Category Archives: Science

Woodstock for the Adventurous and Responsible 

Jordan Peterson interviews Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying.

Stuff about “narratives” starts at about 40 minutes in.

Content:

(0:35) Intro (3:36) Bret and Heather at Peterson Academy (6:19) The social media approach to learning: iterative feedback (12:01) Combating the evolution of corruption (17:37) The benefits of recorded lectures, future goals for in-person conventions (20:27) Cost of entry, managing bad actors, and the hierarchy of curation (26:04) Why Hillsdale College has a 1% dropout rate in the first year (30:36) The difference between censorship and refereeing, leveraging evolution to continuously self-improve (32:58) Elon Musk: adapting solutions faster than those who seek to game the system (34:45) The orthodoxy of the past and predicting the future (36:21) Rescue the Republic – “We’re hoping this will be an event the way Woodstock was a music festival” (40:02) The propositional must be surrounded by the imagistic, the opportunity for discovery (42:14) Propositional intelligence — and what actually makes you wise (45:57) The edge traversed by comedians, the advent of the laugh track (53:03) The radical distortion of music, “music used to be a living entity” (57:35) Putting forth the pillars of our civilization, the exhausted middle (1:00:14) A secular thinker on the spiritual battle we are all engaged in (1:04:11) The necessity of narrative, translating for the secular (1:09:49) The title toward the demonic, using AI to map the pattern of the Logos (1:11:16) Prayer, revelation, and the spirit of the question (1:14:25) Brick-in-the-wall science, hypothesis generation (1:17:59) The relation between openness and divergent associations, hierarchies of mutational repair (1:20:49) A new convergence on a shared perspective, the need of God to answer prayers (1:22:50) Richard Dawkins, winning with your own audience rather than making substantive progress (1:27:41) What the ancients knew about the delusion of being, metaphorical models in science (1:34:40) Dawkins’ one error in “The Selfish Gene”

There is now no doubt that Covid leaked from a lab

Article by Matt Ridley.

He ends with these words:

In short, those of us who argue that the pandemic began with a laboratory accident have comprehensively won the debate. I do have some sympathy with the virologists who have waged a four-year battle to suppress, censor and delete all discussion of a laboratory leak. If my livelihood depended on this kind of research, I too would probably find it hard to accept that a lab leak had happened. Scientists, politicians, businesspeople and even journalists have a vested interest in hoping the subject just fades from memory.

Why was Grenfell covered in cladding? Climate targets

There is a refusal to acknowledge the role green policy played in this tragedy.

Article by James Heartfield.

Excerpts:

Yesterday’s phase-two report from the inquiry, led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, rightly highlights Rydon and Harley Facade’s evasion of basic safety oversight, and the complicity of both Kensington and Chelsea council and the UK government’s housing ministry. What it does not do is ask the obvious question – why was the cladding installed in the first place?

Grenfell Tower was part of this trend. In 2012, engineer Max Fordham wrote a report on renovating Grenfell for the Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council with sustainability in mind. His aim was ‘to identify how, as part of the Grenfell Tower refurbishment scheme, the current energy and environmental-comfort problems can be addressed, and how the chosen solutions sit within the London Plan’s aim to bring existing housing stock up to the mayor’s standards on sustainable design and construction’. ‘The poor insulation levels and air tightness of both the walls and the windows at Grenfell Tower result in excessive heat loss during the winter months’, Fordham explained, and ‘the London Plan July 2011 aims to conserve energy’. Fordham argued that the council should have a ‘hierarchy’ of goals for the renovation. At the top of that list, it should: ‘Be lean: use less energy, in particular by adopting sustainable design and construction measures.’

After the overcladding was completed, the council boasted that it had clad ‘a high-rise block in the north of the borough’ – namely, Grenfell Tower – as part of a ‘greener housing’ strategy to ‘mitigate’ the causes of climate change. It admitted that because of the borough’s ‘limited capacity for new housing, we acknowledge the importance of seeking reasonable alterations to the existing building stock to mitigate the causes… of climate change’.

Since the Grenfell Tower fire, no new cladding has been put on to tower blocks to reduce climate change. Presumably, those CO2 targets were never quite as important as they seemed. Indeed, millions of pounds have since been spent removing dangerous cladding from these blocks. Billions more has been earmarked to complete the de-cladding of more than 500 buildings that are still considered dangerous.

There is no doubt that 72 lives were lost mainly because unscrupulous companies and legislators cut corners to slap cheap and dangerous materials on the sides of large working-class estates. But as wicked as the cost-cutting surely is, we cannot ignore why it was felt at the time that this cladding was necessary. This was a disaster fuelled by climate targets.

The COVID “vaccine” had no benefit

Zero. Zip. Nada.

Article by Steve Kirsch.

Excerpts:

Official US government data, “gold standard data,” shows that the vaccine didn’t save any COVID lives at all. None. In fact, if anything, the data shows that the vaccine made you more likely to die from COVID. To the estimated 21 million people who were killed or seriously injured, you should know it was all for nothing.

[. . .]

In science, if you can’t explain a data point, you don’t just write it off. You have to explain it or at least publicly admit that your hypothesis could be wrong until you can explain it.

And this wasn’t cherry picked either. In the entire time I’ve been a “misinformation spreader,” I’ve only gotten one insider call from someone in a nursing home who would reveal the date that the vaccine was rolled out in her facility. One.

And even if I scoured all 15,000 nursing homes for a case like this, it still can’t happen because the probabilities are too small.

So I had two independent ways at looking at this data: the tip from the insider and the data reported to the government. Both aligned.

Does this deserve investigation?

Of course!

But there will be no investigations. Ever.

Because that’s the way science works nowaday [sic]. It’s all about ignoring all credible evidence that doesn’t support the narrative. And that should be troubling for everyone.