I’ve been asked why I’m so skeptical when it comes to health and medical science. My answer is because I’ve spent many hours studying medical history, and I’ve seen how much damage doctors have done over the centuries. If you were to select a patient-doctor consultation at random from all the ones that have happened throughout history, your odds are probably better of selecting one in which the doctor harmed the patient than one in which the doctor helped the patient. That is certainly true if you only look at consultations happening before the year 1900.
It’s a shame that medical history generally isn’t part of the curriculum in medical school. If it was, maybe doctors would be more humble about what they know, and what they don’t know. If I were to design a medical school curriculum, I would make the first five to ten weeks of medical school an in-depth course in medical history, with a particular focus on all the mistakes doctors and scientists have made through the centuries, and why they made those mistakes. To quote a well worn cliché, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.
Personally, I wear my skepticism as a badge of pride. If I were to seek out a doctor for some medical condition I was suffering from, I would want that person to be a natural skeptic. I would want someone who won’t believe something just because that’s what they were taught in medical school, or because it’s what they heard from a salesperson working for a pharmaceutical company.
I’m going to present four different cases from recent history, that I think show clearly why it’s important to be highly skeptical when it comes to the area of health and medicine. Things can often seem to be very beneficial after a few early studies, or because common sense suggests they should be beneficial. Then when more data comes in, sometimes decades after a certain treatment has become the “gold standard” of therapy, it becomes clear that the intervention is actively harmful. In some cases, millions of people have died prematurely as a result of the intervention by this point. When this happens, when something goes from being the recommended therapy to turning around 180 degrees and becoming something that doctors recommend against, it is known as a medical reversal. Unfortunately, medical reversals are common.
Another thing that I think is unfortunate is that scientific methodology is not really something that is taught in school. People even leave university with very limited training in scientific method. This causes the large majority of the population to be unable to weigh scientific evidence themselves, and it makes them totally beholden to the opinions of others. That’s why I try to use this blog to educate in scientific method. Science, just like democracy, thrives when lots of people are able to examine different pieces of evidence and think for themselves.
Anyway, let’s get to the four cases.
Lobotomy was first developed in the 1930’s by Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, and further refined by two American doctors, neurologist Walter Freeman and neurosurgeon James Watts. A lobotomy is basically a surgical intervention in which parts of the frontal cortex of the brain are destroyed. It was developed as a treatment for psychiatric disorders, based on the hypothesis that destroying parts of the frontal lobe would allow destructive mental patterns to “reset” themselves.
After his first surgeries in 1935, Moniz presented a case report of twenty psychiatric patients. He claimed that a third were significantly improved in their underlying psychiatric illness, while a third were mildly improved, and a third were unimproved. None were apparently harmed. This claim was immediately countered by the psychiatrist that had provided the patients to Moniz, who responded that all the patients had suffered a “degradation” of personality.
The frontal cortex is responsible for complex goal oriented behavior, self-control, and higher order thinking, pretty much the things that separate humans from other animals. So, knowing what we know today about the function of the frontal lobe, destroying large chunks of it is likely to turn a person in to an apathetic, lethargic zombie. And this is what happened to the people who were lobotomized, as was clear early on to those who cared to look.
In spite of the limited evidence of benefit, and early suggestion of harm, the procedure was taken up enthusiastically in several parts of the world. By 1949, when lobotomies were at their most popular, thousands of people were being lobotomized around the world each year. That same year Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine for his efforts.
Then the truth started to catch up with the hype. It became clear that somewhere between 5% and 15% of all patients undergoing lobotomy were being killed by the procedure, either dying on the operating table or shortly after surgery. It was not uncommon for arteries in the brain to become accidentally nicked, resulting in major intracranial bleeding and strokes. When this didn’t kill outright, it often resulted in severe physical handicaps.
It also became more widely known that, although the patients might become more “placid” after the procedure, they were hardly being cured. People who had been institutionalized before the procedure, continued to be institutionalized after the procedure. Few people were able to function independently after undergoing a lobotomy. So lobotomies gradually fell out of favor, although they were still being carried out on patients in some countries as late as the 1980’s.
Let’s move on to our next medical reversal. Starting in the 1960’s, public health authorities around the world started recommending that parents have their babies sleep on their stomachs. The recommendation was not based on any scientific studies, rather it was based on “common sense”, that all too frequent destroyer of lives.
There were multiple hypotheses floating around that together constituted the basis for the recommendation. One was that it would decrease the risk of hip dysplasia, another was that it would prevent scoliosis, a third that it would decrease the risk of aspiration of milk (accidentally getting milk in to the airways), a fourth that it would prevent babies developing “flat heads”.
In the late 1980’s, observational data started to appear suggesting that prone sleeping was causing a huge increase in the number of children dying of cot death, a.k.a. SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Children sleeping on their bellies appeared to be around 500% more likely to die of SIDS than children sleeping on their backs.
Pretty much over night, government health authorities switched from recommending that babies sleep on their bellies to recommending that they sleep on their backs. And virtually over night, the rate of cot death dropped. Dramatically. Here in Sweden, the number of children dying of SIDS decreased by 85% over the course of a few years.
How many children died unnecessarily during the few decades in which prone sleeping was being recommended by public health authorities? Probably millions.
It amazes me how keen government agencies often are to offer recommendations based on little or no evidence, especially when we have such clear examples of situations in which this has resulted in mind-boggling harm. If only public health professionals bothered to follow the first credo of the medical profession, which is “first, do no harm”.
Let’s move on to our next case.
Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID’s) have been around for a long time. Aspirin was invented in the 1890’s, and ibuprofen has been around since the early 1960’s. One problem with these drugs, which has been recognized since the early days, is that they can cause stomach ulcers. In fact, over-use of NSAID’s is one of the most common reasons for emergency hospital admissions due to bleeding ulcers.
The reason for this side-effect is that NSAID’s block an enzyme called cyclo-oxygenase, generally shortened to just COX (another name for NSAID’s is COX-inhibitors). There are two different versions of COX, COX-1 and COX-2. All the early NSAID’s are unselective COX-inhibitors. In other words, they block both COX-1 and COX-2.
At some point it was discovered that the entire positive effect that comes from NSAID’s, in terms of decreasing inflammation and pain, comes from their inhibition of COX-2, while inhibition of COX-1 is responsible for the side effect of increased bleeding. This naturally led drug companies to seek to develop specific COX-2 inhibitors, that would decrease inflammation, but not cause stomach ulcers.
In 1999, the first two COX-2 selective inhibitors came on the market, rofecoxib (a.k.a. Vioxx), produced by Merck, and celecoxib (a.k.a. Celebrex), produced by Pfizer. They instantly become some of the best selling drugs in the world. Of the two, rofecoxib was much better at blocking COX-2 specifically, and thus far less likely to cause stomach ulcers.
After a few years on the market, signals started to appear that rofecoxib was associated with a heavily increased risk of heart attack and stroke. In fact, people taking rofecoxib had something like a 300% increased risk of having a heart attack compared with people taking non-selective NSAID’s. Merck’s initial response was, unsurprisingly, to try to put the lid on this information. But by 2004, the cat was well and truly out of the bag. In the face of mounting criticism (and lawsuits), Merck chose to withdraw the drug from the market. By that point, 80 million people had been treated with rofecoxib and around 100,000 people had suffered unnecessary heart attacks.
I’m going to end with a slightly more personal example. On my first day of medical school I was told about a fantastic new treatment that had been developed at my new place of study, Karolinska Institutet, and its associated hospital. The developer of the new treatment was a surgeon called Paolo Macchiarini, and the treatment was a stem-cell coated synthetic windpipe. The windpipe could be transplanted in to people who had damaged their windpipes in accidents, or who had to to have their windpipes removed due to cancer. The idea was that the synthetic windpipe would meld with the surrounding tissues and grow in to a fully functioning new windpipe.
Paolo Macchiarini had been head-hunted by Karolinska Institutet in competition with several other top universities. He seemed a shoe-in for the Nobel prize.
The synthetic windpipe transplant surgeries had started in 2010. The first people to be operated on all died relatively soon afterwards, but there was a lot of media hype around them anyway, probably due to the feeling that this was a revolutionary technology, and probably also due to the fact that Machiarini was an excellent salesman.
Since the people he operated on had an annoying habit of dying, Machiarini supposedly felt that he needed healthier specimens to operate on. Thus far, all the people had been suffering from end-stage diseases that would have killed them in the near future even without the surgery. Maybe they were just too sick to begin with to truly benefit?
So he found some people who weren’t actually dying. In 2012 he put synthetic windpipes in to two people who lived with chronic tracheostomies (breathing tubes in the throat) after car accidents, and one in a woman who had suffered accidental damage to her trachea during an earlier surgery. In 2013 he put a synthetic windpipe in to a two-year old who had been born without one. These people were perfectly healthy otherwise, and they were young.
The synthetic windpipes didn’t work. The stem cells didn’t turn in to functional epithelium, as had been hoped. The synthetic windpipes became seeding grounds for bacteria and were attacked by the immune system. They failed to meld with the surrounding tissues. They literally fell apart within months. And the patients died.
What is particularly galling is that there was no need for the synthetic windpipes. Windpipes could have been taken from cadavers instead. In fact, Machiarini had started out doing surgeries with windpipes from cadavers, which had on the whole been successful, but had then chosen to switch over to synthetic windpipes, apparently because it seemed more high-tech and was therefore more likely to generate media attention. The entire exercise was a PR-stunt, primarily intended to speed Paolo Machiarini on the path to a Nobel prize.
By the time I first heard of the synthetic wind pipes, on my first day of medical school in September 2014, things were already starting to come apart. The patients were dying like flies – even the ones who had been healthy before their surgery. Yet Machiarini was continuing to publish articles in prestigious scientific journals, in which he claimed that the stem cell treated synthetic windpipes were holding up well, and integrating with the surrounding tissues, just as planned.
Everything came crashing down very suddenly, in 2016, when Swedish public television aired a documentary that told the truth about Machiarini’s surgeries. Apart from making clear that the surgeries were nowhere near as successful as was being claimed, it became clear that Machiarini had never tested any of his synthetic windpipes on animals before moving on to humans(!), and it also surfaced that colleagues at Karolinska University Hospital had tried to blow the whistle on Machiarini two years earlier, in 2014, but had been threatened in to silence by the leadership at the university and the hospital.
I guess this last case isn’t really a medical reversal, since the synthetic windpipes never actually became standard practice. But I think it’s an interesting cautionary tale. There are lots of charlatans out there, masquerading as serious scientists. Some of them get discovered early on, like Paolo Machiarini, and some of them don’t get discovered until decades have passed and many people have had their lives ruined, like Egas Moniz.
My main point from these cases is that doctors and health authorities harming patients is not even remotely something that is in the distant past. We’re not talking blood letting here, a practice that resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths, but that doctors thankfully stopped doing on a regular basis two hundred years ago. Serious medical reversals have happened in the recent past, and they will happen again. They are particularly likely when new interventions get rushed out based on scant evidence.
The one-time hero of the pandemic, Tony Fauci, is losing the trust of mainstream America after flip flopping on critical #Covid19 information one too many times. His latest admission is the final straw for many public figures, including avid pro-vaxxers.
R. James Woolsey, who served as CIA director from 1993 to 1995 under President Clinton, has just come out with a new book about the Kennedy assassination that is straight out of a 1964 time warp. Co-authored by the late Ion Mihai Pacepa, a two-star general of the secret police in communist Romani who later defected to the United States, the book, entitled Operation Dragon, posits an old 1964 conspiracy theory that some people in the U.S. national-security establishment were peddling back in 1964 — that the communists conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK.
In the process, Woolsey does what the mainstream press has done for 60 years — he simply ignores the mountain of circumstantial evidence that assassination researchers have uncovered since the 1960s that inexorably points the finger of guilt at the U.S. national-security establishment, which was conducting all sorts of Cold War national-security regime-change operations in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.
That was perhaps the biggest benefit of the shroud of national-security state secrecy that was imposed on the Kennedy assassination. The malefactors knew that if they could just keep a secrecy cap on the assassination and its aftermath, there was a good chance that their assassination and cover-up could succeed.
There is no better evidence of this phenomenon than the autopsy that the U.S. national-security establishment performed on the body of President Kennedy just a few hours after his death.
What does Woolsey say about the autopsy? He says nothing. He doesn’t mention it at all, just as the mainstream press never mentions it. Total, absolute silence. Instead, Woolsey keeps his mind firmly embedded in an old 1964 assassination conspiracy theory — that those evil communists conspired to kill President Kennedy because they hated him so much.
Why is the JFK autopsy so important? Because it provides a key to understanding the who of the assassination. The U.S. national-security establishment knew that. That’s why military officials encased the autopsy in strict national-security state secrecy from the very beginning.
As Woolsey knows, there is one irrefutable fact in the Kennedy assassination: the autopsy on Kennedy’s body was carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment. That is, not by the Soviets. Not by Nikita Khrushchev. Not by the communists. Not by Fidel Castro. Not by the Mafia. Not by the Mossad. It was conducted solely by the U.S. national-security establishment.
A shroud of national-security state secrecy was immediately over the autopsy, which was conducted just a few hours after the assassination. Participants were told never to reveal what they had seen. They were forced to sign secret written secrecy oaths. They were threatened with severe action if they ever talked.
The secrecy worked for years and even decades. But assassination researchers, seeing mysteries and anomalies arise in the circumstances surrounding the autopsy, kept pressing, Finally, in the 1990s — thirty years after the assassination — the Assassination Records Review Board partially broken through the dam of autopsy secrecy.
Why would the national-security establishment conduct a fraudulent autopsy? There can be only one reason — cover-up. What other purpose would a fraudulent autopsy serve?
‘The natural question arises: Who would the Pentagon and the CIA be covering up for? Certainly not for the communists or the Soviets. As Woolsey documents so well, the Pentagon and the CIA hated the communists and the Soviets. As Woolsey himself would readily acknowledge, there is no reasonable possibility at all that the Pentagon and the CIA would have wanted to cover up an assassination of a U.S. president by the Reds, who, the Pentagon and the CIA steadfastly maintained throughout the Cold War, were coming to get us as part of a supposed international communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow.
Keep in mind, after all, that the plan to conduct a fraudulent autopsy would have had to originate prior to the assassination itself, especially since it was launched immediately on the death of President Kennedy. That was when a team of Secret Service agents, brandishing guns and implicitly threatening the use of deadly force on Parkland Hospital medical personnel, forced their way out of Parkland with Kennedy’s body. Saying that they were operating on orders, they refused to permit the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, to conduct the autopsy, as Texas law required. They took the body to Dallas Love Field, where new President Lyndon Johnson was waiting for it. Johnson then took the body and placed it in the hands of the military in Maryland.
How could they have launched their autopsy scheme without knowing who had conducted the assassination? That’s how we know they did it. The fraudulent autopsy had to have been built into the assassination plan itself.
Of course the national-security establishment’s fraudulent autopsy on President Kennedy’s body is the last thing that James Woolsey is going to discuss in his new book on the Kennedy assassination. He’s still stuck back in 1964, when some in the U.S. national-security establishment were peddling the false conspiracy theory blaming the Kennedy assassination on the Reds.
Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous women and men were the victims of forced sterilizations in the 1990s. At least 18 of them died during the surgery.
Peru’s Congress this week passed a law that will allow the compensation of victims of forced sterilizations that occurred during President Alberto Fujimori’s administration (1990-2000).
The law, which was promoted by Indigenous activist Tania Pariona, is part of the 2006 Integral Reparation Plan (PIR) created to compensate victims of human rights violations.
“We have fought for many years to demand justice, truth, and reparations,” said Esther Mogollon, the advisor of the Peruvian Women Affected by Forced Sterilizations’.
“The new law is a big step, although there is still a long way to go to achieve justice,” she pointed out adding that the news comes to light just days before Fujimori faces justice over forced sterilizations.
On March 1, a judge will decide whether he will open criminal proceedings against Fujimori, who is currently in prison for crimes against humanity.
Over 350,000 women and 25,000 men were sterilized against their will during his administration as part of a plan to reduce the birth rate in the country’s rural and Indigenous communities. At least 18 people died during the surgery.
For these crimes, authorities will also bring to Justice former Health Ministers Eduardo Yong, Marino Costa, and Alejandro Aguinaga.
The new White House Team has been in place for more than a month and it is perhaps time to consider where it is going with America’s fractured foreign policy. To be sure, when a new administration brings in a bunch of “old hands” who made their bones by attacking Syria and Libya while also assassinating American citizens by drone one might hope that those mistakes might have served as valuable “lessons learned.” Or maybe not, since no one in the Democratic Party ever mentions the Libya fiasco and President Joe Biden has already made it clear that Syria will continue to be targeted with sanctions as well as with American soldiers based on its soil. And no one will be leaving Afghanistan any time soon. The Biden team will only let up when Afghanistan is “secure” and there is regime change in Damascus.
A big part of the problem is that the personnel moves mean that the poison from the Barack Obama years has now been reintroduced into the tottering edifice that Donald Trump left behind. Obama’s United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice once made the case for attacking the Libyans by explaining how Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi provided his soldiers with Viagra so they could more readily engage in mass rapes of presumably innocent civilians. Unfortunately, Sue is back with the new administration as the Director of the Domestic Policy Council where she will no doubt again wreak havoc in her own inimitable fashion. She is joined at the top level of the administration by Tony Blinken as Secretary of State, Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence, Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor, Samantha Power as head of USAID and retired General Lloyd J. Austin as Secretary of Defense. All of the appointees are regarded as “hawks” and have personal history working with Biden when he was in Congress and as Vice President, while most of them also served in the Obama administration.
Be that as it may, Joe Biden and whoever is pulling his strings have assembled a group of establishment warmongers and aspirant social justice engineers that is second to none. Those who expected something different than the usual Democratic Party template have definitely been disappointed. Hostility towards China continues with warships being sent to the South China Sea and the president is seeking to create a new Trans-Atlantic alliance directed against both Beijing and Moscow. The Europeans are reportedly not enthusiastic about remaining under Washington’s thumb and would like some breathing room.
In a phone conversation where it would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall, Biden warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States would no longer ignore his bad behavior. The official White House account of the call included the following pithy summary: “President Biden reaffirmed the United States’ firm support for Ukraine’s sovereignty. He also raised other matters of concern, including the SolarWinds hack, reports of Russia placing bounties on United States soldiers in Afghanistan, interference in the 2020 United States election, and the poisoning of Aleksey Navalny.”
And to be sure, there have already been a number of issues that Biden might have dealt with by executive order, like lifting the illegal and unjustified blockade of Cuba, that could have inspired some hope that the new administration would not be just another bit of old wine in new bottles. Alas, that has not taken place but for a series of moves to unleash another wave of illegal immigration and to “protect LGBTQ rights globally.” Biden has also retained a heavy military presence in Washington itself, possibly as part of a Constitution-wrecking plan to tackle what he is referring to as “domestic terrorism.” The domestic terrorists being targeted appear to largely consist of people who are white working and middle class and voted for Trump.
In some ways, foreign policy might have been the easiest fix if the new administration were really seeking to correct the misadventures of the past twenty years. Quite the contrary, Biden and his associates have actually reversed the sensible and long overdue policies initiated by Donald Trump to reduce troop strength in Germany and bring the soldiers home from Syria and Afghanistan. Biden has already committed to an indefinite stay in Afghanistan, America’s longest “lost” war, and has covertly sent more soldiers into Syria as well as Iraq.
As regards Latin America, the U.S. clearly is prepared to double down on regime change in Venezuela, continuing its Quixotic support of Juan Guaido as president. Meanwhile, the new Secretary of State Tony Blinken has clearly indicated that there will be no end to deference to Israeli interests in the Middle East. Under questioning by Congress, he has insisted that Israel will be “consulted” on U.S. policy to include arms sales in the region, which has been interpreted to mean that Jerusalem will have a veto, and has confirmed that his view on Iran is identical to that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both are apparently promoting the view that Iran will have enough enriched uranium to construct a weapon within a few weeks, though they have not addressed other technical aspects of what would actually be required to build one. Netanyahu has been making the claim about the Iranian threat since the 1980s and now it is also an element of U.S. policy.
Biden and Blinken have also moved forward slowly on a campaign commitment to attempt renegotiation of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran that President Trump withdrew from in 2017. As a condition to re-start discussions, the Iranian leadership has demanded a return to the status quo ante, meaning that the punitive sanctions initiated by Trump would have to be canceled and Iran would in return cease all enrichment activities. Biden and Blinken, which admittedly sounds a bit like a vaudeville comedy duo, have reportedly agreed to withdraw the Trump sanctions but have also suggested that Iran will have to make other concessions, to include ending its ballistic missile development program and ceasing its “meddling” in the Middle East. Iran will refuse to agree to that, which means that the bid to renegotiate could turn out to be nothing more than a bit of theater involving multilateral “discussions” hosted by the European Union and the pointless hostility between Washington and Tehran will continue.
And speaking again of Israel, there have been concerns expressed by the usual suspects because Biden had not telephoned Netanyahu immediately after the inauguration. It may be true that the president was sending a somewhat less than subtle message signaling that he was in charge, but the call has now taken place and everything is hunky-dory. As a separate issue, the Jewish state has, of course, the world’s only secret nuclear arsenal, estimated to consist of at least 200 bombs, and it also has several systems available to deliver them on target. For no reasons that make any sense, the United States since the time of President Richard Nixon has never publicly confirmed the existence of the weapons, preferring to maintain “nuclear ambiguity” that allows Israel to have the weapons without any demands for inspections or constraints on their use. The most recent four presidents have, in fact, signed secret agreements with Israel not to expose the nuclear arsenal. Biden has apparently not done so yet, but appeals by international figures, including most recently South African Desmond Tutu, had produced some expectations that the new administration might break with precedent.
Giving aid to Israel is, in fact, illegal due to the Symington Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, which bans U.S. economic and military assistance to nuclear proliferators and countries that seek to acquire nuclear weapons. But Biden has already indicated that he would not under any circumstances cut aid to Israel, so the matter would appear to be closed. In any event the Symington Amendment includes an exemption clause that would allow the funding to continue as long as the president certifies to Congress that continued aid to the proliferator would be a vital U.S. interest. Given Israel’s power in both Congress and the White House it is not imaginable that its aid would be affected no matter what Netanyahu and his band of criminals choose to do.
So, it would seem that Biden is unprepared to either pressure or pursue any distancing from Israel and its policies, not a good sign for those of us who have encouraged some disengagement from the Middle East quagmire. And one final issue where some of us have hoped to see some movement from Biden has also been a disappointment. That is Julian Assange, who is fighting against efforts to have him extradited from England to face trial and imprisonment in the U.S. under the Espionage Act. Many observers believe that Assange is a legitimate journalist who is being set up for a show trial with only one possible outcome. The entire process is to a large extent being driven by a desire for revenge coming largely from the Democratic Party since Assange was responsible for publishing the Hillary Clinton emails as well as other party documents. Biden has already indicated that the process of extraditing Assange will continue.
So, Biden has been a major disappointment for those who expected that he might change course regarding America’s pathological involvement in overseas conflicts while also having the good sense and courage to make relations with countries like Iran and Israel responsive to actual U.S. interests. Finally, it would be a good sign if Assange were to be released from the threat of trial and prison, if only to recognize that free speech and a free press benefit everyone, but that is perhaps a bridge too far as the United States moves inexorably towards a totalitarian state intolerant of dissent.
Although many are familiar with recent global greening, I prefer to always check the source data. And so I downloaded all of their available 16-day-increment data from 2000 to 2021. Here’s my result:
0.0936 –> 0.1029 is +9.94%
10% global greening in 20 years! We are incredibly fortunate!
I just wish everyone felt that way. But you know not everyone does. To the extent that humans enhance global greening is precisely what social parasites want to tax and regulate. No good deed goes unpunished.
Anyway, Enjoy 🙂 -Zoe
P. S. The Earth is ~29% land. A Veg Index of ~0.29 would mean all covered land is heavy vegetation.
For decades, climate change researchers and activists have used dramatic forecasts to attempt to influence public perception of the problem and as a call to action on climate change. These forecasts have frequently been for events that might be called “apocalyptic,” because they predict cataclysmic events resulting from climate change.
In a new paper published in the International Journal of Global Warming, Carnegie Mellon University’s David Rode and Paul Fischbeck argue that making such forecasts can be counterproductive. “Truly apocalyptic forecasts can only ever be observed in their failure–that is the world did not end as predicted,” says Rode, adjunct research faculty with the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, “and observing a string of repeated apocalyptic forecast failures can undermine the public’s trust in the underlying science.”
Rode and Fischbeck, professor of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy, collected 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. With the passage of time, many of these forecasts have since expired; the dates have come and gone uneventfully. In fact, 48 (61%) of the predictions have already expired as of the end of 2020.
Fischbeck noted, “from a forecasting perspective, the ‘problem’ is not only that all of the expired forecasts were wrong, but also that so many of them never admitted to any uncertainty about the date. About 43% of the forecasts in our dataset made no mention of uncertainty.”
In some cases, the forecasters were both explicit and certain. For example, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and British environmental activist Prince Charles are serial failed forecasters, repeatedly expressing high degrees of certainty about apocalyptic climate events.
Rode commented “Ehrlich has made predictions of environmental collapse going back to 1970 that he has described as having ‘near certainty’. Prince Charles has similarly warned repeatedly of ‘irretrievable ecosystem collapse’ if actions were not taken, and when expired, repeated the prediction with a new definitive end date. Their predictions have repeatedly been apocalyptic and highly certain…and so far, they’ve also been wrong.”
The researchers noted that the average time horizon before a climate apocalypse for the 11 predictions made prior to 2000 was 22 years, while for the 68 predictions made after 2000, the average time horizon was 21 years. Despite the passage of time, little has changed–across a half a century of forecasts; the apocalypse is always about 20 years out.
Fischbeck continued, “It’s like the boy who repeatedly cried wolf. If I observe many successive forecast failures, I may be unwilling to take future forecasts seriously.
That’s a problem for climate science, say Rode and Fischbeck.
“The underlying science of climate change has many solid results,” says Fischbeck, “the problem is often the leap in connecting the prediction of climate events to the prediction of the consequences of those events.” Human efforts at adaptation and mitigation, together with the complexity of socio-physical systems, means that the prediction of sea level rise, for example, may not necessarily lead to apocalyptic flooding.
“By linking the climate event and the potential consequence for dramatic effect,” noted Rode, “a failure to observe the consequence may unfairly call into question the legitimacy of the science behind the climate event.”
With the new Biden administration making climate change policy a top priority, trust in scientific predictions about climate change is more crucial than ever, however scientists will have to be wary in qualifying their predictions. In measuring the proliferation the forecasts through search results, the authors found that forecasts that did not mention uncertainty in their apocalyptic date tended to be more visible (i.e., have more search results available). Making sensational predictions of the doom of humanity, while scientifically dubious, has still proven tempting for those wishing to grab headlines.
The trouble with this is that scientists, due to their training, tend to make more cautious statements and more often include references to uncertainty. Rode and Fischbeck found that while 81% of the forecasts made by scientists referenced uncertainty, less than half of the forecasts made by non-scientists did.
“This is not surprising,” said Rode, “but it is troubling when you consider that forecasts that reference uncertainty are less visible on the web. This results in the most visible voices often being the least qualified.”
Rode and Fischbeck argue that scientists must take extraordinary caution in communicating events of great consequence. When it comes to climate change, the authors advise “thinking small.” That is, focusing on making predictions that are less grandiose and shorter in term. “If you want people to believe big predictions, you first need to convince them that you can make little predictions,” says Rode.
Fischbeck added, “We need forecasts of a greater variety of climate variables, we need them made on a regular basis, and we need expert assessments of their uncertainties so people can better calibrate themselves to the accuracy of the forecaster.”
Even some in the independent media have bought into the hype surrounding the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID vaccine and its “non-profit” nature. But once you peel back the layers of obfuscation you quickly find not only the profit motive hiding underneath, but the dark specter of eugenics. Whitney Webb of Unlimited Hangout joins us to discuss her recent article, “Developers of Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Tied to UK Eugenics Movement.”
Masks don’t protect and risk harm to health from long term use.
They’re porous to permit breathing. If not, masks would hermetically seal wearers and suffocate them.
Peer-reviewed studies of mask-wearing showed no relationship between their use in public and protection from seasonal flu-renamed covid.
Earlier I quoted Professor of Physics Denis Rancourt, an expert in his field, explaining that no study exists that shows mask-wearing effectiveness.
Based on what’s known about viral respiratory diseases, they’re mainly transmitted by “too fine to be blocked… aerosol particles” able to penetrate all face masks.
“No RCT study with verified outcome shows a benefit for HCW or community members in households to wearing a mask or respirator.”
Yet public health authorities in the US and West — in cahoots with dark forces — falsely claim otherwise.
Long term use of masks is hazardous from pathogens accumulating on and inside them.
According to the peer-reviewed Primary Doctor Medical Journal, a study titled “Masks, false safety and real dangers” showed that their use achieved no reductions in covid outbreaks — just the opposite.
Long term mask-wearing increases the risk of contracting the illness.
Nations with the lowest incidence of mask-wearing had fewer outbreaks.
A separate Danish mask study found no “statistical difference” in outbreaks with or without their use.
By accumulating pathogens, masks can spread infections instead of protecting against them.
Mask-wearing also decreases oxygen to less than what OSHA in the US requires.
According to critical care physician/public health expert Dr. Pascal Sacre, extended mask-wearing increases the risk of infection, not the other way around as falsely claimed by governments, their public health officials and press agent media.
(S)cientific and medical analysis” proved it, he stressed.
“(A)ir, once exhaled, is heated, humidified and charged with CO2.”
“It becomes a perfect culture medium for infectious agents (bacteria, fungi, viruses).”
Their longterm use “is a scientific and medical aberration!”
Dr. Joseph Mercola agrees, saying the notion that mask-wearing prevents contraction of covid and saves lives is pseudo-science nonsense.
A year ago, Surgeon General Jerome Adams argued against their use, saying they’re “not effective.”
Even huckster/profiteer Fauci said last March that “people should not be walking around with masks (because they’re) not providing the perfect protection that people” believe.
By mid-2020, heavily promoted mask-wearing in the US and West became the norm.
Mercola cited a large-scale Chinese study involving millions of individuals that showed “not a single case of covid… traced to an asymptomatic individual who had tested positive,” adding:
“Mask wearing does not reduce the prevalence of viral illness and asymptomatic spread is exceedingly rare, if not nonexistent.”
The bottom line on mask-wearing is they don’t protect and risk harm to health.
Yet their use is increasingly mandated in the US and West.
Biden earlier defied science, saying wearing them “save(es) American lives (sic), so let’s institute a mask mandate nationwide, starting immediately.”
He mandated their use in federal buildings and on its land by executive order.
His EO falsely claimed that he’s “relying on the best available data and science-based public health measures (sic),” adding:
“Such measures include wearing masks when around others, physical distancing, and other related precautions (sic).”
“(T)o protect the federal workforce and individuals interacting with the federal workforce, and to ensure the continuity of government services and activities, on-duty or on-site federal employees, on-site federal contractors, and other individuals in federal buildings and on federal lands should all wear masks, maintain physical distance, and adhere to other public health measures (sic).”
His order also “encourag(es) masking across America. Will mandating it follow?
Is mandatory mass-jabbing with hazardous to health toxins coming?
Will refuseniks be criminalized or otherwise punished?
Is what’s unfolding too unbearable for most people to bear?
Mass resistance to what’s unacceptable is the only alternative.
Otherwise free and open societies in the US and West may be lost forever in our lifetimes.
There are simple but profound ways to view the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and to understand the who and why of the assassination.
1. The U.S. national-security establishment conducted the autopsy on President Kennedy’s body. This is one of the irrefutable facts of the assassination. It is one of the facts with which everyone agrees.
That is, the Mafia did not conduct the autopsy. Neither did Fidel Castro, the Soviets, or other communists. The same for the Israeli Mossad. Only the U.S. national-security establishment conducted the autopsy.
2. Texas law required the autopsy to be conducted by the Dallas County medical examiner, a civilian. Operating on orders, however, a team of Secret Service agents, brandishing guns and implicitly threatening to use deadly force against the Dallas County medical examiner, forced their way out of Parkland Hospital with Kennedy’s body. The team took the body to Dallas Love Field where new President Lyndon Johnson was waiting for it.
3. Johnson delivered Kennedy’s body into the hands of the U.S. military at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland rather than a civilian medical examiner. There was no ostensible reason for doing this, given that the United States isn’t supposed to be a military nation and given that Kennedy wasn’t killed on the battlefield by the enemy in war.
4. The participants to the military autopsy were told that the autopsy was a highly classified operation. They were sworn to secrecy and threatened with severe punitive action, including court martial and criminal prosecution, if they ever revealed what they had seen. They were required to sign written secrecy oaths.
5. For 30 years, the military’s shroud of secrecy over the autopsy succeeded in preventing people from learning about important aspects of the autopsy. Finally, in the 1990s the dam of secrecy was partially broken through the efforts of the Assassination Records Review Board.
For example, the ARRB took the sworn testimony of U.S. Navy petty officer Saundra Spencer, who worked in the military’s photography lab in Washington, D.C. On the weekend of the assassination, she was asked to develop the photographs of JFK’s autopsy. She was led to to believe that her development of the photographs was classified. She kept her secret for some 30 years.
The ARRB asked Spencer to examine the official photographs in the JFK records. She closely examined them. She then testified that those were not the autopsy photographs she developed. The ones she developed showed a massive exit-sized wound in the back of President Kennedy’s head, which matched what Dallas treating physicians and other eyewitnesses had stated immediately after the assassination. The official photographs in the record show the back of Kennedy’s head to be intact. That means there were two different, contradictory separate sets of photographs in the Kennedy autopsy, which implies fraud.
Another example: the ARRB discovered that there were two separate brain examinations that the military autopsy physicians were falsely conflating as one brain examination. At the first brain exam, the brain was sectioned or sliced like a loaf of bread, which is standard autopsy procedure in gun shots to the head. At the second brain exam, there is an intact, albeit damaged, brain.
There is no way that a sectioned brain can reconstitute itself into a fully intact brain. That means that the second brain exam had to have entailed a brain that was different from the brain at the first brain exam, which, again, implies fraud.
Another example: A Marine sergeant named Roger Boyajian told the ARRB that his team secretly carried the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue about an hour-and-a-half prior to the official introduction of the body Into the morgue — once again, evidence of fraud.
7. There is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. None. And no member of the mainstream press or the U.S. national-security establishment or anyone else has even offered an innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy.
8. A fraudulent autopsy had to have been part of the cover-up of the crime itself. It is obviously something that had to have been planned in advance, for it is impossible to imagine that the U.S. national security establishment, immediately after the president was declared dead, wouldhave suddenly, without any justification, conceived the notion of a fraudulent autopsy.
9. The national-security establishment would never have conducted a fraudulent autopsy in order to cover up an assassination of a U.S. president by the communists, the Mafia, the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro, or the Mossad. There is only one logical possibility: the national-security establishment’s fraudulent autopsy, shrouded in official secrecy, was designed to cover up its assassination of the president.
10. From the start of his administration, President Kennedy was at war with the national-security establishment over the future direction of America. The war began with differences over U.S., foreign policy toward Third World nations, proceeded into the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Berlin crisis, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Cold War.
In his June 10, 1963, Peace Speech at American University, Kennedy threw the gauntlet down and declared an end to the Cold War and, implicitly, an end to the ever-growing budgets, power, and influence of the national-security establishment. Owing to what was considered JFK’s extremely dangerous conduct that supposedly threatened a U.S. defeat in the Cold War and a takeover of the United States by the communists, Kennedy was deemed to be a grave threat to national security.
The war ended with Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, in a regime-change operation that was no different in principle from those that preceded it and followed it (e.g., Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Cuba 1960s, Congo 1961, and Chile 1973).
Recent NYT article reveals how insane progressive thought has become. Critical Thinking is so yesterday. Let the fact-checkers teach you how ignorance is strength!!
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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In the process, Woolsey does what the mainstream press has done for 60 years — he simply ignores the mountain of circumstantial evidence that assassination researchers have uncovered since the 1960s that inexorably points the finger of guilt at the U.S. national-security establishment, which was conducting all sorts of Cold War national-security regime-change operations in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.
February 2000, [Source]
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Aletho News
