Twisted Science
The powers that be have incentive to misrepresent findings.
Throughout the pandemic, we were told by the powers that be to trust the science. But science is a process, not a person in whom we can place our faith. This process always produces meaningful data about how the world works, yet correctly interpreting that data isn't always easy or possible. And for a variety of reasons, official interpretations of scientific data appear broadly untrustworthy.
Here's a quote from a 2005 paper by John Ioannidis about this issue:
A research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.
If the name Ioannidis sounds familiar, that's because this top notch scientist was an outspoken opponent of lockdown policies, for which he was lambasted by blue news and censored by social media. After disastrous pandemic policies upended everything, WaPo and other legacy news outlets pushed the story that we did too little, not too much, in our efforts to combat the virus. I know there are reasonable people out there who actually believe this.
Problems with the basics of how science is produced have been highlighted in The Lancet and by the New England Journal of Medicine's former editor. Maybe scientific findings have become more trustworthy in recent years. But a new paper in Nature suggests that problems are still widespread. Here's a quote from that one:
By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data.
Beyond these apparently run-of-the-mill problems, even prestigious journals like Nature aren't safe from manipulation by powerful interests. Anthony Fauci's NIH manipulated the scientists behind an important covid paper. His office pressured them to categorically rule out the possibility that the virus had leaked from a lab. When their paper, 'The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2' came out, many were fooled by the deception, including me. That is, until it came out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting bioweapons research which was probably the original source of the virus.
None of this is intended to suggest that science itself shouldn't be trusted. But when science is used by powerful interests to support questionable policies, it ceases to be a tool for the betterment of all mankind, and instead becomes a prop in the public theater used by the control regime to trick us into complying with the regime. This was on full display during covid, and we can expect to see comparably corrupted science used to rationalize insane climate policies in the near future.
During the pandemic, we were told that trusting the science meant trusting the experts. And we now know that our top public health expert was literally and directly corrupting a scientific inquiry with global implications. These days, I listen to the experts in the same way as I listen to salespeople. They might have accurate information, but every one of them is working an angle.
Wilting Plant Syndrome
Healthcare in the US is about half nonsense. If the pandemic taught us anything, it's that the medical establishment is frequently wrong and way too powerful. Iatrogenic deaths are commonplace and Big Pharma owns Washington. Anything that can be medicated will be medicated. And many social problems have been redefined by industrial medicine as individual medical problems. This is the subject of a Guardian article titled, "I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health." Here's a quote:
If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with "wilting-plant-syndrome" – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.
People experiencing poverty or living in marginalized communities are routinely harmed by their environments. Anxiety is a perfectly natural response to living in such an environment. Depression may be too, especially when the harmful environment is also inescapable. And what are people told when the psychological consequences of this harm become apparent? They're told they have a brain chemistry imbalance which must be corrected with medication. At no point in the process is brain chemistry measured.
For some more than others, living in a visibly deteriorating human ecology where money is artificially scarce is stressful. It is naturally psychologically challenging. Our prevailing order favors the gaslighting and victim-blaming of individuals whenever one complains too loudly about being negatively impacted by this order. Mental health in general worsened during the pandemic.
The Business of Trans
My local coffee shop is a trans hangout. I have a few good friends who are trans and feel like we all have a right to express our identities however we see fit. When I turn on any new Netflix show, it seems like every third character is trans. And trans issues are always in the news.
At some point during the last few years, I began to suspect that trans perspectives were being over-represented in pop culture, and I wondered why that might be. When I asked Google, all I encountered was a bunch of info on gender reassignment and few solid answers to even the most basic questions. How many people are trans? How big is the market for trans-specific drugs and medical procedures? What I eventually found was a little surprising. This Pulse article looks at the topic in detail. Here's some of what it says:
Approximately 2% of high school aged teens identify as "transgender." In 2021, approximately 42,000 children and teenagers across the US received a diagnosis of "gender dysphoria." This is more than triple the number in 2017, and we are likely to see the same trends when data from 2022 and beyond is released. ... 20-30% of patients may discontinue hormone treatment within a few years due to various medical complications. ... 60 to 90 percent of children who identify as transgender no longer want to transition by the time they're adults.
So only 1 in 50 kids identifies as trans and up to 90% of these kids grow up to change their minds about transitioning. If these figures can be believed, that's a very small number of trans people in the population. But since gender dysphoria diagnoses tripled from 2017 to 2021, there is reason to believe the trans population is experiencing a period of explosive growth. While most of this growth can likely be attributed to increasing societal acceptance of trans people, the coinciding growth in gender reassignment drug sales and surgeries suggests that Big Pharma and industrial medicine have a strong interest in popularizing transgender identities.
Transitioning is big business for surgeons. According to one report, "The U.S. sex reassignment surgery market size was valued at USD 1.9 billion in 2021 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.23% from 2022 to 2030." Two billion dollars a year is substantial, and that's an intense growth rate. The figures from drug sales are harder to find. A New York Post article provides figures for one drug:
Medroxyprogesterone acetate, a common drug in "gender-affirming therapy," has long been used to chemically castrate sex offenders. Another widely used medication is Lupron, a controversial hormone blocker. Lupron was initially developed to lower testosterone levels in men with prostate cancer, effectively chemically castrating them. It's now used as a puberty blocker in the booming business of "transitioning" children. Lupron manufacturer AbbVie made $726 million on the drug alone in 2018. AbbVie has joined other major pharmaceutical companies in lobbying to keep drug prices high.
If just one medication in this class was making $726 million annually five years ago, it's reasonable to assume that the total market for all related drugs might amount to several billion a year today. That's a lot of motivation for Big Pharma to stimulate demand for their products. And given the industry's all-pervasive reach and incredible sophistication, it may be promoting gender dysphoria in a million little ways throughout culture, such that the advertising campaign is easily mistaken for a more organic increase in societal awareness of trans issues.
Taking media portrayals of these issues at face value, it's easy to come away with the impression that gender affirming medical interventions are backed by good science. But digging deeper, it becomes apparent that the science has been grossly misrepresented by media and in pop culture. It seems broadly good that we as a society are now recognizing trans people and the potential value of gender affirming care. So it's puzzling that the scientific basis for this care is glossed over in favor of polarizing emotional arguments in popular media.
Climate Alarmism
From my perspective, climate change is an undeniable reality. Environmental catastrophes have become intertwined with everyday life. Most common foods now contain microplastics and hormone-disrupting chemicals. Most of the planet's insects and fish are dead. There are forever chemicals in the groundwater. Some animal species are getting weird diseases. Other species are going extinct.
All of this is evidence that our climate is changing, but this evidence is typically ignored in public discourse. Instead of addressing the apocalyptic ecological issues we face, we're being told to focus exclusively on atmospheric carbon. And we're being primed to accept a whole host of restrictive policy measures based on climate science that is, at best, inconclusive.
Here's a quote from a Forbes article that lays out some problems with this science and how it's being misrepresented:
In 1996, former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev emphasized the importance of using climate alarmism to advance socialist Marxist objectives: "The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order." ... IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world's wealth." ... Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of 2001 and 2007 IPCC report chapters, writing in a 2007 "Predictions of Climate" blog appearing in the science journal Nature.com, admitted: "None of the models used by the IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed state."
It would be super cool if our computer models could accurately represent our planet's climate. But they can't. Our models can't even predict the weather two weeks into the future. We can see that glaciers are melting. We can measure rising temperatures and compare them with the temperatures we measured a hundred years ago. We can examine ice core data and consider the implications of that. But our grasp of the big picture is shaky at best.
At the same time, every one of us has the innate potential to tap into deep ecological awareness. If society's choices were guided by such awareness, many of these choices would be different. Instead, this potential remains largely ignored. On this account, all I can really do is feel sad for people. Because either they feel the natural world as a living, breathing thing, thereby feeling the distress it is in, or they cannot feel the world at all, which is a more heartbreaking thought.
On a deeper level, I think people do feel the ecological distress evident all around us. But instead of recognizing this feeling for what it is, they misidentify it as the kind of personal problem that the control regime approves of, which is to say the kind of problem that can be blamed on a perceived enemy. Although it's perfectly reasonable to lament the wholesale destruction of the biological context for our lives, the cure for this is to actually fix our harmful systems. And the control regime has no appetite for a fix like that.
One of the most frightening policy responses to the climate crisis is the use of geoengineering. There are people out there who think that spraying reflective aerosol chemicals all over the world is the solution to the perceived problem of global warming. These people are an existential threat to our species. They have no idea what the real impact of their proposals would be, and appear ready to risk all of our lives on the shoddiest of science.
From where I stand, reducing emissions and transitioning to renewable energy makes sense. So does radically changing our land use habits to regenerate ecosystems instead of destroying them. But experimenting with climate interventions that could easily go horribly awry is deeply unwise. We don't even understand the climate. It's not at all clear that the climate itself is broken. Tinkering with this system we don't understand is beyond foolish. I would call it sheer madness.
Transhumanism and Biofascism
An article last year in The Defender claimed that transhumanism and biofascism are tools of the technological elite. The article said that the World Economic Forum was behind authoritarian biofascism and media manipulation related to the pandemic. Included in the piece was a video featuring Dr. Yuval Noah Harari talking about how people don't really have freedom or feelings. According to his website, Harari "gave keynote speeches on the future of humanity in Davos 2020 and 2018, on the World Economic Forum’s main Congress Hall stage."
This article, from a popular alternative health site, highlights an important conversation going on right now. Things like lockdowns, mandates, and vaccine passports were forced upon the public in many places on the grounds that they would stop the virus. But these 'grounds' were woefully inaccurate computer models, and none of the compulsory measures did stop the virus. Despite this, many in positions of influence, including at the WEF, irrationally continue to behave as if the biofascism was warranted. This suggests that they will continue promoting efforts to control populations using similar tactics in the future.
I don't think the WEF was behind the covid biofascism, though the organization may have influenced policy decisions in some jurisdictions. Even so, it does seem like the WEF is pushing a transhumanist agenda. The Harari video is a great example of the kinds of rhetoric being used to push this agenda. Much of what he said in the video is arguable, and some of it is just flat out wrong.
Humans are not reducible to bio bots. Our minds aren't reproducible. The qualia of free will prove the existence of free will. Same goes for feelings. This is related to the hard problem of consciousness, which humanity is no closer to solving than it was a hundred years ago. Harari seems to be under the mistaken impression that more data and bigger algorithms will somehow prove that freedom and feelings aren't real, despite their observable reality.
Knowing little about Harari, I googled him + hard problem of consciousness. I found a scathing critique in Psychology Today. Here's a quote:
Harari is wrong that organisms are algorithms and life is data processing, because life and data processing operate with different mechanisms—except for the brain, where there is some overlap. He is also wrong that intelligence is decoupling from consciousness, since, in people, consciousness is one of the mechanisms of intelligence (although computers are becoming increasingly intelligent without any increase in consciousness). He is mistaken that intelligent algorithms may know us better than we know ourselves because such algorithms lack introspection and empathy. His question about what is more valuable—intelligence or consciousness—is a false dilemma for people, since we have both and they interact.
From what I gather, the entire transhumanist movement misunderstands the hard problem of consciousness as stubbornly as Harari does. This movement promises a high tech utopia but delivers far worse. From Delgado to microchip implants, transhumanism is ugly. And forced transhumanism would of course be a crime against humanity.
Fortunately, we're not there yet. No one is forcing microchip implants on anyone that I'm aware of. And most transhumanists appear as nonthreatening as Harari. These aren't dangerous people. They just believe in the possibility of eternal life through synthetic biology. That doesn't strike me as any weirder than some of the other things people believe about eternal life.
The Larger Story
Legacy news supports some conversations while suppressing others. Big Tech works with the government to tightly control conversations on social media. Big Pharma wields immense influence over government and media. The public discourse on most topics reveals this influence. For example, trans issues are frequently discussed but no one ever talks about how pharma might be exploiting the situation.
Perspectives that challenge the control regime's prescribed worldview are censored and discredited in a variety of ways. During the pandemic, questioning the lies told by officials was regarded as anti-science. Even now, questioning the safety of the experimental covid vaccine is regarded as anti-vax. True, some of the people who ask these questions are dubious. But many who ask these questions are following the science, not running from it.
The public conversation about the climate crisis is being heavily manipulated to unknown ends. We're literally in the middle of a mass extinction event, but instead of talking about that, everyone is talking about carbon. It's super screwy. Almost as screwy as proposing to alter the climate with geoengineering.
During the pandemic, we witnessed scientific deception on an epic scale. Now we know for sure that many experts can't be trusted. Our whole information landscape is suspect. In the face of untrustworthy leadership, it's on us to make sense of what's happening.
The larger story here isn't a settled matter. It is instead a story we all participate in crafting, whether we know it or not. Right now, the control regime is working overtime to trick us into believing we don't have power here. But of course we do.
For more of my writing, check out my scifi novels and my Hive blog. And if you think you can handle it, check out my dorky new conspiracy rap on Twitter.