America's “Fifth Column”

By Rich Kozlovich

In 1936 Emilio Mola, a Nationalist general during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil war referred to a fifth column at his disposal when it was clear there were only four columns of troops marching on Madrid.  What did it mean?  These were supporters who would undermine the enemy from within the city.  A population who had loyalties they hid from the group.  Individuals who supported efforts against the group they claimed to be a part of.  We would probably call them terrorists today, but most certainly traitors.

Until Trump was elected, and SCOTUS overturned Chevron with the Loper Bright decision, it became the duty of society to obediently ignore obvious, ignore what they could see going on before them, and provable realities.  Inculcated deep within the collective psyche of America we were expected to accepting every bit of horsepucky which the so-called experts, the media, leftist politicians, consultants, activists, and academicians heaped upon us. 

Now it's our duty and responsibility to stand up against things which are unproven or improvable.   To end support of things that are not true, while having the courage to stand up for those things which are true.

Academia is constant groveling before that “sacred cow”, known as government grant money, which has corrupted the universities, and we now know the media has been funded by the bureaucrats to support their continued tyranny over America. 

 

Think about this.  What if the only grant money available was for the purpose of proving there was no such thing as anthropogenic climate change?  I'll tell you what would happen, there'd be a dramatic shift in gears and the information coming out of these self same universities would change overnight.  On August 4th, 2006 an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal by Shirley S. Wang, reporting on a study that researched the potential of bias in science when it is tied to funding.  The finding? 

 

“Studies show that even small gifts create feelings of obligation, and that those feelings can influence subsequent decisions, so why do many researchers feel they're immune to conflicts of interest?” “Just as we fool ourselves into thinking we're more ethical, kind and generous than we are, so scientists can be blind to the very real possibility that their work is inappropriately influenced by financial ties. These psychological processes usually operate so subtly that people aren't aware that such ties can bias their judgment.”

 

Based on the tone of her article she was attacking the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, and her points were well made.  However, what about research that is tied to a regulatory agency such as EPA?  Are these researchers any less affected by this same kind of bias? 

The activists have no problem finding problems to whine about.  That's easy, especially when these problems are usually speculative.  You know the kind I am talking about.  So much of their whining is filled with Weasel-words and Phrases.

This could happen or that could happen or maybe something could possibly cause something, someday, somewhere by someone doing anything or something or maybe no one doing nothing or anything anywhere.   

Wow, get your mind around that!  Whining about speculative problems is one thing, fixing real problems is another.  We must remember that every action triggers the law of unintended consequences.  Some consequences are positive and some are negative.  Sometimes both.  

What happens when the fixes they impose on society leads to unintended negative or even vile consequences?  Usually people die.  Yet they go on their merry way as if this is normal or worse yet, acceptable.  DDT is a case in point.  Tens of millions have died unnecessarily over the last 52 years since the ban on DDT and yet they still fight to maintain this ban.  These are adherents of a neo-pagan secular religion.  "Ecotheologians, demanding 'death' on a crowded planet."

“Fifth Columnists” are heroes when they win.  If they lose, they are traitors, either way they undermine society and civilization while proclaiming to the world they are bringing enlightenment, promising utopia, but consistently delivering dystopia.  

We need to start shedding ourselves of these so-called in the media, academia, scientific advisors, government consultants, and bureaucrats, who don’t know whose side they are on.  Then again, maybe these “Fifth Columnists” really do know what side they’re on, and it's not the side of humanity.

 

Kakistocracy: We are Ruled by Charlatans, Knaves, and Fools. Scientific Integrity, Part VIII

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” -George Orwell

 By Rich Kozlovich

(Editor's Note:  This is Part VII in this ongoing series, and has been sitting forgotten in my draft file. I've updated and added a lot of material, and I have a lot more I didn't use.  Here is  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and Part VII.  You may wish to view my entire kakistocracy file, which will include the articles from this series.  I had intended to add more but it was a difficult and massive undertaking and turning into a job.   RK)

Let's start with this profound truth.  The Holy Grail of science is no longer truth. It's grant money, and when science becomes rich, it becomes politics.  

As we watch the world move along embracing irrational self serving social, scientific political, and cultural paradigms were seeing societies striving diligently to cancel their culture, corrupting science with politics, enforcing a thought crimes from a small  segment of society that's never satisfied, and never will be satisfied, destroying great institutions because their leadership is filled with self serving invertebrates.  All science now must be predicated on race, just as in Nazi Germany you couldn't separate mathematics from race, primarily Jewishness.  

Lysenkoism is now rampant in American science, and just as scientists under Stalin buckled under, so too it's happening in America. Scientists who are prominent and respected are afraid to speak out for fear not only of their careers, but their personal safety. 

Censorship is now the agenda in academia, Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist from the University of Chicago, was invited to deliver a lecture at MIT but outraged activists filled the social media with demands he be cancelled because he had the audacity to call for "equal opportunity, fairness, merit-based evaluation, and academic freedom".  MIT caved and in spite of their alleged policy on openness, they demonstrate a culture of cowardice. 

Britain has now become a totalitarian state.  Anyone who refuses to go along with the mutilation of young children for transgender purposes must be made to suffer, and they're being arrested.  If you're guilty of "wrong thinking", you will not be tolerated.   This is an injustice that's being acted on, and it's being enacted on in the real world, and from what can reasonably and historically be called America's mother country.

SCIENTIFIC CORRUPTION

How The Left Succeeded - A truly evil man named Noah Harari, a futurist advisor to the World Economic Forum (WEF), told the forum that they must become the majority and leave the rest behind. He was saying we don’t need regular folks. We don’t need carpenters, plumbers, hairdressers, mechanics, automobile workers, farmers, and ranchers. They are all lesser lights. What we want to accomplish on this planet is all for us, Harari was saying.

For the WEF and other related organizations, this statement was acknowledging the globalist elites’ desire to activate Eugenics. It was introduced in the latter part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century in Russia, where all science that did not fit their desired narrative was rejected. In the end, it set back Russia for decades. It is happening here in the US and will likely have the same result setting our nation back decades if we don’t stop it. Deciding that emissions of carbon dioxide are bad with no science to support it is an example of Eugenics which disregards all science it does not agree with.......

 Corrupted science: The Left’s Machiavellian bludgeon - By Michael J. Maxwell November 25, 2021- Science is a noble human endeavor with the goal of discovering, examining, testing, explaining, harnessing, and preserving physical nature for the benefit and advancement of humankind.  Moreover, the virtuous pursuits of science serve to augment our understanding of the previously unknown.  In its purest application, science is never truly settled.  Science is not suited to reach concrete conclusions on the how, when, where, or why of the cosmic mysteries of the material universe, its creation, or its Creator.  For science, in its historically accepted proper application, is not based on conjecture alone.  Scientific theories must be proven factually, through exhaustive experimentation and testing, to become relevant, applied, and useful.  The publishing of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity in 1916 was followed by extraordinarily frustrating, peer-generated attacks on his groundbreaking science. A booklet was published in 1931 titled A Hundred Authors Against Einstein, featuring many ill-informed contributions. In total, 121 authors are identified as opponents to Einstein’s vaunted Theory of Relatively........

 Academic Ideologues Are Corrupting STEM. The Silent Liberal Majority Must Fight Back (quillette.com) Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman 18 Dec 2021 - Earlier this year, I (Anna) did something that my friends feared I would come to regret: I publicly spoke out against the intrusion of illiberal thought into science and education, with a letter entitled, The Peril of Politicizing Science, published on June 10th in The Journal of Physical Chemistry. In that letter, I drew on my own early life in the USSR, where communist ideology permeated all aspects of life, and survival required strict adherence to the party line and enthusiastic displays of ideologically proper behavior.  I noted that certain names and ideas are now forbidden within academia for ideological reasons, just as had been the case in my youth. My own home town of Yuzovka, I noted, was called Trotsk (after Leon Trotsky), then renamed Stalino after Trotsky was purged, then Donetsk when Stalin was posthumously canceled by Khrushchev. ............

Ten (10) Ways Science is Being Attacked - Jon Parmentola, commented on John Droz Jr.’s Substack site - I allege that if you look at those in the administrative structure of the National Academies, they are dominated by humanities majors. The same is true of universities and colleges. The assault on science comes from the humanities. I saw it when I was a professor. Those in the humanities were jealous because those in STEM could buy time off teaching through grants to do research. The humanities were subordinate to those in STEM. That is not true anymore.

You can trace this contempt for science to the poet William Blake, who referred to Newton’s discoveries as Newton’s sleep. The assault on the Constitution has to do with its formulation more along the lines of a scientific theory of managing governance and social behavior. It is also evident in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident……. It is formulated according to postulates like Euclid's plane geometry.

It's no accident since Jefferson was a scientist of sorts. For those in the humanities there is no objective truth or cause and effect. Their fields of research are riddled with storytelling and nonsense. That is what we are fighting. 83% of college/university graduates major in the humanities. They fundamentally practice pseudo-science by using a narrative to dismiss facts that contradict their narrative. It's the exact opposite of the scientific method......

Science Needs a New Paradigm - By Robert Arvay November 27, 2017 - Science and politics used to be very separate institutions. Where they did overlap, science was nonpartisan. The role of scientists was to provide objective evidence -- and dispassionate, nonpolitical interpretations of that evidence. Indeed, one rarely if ever could detect the political leanings of any particular scientist. 

Also, science and religion used to get along, at least for the most part. Today, that has changed, and the results include significant dangers for society. For example, the topic of climate change has produced the myth of “settled science.” Science is never settled. While we all may agree that the climate does change, there is an anti-capitalist agenda behind the claims of many scientists -- that we must radically reduce our standards of living to prevent climate catastrophe. Politics and ideology, not science, promote that so-called scientific view...........

TRANSGENDERISM

Scientists Shocked to Discover That Male and Female Athletes are Different! Brian C. Joondeph, M.D. A man is a man, and a woman is a woman. Claiming otherwise is magical thinking, fine for one to indulge personally, but not at an athletic, societal, or cultural level. It was once a commonsense belief and universal truth that men and women, boys and girls, are different, especially in the realm of athletics. With rare exceptions, men and women compete in their own categories, from high school level through college to the Olympic games and professional sports. Mixed competitions place women and men on the same team, such as mixed doubles in tennis, or dancing, either in the ballroom, or on ice. Equestrian sports are an exception, but the fact that a horse is a major part of the sport reduces the sex difference between competitors. ......

The leading ‘scientific’ agency behind so-called transgenderism allegedly knew its ‘treatments’ could be dangerous and ineffective -  March 6, 2024 by Andrea Widburg - Because WPATH has been the recognized authority for “trans” care in America and Europe, these revelations could bring down the once-powerful organization. On Monday, Michael Shellenberger’s organization, Environmental Progress (“EP”), published a report that may end the trans movement. It obtained what it says are leaked files from WPATH—the World Professional Association of Transgender Health—which has set the standard of so-called “care” for so-called “transgenderism” across America. These files reveal that the people behind WPATH were allegedly aware of evidence showing that their recommendations were unhelpful and dangerous......

Lack of Consent, Liver Cancer, Reduced Sexual Function: Internal Docs Reveal Experimental Nature of “Gender-Affirming Care” - By Tyler O'Neil, Daily Signal Mar. 5, 2024 - Doctors at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health repeatedly struggled with various side effects of what they call “gender-affirming care,” including cancer in teens, reduced sexual function, and the lack of informed consent for procedures with lifelong impacts, newly unearthed documents reveal. WPATH, a controversial organization that transgender advocates and health agencies use to justify “transgender” medical interventions, frames itself as the leading expert organization on medical care for people who identify as transgender. It has faced criticism for advocating experimental practices that ignore serious concerns about informed consent and long-term side effects.....The practice of sexually ‘transitioning’ children will be remembered as one of the “greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine,” a report commissioned by French senators stated......  

 

Bombshell Report: Trans ‘Treatments’ for Children One of ‘Greatest Ethical Scandals in Medical History’ -  The practice of sexually ‘transitioning’ children will be remembered as one of the “greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine,” a report commissioned by French senators stated. A landmark report produced at the behest of the centre-right Les Républicains in the French Senate found that the medical industry embarked upon the practice of giving children life-altering transgender treatments with little evidence of its effectiveness while ignoring the side effects. The report found that while parents were often pressured by doctors to put their children on puberty-blocking drugs to prevent suicide, there is little proof that this course of action has any better outcomes for the child........  

 

Transgender ‘affirmation’ has long-term consequences, Oklahoma City psychiatrist says “Affirming” a child’s belief that he or she is actually the opposite gender puts those children on a fast-track to medical interventions that have severe, negative side effects that cause that child to be a patient for the rest of their lives, according to a local expert.  And in most cases the gender distress expressed by children is often resolved within a few years when the child is not subjected to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

“Every single patient deserves to be treated with respect, with dignity, with empathy, with compassion, and they deserve excellent medical care,” said Lauren Schwartz, a board-certified psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Oklahoma City. “That’s not what’s going on here.”......... “social affirmation,” the practice of calling a child by opposite-sex pronouns or allowing the child to dress as a member of the opposite sex, “is not harmless.”

“Parents think that affirming their child is kind and loving. That’s what they’re told......But it’s not kind of loving to validate an untruth........That psychological pressure leads to further actions with permanent physical and mental consequences.......allowing a child to receive “puberty blockers” in response to gender dysphoria can fuel an iatrogenic effect in which an alleged response to a condition is actually responsible for creating or worsening the condition. Children who feel they don’t fit in truly don’t fit in with their peers after use of puberty blockers......

........ some medical websites claim that puberty blockers simply “pause puberty to give children time to think,” are fully reversible, harmless, safe, effective, and lifesaving.......“None of these things are accurate,”......  puberty blockers have significant side effects that are not fully reversible. Those side effects include damage to the hypothalamus, which regulates body and brain development, communication between hormones and the nervous system, sleep-wake cycles, temperature regulation, fluid balance, heart rate, hunger, and reproduction.  “These are not small things that we are impacting,”

The drugs used as puberty blockers have never received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval as treatments for gender dysphoria.....The side effects caused by puberty blockers also include diminished bone density, early-onset osteoporosis, chronic bone pain and fractures (which does not cease even when the use of puberty blockers is halted), increased risk of infertility, permanent negative impacts on adult sexual function, and cognitive impairment.  “It does impact IQ,”.........adding that the full cognitive impact of puberty blockers remains unknown.

Male patients who are given female hormones have increased risk of blood clots, tumors of the pituitary gland, strokes, high cholesterol, and irreversible infertility. Female patients who take male hormones experience increased red-blood cells (which negatively impacts the heart and cardiovascular system); severe liver dysfunction; heart attacks; depression; hypertension; breast, cervical, and uterine cancers; and irreversible infertility.

“They are going to be a patient for life,” ....... “If you arrest puberty and you put someone on cross-sex hormones and you remove their organs that produce their own biological hormones, they’re going to have to take hormones for the rest of their life.”......

CLIMATE

‘Climate fatigue’ sabotages the ‘net zero’ agenda - July 8, 2024 by Olivia Murray -A win is a win. Here’s this, from one of my favorite bloggers, and shared with me by one of AT’s dearest friends: Climate Fatigue strikes in Ireland: Most people don’t believe it harms them and have no plans to be vegetarian or give up their cars Yet another survey shows most people know what to say when asked banal questions of climate dogma — ‘Yes they are ‘very worried’. But more than half the population don’t believe climate change is going to harm them and they have ‘no intention’ of giving up meat, or their cars or their pets......

 

‘They’ shrieked about ‘global warming’ — but now they admit we were ‘accidentally cooling’ - July 8, 2024 by Jack Hellner - Is there anything less trustworthy or credible than government-promoted science?  When it comes to climate science, basically, researchers, mainstream media outlets, the UN, and the Democrats simply make things up as they go along to fit the narrative.  When the earth didn’t warm up as much as they predicted, they changed the terminology from global warming to climate change. When hundreds of dire predictions never came true, and they had no scientific data to support their policies to destroy industries and our quality and way of life, they just made things up, just like they did with COVID. Now, take a look at this, from The Washington Post, via Yahoo News: 

 

Protesters Who Conspired to Block Roads Get 4 Years in Prison A good start -  July 19, 2024 by Daniel Greenfield - The good news is that at least some of the radicals plotting to block roads are facing consequences. The bad news is that it’s happening in the UK, not in America, where there are still light gentle slaps on wrists being dispensed by leftists to their fellow leftists who block roads, vandalize museums, and terrorize people.....

Biden sending $120 million to tribes for climate change war - The Biden administration announced Thursday that it is giving Native American tribes across the country a total of $120 million to fight climate change. The Department of the Interior (DOI) is disseminating the money, which will be split into 146 different awards to support projects that enhance "climate resilience" in tribal communities. The funding is inspired in part by the administration's view that Native American populations are among the least able to prepare or recover from climate change's impacts.

 

Climate Change and a science we can trust -  The American left occasionally professes to have some investment in Christianity, but those are words, and as the Scripture teaches, by their fruits shall you know them. By their words, actions and boondoggles, the inevitable conclusion is their one, true faith is political power, and one of its principle tenets is “climate change.” Their revealed faith used to be known as “global warming,” but all of a sudden, the global stopped warming, and hasn’t warmed for some two decades. Embarrassing. Thus, the holy crusade was rebranded “climate change,” which has the advantage of being at least marginally true. The climate, like the weather, changes. Unfortunately, actual science reveals past climate hasn’t changed as they’ve claimed, so they simply ignore that science and make their own......

The results are in: How much will wind energy cost this one state’s consumers?"> - August 26, 2024 by Olivia Murray - About four times as much, with an additional three billion in taxpayer dollars—some might call this “price-gouging.”On Friday, The Wall Street Journal published an article by Gordon Hughes that (somewhat rhetorically) asked this titular question: “Why Is New York Paying So Much for Wind Power?” Hughes called the reader’s attention to the revelation that the state of New York had entered into a contract with two wind energy companies, an agreement that will quadruple the cost of energy for the consumer—and that’s including three billion in taxpayer dollars to offset the final price per megawatt-hour—which is “far above the break-even cost of generating electricity.” Some might call this… “price-gouging” and “corporate greed.” (Just not the progressive Democrats sanctioning seemingly-endless corrupt business schemes in the “green energy” sector with the public’s pocketbook and the power of the pen.) Mike Shedlock at MishTalk breaks it down here:.....

 

MEDICINE 

 

The ‘Can We?’ and the ‘Should We?’ of Science- The remarkable journey of the COVID-19 virus — from bat caves in Laos to freezers in Wuhan, through test tubes and gene-editing machines and “humanized mice,” and finally out into the rest of the world and through your lungs and mine, often two or three or four times by now — has made a lot of people think long and hard about whether they can trust scientists, as a whole, to do the right thing.  As well it should have.  Defenders of the status quo are quick to admonish the plebs for not trusting the experts, as they point to the fact that most professional virologists are in favor of keeping gain-of-function research going.  How can you, a pleb, act as though you know more about virology than the average virologist?.....

 

Truth or Consequences

A powerful message is hidden in the Mann v Steyn miscarriage of justice

John Droz jr. Aug 12, 2024 @ Critically Thinking About Select Societal Issues

I was going to write about this before, but Life repeatedly intervened.

A while back I saw this thoughtful commentary about the troubling Mann v Steyn trial, posted by a person who does not identify as right-leaning: Helping Mann be a Mensch: Have Scientific Institutions (And the Rest of Us) Let Him Down?

The author made some fine points, like: scientists should be able to have civilized discussions with people who disagree with them. That said, her good commentary missed two key facts about what is currently societally going on.

Real Science is all about better understanding the TRUTHS of our existence.

The point she did not make is that people like Mann have migrated from Real Science to Political Science — which instead is all about making POLICIES.

When scientists disagree about Truths, they can go back and look at what the evidence says. Whoever makes the stronger evidentiary argument wins…

On the other hand, when scientists disagree about Policies, the proponents’ response is quite different: appeal to authority (consensus, etc.). The evidence (aka Truth) is a minor player when it comes to political Policies.

This situation is made even worse by the profound changes in our value system. Through the last several centuries we relied on a Judeo-Christian set of moral standards (like the Ten Commandments). That reinforced the time-honored tradition of scientists constructively debating with other scientists about the evidence.

Maybe one scientist concluded that the other missed the point. Maybe one thought the other was misinformed. In any case, they both tried to come up with stronger, honest evidence — or some ally who could present the evidence in a better way.

No one was ever sued about such disagreements!

However, Relativism has simultaneously blossomed (not accidentally!) along with the switch from Real Science to political science. This philosophy states that there is no such thing as Truth (only relative, personal truths). These new value standards include such problematic memes as the end justifies the means.

That is exactly how most climate alarmists act: scorched earth policy against anyone who has the temerity to question their political policies to "save the world from pending extinction." Since they have contrived a cataclysmic “end,” that grants them the “right” to justify almost anything, including blatant lies.

As I was wrapping up my commentary, I happened to see this:

Good stuff! Hopefully, it should be clear that there are exceptionally adverse consequences when we allow Relativism to replace Judeo-Christian standards, and political science to replace Real Science.

---

Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time - but why would you?

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We are headed for a dark age in science

December 6, 2022 By Robert Arvay

Science has had a long and difficult path to its success, and to its well deserved respect over its main competitors: superstition and falsehood.  Arguably, in 1945, that respect reached its zenith, with the detonation of the nuclear weapons that are credited with ending World War 2.  Science-based technology literally exploded onto the public consciousness.  No one could argue with its awesome demonstration of power.  Nor could anyone doubt that the predictions of scientists, no matter how fantastic, must eventually come true.  Why, by 1966, we will all have flying cars!

Of course, we did not.  That is certainly forgivable, but scientific technology has fallen short of public expectations in more ways than just that.  Some years ago, an eminent physicist published a commentary lamenting the transformation of science from an evidence-based endeavor into a proposal-based activity — a guessing game.  Instead of observation, hypothesis, and experiment, physics seemed to have moved its laboratories to the blackboard.  We are all familiar with the confusing maze of cryptic, Greco-Arabic symbols that describe for us such unproved pronouncements as the existence of multiple universes, subatomic strings, and "dark" physics, for none of which there is direct physical evidence.  Yet these educated guesses enjoy a degree of acceptance rivaling that of confirmed experimental results, blurring the line between scientific fact and speculative conjecture.........To Read More....

Moral Fashions and the Corruption of Science

Author:  John A.  Posted by Rich Kozlovich   

Editor's Note:  Originally published July 26, 2009 @ Paradigms and Demographics, I asked John A. for his last name in order to properly credit this commentary, but he commented that he keeps his “surname off the Internet."  John apparently is a history buff and categorizes himself as a “classical liberal”. 

Those among us who are history buffs will find that statement insightful. For those who aren’t, I have linked the history of “Classical Liberalism” in the article. It isn’t what you think. I have also linked a number of names and events that may not be commonly known to most people in order to give everyone the true flavor of what John is saying. 

I would also like to thank him for allowing me to reprint what originally was an e-mail that appeared in the blog Greenie Watch. 

I didn't recheck all the links, so I hope they all still work. RK

The history of science is rife with examples of political, social and moral fashions which not simply influence, but pervert the scientific method and corrupt the conduct of scientists. Einstein faced off the political and moral fashions of Nazism and eugenics but plenty of his colleagues happily incorporated those twin systems into their own research. Eugenics also laid the foundations for the moral crusade against alcohol in early 20th Century America which was again a supposedly scientific assessment delivered as a moral panic which must be addressed immediately lest America fall into a deep pit of moral degeneration.

The example of Trofim Lysenko and the political outlawing of Mendelian genetics in Stalinist Russia is a particularly scary example of a political fashion given to be a moral and political imperative by a dangerously unstable man who became President of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The parallels with the modern global warming scare are obvious.

Another example would be neo-Malthusianism as popularized in the 20th Century repeatedly by Paul Erlich first in the 1960s and more recently by the scarily named "Optimum Population Trust" (and here)which includes such luminaries as Sir David Attenborough calling for mandatory limits on family size to prevent near future overpopulation and mass starvation. Once again, a supposed scientific analysis is communicated as a moral imperative.  John Holdren, now President Obama's Climate Czar, co-wrote several books with Paul Erlich in the 1970s at least one of which argued for forced abortions, forced adoptions of illegitimate children or from mothers "who contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children" and the introduction of chemicals into water and food that rendered people sterile. All of this to forestall a crisis of overpopulation by the year 2000!

Carl Sagan, Erlich and others began and propagated the Nuclear Winter story of the 1980s, together with scary scenarios about likely darkening of the skies due to dust from burning cities rising into the stratosphere and blocking out the Sun. All with the aid of computer models with extremely rubbery parameters and dubious simplifications. A moral imperative against nuclear weapons? You betcha. Even Richard Feynman, iconoclast as he was, while averring that the underlying theory was nonsense, could not raise his voice too loud lest people think he was in favour of nuclear proliferation. Moral panics do that to the best of scientists.

There are lots more examples, but you get the idea. These scientific fashions all in their own time held great sway in academia and mainstream media. They divided scientists into those who were credible and those who were so morally and intellectually corrupt as to actually oppose these ideas.

Modern environmentalism has most, if not all of the above ideas incorporated into the unholy fusion of science and Marxist political theory now called "ecology", but is really a manifestation of what David Henderson memorably called "Global Salvationism".

The most interesting thing about all of this is that I, as a classical liberal, can find common cause with people from a wide spectrum of political and philosophical beliefs that the lessons of history are that moral fashions in science are endemic, cyclical and a constant menace to the real business of scientists to understand how the Universe works.

Scientists don't live in a fashion-free vacuum. They dress themselves in the fashions of the day, read the latest scare stories of the day, follow the latest celebrity soap operas of the day and most of all abide by rules to not upset the funding apple-cart from which their work is done, whatever their personal and moral qualms, at least until retirement.

Viewpoint: ‘Health impact of chemicals doubled in last 5 years’? Gullible media misreporting flawed studies mislead the public

Geoffrey Kabat | August 19, 2020

This article or excerpt is included in the GLP’s daily curated selection of ideologically diverse news, opinion and analysis of biotechnology innovation.  Plastics and pesticides: Health impacts of synthetic chemicals in US products doubled in last 5 years, study finds,” a July 22 CNN headline announced to the world. Referring to a paper recently published in the journal Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, the media outlet told its readers in no uncertain terms what’s at stake:

The proof is piling up: Many synthetic chemicals can harm your health and that of your children. Evidence has doubled in the last five years about the negative impact on our health of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in plastics, pesticides, flame retardants and other merchandise….

“It’s a global problem,” the paper’s senior author told CNN. “These are chemicals used in consumer products all across the world.”...............

In fact, the astounding claim that the “health impact of synthetic chemicals in US products” has doubled in the space of five years is in no way supported by the Lancet analysis. The media coverage of the paper, and indeed the paper itself, are part of a decades-long trend among some scientists and activists to amplify the risk of exposure to chemicals in consumer products far beyond what can be justified by the evidence..............

A key fact that the review authors failed to acknowledge anywhere in their paper is that most of the exposures reported in the studies they examined add up to trace amounts of the various compounds. That is, they can be detected with sophisticated analytical techniques but are below the level where they are likely to cause any harm.  This poses a problem for epidemiologic studies..........While focusing on trace chemical residues, studies investigating EDCs often fail to account for the many lifestyle factors that have documented health effects and are likely to dwarf the possible impacts of EDCs................

This conclusion deserves careful scrutiny for many reasons, the most important being that the Lancet review and the new JAMA Network Open study failed to acknowledge that BPA has been the subject of extensive, high-caliber research over the past two decades. This research has demonstrated that human exposure to BPA is extremely low and that the compound is efficiently metabolized and excreted in urine, even in infants. Furthermore, BPA’s estrogenic potency is orders of magnitude lower than that of the natural hormone estradiol.

In their introduction, the authors of the Lancet paper referred to DDT, an insecticide whose indiscriminate use following World War II gave rise to the environmental movement in the 1960s. But the DDT experience also provides a cautionary tale, which they failed to mention.
In 1993 an early epidemiologic study reported that, compared to women with relatively low blood levels of a DDT metabolite, women with relatively high levels had a three-fold increased risk of developing breast cancer. The results were widely publicized and generated intense concern among women. However, when a large number of further studies were done, their results consistently failed to support the existence of an association............To Read More....

When Experts Make Mistakes: 3 Ways to Spot Junk in Science Journals

By Cameron English — October 11, 2019

The popular press regularly botches its science reporting. Not a week goes by without an exaggerated headline about the so-called “vaping epidemic” or a news story erroneously warning that an innocuous pesticide causes cancer.

Fact checking the media's sloppy science journalism is one of my favorite pastimes, but it also prompts an important question: why does the press bungle its science coverage so frequently? Sometimes it's because reporters are gullible, ideological, or have no particular interest in or knowledge of the topic they're covering. But another serious problem is that universities, science journals, and individual experts often get things wrong. The scientific community knows this all too well, as cancer epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat recently explained:

[T]he public and journalists – the consumers of information about health – need to be aware of something that researchers know well – there is no [study] that is so dreadful that it cannot be published somewhere.

If you're a consumer of science news, or just a curious person looking for information on nutrition or medicine, you have to learn how to spot junk science in sources that are typically reliable and evaluate claims made by people who are usually trustworthy. So here are a few guidelines that have helped me separate sound research from misinformation, as both a science writer and a consumer..............To Read More...

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The Truth About Global Warming

Glaciers are Outliving the Environmentalist Who Predicted Their Doom

Won’t someone save the environmentalists?
 

June 12, 2019 Daniel Greenfield 

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

"This August I visited Glacier National Park in Montana," Gianna Kelly, the founder of Climb for Conservation, wrote in the Huffington Post. "I am still stunned to have learned the following fact:  by 2020, no glaciers will exist in Glacier National Park."

Kelly, who had worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, wrote that back in the first year of the Obama administration. It might stun her more to learn that Obama is out of the White House and that the glaciers of Glacier National Park are still there and waiting to be visited.
Throughout the Obama era, visitors to Glacier National Park were frequently harangued with false claims that the glaciers would all be gone in a decade. These warnings decorated dioramas and trash cans even as the hysterical propaganda become more ridiculous with every passing year.

The snow lay heavy on Logan Pass, when I arrived in July 2017. Visitors stomped through thick snow to reach the Hidden Lake Overlook. The alpine meadows of the Hanging Gardens didn’t live up to their name. Instead of the wildflowers that most visitors expected, there were nearly endless fields of white. Mountain goats, unaware that they were threatened by the supposed rising temperatures that were warming Glacier’s glaciers into extinction, eyed us suspiciously as we tried not to slip on the ice.

Sperry Glacier, a frequent target for environmentalist doommongers, was still there in the distance........To Read More....

Chemistry Papers Are Retracted Mostly Due to Plagiarism, Data Manipulation

By Alex Berezow — May 28, 2019 @ American Council on Science and Health

Retractions in science are a fact of life. Sometimes, the published literature is wrong, and when it is discovered, the paper is often stricken from the scientific record.

We would like to believe that most retractions are due to honest errors, for example, accidentally mixing up control and experimental groups. We don't want to believe that most retractions are for nefarious reasons, like fraud.

Unfortunately, new research by François-Xavier Coudert published in the journal Chemistry of Materials does not reveal happy data. Dr. Coudert found 331 papers in the fields of chemistry, materials science, and chemical engineering that were retracted in 2017 and 2018. The overall retraction rate (about 3 per 10,000) is low, which is good news, but the reasons for the retractions were disheartening.

Dr. Coudert learned that 229 of the 331 papers (69%) were retracted for plagiarism and "data manipulation," which, more often than not, is a nice way of saying "fraud." (See chart.) Only 54 of the papers (16%) were retracted due to "honest errors."

Cheater, Cheater, Pumpkin Eater

Obviously, this is not good news, but there could be another explanation for the data: Systematic bias in which papers are retracted.

Plagiarism is relatively easy to catch. If somebody copies and pastes entire tracts of text, often somebody will notice. (Besides, we now have software that screens for plagiarism.) Fabricated data is much harder to catch, but an eagle-eyed scientist might notice irregularities with digital images that may indicate manipulation or data that looks "too good to be true." If detected, plagiarism and data manipulation are slam-dunk reasons to retract a paper.

That isn't necessarily the case for "honest errors" for two reasons. First, honest errors are exceedingly difficult to catch. Second, if scientists believe that the authors of another paper committed an error, they often address it by performing a better experiment and/or publishing a response. In this way, the scientific record is self-correcting, and there isn't as compelling a reason to retract a paper just because something in it is wrong. In this way, a systematic bias in retractions may be responsible for Dr. Coudert's findings.

If this analysis is correct, the good news is that fraud is still likely a minor problem. The bad news, however, is that there are a lot of honest errors out there in the published record which have yet to be detected.

Source: François-Xavier Coudert. "Correcting the Scientific Record: Retraction Practices in Chemistry and Materials." Chem. Mater. 31(10): 3593-3598. Publication Date: May 28, 2019 DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.9b00897
 

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scientific journals

Retraction

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Fake climate science and scientists

Alarmists game the system to enrich and empower themselves, and hurt everyone else

Paul Driessen

The multi-colored placard in front of a $2-million home in North Center Chicago proudly proclaimed, “In this house we believe: No human is illegal” – and “Science is real” (plus a few other liberal mantras).

I knew right away where the owners stood on climate change, and other hot-button political issues. They would likely tolerate no dissension or debate on “settled” climate science or any of the other topics.

But they have it exactly backward on the science issue. Real science is not belief – or consensus, 97% or otherwise. Real science constantly asks questions, expresses skepticism, reexamines hypotheses and evidence. If debate, skepticism and empirical evidence are prohibited – it’s pseudo-science, at best.

Real science – and real scientists – seek to understand natural phenomena and processes. They pose hypotheses that they think best explain what they have witnessed, then test them against actual evidence, observations and experimental data. If the hypotheses (and predictions based on them) are borne out by their subsequent findings, the hypotheses become theories, rules, laws of nature – at least until someone finds new evidence that pokes holes in their assessments, or devises better explanations.

Real science does not involve simply declaring that you “believe” something, It’s not immutable doctrine. It doesn’t claim “science is real” – or demand that a particular scientific explanation be carved in stone. Earth-centric concepts gave way to a sun-centered solar system. Miasma disease beliefs surrendered to the germ theory. The certainty that continents are locked in place was replaced by plate tectonics (and the realization that you can’t stop continental drift, any more than you stop climate change).

Real scientists often employ computers to analyze data more quickly and accurately, depict or model complex natural systems, or forecast future events or conditions. But they test their models against real-world evidence. If the models, observations and predictions don’t match up, real scientists modify or discard the models, and the hypotheses behind them. They engage in robust discussion and debate.

They don’t let models or hypotheses become substitutes for real-world evidence and observations. They don’t alter or “homogenize” raw or historic data to make it look like the models actually work. They don’t hide their data and computer algorithms (AlGoreRythms?), restrict peer review to closed circles of like-minded colleagues who protect one another’s reputations and funding, claim “the debate is over,” or try to silence anyone who dares to ask inconvenient questions or find fault with their claims and models. They don’t concoct hockey stick temperature graphs that can be replicated by plugging in random numbers.

In the realm contemplated by the Chicago yard sign, we ought to be doing all we can to understand Earth’s highly complex, largely chaotic, frequently changing climate system – all we can to figure out how the sun and other powerful forces interact with each other. Only in that way can we accurately predict future climate changes, prepare for them, and not waste money and resources chasing goblins.

But instead, we have people in white lab coats masquerading as real scientists. They’re doing what I just explained true scientists don’t do. They also ignore fluctuations in solar energy output and numerous other powerful, interconnected natural forces that have driven climate change throughout Earth’s history. They look only (or 97% of the time) at carbon dioxide as the principle or sole driving force behind current and future climate changes – and blame every weather event, fire and walrus death on manmade CO2.

Even worse, they let their biases drive their research and use their pseudo-science to justify demands that we eliminate all fossil fuel use, and all carbon dioxide and methane emissions, by little more than a decade from now. Otherwise, they claim, we will bring unprecedented cataclysms to people and planet.

Not surprisingly, their bad behavior is applauded, funded and employed by politicians, environmentalists, journalists, celebrities, corporate executives, billionaires and others who have their own axes to grind, their own egos to inflate – and their intense desire to profit from climate alarmism and pseudo-science.

Worst of all, while they get rich and famous, their immoral actions impoverish billions and kill millions, by depriving them of the affordable, reliable fossil fuel energy that powers modern societies.

And still these slippery characters endlessly repeat the tired trope that they “believe in science” – and anyone who doesn’t agree to “keep fossil fuels in the ground” to stop climate change is a “science denier.”

When these folks and the yard sign crowd brandish the term “science,” political analyst Robert Tracinski suggests, it is primarily to “provide a badge of tribal identity” – while ironically demonstrating that they have no real understanding of or interest in “the guiding principles of actual science.”

Genuine climate scientist (and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology) Dr. Judith Curry echoes Tracinski. Politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren use “science” as a way of “declaring belief in a proposition which is outside their knowledge and which they do not understand…. The purpose of the trope is to bypass any meaningful discussion of these separate questions, rolling them all into one package deal – and one political party ticket,” she explains.

The ultimate purpose of all this, of course, is to silence the dissenting voices of evidence- and reality-based climate science, block creation of a Presidential Committee on Climate Science, and ensure that the only debate is over which actions to take first to end fossil fuel use … and upend modern economies.

The last thing fake/alarmist climate scientists want is a full-throated debate with real climate scientists – a debate that forces them to defend their doomsday assertions, methodologies, data manipulation … and claims that solar and other powerful natural forces are minuscule or irrelevant compared to manmade carbon dioxide that constitutes less that 0.02% of Earth’s atmosphere (natural CO2 adds another 0.02%).

Thankfully, there are many reasons for hope. For recognizing that we do not face a climate crisis, much less threats to our very existence. For realizing there is no need to subject ourselves to punitive carbon taxes or the misery, poverty, deprivation, disease and death that banning fossil fuels would cause.

Between the peak of the great global cooling scare in 1975 until around 1998, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and temperatures did rise in rough conjunction. But then temperatures mostly flat-lined, while CO2 levels kept climbing. Now actual average global temperatures are already 1 degree F below the Garbage In-Garbage Out computer model predictions. Other alarmist forecasts are also out of touch with reality.

Instead of fearing rising CO2, we should thank it for making crop, forest and grassland plants grow faster and better, benefitting nature and humanity – especially in conjunction with slightly warmer temperatures that extend growing seasons, expand arable land and increase crop production.

The rate of sea level rise has not changed for over a century – and much of what alarmists attribute to climate change and rising seas is actually due to land subsidence and other factors.

Weather is not becoming more extreme. In fact, Harvey was the first Category 3-5 hurricane to make US landfall in a record 12 years – and the number of violent F3 to F5 tornadoes has fallen from an average of 56 per year from 1950 to 1985 to only 34 per year since then.

Human ingenuity and adaptability have enabled humans to survive and thrive in all sorts of climates, even during our far more primitive past. Allowed to use our brains, fossil fuels and technologies, we will deal just fine with whatever climate changes might confront us in the future. (Of course, another nature-driven Pleistocene-style glacier pulling 400 feet of water out of our oceans and crushing Northern Hemisphere forests and cities under mile-high walls of ice truly would be an existential threat to life as we know it.)  

So if NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio and other egotistical grand-standing politicians and fake climate scientists want to ban fossil fuels, glass-and-steel buildings, cows and even hotdogs – in the name of preventing “dangerous manmade climate change” – let them impose their schemes on themselves and their own families. The rest of us are tired of being made guinea pigs in their fake-science experiments.