If you’ve done any academic work at all, in any field — scratch that, if you’ve done any competent, diligent work in any field — you’ve experienced the frustration of the “phantom cite”. This is where you see a startling assertion in Jones. You check his footnote — see Smith. You go pull Smith off the shelves, and his footnote says “see Williams”. Williams cites Parker, Parker cites Adams, Adams cites Rogers, until finally, you pull Rogers and … nothing. Not the “oh gosh, I’d have to travel to the British Museum to check this, and it’s in Medieval High Bulgarian anyway” kind of nothing, but the bald-ass assertion kind of nothing.
Happens all the time. There are a couple of reasons for this. Being as charitable as I possibly can, I’m going to call one “survivorship bias”. I’m sure you’ve seen this … Since, again, we’re being extremely charitable here, this isn’t actually a case of “just tell ’em what they want to hear”. I’ll illustrate from my own research experience. My dissertation asserts that General Ripper, commander of the 43rd Imaginary Infantry in Au Phuc Dup province, Republic of Vietnam, was convinced that the local provincial governor, Long Duc Dong, was a Communist infiltrator. Now, this is a 100% true fact, that Gen. Ripper believes Long Duc Dong is a Communist. Armies are awash in paperwork, and moreover Gen. Ripper was an obsessive letter-writer and diarist, so you can find hundreds if not thousands of citations stating it directly: “I, Gen. Ripper, believe that Long Duc Dong is a Communist”.
Which explains quite a bit about why Gen. Ripper made the decisions he did, which in turn is why this 100% indisputably true fact — that Gen. Ripper thought Long Duc Dong was a Communist — features so prominently in that study of the dynamics of command in the 43rd Imaginary Infantry.
The problem, though, is that some other historian comes along, looking at something very different — say, the effectiveness of anti-Communist propaganda in the IV Corps operational area — and comes across my dissertation. From this, he writes “So ineffective was the anti-Communist propaganda campaign that even the governor, Long Duc Dong, was strongly suspected of being a Communist infiltrator”. And from that, another historian, looking for the prevalence of pro-Communist sentiment, concludes that “despite the Americans’ best efforts, the extreme south of the RVN was so thoroughly indoctrinated that even the Governor, Long Duc Dong, was a Communist”.
Now, all of that is true except for the last bit. It is not, in fact, proven that Long Duc Dong was a Communist. Gen. Ripper sure thought he was. And Gen. Ripper continued to think so, even after the anti-Communist propaganda campaign, which means that the campaign indisputably failed in Long Duc Dong’s case — he carried on acting like enough of a commie to keep Gen. Ripper’s suspicions up. But thanks to the thicket of citations, it’s the last bit — the assertion that Long Duc Dong was, indisputably, a Communist — that has by far the most footnotes attached to it. Hell, the footnotes probably cite all the same things I did — the truckloads of letters and documents from Gen. Ripper saying “Damn that Long Duc Dong, he’s a Communist!!”
That’s because he lifted them straight from my dissertation, all impeccably footnoted — by which is meant, giving ME full credit — and do you see what I mean? None of the historians involved had any obvious axe to grind, no viewpoint to push. It’s just that everyone’s bibliography is a hundred pages long, and nobody has the time to read every page of every book in those hundred pages. Jones just skimmed Smith’s index, looking for names of commies. Smith did the same thing with my index, of course, in which he found “Dong, Long Duc, Communist sympathies of,” with dozens of page numbers referenced.
Severian, “‘Studies'”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-22.
May 18, 2024
QotD: Academic research and the “phantom cite”
May 16, 2024
The replication crisis and the steady decline in social trust
Theodore Dalrymple on the depressing unreliability — and sometimes outright fraudulence — of far too high a proportion of what gets published in scientific journals:
Until quite recently — I cannot put an exact date on it — I assumed that everything published in scientific journals was, if not true, at least not deliberately untrue. Scientists might make mistakes, but they did not cheat, plagiarise, falsify, or make up their results. For many years as I opened a medical journal, the possibility simply that it contained fraud did not occur to me. Cases such as those of the Piltdown Man, a hoax in which bone fragments found in the Piltdown gravel pit were claimed to be those of the missing link between ape and man, were famous because they were dramatic but above all because they were rare, or assumed to be such.
Such naivety is no longer possible: instances of dishonesty have become much more frequent, or at least much more publicised. Whether the real incidence of scientific fraud has increased is difficult to say. There is probably no way to estimate the incidence of such fraud in the past by which a proper comparison can be made.
There are, of course, good reasons why scientific fraud should have increased. The number of practising scientists has exploded; they are in fierce competition with one another; their careers depend to a large extent on their productivity as measured by publication. The difference between what is ethical and unethical has blurred. They cite themselves, they recycle their work, they pay for publication, they attach their names to pieces of work they have played no part in performing and whose reports they have not even read, and so forth. As new algorithms are developed to measure their performance, they find new ways to play the game or to deceive. And all this is not even counting commercial pressures.
Furthermore, the general level of trust in society has declined. Are our politicians worse than they used to be, as it seems to everyone above a certain age, or is it that we simply know more about them because the channels of communication are so much wider? At any rate, trust in authority of most kinds has declined. Where once we were inclined to say, “It must be true because I read it in a newspaper”, we are now inclined to say, “It must be untrue because I read it in a newspaper”.
Quite often now I look at a blog called Retraction Watch which, since 2010, has been devoted to tracing and encouraging retraction of flawed scientific papers, often flawed for discreditable reasons. Such reasons are various and include research performed on subjects who have not given proper consent. This is not the same as saying that the results of such research are false, however, and raises the question of whether it is ethical to cite results that have been obtained unethically. Whether it is or not, we have all benefited enormously from past research that would now be considered unethical.
One common problem with research is its reproducibility, or lack of it. This is particularly severe in the case of psychology, but it is common in medicine too.
May 13, 2024
Unravelling the actual origins of Covid (aka Wuhan Coronavirus)
In Spiked!, Matt Ridley outlines some of the more recent admissions-against-interest of the people who used to accuse you of tinfoil-hattism and peddling conspiracy theories when the topic of the origins of Covid came up:
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.
Two of the key figures in the story of Covid’s origins gave away vital new information last week before the US Congress.
One of these figures is Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina professor who invented ingenious techniques for genetically altering coronaviruses. He effectively taught scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China how to do “gain of function” experiments with bat-derived sarbecoviruses to make them more infectious or lethal in humanised mice. The other figure is Peter Daszak, the highly paid president of the non-profit, EcoHealth Alliance. Over many years, EcoHealth Alliance has channelled large sums of US taxpayer money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for “gain of function” experimentation, and for finding new sarbecoviruses in bats.
Up until now, Baric and Daszak have taken slightly different approaches to (hardly) helping the world understand what went on in Wuhan before the Covid-19 outbreak in November 2019. Baric has remained largely silent, refusing to do interviews or sign up to articles in the scientific press. He remained silent last week, too, but the Congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released the transcript of a lengthy closed-door session it held with him in January.
Daszak, by contrast, has adopted a high profile, organising round-robin letters defending his friends and colleagues in Wuhan, giving interviews, writing articles and getting himself appointed to not one but two commissions investigating Covid’s origins, despite a glaring conflict of interest. He appeared before the subcommittee on 1 May.
Both men reluctantly admitted under oath to points that markedly strengthen the already strong hypothesis that the pandemic began with an accident in a laboratory in Wuhan. But before considering what they said, it might be worth briefly looking at the relationship between the two.
In comments on a draft of a grant proposal written in 2018, which were made public last year, Daszak boasted of how cheap it is to do experiments in Wuhan because they use a lower biosafety level (BSL-2), without negative-pressure work cabinets. Baric responded that US scientists would “freak out” at that. So a newly released email Baric sent to Daszak on 27 May 2021 smacks one’s gob somewhat. Responding to Daszak’s insistence that the Wuhan Institute actually used safer versions of these low safety standards for its experiments, Baric wrote:
Your [sic] being told a bunch of BS. Bsl2 [with] negative pressure, give me a break. There [sic] last paper mentioned bsl2 [with] appropriate PPE. This last part was the first and only time this was ever mentioned, never in earlier papers, and in the latest paper never defined either. I have no doubt that they followed state-determined rules and did the work under bsl2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.
Baric clearly does not have a high regard for the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s safety standards, or indeed for his virus-hunting grantrepreneur colleague, Daszak. Nor do some other scientists who have nonetheless defended Daszak in public. Thanks to freedom-of-information revelations, we now know that “Dastwat” and “EgoHealth” are just two of the epithets used about him by his friends. With friends like that …
Both men still insist, however, that the pandemic began naturally – but, to borrow from Mandy Rice-Davies, they would say that wouldn’t they? Before the subcommittee, where even the Democrats gave him a pasting, Daszak was forced to concede some key points on which he had previously stonewalled or said the opposite.
Firstly, he had to concede that a lab leak was possible. Yet back in 2020, Daszak told Democracy Now that “the idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true … So it’s just not possible.”
April 9, 2024
Checking in on the front lines of paleontology research
Sarah Hoyt is amazed and surprised at some recent revelations about the latest paleontological discoveries:
Yesterday I did something I used to do more often, and looked into the latest discoveries in paleontology and archaeology and such.
And shortly after remembered why I no longer do it every month.
Apparently the latest, greatest news is that — yo, this is amazing — they’re finally not studying pre-history through the eyes of racism and sexism, and as such have determined that pre-historic hunting parties were as much as 80% female.
This is a discovery that of course makes perfect sense. No doubt the males were all back at base camp, chest-feeding the babies. Thereby freeing the pre-historic girl bosses to go and hunt them some mammoth.
If you’re staring at the screen with dropped jaws, I haven’t gone insane. I know this is utter and complete nonsense. It’s not my fault that the people running all our intellectual institutions, including research are morons studying to be idiots.
Applying the Heinlein filter for the actual reason they have to believe that up to 80% — 80%! — of pre-historic hunters were female, i.e. “Again and again, what are the facts?” we get that they found one grave — one — where the DNA of the remains are female (and here we’ll keep quiet about the strange idea that 6000 (I think) year old DNA is easily extracted, non-contaminated, etc. We’ll pretend we don’t know all the times they walked back “new species” because the DNA amplification techniques CREATED those discoveries.)
Let’s assume they’re correct and this was a female, buried with hunting implements. Sure, maybe she was a hunter. There will always be one or two in a large enough band, for the reason that in primitive societies some women are brought up as male: lack of a son, need to support the family, etc. (It is rarely a sexual thing, or because the person WANTED this. In fact it’s often decided for them before they are weaned. In fact, in primitive/ancient societies including the ones of our ancestors that we know about in detail, there was remarkably little room for self expression, self-conception or self interest. When you live close to the bone, such things are subjugated to the needs of the family, the clan, the tribe, more or less in that order. Because survival is hard.) We’re also informed, in BREATHLESS tones that it’s now thought that spear throwers were used to make sure women could throw spears fast enough! That’s why they exist.
But spear throwers are made and used by males, the world over. Go look at the tubes of you and you’ll see videos of people making them and using them, and they’re all male.
Further there is no society today of the ones still surviving more or less in a stone age way that has that kind of distribution for hunters. More importantly, there is no record of them, going as far back as we can.
Maybe this is because yes indeed, the past (being much closer to the bone, and therefore less willing to indulge in story telling) viewed things through a racist and sexist lens. Why not? After all I grew up in an intensely patriarchal society that still hadn’t adapted to the idea of women taking any hand in intellectual pursuits. And yes, that was unwarranted sexism. And every society is racist against every other (Actually culturist, but it’s often couched in terms of race.)
But still … You’d think that here and there there would be a race of valiant Amazons, whose men stay home and pound the taro while they go out and hunt, right?
But the truth is that if you put this notion to the remaining stone age people, they will laugh till they pee themselves. Yes, I know, I know, they internalized sexism from the evil white colonizers whom they’ve met three times in the last 100 years. That’s how powerful and evil whiteness is.
Or, listen, okay? I know this is just crazy talk, but maybe males and females are different and have evolved to fulfill different reproductive functions. And the reproductive function of females is more onerous than that of males. Women in our natural state, and unless something has gone seriously wrong — which of course makes us of less use to the tribe — spend most of our lives pregnant, nursing or carrying for children too young to care for themselves.
March 5, 2024
The National Microbiology Laboratory scandal in brief
Tristin Hopper rounds up some of the eye-opening details of the security breach at Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Lab which certainly looks like a factor in the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic story:
Whether or not COVID-19 started as an accidental lab leak, the pandemic just so happens to have originated in the same neighbourhood as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, home to a coronavirus laboratory with a known history of lax security protocols.
For that reason alone it’s a major scandal that Canada’s own high-security biolab was employing two scientists – married couple Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng – who according to CSIS exhibited a reckless disregard of lab security and the protection of confidential information. Now, tack on the fact that both Cheng and Qiu are suspected of prolonged unauthorized contact with the Chinese government.
This week, Health Canada bowed to opposition pressure and published an illuminating package of more than 600 official documents detailing CSIS’s evidence against the couple, as well as internal emails from the Winnipeg-based National Microbiology Laboratory where they worked. The highlights are below.
The lab is surprisingly casual about shipping planet-altering pathogens
One of the main accusations against Qiu is that she sent lab samples to China, the U.S. and the U.K. without proper authorization. Around this same time, she also sent highly virulent Ebola samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
[…]
Cheng was accused of breaking virtually every cyber-security law in the book
If Qiu’s signature offence was sending out lab materials without proper authorization, Cheng’s was that he routinely ignored even the most basic protocols about computer security.
[…]
Throughout, both were in constant (unauthorized) touch with China
The CSIS reports don’t necessarily frame Qiu and Cheng as traitors.
[…]
The pair kept changing their story after being presented with smoking gun evidence, according to CSIS
Some of the documents’ more cinematic passages are when CSIS agents describe lengthy interrogations in which the pair were confronted about their alleged breaches of Canadian national security.
February 17, 2024
Hitler speaking – not the raging, raving maniac we all think he was
Colby Cosh on a major German academic effort to provide an authoritative digital record of Adolf Hitler’s actual speeches, rather than the highly selective snippets we in the English speaking world have seen or the “official” transcripts that were published in Nazi propaganda organs:
Adolf Hitler making a speech sometime between 1933 and 1940.
Library and Archives Canada item number 3191955.
You may have seen reports that a consortium of German research institutions has set out on a seven-year project to compile, annotate and digitize every speech Adolf Hitler gave as chancellor of Germany. The effort is being led by the Institute of Contemporary History (Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte, or IfZ), a Munich-based German government research consortium founded in 1947 to preserve the various records of Germany’s experience under National Socialism. Since that time, there has been a whole lot more zeitgeschichte in Germany, of course, so the IfZ also does a lot of work on communism, the Cold War and German reunification. It helps run important museums and historical sites, such as Hitler’s mountain retreat on the slopes of the Obersalzberg.
[…]
The co-head of the new project is Magnus Brechtken, deputy director of the IfZ and author of a landmark 2017 biography of Hitler’s pet architect and economic manager, Albert Speer. In January, Brechtken gave an absorbing German-language interview explaining the need for a contemporary, digital Hitler edition. Run that puppy through Google Translate and you’ll see that it commences amusingly with the question, “So do you have Adolf Hitler’s voice running through your head all the time?”
(This probably wouldn’t be as hellish as it sounds. Hitler didn’t really bellow like a rabid animal at his audiences for hours on end, contrary to the image of him that you and I have in our heads, and he spoke with a low, musical Austrian accent that German speakers like Brechtken seem to appreciate.)
Brechtken observes that in writing his Speer book, he spurned Domarus and went to the Sisyphean trouble of running down primary versions of relevant Hitler speeches himself. Hundreds of audio recordings of Hitler have survived in the German Broadcasting Archive in Frankfurt, and the project team has computer scientists and even linguists on board to help integrate text, sound and historians’ notes on persons, events and the context of the speeches.
No doubt the finished product will be consumed by the uglier parts of today’s German political right, and its reaction is fully predictable. Some will say, “At last, the real Hitler!”; and an equal number will say, “This whole project is a parcel of falsehoods — it’s fake Hitler!”
February 7, 2024
As the media now tell us, it’s dangerous to do your own research and you should just trust them about everything
David Friedman has some timely tips on how you might go about determining the truth of an assertion offered in the legacy media or online source of undetermined trustworthiness:
Following up the claim you come across an article, perhaps even a book, which does indeed support that claim. Should you believe it?
The short answer for all of those examples, some of them claims I agree with, is that you should not. As I think I have demonstrated in past posts, claimed proofs of contentious issues are quite often wrong, biased, even fraudulent.
More examples from previous posts, here or on my old blog:
An estimate of the cost of a ton of carbon dioxide calculated with about half the total depending on the implicit assumption of no progress in medicine for the next three centuries.
A factbook on state and local finance that deliberately omitted the most important relevant fact that readers were unlikely to know.
A textbook, in its third edition, with multiple provably false claims.
The important question is how to tell. There are three answers:
1. Read the book or article carefully, check at least some of its claims — easier now that the Internet provides you with a vast searchable library accessible from your desktop — and evaluate its argument for yourself. Doing this is costly in time and effort and requires skills you may not have; depending on the particular issue that might include near-professional expertise in statistics, history, physics, economics, or any of a variety of other fields. I have taught elementary statistics at various points in my career, both in an economics department and a law school, but gave up on a controversy of considerable interest to me (concealed carry) when the statistical arguments got above the level I could readily follow.
2. Find one or more competent critiques of the argument and see if you find them convincing. This is the previous answer on easy mode. You still have to think things through but you don’t have to search out mistakes in the argument for yourself because the critic will point you at them, with luck offer evidence.
There are three possible conclusions that that exercise may support: that the argument is wrong. that it might be wrong, that it is probably right. The way you reach the last conclusion is from the incompetence or dishonesty of the critique; I am thinking of a real case.
John Boswell, a gay historian at Yale, argued that both the scriptures and early Christianity, unlike modern Christian critics of homosexual sex, treated it as no worse than other forms of non-marital intercourse. What convinced me that Boswell had a reasonable case was reading an attack on him by a prominent opponent which badly misrepresented the contents of the book I had just read. People who have good arguments do not need bad ones.
Of course, there might be other critics with better arguments.
An entertaining version of this approach is to find an online conversation with intelligent people covering a wide range of views and follow discussions of whatever issues you are interested in. With luck all of the good arguments for both sides will get made and you can decide for yourself whether one side, the other, or neither is convincing. Forty years ago I could do it in the sf groups on Usenet, which contained lots of smart people who liked to argue. Five years ago I could do it in the comment threads of Slate Star Codex. Currently Data Secrets Lox works for a few controversies but the range of views represented on it is too limited to provide a fair view of most.
The comment threads of this blog are at present too thin for the purpose, with between one and two orders of magnitude fewer comments than the SSC average used to be, but perhaps in another few years …
3. Recognize that you don’t know whether the claim is true and have no practical way of finding out, at least no way that costs less in time and effort than it is worth. This is the least popular answer but probably the most often correct.
January 24, 2024
The father of the “Green Revolution”
In the latest review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, Jane Psmith reviews The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann:
Norman Borlaug is generally estimated to have saved the lives of about a billion people who would otherwise have starved to death.
Yet despite all this — and Borlaug’s is a great story, which Charles Mann tells better and in far more detail than I do above — his book isn’t really a biography of Borlaug or of its other framing figure, early environmentalist William Vogt.1 Rather, it’s a compellingly-written and frankly fascinating overview of various environmental issues facing humanity, and of two different sorts of approaches one can take to addressing them. Mann opens by introducing the two men, but as soon as he’s done that they function mostly as symbols, examples and stand-ins, for these two schools of thought about the world and its problems.
Borlaug is the Wizard of the title, the avatar of techno-optimism: with hard work and clever application of scientific knowledge, we can innovate our way out of our problems. Vogt is the Prophet, the advocate of caution: he points to our limitations, all the things we don’t know and the complex systems we shouldn’t disturb, warning that our constraints are inescapable — but also, quietly, that they are in some sense good.
It’s not hard to identify the Wizards all around us. Inventors and innovators, transhumanists and e/acc, self-driving cars and self-healing concrete … every new device or technique for solving some human problem — insulin pumps! heck, synthetic insulin at all! — is a Wizardly project.
It’s a little more difficult to pin down what exactly the Prophets believe, in part because they spend so much time criticizing Wizardly schemes as dangerous or impractical that it’s easy to take them for small-souled enemies of human achievement.2 That isn’t fair, though — there’s a there there, a holistic vision of the world as an integral organic unity that we disturb at our peril, because the constraints are inextricably linked to the good stuff.
If that seems too abstract, here’s an example. Imagine for a moment (or maybe you don’t have to imagine) that you have a friend who subsists entirely on Soylent. It’s faster and easier than cooking, he says, and cheaper than eating out. He’s getting all his caloric needs met. And he’s freed up so much time for everything else! Now, anyone might express concern for his physical health: does Soylent actually have the right balance of macronutrients to nourish him? Is he missing some important vitamins or other micronutrients that a normal diet might provide? Is the lack of chewing going to make his jaw muscles atrophy? And those are all reasonable concerns about your friend’s plan, but they all have possible Wizardly solutions. (A multivitamin and some gum would be a start.)
If you’re a Prophet sort, on the other hand, you’re probably going to start talking about everything else your friend is missing out on. There’s the taste of food, for one, but also the pleasures of color and texture and scent, the connection to the natural world, the role of community and tradition in shared meals, the way cooking focuses thought and attention on incarnate reality. You might throw around words like “lame” and “artificial” and “sterile” and “inhuman”. Your friend’s Soylent-only plan assumes that the whole point of food is to consume an appropriate number of calories as quickly and easily as possible, hopefully in a way that doesn’t meaningfully degrade his health, but a Prophet rejects his premise entirely. Instead, a Prophet argues that your friend’s food “problem” is actually part of the richly textured beauty of Creation. Yes, feeding yourself and your loved ones delicious, healthful, and economical meals takes time and effort, but that’s simply part of being human.5 You should consider that a challenge to be met rather than a threat to be avoided.
Unfortunately, Mann does the Prophets a disservice by choosing William Vogt as their exemplar. Yes, he was an important figure in the history of the modern environmental movement. Yes, he wrote a very influential book.4 And yes, his careful attention to the integrity of the ecosystems he studied was quintessentially Prophet. But he saw human beings mostly as disruptions to the integrity of those ecosystems, and pretty much every one of his specific predictions — not to mention the predictions of his many followers, most famously Paul Erlich in The Population Bomb5 — have simply failed to come true. Compared to Borlaug’s obvious successes, Vogt’s dire warnings that humanity will soon exhaust the Earth’s capacity and doom ourselves to extinction (unless we abort and contracept our way there first; his second act was as director of Planned Parenthood) seem laughable. Reading about his life can leave you with the impression that Prophets are just people who are more worried about a spotted owl than a starving child, and frankly who cares what those people think?
1. They were roughly contemporaries, but this is emphatically not the story of a pair of rivals; they encountered each other in person only once, in passing, after which Vogt wrote an angry letter to the Rockefeller Foundation demanding they cease Borlaug’s Mexican project at once.
2. And, to be fair, a lot of the language and arguments pioneered by Prophets does get employed by a sclerotic managerial class opposed to anything they can’t fit neatly into their systems and processes and domain-agnostic expertise. But more on that later.
3. Incidentally, this is more or less the argument between the Wizards and the Prophets when it comes to soil. Wizards are delighted with the Haber-Bosch process and artificial fertilizers; Prophets decry the “NPK mentality” that sees the soil as a passive reservoir of chemicals and instead laud composting, manure, and other techniques that encourage the complex interactions between soil organisms, plant roots, and the physical characteristics of humus. This is the origin of the fad for “organic”, a label that doesn’t mean much when applied to industrial-scale food production and is often more trouble than it’s worth for small-time farmers and ranchers. Still, Mann’s story of the movement’s birth is interesting.
4. You’ve probably never heard of it, but it was influential!
5. Apparently out of print! Good.
January 10, 2024
The unexpected rise in “Unknown Cause”
Mark Steyn rounds up some interesting details on that long-forgotten-by-the-media pandemic and corresponding heavy-handed government interventions that made things so much worse:
The obvious problem with appeals to authority, at least for anyone more sentient than an earthworm, is that across the western world the last four years have been one giant appeal to authority – and the result of mortgaging the entirety of human existence to the expert class is the rubble all around. Just for starters:
US scientists held secret talks with Covid ‘Batwoman’ amid drive to make coronaviruses more deadly
You don’t say! When would that have been? Oh:
…just before pandemic
Well, there’s a surprise!
A new cache of documents, obtained by Freedom of Information campaigners and seen by The Mail on Sunday, reveal the extent to which the controversial work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was supported, and often funded, by America.
You got that right. Wuhan is the virological equivalent of a CIA black site in Pakistan: it’s where the Deep State goes to do the stuff it can’t do in suburban Virginia.
So how’s that working out for the planet? Way back in 2022, The Mark Steyn Show reported that “Unknown Cause” was now the leading cause of death in Alberta. According to the somewhat lethargic lads at Statistics Canada, taking eighteen month to catch up with yours truly, that same year it was the fourth leading cause of death across the entire country. “Unknown Cause” is rampaging from Nunavut igloos to the Hamas branch office in Montreal: Between 2019 and 2022, it was up almost five hundred per cent.
Does “Unknown Cause” have an awareness-raising ribbon like Aids or breast cancer? Are there any celebs who’d like to headline a gala fundraiser or do an all-star pop anthem?
Apparently not. Gee, it’s almost as if taking too great an interest in “Unknown Cause” can lead to a bad case of cancer of the career. Nevertheless, the official StatsCan numbers are, to put it at its mildest, odd. By the end of 2022, Canada was one of the most jabbed nations on earth, with a Covid vaccination rate of ninety-one per cent, the highest in the G7, by some distance (UK and US both at eighty per cent).
And yet, if these government numbers are to be believed, something very strange happened. In the most jabbed member of the G7, Covid deaths went up. As The Western Standard‘s Joseph Fournier noticed, while almost nobody else did, Covid deaths per annum across the Deathbed Dominion shot up 25 per cent from the days of curfews, and arrests for playing open-air hockey:
2020 15,890
2021 14,466
2022 19,716
So, in Jabba Jabba Central, more people died of Covid in the most recent annual round-up than at the height of the pandemic. In fact, on those numbers, Canada has yet to reach “the height of the pandemic”. Here’s another striking feature – again, direct from Statistics Canada:
During the first year of the pandemic, older Canadians (65 years of age and older) accounted for 94.1% of COVID-19 deaths, while those aged 45 to 64 years accounted for 5.3%. In 2021, while the number of COVID-19 deaths among individuals aged 65 years and older (82.0%) remained high, the proportion of deaths among those aged 45 to 64 years nearly tripled to 15.5%.
So, in the most vaxxed nation of the G7, middle-aged persons account for three times the proportion of Covid deaths than they did at “the height of the pandemic”.
Like I said: odd.
Canadian life expectancy? Down. Oh, just by four months or so. But that’s three times the size of last year’s drop.
Excess mortality? Indeed: In 2019 the age-standardised death rate was 830.5 per 100,000 people. In 2022 it was 972.5. As I’ve pointed out a gazillion times on telly, that’s the opposite of what’s meant to happen post-pandemic: After the Spanish Flu, the mortality rate fell because people who would otherwise have died in 1924 had already died in 1919. That phenomenon is visible in Eastern Europe, but nowhere in the Dominion of Death.
Last year I mentioned en passant to my friend Naomi Wolf that the Covid vaccines were beginning to remind me of the scandals of her old chum Bill Clinton: one such can do a politician in, but, if you have (as Slick Willy did) a multitude of ’em, who can follow it all? If Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca just caused, say, myocarditis, maybe people would find it easier to focus on. Instead, it causes myocarditis in men and infertility in women and, if you manage to dodge the latter, the mRNA shows up in newborn babies; it brings on Guillain–Barré syndrome and Ramsay Hunt syndrome and lightning-speed turbo-cancers. Alternatively, you could get a dose of the SADS and drop dead on stage or on the footie pitch, or at home watching the telly. It’s a lot to keep track of.
Or maybe, as in Alberta, you just die of … whatever. And nobody cares to find out.
January 5, 2024
Qatar’s Aggies
In The Free Press, Eli Lake discusses the deal between Texas A&M and the Qatari government that gives the Qatar Foundation — run by the Qatari royal family — full ownership of any intellectual property developed at the Qatari campus of the university:
Texas A&M’s Nuclear Engineering and Science Center in College Station, Texas.
Photo via Texas A&M
What does Qatar get for its investment in U.S. universities? The answer may surprise you. In addition to the prestige and the influence of affiliating one’s national philanthropy with elite schools, Qatar is also accumulating the kind of technical research that was once the prize of American universities.
Consider Texas A&M University, one of the best places in the country to study nuclear engineering. Last month, The Free Press obtained exclusive access to a copy of the latest contract between Texas A&M and the Qatar Foundation that shows all of the intellectual property developed at the university’s campus in Doha belongs to the Qatar Foundation, a national philanthropy owned by the country’s royal family.
“The Qatar Foundation shall own the entire right, title, and interest in all Technology and Intellectual Property developed at (Texas A&M University Qatar) or under the auspices of its Research Program, other than those developed by non-TAMUQ employees and without financial support from the Qatar Foundation or any of its affiliates,” says the contract, dated May 25, 2021.
This kind of arrangement is common for large research universities in America. But TAMUQ is not your ordinary university. It is entirely funded by the Qatar Foundation. Kelly Brown, a spokeswoman for Texas A&M, told me that Qatar “pays for all faculty and staff salaries” as well as the physical campus, labs and equipment, housing, transportation, and travel allowances for professors.
It’s no small matter. The intellectual property generated by Texas A&M University in Qatar, or TAMUQ, includes highly sensitive research in a variety of fields ranging from computer science to bioengineering. Last year, TAMUQ inked an agreement to develop projects with a subsidiary of Barzan Holdings, Qatar’s largest arms manufacturer.
Andre Conradie, the CEO of the joint venture between Barzan and Germany’s Rheinmetall, said at the time, “This partnership will encourage the development of technological and operational capabilities to enhance military protection.”
As one of the country’s premier schools in nuclear engineering, Texas A&M has access to two nuclear reactors in Texas not affiliated with the U.S. government. In December, the National Nuclear Security Administration renewed a contract for the university, along with the University of California and Battelle Memorial Institute, to manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which involves oversight of teams who design and maintain nuclear weapons for the U.S. government.
November 9, 2023
How they saved the holes in Swiss cheese
Tom Scott
Published 1 May 2023Agroscope is a Swiss government-backed agricultural research lab. It’s got a lot of other resarch projects too, but it also keeps a backup of the Swiss cheese bacterial cultures… just in käse.
(more…)
October 27, 2023
The Tale of Fat Man and Little Boy
World War Two
Published 26 Oct 2023Here near the end of 1944, we look at the development of the atomic bomb. What different methods of creating a nuclear reaction are being developed? How close are they to development? How does it work? Will they be able to make one in 1945? Will it go boom?
(more…)
September 29, 2023
WW2 Jet Engine Development
World War Two
Published 28 Sep 2023Jet planes and jet engine technology revolutionized air travel, as we are all well aware. However, the development of jet planes during WW2 was fraught with all sorts of obstacles and hurdles. Let’s take a look at it.
(more…)
September 6, 2023
“[W]hy does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? … it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it”
Patrick T. Brown in The Free Press on how he had to leave out the full truth on climate change to get his paper published:
If you’ve been reading any news about wildfires this summer — from Canada to Europe to Maui — you will surely get the impression that they are mostly the result of climate change.
Here’s the AP: Climate change keeps making wildfires and smoke worse. Scientists call it the “new abnormal”.
And PBS NewsHour: Wildfires driven by climate change are on the rise — Spain must do more to prepare, experts say.
And The New York Times: How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox.
And Bloomberg: Maui Fires Show Climate Change’s Ugly Reach.
I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.
So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it.
The paper I just published—”Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California” — focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.
This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives — even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.
To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.
[…] as the number of researchers has skyrocketed in recent years — there are close to six times more PhDs earned in the U.S. each year than there were in the early 1960s — it has become more difficult than ever to stand out from the crowd. So while there has always been a tremendous premium placed on publishing in journals like Nature and Science, it’s also become extraordinarily more competitive.
In theory, scientific research should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value.
In reality, though, the biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.
September 5, 2023
“… the misogyny myth persists because both sexes want to believe it”
In City Journal, John Tierney disassembles the “misogyny myth” of modern culture:
Misogyny is supposedly rampant in modern society, but where, exactly, does it lurk? For decades, researchers have hunted for evidence of overt discrimination against women as well as subtler varieties, like “systemic sexism” or “implicit bias”. But instead of detecting misogyny, they keep spotting something else.
[…]
If you haven’t heard of this evidence, it’s because of the well-documented misandrist bias in the public discussion of gender issues. Scholars, journalists, politicians, and activists will lavish attention on a small, badly flawed study if it purports to find bias against women, but they’ll ignore — or work to suppress — the wealth of solid research showing the opposite. Three decades ago, psychologists identified the “women-are-wonderful effect”, based on research showing that both sexes tended to rate women more positively than men. This effect has been confirmed repeatedly — women get higher ratings than men for intelligence as well as competence — and it’s obvious in popular culture.
“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning”. Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”? If the patriarchy really did rule our society, the stock father character in television sitcoms would not be a “doofus dad” like Homer Simpson, and commercials wouldn’t keep showing wives outsmarting their husbands. (When’s the last time you saw a TV husband get something right?) Smug misandry has been box-office gold for Barbie, which delights in writing off men as hapless romantic partners, leering jerks, violent buffoons, and dimwitted tyrants who ought to let women run the world.
Numerous studies have shown that both sexes care more about harms to women than to men. Men get punished more severely than women for the same crime, and crimes against women are punished more severely than crimes against men. Institutions openly discriminate against men in hiring and promotion policies — and a majority of men as well as women favor affirmative-action programs for women.
The education establishment has obsessed for decades about the shortage of women in some science and tech disciplines, but few worry about males badly trailing by just about every other academic measure from kindergarten through graduate school. By the time boys finish high school (if they do), they’re so far behind that many colleges lower admissions standards for males — a rare instance of pro-male discrimination, though it’s not motivated by a desire to help men. Admissions directors do it because many women are loath to attend a college if the gender ratio is too skewed.
Gender disparities generally matter only if they work against women. In computing its Global Gender Gap, the much-quoted annual report, the World Economic Forum has explicitly ignored male disadvantages: if men fare worse on a particular dimension, a country still gets a perfect score for equality on that measure. Prodded by the federal Title IX law banning sexual discrimination in schools, educators have concentrated on eliminating disparities in athletics but not in other extracurricular programs, which mostly skew female. The fact that there are now three female college students for every two males is of no concern to the White House Gender Policy Council. Its “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” doesn’t even mention boys’ struggles in school, instead focusing exclusively on new ways to help female students get further ahead.
