Why people don't trust experts anymore,

Part 872.  Because some of them are lying bastards with an agenda that does not involve the truth.

It's Monday, and the Stalin wannabes in (fG)Britain are hard at work

Meanwhile, Ulstermen and Provos in Ireland are working together to tell the .gov to go to hell, and their media is going all it call to aid the .gov in calling the proper people names.


Meanwhile, "We must prevent a Super El Nino, let's screw with the atmosphere to prevent it!" say idiots.
According to computer simulations, this could keep global warming within safe levels and dramatically cut the severity and length of marine heatwaves.

However, this extreme geoengineering technique is highly controversial, and even the researchers aren't sure what the consequences would be.

Co–author Professor Phoebe Zarnetske, of Michigan State University, warns: 'There's very little known about the ecological impacts.'
Gee, ya think MAYBE?


"You can't have people over to your house to pray without a permit.  Oh, and if you get the permit it's no longer your house and you can't live there."
I'll take 'Politicians who need horsewhipping' for a thousand, Alex.

Oh yes, it snowed

Not a horrible amount thus far, but it'll definitely be fun getting to work, and take longer.

So, while I'm doing that,

Michael Mann gets ass handed to him in court.  And it's about damn time.


Sounds like someone's messing with illegal oil shipments.

Speaking of the weather, it says 'snow showers' today with a couple of inches possible.  Ok.
Tonight  'snow showers' with 3-7 inches possible.  Some showers, huh?
Tomorrow: 'snow showers then chance of snow showers', 2-4 inches possible.  Again, pretty heavy showers.
You ever get the feeling of the forecast being "We don't know, just guess"?

The stuff above I wrote this morning, and forgot to load before I left.  Now home:
Yes, more snow fell, but no freezing rain.  Snow can be a pain, frankly freezing rain can scare hell out of me.  It can lead to days with no power and other stuff.  Some places are getting enough of that, I hate to think about it.

As is, they're saying several more inches of snow are possible here tonight and tomorrow, and I've been informed not to come to work tomorrow.  It got busier than I expected(it's Oklahoma, people will go through a lot to get to the range or to buy something), but if it's this busy tomorrow I'll be flat amazed.  And right now I'll be quite glad to forego those hours of pay.

And yes, the shoulders are getting better.  The right's just a bit sore depending on what I do, the left is still a pain to do a number of things, but it is improving.  The back from the pulled muscle is a lot better.  I think the pressure changes as well as the cold are bothering the shoulders, but I'll get through it.*


*Barring some other graceful maneuvers, at least.

Be it remembered that the EffingBI laboratories have been caught

being incorrect- or just plain lying- about their results, and their main reaction was to try and cover it up.  To the point of not notifying the lawyers of possible innocent people that the evidence against them was bullcrap.

I will note that daughter was once studying forensics, and became greatly discouraged over time as she found how many of the "We can tell you the Truth!" proclamations were, at best, questionable.

I'm reminded of one of the lawyers who handed the FBI labs ass  to them wondering why more people, faced with what his client had been, did not demand the evidence be evaluated by someone other than the FBI.  Because it turns out that's a very good thing to do.

There are multiple countries where officials involved in the Coronavirus crap

belong in jail.  For a start.  For instance,
For five years, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has assumed that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory. The BND classifies the laboratory theory as "probable" and is "80 to 95 percent" certain. Since then, the German government has kept secret the BND's findings that the virus originated in the biolab in Wuhan . This is reported by NZZ, Zeit, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Makes you wonder how much damage to their- and other- countries they considered acceptable to their "This gets us more power!" plans.


That's one of the groups involved who went with "We need to keep everyone scared", no matter what.  One of the bits of consequence we're still dealing with:
A growing number of scientific studies have concluded the measures in the United States did little to slow the rampaging pathogen. What’s more, the stifling of public debate about them eroded trust in public health policy and prevented more effective strategies, according to a number of prominent infectious-disease experts.
...
But while the impact of lockdown policies is still being studied, new research paints a troubling picture of the immense collateral damage inflicted by them.
The measures increased poverty and wealth disparities, spurred a dramatic rise in adolescent anxiety and depression, contributed to a surge in fatal drug overdoses, and led to devastating learning losses in schoolchildren, who have yet to recover, according to scientific studies. As of last spring, the average American student remained half a grade behind pre-pandemic levels in both math and reading, according to a recent report card on pandemic learning loss.
And yes, there's more.


Now let's go to the current "People who need introduction to a flagrum" situation with bird flu:
While I may have been right about the gain-of-function (GOF), I was wrong about the laboratory. It turns out this frankenvirus might be a joint American and Dutch creation.

And, as with China, poor biosafety practices may have been a contributing factor.

"Trust the Science and Experts!", my ass.

While I have a little time, some of the things I've run across recently

No, the NYeffingTimes doesn't understand the nation, at least more than half of it.
Mind you, this is a paper that now lets junior staffers and reporters whine and scream and ignore the senior editors; if I ran that place there would've been a lot of these idiots fired in the last year or two.


Trusting the science is fine, except when the 'scientists' putting it up are lying, conniving bastards.


No link, just me wondering: after the bastard sent people from his Labour Party over here to interfere in our election, I wonder what Two Tier Starmer is thinking right now?  Probably same as a bunch of other leftist EUnuchs: "Uh oh..."

That bastard should've been fired a long time ago, and he'll hang on till the last moment; have to screw-up as many kids as possible before he's gone.


Yeah, FEMA is sick.  But I think there is likely to be some treatment done soon.


Ballot 'security' in Cook County.


And that's it for now.  I'll see you when I can.

After a quick look over the news, this I had to say something about

A prominent doctor and trans rights advocate admitted she deliberately withheld publication of a $10 million taxpayer-funded study on the effect of puberty blockers on American children — after finding no evidence that they improve patients’ mental health.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy told the New York Times that she believes the study would be “weaponized” by critics of transgender care for kids, and that the research could one day be used in court to argue “we shouldn’t use blockers.”

Critics — including one of Olson-Kennedy’s fellow researchers on the study — said the decision flies in the face of research standards and deprives the public of “really important” science in a field where Americans remain firmly divided.
Example #I forgot of "Why don't you trust the experts?"  Because a bunch of the lie, exclude data, and sometimes throw a study out if it doesn't show what they want.

When asked by the Times why the results have not been made public after nine years, she said, “I do not want our work to be weaponized,” adding, “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

She then flat-out admitted she was afraid the lack of mental health improvements borne out by the study could one day be used in court to argue “we shouldn’t use blockers.”
...
When pressed by the outlet for an explanation for the seemingly contradictory findings, Olson-Kennedy attributed it to “data averages,” and said she was “still analyzing the full data set.”
Translation: "I've hidden this as long as possible, now I have to excuse what I did."
Lying clown.
Which led to J.K. Rowling Pouncing!

Remember, we're not talking about adults, we're talking about KIDS they're experimenting on.  Which makes this even more inexcusable.


Personal note: Still getting things done, will get back to regular yelling here at some point, but it may be a while.

Also adding to the "Why don't you trust .gov agencies?" is this

climate hysteria prediction group, which also involves "Don't trust the media":
NOAA’s prediction is heavily predicated on computer climate models that assume a huge acceleration in sea level rate of rise over the next 75 years.

In particular, NOAA’s Sea Level Rise Viewer, upon which the prediction is based, relies on estimates and models used in 2007.

These estimates are woefully outdated, and with the new generation of models now in use, the old estimates used by CBS don’t accurately represent the future of the current best projections. The predictions CBS cites are shown in Figure 1.

Things are finally coming out, and it demonstrates why "Trust the Experts/Science!" is bullshit

At long last, National Institutes of Health (NIH) principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted to Congress Thursday that US taxpayers funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
...
“Tabak was engaging in the usual obfuscation and semantic manipulation that is so frustrating and pointless,” Nickels said, adding that the NIH bigwig was resisting accountability for risky research that can create pathogens of pandemic potential.

"What? Take responsibility? That's not what we do!" seems to cover it nicely.

Now this:
The nation’s top public health official during the Covid-19 pandemic admitted that the origins of the coronavirus remain up for debate, the lab-leak theory is not a conspiracy, and that there was no scientific evidence to support the government’s social-distancing guidance.
Collins and Fauci trashed anyone who dared contradict their Preferred Narrative, damaged and destroyed careers, and got God only knows how many people killed, it appears in large part to protect themselves from having to answer what they'd been doing for years.

Appears what they should've all been saying was "Trust OUR Experts, and OUR version of  Science!"

Holy... what the HELL is wrong at Harvard?

I'm copying this from Instapundit, because the full article is paywalled.  The bold is mine:
The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, is seeking to retract six studies and correct 31 other papers as part of a probe involving four of its senior cancer researchers and administrators.

More than 50 papers, including four co-authored by Chief Executive and President Dr. Laurie Glimcher, are part of a continuing review, according to Dr. Barrett Rollins, the cancer institute’s research-integrity officer. Some requests for retractions and corrections have already been sent to journals, he said. Others are being prepared. The institute has yet to determine whether misconduct occurred.

Also under investigation are papers co-authored by Chief Operating Officer Dr. William Hahn; Director of the Clinical Investigator Research Program Dr. Irene Ghobrial; and Dr. Kenneth Anderson, program director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center.

All four researchers have faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School, making it the latest tranche of misconduct allegations leveled at Harvard researchers. Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University president early this year, facing allegations of plagiarism. Last year, Harvard Business School placed Prof. Francesca Gino on administrative leave after accusations that her work contained falsified data.

Glimcher and the other researchers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Dana-Farber’s disclosure about its probe arrived after a data sleuth pointed to irregularities in the researchers’ papers.

In early January, molecular biologist Sholto David published a blog post describing what he said were signs of image manipulation in papers by the Dana-Farber researchers. David contacted Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School with his concerns, submitting a list of papers he said contained problems.

The most serious, he said, had to do with images of experimental results that had signs of copy-and-pasting by software such as Adobe Photoshop. “Those are pixel-perfect matches for the same area, but it’s supposed to be a different sample,” he said.
Holy shit.  This is worse than plagiarism, this seems to be falsification of data in important studies.  And all four of these clowns are Harvard Medical School staff?

Which, once again, brings up "How the hell can you trust the science when the people in charge are faking things?

How the hell are you supposed to 'trust the science' when

people like Fauci are in charge, and crap like this is going on?
One of the paper’s co-authors, psychology professor Steve Stewart-Williams, summarizes the evidence for the current wave of scientific censorship and self-censorship, as well as the rise of censorious attitudes among scientists, which motivated the paper:

Increasing numbers of scientists report being sanctioned for conducting politically contentious research.

Retractions of papers have become more and more common over the last decade, and at least some of these appear to have been driven primarily by concerns other than scientific merit. One group of scholars even retracted their own paper, not because it was scientifically flawed, but because it was being cited by conservatives in ways the authors didn’t approve of.

Several lines of research suggest that studies reaching politically unpalatable conclusions may have a harder time negotiating the peer-review process than they would if the conclusions were in the opposite direction. As the paper notes, “When scholars misattribute their rejection of disfavored conclusions to quality concerns that they do not consistently apply, bias and censorship are masquerading as scientific rejection.”
Oh yes, there's more.

As Insty said, 'Anthropology used to be a science.'

A “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” panel has been canceled by the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society, which stated the topic would cause too much “harm.”

“This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, the safety and dignity of our members, and the scientific integrity of the program,” states a Sept. 25 letter to the panelists from the two groups.
Translation of the second paragraph: "YOU SAID 'SEX' IS IMPORTANT AND BIOLOGICAL FACT!!  YOU TRIGGERED PEOPLE!!  AWAY WITH YOU!!"

Want proof?
The canceled scholars were set to focus on the fact that while “it has become increasingly common in anthropology and public life to substitute ‘sex’ with ‘gender,’ there are multiple domains of research in which biological sex remains irreplaceably relevant to anthropological analysis,” according to the panel’s description.

However in their letter scrubbing the presentation, the two groups stated the “reason the session deserved further scrutiny was that the ideas were advanced in such a way as to cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.”
"YOU HURT FEELINGS!  AWAY WITH YOU!!"

Why people insisting "Trust the Science!" is bullshit, Reason #2:

The information you're given is too often crap.
A climate scientist has admitted exaggerating the impact of global warming on Californian wildfires to get his research published.

Patrick T Brown claims studies about climate change are rejected by scientific journals if they do not 'support certain narratives' and they favour 'distorted' research which overstates dangers.

He says his research article, which was published last week in Nature and titled 'Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California', focused exclusively on climate change and intentionally ignored other key factors.

The US state has suffered extreme wildfires in recent years which have led to loss of life and property. Writing in The Free Press, Dr Brown said: '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... want to tell.'

Explaining why he did this, Dr Brown, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in the US, said: '... it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals...

The response from Nature bothers me:
Dr Magdalena Skipper, editor in chief at Nature, which is based in London, said the journal did not have a 'preferred narrative' when it comes to science. She said it had an 'expectation' that researchers had used the most appropriate data, methods and results, adding that 'to deliberately not to do so is, at best, highly irresponsible'.
The bold is the part that bothers me, because 'most appropriate' can mean one thing to an honest researcher, and another to "I know what they want, and I'll give it to them."  Maybe I'm being too suspicious, but, unfortunately, I doubt it.

At this point there's reason NOT to trust the bastards,

on this or much else.
Recently, Cochrane validated this, and found no evidence to support masking adults. Yet, all these years, Anthony Fauci repeatedly went on TV, and falsely claimed masking works, including cloth masks—which demonstrably don’t work, contradicted by multiple randomized trials.

Now, on CNN, Fauci is challenged. Please watch this amazing 1 minute video, link below. Fauci is directly confronted with the recent Cochrane review. Then consider his answer.

Fauci’s answer is that masks work for individuals, but not at the population level. But this is bizarre. He advocated for mask mandates at the population level. If he knew they did not work, why did he encourage them for populations? Moreover, even this week, he continues to advocate for them— at a population level.
Isn't it wonderful, from Mr. Science himself?

"Trust the experts! Obey! Even when they turn out to be political hacks

who lied to you!"  Etc.  Followed later by "We'll try to change history, because we don't  have the ethics or balls to admit error."
There is now a near consensus that at the very least a lab leak is quite plausible, which has raised the question: why hasn’t Nature Medicine, the journal that published this paper that spawned a million censorships, looked into retracting the paper given its clear contradiction with both reality and with the now apparent opinions of the authors as they wrote the paper?

If the authors lied in the paper, shouldn’t it be retracted?

No. Because Nature Medicine is now rewriting history. The editor now claims that the paper wasn’t research at all, but an expression of an opinion. Just a “point of view.” It wasn’t definitive research, but an Op/Ed or something.

No, you cannot trust their version of

'the Science'.  This is just one wonderful bit:

My, my, from a not right-wing news source, problems with the NIH

The National Institutes of Health failed to provide adequate oversight of an American organization that funded controversial research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, according to a new government report that is sure to raise new questions about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report is evidence of “major failures in past NIH oversight of high-risk research on enhanced potential pandemic pathogens,” Rutgers molecular biologist Richard Ebright told Yahoo News in an email.

Issued by the inspector general of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, the new report says nothing about the origins of the coronavirus. For the most part, it concerns research that took place well before the first cases of what came to be known as SARS-CoV-2 were discovered in China in late 2019.

But it does note that the American organization in question, the EcoHealth Alliance, should have been more rigorously scrutinized by federal officials regarding assurances that its partner lab in Wuhan was not using U.S. funds to conduct gain-of-function research, which boosts viruses to study how they might evolve in nature.

“The entire picture starts to look extremely disconcerting,” mathematical biologist Alex Washburne told Yahoo News. He said that a project on coronaviruses originating in bats, for which the EcoHealth Alliance had given a grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, “was clearly gain-of-function research.”

Some various 'Republicans Seize/Pounce' stuff.  Of course.  But wait, there's MORE!

The NIH “raised concerns” about some of the research EcoHealth was funding in China but ultimately did not put a halt to any of the work, Grimm wrote in her 64-page report. Crucially, EcoHealth failed to produce a progress report about its subgrants in the summer of 2019, just months before the advent of the coronavirus.

Despite these concerns, EcoHealth continues to work with the federal government; the organization was recently the recipient of $3 million from the Department of Defense to study viruses in the Philippines.
And more.  

By the way, anyone notice how fast the 'questioning our conclusions is racist/will stoke racism' crap started?  Like, the moment questions were asked?  Not to mention "We can't name this the way we've done it for decades, it can be seen as racist!"  Seems to be one of the defaults of an awful lot of people, to try to shut others up.

Vanity Fair has committed an act of actual reporting

There's the full dose of 'Evil Trump, right-wing conspiracy, racist', etc. that you'd expect, but they actually go into the lab-leak theory of how Wuhan hit the world.  Including the silencing of lots of scientists and doctors.  Worth reading.

Short version: the woke are trying to destroy ALL the sciences

with their bullshit.  In this specific case, anthropology.

No excerpts, there's just too much there.

Fauci and Collins belong in jail, and should be sued by all the doctors and researchers they tried to ruin

The damage they did, both to the science they claim to champion and to lots of people, is huge.
Note the irony: to 'stop conspiracy theories', they created a conspiracy to hide the truth.

Bold mine:
Andersen reported to Fauci that “after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” Eddie is Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney; Bob is Robert F. Garry of Tulane University; Mike is Michael Farzan at Scripps Research. In their unanimous view, the virus didn’t come from nature and may instead have escaped from a lab.
...
You might think that the senior administrators present at the conference would have rushed to investigate the startling inference that their expert advisers had drawn. But just one day after the teleconference at which his experts explained why they thought the virus seemed manipulated, Collins complained about the damage such an idea might cause. “The voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony,” he wrote on February 2, 2020, according to the new emails.

Even after the March 2020 Nature Medicine article, which made the natural-origin theory the mainstream view, Collins still fretted that the lab-leak idea had not been sufficiently suppressed. “Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy,” he emailed Fauci on April 16.
...
So what induced these virologists to such a radical change of view? “The February 1, 2020, telecon sent a clear message to participants that Fauci and Collins regarded discussion of the lab leak possibility, even though plausible on scientific data, to be politically unacceptable and something that had to be blocked,” says Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, a molecular biologist and a leading critic of gain-of-function research.

Fauci oversees a large portion of funds available for virology research in the U.S. It is not unreasonable to suppose that virologists keen on continuing their careers would be very attentive to his wishes. Both Garry’s and Andersen’s labs receive large sums of money from the NIAID. “Telecon participants with current and pending grants controlled by Fauci and Collins could not have missed or misunderstood the clear message,” Ebright says.
They've repeatedly lied under oath, they went through games to funnel money to the PRC for what boiled down to biological warfare research.  They tried to ruin- DID ruin some- anyone who pointed out the elephant in the lab.  And they may well have been instrumental in the deaths of one hell of a lot of people.  And THEN they pushed a vaccine at any cost and trashed the idea of other treatments.

Jail.  At the least.