to prove and take a decade or longer.

MUCH more likely is that poor sleep increases the risk of dementia. And those with poor sleep use sleeping pills excessively.

Anyone engaging in obvious logical fallacies this stupidly should stop embarrassing themselves in public—correlation is not causation. Or start riding your bicycle and driving your car naked.

Sleeping Pills Increase the Risk of Dementia, 4 Tips to Treat Insomnia Naturally

2023-03-14. Emphasis added.

...The study followed approximately 3,000 older whites and blacks without dementia for an average of nine years. It found that white participants who used sleeping pills regularly had a 79 percent increased risk of developing dementia compared to those who rarely used them.

...However, prolonged reliance on sleeping pills can increase the risk of dementia...
[WIND: nonsense; correlation is causation]

...

WIND: from the original study, the appropriate conclusion is made amounting to “why does this occur”, that is, it is conjures up a hypothesis worth studying—nothing more. The implication being “fund us”, which is what you read 99.9% of the time—that’s the game.

Conclusion: Frequent sleep medication use was associated with an increased risk of dementia in White older adults. Further research is needed to determine underlying mechanisms.

This kind of nitwit-grade reporting is everywhere now. It’s ideal for pushing an agenda or sales pitch to the gullible public.

I’m becoming reluctant to cite articles on health by The Epoch Times any more, because the intellectual capability of its medical writers has plunged. I don’t need the extra work of having to explain the stupid and unjustified claims, or my brand contaminated with this kind of bunk.

Anon MD writes:

Emphasis added.

I loved your “correlation is not causation” article. This has been a pet peeve of mine for decades and I think arises from the general lack of critical thinking ability in our society, the desire by news media for a quick clickbait article to draw readers in, and the push within academia to publish (even crap or made-up stuff) or perish. Generally, most of these articles end with a call for more research, presumably to be paid for by the public, or at least someone other than the author.

The issue really is that causation is binary. Something either DOES or DOES NOT cause something. But the latter is not exciting, so if you don’t have unequivocal proof of the former you have to say it MAY cause something, which is a pretty useless statement, but it does draw the feckless morons in. And you can see how this feeds into the general media’s need to attract readership. First you take an asinine statement like “sleeping pills may cause dementia” and then you append “BREAKING NEWS!” and put it as your lead story. At that point the uncritical thinkers who can’t tell BS from click bait will embrace it as true and the statement gets a life of its own, until the next garbage correlation story hits.

I can’t tell you how many times in my long career I’ve read about coffee doing “something” (insert random causation word here: infertility, increased sex drive, impotence, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, hemorrhoids, toenail fungus, breast enlargement, penis shrinkage, loss of IQ, increased IQ, leukemia, miraculous cancer cure, etc.). Anyone with the brains that God gave a goose would look at this nonsense after awhile and just ignore it.

And then of course, there is the reverse correlation. Maybe one of the first signs of dementia is increased insomnia, leading to an increased use of sleeping pills. Maybe. To the jackasses out there who publish garbage like this, I say “Get a life and do something useful.” To those who abet this crap by believing in it, I say “Save your energy and just go click on that article about the foods you should avoid to prevent toenail fungus.” The utility of the information gained is about equal but you will have cut the amount of useless crap you read in half, which by any measure is a good thing.

As for me, I plan to go fly fishing with my 9 ft carbon fiber fly rod in an aluminum rowboat on June Lake during a lightning storm wearing nothing but a chain mail thong because my research has shown conclusively that this combination of activities has never in the history of the world resulted in a lighting strike there. And of course this activity must also prevent toenail fungus because I don’t have any. Even a moron should be able to see this. Q.E.D.

WIND: I really enjoy this stuff. There ought to be podcast for it!