Science

 

Aaron Rodgers: 'If Science Can't Be Questioned...It's Propaganda'

 

Aaron Rodgers, the star quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, decried the appeal to authority on the "Pat McAfee Show," those who say science shouldn't be questioned, equating that fallacy to propaganda.

"If science can't be questioned, it's not science anymore; it's propaganda," Rodgers told an excited McAffee.

"That's the truth," he added. "When did science become this blind agreement [about] not having any debate over what can actually heal people and work for people. That makes no sense to me."

What should we have done about the Wuhan flu?

The short answer to those who were for masking, social distancing, and lockdown.

 DOING NOTHING WOULD HAVE BEEN DRAMATICALLY PREFERABLE! 

Mark Changizi

@MarkChangizi

Lockdowns were NOT common sense measures. They were hysterical reactions out of fear. Here are 15 of just some of the reasons why it was not common sense.  

(I’m not including all the reasons we have NOW to see they were a bad idea.)

  The long answer: 

FRIEND WRITES IG COMMENT TO ME: 

"If you challenge the scientific community you should have an alternate solution to the problem. Simply throwing your hands in the air doesn’t sound like a well informed argument. What is the solution? Do nothing isn’t one."

MY RESPONSE

1/First, this isn’t “Mark against the scientific community.”

This is one subcommunity of scientists who agreed with the narrative the media and politicians were pushing, and those same scientists thereby became the “experts” in their stories, and represented “The Science.” 

2/Another huge community of scientists worldwide were against this since the start. But their story didn’t fit the narrative of “an altogether novel and dangerous virus that we should do anything and everything including violating civil rights en masse in order to stop.”  

3/I am associated with several organizations of scientist who have been opposing this from the start. Just because CNN tells you “experts say” doesn’t mean “experts say.” It’s bullshit. 

4/As for where the responsibilities are...

For those proposing altogether novel, draconian, civil rights quashing interventions, what was required was to provide a cost-benefit analysis, including the obvious potential for devastating side effects.

They did no such analysis. 

5/Instead, they misapplied the Precautionary Principle, saying “We have to do something out of precaution!”

But the Precautionary Principle is that the burden of evidence is on those proposing the new, untested policy. 

6/Lockdowns, mandatory masking, social distancing, etc. WERE the new, untested policies. …AND were explicitly recommend AGAINST as of 2019. They were enacted by panic, copy-catting other nations & states, and CYA (to be seen as doing something).  

7/Not only did they not do the utility calculus on both sides of the equation, they pretended that we live in China, where there are no civil rights.

The first two principles for medicine are

(1) Do no harm.

(2) Obtain consent.

Both were violated. 

8/The harms have in fact been massive. And obvious. I was shouting against it on social media since March 10 of 2020, along with like-minded colleagues on the Left, Center and Right. 

9/And — worse — the interventions have been shown to not even have narrowly worked. Their ONLY effect was the devastating side effects, to health (short and long term lockdown deaths) and livelihoods (crashed economies). 

10/The responsibility is not on me to say what else we should have done.

DOING NOTHING WOULD HAVE BEEN DRAMATICALLY PREFERABLE! 

11/But there WERE obvious things to do.

The infection fatality rate ranges from 0.0002% for <18 years old (which is many times safer than flu) to 5% or even more for those pushing 80+ with comorbidities (which is potentially several times worse than the average flu). 

12/end

That’s four or so orders of magnitude variation, and so there is absolutely no reason to overturn society, because the folks in danger are painfully obvious.

Focused protection of THOSE individuals was all that was needed. 

Dictatorial State Power Wearing a Lab Coat

No group has done more to create havoc in the country than the “scientists” who have been running the world’s policy designed to deal with the Chinese Communist Party’s decision to hide the fact that their virology lab released – probably accidentally - a lab-created virus for which there is no vaccine or cure.   

After first ignoring the virus, leading epidemiologists got press headlines by predicting the virtual second coming of the Black Death.   Political leaders eventually reacted by shutting down the economies of much of Europe and North America, throwing untold millions – 20 million in America alone – out of work and forcing most of the rest of us to hide out at  home.

British scientist Neil Ferguson ignited the world’s drastic response to the novel Wuhan coronavirus when he published the bombshell report predicting 2.2 million Americans and more than half a million Brits would be killed. He now says both that the U.K. should have enough ICU beds and that the coronavirus will probably kill under 20,000 people in the U.K. - more than half of whom would have died by the end of the year in any case because they were so old and sick.

Ferguson, labeled the “gold standard” of disease modeling has quite a history of being wrong.  In 2005 he predicted that up to 200 million people could die from the Bird Flu.  The Bird Flu’s death toll from 2003 to 2020 is 455.

Dr. Ferguson was equally off with his death projections for mad cow disease. He made big headlines in the United Kingdom by predicting that mad cow disease could kill between 50 and 50,000.  Millions of cows were slaughtered. But to be fair, his scientific ‘model’ was right. The death toll is 178 to date.

A world that has lost its faith in God has replaced that faith with another, and it is known as “Science.”  If you question the High Priests of Science you are denounced as a sister-marrying, racist, bigoted, Flat-earth, knuckle dragging troglodyte.  You probably do not believe in global warming, use plastic straws, are not saving the planet by using re-usable grocery bags and drive your own car instead of using the disease petri dish known as mass-transit. 

But after several two-week extensions of our government induced and scientifically promoted self-imprisonment, people are beginning to notice.  The Scientific Gods were wrong. 

The hallowed Dr. Fauci was wrong about the Wuhan flu any number of times.  He said it was “not a major threat for the people of the United States” on January 31^st.  On February 21^st he told the American people that the threat of coronavirus as “miniscule;”  that the annual flu was more a threat.   As March ended, Dr. Fauci did a U-turn and was recommending a nationally federally mandated shut-down, even in parts of the country with no evidence of coronavirus. 

People are beginning to question whether the polices that governments have enacted are based on faulty computer models.  The models predicted hospitalizations that were vastly larger than the actual numbers. 

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) Predicted 135,000 hospital beds just for coronavirus patients, 65,000 in New York alone. For New York, the real number is closer to 13,000. Emergency hospitals were set up, not used, and then dismantled because of a lack of patients.  Other areas – not hot spots like New York – were even father from predictions. 

Remember the ventilator crisis? A shortage meant people would die.  The Governor of New York, Mario Cuomo demanded 30,000 – 40,000 ventilators from the Federal Government based on these predictions.   He got 16,000.   Today, Cuomo is giving ventilators away.  Meanwhile Ford and GM are churning out tens of thousands of ventilators that will go into storage.

Then there are the global organizations like WHO – the World Health Organization.  First, they denied that there was a problem.  They echoed the Chinese government that the virus could not be passed from human to human.  They claimed that it came from the Wuhan wet market.  On April 6^th the WHO said that healthy people don’t need to wear face masks, mere days after the CDC told people to mask up.  That was only a few weeks after the CDC told people not to wear masks, that wearing a face mask was useless … or worse. 

It is now more than likely that the virus was man made and has a label attached to it “Made in China.”  The Chinese Communist Party has denied it and instead claims that it’s a product of the US Military. The WHO has denied it.  The American Press has vigorously denied it.  In fact, the American Press labelled it a debunked conspiracy theory.  The Columbia Journalism Review even says that if the virus originated in the Wuhan virology lab, it is still a “conspiracy theory.”  It is impossible to find a better definition of “Gaslighting” that that. 

Government policy evolved like a tragedy, one domino knocking the other over.  In the beginning: no problem.  Then 11 million residents of Wuhan were shut in their homes.  Neil Ferguson predicts mass deaths.  What public official can resist scientists predicting mass death?  The airwaves were filled with charts and graphs created by eminent scientists with impeccable credentials, the High Priests of Science, proving - with computer models and PowerPoint presentations -  that unless we kill the economy everyone will die. 

So we shut up our shops and threw tens of millions out of work.  Many millions work for small businesses that will never re-open.  Some state and local officials went further.  Governor Whitmer of Michigan decided that buying seeds for your garden, or paint for your home was a threat to the health and safety of Michiganders.  Strictly forbidden!

Church services were cancelled nation-wide.  Tucker Carlson asked the Governor of New Jersey why he thought that he had the Constitutional power to forbid church services.  The Governor replied that it never occurred to him that the freedom to practice your religion was enshrined in the Constitution.  It was, he explained, above his pay grade.  Other officials went further and when a pastor held a service in his parking lot for people who stayed in their cars with windows rolled up, the local police issued $500 tickets to the parishioners.  

As recently as two months ago, this country was filled with officials who swore to uphold the Constitution and defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  They lied.  Encouraged by Scientists to rule by decree, they grabbed the opportunity with relish.

And the people, convinced that following orders meant safety, went along. It is amazing to see how quickly sacred ideals are discarded in the face of public pressure.  In American culture, the guy in the lab coat, the Scientist, has proved that they can get politicians, the police, and the people to go along even if it a week later he tells them the exact opposite.

The police especially disillusion me. It has been an article of Conservative faith that the military and the police would never turn on the American people, enforcing dictatorial rule.  If you get cops in Greenville Mississippi to give $500 tickets to people for sitting in their cars in the church parking lot listening to a sermon, what else will they do if given the order?

Progressives Against Progress

Excerpt:

[Classical] Liberalism, which had once viewed men and women as capable of shaping their own destinies, now saw humanity in the grip of vast ecological forces that could be tamed only by extreme measures to reverse the damages that industrial capitalism had inflicted on Mother Earth. It had become progressive to reject progress.

Rejected as well was the science that led to progress. In 1970, the Franco-American environmentalist René Dubos described what was quickly becoming a liberal consensus: “Most would agree that science and technology are responsible for some of our worst nightmares and have made our societies so complex as to be almost unmanageable.” The same distrust of science was one reason that British author Francis Wheen can describe the 1970s as “the golden age of paranoia.” Where American consumers had once felt confidence in food and drug laws that protected them from dirt and germs, a series of food scares involving additives made many view science, not nature, as the real threat to public health. Similarly, the sensational impact of the feminist book Our Bodies, Ourselves—which depicted doctors as a danger to women’s well-being, while arguing, without qualifications, for natural childbirth—obscured the extraordinary safety gains that had made death during childbirth a rarity in developed nations.

Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria.

I can't help but laugh at the delusions of Liberals when they call themselves the Party of Science.

Getting to the Bottom of EPA Climate Fraud

We're going to get a scientific Truth Commission to figure who committed this fraud.

In December 2009, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency issued its Endangerment Finding (EF) – decreeing that carbon dioxide (CO2) and other “greenhouse gases” (GHGs) endanger the health and welfare of Americans. In the process, EPA ignored the incredible economic, health and welfare benefits of fossil fuels – and the fact that (even at just 0.04% of the atmosphere) carbon dioxide is the miracle molecule that enables plants to grow and makes nearly all live on Earth possible.

EPA turned CO2 into a “dangerous pollutant” and ruled that fossil fuels must be eradicated. The agency subsequently used its EF to justify tens of billions of dollars in climate research, anti-fossil fuel regulations, and wind and solar subsidies; President Obama’s signing of the Paris climate treaty; and proposals to spend trillions of dollars a year on Green New Deal (GND) programs.

And yet, despite multiple demands that this be done, there has never been any formal, public review of the EF conclusion or of the secretive process EPA employed to ensure the result of its “analysis” could only be “endangerment” – and no awkward questions or public hearings would get in the way.

'Anti-Science' Trump Administration To Revert Definition Of Gender To Objective, Scientific Standard

From the Babylon Bee:

 

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The "anti-science" and "anti-facts" Trump administration is considering reverting the definition of gender to a biological, objective, scientific standard, drawing the ire of the "pro-science" left.

Critics have long claimed Trump is opposed to science, and they believe his decision to use scientific standards to define gender prove his anti-science stance.

"Trump obviously can't stand scientific facts, and that's why he's hatefully changing the definition of gender to a biological, objective standard," said one MSNBC host. "The true lover of science knows that gender is a nebulous, imaginary concept that you can change based on your feelings." The hosts of the program then chanted "Love trumps hate!" for a full 45 minutes before the show ended.

Rebekah Mercer Fights Back

This is the kind of thinking that the Democrats and the Press, - but I repeat myself - hates.

“I oppose politicized science,” she writes, “in which researchers cannot study certain subjects -- or even ask certain questions -- for fear of a career-ending backlash and persecution.” Noting that America “was founded on the principle of open discourse” and that “[i]ntellectual diversity and vigorous, reasoned debate have been fundamental to America’s success, making us the freest, most prosperous, and most innovative society in human history,” Rebekah Mercer warns that “we have lost our way” and that “America is now a society that threatens, pillories, and harms those who dare to question the status quo.”

The anti-science Nazis in the media march on.

I thought the science was settled.

It seems that every week we hear of a new study that tells us something completely different from the study before. One week eggs are harmful. The next, they're all but the elixir of life. A week later, they might as well be cyanide. It's difficult to keep up.

One constant has been that eating too much dietary fat is bad for your health. In fact, one could call it a scientific consensus.

However, one of the great things about science is that everything is supposed to be questioned, including the accepted notion that dietary fat is bad for you. In fact, Legal Insurrection reports on one study that did and found that fat may not be the poison we've been led to believe.

It turns out that after the low-fat dietary guidelines were published the incidence of obesity and diabetes has exploded.

As LI points out, so many government dietary shibboleths have come crashing down that it's probably a good idea to just ignore whatever Uncle Sam trots out next as the way to eat.

Ditto for government "science" on global warming.

HOUSE APPROVES BILL TO FORCE PUBLIC RELEASE OF EPA SCIENCE

WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Republicans are taking aim at the Environmental Protection Agency, targeting the way officials use science to develop new regulations.

A bill approved Wednesday by the GOP-controlled House would require that data used to support new regulations to protect human health and the environment be released to the public.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said "the days of 'trust me' science are over," adding that the House bill would restore confidence in the EPA's decision-making process.

Democrats approve of government agencies making rules based on data they want to keep secret from you.

Progressives Must Confront Their Racist Roots

The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society. Against the selfishness, disorder, corruption, ignorance, conflict and wastefulness of free markets or mass democracy, they advanced the ideal of disinterested, public-spirited social control by well-educated elites. The progressives were technocrats who, Leonard observes, “agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.” Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction.

Leonard also brings to light an embarrassing truth: In the early 20th century, the progressive definition of the common good was thoroughly infused with scientific racism. Harvard economist William Z. Ripley, for example, was a recognized expert on both railroad regulation and the classification of European races by coloring, stature and "cephalic index," or head shape. At the University of Wisconsin, the red-hot center of progressive thought, leading social scientists turned out economic-reform proposals along with works parsing the racial characteristics -- and supposed natural inferiority -- of blacks, Chinese, and non-Teutonic European immigrants. (Present-day progressives somehow didn’t highlight this heritage when they were defending “the Wisconsin Idea” against the depredations of Republican Governor Scott Walker.)

Eugenics and "Race Science"

“The ‘race suicide’ of the American or colonial stock should be regarded as the most fundamental of our social problems,” the Wisconsin economist John R. Commons wrote in 1920. His colleague Edward A. Ross, who popularized the terms “social control” and “race suicide,” called interest in eugenics “a perfect index of one’s breadth of outlook and unselfish concern for the future of our race.”

In the early 20th century, most progressives viewed as cutting-edge science what today looks like simple bigotry. “Eugenics and race science were not pseudosciences in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” Leonard emphasizes. “They were sciences,” supported by research laboratories and scholarly journals and promoted by professors at the country’s most prestigious universities.

While some socialists and conservatives also embraced them, Leonard argues, eugenics and scientific racism fit particularly well with progressive thought: “Eugenics was anti-individualistic; it promised efficiency; it required expertise, and it was founded on the authority of science.” Equally important, “biological ideas,” Leonard writes, gave progressive reformers “a conceptual scheme capable of accommodating the great contradiction at the heart of Progressive Era reform -- its view of the poor as victims deserving state uplift and as threats requiring state restraint.” They could feel sorry for impoverished Americans while trying to restrict their influence and limit their numbers.

Scientist Predicts ‘Little Ice Age,’ Gets Icy Reception From Colleagues

Science in the age of Obama.

Professor Valentina Zharkova at Northumbria University is being attacked by climate change proponents for publishing research suggesting there could be a 35-year period of low solar activity that could usher in an “ice age.”

Zharkova and her team of researchers released a study on sunspot modeling, finding that solar activity could fall to levels not seen since the so-called “Little Ice Age” of the 1600s. Zharkova’s conclusions may have huge implications for global temperature modeling, but her analysis is not accepted by some climate scientists.

“Some of them were welcoming and discussing. But some of them were quite — I would say — pushy,” she told The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) in an interview on her solar study.

In fact, Zharkova said some scientists even tried to have her research suppressed.

Why Some of the Worst Attacks on Social Science Have Come From Liberals

I first read Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science when I was home for Thanksgiving, and I often left it lying around the house when I was doing other stuff. At one point, my dad picked it up off a table and started reading the back-jacket copy. “That’s an amazing book so far,” I said. “It’s about the politicization of science.” “Oh,” my dad responded. “You mean like Republicans and climate change?”

That exchange perfectly sums up why anyone who is interested in how tricky a construct “truth” has become in 2015 should read Alice Dreger’s book. No, it isn’t about climate change, but my dad could be excused for thinking any book about the politicization of science must be about conservatives. Many liberals, after all, have convinced themselves that it’s conservatives who attack science in the name of politics, while they would never do such a thing. Galileo’s Middle Finger corrects this misperception in a rather jarring fashion, and that’s why it’s one of the most important social-science books of 2015.

At its core, Galileo’s Middle Finger is about what happens when science and dogma collide — specifically, what happens when science makes a claim that doesn’t fit into an activist community’s accepted worldview. And many of Dreger’s most interesting, explosive examples of this phenomenon involve liberals, not conservatives, fighting tooth and nail against open scientific inquiry.

What's interesting is that this writer believes that man is causing global warming while the actual evidence - as opposed to the politicized climate models - contradicts it.  It's a perfect illustration of the very phenomenon she's writing about.