Category Archives: Science

The Story of Pfizer Inc.

A Case Study in Pharmaceutical Empire and Corporate Corruption

Article here.

Excerpts:

The extensive history of the pharmaceutical industry is filled with stories and deeds of adventures, misadventures, profit-making, profit-taking, fraud, bribery, false claims, messianic promises, and criminal conduct. 

Few companies in the history of medicine have received as much attention as Pfizer Inc. has received these last three years of the Corona Crisis.

Through the course of relentless media coverage and amidst all the sound and fury, Pfizer has managed to avoid scrutiny of its previous criminal conduct and is universally portrayed in the mainstream media as a benevolent enterprise whose mission is to nobly service humanity.

In an effort to set the record straight we embark upon a comprehensive historical examination of this company which sprouted from humble beginnings into one of the most influential corporate behemoths walking the earth today.

[. . .]

Given Pfizer’s documented record of misdeeds, any reasonable person would ask:

“Is this a company that belongs behind the wheel of the most widespread mass vaccination campaign in history?”

“Is this a company we should trust with experimental medical technology?”

“Is this a company we want to be in control of the most radical mass medical experiment in human history?”

“How is it that a company that habitually engaged in such illegal practices was able to reinvent itself as the savior of humanity?”

Remember that “record temperature” in July last year?

It was probably caused by three jets landing in quick succession at the airport where the temperature was measured

See article here.

Excerpts:

“In the light of our latest revelations, it’s time the Met Office made a statement about its claimed record at RAF Coningsby. It should either withdraw it, or provide convincing evidence as to why the record should be retained. If it does not take public action, it risks the ‘record’ becoming a national joke.”

“Last year was a warm year in the U.K. and July 19th was undoubtedly a very hot day, although the mini-heatwave had broken by 22:00, with rain in London and a 20°C drop in temperature. Five English places declared temperatures over 40°C, but all have problems with non-climatic heat corruptions.”

Charlatans in Science

A real life "Uncle Andrew"

See here.

Excerpts:

As an example of [Peter] Hotez’s repeat offenses, Dore plays a compilation video of Hotez, starting with Hotez pointing out there are “unique potential safety problems” related to coronavirus vaccines in 2020. Then, something happened and Hotez never admitted the possibility of safety problems again.

Instead, he started pushing the single-dose Janssen shot, which later got pulled in several countries due to life-threatening blood clots. Then he started pushing the two-dose mRNA shots, saying they offer “long-lasting” protection. Then, when the boosters rolled out, he switched to saying “I’ve always said this is a three-dose vaccine.”

Then, he argued “a fourth immunization” would be necessary “to keep the country going.” And when hospitals continued to fill up with COVID patients, he told people to get the bivalent booster.

After that, he started saying yearly boosters would be necessary, only to later change his mind saying we may need a booster “every few months,” because the boosters “aren’t holding up as well as we’d like.”

He also pushed the COVID jab on young children, claiming COVID was “picking off young people like we’ve never seen [before].” With a track record like that, proving yourself wrong every few months, criminalizing critique would surely be nice.

Eric Metaxas and “Letter to American Churches”

Discussion with Jordan Peterson

I haven’t heard of this author or his new book with the above title before but he sounds immensely interesting. Not least because he, having grown up in America, has a Greek (father) and German (mother) background. His mother having lost her father in the Second World War.

Here’s the video description:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Eric Metaxas discuss his most recent book, “A Letter to the American Church,” which argues a betrayal of faith by those who stay silent in the face of tyranny. They parallel the arbiters of speech across history against those populating today, and detail the responsibility to act against falsehood that is intrinsically present in the Abrahamic tradition, yet increasingly absent in the American church today.

Eric Metaxas is an American author, speaker, and radio host. He has written award winning biographies, such as “Bonhoeffer,” as well as children’s books like “Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving,” Metaxas hosts Socrates in the City, a recurring popular event where he interviews writers and thinkers on theology, moralism, and philosophy. He also hosts the nationally syndicated Eric Metaxas Show, more broadly referred to as “The Show About Everything.”

In the podcast (1 h 33 min, on Youtube here, on Bitchute here), Metaxas explains that in his new book he says that the American churches are making the same mistakes the German churches made in Nazi Germany. They looked the other way and narrowed themselves down to “thin theology”. Some did speak up, but not until it was too late to achieve anything meaningful.

(I would add that this “letter” should be addressed to churches “in the American Empire”, which includes the UK and all of Europe.)

Another thing he says is that churches that defied the Covid measures and stayed open during lockdowns “increased four to fivefold”, while those that locked down “withered”.

I can certainly believe that.

He has an amazing personal conversion story that involves a dream, at the age of 25, about picking a golden fish out of the water. He knew in the dream that the fish is Christ.

He has previously written an impressive number and range of books, including biographies about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther and William Wilberforce. According to Wikipedia, the latter was “the companion book to the 2006 film [on Wilberforce: Amazing Grace].”

In 2021, he published a book titled “Is Atheism Dead?” and last year the aforementioned “Letter to American Churches.”

The Mythology of Spaceship Earth

Article by Gary North, written in 1969, the year of the first landing on the moon.

The full article is here.

Excerpts:

The gap between moral wisdom and scientific knowledge has been a problem since the scientific rev­olution of the sixteenth century. Immanuel Kant, writing in the late 1700’s, struggled mightily with this very question: How can man bridge the intellectual chasm between scientific knowledge (the realm of law and necessity) and moral knowledge (the realm of freedom and choice) without sacri­ficing the integrity of one or the other? Hegel, Marx, and the mod­ern moral philosophers have all lived in the shadow of this dilem­ma, and the crisis of modern cul­ture reflects man’s failure to re­solve it. The responses to this dilemma, as a rule, take one or the other of two forms, symbolized by Arthur Koestler as the Com­missar on the one hand, and the Yogi on the other.

The Commissar is enraptured with science and technology; he is confident that scientific planning in proper hands can so alter man’s environment as to bring about a new earth and a new mankind. The Yogi takes the opposite tack of disengagement from “the world,” laying stress on each man cultivating his own garden. Find inner peace, he urges, and the ex­ternal world will take care of it­self. His assumption is that sci­ence and technology are neutral, that developing from their inner imperatives they will eventually find their own benevolent level.

[. . .]

Mr. Wicker, unfortunately, made a great leap of faith when he be­gan to compare our heavenly achievement with our supposed capabilities for solving more earthly tasks. He was not alone in this leap. Editorial after edi­torial echoed it, and I single him out only because he is widely read and generally regarded as one of the superior liberal pundits. He makes the leap seem so plausible: “So the conclusion that enlight­ened men might draw is that if the same concentration of effort and control could be applied to some useful earthly project, a similar success might be ob­tained.” He recommends a vast program of publicly-owned hous­ing construction, say, some 26 million new units by 1980.

Flora Lewis’ column was far more optimistic; her horizons for mankind’s planning capabilities are apparently much wider. “If the moon can be grasped, why not the end of hunger, of greed, of warfare, of cruelty?” She admits that there are problems: “They seem provocatively within our new capacities and yet maddeningly distant. We are told it is only lack of will that frustrates these achievements, too.” Nature is boundless, apparently; only our “lack of will” prevents us from unlocking the secrets of paradise and ending the human condition as we know it. This is the mes­sianism of technological planning. It is basic to the thinking of a large segment of our intellectuals, and the success of the Apollo flights has brought it out into the open.

Mr. Wicker wisely set for our government a limited goal. Miss Lewis does not necessarily limit the task to government planning alone, but it is obvious that she is basing her hopes on a technological feat that was essentially a statist project. At this point, several questions should be raised. First, should the state have used some $25 billions of coerced taxes in order to send two men to the moon’s surface? Would men act­ing in a voluntary fashion have expended such a sum in this gen­eration? In short, was it worth the forfeiting of $25 billions worth of alternative uses for the money? Second, given Mr. Wick­er’s plans, could we not ask the same question? Is the construction of public housing, and the use of scarce resources involved in such construction, on a priority scale that high in the minds of the American public? Would a non­inflationary tax cut not be pref­erable?3 It is typical of socialistic thinkers to point to emergency spending (e.g., a war) or some statist rocket program and rec­ommend a transfer of funds from one branch of the state’s planning bureaucracy to another. I have never heard them recommend a reduction of spending by the state. Spending precedents set in war time, like “temporary” taxes, seem to become permanent. Finally, in Miss Lewis’ example, is the mere application of the techniques of applied science sufficient to end warfare and cruelty? Or could it be, as the Apostle James put it, that our wars come from the hearts of men? Conversion, in and of itself, may not redeem tech­nology, but can Miss Lewis be so certain that technology can redeem mankind?

[. . .]

A LEAP OF FAITH

Therefore, to take a leap of faith from some particular in­stance of a “successful” govern­ment project—success defined as the operationally satisfactory com­pletion of a certain unquestioned goal—to the realm of economic planning involves a faith far greater than anything imagined by the medieval scholastics. Yet Dr. Irving Bengelsdorf, a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times, thinks that “there may be hope” along this line of thinking, in spite of the difficulties inherent in any computerized quantification of qualitative personal prefer­ences. He states the problem well; he cannot show how his answer is linked operationally with the prob­lem he states:

In contrast to the novel and un­cluttered venture of getting to the moon, [an] uninhabited, non-social, non-political moon, the problems of society are exceedingly complex to solve because any solution demands that, people have to change their daily ways of life, their interactions with other people. This is difficult to do. For, from birth, people already come overlaid with traditional prejudices, encrusted with hoary cultures, and swaddled in ancient customs. And these are hard to change.

But, there may be hope. Both the Apollo 11 flight and the Manhattan Project of World War II show that once a clear goal has been set, a vast, complex project involving large num­bers of people with different training and skills working together can achieve a solution.

Between the first paragraph and the second lies a social revolution. Also present in the gap is the un­stated assumption that we can re­duce the complexities of society to “a clear goal,” which is pre­cisely the problem governments have not learned to solve. I am at a loss to see how a wartime bomb project or a trip to the moon in­dicate anything except the amaz­ing capacity for spending that gov­ernments possess.

SPACESHIP EARTH

Barbara Ward, one of the most respected Establishment thinkers in Britain, and former editor of The Economist, has taken Buck­minster Fuller’s spaceship analogy and has turned it into an effective neo-Fabian propaganda device: “The most rational way of con­sidering the whole race today is to see it as the ship’s crew of a single spaceship on which all of us, with a remarkable combination of security and vulnerability, are making our pilgrimage through infinity.” [. . .]

[. . .]

The problem with all of this “spaceship reasoning” is that it assumes as solved those funda­mental problems that need solving in order to make possible the spaceship analogy. The thing which strikes me as ironic is that the language of the spaceship involves a chain of command approach to the solution of human problems. Those humanitarian intellectuals who decry the petty military dicta­torships in underdeveloped nations want to impose a massive system of command over the whole earth. That is what the call to world gov­ernment implies. The spaceship analogy necessarily views society as a vast army. Yet for some reason, Hayek’s identical conclusion about the implications of socialist planning is invariably rejected as absurd. It is the mentality of the militarist. Miss Ward even is will­ing to admit that our experiences in wartime helped to create the foundation of modern economic policy:

Thus, not by theory or dogma but largely by war-induced experience, the Western market economies have come to accept the effectiveness and usefulness of a partnership between public and private activity. . . . but there is now no question of exclusive reliance on any one instrument or any one method. The pragmatic market economies have worked out their own evolving conceptions of public and private responsibility and the result is the dynamic but surprisingly stable mixed economy of the Western world.

THE CHAOS OF NONECONOMICS

I would have put it a different way. I would have pointed to the signs of our contemporary sys­tem’s increasing inefficiency, cor­ruption, and extralegal practices which we more usually associate with those warfare economies from which she says we borrowed our planning techniques. What we have created is non-economics, and Miss Ward proclaims the ben­efits of such a system:

But, on the whole, in economics the Western world can move from posi­tion to position with little sense of contradiction and incompatibility. We had no very fixed views before so we do not have to bother too much about what we believe now. It is a consider­able source of strength.

This, then, is “reason, spaceship style.” It is the triumph of intel­lectual chaos, and it is inevitably recreating the economy in its own image.

GROUNDING THE SHIP

Dr. William G. Pollard, a physi­cist who was a part of the Man­hattan Project, has written a little book which tries to undergird the spaceship analogy with a theolog­ical framework. His theology is radical, but he is honest in seeing the purpose of the Apollo flights as being ultimately religious. He thinks it marks the end of the era of science-worship. Diminishing marginal returns are about to set in:

Sending men to the moon and bringing them back in 1969 may prove to be from the perspective of the twentieth century the central symbol of the golden age of science in the twenty-first. Like the great pyramids of Egypt or the lofty cathedrals of medieval Europe, this feat will stand out as a peak expression of the spirit of the golden age; the maximum economic investment which a great civili­zation could make in a feat which served no useful purpose other than making manifest the lofty height to which the spirit of an age could rise. It will not be worth repeating except perhaps by Russia for the purpose of sharing in its glory. Thereafter, even more massive applications of science and technology to basic human needs will have become so urgently neces­sary that no further diversion of available talent and resources to manned space flights can be per­mitted.

We can hope that he is correct, but who knows for certain? The government was so successful, as it usually is, in achieving a feat “which served no useful purpose” other than its own glory, that we may have more of the same. But this much should be clear: the analogy of spaceship earth is more than an analogy; it is a call to religious commitment. The call is to faith in centralized planning.

At the beginning of this essay, I pointed to the dual theories of regeneration, symbolized by the Yogi and the Commissar. They feed on each other, take in each other’s intellectual washing, so to speak. If we are to confront the mythology of spaceship earth, it must be in terms of a rival moral philosophy, one which has social and economic implications, as well as technological implications. We must deny the validity of any vision of man as central planner, a little god who would arrange in an omniscient fashion the lives of all men in all the spheres of their existence, as if we were some per­manent military crew. We must acknowledge the validity of the late C. S. Lewis’ warning in The Abolition of Man that when we hear men speaking of “man’s tak­ing control of man,” we should understand that it implies certain men taking control of all the others.

When men seek to divinize the state, they succeed merely in cre­ating hell on earth. The Christian church fought this point out with the Roman Emperors, both pagan and Arian. The state may not claim to be God’s exclusive or even chief representative on earth.”’ The the­ology of spaceship earth would have us return to the religious political theory of the ancient world, all in the name of progres­sive technology and planning.

The astronauts are back on earth. We must seek to keep them here. It is time to ground our spaceship programs, both interplanetary and domestic. Let the captains go down with their ideological ship. There are better ways of allocating our scarce resources than in construct­ing spaceship earth.

Solar Power Creates Waste and Pollution

Article by H. Sterling Burnett.

The article concentrates on the growing, and essentially disregarded problem of recycling of the panels. What the article doesn’t mention is the pollution due to the extraction of toxic metals from the ground which wouldn’t happen (certainly not to the current extent) without the artificially, government-induced boom in solar panels. Also, it doesn’t mention that solar panels get very hot in the sun and therefore increase the surrounding temperature and dryness in the atmosphere. That in turn draws moisture from the ground, and we get droughts.

This is more than a free speech crisis

It’s a humanity crisis, says Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi, a journalist who has been investigating how the FBI and other US authorities influenced Twitter during the pandemic to uphold a certain “narrative”, spoke recently to a Free Speech gathering in London. Below is an excerpt of what he said. The full text is here.

[. . .]

But after looking at thousands of emails and Slack chats, I first started to get a headache, then became confused. I realized the old-school Enlightenment-era protections I grew up revering were designed to counter authoritarianism as people understood the concept hundreds of years ago, back in the days of tri-cornered hats and streets lined with horse manure.

What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.

[. . .]

But it goes deeper. Michael and I found correspondence in Twitter about something called the Virality Project, which was a cross-platform, information-sharing program led by Stanford University through which companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook shared information about Covid-19.

They compared notes on how to censor or deamplify certain content. The ostensible mission made sense, at least on the surface: it was to combat “misinformation” about the pandemic, and to encourage people to get vaccinated. When we read the communications to and from Stanford, we found shocking passages.

One suggested to Twitter that it should consider as “standard misinformation on your platform… stories of true vaccine side effects… true posts which could fuel hesitancy” as well as “worrisome jokes” or posts about things like “natural immunity” or “vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway.”

This is straight out of Orwell. Instead of having “ambiguities” and “shades of meaning” on Covid-19, they reduced everything to a binary: vax and anti-vax.

They eliminated ambiguities by looking into the minds of users. In the Virality Project if a person told a true story about someone developing myocarditis after getting vaccinated, even if that person was just telling a story – even if they weren’t saying, “The shot caused the myocarditis” – the Virality Project just saw a post that may “promote hesitancy.”

So, this content was true, but politically categorized as anti-vax, and therefore misinformation – untrue.

[. . .]

“This continual process of seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices,” wrote Graphika, in a report sent to Twitter, “leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true or false.”

It was the same with someone who shared true research about the efficacy of natural immunity or suggested that the virus came from a lab. It all might be factual, but it was politically inconvenient, something they called “malinformation.” In the end, out of all of these possible beliefs, they derived a 1984 binary: good and ungood.

They also applied the binary to people.

This was new. Old-school speech law punished speech, not the speaker. As a reporter I was trained that if I commit libel, if I wrote something defamatory that caused provable injury to someone, I would have to retract the error, admit it, apologize, and pay remuneration. All fair!  But the court case wouldn’t target me as a person. It wouldn’t assume that because I was wrong about X, I would also be wrong about Y, and Z.

[. . .]

One last note. As Michael and I found out recently with regard to the viral origin story, things deemed politically good often turn out to be untrue, and things deemed ungood turn out to be true.

I can recite a list if need be, but many news stories authorities were absolutely sure about yesterday later proved totally incorrect. This is another characteristic Orwell predicted: doublethink.

He defined doublethink as “the act of holding, simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely.”

Not long ago we were told in no uncertain terms the Russians blew up their own Nord Stream pipeline, that they were the only suspect. Today the U.S. government is telling us it has known since last June that Ukrainian forces planned it, with the approval of the highest military officials. But we’re not expected to say anything. We’re expected to forget.

What happens to a society that doesn’t square its mental books when it comes to facts, truth, errors, propaganda and so on? There are only a few options. Some people will do what some of us in this room have done: grow frustrated and angry, mostly in private. Others have tried to protest by frantically cataloging the past.

Most however do what’s easiest for mental survival. They learn to forget. This means living in the present only. Whatever we’re freaking out about today, let’s all do it together. Then when things change tomorrow, let’s not pause to think about the change, let’s just freak out about that new thing. The facts are dead! Long live the new facts!

We’re building a global mass culture that sees everything in black and white, fears difference, and abhors memory. It’s why people can’t read books anymore and why, when they see people like Russell who don’t fit into obvious categories, they don’t know what to do except point and shriek, like extras in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

We have been complaining about censorship, and it’s important to do that. But they are taking aim at people in a way that will make censorship unnecessary, by building communities of human beings with no memory and monochrome perception. This is more than a speech crisis. It’s a humanity crisis. I hope we’re not too late to fix it.