The puzzle to me is that, hypothetically, if one were a scientist studying viruses or the immune system (or if one were a medical doctor), wouldn't covid have presented the most exciting, intellectually stimulating opportunity of one's career? Shouldn't scientists be falling over themselves to design studies to test the hypotheses they (or people who call themselves scientists) have been treating as incontrovertible truths? Where is the curiosity and desire to innovate?
Curiosity and the desire to innovate is sometimes overshadowed by the necessity of maintaining a good publication record in high-impact journals.
Writing pro-narrative covid papers has been an exercise in plucking low-hanging fruit. Rapid publication times and often getting through the review process with a wink and a nod.
Getting a paper published with evidence against the narrative has been very difficult, and impossible in some cases.
Re Polio vs Covid comparison, Polio vax testing was much more rigorous than testing for Covid jabs e.g. 1.84 million subjects in Salk Polio vax tests vs <0.05 million in Pfizer Covid jabs tests. https://cmw.news/index.php?t=1636437256
"Safe and effective" was used for that campaign as well which was stopped due to the large number of harms from it. In my view "Safe and effective" can be translated as "safe for us and effective for them". i.e. it kills without too many noticing.
Mr. Riggery Pokery, you write very well and are skilled at extracting very high signal to noise ratio information, with a touch of humor, from the digital cacophony with which we are all bombarded daily. Thank you for that. I am now a subscriber.
Thank you Brendan - very kind of you to say - and very much appreciated.
I've always tried to be a "big picture" person. The detailed analyses of the charts and stats ARE very important to get the foundations right - but I think we need a lot of easily-digestible tidbits to hammer things home to the average person who probably glazes over as soon as things get technical.
My PhD supervisor was an absolute master at this sort of thing - he could take a complex physics problem and figure out what the answer had to be - the guy had the most amazing "intuition" and overall grasp of things I've ever seen. He didn't do overly technical analyses, not because he couldn't, but because he didn't need to and could see his way to a solution without it.
I've tried to copy his approach for 30 years - but I have only a fraction of his talent, sadly.
Yes - can't disagree with much of what you write here.
The list is more in the nature of potential "facts" - but, despite the lack of absolute intellectual rigour in calling them hypotheses, I would argue that this is the lens through which we need to view the covid saga. For two reasons:
(a) it reminds us of the provisional nature
(b) it reminds us that these things need to be tested
As for the QM interpretation thing - it's really very interesting. If we take the standard Copenhagen interpretation it pushes towards one way of thinking about the world. If we take the Bohmian interpretation then we are pushed in another direction. With the Bohmian version of things, there really ARE particles but guided by a non-observable, non-local, wave-like potential. It's a very different view of reality. The problem is, is that both interpretations can be shown to be mathematically equivalent. But which one is a closer fit to "reality"? No way of telling at the moment.
Of course there's the whole epistemic/ontic debate surrounding QM too - do the maths and symbols represent, to some extent, some underlying reality, or are they just a convenient technical tool for allowing us to predict answers to specific questions?
The problem with elephants is that they get bigger...and they are squashing us to death.
Very good description.
Thank you - I enjoyed writing it :-)
Excellent! We Germans have grown up with talking elephants, so we should understand: https://ibb.co/s2HWYZm
Ah, another gem. Thank you.
The puzzle to me is that, hypothetically, if one were a scientist studying viruses or the immune system (or if one were a medical doctor), wouldn't covid have presented the most exciting, intellectually stimulating opportunity of one's career? Shouldn't scientists be falling over themselves to design studies to test the hypotheses they (or people who call themselves scientists) have been treating as incontrovertible truths? Where is the curiosity and desire to innovate?
Curiosity and the desire to innovate is sometimes overshadowed by the necessity of maintaining a good publication record in high-impact journals.
Writing pro-narrative covid papers has been an exercise in plucking low-hanging fruit. Rapid publication times and often getting through the review process with a wink and a nod.
Getting a paper published with evidence against the narrative has been very difficult, and impossible in some cases.
Thank you!
Getting infected with SARS-Cov-2 in a quarantine hotel: "spooky action at a distance".
When you live in a corporatocracy truth can be the enemy of a successful sales campaign.
Re Polio vs Covid comparison, Polio vax testing was much more rigorous than testing for Covid jabs e.g. 1.84 million subjects in Salk Polio vax tests vs <0.05 million in Pfizer Covid jabs tests. https://cmw.news/index.php?t=1636437256
"Safe and effective" was used for that campaign as well which was stopped due to the large number of harms from it. In my view "Safe and effective" can be translated as "safe for us and effective for them". i.e. it kills without too many noticing.
That's really helpful, thank you.
Mr. Riggery Pokery, you write very well and are skilled at extracting very high signal to noise ratio information, with a touch of humor, from the digital cacophony with which we are all bombarded daily. Thank you for that. I am now a subscriber.
Thank you Brendan - very kind of you to say - and very much appreciated.
I've always tried to be a "big picture" person. The detailed analyses of the charts and stats ARE very important to get the foundations right - but I think we need a lot of easily-digestible tidbits to hammer things home to the average person who probably glazes over as soon as things get technical.
My PhD supervisor was an absolute master at this sort of thing - he could take a complex physics problem and figure out what the answer had to be - the guy had the most amazing "intuition" and overall grasp of things I've ever seen. He didn't do overly technical analyses, not because he couldn't, but because he didn't need to and could see his way to a solution without it.
I've tried to copy his approach for 30 years - but I have only a fraction of his talent, sadly.
It's passed on from Empire to Empire. From Constantinople to Istanbul to Bath. And now to GAVI.
I liked the image of the elephant tea party so much that I quoted it on my (German and mostly unread) blog.
Yes - can't disagree with much of what you write here.
The list is more in the nature of potential "facts" - but, despite the lack of absolute intellectual rigour in calling them hypotheses, I would argue that this is the lens through which we need to view the covid saga. For two reasons:
(a) it reminds us of the provisional nature
(b) it reminds us that these things need to be tested
As for the QM interpretation thing - it's really very interesting. If we take the standard Copenhagen interpretation it pushes towards one way of thinking about the world. If we take the Bohmian interpretation then we are pushed in another direction. With the Bohmian version of things, there really ARE particles but guided by a non-observable, non-local, wave-like potential. It's a very different view of reality. The problem is, is that both interpretations can be shown to be mathematically equivalent. But which one is a closer fit to "reality"? No way of telling at the moment.
Of course there's the whole epistemic/ontic debate surrounding QM too - do the maths and symbols represent, to some extent, some underlying reality, or are they just a convenient technical tool for allowing us to predict answers to specific questions?